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Fall 2006
Volume 06, Number 1

Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy

Book Reviews

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Foucault and Latin America
Benigno Trigo, ed. (New York: Routledge Press, 2002).

Reviewed by Elizabeth Greenwood
Lehman College

A kitchen table, a clearing in the jungle, an archive of secrets. These spaces of discourse and dialogue, of resistance and revelry are the unassuming places where Foucauldian analysis speaks. A heap of broken images, a mythic city. The surreal, dynamic texture of Latin America breathes and seethes history, madness, protest, and, above all, stories: the unexpected narrative of bodies and souls that Michel Foucault sought to extricate from the auspices of power. The elite and the campesinos, the Spanish and the indigenous, and in the endless dance of discovery and re- discovery, Latin America engages with Foucault more distinctly than his home, France, but does so with impassioned urgency. Between the ciudad letrado of Angél Rama and the tiny, daily struggles of Julia Alvarez, power twists and turns, knowledge ebbs and flows. But from all angles, Foucault seeps into the Latin American conversation with its past and present, with its ghosts and their keepers.

Benigno Trigo, SUNY–Stony Brook professor of Hispanic Languages and Literature, edits this dense yet provocative volume. He aims to create an intellectual space where "…students of Latin American critical thought can turn to find the landmark appropriations and deployments of Foucault’s theories, a representative gathering of original essays likewise informed, as well as essays that reflect on those very appropriations" (Trigo xxi). This grievous gap between Foucault’s analysis and its application in Latin America is indeed an exigent space to fill, and Trigo assembles some of Latin American academia’s finest minds to write on the topics of Discourse, Government, Subjectivity, and Sexuality in the four parts of the book. The anthology mirrors the diverse and paradoxical landscape of Latin American culture and politics in its inconsistencies: some of the articles are quite illuminating, accessible, and maverick in their approach, while others are laden with esoteric language and vague or strained connections to Foucault’s philosophy. In broad strokes, this work is not for the Sunday afternoon reader of Foucault, as it synthesizes nuanced subtleties of the philosopher’s analysis in the oftentimes ephemeral, "magically realistic" context of Latin American criticism. Five essays (two from Discourse and one each from the other sections) especially encapsulate this project in light of the principal thematic images of the book—writing and space—with both its strengths and weaknesses.

While the collected essays touch upon various themes in Foucault’s theories, they all inevitably lead back to issues of writing (or discourse and language) and space (conceived symbolically as agency or physically in domain). Both of these themes cut to the heart of all of Foucault’s writings, as well as the arguments of his critics. Angél Rama’s leading essay in the section on Discourse, "The Ordered City," from the groundbreaking book La ciudad letrada, frames the entire book in these tensions of "organic" versus "ordered." Rama employs the severe shift away from the magical, sensory, and traditionally indigenous (or the organic) cities of pre- Conquest Latin America to their constructed and monitored mutations (the ordered). Rama describes this transformation, exemplified by Tenochtitlán to modern day Mexico City, writing in language straight out of Foucault’s Discipline and Punish: "… they [the Spanish] adapted themselves to a frankly rationalizing vision of an urban future, one that ordained a planned and repetitive urban landscape and also required that its inhabitants be organized to increasingly stringent requirements of colonization, administration, commerce and defense" (Rama 4). The stones of colonization sought to divide and to order.

While Foucault examines European Panopticism (Discipline and Punish) as a uniquely eighteenth-century innovation, we see parallel surveillance and power/knowledge relationships emerge in colonial Latin America in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Conquest required docile bodies, record keeping, and examination. But less overt than the grooming malleable bodies to become subjects of the sovereign, Rama argues that the physical layout of cities and the elite interpreters who populated them created the "order of signs" along with surveillance. In other words, urban organization provided the arena in which preferred symbolic communicators could form the new episteme: knowledge became codified (Rama 7-9). Indeed, the repercussions of designing the public language of prestige are far-reaching. As Rama explains, "The capacity of the order of signs to configure the future was complemented symmetrically by an ability to erase the past" (Rama 9). Not only do signs normalize and create a determinant hierarchy among the lettered and the unlettered, writing these signs steamrolls vestiges of the organic past. Urbanization raises the stakes in the Latin American game of "discovery" to new heights. Marginalization or confinement is not an option, as in Foucault’s European case studies, but instead we see unbridled obliteration of history.

Rama’s essay provides the touchstone for the entire project of the book in that it refocuses Foucauldian theories to their very essence. The letter is the confinement of discourse, which defines the inherent lack of agency available in the power/knowledge dynamic. Through the writing of the Latin American city, knowledge is simultaneously destroyed and created, and discourse and space realize their most pure amalgamation. In a puzzlingly complex article by Roberto González Echevarría, "A Clearing in the Jungle: From Santa Mónica to Macondo," the empowerment and oppression of writing is further developed in terms of the Latin American archive novel, focusing a great deal on Gabriel García Marquez’s Cien años de soledad. As González Echevarría echoes, "Writing begins in the city with the need to order society and to discipline in the punitive sense…writing is bound to the founding of cities and to punishment" (González Echevarría 47). And, moreover, "Latin America…was created in the archive" (69). In stolen, shadowy moments, the Latin American novelist finds serenity and surrender in the very place Foucault himself did as well.

The archive is the site where myth, history, and narrative converge to create a "new history" (49). Just as Foucault immersed himself in the dusty, forgotten stories of madmen and libertines, Latin American novelists speak to the past to write history sensually, as Foucault describes the "…fictional discourse to induce effects of truth" (Foucault 193) in Power/Knowledge. González Echevarría wants to advocate the fictive as an outgrowth of the archive even further, describing it eschatologically, "…the chronicle of death foretold" (66). A new truth of life is realized through an illusory death. By dressing the archive in clothes of reckoning and Armageddon, the author attempts to pull his reader into the self-reflective world of the writer. The archive plays a central role to the landmark novels of Latin America, González Echevarría argues, because of the secrecy, power, and possibility for new discursivity in this obscured corner. The archive keeps secrets and the writer is the catalyst to question the power that constrains the knowledge, and vice versa. But, like Foucault’s thoughts on sexuality, this shadowy knowledge is at its intellectual climax when the secret interacts only between the page and the reader. What results from the archive is a fresh entity, a new history, all unto its self. González Echevarría’s grandiose, layered style can easily bewilder, but the ensemble he projects in the archive of history/culture/legality and bureaucracy tied in with the myths that define and re-create history are ideas made possible only by the work of Foucault. The dusty secrets of the two writers meld and dazzle across the page.

A marked (but admittedly welcome) departure from Gonzalez Echevarría’s lush prose comes from University of California–Santa Cruz Spanish professor Juan Poblete. In his article from "Government" entitled "Governmentality and the Social Question: National Formation and Discipline," Poblete discusses the terminology utilized by the Chilean state on how the unorganized masses should be governed. We see, then, an analysis that applies Foucault’s broad theory of power to the state sphere. Yet Poblete demonstrates the way in which this state-sanctioned normalizing power trickled down to the micro-scale of the family in Chile in the late eighteenth century. While this theoretically sounds like an intriguing case study of the transference and dispersal of power into a new arena, Poblete’s examples feel strained and weak in the shadow of the Foucauldian theories he quotes at great length. Jumping from examples of church to school to market economies to the domestic sphere with very little transition, while making ambiguous references to other scholars simultaneously, the author forces the reader to make connections solitarily.

However, Poblete does illuminate Foucault’s power theorems quite effectively in a few places, including his discussion of the role of the police and the semantic significance carried with it. The poor are watched in terms of security and planning, while normalization inevitably results. He extends the same metaphor in describing the Christian school as well: "Insofar as the goal of its educational effort was not the transformation of the social order but its efficient and controlled reproduction, the state could afford, specially at the beginning to delegate the task of primary education to the Church. Thus is allowed at that level a great degree of continuity and republican educational traditions" (Poblete 142). The author unearths an imperative ramification of pastoral education by viewing the phenomenon through a Foucauldian lens. But this article, and indeed the Governmentality section on the whole, are lackluster in comparison to the rest of the book. Perhaps this is because of the paradoxical tendency to apply the power relations that function tangibly on the micro-level to the great scale of governmentality. For in the minute, and in the unassuming, power battles of grandeur are fought.

Editor Benigno Trigo examines horizontal, small-scale dominance in his essay from Subjectivity on "Thinking Subjectivity in Latin American Criticism." Theories of subjectivity ironically stem from the foundation of writing and space previously discussed; yet modern Latin American critics tend to acquiesce to the traditional delimited conceptions of power as solely oppressive, and the subject as perpetually oppressed. Breaking out of this mentality, Trigo argues, is necessary in order to formulate a more dynamic and positive blue print for resistance. Similar to Judith Butler’s emphasis on a recentering of the subject as intimately bound up with the object, Trigo wants to depart from the binary.
One definition of this binary that Trigo discusses comes directly from thinkers discussed earlier, Angél Rama and Roberto González Echevarría. Referencing again primordial elements and their realization in space, the two critics construct their binary, as Trigo explains, "…between an organic object/Other that contains and its origin of an inorganic subject/self that paradoxically gives birth to itself" (Trigo 176). Fully grasping this concept proves challenging in the article, as Trigo glosses over a number of subjectivity theories, but this dichotomy is the most compelling. Rooted in the language of self-reflexive biology, Rama and González Echevarría formulate a binary that is simultaneously divided yet enmeshed in its opposition, and recapitulates to form new power/resistance dynamics out of the same, recycled clay. Yet while these two thinkers speak in a language alluding to biopower, they apparently "…do not seem aware that their oppositions are based on unexamined notions of sexual difference" (Trigo 176). Trigo cites well-known feminist theorists in Latin American criticism who emphasize the consequence of bodily drives and desires of the subject in contrast to the "performative" and socialized aspects of what ultimately becomes gender, echoing Butler’s seminal ideas.

Trigo’s overview of Latin American thinking on the role of the subject in resistance is informative and sweeping but challenging to follow in all its digressions and oppositional directions, as is the nature of subjectivity studies in general. One of the main problems in determining the precarious role of the subject seems to be the tendency to universalize. To determine the position, or lack thereof, of the subject in mapping plans of social resistance, context should be key. That said, perhaps subjectivity should be looked at more subjectively. In the case of the gender hierarchy in Latin America, denying the subject of the woman (who has been with comparatively much less voice and agency than women in North America or Europe), diminishing the unique character of the woman herself seems to negate the cause in this particular circumstance. Similarly, the struggle of indigenous peoples throughout Latin America clings on to a sense of subjectivity in the manifestation of a collective identity, as this is a return to their historical cultural roots. Theoretical subjectivity, then, should coalesce to the impossibility of establishing a universal rule for the nature of struggle, and can then adapt itself to the needs of particular communities.

SUNY–Stony Brook philosopher Kelly Oliver brilliantly clarifies the everyday struggles and more latent subjectivity aspects of race, class, and gender in the novels of Dominican writer Julia Alvarez. Oliver’s essay "One Nail Takes Out Another: Power, Gender, and Revolution Julia Alvarez’s Novels" examines and extends Foucauldian theories, explaining, "…[Alvarez’s novels] at once demonstrates Foucault’s thesis that resistance must take localized forms and at the same time makes all the more striking the Foucauldian blind spot of sexual difference in relation to power" (Oliver 236).

The realistic poignancy of Alvarez’s stories usually centers on the family as a locus to illuminate greater political and social issues. In the Time of the Butterflies, for example, tells the story of the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and its eventual revolutionary demise through the alternating voices of the three Mirabal sisters. By focusing on the small, familial scale, Oliver argues that Alvarez expands Foucault’s theories of the micro-functioning of power to a feminine, domestic sphere; the dinner table debates between fathers and daughters, the memories and secrets revealed over afternoon coffee. Alvarez unearths a subjugated knowledge, the marginalized epistemology of the Latin American matriarchy, and thus produces a counter-knowledge that carries with it the legacy of resistance that brews below the surface, a resistance that is as discreet as the power it challenges.

Oliver connects Foucault’s contention that "‘local, specific struggles’ against local forms of power and resistance on all levels can affect change" (Oliver 237) to the small yet intentional and calculated resistances of Alvarez’s characters. The Mirabal sisters act not only against the tyrannical Trujillo but also against their father who controls them. Oliver explains, "Alvarez suggests that revolution is a matter of ‘constant skirmishes’ on an everyday, mundane level….This comparison [Trujillo/patriarchy] itself suggests that revolution happens continually through everyday resistances rather than ‘global’ overthrow" (Oliver 241). With this and many other examples of "mundane" rebellion in Alvarez’s writings, Oliver demonstrates the positive, effective convergence of writing and space to produce tenable change in the face of power. By the Mirabal sisters and other women struggling in their own homes and in spite of patriarchal power, their goals of liberation are more complete in the microscopic than that of universal feminism. Foucauldian struggle is a function of small acts in small spaces, and Oliver’s article stands as a shining, literary example that is not only inspiring but also feasible.

The work of Foucault has often been described as incomplete. His power/knowledge relationship can be paradoxical, and his murder of the subject perhaps dies without sufficient mourning. But because of the wonderful dramatic irony and shadowy ambiguities of the Foucauldian project, new ideas and great intellectual strides can recapitulate outward toward the gasp, the whisper of freedom in the distance. Foucault and Latin America mirrors its muse. While the bulk of the essays in the volume rivet the imagination and provoke further inquiry, it is an incomplete project. The elitism of the Latin American left resounds throughout the book, in the sense that theory is championed unabashedly over practice. This is most evident in the lack of papers on indigenous struggle, namely, the Zapatistas. Lauded by critics and journalists internationally as the first "postmodern" revolution, there is not one mention of the Chiapan rebel group that captured the attention of the world in their refusal of power and elimination of the subject through the facelessness of the ski mask.1 Similarly, the next volume may want to address the feminist movements in Latin America in their own section, rather than keeping this discourse relegated to the chapter on "Subjectivity." But the importance of Foucault’s project to Latin American thought is undeniable and helps us appreciate the philosopher in a new light. Hopefully, Foucault in Latin America serves as the point of departure to illuminate the contemporary struggles of Latin America that define our modern moment.

Endnotes

1. See Grassroots Postmodernism by Gustavo Esteva and Madhu Suri Prakash (Zed Books, 1998) and Specters of Liberation by Martin Matustik (SUNY Press, 1998) for discussion of the EZLN and subjectivity.

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