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COPYRIGHT 2005 Modern Humanities Research Association
The transition from classical to post-Marxism, recently promoted by colonial critics, constitutes a theoretically regressive step. Focusing on the paradigmatic figure of Jose Rabasa, this article argues that the post-structural 'linguistic turn', involving the marginalization of the referent, can be sustained only at the cost of a series of performative contradictions. Integral to the latter is the displacement of 'ideology' by 'rhetoric' and by an ultimately idealist notion of the 'discursive unconscious'. The preoccupation with rhetoric precludes the development of a workable notion of science and, more importantly, of the history of science. Rabasa's irrationalism informs his notions of Eurocentrism and cultural incommensurability and his politically reformist doctrine of the Other, elaborated with reference to Zapatismo.
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As Bryan S. Turner has amply documented in Marxism and the End of Orientalism, Marxism itself is plagued with Hegelian Eurocentric conceptual devices [...] we must not only avoid imposing a Hegelian grid but also destroy the ground upon which Marx, Hegel and all models of 'development' or acculturation build their historical stages. (1)
Nothing is more arresting, to members of an older generation at least, than the ease with which the self-proclaimed post-Marxist, of recent vintage, says goodbye to all of that. It is, to be sure, not exactly an unfamiliar phenomenon: after all, reformism and desertion have been with Marxism since its origins in the nineteenth century, and, the gains of the October Revolution notwithstanding, each decade of the twentieth century was marked by political events that forced upon comrades and fellow-travellers a settling of accounts, which saw many distancing themselves from the Communist movement in some, if not all, of its manifestations. Particularly revealing in this respect are the career trajectories of such writers as E. P. Thompson, Raymond Williams, and Hobsbawm, to name but three examples. (2) The same is true of the '68 generation, many of whose gurus--Barthes, Lyotard, Kristeva come to mind--had a fraught relationship with Marxist ideas. But even those such as Michel Foucault, who from the beginning more or less took up a position outside Marxism, could invariably be found structuring their arguments with an eye to Marxism, to the extent that, as Eagleton has recently observed, they contrived never to leave it behind. (3)
This was not true of the generation that followed, which, while in large part inspired by Foucault's ideas, found it much easier to relinquish the Marxist legacy. Symptomatic in this respect is the above deployment of Turner's Marx and the End of Orientalism, a work conceived--by its author at least--not as attempting to disqualify Marxism, which is what Rabasa implies, but to promote an Althusserian, as opposed to Hegelian, Marxist programme. To be more precise, Turner sees his work as contributing to the Marxist theorization of pre-capitalist modes of production, which was confessedly still in its infancy. (4) This said, it is also true that the same writer is resisting an emergent post-Marxism, as embodied in the work of Barry Hindess and Paul Hirst, who are seen as heralding a return towards Weberian sociology. (5) Hindess and Hirst were, in fact, to be typical of those who, over the ensuing couple of decades, managed to keep one foot in and one foot outside Marxism, before finally shifting over into the non-Marxist camp. Here they were joined by members of the generation that matured in the 1990s, whose familiarity with the canon is much more mediated and indirect.
The aim of the present paper is to scrutinize the basic theoretical positions assumed by this self-proclaimed 'post-Marxist' generation. Towards this end, I have chosen to focus upon Jose Rabasa, whose work, ambitious in scope and forcefully argued, has assumed something of a paradigmatic status within the domain of Hispanic (colonial) studies. (6) My strategy will be to continue the project of renewal that was undertaken by Turner and commandeered by Rabasa for his own ends. For while there is no point in denying its declining influence during the 1980s and 1990s, Althusserianism has exhibited an impressive 'staying power' in the face of more recent post-structuralist, postmodernist trends. From its perspective, the view of Marx as a philosopher of history was always distorting and one-sided. Marx, the Althusserians argued, quickly abandoned the Hegelian notion of history as the fulfilment of its idea, in favour of its alternatives, namely the conception of 'history without a subject' and the aleatory instance of the class struggle. Proclamations as to Althusserianism's 'fall' are belied by the ongoing productivity of scholars across a broad swath of disciplines, who were inspired and renewed by it and upon whom we shall be drawing during the course of this paper, as a means of evaluating and assessing the alternative post-Marxist programme.
Such Marxiological distinctions, it has to be said, are the last thing on the minds of the newer generation of culture critics, who, their opposition to Eurocentrism notwithstanding, are busy shopping in the more fashionable parts of Paris. Here, relativity, linguisticism, ontological irrealism, judgemental irrationalism, the emphasis upon individual identity, and Power (as opposed to exploitation) are all the rage. We believe, and will be aggressively arguing, that the suasory force of these positions, together with the theoretical basis that sustains them, owes more to politics than the validity of their social theory. Our attention will focus on the claim that there is nothing outside discourse, that what is involved in the comparison of one theoretical paradigm with another is the simple juxtaposition of one 'fiction' with another. Whether the poststructuralist always means exactly what he says is a moot point, but the fact that he feels the need to talk in such terms is undoubtedly significant. The reasons, we believe, are to be found in the material outside, which post-Marxists themselves are insistent on placing beyond the reach of discourse. We shall be critiquing this post-structuralist position from the standpoint of a critical realism that theorizes the existence of social structures as implicated in discourse but not reducible to it. Such structures are separated from the discursive realm by an ontological hiatus. (7)
The Linguistic Turn
Somewhere in the early 1970s, a whole series of disciplines in the Arts experienced a shift of paradigmatic proportions. Analysis gave way to description, the broad canvas to the miniature, economic and social structure to cultural detail, explanation to empathy. At first blush, it seemed to involve simply a change of mood rather than of intellectual direction, although pretty soon it became apparent, as the post-structuralist movement gathered momentum, that rather more was at stake, including the very distinction between fact and fiction. (8) By the early 1990s the new trend had penetrated to the remoter corners of the anglophone academy, where it was enthusiastically embraced by a new generation of colonialists in the field of Hispanism. Rabasa's Inventing A-m-e-r-i-c-a perfectly reflects the state of the art:
My emphasis on the production of America as something 'new'--that is, semiotically created--challenges the view of the New World as a natural entity, discovered, revealed, or imperfectly understood. Consequently, I am less interested in issues regarding a distortion or misrepresentation of the New World than in how a new region of the world was invented, and how fiction (literary or otherwise) and history constitute complementary forms of understanding the 'West' and 'the Americas'. (IA, p. 6)
This is a notably provocative but also curiously indecisive statement if one considers it carefully. Provocative in so far as Rabasa appears to be arguing for the semiotic origins of a continental land mass: America, it seems, did not exist until it was named. Can this be what the author intends? Of course, we readily concede that in its prehistory America was not called 'America', a name resonant with every kind of historical, cultural, and ideological nuance. Still, part of the being of America was there from the beginning--or so, at least, common sense protests--which would distinguish it, say, from the land mass that became Antarctica. At which point the element of indecision increasingly enters into consideration.
Let us take Rabasa's conceptual challenge on board and further explore its textual ambiguities. Closer scrutiny reveals that the colonialist is not denying the existence of an external world or, presumably, our capacity to refer to it, but is simply confessing to being 'less interested' in this existence than he is in the world of discourse, a position that is confirmed in his more recent work: 'My use here [of the northern frontier of New Spain] seeks to foreground a geographic area that was written about, imagined, and mapped from a colonizing perspective, rather than a natural entity that was discovered, known and charted' (WV, p. 21). As if to counteract any bias towards irrealism, Rabasa adds: 'It would be erroneous, however, to think that the people involved in colonial enterprises lacked the resolve to verify what a philosophical realist would call the brute physical facts and were content with ideological, willful claims to the territories' (WV, p. 21). True, it is not altogether clear whether Rabasa himself is equally attached to the belief in 'brute physical facts', but the implication at least is that he is no idealist. Representation, then, and misrepresentation of the New World are perfectly feasible, or so Rabasa can be taken as implying: the emphasis is simply elsewhere, on what is in a name ('America'), which would explain why 'fiction' and 'history' are not mutually exclusive but 'complementary forms', whose relation, presumably, would need to be carefully nuanced.
In sum, there seems little to object to here. Indeed, the preoccupation with language, as the medium and vehicle of social thought and even of life itself, is indisputably something to be lauded. It was, after all, one of the achievements of modernism to insist that reality does not spontaneously offer itself to the gaze--the claim of earlier nineteenth-century movements such as empiricism--but had to be revealed, laboriously. Further to which, most people would now generally concede that no discourse may lay claim to epistemological privilege when it comes to accessing reality. And if there are scholars, such as (allegedly) Tzvetan Todorov, who are concerned with issues of correspondence between Columbus's words and the reality to which they (mistakenly or otherwise) refer, then surely Rabasa is quite entitled to concern himself with the production, by Columbus, of a 'New World code' and the construction of a 'complex artifice' through which to 'entice the imagination of his contemporaries' (IA, p. 53).By the same token, he is also justified in focusing on the way in which actual events are related, and on associated questions (upon whose complexity we can all agree), leaving on one side (but not excluding) questions of historical veracity (IA, p. 160).
Yet there are moments,...
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