Ava Du Vernay’s film Selma has generated yet another wave of mass mediated debate over cinematic representation of black Americans’ historical experience of racial injustice. The controversy’s logic is at this point familiar, nearly clichéd. Du Vernay and others have responded to complaints about the film’s historical accuracy, particularly in its portrayal of Lyndon Johnson, with invocations of artistic license and assertions that the film is not intended as historical scholarship. However, even Maureen Dowd recognizes the contradiction at the core of those claims. “The ‘Hey, it’s just a movie’ excuse doesn’t wash. Filmmakers love to talk about their artistic license to distort the truth, even as they bank on the authenticity of their films to boost them at awards season.”1 And that contradiction, as I’ve noted [“Django Unchained, or, The Help”], permeates the dizzyingly incoherent and breathtakingly shallow pop controversies spawned by recent films dramatizing either the black experience of slavery or the southern Jim Crow order.

Notwithstanding their boosters’ claims about these films’ relation to the historical moments they depict, Selma and its recent predecessors, like other period dramas, treat the past like a props closet, a source of images that facilitate naturalizing presentist sensibilities by dressing them up in the garb of bygone days. And the specific sensibilities that carry the spate of slavery/Jim Crow-era costume dramas are those around which the contemporary black professional-managerial class (PMC) converges: reduction of politics to a narrative of racial triumph that projects “positive images” of black accomplishment, extols exemplary black individuals, stresses overcoming great adversity to attain success and recognition, and inscribes a monolithic and transhistorical racism as the fundamental obstacle confronting, and thus uniting, all black Americans. History is beside the point for this potted narrative, as is art incidentally, which the debate over the relative merits of Spielberg’s Lincoln and Tarantino’s Django Unchained demonstrates. The only metric that could make comparing such radically different films seem plausible is the presence or prominence of a black hero or black “agency.”

Du Vernay threw the cat out of the bag in discussing her characterization of Johnson’s role in the struggle for the VRA. The original script portrayed the president as more centrally engaged and actively supportive but, she says, “I wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie; I was interested in making a movie centered on the people of Selma.” Of course, her film doesn’t follow through on that pious declaration; she avoids the white savior but only to replace him with a black one. Selma is, despite her insistence that it isn’t, another iteration of King idolatry.2 But the “white-savior” comment is helpful because it makes clear that representing history is not the point of these films. As English literature professor Jerome Christensen contends in a defense of the film’s relation to history, “Selma is not education, it’s mobilization—it’s a movie that wants to move you. Its aim is not accuracy, but to be tragically and poignantly clever.” He goes on to assert: “That movie is Ferguson…Nothing has changed. That’s why Johnson in some sense can’t be the hero of the movie. He can’t be the white savior, because nothing was saved.”3 Similarly, in articulating what offends her about Maureen Dowd’s criticism, the perpetually affronted Gender & Women’s Studies and Africana Studies professor Brittney Cooper declares, “a new racial lens is exactly what America needs. In Selma, we learn what films look like when directors and cinematographers who love and respect black people turn their gaze on us. Selma artfully displaces a white gaze, and it is the unnamed and unsettling anxiety that sits at the heart of so many of the critiques of the film.”4

From that perspective Selma isn’t really about the campaign for voting rights at all; as Christensen says, it’s mobilization and what it’s mobilization for are above all the status claims precisely of the black PMC, here embodied by black filmmakers and actors and, presumably, the parasitic chatterers who bloviate about them. That helps to understand why the ersatz political debate about the film shifted so smoothly into arguments that its director and actors had been “snubbed” for Oscar nominations as well as why the alleged snub is represented as an injustice against black Americans writ large—i.e., not simply the individuals who might have been nominated. In a perverse revision of the old norm of labor solidarity, “an injury to one is an injury to all,” now it’s the black (haute) bourgeoisie that suffers injustice on behalf of the black masses. It’s prominent black individuals’ interests and aspirations that are asserted—under the flag of positive images, role models, equivalent vulnerability to racism, and other such class-inflected bullshit—as crucial concerns for the race as a whole. To be sure, this isn’t a new phenomenon, not even in the imaginations of post-blaxploitation era black filmmakers. Tim Reid’s 1995 period film, Once Upon a Time When We Were Colored, adapted from a black conservative’s lovingly nostalgic memoir of growing up in the Mississippi Delta region between the late 1940s and early 1960s, fabricates an incident in which the mass of impoverished and brutalized black sharecroppers rise not to protest their own circumstances—abrogation of citizenship rights, discrimination, lynching, or exploitation in the cotton economy—but to support a black icehouse operator whose white competitors were conspiring to put him out of business.5 This is pure class fantasy.

Much of the debate that Selma has sparked about the relation between artistic license and commitment to historical accuracy rests on terms that are too formalistic to be useful. It doesn’t make sense to talk about the limits of creative license, especially for a narrative that purports to historical or political significance, unless the critique is linked both to the narrative’s focal arc—the specific story the artist wants to tell and how—and to assessment of the ideological commitments and potential impact of that narrative. One objection to Du Vernay’s depiction of Johnson as resistant to pursuing a voting rights law is that it is an unacceptable expression of creative license because: 1) it falsifies the history of the civil rights movement in a way that 2) egregiously distorts a significant element of that history and 3) in doing so, leaves an erroneous picture of how the key victories of the civil rights movement were won that moreover 4) can have counterproductive implications for how we think about political strategy today. In addition to those who defend the film on grounds I’ve discussed, others have acknowledged its consequential misrepresentations but nonetheless conclude that on balance, even with those faults, the film makes a significant contribution in telling even a flawed version of the story of the Selma campaign to a popular audience. Albert R. Hunt, after critically discussing the substance and implications of the film’s treatment of Johnson, rejects Joseph A. Califano’s urging not to see the film. Hunt concludes, “You should see this movie, and know the story of Selma’s Edmund Pettus Bridge. That was brought home to me by my 25-year-old apolitical daughter, Lauren: ‘Seeing it is a lot different than reading about it.’”6

But what does Selma communicate? Does its vision of the Selma campaign as a dramatic event, as much an existential as a political triumph, contribute to making sense of the sources and goals of the civil rights movement, the pursuit of voting rights enforcement, or the relation of either to contemporary problems bearing on race and inequality? If we’re reporting on how our children responded to it, my son, who is an historian, commented at the beginning of the controversy about Johnson’s role that it’s only a matter of time before students show up in his undergraduate courses rehearsing the wrong-headed common sense understanding they’d acquired from the movie or discussions of it. Or, for that matter, from professors of Africana Studies, or English or (for sure) Cultural Studies. Under these conditions, maybe the most pertinent response to Du Vernay’s film is to lay out an historically richer and thicker account of the struggle for voting rights enforcement and the impact of the VRA on the South, black politics and American politics in general over the half-century since its passage.

The 1965 Voting Rights Act (VRA), of course, was one of the crowning achievements of the high period of southern black political insurgency that began in the late 1940s and accelerated through the early 1960s. The story of the heroic popular protest campaign, culminating in the violent “Bloody Sunday” Selma march, which created the political environment securing the bill’s passage is well known. The most recent irruption of recurrent attempts to undermine voting rights—via the panoply of efforts to stifle voter registration and actual voting, to dilute voting strength through manipulating reapportionment to pack, stack, or disperse concentrations of targeted groups, and finally through direct attack on the VRA itself7—only underscore how successful that law has been in democratizing American society. And that success extends beyond opening opportunities for black or Latino candidates to win office or even for black and Latino voters to register their preferences directly. It has substantially altered the political culture of the region as well as the country as a whole.

After open Nazi/Klansman (take your pick; he wore both swastika and hood) David Duke had received a majority of white votes in both the 1991 Louisiana gubernatorial race and a US Senate race a year earlier, I was asked to comment on whether his appeal was a lamentable testament to how little things had changed in southern politics. My response was that his overall performance in those two elections was rather an illustration of the significance of the VRA. Twenty-five years earlier, if Duke had gotten solid majorities of the white vote, he’d have been elected. And that is not just a simple arithmetical point about the additive force of the black vote. That by the dawn of the 1990s more than two-fifths of white Louisiana voters had no trouble voting for candidates actively supported by a vast majority of black voters marks a more significant sea change. That deeper shift in political culture and the potential it implies for pursuit of a transformatively progressive politics is also a reason that the reactionary alliance of fascist agitators, racist and other lunatics and the corporate interests that fund them have become so hell bent on undoing voting rights.

In fact, the contemporary campaign of disfranchisement looks a lot like its predecessor at the end of the 19^th century, and that similarity should remind us that the VRA did not so much extend the franchise to black southerners as restore it. Many of us no doubt find in our teaching that, for undergraduates in particular, black American political history is a seamless blur from slavery to Jim Crow and that, notwithstanding a lot of gestural references to black people’s “agency,” students have no sense of the impact of the Fifteenth Amendment in opening a generation of active and impressive political participation.8 The campaign for disfranchisement that intensified in the 1890s was the direct outcropping of the dominant merchant-planter class’s concerns that blacks and white poor farmers and workers could align to challenge ruling class power. That was not a Freudian compensatory fantasy. Enough evidence existed even before the Populist insurgency of the 1890s to sustain those concerns. In Class, Race, and the Civil Rights Movement, Jack Bloom describes the context that underlay white elites’ fears. The insurgent Readjuster movement in Virginia won statewide office in 1879 on an alliance of black freedmen and white workers and farmers. More than 60,000 black people across the region belonged to the Knights of Labor, and they made up a majority of the Knights’ 3,000 members in Mississippi. The Colored Farmers Alliance, linked to the Populist movement, boasted more than 1,250,000 members. Most dramatically, a North Carolina Populist-Republican Fusion ticket swept statewide in 1894, including most of the major cities, and was re-elected in 1896. Tellingly, the Fusion government was overturned in 1898 in a white supremacist putsch conducted by Democratic elites.9

As J. Morgan Kousser indicates, the aggressive campaign of disfranchisement that took place in the 1890s and early 1900s, while certainly fueled and justified by racism, was about disciplining white poor farmers and workers as well as eliminating black voting.10 Removing blacks from the electoral equation forced poor and working-class whites to define their political aspirations in terms that presumed the absolute hegemony of the merchant-planter-industrialist class. In his classic study, Southern Politics in State and Nation, V. O. Key argued that plebeian whites were able to win in the political order thus produced not much more than the trappings of nominal white supremacy. That’s all the “southern exceptionalism”—successful disfranchisement (and, after all, northern elites tried and largely failed to disfranchise lower-class whites as well)—necessary to explain why the center of gravity of the region’s politics has been distinctively reactionary. That absolute ruling class dominance meant, for example, that southern trade unionists could not count on significant support from state and local elected officials when they attempted to organize in the 1920s and 1930s with predictable consequences. Indeed, quite the opposite was the case.

I mention the dynamics and consequences of disfranchisement for three reasons: 1) I believe it is important to stress the fact that black people openly and enthusiastically exercised citizenship rights for decades after Emancipation; 2) noting those facets of the historical context underscores the broad significance of both the franchise and its loss, and 3) it is also important to recognize that what most crucially connects successful disfranchisement at the beginning of the 20^th century and contemporary efforts is not so much an invariant, transhistorical “racism” (though there has been no shortage of racist argument and targeting involved in each instance) but a very pragmatic attempt by powerful elites to shrivel the electorate to solidify partisan advantages for their narrow programs of upward redistribution. Black people, that is, were targets of disfranchisement in the earlier moment as much as a Republican-Populist voting bloc as because they were black, just as today’s disfranchisement efforts target blacks and Latinos as Democratic voters. Keeping that in mind may help to neutralize some of the pointless banter about whether black teabagger darlings like South Carolina’s Tim Scott are embodied evidence that that reactionary element is not racist or are merely tokens and dupes and/or lunatics. (I got hit with a deluge of threats and denunciations—more than 350 hate emails in a couple of days—from right-wingers affronted by a very mild, milquetoast even, New York Times op-ed on the significance of Scott’s appointment to fill out the term of Jim Demint, which concluded that Scott’s appointment did not have any larger historical significance but should be understood entirely in relation to partisan jockeying for position in contemporary South Carolina politics and rhetorical posturing in the most ephemeral national political chatter.11) That is not an argument that can be resolved—one side alleges racism, the other denies it—and is moreover not really the point.

Many activists struggled to challenge the post-Populist disfranchisement without much success until the changed national political climate—itself in part a product of increased black voting strength outside the South—opened institutional opportunities. In 1944, for example, the Supreme Court’s decision in Smith v. Allwright invalidated the Texas white primary, which had defined the state’s Democratic Party as a private club and therefore legally able to restrict membership to whites, and subsequent cases extended the ruling to white primaries in other states. This ushered in the beginnings of a shift in southern politics. Between 1938 and 1946 black voter registration in the region trebled to more than 600,000. Henry Lee Moon reported that the increases were “most spectacular” in the cities. In 1946 alone black registration increased in Atlanta from 5,000 to 25,000; 1,200 to 20,000 in Savannah GA; 2,500 to 15,000 in Jacksonville, FL. New Orleans recorded a similarly dramatic increase, from roughly 400 black voters in 1940 to more than 28,000 by 1952.12 These dramatic increases in black voting, however, could not translate into much beyond clientelist politics because black voting strength was generally restricted to cities and even there was not a large enough bloc to support pressing more aggressively to shape policy agendas.

Passage of the VRA opened new electoral possibilities in both urban and rural, especially black belt, areas. These new possibilities showed up in exponential increases in black office holding, from fewer than 1,500 nationally in 1970 to nearly 8,900 in 1998. For the first time since the Reconstruction era, black candidates in the South were elected sheriffs and other city and county officials and to state legislatures. (Selma concludes with a mostly triumphal montage of freeze-frames of selected individual participants in the events with captions indicating aspects of their future lives. Sheriff Jim Clark appears with the note that he was voted out of office in the next election. It struck me that that suggests one prosaic, material reason for his intransigent opposition to black enfranchisement—knowledge that he would lose his job.13) The ranks of black elected officials outside the South grew substantially as well, and the most visible expressions of the new possibilities were the increased numbers of black congressional representatives and the emergence of a phalanx of big-city mayors. The number of blacks in Congress grew from 9 in 1969 to 43 in 2013. By the mid-1980s, what I characterized as black urban regimes—i.e., “black-led and black- dominated administrations backed by solid council majorities,” a formulation intended to distinguish racial transitions in local governing coalitions from instances of black mayors like Tom Bradley in Los Angeles or Wellington Webb in Denver who won office as representatives of electoral coalitions in which nonwhites were not a majority—governed in thirteen U.S. cities with populations of 100,000 or more.14 Many more were elected in smaller cities, typically near-in suburbs that had become largely black in population.

These transformations in black officialdom were widely lauded, understandably, as fulfillment of the victories of the civil rights insurgency. After all, the early waves of the new black elected officials included many with either civil rights, federal Office of Economic Opportunity Community Action or Model Cities experience.15 Moreover, not only was the new stratum of black officials and functionaries directly the product of civil rights and Black Power activism; the election campaigns that propelled the racial transition typically draped themselves in the raiment of popular civil rights insurgency, and candidates commonly presented themselves as embodying the next phase of the victorious movement. Such élan was likely unavoidable in that heady moment. However, as is often the case in politics, the story was more complicated than that.

I laid out an argument in the late 1980s that making sense of the racial transition within which the black urban regimes were constituted required examination of the structural and institutional contexts within which transition occurred. In particular, I focused on the significance, in addition to insurgent black political activity, of metropolitan demographic and political-economic reorganization during the decades after World War II. I argued that, for black urban governance at least, two contradictions were crucial to understand: 1) the political-economic conditions that enabled their emergence, including the fiscal stress characteristic to largely minority municipalities, also undercut those regimes’ capacities to undertake courses of action that would address the downwardly redistributive concerns shared disproportionately among the largely minority electoral coalition and 2) the governing coalitions on which those regimes depend are preemptively weighted toward the pro-growth elites who are committed to programs of aggressive upward redistribution predicated largely on suppressing or preempting the downward redistribution to which the electoral coalition is disposed. I examined Atlanta Mayor Maynard Jackson’s effort in the 1970s to harmonize the latter contradiction in the case of an airport construction controversy by concocting a notion of black political interest that linked it to one of the contending developers’ proposal.16 Other scholars have made similar arguments about the limits and contradictions of black urban governance—for example, among urbanists, Clarence Stone’s and Claude Barnes’s work on Atlanta, Dennis Judd’s on Denver, Stephen Samuel Smith on Charlotte, Bryan Jones and Lynn Bachelor on Detroit, William E. Nelson on Cleveland, and Robert Smith among students of black politics.17 This scholarship identified structural and ideological tensions but for the most part did not examine closely the fine dynamics of legitimation—the material substance of political incorporation—that linked the new black political class to its governing and electoral bases and in the process articulated a new black politics materially rooted in new opportunity structures that were compatible with elaboration of a privatized and market-driven politics that eventually would become hegemonic as neoliberalism.

More recently a very interesting scholarship has shown the extent to which racial transition in urban politics characteristically was anchored in alliances between insurgent black activists and functionaries and a rising stratum of aggressively pro-growth liberals. John David Arena’s Driven from New Orleans, a study of the forty-year attack on low-income public housing in New Orleans, shows in wonderful detail how from its beginning the racial transition that began in the late 1960s in that city was tied to an urban liberalism that was also the cornerstone of the new, rationalized tourist economy and a broader program of targeting public resources to support rent-intensifying development. Arena examines the nexus of racial transition in local government and an emergent black political class, the policy content of post-segregation era racial liberalism, and the roles of philanthropic foundations and neighborhood groups in consolidating and legitimating that developmentalist regime via discourses of grassroots authenticity. Timothy Weaver discusses the emergence of black governance in Philadelphia as a product of a similar coalition. Kent Germany examines the key role of local administration of War on Poverty and Great Society funds in formation of the institutional architecture of racial transition in New Orleans as well as its intricate connections with the emerging racial and growth liberalism in the 1960s, and Megan French-Marcelin studies the role of the Community Development Block Grant program and other federal economic development aid in cementing interracial growth liberalism in New Orleans in the 1970s and 1980s.18

Among its other contributions, this literature throws into relief what is problematic about a common interpretive tendency in the fields of black politics, black American political history, and black studies generally to posit as a central critical analytical category an idealized “black liberation movement,” “black freedom movement,” or “black community” that in effect exists outside or logically and normatively prior to larger political dynamics in American society and political economy. In positing a false coherence, this interpretive posture, which has its roots, as Cedric Johnson’s and Dean Robinson’s work shows definitively, in Black Power and post-Black Power communitarian radicalism, has been problematic—I’d argue counterproductive—in both scholarly and civic domains. From its earliest iterations as a leftist or racial populist critique of the limitations of Black Power as ideology and program, going back to the end of the 1960s in Robert L. Allen’s Black Awakening in Capitalist America and to some extent Harold Cruse’s critiques of Black Power ideology,19 that interpretive posture preempted recognizing how emergence of a stratum of public functionaries and aspirants had the potential to alter radically the practical universe of the political for black Americans across the board, from the most mundane aspects of quotidian life on up to larger questions of the nature and direction of public policy at all levels.

Such analytical purblindness was understandable at that historical moment both because the new political regime had not begun to take concrete shape and because the rhetorical force of the struggles against racial exclusion and discrimination reasonably presumed a collective or unitary and popular black interest in opposing racism and racially discriminatory treatment. Furthermore, the popularity of anticolonial metaphor gave a radical patina to formulations of black Americans as a singular “People.” As a standard of critical judgment, however, that perspective was never adequate for the interpretive or political challenges presented by the evolving post-segregation order or the revanchist turn in national politics begun in the 1970s and its many ramifications down to states and cities and the lives of all working people as that political turn consolidated on bipartisan terms and intensified over subsequent decades. (Political scientist Alex Willingham, in an article originally published in 1975, was probably the first to articulate a clear understanding of the limits of black radical ideology in this regard.20) It can lead only to dead-end arguments—the parallel to pointless debates about whether or not some individual or stance is racist—about whether individual or program X really represents the interests of the black community or is a “sell out” or inauthentic.

In our current political moment, in which even flamboyantly race-conscious black people embrace career opportunities and ideological rationales attendant to the destruction of public education, privatization of public goods and services, and the dynamic of rent-intensifying real estate development commonly described as gentrification or neighborhood upgrading and revitalization, formulations that presume an idealized “black community” or “black masses” as a collective political subject obscure the real processes through which the larger revanchist regime gains legitimacy among black officials and citizens as its imperatives take on the character of pragmatic common sense. An extreme, or extremely ironic, illustration of this accommodation is Howard Fuller, once also known as Owusu Sadaukai, who was a legendary Black Power radical in North Carolina, a key figure in 1970s Pan-Africanism, then a Marxist-Leninist-Mao Zedong Thinking trade union activist. Some time after returning to his Milwaukee hometown, Fuller became the city’s school superintendent and established a reputation as a teachers’ union foe, and is now the founding eminence of the Black Alliance for Educational Options, the main black pro-voucher, pro-charter, militantly anti-teachers union organization. However, dramatic cases of radicals’ apparent conversion are less meaningful than are the many, far more insidious instances of following “natural” trajectories along a track of NGO-driven “community activism,” as Arena describes, or other forms of “doing well by doing good” that lead precocious undergraduates to Teach For America and other organizations of neoliberalism’s Jungvolk. Similarly precocious public officials like Cory Booker or Barack Obama insistently define racial aspirations—indeed all concerns with social justice—in line with the interests of financial capitalism, and many, many others all down the pyramid of social standing and power also imagine individual futures and “success” in savoring fantasies of pursuing personal advantage by operating within what a broader perspective reveals are the structures of neoliberal dispossession. An interpretive posture that posits an unproblematic “black community” or “black masses” as a normative standard cannot adequately conceptualize the relatively autonomous tendencies toward neoliberal legitimation in black politics; much less can it confront them politically.

This may be a reason that, as Cedric Johnson and I have complained to each other about since 2006, anti-racist activists focused their political outrage and calls for national action, including mobilization for mass marches, on a racial incident in Jena, Louisiana that was little more than a high school fight yet were incapable of, if not uninterested in, mounting any systematic or coherent action to protest the ongoing travesty of forced displacement and criminal inaction affecting hundreds of thousands of people little more than a three-hour drive away in post-Katrina New Orleans. Jena fit comfortably into a historically familiar frame of stereotypically southern small town racism/antiracism; the political and interpretive tools available in antiracist discourse did not work so cleanly in New Orleans.

Fortunately, recent years have also seen the appearance of a scholarly literature that actively investigates differentiation and class tensions within black politics, both in contemporary life and in the Jim Crow era when presumptions of unproblematic racial unity made more sense empirically. In addition to the work of Arena, Marcelin, Johnson and Robinson I’ve already mentioned, Preston Smith’s Racial Democracy in the Black Metropolis is a study of intraracial tensions and conflict in housing politics in postwar Chicago; Michelle Boyd’s Jim Crow Nostalgia examines a black on black gentrification initiative and attendant political dynamics on Chicago’s South Side in the 1990s and early 2000s, and Touré Reed’s Not Alms but Opportunity examines the class character and contradictions within the National Urban League and its Chicago and New York branches’ programmatic approaches to the organization’s articulated goal of racial uplift over its first forty years. The collection Renewing Black Intellectual History presents a set of case studies that exemplify the benefits of an approach that proceeds from presumption that political processes, differentiation, and structurally rooted antagonisms do not begin at the boundaries of the black American population and have been integral in shaping black Americans’ politics no less than any other.21

So, to conclude this rumination on the VRA, I should note that, while my discussion of the resultant evolution of black politics has focused on the emergence of a new urban regime, similar conclusions can be drawn about other domains as well, from the Congressional Black Caucus, to state legislative politics. In fact, Prof. Willie Legette, a political scientist at South Carolina State University whose extraordinarily apt aphorism begins this essay, and I began in the early years of the current century a running, admittedly somewhat tribalist as well as jocular, discussion about whether the South Carolina black political class or its Louisiana counterpart is the worst—most feckless, least imaginative, most self-serving, capitulationist, venal and time-serving—in the country. (All in all, I suspect that the real answer is a variation of my father’s assessment of state legislatures across the board—i.e., that the worst one in the country is the one presiding in the state where you are at the moment.) What initiated our discussion was the nearly simultaneous performance of the South Carolina black legislative caucus in the Confederate flag controversy that erupted in 1999 and Louisiana black Democrats’ immediate supplication to reactionary Republican Governor Mike Foster, described during his first campaign as “David Duke without the sheet” and who ran on a pledge to complete the work that his grandfather Murphy J. Foster—who not only propounded the call for the 1898 disfranchising state constitutional convention that reduced black voting by more than 90% but also sent in the militia to break the New Orleans general strike—had begun in his eight years as governor.

What we have observed then and subsequently, however, is ultimately a natural entailment of the VRA, insofar as it facilitated black Americans’ participation in the routine arrangements of American politics. That remains a significant victory of the civil rights movement. Election of a black sheriff in Madison Parish, Louisiana, not only democratized police-community relations; it also was an element in facilitating black incorporation into other opportunity structures unavailable under the regime anchored by disfranchisement. The VRA has contributed to altering political and social life in the region in other progressive ways as well. It has also contributed significantly to altering the character of black politics, in addition to ways I’ve already mentioned, by throwing into relief the fact that the interests of black elected officials and the black political class in general are not necessarily isomorphic with those of a “black community,” no more than is the case with respect to any politicians and their constituents in the American political system. Their limitations underscore, or should, the fact that electoral politics is a domain, albeit a necessary one, for consolidating and institutionalizing victories that have been won on the plane of social movement struggle. In that sense the victory condensed in the forms of participation enabled by the VRA is necessary—a politics that does not seek institutional consolidation is ultimately no politics at all—but not sufficient for facing the challenges that confront us in this moment of rampant capitalist offensive against social justice, but neither are the essentially nostalgic modalities of protest politics often proposed as more authentic than the mundane electoral domain. It is past time to consider Prof. Legette’s aphorism and engage its many implications. And that includes a warrant to resist the class-skewed penchant for celebrating victories won in the heroic moment of the southern civil rights movement as museum pieces disconnected from subsequent black American political history and the broad struggle for social justice and equality.

The Missing Frame

At the center of Pedro Mairal’s novel The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra (2008) is an enormous painting, “four kilometers long” (MY31/S38), which the eponymous, mute artist, Juan Salvatierra, painted over the course of sixty years.1 Recalling various styles of art, including “art brut,” post-impressionism, and Japanese “emakimono” (MY8/S9), the painting chronicles Salvatierra’s life in Barrancales, a fictional village located on the Argentine side of the River Uruguay. The narrator, Salvatierra’s son Miguel, returns with his brother Luis to Barrancales two years after their father has passed away to decide what to do with the painting, now stored as more than sixty individual rolls of canvas hanging from the roof beams of the shed where he painted every day. The brothers quickly realize “It would have been impossible to exhibit the entire canvas in one place” (MY21/S28) because the “canvas had no borders, even at the end of each roll: they all fit exactly with the start of the next one.” “If he could have,” Miguel continues, “Salvatierra would have kept them all together in one vast scroll, although it would have been impossible to take care of it or transport it” (MY24/S30). But if the size of what Salvatierra had intended to be grasped as “one vast scroll” complicates any decision about exhibiting the painting, the absence of any “borders” also raises larger questions about the nature of the work itself and its relationship to the beholder. Where could one stand to look at the painting in its entirety? How could one begin to understand this scroll if one could never see the work in its totality? Can these scrolls really be understood as a painting if they can never be observed together? When do paint and canvas become a painting?

These questions have everything to do with painting as a specific medium, though we will see that, in raising such questions, The Missing Year of Juan Salvatierra (from here on, Salvatierra) gestures to a concern that has been crucial to the development of Latin Americanist literary criticism and theory for some time now: the concern with the text’s relationship to the world and to its reader. This concern becomes all the more apparent in Mairal’s novel when Salvatierra’s son tells us that, “Possibly because of this sense of the limitless flow of nature that the canvas had, I find it hard to call it a painting, because that suggests a frame, a border that surrounds certain things, and that’s precisely what Salvatierra wanted to avoid” (MY54/S67-8). Importantly, the expansiveness of a canvas that appears “to flow on forever” (MY18/S21) gives rise to an impression of boundlessness that not only compels Mairal’s narrator to wonder whether the four kilometers of canvas are, in fact, a painting, but also precipitates the sensation that “you might plunge headfirst into the canvas” (MY76/S99).2 Mairal’s novel thus presents the conception of an artwork for which representing reality is less appealing than consuming or even becoming it, thereby calling to mind something like Borges’ cartographers who create a “Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it”; a map, in other words, for which the difference between the Empire and a representation of it ceases to matter altogether.3

This conception of art, however, is not just limited to fiction; and indeed, it also underlies a dominant strain of Latin Americanist thought that comprises the focus of this essay, and for which this unframing has been conceived as a point of departure for a host of theoretical positions not just on art, nor on literature alone, but on politics as well.  These positions include the testimonio criticism, affect theory, postautonomy, and posthegemony. Despite apparent differences between these, we argue that what has unified Latin Americanist criticism and theory at least since the 1980s, is this question of the frame, or more precisely, the effort to imagine how the text dissolves it. We can begin to see what this looks like, for example, in Néstor García Canclini’s claim that art “became ‘unframed’ because…the attempts to organize it in terms of aesthetic prescriptions or a theory about the autonomy of the fields (Bourdieu) or of worlds (Becker) hardly work.”4 The frame is posed here as a matter of categories or criteria that have long defined literature and literary criticism, but primarily with an eye to marking their obsolescence. As for politics, Latin American studies has tended to characterize the investment in such categories and criteria as radically conservative, working even, as Jean Franco suggested in 1979, in the “service of reactionary governments.”5

But if Mairal’s novel raises questions about the frame’s dissolution, it also prompts us to reconsider what the political meaning of the assertion of the frame might be. And it does this by presenting another conception of Salvatierra’s canvas that openly undermines the identification of the artwork with unframed experience, and the idea of the work as reality paralleled in Borges’ anecdote.  This other conception emerges shortly after the brothers discover that the roll Salvatierra painted in 1961 is missing. Miguel becomes determined to find it, not only because “If one part was missing, [he] wouldn’t be able to take it all in its entirety” (MY77/S100), but also because recovering the missing roll would mean that “this world of images would have a limit.” “The infinite would reach an end,” he thinks, “and I could discover something he hadn’t painted. Something of my own” (MY77/S101). Thus, Salvatierra’s son suggests that finding the missing roll of canvas would not simply complete the painting, but produce a “limit” capable of drawing a “border” (MY54/S67-8) between the canvas and the world Miguel inhabits as he looks at it, and so locating Salvatierra’s missing year would mean introducing the “frame” (MY54/S67-8) that the canvas’s “limitless flow” (MY54/S67-8) ostensibly dissolves.6

That Miguel associates this border earlier with his own definition of a “painting” further suggests that such a frame would not only render legible the distinction between the images on the canvas and the world these depict, but also that this frame is what makes the painting a painting—that is, what makes the work contiguous with but not identical to the reality it depicts. As we will see, however, the novel’s attention to the frame will not only entail a refusal of the artwork’s reducibility to the world, but also—and perhaps more importantly—mark an insistence on the irrelevance of the beholder’s experience to both the question of what is or isn’t part of the painting and to what it means. And if attending to the frame is a way of marking the distance between the world represented on the canvas and Miguel’s experience of it, it will also turn out to be a way of stressing the irrelevance of the experience and subject position of the viewer to the artwork’s meaning. Indeed, insofar as the completion of the image, what Salvatierra identifies as the frame, functions as a “border” that presupposes a distance between painting and beholder, the novel also suggests that its absence will ultimately transform the work into an occasion for the subject’s experience of boundlessness and limitlessness, the sensation, in other words, that “you might plunge headfirst into the canvas” (MY76/S99).7

Thus, Salvatierra presents us with two conceptions of the same work: one that tries to incorporate, and in this sense, is the world, and another that aims to represent it. The distinction between these conceptions not only asks us to consider the relationship between, say, a tree in Salvatierra’s painting and a tree outside of it, but also foregrounds the issue of the beholder’s relationship to the painting as well. The choice between the framed painting and unframed experience is, in this sense, what Michael Fried has described as the distinction between art and objecthood, a distinction which requires us to consider “whether the paintings or objects in question are experienced as paintings or as objects.”8 And yet, this essay not only asks why a novel like Salvatierra might want to revisit the concept of the frame, now virtually absent from contemporary discussions in criticism and theory, but also attempts to demonstrate what this absence has meant to the development of Latin Americanist discourses on culture and politics. Thus, tracing this development through key concepts that have come to define Latin Americanist criticism and theory, including postautonomy, the postaesthetic, and posthegemony, we argue that the assertion of the frame is central to both literature and politics today.

In contrast, contemporary Latin American studies points to a particular configuration of art’s relationship to politics and the market, but one which is predicated on a repudiation of the distinction between literary and non-literary objects, predicated, in other words, on the elimination of the frame. For reasons that will become clear, moreover, this configuration finds its origins in a transformation in the global structure of exploitation, one which has animated a political concern with categories like exclusion, but which in so doing, has ultimately oriented political theory away from the critique of this same economic structure. Latin Americanist criticism and theory can, in this sense, be said to participate in what Walter Benn Michaels has identified as the invisibility of the frame within postmodern and poststructuralist accounts of the text and the work of art that is doubled by another: the invisibility of the structure that creates class inequality in neoliberalism.9 Building on Michaels’ extended engagement with the relation between these two kind of invisibility, our aim in this essay is to determine how an assertion of the frame not only offers a means toward rendering the literary visible, but also and more importantly might reorient Latin American studies toward the critique of social structure itself.

Postautonomy

We can observe something like the culmination of what we are here calling the objecthood of the text in what the critic Josefina Ludmer has recently described as postautonomous literatures (literaturas posautónomas). For Ludmer, such postautonomous literatures “appear to be literature but cannot be read with literary criteria or categories like author, work, style, writing, text and meaning.”10 “They cannot be read as literature,” she adds, “because they subject ‘literature’ to a drastic operation of emptying-out.”11 Ludmer subsequently locates the origins of literature’s postautonomy in two postulates:

The first is that everything cultural (and literary) is economic and that everything economic is cultural (and literary). And the second postulate would be that reality (if considered from the perspective of the media, which continuously constitutes it) is fiction and that fiction is reality.12

Postautonomous literatures would therefore seem to recall the historical avant-garde’s well-known attack on the category of “work,” though the difference, according to Ludmer, is that this same gesture today acquires an entirely new significance following the end of literary autonomy, or as she puts it, the “end of Bourdieu’s field, which presupposes the sphere’s autonomy (or the thought of spheres).”13 That is, postautonomous literatures are not so much an attack on literary autonomy as they are a symptom of the collapse of what Bourdieu identifies as the “field of restricted production,” whose autonomy “can be measured by its power to define its own criteria for the production and evaluation of its products.”14 This is the sphere in which symbolic goods are manufactured for those producers who establish the criteria of aesthetic value, “internal demarcations [that] appear irreducible to any external factors of economic, political or social differentiation,” including what Ludmer designates the “literariness” (literaturidad) of a work.15 For Ludmer, however, any claim to such irreducibility today ultimately fails to recognize “new conditions of production and circulation of the book that modify ways of reading” in the “era of transnational book publishing corporations or the book’s role in major newspaper, radio, and television networks, as well as in other media.”16 What this means, then, is that postautonomous literatures get what other forms of writing don’t: that it no longer makes any sense to insist on the irreducibility of art to economic, political, or social phenomena, or more simply, on the distinction between art and nonart.

What Ludmer imagines here, in other words, is a form of writing that eliminates its own frame. This much is clear when she notes that these “writings not only cross the border of ‘literature,’ but also that of ‘fiction’ and remain outside-inside both borders.”17 Needless to say, the “border” evoked here has less to do with the physical dimensions of the canvas than with the boundary that categories like “literature” and “fiction” afford. And yet, like the notion of a limitless and unframed work in Salvatierra, such forms of writing not only suggest “they are and at the same time are not literature,” but that “they are fiction and reality” as well, insofar as reality now is “produced and constructed by the media, technologies, and the sciences,” and in this sense, “does not want to be represented because it already is pure representation.”18 Postautonomous literatures might be understood best, then, as a negation of the distinction between art and nonart that embodies a new situation marked by an alteration in the relationship between the economic and the cultural.

No doubt this is the scenario that has defined artistic production within the centers of the global economy like the United States for some time now: a de-autonomization associated with what Fredric Jameson identified nearly three decades ago as “postmodernism or, the cultural logic of late capitalism”; and indeed, one cannot help but hear in Ludmer’s account echoes of Jameson’s claim that “The theory of postmodernity affirms a gradual de-differentiation of these levels, the economic itself gradually becoming cultural, all the while the cultural gradually becomes economic.”19 Importantly, this is this same de-differentiation between aesthetic and commodity production which, according to Jameson, was attended by the rise of a situation within the first world, in which “we seem increasingly incapable of fashioning representations of our own current experience.”20From a certain perspective, then, the trajectory Ludmer traces points to the enlargement of a dynamic to which Jameson’s term “postmodernism” refers: namely, capitalism’s ceaseless march across the globe into previously unincorporated enclaves of cultural production, now integrated into the market. Ludmer’s account thus raises the question of whether the standpoint of Latin American cultural production today is no different than that of the first world, and it is precisely this indistinctness her notion of postautonomous literatures would seem to register in approximating the vanishing point of postmodernism’s own contemporaneity—a sense of the present which, according to Jameson, is no different than that of the commodity.

Postliterary

That said, “postmodernism” has long been part of the Latin Americanist lexicon, as some of the more significant developments in Latin American studies since the 1980s can be understood to participate in what John Beverley and José Oviedo in 1993 called the “postmodernism debate in Latin America.”21 The origins of this “debate,” they contend, lie in the “crisis of the project of the Latin American Left in the wake of its defeat and/or demobilization in the period that extends from 1973 to the present.” “[A]ll of these factors,” they explain, “led to a pervasive climate of ‘disenchantment,’ in which the nationalist and leftist ideologies that had defined the protagonism of the Latin American intelligentsia in the previous period have been at best put on hold, at worst abandoned” (5). For Beverley and Oviedo, the “disenchantment” with Left politics—like that of the Cuban Revolution, for instance—as well as the emergence of new social movements throughout the region demanded the “postmodern” move away from a “politics (and epistemology) of representation to one of solidarity and participation” (8). The problem, as they saw it, was that intellectuals had failed to include, for example, grassroots indigenous populations who worked on writing radio soap opera scripts in Aymara (8). Which is to say that the question of inclusion becomes just as important to culture as it is to politics. Postmodernism in Latin America consequently “posits” a “new sense of cultural and aesthetic agency” to which the Left had not yet reconciled itself. This “new sense,” then, not only marked a reconfiguration of art’s relationship to politics, but would also prove essential to a redefinition of politics itself as the vindication of the excluded subjects of subalternism.

Yet, it is worth remembering that what Beverley and Oviedo conceive as a “new sense of cultural and aesthetic agency” also constituted a foundational moment for Latin American cultural studies, which, as Neil Larsen has shown, rejected that stigmatization of mass or popular culture largely associated with Frankfurt school criticism.22 Against, for example, Adorno and Horkheimer’s critique of the “culture industry,” cultural studies never denies the commodity status of popular culture, but nonetheless urges the recognition of its potential for popular resistance to various forms of domination. But Larsen also makes the connection between this “cultural turn” and postautonomy all the clearer when he notes that the identification of this “oppositional, emancipatory character” derives from an understanding of mass culture that is now cast as “embodying its own scale of values to which notions of aesthetic autonomy are fundamentally irrelevant.”23 This disavowal of notions like autonomy in cultural studies is thus explicitly rooted in a democratizing impulse directed at the dismantling of what has been widely conceived as the Frankfurt school’s shortsighted and elitist insistence on the distinction between “high” and “low” art and hierarchies of aesthetic value, and impulse we can already see underlying Franco’s claim in 1979 that aesthetic autonomy works in the “service of reactionary governments.”24 In short, the turn away from autonomy and toward cultural studies signaled the desire for a more inclusive society.

Perhaps no development in this period captures the nature of this impulse more than testimonio criticism, whose theorization is underwritten by that conception of the unframed text, which is also central to Ludmer’s postautonomous literatures. As is well known, the testimonio begins to gain critical attention in the late 1960s with the publication of Miguel Barnet’s Biography of a Runaway Slave (1966), and with its consecration following the decision by Cuba’s Casa de las Américas to create a testimonio category for its annual prize. Its subsequent rise to prominence as the expression of new social movements throughout Latin America would eventually lead critics like George Yúdice to define the testimonio as an “authentic narrative, told by a witness who is moved to narrate by the urgency of a situation (e.g., war, oppression, revolution, etc.),” as is the case, most notably, of I, Rigoberta Menchú (1982).25 On one hand, then, we might say that the testimonio and postautonomous literatures couldn’t be more different; the commitment to the transmission of an “authentic narrative” is clearly at odds with that capacity to “fabricate present” (fabrican presente) that Ludmer attributes to the postautonomous text: one embodies “authentic” reality, while the other manufactures it (what Ludmer also calls “realityfiction” [realidadficción]).26 On the other hand, it doesn’t take much to see that the testimonio’s means of transmission are founded on a similar disavowal of “literary criteria or categories like author, work, style, writing, text and meaning.”

This is precisely what Larsen underlines when he refers to the testimonio as “postliterary culture.”27 As Larsen demonstrates, readings of testimonios like Menchú’s “seem to produce a virtual ‘erasure’ of the authorial function itself,” an “erasure” which would, from our perspective, seem to prefigure literature’s postautonomy.28 And it is this same commitment to the putatively “postliterary” that Larsen sees in accounts like Yúdice’s, in which the difference between “the testimonial narrative and narrator…ceases to matter,” so that Menchú does not so much “invent or invoke the village or tribal community” as “she herself, or the story, becomes, even constitutes, the community.”29 Which is to say, in the terms elaborated here, that, for Yúdice, it is as if Menchú steps into and out of the frame, or more precisely, it is as if her narrative eliminates it.

This and similar readings of the testimonio also demand a shift in the way we conceive of literary representation, and so it is perhaps not surprising that the thrust of various approaches to the testimonio has long been to downplay the question of representation itself in favor of its practice or performativity. Accordingly, Yúdice claims that “the speaker does not speak for or represent a community but rather performs an act of identity-formation that is simultaneously personal and collective.”30 Yet, this insistence on performativity, is not simply a shift away from representation, but a desire to re-describe literary meaning as a “truth effect” that the testimonio generates.31 Following this logic, the political value of the testimonio, for the postliterary critic, has less to do with the meaning it communicates, since any progressive newspaper, novel, or essay can also speak to these same social injustices. Rather, it is the emphasis placed on the effect generated by this antiliterary text that brings it closer, for example, to a politics of “international human rights and solidarity movements” (37). In this way, critics imagine that the testimonio triggers a univocal political reaction, and so what is important is not simply what it says about a particular group, but rather the unframed text’s ability to elicit what Beverley himself calls an “ethical and political response” (36) like solidarity from the reader; and indeed, for the testimonio to be ethical at all, it must eliminate the frame.

The consequences of this shift from the meaning of the text to the effect it produces are made explicit in in Beverley’s 1989 essay, “The Margins at the Center,” which introduces the idea that the testimonio “constitutes itself as a new form” (40) and “implies a radical break” with the literary and “literature” (42). More specifically, he argues that the testimonio is written with an eye to overcoming “bourgeois writing since the Renaissance” by undermining the idea of “authorial intention” that has long been “bound up” with various notions of literary interpretation and reading. In short, Beverley suggests that insofar as the testimonio calls for a refusal of those concepts central to definitions of literature and literary criticism, then it, like Ludmer’s text, “cannot be read as literature.”

Testimonio criticism, nonetheless, advances the postliterary as an embodiment of political potential—an embodiment, that is, of a “new sense of cultural and aesthetic agency.” Beverley puts it this way:

Because the authorial function has been erased or mitigated, the relationship between authorship and forms of individual and hierarchical power in bourgeois society has also changed. Testimonio represents an affirmation of the individual subject, even of individual growth and transformation, but in connection with a group or class situation marked by marginalization, oppression, and struggle. (41)

Ultimately, we can see that the testimonio as a postliterary phenomenon is also crucially a political project, one that attacks not simply literature and hierarchies of aesthetic value, but a political system that produces a hierarchization of Latin American society, including  marginalized groups like the subaltern.

Beverley has more recently summed up the aims of this project in Latinamericanism after 9/11 (2011) with the question, “What would be the elements of a Latinamericanism articulated ‘from’ the subaltern?”—“from” the position, in other words, of those individual and collective subjects that have long been excluded from the national-popular discourses of Latin America.32 And while he has more recently abandoned subalternist critique in favor of what he takes to be a more pragmatic support of the Left governments of the marea rosada he identifies with “postsubalternism,” the terms remain largely the same: an “alliance politics” including various “social groups” and the “different sorts of experiences, interests, values, worldviews, histories, cultural practices, sometimes even languages”(83) that define them. And in fact, one can observe a similar reasoning behind Beverley’s earlier account of the testimonio narrative in “Margin at the Center,” which he understands as “democratic and egalitarian” because it allows for the “entry into literature of persons who would normally […] be excluded” (35) as a result of their race, gender, or social class. More to the point, the testimonio is conceived here as giving voice to those who speak not “about” but “from” the position of exclusion.

At the same time, Beverley also believes that the testimonio’s democratic and egalitarian character allows for an identification with the excluded that promotes “solidarity,” and in so doing, undercuts what Latinamericanism after 9/11 will later describe as the “neo-Arielism” (19) promoted by Latin American intellectuals. These are intellectuals who, according to Beverley, not only regard North American Latin Americanists with skepticism, but also—and more importantly—ignore the “proletarian/popular on whose behalf they had pretended to speak” (20). In this sense, Beverley’s Latinamericanism works toward a de-hierarchization of the political that mirrors the democratization of culture already implicit in cultural studies’ disavowal of aesthetic criteria like autonomy. But this also means that both Latinamericanism and the testimonio reflect a deep investment in the position “from” which one speaks, as well as of the “authentic” (24) voices of those indígenas, afro-latinos, mulattos, mestizos, women, sexual minorities, homosexuals, and even readers and critics, that both literature and traditional politics have excluded. We will return to this investment shortly, but for now it is important to note that the distinction between literary and postliterary culture is, for testimonio criticism, predicated on the idea that a politics of inclusion begins once literature as such ends.

Postaesthetic

But where, for Beverley, the politics of inclusion central to cultural studies presents a solution to the problems posed by the crisis of the Latin American Left, Alberto Moreiras has shown why a commitment to identities fails as a response to a “substantive change in the structure of capitalism at the world level.” This is the post-Cold War moment of Latin American politics that Moreiras’ own contribution to this issue of nonsite examines in Horacio Castellanos Moya’s La diáspora (1989), in which he reads the novel’s engagement with the defeat of the Central American Left as gesturing toward, in his words, “things and affects that might harbor the seed of historical potencies that remain unseen and unimaginable.” In his seminal The Exhaustion of Difference (2001), Moreiras had already demonstrated what this same moment has meant not simply for Latin American literary and cultural debates, but for the function of “critical reason” more generally.33 According to Moreiras, the insistence on the need to articulate a Latin Americanism “from” the position of the excluded is a kind of “locational thinking,” a form of thought that underlies culturalist notions of a specifically Latin American alternative modernity belonging to what he calls the “aesthetic-historicist paradigm” (15).

Yet, such notions are, according to Moreiras, now exhausted in the wake of the very transformations in global capitalism that postmodernity and globalization name.  Like Ludmer, then, Moreiras draws on Jameson to suggest that Latin Americanist discourse has yet to contend with this change, what he later describes as the “move of capital toward universal subsumption under globalization” (29). Moreiras’ point, however, is not to urge an abandonment of cultural studies altogether; and indeed, he argues that cultural studies has made important contributions to the “destruction” of the aesthetic-historicist paradigm by revealing the singularity of not just literature and art but also of Latin American history as discrete objects of study to be “mere ideological prejudice” (15). Yet, cultural studies, he maintains, is still committed to a concept of critical reason tied to the “determination, evaluation, and defense of what is properly Latin American,” and therefore “cannot go beyond the affirmation of an identitarian space-in-resistance, whether from a continental, national, or intranational perspective” (5), and of which Beverley’s commitment to the subaltern is only one version. That is, despite uncovering this “ideological prejudice,” Latin American studies remains largely invested in understanding its object exclusively in terms of identity and difference at a moment marked by the “commodification of location” (21). From this position, refusing to confront this moment of real subsumption, the success of Beverley’s commitment to locational thinking turns out to be a failure.

Accordingly, central to The Exhaustion of Difference is the question of how to study Latin America, while avoiding the “pitfalls of its recommodification” (22), or the trap of locational thinking. As can be expected, this project becomes all the more difficult in the age of real subsumption,  “the moment in which intellectual labor, no longer a for-itself, has become a moment of capital” (100). Recalling Jameson and prefiguring Ludmer, Moreiras insists this moment is just as conclusive for art in general and literature in particular, neither of which has recourse today to the distinction between art and commodity, or art and nonart:

And the same happens to aesthetic thinking, which is always necessarily based on the possibility of an existing if unreachable outside…which is aesthetically posited as the transaesthetic foundation of the real and therefore as foundation of the aesthetic itself. (20)

For Moreiras, in other words, the so-called autonomous space of aesthetics—what long acted as one foundation of critical reason—has disappeared.  Which is to say that the distance between the artwork and beholder, what, as we’ve already noted, the concept of the frame presupposes, can no longer be preserved under the conditions of real subsumption. That Ludmer’s claim regarding the “end” of the “thought of spheres” will resonate with this account is obvious enough, though the dissolution of the frame here—of what Moreiras calls at one point the “hermeneutic circle”—takes on a specifically political meaning in the conceptualization of the literary that is “postaesthetic and posthistoricist” (16). So, although cultural studies has been “fundamentally committed to the deconstruction of the inside-outside relationship” on which culturalist theories of modernity have rested, it has yet to “engage in the radicalization of its own postulates and look for…the outside of the hermeneutic circularity, what has been subalternized,” and in this sense excluded “as the constitutive outside of the hegemonic relation” (16). Or, said differently, the postaesthetic offers a response to the “aesthetic-historicist paradigm” at the center of Latin Americanism because it takes into account the conditions of real subsumption, conditions which cultural studies continues to ignore.

The postaesthetic moment is the revelation and recognition of this “remainder” (16) and “constitutive outside” as “savage space” (15), which comes to define the concept of critical reason that may yet meet the challenges posed by the real subsumption of intellectual labor today, and which, we will discuss, underlies what Moreiras elsewhere identifies as the “nonsubject of the political” and “infrapolitics.” For now we ought to note that the identification of critical reason with deconstruction here results not only in a reconceptualization of the aims of cultural studies, but in the discovery of entirely new critical possibilities within literary studies as well. For Moreiras, this has everything to do with the “subaltern function” literary studies assumes following the ascendency of cultural studies within the university, a function that allows it to realize the “irruptive possibilities” of “postaesthetic and posthistoricist language” by means of the “literary labor of translation” (16). From the postaesthetic view of this literary labor, however, this point is not to produce a complete translation, but rather that, in taking up this task, criticism could possibly reveal the existence of what he identifies as an “untranslative excess” (23). That translation will always remain incomplete not only recalls the impossibility of completely knowing the object of study (Latin America), but also that some aspect of this object must overcome conceptualization/representation if we are to avoid expropriations and appropriative practices constitutive of capital’s law of equivalence, or the “commodification of location” (21) that has exhausted all thinking of identity and difference. In short, the postaesthetic points to that which always remains the “unreachable outside” of aesthetic and historicist thinking.

At the same time, resistance to the “commodification of location” is associated here with a postaesthetic dimension that rests on the identification of an “excess” not simply as a “supplement to location” (23), but as supplement to the “thought of spheres” that Ludmer associates with literary categories and criteria; and, as Moreiras makes clear, the point of the postaesthetic is to demonstrate the degree to which such thought is predicated on the exclusion of a “constitutive outside” (excess) that, at the same time, destabilizes the “inside-outside relationship.” It is in this sense, then, that the postaesthetic—like the postliterary and postautonomous—can be said to be directed at imagining a text that dissolves its own frame. Or to return to Salvatierra, we might say that, from the perspective of the postaesthetic, the missing scroll works in the novel to destabilize the inside-outside relationship through which the artwork becomes visible. That is, like the supplement in Moreiras’ account, the missing year prevents the frame from completely closing. But where, for Miguel, the unavailability of the scroll means forever living in neither the real nor the aesthetic world, for the postaesthetic, it means the end of the aesthetic-historicist paradigm and the beginning of a new project. And so, like its postliterary and postautonomous counterparts, the postaesthetic imagines that politics begins once the frame dissolves and literature ends.

Posthegemony

As Mairal’s novel indicates, this dissolution of the frame would not only render the world indistinguishable from its representation, but in so doing, transform the artwork into an occasion for an experience in much the same way any object we encounter in the world might become such an occasion.34 Or, to put it in terms borrowed from Fried, the distinction between the work of art and its objecthood ceases to matter altogether. And as we have begun to argue, in the context of Latin American criticism and theory, a similar distinction is identified as the problem both postliterary and postaesthetic conceptions of text seek to overcome with an eye to decisively political ends. This is nowhere more apparent than in testimonio criticism, which understands the performative dimension of the postliterary text as a means toward generating an experience that would result in the reader’s identification with the subaltern. But where a critic like Beverley had seen the possibility of solidarity and participation in this dimension of the testimonio narrative, the same insistence on readerly responses vis-à-vis the text that underlies his argument against literature will persist in radicalized form—one that makes it even more fundamental—in Jon Beasley-Murray’s important account of posthegemony.35

 To begin, Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony (2010) argues that considerations of consent, opinions, and beliefs—what he calls “traditional politics”—“offers at best a temporary palliative, at worst a fatal distraction from the real workings of power and domination” (xii).  As a result, he locates the possibility of a left politics today in the articulation of habit, affect, and the multitude (as articulated by Bourdieu, Deleuze, and Negri respectively). Beasley-Murray consequently maintains that “in stressing the role of habit,” posthegemonic analysis points to “processes that involve neither consent nor coercion”; and “in stressing the role of affect,” it turns to “the impersonal and embodied flow of intensities that undermines any concept of a rational subject who could provide or withdraw his or her consent” (x).

As Charles Hatfield suggests in his contribution to this special issue, the consequences of this shift away from questions of consent, opinion, and belief that the term “posthegemony” refers to become all the clearer in Beasley-Murray’s claim that “What matters is how things present themselves to us, not what they may represent” (205, emphasis in original). For Hatfield, this amounts to a reiteration of the same commitment to the primacy of the subject’s position that has been central to Latin American intellectual history, and that Moreiras criticizes. But Posthegemony’s emphasis on the “how things present themselves to us” demands an attention to the subject’s affective responses that will, as Beasley-Murray suggests, also have far-reaching consequences for the relationship between politics and aesthetics. Following Terry Eagleton’s notion of aesthetics as a “privileged means by which affect is purified, submitted to the apparent disinterestedness of liberal ideology,” Beasley-Murray discovers a posthegemonic politics in what Eagleton cites as the “habits, pieties, sentiments, and affections” that not only become “the ultimate binding force of the bourgeois social order,” but for this reason also offer a “resource for revolution” (149).

Dierdra Reber’s essay in this issue provides a comprehensive sense of what Eagleton’s claim looks like within the Hispanist literary canon by tracing an affective narrative logic from the colonial period and nineteenth-century independence moments, through the Latin American “boom” literatures, and to present-day mobilization of social media by protest movements in Mexico (#yoysoy132) and Spain (15-M). But Posthegemony takes this claim a step further in imagining that aesthetics is politics to the extent that it provides “something in the body” with an opportunity to “revolt against the power which inscribes it” (149). This is in no small part because “Resistance is no longer a matter of contradiction, but rather of the dissonance between would-be hegemonic projects and the immanent processes that they always fail fully to represent” (136). That this view of aesthetics stems from a “politics of affect” (130) that foregrounds what Posthegemony describes as the “(non)relation or incompatibility between processes of capture and affective escape” (138) will therefore also suggest that Beverley’s “antiliterary” text falls short precisely because the forms of solidarity with new social movements—just as the solidarity with the marea rosada his “postsubalternism” will seek later—rest on the production of a readerly experience that are subject to the processes of capture executed by the state, the party, or populism. In contrast, Beasley-Murray insists that “however much affect is confined, something always escapes” (132), and it is in this “something” that a radical potential for resistance lies. In this way, the “resources for revolution” he sees in aesthetics are deeply bound up with the work’s ability to generate an affective response that, at the same time, underscores the irrelevance of representation and, by extension, of cognitive processes of interpretation. And it is only in so doing that aesthetics can sidestep questions of belief or consent.36

Yet, as Abraham Acosta usefully puts it in an incisive reading of Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony and Beverley’s Latinamericanism after 9/11, “what we see between the two is the fashioning of competing models and the formation of a new economy of reading.”37 We would only add that this is particularly true insofar as “reading” is understood here not as the interpretation of meaning, but as an attention to the effects a work provokes in the reader. To be sure, this attention is oriented toward different—if not altogether antithetical—political ends in each. For Beverley, the aim is “the formation of a new historical bloc at national, continental, and intercontinental levels in Latin America based on alliance politics between social groups (including but not limited to economic classes) with different sorts of experiences, interests, values, worldviews, histories, cultural practices, sometimes even languages.”38 In contrast, Beasley-Murray suggests that the conjunction of an embodied affect and habit “leads us to the multitude: a social subject that gains power as it constructs new habits, new modes of being in the world whose durability is secured precisely by the fact that they are embodied well beneath consciousness” (178). And yet, if Beverley’s postliterary or “antiliterary” text can be said to perform a kind of consciousness-raising that provides the reader with those beliefs that Beasley-Murray’s politics of affect treats as “temporary palliative” and “fatal distraction,” both are equally committed to imagining a form of immediacy between reader and text that demands a dissolution of the frame. For what is primary in both is not what a work represents, but rather with how it affects us. In brief, what is significant and political about the work of art is, for both, the effect it has on the reader, not what it means or represents.

But this also means that insofar as Posthegemony’s emphasis falls on the “embodied flow of intensities” or effects provoked, then what it understands as the function of the literary text or artwork more generally is no different from that of non-aesthetic objects like populist rhetoric, mass media, or popular culture. Of course, from the standpoint of affective criticism—and from that of cultural studies’ critique of aesthetics—this is precisely the point. In this way, Beasley-Murray provides what is perhaps the clearest picture of what the literary text is and does under the conditions of real subsumption that Ludmer’s postautonomy names. For Ludmer, such forms of writing register a self-reflexive refusal of the literary in its most conventional or formal sense to suggest that they are not fiction because rather than represent reality they “fabricate present.” And if, according to Beasley-Murray, “what matters is how things present themselves to us, not what they may represent,” this is, from Ludmer’s perspective, because in the wake of literature’s real subsumption (“everything cultural [and literary] is economic and that everything economic is cultural [and literary]), there is nothing to represent (“reality…is fiction and fiction is reality”).

As Ludmer also suggests, this emptying-out of both the literary and its claims to representing the present as historical referent will have wide-ranging consequences, not only with respect to the way in which texts are circulated and read, but particularly in regard to what Adorno and Horkheimer had seen as the “distinction between the logic of the work and that of the social system,” a division that literature’s assertion of autonomy had formerly provided. This “social system” is one in which labor processes of all kinds, including cultural ones, are directed toward the creation of value and its valorization. Said differently, without recourse to the logic of the work that such autonomy presumes, we must consider the literary object primarily in relation to what Marx understood as the “unity of the labor process and the process of valorization,” in “the capitalist process of production, or the capitalist form of the production of commodities.”39 And if literature is a commodity like any other, then it can be said to play a significant role in the process of valorization represented by Marx’s exchange-formula M-C-M¹. From the standpoint of this same process of valorization, however, this also means that a literary text is no more significant—indeed, no different—than, say, a Hollywood blockbuster, a saw, a toothbrush, or any other object. Of course, no commodity can fulfill this role unless it meets the demands imposed by the market, which is to say that to presume that literature is only a commodity like any other requires us to believe that what it is and does is determined exclusively by the effort to fulfill consumer desires and realize its exchange-value. Consequently, if Ludmer believes that postautonomous literatures “cannot be read as literature,” this is because what she cites as “literary criteria or categories like author, work, style, writing, text, and meaning” all evince the same market-driven calculation that does not just efface the distinction between artworks and commodities, but also renders the distinction—much like Salvatierra’s absent frame—between literature and any other kind of object irrelevant.

Furthermore, we can understand why the reader’s or viewer’s affective dispositions and experience become all the more important at the moment of literature’s postautonomy, why, in other words, the term “postautonomous literatures” is simply another name for the literatures of posthegemony. For what the work says about itself is, from the point of view of the commodity, less important than what it might say to and about us as readers/consumers, since it is only in light of her or his response that the object has any value for the critic. Thus, what follows from the repudiation of categories like artwork or meaning is a deep investment in considerations of whatever effect the artwork—like any object—happens to produce, and so what we experience and who we are as subjects of that experience become primary concerns. Indeed, for reasons we have already touched on, this insistence on the commodity character of all literature, and art more generally, offers a means toward imagining a dissolution of the frame that renders the work’s objecthood all the more conspicuous. This is no less the case for the posthegemonic commitment to  “how things present themselves to us,” for insofar as interpretation is understood here as a cognitive function associated with consent, opinion, belief, and representation, then the question of what a text or painting means is just as much a “distraction” from what is both significant and political about the work itself. And if what matters instead are questions of what happens to us (at a pre-cognitive, corporeal level), as well as who we are (as embodied subjects), then Beasley-Murray’s account is not just consistent with Ludmer’s, but marks a similar insistence on the primacy of textual effects that is consistent with the notion of the frameless text we have traced from the rise of testimonio in 1980s to the postautonomous literatures of the present. We might even say that Beasley-Murray’s affective criticism goes a step further insofar as this commitment to the primacy of what happens at the pre-cognitive and corporeal level makes it impossible to even register something like the frame.

Inequality, Exploitation, and Inclusion

The disintegration of the modicum of distance from the market that literature’s assertion of autonomy had formerly provided here meets the disintegration of that distance between the artwork and subject, or between the text and reader, that the frame presupposes. And as we have just seen, what follows from this is an increasing attentiveness to the question of what happens to the reader. But while this project came to define a good deal of literary and cultural debate in Latin America throughout the last three decades, it has also been consistently given an immediate political content, one which has been underwritten by a concern with the different positions individual and collective subjects assume within society.

The prominence given to this concern marks a tendency that extends well beyond the disciplinary boundaries of these debates and to other disciplines; and in fact, the consequences of this orientation are perhaps nowhere more apparent than in John Womack’s “Doing Labor History: Feelings, Work, Material Power” (2005). Here Womack examines the importance labor studies increasingly places on the worker’s experience, and questions of race, gender, or identity more generally. This concern, he observes, has been attended by a tendency to treat a worker’s relationship to labor—and labor’s relationship to capital—as less important, if not altogether irrelevant. The result, according to Womack, has been a shift from analyses of “coordinated labor power in production” to an investment in accounting for “individual, personal experience, not work, but the feeling of a self at work.”40 Similarly, labor history’s concern with who the worker is—with his or her “‘voices,’ ‘subjectivity,’ ‘experience,’ ‘meanings,’ ‘identity,’ and ‘language’” (274)—not only refuses to see “workers…as labor power” (283), but in so doing, also prevents historians from understanding the very economic structure that transforms individuals into workers in the first place (that is, capitalist production). And this is particularly true, according to Womack, in the case of “U.S. historians of Latin America” (279), for whom the disappointment with the Marxian or revolutionary Left throughout the region would prove decisive by 1990.

But the tendency Womack considers here can also be said to participate in what Daniel Zamora has identified as a “semantic and ideological evolution” that has sought to redefine the fundamental problem of exploitation as a question about exclusion.41 As Zamora suggests, this evolution is rooted in a broader tendency—inside and outside of the university—to conceive of politics exclusively as an accounting for the disproportionate effects of inequality that individuals and marginalized groups experience under capitalism. Tracing this shift through debates on the economy in Europe and the US since the 1980s, and back to the stress on domination and discrimination underlying the critique of classical Marxism of the late-1960s, Zamora notes that the growing centrality of the term “excluded” for both the Right and the Left has worked primarily to displace a concern with those forms of exploitation that underlie labor’s relationship to capital. What this has meant, according to Zamora, is that

[T]he categories of “the unemployed,” “the poor,” or the “precarious,” are swiftly disconnected from being understood in terms of the exploitation at the heart of capitalist economic relations, and find themselves and their situation apprehended in terms of relative (monetary, social, or psychological) deprivation, filed under the general rubrics of “exclusion,” “discrimination,” or forms of “domination.”

Whether mobilized on behalf of conservative critiques of the “privileged and protected welfare underclass,” or by leftists with an eye to underscoring the radical potential of the “precariat,” the “sans-culottes,” or the “part of the partless,” this focused attention on the category of the “excluded” pits two factions of the same exploited class—the employed and unemployed, “active” workers and “surplus populations”—against each other. Importantly, this shift has also succeeded in redefining the antagonism between labor and capital at the heart of capitalism as the conflict between the “included” and the “excluded,” and in so doing, has reoriented the aims of social and political theory away from the transformation of the mode of production and capitalist economic relations. And if, as Zamora notes, “what takes center stage is what/where one is (one’s identity) in the relations of domination within one’s own class (unemployed, underemployed, immigrant, etc.),” then we can begin to see why this semantic and ideological evolution can be said to recall the same commitment to the prominence of identity and experience Womack sees in labor history’s concern with “the feeling of a self at work.”

No doubt the historical trajectory Zamora outlines belongs to the context of the end of the American and European postwar boom that introduced not only a quantitative change in unemployment, but also a qualitative transformation in the form that unemployment takes. And yet, it is also true that a similar change in the global distribution of unemployment—as well as in the global division of labor—has produced comparable consequences in intellectual and political debates within the context of Latin American studies since the 1980s. As Robert Kurz has shown, this postwar boom corresponds to a period marked by an explosive increase in capital intensity (what Marx calls the “organic composition of capital”) propelled by an unprecedented leap in the scientific and technical capacity of capitalist production during the postwar period, but whose origins lie in the very logic of commodity production that demands the development of productive forces from businesses with an eye to competitiveness.42 The result is an intensification of productivity that renders capital increasingly incapable of absorbing labor power. Or, as Kurz puts it, capitalism becomes “‘unable to exploit,’ that is, for the first time in the history of capitalism, the total global mass of productively exploited abstract labor is declining absolutely, as a result of the permanently increasing levels of productive forces.”43 This new and unprecedented standard of productivity leads to a decline in profitability that throws the entire global system of commodity production into crisis.

The consequences of this historically specific immanent contradiction are well known in Latin America, whose economies could not keep up with these new levels of productivity, and onto which the burden of this crisis is eventually shifted by way, for example, of the structural adjustment policies designed by the IMF and World Bank. What follows, according to Kurz, is the “collapse of modernization,” a situation in which the conditions of possibility for social and economic modernization had been radically altered, if not altogether eliminated, by the third world’s inability to meet new levels of productivity. Consolidated under the debt crisis of the 1980s, this collapse of modernization would render the developmentalist hope for success within that system—to say nothing of an alternative to it—an impossibility. But this also means that the proletarianized masses that various modernization projects promised to integrate into the national-popular state become redundant to capital’s economic needs, transformed now into what Kurz calls “monetary subjects without money.” For Kurz, “Most of the world’s population today, therefore, already consists of monetary subjects without money, people who do not fit into any form of social organization, neither pre-capitalist nor capitalist, much less post-capitalist, being forced to live a social leprosy that already comprises most of the planet.”44 These are surplus populations, but Kurz’s terminology is important here precisely because it marks the degree to which they remain products of and subject to the logic of exploitation, even as unabsorbed labor power.

But if this transformation in the political configuration of the world economic system can be said to precipitate the explosion in the surplus populations of Latin America’s favelas, villas miserias, and ciudades perdidas, it might also be understood as the origins of that tendency within political theory and debates to emphasize the “excluded.” It is perhaps for this reason that the displacement of a concern with exploitation by questions of domination and discrimination Zamora traces was no less decisive for Latin American studies. Citing Žižek, Zamora notes that the critique of classical Marxism in Europe and the US “compelled many thinkers and movements to redefine their sense of the ‘social agents who could play the role of the revolutionary subject, as understudies who might replace an indisposed working class: Third World peasants, students, intellectuals, the excluded.’” This is also the case in Latin America following the socioeconomic collapse of modernization, which precipitated a dismantling of political utopias and rise in surplus populations that appear to have posed new challenges to the Marxian commitment to exploitation as the privileged category of social critique.45 Accordingly, a similar search for such “social agents” increasingly—though not totally—divested of any association with class like the subaltern that has been as central to Latin Americanism for some time now.

For example, we have already observed how this collapse and ensuing disappointment underlies Beverley and Oviedo’s call for a shift from a “politics (and epistemology) of representation to one of solidarity and participation.” Beverley’s work throughout the same period maintained that resistance in the form of such solidarity and participation with various social movements would oppose the hierarchies and subordinations imposed by the national-popular state.  What Beverley and Oviedo call “alliance politics,” to be sure, is simply another name for “identity politics,” though, more importantly, it also highlights the degree to which Beverley’s notion of resistance redefines the goal of all politics as a critique of domination articulated in terms of inclusion.

Moreiras proposes an alternative to such politics of inclusion/exclusion when he insists that such solidarity and participation always presumes some prior exclusion that ultimately undermines the egalitarian project promoted by critics like Beverley. Moreiras has more recently expanded on this point in a response to Beverley, explaining that the “notion that the subaltern is the constitutive outside of any hegemonic articulation—hence, the subaltern cannot claim belonging, and must therefore not claim any positive identity whatsoever: the subaltern is the nonsubject of the political.”46 This is a concept he fully develops in Línea de sombra (2006) as an alternative to all forms of “subjectivism in politics”—that is, to the insistence on the political primacy of the subject. Such subjectivism, Moreiras argues, “is always exclusionary, always particularist, even when the subject is conceived as communitarian subject,” as in communism, “and even when the subject conceived of itself as representative of the universal,” as in liberalism.”47 In contrast, the nonsubject is “not an ideal to be reached, a goal to be achieved”; rather, it is “only an instance to take into account, only a necessary condition of all political thought” that suggests that “neither justice nor equality nor liberty would be able to exist if justice, equality, and liberty are exclusionary” in any sense.48 The possibility of a politics beyond the subject is consequently made available by a form of political thought—what Moreiras refers to here and elsewhere as “infrapolitics”—grounded in a recognition of a  “constitutive outside” the nonsubject names, but which, at the same time, can never be incorporated into the articulation of political concepts like justice, equality, or liberty.49 Thus, pace Beverley, the point is not to produce some more inclusive version of these or similar concepts by way of something like an “alliance politics,” since, according to Moreiras, such a politics is invariably derived from an image of the subject that generates its own radical exclusions, remaining always outside all political and aesthetic articulations. Similarly, Susana Draper’s essay in this special issue of nonsite demonstrates how literature, and particularly Roberto Bolaño’s Amuleto (1999), marks the possibility of opening up a space for thinking through and beyond the notion of an impossible democracy to come, all while refusing to reduce that notion to a singular political subject.

Needless to say, Moreiras’ thought of the political finds a counterpart in the concept of the postaesthetic, which, as we noted above, is not directed at any inclusion as such, but rather at the identification of an “excess” on which the binary of inside/outside (inclusion/exclusion) is not just predicated, but also by which it is deconstructed. But if Moreiras’ commitment to subalternism as such can be said to alter the political meaning of exclusion, even radicalizing it as the necessary condition for all politics, we may nonetheless ask whether it can be made to speak not simply to relations of power (which always leave a “remainder,” “excess,” or “outside”), but to a mode of production in which exclusion itself—as in the case of the economic category of monetary subjects without money—is not just coincident with the logic of exploitation, but the inexorable result of that logic. That is, while infrapolitics offers a compelling means for a critique of domination that foregrounds the failure of every hegemonic articulation (justice, equality, liberty) by taking into account the excluded nonsubject, how might it lead to a transformation of a mode of production defined, above all, by exploitation? Or, to put the question another way: how might we map the movement from the infrapolitical to politics itself?

For Beasley-Murray, the upshot of this “vigilant and unceasing critique of power on the basis of hegemony’s inevitable failures” is an unsatisfactory conception of “posthegemony as permanent critique or labor of the negative.” The problem, he argues, is that critics like Moreiras “question the rules of the game by pointing to the aporetic excess for which [hegemony] can never account. But they do not doubt the game itself” (xiv). In response to what he sees as the failure of subaltern studies, Beasley-Murray develops a notion of posthegemony with a view to locating new modes of resistance, which are found in that affect, habit, and multitude to which domination itself—now at the noncognitive, corporeal level—gives rise. From this perspective too, the kinds of inclusion Beverley calls for, whether on behalf of the state, the party, or the people, ought to be regarded with skepticism, insofar as these are functions of an apparatus of “capture” into which the radical potential of such modes of resistance dissolves. In contrast, “Affect precedes and resists the process of subjection that gives us stable emotions and bounded identities,” and so “Something always escapes.” “But affect is ambivalent,” Beasley-Murray argues, and just as easily mobilized by the repressive structures associated with the state and market: “As habit, affect continually encodes structures of domination, even immanently” and “perpetuates an arbitrary social order ‘on the hither side of words and concepts’” (227).

At the same time, it turns out that habit too is “ambivalent,” and therefore “threatens to outstrip the structures that it constitutes.” In this sense, affect and habit are both “components of a constituent power that escapes and exceeds constituted power,” which is to say, that they are tools of domination that nonetheless become a means to resist and subvert it. One is tempted here to see something of Moreiras’ emphasis on the nonsubject as the “constitutive outside,” or “excess,” that refuses all forms of inclusion, though a pointed difference asserts itself in Beasley-Murray’s claim that “Affect and habit are the first two concepts of a theory of posthegemony, but they lead on to a third: the multitude.” For the multitude, as theorized by Negri and as Posthegemony insists, is a subject, and even “reclaims subjectivity from its disrepute in much twentieth-century political theory” (228).  Although, “Like the multitude, the subaltern is beyond representation,” it is nonetheless a “limit concept,” and so whereas “Subalternity is defined negatively,” as the negation of hegemonic articulations of all kinds, the “multitude, by contrast, is defined positively” as the self-constituting subject of history that leaves “hegemony behind altogether” (234).

Herein, then, lies both the potential for resistance that embodied forms of affect and habit can be said to possess, as well as the futurity of posthegemony: for “habit leads us to the multitude: a social subject that gains power as it constructs new habits, new modes of being in the world whose durability is secured precisely by the fact that they are embodied well beneath consciousness” (178). Now, while this conceptualization of posthegemony would seem to recall the same investment in experience Zamora and Womack identify with the shift in political theory and labor studies away from the question of exploitation, Beasley-Murray refuses the equation of affect with experience alone, as that which “happens to a body.” At the same time, the disavowal of affect’s reduction to experience gives way to a transformation of history itself into the “recomposition or movement of bodies, a series of modulations in and through affect” (132). For Beasley-Murray, then, the point is not so much to foreground an experience produced by the subject’s position within a particular social structure determined by one’s race, gender, or class. The point is rather to conceive of this very structure as both acting on and a product of such bodily movements, which will, at the same time, give rise to new affects and habits that resist systematicity and structure as that which “always escapes.”

For all that, such resistance should, again, not be confused with that form of radical exclusion on which Moreiras’ thought of the political insists; on the contrary, insofar as affect, habit, and the body itself are now grasped simultaneously as the object of domination and locus of resistance “on the hither side of words and concepts,” the thrust here is decidedly toward a radicalized vision of inclusion—extended now to bodies, flesh, skin, and nerves—that encompasses life itself, what Beasley-Murray, following Foucault, refers to as biopolitics. That is, political resistance is located in that which “always escapes” the apparatuses of capture associated with the state, party politics, populism, or the market, but remains situated in those processes immanent to the social field.

For this reason, however, Posthegemony’s biopolitics, like Moreiras’ infrapolitics, must also defer the question of class politics, and Beasley-Murray suggests as much when he notes that the “multitude is a subject of a particular kind.” For while it is not the “rational individual beloved of the social sciences or one of the delimited identities of cultural studies’ multicultural alliance” reminiscent of Beverley’s Latinamericanism, it also isn’t the “traditional working class, whose identity derives from its place in the process of production and hence its relation to capital” (228). The multitude, in this sense, is the solution in which all class differences dissolve.50 But, as Zamora explains, “More than (or rather than) an identity, the idea of proletarian,” or the working class, “constituted a category” in classical Marxism. This category was “derived from the general processes of exploitation and inequality” and is a “function of the economic organization of capital.”51 What this means is that although posthegemonic politics advances a powerful critique of how the state, along with social and economic elites, exercise power, the stress laid on “how things present themselves to us,” on those effects generated at the level of the body, involves deemphasizing the general processes that give rise to such effects in the first place. From this perspective, infrapolitics and the politics of affect appear as two sides of the same coin, not simply because both challenge the identitarianism implicit in various kinds of political theory and “traditional politics,” but also because the conditions of the political are primarily conceived in radicalized terms of inclusion or exclusion that renders the structure of exploitation itself a secondary, if not altogether irrelevant concern. As Zamora’s essay makes clear, however, the refusal to recognize exploitation as a primary concern is something which both the neoliberal Right and progressive Left are happy to accept, extending an overall trend since the late 1970s to redescribe the “class difference that generates the very structures of capitalism and exploitation” as difference in how the “effects of inequality get distributed throughout society.”  And the problem with this shift, according to Zamora, is that it obstructs the possibility “to think abstractly about the forces that produce inequality…and leaves us stranded at the level of their immediate forms,” making it all the more difficult to imagine the transformation of the very structure that gives rise to this inequality on both a local and world-systemic scale.

Making Form Visible

Indeed, the point for Womack and Zamora is that the effort to imagine any transformation as such is not simply a question of exploitation, but of making the structure that produces it visible. Womack makes this point clear, for example, when addressing the refusal on the part of labor studies to account for that which defines it as a discipline: labor. This refusal, he argues, is important not simply as a matter of accounting for exploitation, but as a question of conceptualizing the discipline’s object of inquiry itself: “They can ‘explore the articulation [sic, for inflection] of gender and class’ all they please, but they will not explain industrial workers’ gender or class (or discourse or subjectivity), so long as they look for it only in ‘experience’” (93). In other words, insofar as what counts is the “feeling of the self,” then it matters very little whether that feeling is produced by work, discrimination, inequality, exclusion or even other bodies. That is, the emphasis on experience functions to make the cause of that experience—capitalist economic relations—tangential at best, irrelevant at worst.

Undoubtedly, the brand of political theory developed by several of the critics considered here concerns the way in which power functions and effectuates domination under capitalism, and how the effects it generates become sites of potential resistance and revolt. Thus, Beasley-Murray reads in Marx the claim that “Part and parcel of our exploitation is that our habits are not our own” (204) to suggest that capital demands and imposes mechanisms of social domination that secure the perpetuation of exploitation itself. The problem with the emphasis on domination in Latin American studies, however, is that in leaving questions about the same system’s mode of production aside, it has tended to render the structure of capitalist economic relations barely visible. Said differently, while an attention to embodied habits, experience, or hegemonic articulations may very well gesture toward an account of how exploitation continues to persist, it alone cannot make the relations of production that generate the structures of class inequality and exploitation legible in the first place. To think otherwise would be to render the difference between this system and the manner in which it reproduces itself indistinguishable. From this point of view, then, we can begin to understand the force of what Zamora means when he notes that the “invisibility” of these structures “is a kind of image of neoliberalism.”

No doubt Womack’s and Zamora’s astute insights into labor and the structure of the economy also find a parallel in Latin Americanist literary and cultural debates, which have borne witness to a turn away from that which had long defined these and similar fields: an attention to the work itself. The predominant literary project that emerges from these debates is one committed to the text’s dissolution of the very structure that distinguishes it from non-literary objects, and art from nonart more generally, rendering the differences between these invisible. Beatriz Sarlo makes a similar observation about cultural studies when she notes that:

[T]he aesthetic question cannot be ignored without significant loss. Because if we ignore the question of aesthetics we would be losing sight of the object that cultural studies is trying to construct (in opposition to an anthropological definition of culture).…The difficulty that we face is that we are no longer sure in what sense (whether formal or fundamental) art is a specialized dimension of culture, a dimension which can be defined separately from other cultural practices. Thus, once again, the point which concerns us is whether we can capture the specific dimension of art, that feature which tends to be overlooked from the culturalist perspective which motivates cultural studies, which so far has been ultra-relativist with respect to formal and semantic density. The paradox we face could also be considered one in which cultural studies is perfectly equipped to examine almost everything in the symbolic dimension of the social world, except art.52

Sarlo’s claim here has been widely criticized as evidence of her elitism—or even, as Beverley suggests, of her “neoconservative” thinking—and as evoking a desire to return to more traditional notions of literary studies associated with the national-popular state.53 Given Sarlo’s stress on values and her defense elsewhere of expertise, such criticisms are warranted.54 At the same time, Sarlo’s interest in the “aesthetic question” also raises crucial questions about the invisibility the “specific dimension of art” assumes within cultural studies. This is essentially a question of mediation, and so we might change the valences of terms like “value” and “ultra-relativist” to suggest that what is at stake here is the possibility of accounting for form at a moment when literature and culture are conceived primarily as isomorphic. From this perspective, Sarlo’s critique can be said to mark a commitment to the primacy of form, one which need not culminate in a defense of notions like “aesthetic value,” as it does in her essay, but which is nonetheless a necessary condition of any effort to conceptualize not just a distinction between art and nonart, but a distance between the artwork and reader’s or viewer’s experience.

We get a version of what this might look like in Mairal’s Salvatierra, and particularly in Miguel’s idea that finding the missing scroll would complete his father’s “work.” What is crucial here for Salvatierra’s son—and crucial for a certain conception of literature and art—is that without the roll, the difference between art and life becomes blurred, producing what the novel describes as the sensation of a  “limitless flow” or the “infinite.” But this, as we recall, also raises the question of what, if anything, could make the four kilometers of canvas something other than an object the beholder experiences in the same way she or he might experience any other massive object.

This is a question the novel seeks to address, for instance, when Miguel recalls that the Guinness Book of Records people had proposed to lay out the work on a highway and film it from a helicopter. The brothers refuse because “Salvatierra wouldn’t have liked this. He hadn’t painted his work for it to be seen from a helicopter like some kind of monstrous prodigy” (MY31/S38).55 Viewing the painting in this way would suggest experiencing the enormity of an amazing or unusual thing, and, as Mairal’s narrator would have it, Salvatierra had sought to create something else. Indeed, the novel alerts us to this fact earlier when Miguel notes that their father had distanced himself from the “installations and happenings” of the sixties, “aesthetic concerns that were alien to him” (MY23/S28), and which were—at least historically— conceived as attacks on the institution of art and the category of “work” itself. This is why Miguel’s search for the missing year is central to Salvatierra’s story, for finding the scroll would imply that “The infinite would reach an end.” But if finding the scroll would complete the work of art, and in this sense, provide a “frame, a border,” this does not mean that the sensation of limitlessness it provokes is totally irrelevant to its status as a painting; what the frame introduces rather is the possibility of distinguishing between whatever Miguel might feel before the canvas and what the artist wants everyone to feel. Indeed, no one denies that artworks can provoke an infinite range of responses from viewers/readers that have everything to do with who they are. The problem isn’t that the work of art gives rise to various kinds of effects, or even that we might think of it as the source of our affective dispositions. Rather, the problem is that, in the absence of the frame, the difference between painting and objects ceases to matter altogether, and so the experience of a tree in Salvatierra’s painting becomes no different than the experience of a tree outside of it. Thus, the insistence on the frame turns out to be not only an insistence on a distinction between art and nonart, but an assertion of the irreducibility of the artwork’s intended effects to the actual effects it occasions.

What it means to make artistic form visible, then, is to mark a distance between artworks and objects, between a representation of the world and the world itself, and in this sense, to make the difference between intended and unintended effects visible. Borrowing from Michael Fried, we might say that in defeating or suspending its own objecthood, Salvatierra’s painting would not simply insist on the irrelevance of the beholder’s experience to its meaning, but more precisely, on the irrelevance of those unintended effects that any beholder might experience. The difference between these views is provided here by the frame, which, in foregrounding the canvas’ status as painting, allows us to ascribe the sensation of limitlessness Miguel feels not to an object but to a work of art, and to understand that sensation itself as an intended effect, that is, as a question of meaning and interpretation.

In this way, Salvatierra’s assertion of the frame can be said to approximate Fried’s idea of absorption in painting, which is both constitutive of a “mode of pictorial unity,” as well as a means by which to refuse the reduction of the artwork’s meaning to the beholder’s actual experience.56 What is important in Fried’s account, as in Sarlo’s, is the possibility of envisioning a work whose form and meaning remain irreducible to those unintended effects the beholder/reader may experience. And we can see something of the inverse in Beasley-Murray’s claim that “What matters is how things present themselves to us, not what they may represent.” For if what the work may represent or mean—an interpretive question associated with “consent, opinion, and belief”—does not matter, then the difference between intended and unintended effects cannot matter either. Conversely, in Mairal’s novel, the insistence on this “specific dimension of art” presupposes a distance that not only allows Miguel to live outside of his father’s painting and past, but also makes representation possible; to insist on what Miguel calls the frame, in other words, is to insist on the irreducibility of art to objecthood, making visible a formal distinction between meaning and readerly experience that a significant swath of Latin Americanist theory has treated as unimportant for the last thirty years.

The point, however, is not simply that the text needs to defeat or suspend its own objecthood. It is also a matter of making form—literary and social—visible. Steve Buttes’ contribution to this issue of nonsite provides a sense of why this is the case by turning to the matter of literature and debt, though as Womack and Zamora indicate, this is not a question for literary studies alone. That is, it isn’t difficult to see that the success of neoliberalism as a political project has depended largely on the effort to imagine, or insist on, a world in which economic structures like class inequality are invisible, one in which “there is no such thing as society,” and in which the free market operationalizes the self-interest of unconstrained individuals. As both Womack and Zamora point out, part of the problem with this invisibility is that it makes it impossible to understand the effects generated by capitalist economic relations like the exclusion of surplus populations. In the case of Latin American studies, it has been primarily culturalists, like Beverley, who have stressed the primacy of experience. And while critics like Moreiras and Beasley-Murray offer incisive critiques of subjectivism and identity politics that underlie this project, they are equally committed to doing away with form; indeed, all see form (and the mediation it assumes) as central to both the aesthetic and political problem.

This is a situation in which something like the assertion of the frame in Salvatierra, what amounts to a refusal of the artwork’s objecthood, acquires an entirely new political significance, because in making the “specific dimension of art” legible, it also marks a limit to the reduction of the artwork’s form to the experience of seeing it or reading it. Or, to put it another way, the assertion of the frame is what makes seeing or reading not simply a question of what the work says to and about us as viewers or readers, but a question of what it means, and in this sense, of interpretation. And insofar as the question of meaning is predicated on an attention to form, on what we have been calling the frame, then we can begin to see how this attention orients our thinking away from the prominence given to experience, and effects more generally, that plays into a disavowal of structure (economic, political, social) that neoliberalism demands. Which is just to say that if an assertion of literary form is, in fact, a politics, this is because it insists on a certain irrelevance of the claim “that everything cultural (and literary) is economic and that everything economic is cultural (and literary),” a claim which underlies that conception of the unframed text that we have traced through the work of Ludmer, Beverley, Moreiras and Beasley-Murray. Indeed, what follows from this claim is not simply an injunction to conceive of literature as nothing but a commodity like any other, but a refusal to conceive of the text as anything more than an object. And yet, the insistence on form—on that which makes Salvatierra’s painting, for example, a representation of the world rather than an object in it—suggests that regardless of whether art is a commodity, its meaning isn’t. To think otherwise, as we have shown, is to reduce meaning to experience, and to understand interpretation as nothing but an attention to whatever effects the text provokes. A politics of form consequently emerges not simply from the visibility of the frame, but in a certain irreducibility of meaning to experience that this visibility maintains. In this sense, the insistence on form becomes the theoretical point of departure for a critique not simply of the Latin Americanist commitment to the unframed text, but also of the market, where the distinction between meaning and effect, art and objecthood, and interpretation and experience similarly dissolves. And it is in maintaining this distinction that the assertion of the frame preserves the possibility of seeing the very structure of exploitation that neoliberalism demands to be hidden.

Beverley’s project of cultural dehierarchization thus begins to look less like something that was—as he puts it—“ceded to the market and to neoliberalism” by the Left and more like something that is part and parcel of neoliberalism itself (23). If neoliberalism has come hand in hand with a cultural project that absorbs economic inequalities into cultural differences, my argument is that it has also brought with it a series of theoretical investments for Latin American literary criticism that turn interpretative disagreements into the identitarian differences between readers. Indeed, it could be said that one of the most pervasive orthodoxies in the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies is the explicit or implicit repudiation of the idea that what matters about a text is the meaning its author intended.4 This produces a conversion of disagreements into difference because, as I will argue, without intention, or the idea that a text’s meaning exists independently from our individual experience of it, we cannot have interpretive disagreements. In order to disagree with someone about a text’s meaning, in other words, we must not only think that our interpretation is in fact the interpretation but also that our different experiences as readers is irrelevant. How else would it make sense to think that others, who have their own irrefutably distinctive experiences of reading a text, are mistaken about what it means?

In the introduction to her important edited volume entitled The Ethics of Latin American Literary Criticism: Reading Otherwise (2007), Erin Graff Zivin poses a provocative question: “Can the act of reading be understood as an event?”5 If the answer is “yes,” then one consequence is that the reader’s identity must now be seen as essential to the enterprise, since s/he is actually a participant in the event. Moreover, no two readings—or events of reading—will be alike because, among other things, no two readers will be alike. If reading is thought to be an event, then, a full accounting of the subject position of each reader will be fundamentally important, since each reading will vary depending on who is doing it, where, and when. In fact, the entire range of these variations will have to become the focus of our investigations—and we will be left to make sense of them by describing not the text but rather the endless difference of each reading subject, the place in which s/he is reading, etc.

Graff Zivin alternatively considers what might be gained by exploring other “interrelated avenues of inquiry,” such as the role of affect or the extent to which “we can locate within literary discourse an ‘other side’ of representation, some element within the confines of the text (or within our encounter with the text) that resists representation” (2). However, affect and that which “resists representation” are two sides of the same coin since both force us to abandon interpretation in favor of a description of the subject position of the reader. On the one hand, if we are interested in a reader’s affective response to a text, instead of interpreting the text we will have to focus on the particularity of the reader having the affective response. On the other hand, if we are interested in that which resists representation, all that we can logically do is deal with the myriad affective responses it produces, since there is no representation that we can interpret. Both of these questions, however, force us to contend with not only the reader but also everything that is part of the reader’s experience.

The extent to which this is true is illustrated in Julio Cortázar’s classic short story “Continuity of Parks” (1956), in which the reader of a novel realizes that he is a character in the novel he is reading. “Continuity of Parks” is most often read as a text that affirms the participation of the reader in the text.6 However, it could also be said that “Continuity of Parks” points to a range of consequences involved in thinking of a reader as a participant, since at the end of Cortázar’s story the reader discovers not only that he is in the text, but also that everything that surrounds him (and is thus part of his experience) is in the text as well: his green velvet armchair, his house, his study, the “great windows,” the “oak trees in the park.”7 In fact, it is precisely the repetition of these elements from the reader’s surroundings at the end of the story that signal his own presence in the novel he is reading. Hence the “continuity” of “Continuity of Parks,” which is simultaneously Cortázar’s shortest story and, at least logically, his most unending, since if the reader is part of the text, then so is virtually everything else.

The interest in questions such as the event of reading or the affective response of the reader makes identitarian difference the main focus of studying a text, but it also destroys the notion of the text as a discrete object that can be studied in the first place. If reading is an event, or if what is relevant about a text is the affective experience of its readers, studying literature inescapably involves describing the infinite and irreducible difference of reading subjects over space and time. Just as every reading event will be bound up with an account of the subjective particularity of each reader, so, too will the affective responses a text produces. However, the fact is that anyone who has ever understood themselves to have read the same text as someone else, or who has ever disagreed with someone else about what a text means, has already rejected the idea that reading is an event, or that the effects a text produces on the reader have any relevance whatsoever to a text’s meaning. That is because in order for two people to disagree, they must first agree that there is a singular truth about what is and is not part of the text.8 In other words, they must agree that the truth about what the text is exists independent of their individual experiences of it, since if what the text is were to be bound up with their individual experience of it, they would have to think that they are not disagreeing but instead talking about two different texts, each one made different by their own experience. Then, having recognized that their individual experience is autonomous from what the text is, they will then have to face the fact that it makes no sense to justify their beliefs both about what the text is and what it means by referring to themselves or their experience. Instead, each of them will realize that they have the beliefs they have about the text because they think those are the true beliefs about it.

Jon Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America (2010), however, presents a very different account of meaning. “What matters,” Beasley-Murray writes, is “how things present themselves to us, not what they may represent.”9 Beasley-Murray thus replaces representation—which involves what something means—with affect—which involves how something is experienced. From the start, the vision of the world that Posthegemony gives us is essentially and inescapably identitarian. That is because the question of what something means will always be answered with a claim about what is, independent of us, whereas the question of how we experience it will always be answered with a description of who we are. That Posthegemony is one of the most brilliant and important examples of Latin Americanist scholarship from the last decade or more is readily apparent. Less apparent, however, are the ways in which Posthegemony radicalizes, rather than repudiates, the identitarian logic that has been at the heart of Latin Americanist thought. It might be said, in other words, that the effort to convert meaning into experience—to think of “how things present themselves to us, not what they may represent”—is the essence of Latin Americanism itself.

To say that Posthegemony is fundamentally identitarian is not to say that it relies on any of the old, familiar identitarian categories or conceptions. Posthegemony operates radically outside the traditional categories or collectivities of identitarianism. For Beasley-Murray, identity is not fixed, but in a state of “constant flux” (127), not essentialized but infinitely heterogeneous, not bound up with the history of popular, regional, national, linguistic, cultural, or racial identities, but “radically open” (234). In other words, Beasley-Murray’s book seems on the surface to understand the world not in terms of “identities” but rather in terms of the “interactions of bodies” that actually “overflow any set identities,” and to imagine a future in which “singularities and partial objects, bodies of all shapes and sizes” would be transformed into “new experimental couplings and collectivities” (132). Given that Posthegemony insists that history is “no more or less than the recomposition or movement of bodies, a series of modulations in and through affect,” in which “bodies either coalesce or disintegrate” in the process of the “continuous variation that characterizes the infinite encounters between bodies,” it might even seem that Beasley-Murray offers up a vision of politics after identity (128). Indeed, it is Beasley-Murray’s hope that we might even be able to one day “liberate ourselves—from our selves” (132).

However, Posthegemony’s identitarianism is found neither in the way it substantializes identity—as popular, regional, national, linguistic, cultural, or racial—nor in the way it conceptualizes it—as embodied, performative, essential, contingent, or discursive.10 There can be little doubt that Posthegemony empties out such categories and goes beyond such theorizations. In their place, however, Posthegemony installs the fundamental logic of identity itself, stripped of its problematic substances or conceptualizations. Posthegemony’s identitarianism, in other words, is found in its replacement of ideology and meaning with affect.11

At the very heart of the political and theoretical project of Posthegemony is the repudiation of ideology (what people believe) and the affirmation of affect, which Beasley-Murray (relying on the work of Brian Massumi) defines as “the constant interactions between bodies and the resultant impacts of such interactions” (127). The “constant interactions” and “impacts” (127) of disintegrating and transmutating bodies, which Beasley-Murray argues are behind all “real workings of power and domination” (xii), are to be understood as fundamentally experiential, rather than ideological, since they take place “far beneath consciousness or ideology” (3). Social order, he argues, was “never in fact secured through ideology,” since “no amount of belief in the dignity of labor or the selfishness of elected representatives could ever have been enough to hold things together” (ix). But rather than claim that affect governs or influences ideology, Beasley-Murray “dispense[s] with the concept of ideology altogether” (177) in favor of “an affect that can do without either ideology or discourse” (30).

Beasley-Murray thus doesn’t need to explicitly make the claim, as he does, that “what matters is how things present themselves to us” rather than “what they may represent,” because without ideology, all that’s left is actually the question of “how things present themselves to us.” That question—about “how things present themselves to us”—can in turn only be answered with a description of who we are, especially given Beasley-Murray’s insistence on the idea that “no two bodies affect others in precisely the same ways” (128).12 The problem we face, however, when we abandon the question of what things represent and replace it with the question of “how things present themselves to us” is that disagreement becomes logically impossible.

We cannot disagree when we believe that there are merely different, equally valid ways of seeing and knowing the world and no singular truth or privileged way of knowing it. This is precisely the point Alberto Moreiras makes in The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (2001) when he remarks that “the positing of location as final redemption” on the part of “Latin American Latin Americanists” leads to a “dubious legitimation.”13 The “legitimation” involved in “the positing of location,” of course, is not inherently “dubious.” Instead, it becomes dubious when it comes hand in hand with critique or disagreement—as Moreiras notes, for “Latin American Latin Americanists” it was “location” that “always already delegitimized their outsiding others” (6). As Moreiras points out, “location” cannot “function simultaneously as a source of legitimation and its opposite” (6).14 If we are committed to the idea that where we are—or who we are—actually counts as a piece of evidence we can use to justify our beliefs as true, then it is not only dubious but also impossible to disagree with the beliefs of others. If our beliefs are true given who we are, then the same must be the case for everyone else’s. Moreiras thus implies that critique involves a radical choice: if “location” or identity is relevant to the truth of our claims, then there can be no critique—but if there is to be critique, it depends on thinking that the truth of our beliefs has nothing whatsoever to do with who we are. This, of course, is not to say that our identity doesn’t condition our beliefs or explain how we got them. I know, for example, that Ted Cruz and I have different identities and occupy different subject positions, but when I disagree with his claim that raising the minimum wage is a bad thing, I don’t care about his subject position—or mine. People can only disagree, in other words, when they believe that there is a truth about what something means, or about what something is, that is autonomous from their subjective experience of it.

Consider, for example, Beasley-Murray’s account of the FMLN (Frente Farabundo Martí para la Liberación Nacional), a coalition of left-wing groups in El Salvador in the 1980s. Beasley-Murray argues that joining the FMLN involved “not the adoption of any specific set of beliefs, but a change in affective state”—indeed, he argues, “it involved a shift from the individualized subjectivity associated with opinion” to the “depersonalized commonality characteristic of affect” (139). Perhaps. To say that the “subjectivity” created was “depersonalized,” however, does not make this way of understanding the conflict between the FMLN and the Salvadoran government any less fundamentally identitarian. If joining the FMLN did not involve, as Beasley-Murray argues, “the adoption of any specific set of beliefs,” then the difference between members of the FMLN and the Salvadoran government is no longer different ideologies about agrarian reform, but rather different affective states that are reducible to different subject positions. Of course, we might have always known that different subjectivities were involved in conflicts, but Posthegemony, by repudiating ideology, makes all conflicts identitarian. That is because without ideology, there is no disagreement, only difference.

Beasley-Murray’s general replacement of ideology with affect would seem to have obvious implications for textual interpretation, and these are made explicit when he writes that the Requerimiento—the 1513 document that declared Spain’s dominion over the Americas—was not a “document that demanded interpretation” but was instead one of several “touchpapers for the violent explosion of imperial expansion” (5). Beasley-Murray argues that while Bartolomé de las Casas saw the conquistadors as “savages more dangerous than the indigenous peoples themselves,” he “failed to see that the Requerimiento channeled that affect” and “placed the lust for gold under the sign of a narrative of progress” (5). In other words, he argues, the “act of reading helped bind the affect mobilized in their hunt for gold, counteracting that affect’s centrifugal tendencies” (5). But that binding and counteracting of affect, Beasley-Murray suggests, was not a function of textual meaning. It instead worked through affect: the “invaders repeatedly intone these words that they themselves barely understand” and “become habituated to a ritual through which the Spanish state, even at a great distance, seeks to regulate their activities” (6). Indeed, the text became “a shibboleth whose signification was purely incidental” (5). Beasley-Murray must repudiate the question of meaning itself—make the text a shibboleth—in order to think of it in terms of the affective response it produces. But ultimately, and logically as he himself notes, this “displaces preoccupation with meaning” (207).

To be sure, the desire to think of texts as objects is closely related to the desire to think of them in terms of their affective powers. In Writing in the Air: Heterogeneity and the Persistence of Oral Tradition in Andean Literatures (1994), for example, the idea of the materiality of the text is key for Antonio Cornejo Polar’s “broad concept of literature that assumes a complete circuit of literary production, including the reception of the message.”15 Cornejo Polar begins by affirming a difference in Latin American literature itself, which proves the insufficiency of “classical philological instruments” to study it (13). But Cornejo Polar goes further: he produces a logic through which the experience of the reader is actually the only thing that counts by replacing “the book’s signifying function” with its status as an “object” (21). In similar fashion, Walter Mignolo writes in The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (1995) that “representation is a notion I have tried to avoid as much as possible in my argument.”16 The trouble with representation, Mignolo suggests, is that it “rests on a denotative philosophy of language according to which names represent things and maps represent territories” and, as such, presupposes the possibility of people knowing “a world outside themselves” (333).17 Mignolo associates that possibility—of knowing “a world outside themselves”—with hierarchies of culture and knowledge. For example, Mignolo argues, “a twentieth-century observer can surmise, when comparing an illuminated medieval codex or a wonderful Renaissance book to a painted Mexica codex, that while the latter is a piece to be admired, it cannot be put at the same level as the medieval codex” (334). However, if we look at the books not as representations or “visible signs,” but instead as “cultural objects” which result from “human needs,” then the hierarchical relation disappears (334). The objects cease to have meaning and are only read in terms of their participation in “activities” between individuals or groups (334). In other words, Mignolo makes it clear that cultural (or epistemic) dehierarchization, the abandonment of meaning, and the interest in textual materiality are all related forms of the same theoretical and political effort.18

This, however, should not give the impression that Latin American literature and criticism does not offer a valuable alternative model for textual meaning. In fact, Jorge Luis Borges’s “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote” (1939) offers one of the best and most lucid theorizations to be found anywhere of the nature of literary interpretation. Borges’s famous story, of course, has most often been viewed as a text that points to the role of the reader in the making of meaning. Lisa Block de Behar, for example, claims that “Pierre Menard” is “one of the best statements in defense of the reader.”19 However, just the opposite is true. Borges’s story actually affirms that meaning has nothing whatsoever to do with either the reader or the context in which a text is read.

Borges’s story is about a French Symbolist poet named Pierre Menard who set out to write Don Quixote. Menard, Borges’s narrator tells us, “did not want to compose another Quixote—which is easy—but the Quixote itself.”20 In other words, Menard did not want to merely copy Cervantes’s novel; instead, he wanted to be its author. As Menard himself explains, “I have taken on the mysterious duty of reconstructing literally [Cervantes’s] spontaneous work” (41). In the end, Menard succeeds in producing verbatim versions of “the ninth and thirty-eighth chapters of the first part of Don Quixote and a fragment of chapter twenty-two” (39).

In Borges’s story, the theoretical questions asked and answered arise from the difference between Menard’s Quixote and Cervantes’s—whether there is one at all, and if so, how it is to be established. The story’s narrator compares Cervantes’s Don Quixote to Menard’s identical version and encounters “a revelation” (43). Despite the fact that the two texts are “verbally identical” (42), the narrator discovers that they are crucially different. He notes, for example, that in Menard’s version the language “suffers from a certain affectation,” while in Cervantes’s the author “handles with ease the current Spanish of his time” (43). The narrator then compares two identical passages: “truth, whose mother is history, rival of time, depository of deeds, witness of the past, exemplar and adviser to the present, and the future’s counselor” (43).

Borges’s narrator dismisses the passage in Cervantes’s version as “a mere rhetorical praise of history,” but in Menard’s, he thinks “the idea is astounding” (43). Given that Menard was “a contemporary of William James,” the “final phrases,” he declares, “are brazenly pragmatic” (43). The reference to Menard’s lines as “pragmatic” is important because it underscores the account of beliefs the story puts forward. The difference between the two texts and their respective meanings in “Pierre Menard” is not grounded in anything objective, but only in a reader’s subjective belief about the truth of what each author intended. But rather than conclude that there can then be no true meanings, just the opposite happens. The narrator writes, “historical truth, for him, is not what happened; it is what we judge to have happened” (43), the point being not that there’s no such thing as historical truth, but instead that whatever we believe happened in the past is what we must also believe is the truth of what happened in the past. Borges’s story extends this maxim into the realm of interpretation, so that what a text means is what we judge its author to have intended it to mean.

In this way, Borges offers a version of Steven Knapp and Walter Benn Michaels’s “Against Theory” (1982) avant la lettre.21 In their famous essay, Knapp and Michaels advance the claim that “what a text means is what its author intends.”22 (725). Indeed, Knapp and Michaels argue that the question of whether something is language or not is the question of whether or not it has an author. To even recognize something as language (and hence meaningful) in the first place, they argue, requires first “positing an author” (728). The question of what exactly language means, then, “will not involve adding a speaker but deciding among a range of possible speakers” (726). In fact, Borges’s story hinges on the narrator’s attribution of a text to different authors or “speakers”—after all, the story’s title, “Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote,” is itself the emphatic identification of an author. Thus the title of Borges’s story, as technically the very first part of it, begins by naming a text and identifying its author, as if to highlight the primacy of authorial intention to the question of meaning.

Borges’s narrator notes that it is “astounding” to compare the two texts: when Cervantes writes about “the curious discourse of Don Quixote on arms and letters,” the narrator sees sincerity (42). “Cervantes was a former soldier,” he notes, so his stance “against letters and in favor of arms” is “understandable” (41). But the same lines in Pierre Menard’s Don Quixote are ironic: Menard, claims the narrator, had the “habit of propagating ideas which were the strict reverse of those he preferred” (42). (It is worth noting here that to believe that what a text means is what its author intends does not depend on establishing that intention in terms of any author’s conscious or even explicit intentions, nor does it depend on what the author believes his or her intention is, either.) The two texts in question in Borges’ story are identical, and yet the narrator sees two different texts that mean two different things. It’s only because the narrator posits two different authors that this is possible: since the texts are identical, only something outside both the words on the page and the reader’s experience could justify thinking that there is a difference between the two. This is in part what Borges means when he qualifies a list of Pierre Menard’s work that does not include Don Quixote as merely his “visible work” (37). In the case of Menard’s Don Quixote, the work is invisible: it cannot be seen when the two texts are put side to side, and it is only because the narrator sees the text and then appeals to something that cannot be seen (i.e., Menard’s authorship) that Menard’s work can then be recognized and evaluated. If meaning were located in the words themselves, then there would be no way to distinguish between Cervantes’s “mere rhetorical praise of history” and Menard’s “brazenly pragmatic” lines (43).

Likewise, if meaning is made by the reader, then the difference between the two texts could never be the kind that Borges’s narrator identifies—”archaic” vs. “current,” for example (43)—which essentially derive from the difference between two authors and their intentions and not the difference between two contexts of reading, or two experiences of reading. Specifically, like in Cortázar text above, the differences would have to include everything that is part of the reader’s experience of them, including, for example, the typographical differences between Cervantes’s Don Quixote and Menard’s. A footnote at the end of the story remarks upon Menard’s “peculiar typographical symbols and his insect-like handwriting” (44). Borges’s narrator, moreover, emphasizes that “Cervantes’s text and Menard’s” are only “verbally identical,” not visually identical (42). If Borges’s point in the story were that the reader’s experience mattered to the question of meaning, then his narrator would have certainly had to take into account the visual differences that were undoubtedly part of his experience of the differences between the two texts. We can perhaps assume that Cervantes’s Quixote was printed, while Menard’s was written by hand. But the narrator emphasizes that Menard’s real work on his Quixote is invisible, which means that he has already decided that the visible or material differences between the two texts were irrelevant. The significance of this is easy to overlook, because we don’t normally attribute meaning to the particular appearance of an author’s handwriting in a manuscript, or even to the way the lines are broken in a piece of prose fiction. Likewise, we don’t normally assume that two verbally identical but visually different editions of the same text (with different fonts, or different line breaks) are in fact two different texts with two different meanings. The reason we do not usually count the line breaks in a novel, the font in a poem, or the page numbers at the bottom of a poem as meaningful is because we do not believe that the author intended them to be meaningful. To be sure, they are part of our experience of the text, but they are not part of the text itself, and this distinction is possible only because what the text actually is exists independent of our own experience of it.23

The idea of “context” as something that is relevant to meaning has regularly been affirmed in readings of “Pierre Menard.”24 Beatriz Sarlo, for example, declares that “Pierre Menard” highlights the ways in which “all new meanings arise from readings.”25 For Sarlo, “the process and the historical contexts of enunciation modify the meaning of signs, which emerges in the activity of reading-writing and is not tied to words themselves but instead to the context of the words” with the result that “the ideological and aesthetic production of the act of reading makes impossible repetition.”26 If it were true, however, that “repetition” is impossible in the “act of reading,” then no one could ever disagree about a text’s meaning, because no one would ever be reading the same text. The words might be the same, but the “context of the words,” to use Sarlo’s phrase, would be infinitely variable.

How can it make sense to suggest that the difference between the two Quixotes in Borges’s story is determined by context? Only after we have first posited an author can we go on to establish the historical context; without the appeal to an author, nothing in the text of Menard’s Quixote can give us the context that would change its meaning. In Borges’s story, meaning changes not when texts are moved to different contexts, but instead when they are attributed to different authors. That’s the point of what the narrator calls Menard’s “new technique” of “erroneous attribution” (44), which prompts the narrator himself to think about attributing “the Imitatio Christi to Louis Ferdinand” (44). It is only when “context” refers to the context of authorship and intention does this claim work, but then context becomes another way of talking about authorship and intention.

Borges not only emphasizes that the author’s intention is what matters, but also reveals that the reader—and the reader’s experience—doesn’t matter. If Borges wanted to affirm the role of the reader over the intention of the author, then the differences between Menard’s Quixote and Cervantes’s would be profoundly visible, not “invisible” as the narrator suggests. The differences would have to include any and all of the physical differences, intentional or not, between the two Quixotes. Without an appeal to the intention of the author of each text, the narrator would be left without a ground from which to decide what was meaningful and what was not in each text. Moreover, Menard’s “new technique” of reading by means of “erroneous attribution” would make no sense, since the very question of attribution would be rendered irrelevant.

If intention is what makes the visible differences between the two texts irrelevant for Borges’s narrator, it is also what makes him irrelevant. In the absence of the relevance of the reader, the reader’s experience, or “contexts,” meaning is fixed—indistinguishable from the author’s intention, and outside of us. To put it differently, when we believe that a text means something, we also believe that it would have meant that had we never existed; alternatively, when we change our beliefs about what a text means, we conclude that our previous belief was wrong, not that it was correct given who we were and the evidence that was available to us at the time. This points to the fact that meaning is independent of us and our experience—or the “context” in which we encounter the text. If that is true, then a belief about what a text means is also a belief about what it should mean for everyone. One of the frequently misunderstood aspects of the argument in “Against Theory” deals with the role beliefs play in interpretation. The fantasy of “theory,” argue Knapp and Michaels, is that there can be a model for interpretation that does not involve the interpreter’s beliefs (737). The idea that beliefs are essential to interpretation might lead some to conclude that true interpretations are impossible. Knapp and Michaels, however, argue that just because beliefs are subjectively produced “does not in any way weaken their claims to be true” (738). Quoting Stanley Fish, they rightly insist that if “one believes what one believes,” then “one believes that what one believes is true” (738).

The meaning of a text is thus never truly ours; what a text means is a belief about what is true outside of our experience. Alternatively, when we disagree about what a text means, the fact that we can disagree about it in the first place leads us to recognize the extent to which we think that “our” interpretation is in fact “the” interpretation. The point of “Pierre Menard” is not that we do not experience texts, or that texts do not produce affective responses in us. Instead, it is that experience, affective responses, and the identity of the reader are one thing and the meaning of a text is another.

It is hard to know whether embracing intention over affect would have any political consequences. My point has been, however, that one of these accounts of interpretation and meaning has been the correlative of a political project that is encountering its limits or exhaustion in neoliberalism. The fact that the most grievous differences in Latin America today are economic ones might seem to suggest that a politics committed to eliminating difference, rather than affirming it, is what we should seek. It is worth recalling, in conclusion, that at the end of his introduction to Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (1999), John Beverley refers to Borges’s “overtly reactionary politics,” and wonders whether “those politics” are “related to his function as a storyteller as well.”27 I would say that what Borges gives us is both a politics and, at least in “Pierre Menard,” a much-needed logic by which we can disagree with those politics and reject them.

This is a good starting point when talking about a reception of postcolonial theory in Poland and in the region of Central-Eastern Europe that used to fall within the sphere of domination of the Soviet Russia. Stanley Bill is quite right in exposing the paradoxes, inconsistencies and impostures associated with this process. I agree with his general diagnosis of postcolonial theory as an attitude cunningly camouflaging its inherent conservatism that gets exposed in its peripheral applications. However, I believe these phenomena should be put into a more general frame and be cast against the background of troubled and traumatic relations with modernity that Poland and the entire region has had for the last couple of centuries. The ideas and convictions expressed by the Polish conservative adherents to postcolonial theory that Bill so eloquently analyzes are just a new articulation of an attitude long established in Polish culture: the one of an alternative and indigenous modernity sharply contrasting with the content of Western modernism, to use above-mentioned Jameson’s notion.  What the Polish adherents of the postcolonial studies advocate is not a simple rejection of modernity tout court, an attitude that can nowadays be found in such places as Bhutan, but rather a perverse deviation from modernity: modernization without modernism.

The fate of postcolonial theory in Central and Eastern Europe is a kind of symptom – not an autonomous phenomenon stemming solely from this theory’s logic, but rather a complex articulation of local ideological content through the conceptual framework of an imported theory. Saying this I do not mean to question Bill’s assertions but rather to give them an additional angle. It is perfectly true that conservative urge to look for authenticity beyond any cultural influences is contradictory with history of Polish, sarmatian culture that borrowed heavily from foreign traditions. On the other hand it is also true that between the 16th and 18th century Poland developed a peculiar and singular socio-cultural regime that offered an alternative to the Western world. One could trace these differences quite a long way back in history as the Marxist historian Perry Anderson does in his seminal books Passages from Antiquity to the Feudalism and Lineages of the Absolutist States.2 Different proprietary relations of nobles to the land (allod in the East as opposed to fief in the West) combined with a different, much more horizontal organization of Eastern European aristocracy led in the early modern times (the 16th century) to a regime radically opposing the Western absolutism. It evolved in an autonomous way into a peculiar kind of democracy, very distant from Western parliamentary system based on representative institution. It resembled much more the ancient, Greek democracy with its emphasis on participation and direct elections of government. As in ancient times this participation was restricted to an elite group of free citizens (the nobility called szlachta), however it gave them collective powers incomparable to these of western aristocracy. From the late 16th onwards kings of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth (a country covering much of Central-Eastern Europe and stretching at that time from the Baltic to the Black Sea on what is much of today’s Poland, Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, Belarus and Ukraine) were elected directly by the entire body of nobility gathering in person on election field in Wola, now a district of Warsaw. Every nobleman had a right to come there and vote for any person he regarded suitable for the job; not everybody could afford such a trip and in practice these events gathered around 50 – 70 thousand participants; still a huge number for any democratic proceedings. It was called electio viritim and should be distinguished from other forms of elections that functioned at the time in places such as The Holy Roman Empire or Italian Republics in the Western Europe. The latter was exercised by a very narrow body of top aristocrats and had little to do with a popular sovereignty of Polish szlachta. The Polish parliament – Sejm – was equally under full control of aristocrats and did not function as an institution of class compromise as it did in Western Europe. Bourgeoisie was completely excluded from any part in the government and Sejm was used as solely aristocratic instrument of exercising power in the interest of the nobility. This political regime was combined with an agrarian lifestyle of szlachta who remained utterly hostile to the city and deeply in love with their rural estates. The material base for their existence was provided by a manorial economy producing grain for the nascent capitalistic market. A form of slave labor was used for this purpose. It was called serfdom, however it functioned very much like slavery (with an important difference that individuals were not sold or bought; human trafficking took form of wholesale exchanges of entire villages with their peasant populations). Polish aristocrats believed themselves utterly superior or even racially different from the peasants. That was expressed by the myth of Sarmatian origins of the szlachta; a myth of colonial nature and I will go back to this point later on. A reader familiar with social history of the United States would probably spot a resemblance with social, cultural and economic landscape of the American South before the Civil War. It’s a legitimate and accurate analogy. In general, Polish society – with its emphasis on family life, implication of religion in the public life and eager use of the word “God” on political occasions, its agrarian ideology, blatant individualism and some other traces – resembles much more to some aspects of the US society than it does to the mainstream of European culture, especially its French, republican and secular ethos.

Traditional, Sarmatian Polish culture shaped by this kind of social relations believed itself to be not only different, but also superior to the West. Szlachta looked with a particular despise on the elements of nascent modernity and its main protagonist – capitalistic bourgeoisie. They believed it to be a degeneration and degradation, they felt proud not to be a part of this evolution and to keep their peculiar form of social organization. They particularly cherished their liberties, describing Poland, opposed to absolutist West, as the land of genuine freedom. Although this liberty was rather a class privilege than freedom in modern sense, they were surely right in one respect – their social and cultural world offered a genuine alternative to the Western culture. Poland was a part of Europe with close ties with other European countries and – what is very important – remained a part of the capitalist world-economy from its very beginning, on the other hand it was culturally exotic and it occupied a peripheral economic position structurally comparable to the place the overseas colonies. Thus Central and Eastern Europe was historically first Third World.3

I devoted so much place to the matters that seem quite far historically, because they form the Sarmatian kernel of Polish postcolonial conservative illusion that boils down to a conviction that we – Poles – do not need to look up to the West or the EU to find an inspiration or a model and we should rather go back to our glorious, Sarmatian past. The temporal distance that separates us from this epoch does not seem to matter. Polish society has got a peculiar attitude towards time and distant past is much closer for us that it is for an average citizen of the Western world. In this respect we resemble the Islamic societies, where crusades dating back to the Middle Ages may very well serve as a justification for today’s politics.

Western modernism – in the sense given to this term by Jameson – remains disgusting and repugnant to most of the Polish adherents to postcolonial theory. But not the Western modernization. Their plan, called „a conservative modernization”, can be accurately described and deconstructed with the pair of notions put forward by Jameson: highways, smartphones, ATMs, the internet, the Dreamliners – YES! Equality, emancipation, diversity, social justice, women and gay rights – NO! Again – in their embrace of capitalism they resemble much more to the American neocons than to the oldschool continental conservatives who tried to somehow curb the free market. Although they verbally defend the lower classes, their policies, while in power, did not differ from neoliberalism – two governments led by the conservative Prawo i Sprawiedliwość party between 2005 and 2007 made Zyta Gilowska, an outspoken neoliberal economist, the ministry of finance, lowered the taxes for the rich and diminished the obligatory contributions for social insurance that employers are required to pay.

There is, of course, a blind spot in this nostalgic, neosarmatian discourse. It does not seem to notice, that while the old, Sarmatian regime did offer an alternative to the West, it utterly failed to withstand a confrontation with it. The timeframe and crucial moments of its existence coincide with a developing modernity in the West in a very peculiar way. Sarmatism, like Western absolutism that paved the way to modern statehood, develops from 15th century, however the very same year 1648 when the modern international order takes shape with the Peace of Westphalia at the end of Thirty Years’ War marks the first major failure of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth: the Ukrainian Revolution led by Bohdan Chmielnitsky (an uprising of Ukrainian warrior nobility – Cossacks – and peasantry against Polish colonial rule). Actually, its aftermath was the Russian conquest of Eastern Ukraine, thus the beginning of a process that we can still see developing today. What is even more pertinent is that the final end of the Sarmatian order in the second half of the 18th century closely coincides with the three major triumphs of modernity: The American, French and Industrial Revolutions. It’s not a mere coincidence. Poland disappears from the map precisely because it was not able to function within the political and social framework of modernity.4 Even Russia, regarded by the Poles as eternally backward, had developed at the time some essential traits of the modern state such as a strong central administration, efficient taxation system and powerful army all of which Poland lacked. From that moment on the relation to modernity of every traditionally and truly Polish soul – I’m not talking here of a rotten cosmopolitan intellectual like myself –is an antagonistic one: „modernity” is the name of force that eliminated our traditional way of life, destroying the most precious aspects of our social order; including its material base, peasant’s slavery, as serfdom was abolished by colonizers in the 19th century (the final reform of Polish agriculture was done, again, by the foreigners, i.e. Soviet sponsored government at the end of Second World War that liquidated large estates and distributed the land among small, individual farmers in 1944). Pragmatic, material efficiency of the Western world is difficult to deny nowadays and the conservatives are very willing to copy it, however not in order to further modernism, but precisely to fight it. So, ironically, modernization is regarded as an efficient way of resisting modernity in its full scope (i.e. modernization combined with modernism).

The conservatives, that embraced the postcolonial theory did it in a very particular way.5 What they refuse to acknowledge is that the culture that they cherish so much, Sarmatism, was in itself a deeply colonial cultural entity. Firstly in its description of the Sarmatian origins – they were supposed to be an alien tribe of warriors that came from the East (or the South in some variants of the legend) and conquered the agrarian populations of Central Eastern Europe. Thus the Polish szlachta believed there was an essential, ethnic difference between themselves, deriving from these Asian warriors, and peasant population descending from the tribes that the Sarmatians believed to have had enslaved. This aspect of „postcolonial imaginary” is, of course, skillfully omitted by contemporary Polish postcolonial „thinkers” (I put the word in quotation mark, because I doubt if a mere repetition of someone else’s concepts can be rightfully called „thinking”). Their even bigger omission is a colonial practice of the Polish mobility in the East. The so called Union of Lublin that created the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in 1569 cut a huge chunk of land – what is a present day Ukraine – from the Great Princehood of Lithuania and put it, within the union, under a direct administrative control of the Kingdom of Poland. One does not need to be a Marxist zealot to see a material motivation for such a move – Ukraine is blessed with one of the richest soils in Europe, perfect for grain cultivation; Polish nobility needed it in order to further and extend its material base – the manorial economy. And that’s what they did. The so called Kresy (the Ends – a Polish term referring to the Eastern ends of the empire, i.e. contemporary Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine) just like the British Raj gave birth to formidable fortunes. There is no anachronism in calling Kresy “Polish colonies” as the term itself was literary used by the Polish political writers in 16th and 17th century (for example in Polska Niżna Albo Osada Polska by Piotr Grabowski dating from 1596; Paweł Palczowski in his Kolęda moskiewska published in 1609 likens Polish expansion in the East with colonial domination of European powers over the West Indies). There was also a whole discourse surrounding Kresy devoted to the proper use that Poland could and should have made of these lands. It can be easily compared to Alexis de Tocqueville’s Travail sur l’Algérie or to Edmund Burke’s discourses such as Speech on The Nabob of Arcot’s Debts or Articles of Charge of High Crimes and Misdemeanors against Warren Hastings. We’ll find all major elements of a colonial discourse in the Polish political thought of the time: a myth of terra nullius, of mission civilisatrice, of natural longing of the savages for progress, of racial and religious superiority of the colonizers and inferiority of the colonized (called, to make ironical „coincidences” even more poignant, Czerń which means „Blacks”) etc. It comes as no surprise that today’s relations between Poland and Ukrain bear a strong postcolonial traits as it can be observed in conflicting evaluation of national heroes (Bohdan Chmielnitsky, but even more Stepan Bandera – a hero for many Ukrainians and a bandit, or a terrorist, to use a more fashionable term, for the Poles), to places of memory (such as cemeteries in Lviv and other Ukrainian cities that used to have a considerable Polish community all the way until the Second World War) and in a general nostalgia that penetrates a lot of Polish discourses on Kresy, a very similar to the British nostalgia for the Raj.

Interestingly enough, this kind of postcolonial critique is completely lacking from the Polish „postcolonial studies” that focus on rewriting Polish historical defeats (partitions in the 19th century, the second world war, the soviet period) in the language of postcolonial theory. For this reason they should  not be called „studies” in any academic or intellectual sense of the word. As it was shown by many scholars, Ewa Thompson’s conceptual frame is self-contradictory and full if blind spots. Claudia Snochowska-Gonzalez was quite right to point out that the notion of “surrogate hegemon” supposedly explaining, why Poland tries to mimic the West, while it was colonized by Russia is an unjustified and unnecessary conceptual complication and its main purpose is to maintain the ideological message and not to account for the facts. As she argues, a much more plausible explication is that, just like many other societies who do not need to look for a surrogate hegemon, we like the West, because we like the West – or at least the West the way it is perceived: as rich and full of opportunities that lack elsewhere.6 The function of the local, Polish postcolonial discourse, although formally associated with the academia is primarily socio-political: it serves as a way to manage collective traumas of Polish history and to use them for specific political aims. It’s hostility towards the cultural mainstream of the Western world and ceaseless efforts to emphasize that „we are not inferior and we have our own patterns of social and cultural development” should not be mistaken with a self-pride. It’s rather a sign of profound complex of inferiority, much larger than that of the Western style liberal modernizers who are accused of lack of dignity. With all reservations that I have against liberalism, the liberals are at least historically more sober – they realize that „our own dear patterns of social and cultural development” are, as a matter of fact, patterns of lack of development and we should not look for inspiration in our own socio-cultural tradition.

Now, a question more interesting for an international reader: how the entire process of this conservative use made of the postcolonial studies changes our perception of postcolonial theory as such and how it puts into questions its supposedly subversive or emancipatory character. First of all, the entire obsession of authenticity and essence penetrating decolonizing world had been described before postcolonial critics started to develop their insights into the souls of the colonized. Clifford Geertz was writing back in 1969 of what he called a tension between „epochalism” and „essentialism” in the new, postcolonial states.7 He found the contradiction between going with the spirit of the epoch – liberal democracy, free market, social emancipation etc. – and cherishing one’s one particular past or essence to be defining for peripheral socio-cultural debates that followed the demise of colonial empires. From this point of view the case of Poland is just another story that repeats what Greetz witnessed in Indonesia or Morocco. What lies between the contemporary postcolonial „thinkers” in the peripheries and the time when Geertz made his observation is not only „postcolonial theory”, but also and mainly postmodernism, or to be more precise poststructuralism (or whatever one wants to call the whole body of texts that many, for instance Slavoj Žižek, refer to as „French bullshit”). In this particular point I do not agree with Stanley Bill – postmodernism received in the 1990-ties and early 2000s a quite a warm welcome from the Polish conservatives. One of its first Polish proponents was Zdzisław Krasnodębski, a philosopher and leading intellectual supporting Kaczyński brothers that just got himself elected to the European Parliament. What Polish conservatives saw in postmodernism was mainly its hostility towards Enlightenment, a denial of master narrations (including any form of emancipatory politics), affirmation of the „other of reason” – religion, local customs, alternative cultural logics (all that in the good old times would just be called by one word: “superstitions”) – and, last but not least, prizing of diversity that got to be automatically interpreted in the peripheries as our right to be different from the mainstream of modernity/enlightenment. It’s not surprising that the communitarian ideas of Will Kymlicka, Alasdair Macintyre, Michael Sandel or Charles Taylor received quite an attention from Polish intellectuals in the 1990-ties. Poststructuralist roots of postcolonial studies are well known and we can see an easy passage here. How close is it to the original intent of the postcolonial studies? One can argue that it’s a false interpretation, a kind of Karamazov complex: Ivan makes a purely theoretical, philosophical comment at the family table (the center) and his semi-retarded bastard brother (the peripheries) goes on to murder their father. The one who would like to defend the postcolonial studies could easily point to the figure of Franz Fanon as an important protagonist, who was a Marxist revolutionary and could not be held accountable for conservative reaction. It would not be intellectually fair to completely deny a Marxist origins of postcolonial studies and to focus solely on postmodernism. However, besides intellectual debates there is also social and political practice. And it’s in this sphere that Marxism suffered a huge blow in the 1990ties as a result of the fall of the USSR. One could complain it’s been somehow unjust as there is a vast Marxist narration that criticized the entire Soviet experiment and it would be difficult to find any major Marx’s work that logically leads to the Bolshevism of early 20th century Russia (one letter to Vera Zasulich from 1881 cannot account for such a foundation). That is, unfortunately, an academic approach, wrongly focusing, despite an insightful advice from Wittgenstein, on the meaning and not on the use. And the use of Marxism as well as of its defeat, was such that it delegitimized any forms of its existence in the mainstream of public life all the way until the crisis of 2008.8 In the East even far more than in the West. That is, in my opinion, a crucial circumstance that tilted the balance and made postcolonialism – in compliance with its poststructuralist and despite its Marxist roots – a deeply conservative and not a progressive discourse. The need for such a discourse – at the same time conservative and fashionable enough to pose as a vanguard of intellectual life, thus conquering the position that had been monopolized by the academic left since the 1960ties – existed before it, as I tried to show and what the abovementioned analysis of Clifford Geertz also proves. It was a need to articulate resentment in an intellectually acceptable way. Postcolonialism perfectly suited this urge and hence it’s carrier in the peripheries.

So, what do we do with the legacy of the postcolonial thought, now that its conservative intend has been proved beyond any reasonable doubt? Theoretically, there is a place for it. As I argued before, a sincere and systematic exploration of the colonial nature of the Polish relation to Ukraine (and Belarus) would be very needed. Especially know, that the fatal triangle Russia-Poland-Ukraine that haunted the history of the region for many centuries seems to be coming back to life. It’s a matter of tactical assessment whether maintaining the postcolonial studies, with their strongly conservative undertone, for such purposes is worth it or not (and whether we need postcolonial theory to do it – maybe classical history of culture could do?). Even a person not as convinced of the uselessness of the postcolonial thought as Vivek Chibber has to admit, that this branch of thought has not produced any major literature that would make quarreled nations reconcile over their troubled past. What’s worse and far more important in the contemporary world, it is even more obvious that no one has become materially better off thanks to the postcolonial theory. It just puts too much stress on recognition and not enough – if any – on redistribution. The major problem of poor postcolonial states is not to have the injustices done to them recognized, but to stop being poor. Unfortunately, a class issue comes into play here – postcolonial recognition is mainly the question for a given nation’s elites that do not need to care about how to make the ends meet. In this respect the postcolonial discourse, despite its apparently anti-establishment stand it has got in Poland, is as elitist as any other academic fashion. The main problem that Polish state should face is not how to stop pleasing to the Western world, but how to start pleasing to its own citizens, that clearly do not show postcolonial admiration with Polish traditions: in the first decade of our membership in the EU (2004-2014) almost 3 million people used the opportunities of the open European job market and escaped the country; that’s surely one of the biggest waves of emigration Poland has ever known in its troubled history, if not the biggest one. The last hype of Polish conservative thought, meant to address this problem, is something called „economical patriotism” that should be more rightly called „national capitalism” and regarded as an unfortunate variation of „national socialism” – a conviction that Poland could be better off if we had some Polish capital (and not only „capital in Poland”, as they say).9 One could think it’s a progress, because at least they realized that capitalism is not a system that benefits everyone, but mainly those who own capital. One could also see, how it goes hand in hand with the revindications of postcolonial theory, so we should not be surprised it includes imperialist claims and advocates for „a global expansion of Polish capital”. Would it somehow benefit people, who live in Poland? It’s doubtful as we can see huge groups of Western societies that have never benefited from the expansion of Western capital. If they ever got any crumbs, it’s only thanks to the struggle they have maintained – on the street and in the factories. Would this expansion benefit anyone outside Poland? Surely not. Even the contrary. Polish garment company LPP was among those that located their production in the infamous Rana Plaza complex in Bangladesh that collapsed last year killing around 1300 people. LPP behaved much worse than major international companies and declined to pay any compensation to the workers. They argued that international brands, like Primark, are well established and rich, so are able to pay, while LPP is a rising company from a poorer country and cannot afford such compensations.10 As one would expect – the capital remains the capital and follows the logic that it finds the most profitable for itself.

We can clearly see the main problem behind the postcolonial discourse: again it all comes down to identity and recognition. If we believe, like many critics of postcolonial thought, including myself, that the main challenge for contemporary progressive politics is to develop a universal emancipatory narration that could conquer people’s imagination the way Marxism did a century ago, than postcolonial theory, despite the legacy of Franz Fanon often quoted in postcolonial text,11 is not a useful tool, but rather an obstacle. There are people, who like Peter Hallward, believe that there is a room for universalism within postcolonial theory.12 Maybe, theoretically, there is. But, again: don’t look at meaning, look at use. Given the entire conservative bias in the way postcolonial theory has been used, it would require a formidable effort to turn the tables. And if we succeeded, would it be a very useful tool? Even the wars between nations are not won by successfully convincing the public of one’s moral superiority and unjust suffering. There is no reason to believe that the class war ever will.

In my reading, the violence of the frame in Marina and the Yucca not only makes what Pinsky calls the particularities of its subject’s life unknowable, it also, more crucially, makes them irrelevant. What I mean is, it’s not just that the photo doesn’t show what Marina is thinking or imagine her life but that it isn’t even interested in them. And because it’s not interested in what she thinks, it’s also not interested in what we might think about her. That’s the point of its insistence on its own internal structure. Thus, for example, it’s not Marina’s barely visible (but, I completely agree, cool) slouch that matters; it’s the loop that straightens her up, that doesn’t belong in any way to her (it’s not an element in her body language) and that has nothing to do with how we feel about her. It’s created and contained by the work itself. Hence its power lies not in any “proliferation of meanings” (what it might mean to you, to me, to men, to women, to black people, to white people, to rich, to poor) but in the fact that it means what it means regardless of who we are.

Another way of putting this is to say that the violence of the frame consists above all in making our lives as irrelevant as hers, and it’s in this indifference to our particularity (this allegorizing of its irrelevance) that I locate the politics of Kydd’s work. The fundamental categories of both conservative and liberal politics in the U.S. today are deployed in debates over how we should understand our own and each other’s particularity, over (to use Pinsky’s examples) questions like whether racism is responsible for the disproportionate number of black people in prison or Native Americans in poverty and whether sexism is responsible for the state’s indifference to providing adequate child care. But these debates are empty, and for two reasons. The first is that it obviously is racism and sexism that’s responsible for these disparities. (Which means the liberals win.) The second is that success in eliminating these disparities – in creating a world where as many white people as black people are in prison, as many Asian Americans as Native Americans are poor, and women are just as free to enter the job market and compete for the best jobs as men – would not create a more equal society. (Which means the conservatives win.)

Why do the conservatives win? Because economic inequality is left materially undiminished and ideologically enhanced by a critique that identifies justice not with the effort to minimize it but with the effort to minimize the role played by racism or sexism in causing it. This is what Adolph Reed and Merlin Chowkwanyun mean when they say that the “disparitarian perspective” is “reflective of a class position tied programmatically to the articulation of a metric of social justice compatible with neoliberalism.” And it’s what Karen and Barbara Fields are talking about when they worry that what they call “racecraft” (the ability of conservatives and liberals to racialize both their defense of inequality and their opposition to it) leaves us “no legitimate language for talking about class.” Indeed, one could put the point in even stronger terms; it leaves us, even when we are talking about class, treating it as if it were a kind of identity, like race or sex, as if opposing “classism” were a way of opposing capitalism.

But works like Marina and the Yucca do have a way of talking about class, and without turning it into just another identity. Indeed, the way they do it is precisely by refusing identity (that’s what it means for Marina, as Marina Pinsky says, to reveal neither its subject’s “interior life” nor her “outward engagement with the world”) and by insisting on distinctions that are instead structural (that’s what it means for Marina to establish the frame itself and hence thematize the irrelevance of the beholder’s interior life and his or her engagement with the world too). The politics of the work thus consist not in its subject matter but in its relation to that subject matter and not in making itself open to the responses of its audience but in asserting its autonomy from them.

So when Marina Pinsky ends her letter by asking, “what is the point of arguing for such autonomy,” one answer is political. It’s a way of imagining our society as fundamentally structured by differences that are produced by the relations between capital and labor and not by how we see or feel about each other. But I don’t imagine that this political answer is entirely adequate. That is, I don’t imagine that the goal of (what seems to me) a good politics is primary here. Naturally, different artists will have different motives but it’s probably pretty safe to say that the desire to make good art takes an almost tautological precedence over any other. The interesting question then is not about the artist’s politics but about his or her understanding of what good art is, about the work’s theory of itself. And Marina and the Yucca’s answer to that question is precisely the assertion of its autonomy. Its good politics, in other words, are less its point than an entailment of its point.

In 1992, 13 years after Margaret Thatcher’s “neoliberal revolution,” the Iron Lady’s chief economic advisor, Alan Budd, declared that he had his doubts that “the 1980’s policies of attacking inflation by squeezing the economy and public spending” had ever really been taken seriously by those at the helm of government. Rather, he wondered if they weren’t really a “cover to bash the workers. Raising unemployment,” he pointed out, “was a very desirable way of reducing the strength of the working class. What was engineered—in Marxist terms—was a crisis of capitalism which re-created a reserve army of labor, and has allowed the capitalists to make high profits ever since.”1 The interest of this anecdote is in its implicit suggestion of a link between the socio-political destabilization and fragmentation of the wage-earning working class (the intensification, in other words, of the difference between the working army of labour and the unemployed reserve) and the politics pursued during the decades following the rise of neoliberalism. The central problem with which we are confronted today, in other words, may be less the conflict between labor and capital, and more, as Margaret Thatcher put it, the antagonism between a privileged “underclass” with its “dependency culture” and an “active” proletariat whose taxes pay for a system of “entitlements” and “handouts.”2

During this same period, in France, André Gorz published his Farewell to the Working Class—a book in which he argued that the “society of unemployment” would henceforth be divided into two camps: “a growing mass of the permanently unemployed” on one side, “an aristocracy of tenured workers” on the other, and, lodged between the two, “a proletariat of temporary workers.”3 Far from constituting the very motor of social change, the “traditional working class” had become little more than a “privileged minority.”4 From now on, the vanguard of the class struggle would be a “non-class” made up of the “unemployed” and “the temporary workers” for whom work would never be a “source of individual flourishing.” Gorz’s idea was that, in today’s world, class conflict is no longer between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat, but rather, between the lumpenproletariat and a working class no longer at odds with the class system.

The fact that this logic—redefining the social question as a conflict between two factions of the proletariat rather than between capital and labor—can today be found on the left as well as the right, raises a number of question. On one side, it aims at limiting the social rights of the “surplus population”5 by pitting “active” workers against them; on the other side, it aims at mobilizing the “surplus population” against the privilege of the “actives.” In the end, both sides end up accepting, to the detriment of all “workers,” the centrality of the category of the “excluded.”

This simultaneously semantic and ideological evolution in some sense reproduces the changes that have taken place in the salariat over the last forty years. Increasing unemployment that is also increasingly concentrated (both socially and geographically) and the consequent emergence of a vast stratum of (what Marx called) the “surplus population” thus figure as key elements for understanding the structural reconfiguration of the salariat in the whole of the industrialized world. It has pushed to center stage a set of political debates about “unemployed youth left adrift,” “the beggars and the homeless” and “postcolonial immigrants without documents or support.” These new protagonists of the urban proletariat now become, as Loic Wacquant pointed out, “the living and threatening incarnation” of the instability generated by “the erosion of stable and homogenous wage work” and “the decomposition of the solidarities of class and culture it underpinned within a clearly circumscribed national framework.”6 This same evolution becomes the condition of possibility both of the various conservative political strategies aimed at limiting access to the Welfare State and of the declining “centrality of the working class question”7 among authors and critics on the left. Now the “exploited” are redefined “by their exclusion,” by their increasingly precarious relationship to work (précarisation).8 In their new invisibility, they constitute a symbol of the reconfiguration of class (as well as ethnic and gender) relations in a society where the explosion of inequality and economic instability has profoundly dismantled the working class. Indeed, their invisibility is a kind of image of neoliberalism, of the replacement of class struggle by unorganized uprisings and class consciousness by the fragmented identitarianism of a deeply fissured salariat. Although this problematic gets articulated differently in different countries, the question of the “surplus population” in all its declensions (the unemployed, the impoverished, immigrants, the excluded, the underclass, the insecurely employed, etc.) finds itself at the heart of both public and expert debate on the economy, on the left and on the right in the decades following the 1980s. The transformations of the period go beyond the issue of how the economy is organized to the issue of how the social question will be asked in the future. Indeed, in debates that are as much intellectual as political, the new centrality of the “excluded” or the “underclass” not only changes the terms of the problem but also of what can count as a solution.

A New Problem Arises…

Between 1963 and 1983, unemployment rates skyrocketed from under 2% to at least 10% in every main industrialized European country. This transformation, as much of the structure of the wage-system as of work itself was perhaps one of the most important of the post-war period, profoundly altering the terms of political and economic discussion. Unemployment had remained relatively low in the post-War period but the following years marked the end of the “30 glorious” years of European post-war peace and prosperity. If the old objective had been “full employment,” the new one was just less unemployment, i.e. “reducing [an] unemployment” rate which had somehow managed to settle in “for good.” A new consensus had begun to emerge: unemployment was not “just a conjunctural phenomenon,” but appeared to be caused by structural factors.9

To this explosion of unemployment were added two relatively new considerations: its increasing duration and its concentration within the workforce. What was thus established was a deep correlation between, on one hand, the increase of unemployment rates and, on the other, the length of time spent unemployed.

What this means is that the rise in unemployment hit a relatively small group very hard while sparing the rest. In Germany, for instance, between 1975 and 2004, 70% of all periods of unemployment were localized in barely 10% of the population.10 In this regard—and in this regard alone—the new segment of the workforce (the poor, the unemployed, immigrants) did indeed become relatively isolated from other active wage-earners. And although the United States in this period saw a less significant rise in unemployment, the 1970s and ’80s nonetheless did see an increase both in the numbers and in the length of unemployment. Furthermore, insofar as unemployment and poverty also became increasingly concentrated geographically—as is suggested by the evolution of African-American ghettos in the United-States—the debate over the “underclass” became increasingly prominent.

It is this widening inequality that would come to constitute a crucial condition of possibility for the political and economic division of the workforce, a division that in the following decades would seriously reconfigure the terms in which the social question would be posed. It would be not so much the question of unemployment as such as the question of its unequal distribution that figured at the center of the debate. And this focus would produce as its corollary both a social and an identitarian fragmentation of the working class. The serious over-representation of certain segments of the workforce (women, immigrants, African-Americans) now put the problem of discrimination at the center of analysis. Where the conflict between capital and labor had structured the analysis of the post-War years, the focus was now on the new crisis of unemployment and in particular on the unequal effects of that crisis.

The Unemployed as “the Other”

This shift rests on the assumption that the unemployed and the employed constitute different populations. But if today, with respect to public policy, it seems natural to separate them, it hasn’t always been that way. Marx, for example, thought of them both as belonging to the “proletariat.” Michael Denning notes that in Capital and the 1844 manuscripts, Marx refers to the “not-busy” (die Unbeschäftigten) rather than to the contemporary category of the “unemployed” (die Arbeitslosen).11 The distinction in Marx’s time was not between two distinct segments of the population as much as it was within a population that was “now absorbed, now set free”12 from the ranks of active labor. In other words, it is not as though there were “two kinds of workers, employed and unemployed, or two sectors of the economy, formal and informal; rather, there is a process in which greater attraction of workers by capital is accompanied by their greater repulsion . . . the workers are sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater masses.”13 It is in this sense that Marx described a fluctuating population, periodically finding itself without work, surviving as best it could while waiting to be reabsorbed by an industrial production that alternated between drawing them in and pushing them out: “laborers are sometimes repelled, sometimes attracted again in greater masses.”14 In this configuration, the increase of unemployment does not generate a split (une dualisation) within the proletariat—it essentially increases the periods of non-employment for every worker.

The current situation, however, has changed. Unemployment obviously existed in Marx’s day, but its structure was different, the crucial change being not so much the increase in unemployment as the form it begins to take. The post-War social welfare state—normalizing work for some and thus normalizing “non-work” for others, helping some to stable, life-long employment while simultaneously allowing others to settle into years of unemployment or social assistance—made the distinction between “active” workers and the unemployed possible. It’s from this perspective that the category of the unemployed as a matter of concern for public policy, in conjunction with the concentration of unemployment, helped to produce, both in theory and practice, a group truly isolated from that of the “salaried population.”15 As long as we were in a situation of full employment and unemployment was relatively low, the new protections made available to workers posed few problems. Workers continued to have lifestyles and trajectories that were fairly homogeneous, thus facilitating a sense of cohesion and collective organization. Yet, as soon as unemployment began ticking upward and became “structural,” welfare protections benefiting both workers and the unemployed tended to differentiate between the two and thus fracture the working class into two segments: those with work and those without.

Such a situation would have been impossible in Marx’s day, or even as recently as the 1930s, as we can see by casting even a passing glance at Dorothea Lange’s or Walker Evans’s famous photographs in which the figures and faces of workers intermingle with those of migrants and the unemployed, each occupying in turn the other positions. In these faces, it’s difficult to tell the difference between someone who’s got a job and someone who hasn’t. Or think of John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath, where the main characters are migrants and workers, employed and unemployed, simultaneously or by turn. Today, unlike when Marx wrote or the 1930s, the experiences of unemployment, poverty, or even of precarious labor are much more heterogeneous and distinct, precisely because of welfare programs (catégories publiques) and the concentration of unemployment in certain sectors of the proletariat. Far from defining a single “proletariat” passing from one status to the other according to the vagaries of the moment, our contemporary societies generate an excess population relatively separate from the “classical” model of the wage-earner/salariat: a population fragmented along ethnic or gender lines, alternating between periods of unemployment, odd-jobs, poverty, etc. It is therefore not so surprising that, once separated from the question of their labor, the categories of “the unemployed,” “the poor,” or the “precarious,” are swiftly disconnected from being understood in terms of the exploitation at the heart of capitalist economic relations, and find themselves and their situation apprehended in terms of relative (monetary, social, or psychological) deprivation, filed under the general rubrics of “exclusion,” “discrimination,” or forms of “domination.”

This evolution is marked by the new importance, for the left and the right, of the “excluded,” and of the idea that henceforth a “post-industrial” society is divided between those who have access to the labor market and those who, in varying degrees, do not. The focus of the world of labor is thus displaced, shifting towards questions of “exclusion, poverty, and unemployment,”16 and the intellectual world largely goes along with, and re-enforces, this dynamic. As the sociologists Stéphane Beaud and Michel Pailoux have noted, this displacement indirectly puts workers “on the inside, on the side of those who have a job (on the side of the ‘privileged,’ and of those with ‘acquired advantages’).”17 What’s foregrounded is no longer the general problem of inequality but instead its distribution, its disproportionate effect on the excluded—the unemployed, the young people in the “banlieues,” immigrants.

Furthermore, seen through the lens of this excess population, the representation of the salariat is increasingly ethnicized. Indeed, the overrepresentation of groups (often descendants of immigrants or immigrants themselves) among the ranks of the “surplus population” reinforces the ethnicization of the social question. The declining relevance of the category of class antagonism or, to quote Xavier Vigna, its “increasingly inoperant symbolic and political character,” thus seems to coincide quite clearly with “the activation of identitarian divides founded on the basis of nationality.”18 The issue here is no longer unemployment as such, but its overrepresentation among certain groups and hence the discrimination to which they have clearly been subjected.

From the “Proletariat” to the “Excluded”…

Alongside this symbolic and political decline of the problem of the working class, one finds the development of new social movements and a radical critique of classical Marxism. In a conference given in Japan in 1978, Michel Foucault asked whether we weren’t beginning to witness “in this period of the end of the 20^th century, something like the end of the age of Revolution.” By this, as Michael C. Behrent astutely points out, he meant not an “end of the revolution” resembling the one imagined by François Furet, but “rather [an age] of the proliferation of struggles, the aim of which is to redistribute the power differential in society.”19 Such a reconfiguration of struggles announced the end of the centrality of the working class and the intensification of the kinds of actions—for the “excluded,” the “marginal,” and the other “subalterns”—dear to Foucault. And it was this increasing importance of occupying buildings for the homeless, distributing food to African immigrants, or demonstrating for prisoners’ rights, etc. that led Sartre to understand this as a transition towards a “moral Marxism” and to see these actions as essentially “moral gestures,”20 the moral dimension residing precisely in the increasing displacement of questions of exploitation by concerns about “minorities,” the “marginal,” and the “excluded”—in short, by questions of domination and discrimination.

This well-known displacement in Western Marxism compelled many thinkers and movements to redefine their sense of the “social agents who could play the role of the revolutionary subject, as understudies who might replace an indisposed working class: Third World peasants, students, intellectuals, the excluded.”21 It was along these same lines, for example, that the Marxist theoretician Herbert Marcuse defended the position that the traditional working class had been thoroughly “integrated” into the capitalist system, and that only “active minorities” and the “young, middle-class intelligentsia” were henceforth capable of radical political action.22 For Marcuse, these “under-privileged” groups, “humiliated, frustrated, oppressed, victims of segregation”23 might now, allied with students, constitute a decisive element in the unleashing of social revolts. The epicenter of social shocks to come was not to be found in the classical proletariat, but among the “unemployed,” the “blacks in the ghettos,” and other marginalized “ethnic” groups. For Marcuse, it was thus self-evident that “modifications in the structure of capitalism alter the basis for the development and organization of potentially revolutionary forces,”24 a view that would be similarly consecrated by André Gorz’s defense of the idea that the classical worker had disappeared, taking with him “the class able to take charge of the socialist project and translate it into reality.”25 For Gorz, today, “the majority of the population now belong to the post-industrial neo-proletariat which, with no job security or definite class identity, fills the area of probationary, contracted, casual, temporary and part-time employment.”26 Unlike Marx’s proletariat, this subject no longer defines itself “with respect to its position in the process of social production,” but rather by the fact that it appears to belong to no class, by the very exclusion from society that is the source of its radical potential and its potential radicality. As a “non-class,” it doesn’t seek emancipation from within labor, but rather more generally from labor. Gorz thus offers a fundamental critique not only of Marxism, but of the idea of progress and of the “meaning of History.” It is no longer possible to imagine a highly industrialized society beneficial to all like the one Marx dreamed of. At best, we might be able to conceive, parallel to such a society, of increasing “areas of autonomy” freed from labor.27 At which point, it’s no longer a question of seizing “power,” but of constructing, on its margins, other forms of agency, other organizational forms.

It was for this reason that Gorz and Marcuse both saw in the Black Panthers a kind of living incarnation of their theories. Some of Eldridge Cleaver’s ideas in particular seemed to them perfect expressions of their own, as when Cleaver described the central problem of our era as the new contradiction between the lumpenproletariat on one side and an alliance between the working class and the bourgeoisie, on the other. For Cleaver, the working class had thus “turned their jobs into property, which they possessed as a right,” de facto excluding those without work from any part in the production and distribution of wealth.28 The end product is a “miserly, stingy bourgeoisie with a greedy working class lickspittleing its boots, standing there with the money bags, tossing out small change like tossing corn to the chickens.”29 The socialization of the means of production that we find in Cleaver’s writings is very different from the one we find in Marx. The lumpen will have to struggle to seize physical control of the instruments of production, snatch them out “of the hands of the bourgeoisie, and the working class.”30 Today, far from being a revolutionary force, the working class “has become as much a part of the system that has to be destroyed as the capitalists themselves. They are the second line of resistance, after the cops.”31 This working class is no more than a “parasite on the human race,” bought off and corrupted by the lure of safe, secure jobs.32

This position, despite the fact that for the Panthers it was more a theoretical façade than actual political practice, would find itself echoed in many intellectual contexts and, in fact, could be said to emblemize the theoretical displacements characteristic of the 1970s and after.

Indeed, it is a version of this perspective that—in different degrees—remains central to contemporary leftist Marxist thinkers like Antonio Negri, David Harvey, Slavoj Zizek, Nancy Fraser or Alain Badiou. Negri, who may be the most obvious example of this tendency, argues that in our era, the major agent of social transformation is the “multitude”—composed of a vague “conglomeration of those with unstable employment, youth, women, part-time workers, the unemployed, but also workers, students and immigrants”33—that replaces that old conception of the “proletariat” and its traditional forms of mobilization. For David Harvey, the whole perspective of urban struggles is elaborated precisely according to the postulate that the traditional workers’ movement based on the workplace has been problematized by the developments of the last 30 years. The very idea of a “right to the city” was first articulated by Henri Lefebvre as a consequence of the fact that in our age the “territorial implantation” of the working class apparently has “as much importance” as “work itself, the space and conditions of labor.”34 Harvey thus insists on the fact that “in much of the advanced capitalist world the factories have either disappeared or been so diminished as to decimate the classical industrial working class.”35 In his view, “the so-called ‘precariat’ has displaced the traditional ‘proletariat’” and “if there is to be any revolutionary movement in our times, at least in our part of the world…the problematic and disorganized ‘precariat’ must be reckoned with.”36 Alain Badiou says essentially the same thing when he declares that the sans-culottes of the coming revolution will be composed of “part of the youth, intellectuals, lower middle-class French wage-earners, and then of course those who are always the first to be persecuted—that is, foreigners and the unemployed.”37 Social change will thus depend on an alliance of the “new proletarians who have come from Africa and elsewhere and the intellectuals who are the heirs to the political battles of recent decades.”38

Analyzing the difference between the crisis of the 1930s and today, Nancy Fraser also estimates that “the class division between labor and capital ceases to appear self-evident, becoming obfuscated by the seemingly more salient divide between the thinning ranks of the stably employed, on one hand, and the swelling precariat on the other.” In such a situation, it strikes her as evident that “organized labor does not speak for society as such. In the eyes of some, it defends the privileges of a minority that enjoys a modicum of social security against the far greater number who do not.”39 Even Slavoj Žižek, while observing the way in which “this focus on the walls that separate the Excluded from the Included may easily be misunderstood as a clandestine return to the liberal tolerant-multicultural topic of ‘openness’ (‘no one should be left out, all minority groups, lifestyles, etc., should be allowed in’),”40 nevertheless thinks that there exists today an “antagonism between the ‘Included’ and the ‘Excluded.’”41 And if he recognizes that this type of thinking can come “at the expense of a properly Marxist vision of social antagonism,” he still argues that “the creation of new forms of apartheid, new Walls and slums” deepens the yawning chasm already separating the “Included from the Excluded”42 and is one of the principle antagonisms of contemporary capitalism. In his analysis, we must accept and integrate into our symbolic universe the end of the old conception of the proletariat and forge a “more radical notion of the proletarian subject.” Today, he thinks, “only the reference to the “Excluded” justifies the term communism.”43 Which is, in essence, the same idea advanced by Jacques Rancière when he centers his philosophical discourse around the question of the “part of the partless” (la part des sans-part), or by Ulrich Beck, who argues more recently that class as the central fault-line of the social has been replaced by the opposition between “a growing minority of the unemployed, those without steady employment, or those excluded from the labor force and the majority of active, full-time workers.”44 And ever since the appearance of William Julius Wilson’s The Truly Disadvantaged in 1987, the “underclass” has played a parallel role in the United States, precisely because Wilson’s focus on poverty and unemployment in the “inner city” displaces the question of poverty and unemployment (not to mention inequality) as such.

We can begin to see some of the problems of this schema, however, when we see it deployed not only by left intellectuals but also by politicians and political figures not at all on the left, and whose aim is essentially to limit access to social benefits. Indeed, we might wonder if, when Margaret Thatcher set the “privileged and protected welfare underclass” against the British “who work for a living,” she wasn’t simply articulating something like an inverted form of Eldrige Cleaver’s argument. And when Nicolas Sarkozy prides himself on his refusal to tolerate “those who don’t want to do anything, who don’t want to work [to] live off the backs of those get up early and who work hard,”45 is he not enlisting the same terms as André Gorz? The conservative right’s neoliberal doxa essentially seeks, as Serge Halimi argues, to “redefine the social question in such a way that the line of social division is no longer one that opposes the rich and the poor, capital and labor, but rather runs between two fractions of the ‘proletariat’—between those who ‘have given up enough, lost enough, and have had enough’ and those who are in the ‘welfare republic.’”46 Neoliberal attacks thus target this new, urban proletariat with unsteady employment prospects in the same way that, in the U.S. well before it ever spread to Europe, policies cutting the social safety-net were carried out in the name of curing a “culture of dependency” rife among an “underclass” (generally associated with African-American communities). The central thesis of neoliberal thought and authors is that the poverty and unemployment of this “underclass” is the product of their backward-looking cultural horizon and behavior. Or, as ultra-conservative commentator Charles Murray puts it, “they are usually poor, but poverty is a less important indicator than personal behavior destructive to themselves and to their communities.”47 When protests or uprisings do indeed occur, explanations such as personal “vice” or indeed “laziness” get trotted out as explanations for these subjects’ poverty and, more generally, their antisocial behavior. The vast majority of the most radically inegalitarian policies, then, “could be traced to the ‘nonworking poor.’”48 In this discursive and political configuration, it’s not workers who are “privileged.” On the contrary, it’s the poor who live off a welfare system that encourages their refusal to work. Indeed, this very argument was at the heart of the private speech that Mitt Romney gave to wealthy donors during the 2012 presidential election. In his view, the election was going to be tight for any republican in a country where, according to him, 47% of Americans “pay no income tax” and are “dependent upon government.” Such voters “believe that they are victims, [they] believe the government has a responsibility to care for them,” were bound to vote for Obama. His goal, then, was “not to worry about those people,”49 but rather to court the votes of “honest,” hard-working Americans. Like the intellectuals on the left, he is committed to the fundamental difference between the supposedly new precariat and the supposedly old working class.

The economic crisis of 2008 has helped to spread this discourse in Europe. In a lengthy interview with De Standaard, the Flemish nationalist leader, Bart De Wever, declared for instance that the contradiction between capital and labor was a thing of the past—henceforth, the new line of demarcation was situated between the “productive” and the “unproductive” members of society. For him, “the State is a money-breathing monster. And where does it get the money? From those who create value. And who consumes this money? The unproductive—they’re so electorally important that this policy just keeps being perpetuated.” In France, Jacques Bompard, a far-right deputy in the French parliament’s lower house, proposed a law that would require people receiving unemployment benefits to work for free. Far from being new, this very idea was part of Nicolas Sarkozy’s platform during his first bid for the presidency. In 2007, he proposed that “those who benefit from social aid perform some service in the public interest—this will incentivize them to take a job rather than live off welfare.” In England, David Cameron justified his party’s social reforms, limiting the amount of monetary aid to the unemployed, by declaring that the system of social solidarity “has become a lifestyle choice for some.”50 The changes advocated by these politicians are thus presented as a way of re-establishing a sense of “fairness” in a system that punishes those who “work hard” and rewards those who are content to live a life of “dependency.” This discourse has become a hegemonic view, incarnating a general tendency on the continent to celebrate those “productive members of society” who “get up early” and to disparage the unproductive ne’er-do-wells “on the dole” (les assistés) every time a politician or intellectual needs to legitimate austerity reforms or the increase in inequality.

Obviously, the political content of such proclamations on the right differs radically from those of Marxist critics and intellectuals at the end of the 1970s. What they share, however, is the assumption that it’s the surplus population who, depending on one’s position, are either the problem or the solution to the problem. One way or another, both see the surplus population rather than the working class, as the central political agent/subject. How indeed can we fail to notice the paradoxical relation between André Gorz’s “non-class” and the “underclass” so dear to Charles Murray? For Gorz, as for neoliberalism, the problem is the relation to labor, not the fact that labor is exploited. Gorz sees in the surplus population a relationship “freed” from work where Thatcher sees the “vice” of idleness that needs to be stamped-out. One raises Paul Lafargue’s “right to laziness” to a virtue where the other sees in it an injustice that must be combatted. But, fundamentally, both follow the same logic. On the left as much as on the right, they’re happy to have the surplus population be the problem precisely because it displaces the old outmoded and dogmatic idea that the crucial problem was actually exploitation. This transition plays a role, then, in “eclipsing the critique of exploitation by focusing attention on the victim whose rights have been denied—prisoners, homosexuals, refugees, etc.”51 Both sides, right and left, are happy to oppose two segments of the proletariat who, thanks to the neoliberal evolution of the global economy, can be organized around a destructive cycle of competition with one another.

…and from Exploitation to Discrimination

The fundamental problem with this approach is that it replaces abstract analysis (i.e., of exploitation) with a more immediate analysis of the global economic logic of capitalism (i.e., of discrimination) seeking, above all, to denounce status differences within the proletariat. Indeed, the distinction between the unemployed and the employed worker is not a class difference, but solely one of intra-class status. The theoretical and political importance bestowed upon the “subaltern” factions of the proletariat is then justified on the basis of the various forms of discrimination within the proletariat. What counts most is that these factions are “isolated,” “humiliated,” “frustrated,” “victims of segregation,” “suffering,” or “ethnically marginalized.” Similarly, the rejection of the capital/labor antagonism is defended on the basis that workers nowadays are “reactionary,” “racists” benefiting from “white privilege,” “consumerist,” “bourgeoisified,” and generally “part of capitalist ideology.” The differences underscored by these descriptions essentially articulate the types of oppression and discrimination of which each group is the victim. Some (the surplus population) are “the most oppressed” and others become “the privileged” whose stable, safe existence has ultimately transformed them into individualist consumers whose revolutionary potential has been shattered. At the structural heart of this type of analysis is the process that distributes the effects of inequality rather than those which produce it in the first place. Forms of discrimination, stigmatization, and exclusion from the labor market structure the organization of class, but produce neither unemployment nor unstable employment (le travail précaire). As Ken Kawashima notes, “the contemporary proliferation, reproduction, and exploitation of contingent work ought not blind us to the fact that this type of labor, along with the inexorable contingency of the commodification of labor power, are endemic traits of the capitalist market economies and have been since the development of industrial capitalism.”52 From this point of view, what we see emerge in the discourse of the surplus population is a desire to substitute a difference in the way people are treated (i.e., the different forms that belonging to the proletariat can take) for the class difference that generates the very structures of capitalism and exploitation, which is to say, the proletariat itself.

The problem with the turn that numerous authors and thinkers on the left have taken is not that they’re wrong about the reality of this ever-growing “reserve army of labor” and its immiseration; it’s that they’ve replaced the abstract analysis of the structures that produced it with an all-too-often subjective adjudication of who is “the most” dominated, discriminated against, or excluded. By affirming that the major contradiction of our time is between the “included” and the “excluded,” between the lumpen on the one hand and the organized working class on the other, they have replaced a structural difference (inherent in the mode of organization of capitalist economies) with a contingent difference (the product of a certain stage of economic development). The main effect of this approach, which necessarily ends up pitting different segments of the wage-earning working class against each other (on the basis of their different identities), is that it makes it difficult to think abstractly about the forces that produce inequality within the proletariat and leaves us stranded at the level of their immediate forms. In effect, for these two types of differences, it gives us two types of identities.

The first is generic and refers back to the notion of the proletariat. Founded on capitalism’s basic organization of social relations, the proletarian qua concept consists of the ensemble of agents who are constrained to sell their labor power in order to live, and comprises in equal parts those who are employed and those who are not. After all, the word proletariat initially designated a Roman citizen whose only wealth was his children (proles). Exceedingly poor, the proletariat constituted the least respected class in Roman society, having only its labor power—and those of its children—as potential source of income. So it is worth underscoring that “proletariat” was not a synonym for “wage-earning worker” (travailleur salarié) but for something like “dispossession, expropriation and radical dependence on the market.” In sum, “you don’t need a job to be a proletarian.”53 More than (or rather than) an identity, the idea of proletarian constituted a category, derived from the general processes of exploitation and inequality. The proletarian is a function of the economic organization of capitalism.

The second type of identity is more prescriptive, based on the immediate form (which is obvious) that the proletariat inhabits in the real economic process, and much less general. Here, one might well distinguish the wage-earner from the poor, the poor from the unemployed, the unemployed from the undocumented, and indeed the “white” worker from “black.”54 The deployment of these categories and their political efficacy—both derived from the workings of global capital—tend to emphasize the identitarian dimension of inequality rather than its more impersonal dimension (which is less obvious): i.e., the accumulation of capital and the subsequent, or parallel, creation of the reserve army of labor. The status differences separating the surnuméraires from workers do not refer, then, to a structural difference within capitalism. They are instead a function of the forms of domination to which these differences are subject(ed), and which in turn fashion the sorts of identities that proletarians may adopt in the social structure (e.g., unemployed, worker, employee, part-timer/temp, undocumented, immigrant, racialized, etc.). All in all, we can detect in this sort of approach a variation on the liberal themes of diversity and multiculturalism, the end result of which is the transformation of class conflict into ethnic or, more generally, identity conflicts.

Indeed, despite the substantial differences between these two modes of representing social inequalities (one based essentially on “respect” and the other is still preoccupied with the question of “inequality”), the fact remains that both take as their principal concern or adversary the form that inequality takes rather than the phenomenon itself. Now, if it is clear that being employed is better than being unemployed (unlike cultural or racial identities, none of which is “better” than any other), what the two logics have functionally in common is a disavowal of the category of exploitation. Both simply reject the centrality of exploitation, and, with it, the contradiction between capital and labor, because their way of conceptualizing the problem isolates the groups they identify from the very relations of exploitation that produce them qua group. The problem is therefore not so much inequality as seen through the lens of exploitation, but rather the way in which effects of inequality get distributed throughout society (with certain groups comparatively sheltered from them, and others not). But, of course, a society in which everyone were equally exposed to inequality would hardly be more desirable than the currently existing one in which some segments are disproportionately subjected to it. If unemployment were not concentrated in specific sectors of the population, but distributed more randomly the salariat might of course be less fragmented along identitarian lines, but the global level of unemployment and inequality would not meaningfully diminish. From this standpoint, the problem is not just the political and economic developments since the ’70s but the logic of the argument itself. That is, as different as post-industrial society may be from what preceded it, the focus on the “excluded” nevertheless leaves the fact of inequality as such untouched, and the fact that the post-’70s change in the structure of inequality has been accompanied by this change in efforts to combat it has only instead served to reinforce it. On the one hand, it’s obviously true that none of the leftist (or in the U.S., liberal) authors cited above understand themselves as supporting a society in which inequality is more equally distributed but absolutely undiminished. On the other hand, it’s difficult to deny that the effect of, say, William J. Wilson’s work on the concentration of poverty was anything other than, as Kenneth Warren remarks, to “create the reform context”55 in which it was possible for the Clinton administration to commit itself to dispersing poverty rather than dispelling it. More generally, attacking the form inequality took rather than the mechanism that produced it in the first place could only, from the standpoint of social critique, amount to a regression.

From this standpoint, it’s easy to follow Fredric Jameson when he maintains that putting the emphasis on the “excluded” is an “essentially moral or ethical gesture, which leads to punctual revolts and acts of resistance rather than the transformation of the mode of production as such.”56 The notion of exploitation leads us, then, to the very heart of the production of inequality, whereas forms of discrimination or, in Jameson’s terms, domination, only bring us back to its mode of reproduction. In this sense, the relations that each perspective, that of exploitation or that of domination/discrimination, maintains with respect to the question of inequality are very different. It thus seems clear that “the outcome of an emphasis on exploitation is a socialist program, while that of an emphasis on domination is a democratic one, a program and a language only too easily and often coopted by the capitalist state.”57 And this is precisely, as Walter Benn Michaels has pointed out, one of the principle ideological effects of neoliberalism—i.e., changing the subject from “differences between what people own (class) to the differences between what people are (identity).”58 One’s position in the (class) relation capital/labor is no longer the object of a fundamental contradiction. Rather, what takes center stage is what/where one is (one’s identity) in the relations of domination within one’s own class (unemployed, underemployed, immigrant, etc.).

The “Virtually Poor” Worker and Abstraction as Method

In his short essay on the “Soul of Man under Socialism,” Oscar Wilde wrote “it is much more easy to have sympathy with suffering than it is to have sympathy with thought.”59 “[F]ind[ing] themselves surrounded by hideous poverty” men are naturally affected by it and generally tend to develop a sort of spontaneous empathy for the poor; human emotions, Wilde says, are “stirred more quickly than man’s intelligence.”60 And yet, despite its best intentions, such empathy tends to hinder rather than enhance our capacity for critical reflection on the sources of poverty in the first place. It focuses our attention on the immediate identity of the poor and not on the social conditions of his or her production qua impoverished subject. The problem is not so much that we feel emotions but that we make a politics out of them. Thus for Wilde, the truly socialist gesture is one that takes man’s “intelligence” as its point of origin, replacing affective response to poverty with abstract reflection on the structures that produce it. The observation that poverty, and the poor, exist doesn’t bother the author. What bothers Wilde is the mode of analysis and comprehension by which one grasps the question of poverty. Is the pauper fundamentally different from the worker moved to pity by the former’s condition, or is this difference itself but skin deep?

Here we come back to the two types of identities and differences we evoked earlier. On a superficial glance, it may indeed seem that the poor person’s “identity” is different from the worker’s. One does not work (or works only intermittently), and the other has a job and a reliable salary. On the immediate or empirical level then, these two positions are fundamentally different, indeed opposite. But take a closer look—one appealing to what Wilde called “intelligence” and thus paying attention to the relations as such rather than to the identity of specific groups—and these differences go up in smoke. Of course the wage-earning worker is less poor than someone who is unemployed, but both are the products of the same antagonism with capital and the same struggle over exploitation. The real gap between the poor and workers or between the unemployed and the employed should not blind us to the fact that the argument and position that the left has to adopt and defend is one that demystifies rather than reinforces the ideological smoke-screen put between the two. This task can only be accomplished, as Jameson affirms, by “a return to abstract categories”61—a methodological principle at the heart of Marx’s work. Marx himself says that we always have to start from the “concrete real” (the world as it presents itself to our understanding and the evidence of experience). Yet, such experiences, such evidence, are themselves products, outcomes. The concrete “real” appears, for Marx, “in reasoning as a summing-up, a result, and not as the starting point.”62 If the concrete real presents itself to our experience as it is, this is not because the real has always been thus, but rather because it is the “synthesis of many determinations” that we have to reconstruct at the level of “concrete (of) thought/an interpretation of the concrete.” The abstraction to which Marx proceeds in order to think the “concrete real” will then include a consideration of “the way in which things arrive at what they are”—that is, the history of their development.63 Marx seeks, then, to assimilate to every concrete determination (the unemployed or the worker, for instance), its “transient nature not less than its momentary existence.”64 So, in order to go beyond or negate the illusion that the subject of poverty is “other” than or “different” from me, we must free ourselves from immediate perceptual categories and conceptualize the conditions of both work and non-work as evolving forms of exploitation in the neoliberal economy. What from one point of view is an opposition (between unemployment and unemployment) is at a higher level of abstraction just the difference between a worker who has got a job and one who does not. The level of analysis is different but the social and historical process that produced here is the same.

It is this level and this identity that are grasped by the Marxist categories of the “surplus population” and of the wage-earner as a “virtual pauper.” The first category is essentially laid out in chapter 25 of the first volume of Capital, in the course of Marx’s discussion of the “general law of capitalist accumulation” and his development of the idea of an “industrial reserve army, that belongs to capital quite as absolutely as if the latter had bred it at its own cost.”65 This army, he says, is the “pivot” on which “the law of demand and supply of labor works.”66 In Marx’s view, “the general movements of wages are exclusively regulated by the expansion and contraction of the industrial reserve army.”67 In other words, he never separates the production of the “surplus population” (the floating population, the reserve army of labor, etc.) from the production of “workers.” In the course of its development, capitalism proletarianizes increasingly larger portions of society while simultaneously producing an excess labor population condemned to suffer the “hell of pauperism.” In the 1857-58 manuscripts (more generally referred to as the Grundrisse), Marx draws emphatic attention to the dialectical link between what he calls the category of “free workers” and poverty. Here, Marx in effect defines the worker as a “virtual pauper.” As he puts it in the Grundrisse, “it is already contained in the concept of the free laborer that he is a pauper: virtual pauper.”68 Beyond immediate appearances, then, Marx’s analysis allows us to comprehend poverty not as a state, but as a process, and see the notion of poverty as always already wrapped up in that of the worker. Simply put, for Marx the pauper is “latent in free labor,”69 pauperism is an integral, virtual dimension of free labor. Yet we have to proceed cautiously with this idea, for the risks of drawing the wrong conclusions from it are considerable. If Marx defends and proclaims the importance of thinking both aspects of labor simultaneously and in relation to one another, he does not go so far as to say that the proletarian is a pauper. He rejects this division at an abstract level, but not at the level of concrete determinations, where the difference in their material situations matters. His point is rather than under capitalism, the conditions in which work is performed are conditions in which the worker cannot help but create the possibility of his own pauperization.

Thus the worker is a worker, but in working he negates his status qua worker by destroying the very conditions of his reproduction as worker—he metamorphoses into a pauper. Thus paid labor makes it own contribution to the “the misery of constantly extending strata of the active army of labor.”70 The double figures of the free worker and the pauper are the common and contradictory product of a single social process (the accumulation of capital), and not two different states stemming from opposed social processes. Taking this premise as his point of departure, Fredric Jameson aligns himself with Marx’s assertion that we need to “think of unemployment as a category of exploitation,”71 and not just as a precarious “status” or a separate situation in relation to the exploitation of the salariat. For Jameson, we cannot isolate the “excluded” from the “structural necessity for capitalism to create a reserve army of the unemployed and to exclude whole sections of society (or here, in globalization, whole sections of the world population).”72

Common Ground: Organizing Co-operation

To return to the abstract process, and the process of abstraction, in the way that Marx understood and deployed it is thus a radical political gesture that may just permit us to demystify the supposed differences within the salariat and the identitarian positions that are imagined to result from them. By adopting an identitarian approach, method, or reading of the problem, opposing the “unemployed” to “active workers,” “immigrants” to “whites,” “the undocumented” to the “native born,” the left has succeeded in doing little more than play into the hands of the political hegemony of neoliberal “common sense” discourse. The conservative right’s work consists, then, in simply reproducing and inverting the very positions of the “Marxist” left, adding a formal dimension supported by appeals to common sense. Indeed, if the idea that workers today are a “privileged” group that needs to be brought down seems more than a little counter-intuitive, the claim that our social problems are the fruits of a culture of dependency (often associated with the figure of an immigrant other) has been reproduced and diffused in the mass media for decades. It is just this “common sense” that imbued Thatcher’s arguments with a kind of power, and which leads André Gorz down a discursive dead-end. Thus, although the right’s moralism (educate the poor through work) and its appeals to ethnocentrism may be nothing new, the support it receives from the double abandonment by the left of the working classes and of a discourse grounded in the struggle against exploitation is; and it is in this support that the right’s current ideological hegemony is anchored. It would seem self-evident that any discourse that aggravates the division between the “surplus population” and the “active population” can do nothing to help the exploited. The strategy adopted by the left since the 1970s, that of turning its (discursive and political) attention to the “excluded,” the “poor” and the “underemployed” or “discrimination” seems in the final analysis to engender a defeat on two fronts simultaneously, leaving open an economic and ideological breach that the right has triumphantly filled. In other words, the proponents of the critique of classical Marxism have ultimately been “supplying the right with just the kind of left it wants.”73 As Stephano Azzara puts it, “the victory of neoliberalism can be measured by the degree to which it has been able—sometimes explicitly but more often without anyone realizing it—to penetrate and restructure the vision of its opponents.”74

Today, more than ever, the success or failure of the struggles to come depends on the capacity of political and class organizations (e.g., unions) to draw attention to the socio-economic stakes represented by the “surplus population,” and to convince the so-called “stable” working class that their fates are intertwined. Indeed, at the very dawn of the industrial era, Marx had already posited that a decisive stage in the development of the class struggle would be the moment when workers “discover that the degree of intensity of the competition among themselves depends wholly on the pressure of the relative surplus population” and thus on their being able “to organize a regular co-operation between employed and unemployed in order to destroy or to weaken the ruinous effects of this natural law of capitalistic production on their class.”75

Translated by Robert St. Clair, The College of William and Mary.

Editor’s note: for a response to Daniel Zamora, please read Todd Cronan’s “The Political Ontology of Unemployment: Why No One Need Apply.”