La globalización y sus espejismos. Encuentros y desencuentros interculturales vistos desde el Sur y el Norte. Globalization and its Apparitions. Intercultural Engagements and Disengagements Seen from the South and the North

La globalización y sus espejismos. Encuentros y desencuentros interculturales vistos desde el Sur y el Norte. Globalization and its Apparitions. Intercultural Engagements and Disengagements Seen from the South and the North

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Av. 6 de Diciembre 2309 y La Niña, 3er. piso Tel.: 222 79 48 - 222 79 49 - Fax: 250 10 66 Casilla: 17-03-4629 Correo-e: [email protected] www.editorialelconejo.com Quito - Ecuador La globalización y sus espejismos. Encuentros y desencuentros interculturales vistos desde el Sur y el Norte. Globalization and its Apparitions. Intercultural Engagements and Disengagements Seen from the South and the North Michael Handelsman / Olaf Berwald (eds.) © Editorial El Conejo, 2009 Supervisión Editorial: Santiago Larrea Diseño y Diagramación: Ernesto Proaño Portada: ISBNDerecho autoral: Depósito legal: 2009

La globalización y sus espejismos. Encuentros y desencuentros interculturales vistos desde el Sur y el Norte. Globalization and its Apparitions. Intercultural Engagements and Disengagements Seen from the South and the North Michael Handelsman / Olaf Berwald (eds.)

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Índice/Table of Contents 1. Introducción/An Introduction Introducción crítica

Michael Handelsman

11

Critical Introduction,

by Michael Handelsman

25

2. Estampa primera… a manera de prólogo/ Opening Sketch . . . As Prologue New York y Tampa desde el aire Abdón Ubidia

41

3. El sueño destapado/ The Uncovered Dream

Entre la ruina y la espera: viaje al mundo de las almas Ricardo Forster

45

Faking/Staking a Village: Hyper-(real?) American Characters In the Supra-Globalized Spaces of French Drama and Danish Film, by Les Essif Nuevas tecnologías y gramáticas viejas. Decolonialidad y globalizaciones alternativas Michael Handelsman

105

Recolonizing Reason: Torture and the Globalization of Indifference, by Olaf Berwald

123

71

4. Alteridades internalizadas y asumidas/ Internalized and Assumed Identities Machado de Assis Digested? A Case of Cannibalism in Brazilian Twenty-First Century Literature, by Luciana Namorato

139

Za is for Saffron: from a book on the Arabic alphabet by Michael Beard

163

Alterity as Experience, Image, and Place: Phenomenological Perspectives on Interculturality, by Bernhard Waldenfels

183

5. Situándose en el mundo globalizado/ Situating Oneself in the Globalized World De “La Moraleja” a “La Milagrosa” (Apuntes de viaje por España) Humberto E. Robles Escribir en el norte. Memoria, culpa, utopía, simonía Mario Campaña

205

219

6. Asia y el Medio Oriente imaginados desde Alemania/ Asia and the Middle East Imagined from Germany A Selection from the forthcoming novel, September, Fata Morgana by Thomas Lehr

235

India Revisited?; or, How Do We Know What India Is?, by Ursula Kocher

245

7. Estampas ilustradas… a manera de epílogo/ Illustrated Sketches . . . As Epilogue Diary from Oaxaca, by Peter Kuper

257

Colaboradores/Contributors

269

1. Introducción/An Introduction

Introducción crítica Michael Handelsman Universidad de Tennessee

“No hay batalla entre la civilización y la barbarie, sino entre la falsa erudición y la naturaleza.” –José Martí, Nuestra América (1891) “[. . . ] una política de la redistribución no puede conducirse con éxito sin una política del reconocimiento, y viceversa.” –Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2004) “The notion of the sudden engagement between the cultures of center and periphery may thus [. . .] be an imaginative by-product of the late awakening to global realities of many of us inhabitants of the center.” –Anthony D. King (1997)

Presentamos a continuación un libro colectivo sobre el carácter contradictorio y conflictivo de la globalización, pero desde un diálogo intercultural y transnacional, que pone de relieve los encuentros y desencuentros que, a menudo, definen las relaciones que existen entre el Sur y el Norte. El volumen incluye: (1) once ensayos sobre diversos aspectos de la globalización vividos y comentados desde varios espacios geográficos, (2) una sección de una novela inédita sobre la guerra en Irak y (3) diez ilustraciones gráficas sobre las manifestaciones callejeras protagonizadas por maestros docentes de Puebla, México. El proyecto incorpora a trece colaboradores, que son de Alemania, Argentina, Brasil, Ecuador y Estados Unidos, y representan una multiplicidad de perspectivas y experiencias, ya que trabajan desde diferentes lenguas

12 (e.g., alemán, castellano, francés, inglés y portugués) y desde diversos campos profesionales, que incluyen la dirección de editoriales y revistas, la ficción, la cátedra universitaria y las artes gráficas. Si bien es cierto que existen muchos libros sobre la globalización, el volumen nuestro está anclado en las artes y las humanidades y pretende alterar cierta tendencia a privilegiar los discursos del Norte como ejes del saber por excelencia, al asumir arbitrariamente que las voces del Sur siguen constituyendo meros objetos de análisis que, rara vez, tienen resonancia más allá de sus respectivos entornos geográficos. Por eso, los materiales incluidos en la colección —que alternan entre ensayos académicos y testimoniales y entre la ficción y las artes gráficas— se alimentan de una dinámica que valora el origen de cada pensamiento y de cada lengua, cuyas gramáticas ya no se comprenden ciegamente desde viejos esquemas coloniales o imperiales. De hecho, los pensadores del Sur y del Norte recogidos aquí analizan la globalización desde sus respectivas experiencias y perspectivas, producto de un transnacionalismo que se inspira en la noción de que se debe pensar localmente para actuar globalmente. Es decir, lejos de particularismos, por una parte, y de universalismos abstractos, por otra, nuestros colaboradores se mueven simultáneamente entre el Sur y el Norte, tanto en el sentido geográfico como en el sentido cultural, y, de ahí, emergen como actores e intérpretes de un mundo globalizado que, frecuente y dolorosamente, se pierde en sus propios espejismos. Algunos de los temas tratados remiten directa o indirectamente a: (1) problemas y conflictos que los escritores del Sur sienten y viven al trabajar en el Norte; (2) representaciones de los procesos de la globalización hechas desde el Sur en comparación con las del Norte; (3) la influencia de los movimientos migratorios en la creación de un sentido desterritorializado de la nación tradicional; (4) conflictos y enlaces entre los que viven dentro y los que viven fuera de un mismo país; (5) globalizaciones alternativas; (6) la traducción como un problema ético y estético; (7) los significados culturales del Sur y del Norte; (8) diálogos a través de las culturas del llamado Sur; (9) el

13 significado de la disidencia en la edad de la globalización; (10) el papel de las artes y el pensamiento en un sistema mundo; (11) colonialismo y colonialidad; (12) descolonización y decolonialidad. El colonialismo, como origen de las relaciones intelectuales jerarquizadas que han mantenido a los pensadores de América Latina en una posición de inferioridad ante sus contrapartes de Europa y Estados Unidos, está implícito en los tres epígrafes que dan inicio a este volumen. Mientras que King reconoce una arrogancia imperial que ha enceguecido e insensibilizado al Primer Mundo ante los múltiples tesoros de las llamadas periferias, donde las cartografías coloniales han querido, demasiadas veces, registrar solamente áreas de extracción y explotación de los recursos naturales y humanos, Martí ya había denunciado hace más de cien años esta misma arrogancia y ceguera. En cuanto al reconocimiento mutuo que Boaventura Sousa de Santos reclama de forma más reciente, vale recordar con el investigador venezolano Fernando Coronil: “Es cierto que Europa transformó a América. Pero también es cierto que América transformó a Europa” (en Neto, 52). En cierta manera, nuestro proyecto es una apuesta por este mismo reconocimiento mutuo que difícilmente elude o vence políticas asimilacionistas y multiculturalistas, que, en nombre de una celebrada diversidad, afianzan aún más —pero con nuevos matices e inventivas sutilezas— las estructuras coloniales de siempre. Es así que las palabras descolonizadoras de Frantz Fanon, citadas por Coronil, ponen de relieve el contexto conflictivo en que hemos concebido este libro sobre los encuentros y desencuentros de la globalización: “Europa es la invención de América” (52). Es precisamente esa actitud desafiante que esperamos haber cultivado al reunir los materiales de nuestros colaboradores, que, desde sus respectivos posicionamientos, evocan maneras “otras” de definir y comprender los procesos contradictorios y asimétricos de la globalización.1 1 Hacemos una distinción consciente al decir “maneras otras” en vez de “otras maneras”; mientras la segunda frase implica una manera entre muchas y puede sugerir alguna dicotomía de valores y, por lo tanto, una supuesta “otredad” dentro

14 A pesar de aquellos intentos de mistificar la globalización en términos del flattening of the world, a la Thomas Friedman, hay que tomar en cuenta que “la contradicción entre los países subdesarrollantes y los países subdesarrollados por aquéllos no sólo ha conservado sino que ha acrecentado su vigencia, y es hoy la contradicción principal de la humanidad” (Fernández Retamar 4). De nuevo, tropezamos con la herencia colonial, la misma que Aníbal Quijano ha expresado como la colonialidad del poder que “en América Latina es ‘una perversa experiencia de alienación histórica’, cuyo eje principal es la reproducción permanente y estructural de relaciones jerarquizadas y racializadas, al establecer juegos de dominación entre identidades asumidas como positivas (occidentales) y negativas (no occidentales) y la incidencia de aquéllas sobre éstas en todas las instancias de poder” (en Vélez Verdugo 14). Al reunir a colaboradores que vienen de diversos espacios geográficos y que son producto de diferentes lenguas y modalidades culturales, todo lo cual se ha alimentado dentro de algunas de las mentadas jerarquizaciones propias de nuestras historias coloniales y que nuestros respectivos sistemas académicos han institucionalizado y normativizado, hemos querido yuxtaponer nuestras diferencias y similitudes y, así, simular críticamente la fluidez y confluencia que caracterizan las relaciones de poder dentro de y entre el Sur y el Norte —las dos caras del colonialismo— y, por extensión, de la globalización. Aunque estamos de acuerdo con Boaventura Sousa de Santos cuando señala que es más acertado pensar en plural y hablar de las globalizaciones (10), el eje transversal de nuestra recopilación de textos y comentarios es su constante interpelación de aquella manifestación de las globalizaciones, que, en realidad, “es el proceso de la extensión por la fuerza (la del dinero o la de las armas, lo mismo de un sistema dominante, la primera frase se refiere a maneras ancestrales que el colonialismo ha silenciado o invisibilizado, pero que ahora vuelven a emerger como sistemas de pensamiento paralelos que pretenden alterar y transformar el sistema dominante.

15 da) de una particularidad, la del capitalismo internacional, y del tipo de sociedad y del tipo de política y del tipo de cultura que con él se asocian” (Rojo, Salomone y Zapata 137). Sin duda alguna, esa “particularidad” se nutre de su capacidad “de subalternizar el conocimiento del otro, a través de múltiples mecanismos” como, por ejemplo, “la producción del saber institucional” (Vélez Verdugo 14). Además, esta misma capacidad de subalternización “remite… al ámbito de las geopolíticas del conocimiento,” las mismas que producen y legitiman “formas de conocimiento y saberes hegemónicos que se imponen sobre aquéllos que son considerados como subalternos” (14). Volvemos a repetir que es contra esa hegemonía que apuntamos nuestras reflexiones sobre la globalización en este libro. De hecho, para los que trabajamos en universidades de Estados Unidos y Europa, principalmente, las hegemonías de los saberes se sienten con mucha fuerza, sobre todo en estos tiempos globalizados, cuando se quiere (con)fundir nuestras múltiples diferencias dentro de una hipotética y homogeneizante “aldea global”. La consolidación de programas académicos y la preferencia por cursos panorámicos designados en términos del “mundo” (e.g., “world literatures”, “world geography”), en vez de aquellos en que se resaltaban las particularidades de las diferentes áreas y regiones del mundo, son una nueva expresión de una larga tradición de colonización y subalternización dentro de las academias. Es decir, las decisiones tomadas respecto de dónde publicar los libros, en qué idiomas escribir y qué libros citar, por ejemplo, determinan muchas veces la suerte de futuros profesionales, y, lamentablemente, no pocos de los intentos de contrarrestar estos nuevos imperios del saber y del hablar se condenan por ser supuestamente localistas, cuando no “fundamentalistas”. No dudemos del acierto que enseña que “el reconocimiento de las diferencias posibilita una interacción en la que ninguna de las partes debe someterse a la lógica del otro” (en Yapu 74-75). Es precisamente esa interacción a la que aspiramos, la misma que entendemos como una convocatoria para complejizar las relaciones entre los diversos pensamientos, muchos de los cuales han sido silenciados a través de los

16 siglos. Por eso, hemos de recordar lo que Roberto Fernández Retamar ya había constatado en 1992: “Dado que también la humanidad es un ecosistema, ni el Sur ni el Norte podrán salvarse por separado” (14). Este comentario de Fernández Retamar no debe leerse como un deseo de fusionar los referentes Sur y Norte, sino, más bien, como un intento de deconstruirlos primero, para luego reconstruirlos en contra de las hegemonías propias del colonialismo y todos sus legados posteriores. Sur y Norte se caracterizan por sus contenidos históricos más que por sus límites fronterizos, aunque sus geografías son también fruto de dichas historias fluidas, entrelazadas y contestadas. De manera que no fue casual cuando el mismo Fernández Retamar retomó su ensayo seminal, Calibán (1971), y explicó en 1986: “Mi aspiración no es, no fue nunca, presentar la América Latina y el Caribe como una comarca cortada del resto del mundo, sino como una parte del mundo: una parte que debe ser vista con la misma atención y el mismo respeto que las demás, no como una nueva paráfrasis de Occidente” (9). En el fondo, se vislumbra en estas palabras de Fernández Retamar una vehemente defensa de identidad, lo que no ha de extrañarnos en esta época caracterizada por acelerados procesos de “la globalización totalitaria” junto con “un modelo económico depredador”, que amenazan con neutralizar toda expresión alternativa.2 Es así que la dirigente indígena del Ecuador Nina Pacari ha advertido que en esas condiciones homogeneizantes: “el concepto de la identidad ofrece un sentido de pertenencia y de comunidad solidaria. La identidad, entonces, debe ser para los países, la columna vertebral que necesitamos para no movernos sin rumbo. Sin ella se pierden raíces, principios y valores que nos marcan, que nos protegen y que caracterizan nuestras vidas” (en Castro-Lucic 49).

Por su parte, el sociólogo catalán Manuel Castells ha puntualizado que, debido al acelerado ritmo de los flujos de riqueza, poder e 2 La investigadora chilena Milka Castro-Lucic ha puntualizado que “la globalización del modo capitalista que se ha expandido por el universo, en la práctica, ha demostrado no tolerar alternativas culturales” (8).

17 imágenes de la globalización, la búsqueda de identidad se ha vuelto una fuente fundamental en la creación de un sentido social (social meaning) ante una aparente desterritorialización, acompañada por la apropiación de tradicionales estructuras, instituciones, movimientos sociales e imaginarios. Por lo tanto, la gente tiende a formular el mentado sentido social no en base a lo que se hace, sino a lo que se es o a lo que se cree ser (I, 3). Por supuesto, esa preocupación por las identidades no se remite a los esencialismos del pasado ni pretende levantar muros para aislar las diferencias en estos tiempos de una incontrolable fluidez de vivencias e influencias. El reconocimiento mutuo, el sentido de pertenencia y la construcción del social meaning, reclamados arriba por un caribeño que piensa desde la Revolución Cubana, por una indígena kichwa de los Andes que piensa desde el movimiento Pachakutik y por un catalán que piensa desde las autonomías internas de España y desde la Comunidad Europea, constituyen una política de las diferencias en un mundo donde, según Anthony D. King, “la globalización no es un proceso de una sola vía, ni tampoco viene de una sola fuente” (x; traducción mía). Las diferencias culturales de estos tres pensadores que se acaban de citar no anulan la posibilidad de que ellos deconstruyan desde sus respectivas identidades una misma historia, la de las exclusiones y asimetrías del ya mentado colonialismo que hoy se conoce como la globalización. Pero esa deconstrucción se proyecta como un primer paso en un largo y continuo proceso de reconstrucción y de la convicción de que otro mundo sí es posible. Seguramente, ésta es la lección que hemos de aprender de los movimientos indígenas de la Región Andina y, también, de la presencia masiva de los inmigrantes del Sur, cuya presencia en el Norte nos obliga a reconfigurar las viejas cartografías de las identidades. En cierta manera, las tensiones que marcan profundamente los encuentros y desencuentros interculturales que atraviesan nuestras historias y nuestros territorios son un recuerdo de que vivimos en un mundo todavía en ciernes. Además, aunque se preguntará si es posible

18 que comunidades de tanta diversidad logren compartir los mismos conceptos y criterios al deconstruir/reconstruir nuestras relaciones sociales, nos quedamos con la esperanza de que el pluralismo reconocido y respetado pueda crear un espacio de negociación y transformación (King 154) o, si se prefiere, de “un diálogo entre saberes” (Nicolas, en Yapu, 67). La globalización y sus espejismos pretende contribuir a este diálogo intercultural. Lejos de dogmatismos y prepotencias, que todavía circulan en algunas publicaciones propias de la Academia y de otros centros del saber oficial, los materiales que se leerán a continuación participan —con modestia— de un proyecto que aspira trascender los tiempos y espacios que acercan y distancian el Sur y el Norte. Curiosamente, este mismo vaivén de acercamientos y alejamientos se patentiza en la formación de cada uno de los colaboradores de este volumen. Parecidos a los etnógrafos y sus informantes evocados por James Clifford en sus “Traveling Cultures” (“Culturas viajantes”), los presentes aquí son verdaderos viajeros, tanto en el sentido físico como en el cultural. Por lo tanto, el Sur y el Norte, una vez más, no emergen como polos opuestos, sino como dos espacios intensamente entrelazados, que también se mueven y cruzan, continuamente, fronteras geográficas y mentales, dejándonos con el Sur en el Norte y el Norte en el Sur. Sin embargo, esta fluidez no ha de leerse como una desterritorialización absoluta sin raíces o historia. Cada colaborador nuestro sabe de dónde es, aunque sea de todas partes. Humberto E. Robles, por ejemplo, ha comentado, más de una vez, que es un ecuatoriano que ha vivido la mayoría de su vida en Estados Unidos, que ha vivido en Europa y ha viajado alrededor del mundo, a través de diferentes lenguas y literaturas y, a pesar de todo eso, él sabe que es ecuatoriano… y de Manabí, sobre todo. Viajeros más que sedentarios son nuestros colaboradores y tienen aquel sentido de pertenencia destacado por Nina Pacari, el mismo que le asegura no moverse sin rumbo. Y el rumbo nuestro va marcando todo un proceso de interpelación de actitudes, valores y vivencias hegemónicos que quisieran diluir y, eventualmente, eliminar nuestra

19 pluralidad desconcertadamente conflictiva, que resiste todo intento de encerrarla en una engañosa “aldea global” concebida, siempre, en singular. Todo lo comentado hasta aquí define el contexto desde el cual se ha concebido nuestro proyecto. También ayuda a explicar el porqué de nuestra decisión de usar dos lenguas en lugar de publicar un libro traducido a una sola lengua. Es decir, entendemos que la globalización, de por sí, es multilingüe, y recurrir a una nueva lengua imperial como lingua franca solamente puede conducirnos a las mismas políticas de exclusión y dominación que han deslegitimado y deshumanizado a aquellas gramáticas que no pertenecen a los discursos oficiales. Por lo tanto, nuestra decisión de publicar los ensayos en español y en inglés —sin traducciones— pretende ser confrontacional; estamos convencidos de la necesidad de motivar, tanto a las editoriales como a los lectores (y a todas las instituciones correspondientes), y promover el multilingüismo en vez de aceptar pasivamente las traducciones a una imaginaria lengua “común” —y rentable—, que distorsiona la naturaleza pluralista y conflictiva de la globalización. ¿De qué otra manera podrán nuestras mentadas voces “viajantes” realizar todo su potencial?3

3 Debido a cierta resistencia a publicar un volumen con más de una lengua por parte de las editoriales, hemos de constatar que tuvimos que hacer una concesión importante, ya que el manuscrito original incluía los textos de Bernhard Waldenfels, Thomas Lehr y Ursula Kocher en alemán, los mismos que Olaf Berwald tradujo al inglés. Más que una contradicción de principios, entendemos nuestra concesión como una clara señal de lo difícil que es romper la colonialidad del saber, un tema tratado en varios ensayos de este volumen. Por lo tanto, quisiéramos creer que este volumen constituirá una contribución, aunque modesta, a los procesos de decolonialidad que pretenden crear globalizaciones alternativas que sean plenamente incluyentes, justas y multilingües. (Ojo: no estamos en contra de la traducción como un valioso vehículo de comunicación y acercamiento, pero sí cuestionamos su uso cuando se la convierte en una excusa para no aprender/enseñar otras lenguas).

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Contextos y contenidos

Este libro consta de seis secciones. Comienza nuestro viaje con un prólogo del escritor ecuatoriano Abdón Ubidia, titulado “New York y Tampa desde el aire”. A partir de las metáforas del rascacielos y la autopista, Ubidia deconstruye el sueño americano, resaltando lo que él percibe como la soledad y la falta de solidaridad colectiva de Estados Unidos. No es una casualidad que este sueño se haya transformado en pesadilla, ya que la mirada de Ubidia se ha enfocado desde un país del Sur que se dejó dolarizar en el año 2000. Con esta misma idea de la globalización como sueño y promesa —aunque puestos en duda— hemos reunido cuatro ensayos en la siguiente sección, que lleva como título “El sueño destapado”. El filósofo y sociólogo argentino Ricardo Forster contribuye con su “Entre la ruina y la espera: viaje al mundo de las almas”, un análisis del poder de los medios de comunicación y lo que él siente como la perpetuación de una morbosidad global frente al sufrimiento del otro, junto a una incapacidad “para interrogar por el sentido de nuestras propias vidas”. Por su parte, el investigador norteamericano Les Essif, cuya especialidad es la cultura francesa, desmitifica el mundo hiperreal de Estados Unidos al elaborar, desde el cine y el teatro de Europa, una reflexión cultural meticulosa, que pone en debate una interpelación sobre el Norte desde el mismo Norte metropolitano y globalizado, revelando profundas fisuras y diferencias dentro de este espacio capitalista e industrializado. Luego, desde mi experiencia como profesor de Estados Unidos muy identificado con el Ecuador, pongo en tela de juicio muchas de las promesas de los avances de las nuevas tecnologías, ya que siguen prevaleciendo actitudes y valores coloniales que impiden una verdadera democratización a nivel global. Sin embargo, reconozco que están emergiendo movimientos comunitarios y civiles que luchan por alternativas que puedan cultivar el sumak kawsay —o el buen vivir—, desde el cual se establecerá un equilibrio entre el progreso material, la conservación ambiental y la justicia social. Olaf Berwald, de Alemania, profesor de alemán en Estados Unidos y coeditor de este volumen, cierra la sección con su

21 denuncia contra una creciente tendencia a subvertir los derechos humanos en nombre de la seguridad contra el terrorismo y, además, condena las nuevas xenofobias dirigidas contra los migrantes que están integrando todos los rincones del mundo desarrollado. Berwald convoca a los intelectuales a crear alianzas pluriculturales que puedan vencer aquellas complicidades que permiten la apropiación de la capacidad de los seres humanos de imaginar y pensar libre y humanamente. “Alteridades internalizadas y asumidas” es el título de la tercera sección y se abre con un ensayo de la profesora brasileña Luciana Namorato, docente universitaria en Estados Unidos. Namorato toma a Machado de Assis como modelo de la interculturalidad intelectual y pone en debate algunas de las tensiones entre lo local y lo global, especialmente en lo que respecta a la creación de un imaginario nacional. Según Namorato, el movimiento intelectual de antropófagos que emergió en el Brasil de los años veinte y treinta del siglo pasado, siguió desarrollando las propuestas de Machado, cuyos textos invitaron a los lectores a reconceptualizar el significado de la originalidad. Con el siguiente ensayo del crítico literario y traductor de árabe y persa de Estados Unidos Michael Beard, se analiza el árabe y sus influencias encontradas en otras lenguas, para demostrar la medida en que todas las lenguas contienen semillas y raíces de otras lenguas y de otros saberes. Implícita en el estudio de Beard, está la necesidad de reconocer y respetar la presencia dinámica de otras culturas y cómo se alimentan entre sí. Una noción parecida acerca de la alimentación mutua aparece en el ensayo escrito por el filósofo alemán Bernhard Waldenfels. En vista de los conflictos y las hostilidades que los movimientos migratorios están generando en todo el mundo, Waldenfels retoma el concepto de la alteridad para interpelarla y poner de relieve su carácter intercultural, insistiendo en la mutua alimentación de lo propio y lo ajeno. Humberto E. Robles y Mario Campaña son dos ecuatorianos que trabajan desde la literatura y la docencia y han vivido muchos años fuera de su país natal. Sus reflexiones sobre algunas de las tensiones y

22 contradicciones pertinentes a la migración y el exilio dan forma a nuestra cuarta sección, “Situándose en el mundo globalizado”. Por su parte, Robles ofrece una serie de observaciones testimoniales de un viaje que hizo en el 2007 a España, donde la presencia de los inmigrantes está resignificando y reconstituyendo las cartografías culturales del país y de Europa, por extensión. En efecto, los inmigrantes ya tienen un papel central en la reconstrucción del mundo globalizado, y cualquier resistencia a esa realidad sólo conducirá a un estado general de caos. Robles señala, también, que uno de los mayores dilemas que definen al inmigrante es el dolor de la nostalgia: “Todos ansían volver. Todos se van quedando”.4 Los “apuntes de viaje” de Robles se complementan con los comentarios de Mario Campaña, que reside en Barcelona y que siente profundamente la relación compleja de Sur/Norte y Norte/Sur, señalando que, si bien el Norte ha sido recogido por muchos del Sur como su utopía, es también cierto que muchos del Norte han visto en el Sur su utopía. Según plantea Campaña, el desplazamiento migratorio, tan generalizado de la actualidad, está reinventando nuestras utopías y, en el proceso, se están rompiendo esquemas coloniales que han creado el ya mentado orden jerárquico y hegemónico del Norte sobre el Sur. No estará de más recalcar que esta ruptura implica una reapropiación de los conceptos de historia e identidad nacionales. En la próxima sección, dos alemanes nos invitan a dirigir la mirada al Medio Oriente y Asia. Concretamente, Thomas Lehr recoge una sección de un capítulo de su novela todavía inédita, Septiembre, en la que emplea la ficción para entrar en la mente de un médico iraquí durante uno de los bombardeos en Bagdad. Lehr combina monólogos interiores de dos norteamericanos, uno de los que muere en las Torres de Nueva York el 11 de septiembre, con dos iraquíes. Las voces narrativas revelan fuertes afinidades que se contrastan con el imaginario contraterrorista creado por el gobierno de Bush. Con Ursula Kocher, pasamos de Irak a la India. En su ensayo, examina el concepto complejo de la autenticidad como un palimpsesto de muchos tejidos culturales 4 Este mismo texto se publicó en Kipus: Revista Andina de Letras, 23 (primer semestre 2008).

23 y, en el proceso de reconceptualizar dicha autenticidad en el contexto de la India, insiste en la necesidad de una praxis más matizada y crítica de las políticas culturales de las identidades. Cerramos La globalización y sus espejismos con el caricaturista Peter Kuper. Durante el tiempo que pasó en Oaxaca, México, pudo ser testigo de las protestas callejeras de los maestros y la represión sufrida por ellos. Kuper capta este doloroso capítulo de la historia reciente mexicana en diez láminas gráficas que recurren a la forma popular del cómic para su testimonio. Estas ilustraciones no sólo cierran el libro, sino que complementan el texto inicial de Abdón Ubidia. Mientras que Ubidia, originario del Sur, expresa su reacción ante la vida aplanadora del Norte, Kuper, que es de Estados Unidos, denuncia el autoritarismo que todavía se sufre en el Sur. ¡Dos testigos de dos sistemas absolutistas!

24 Obras citadas

••Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society, vols. 1-2. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. ••Castro-Lucic, Milka. Ed. Los desafíos de la interculturalidad: Identidad, política y derecho. Santiago: Universidad de Chile, 2004. ••Clifford, James. “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, ••Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. pp. 96-112. ••Fernández Retamar, Roberto. “Calibán ante la antropofagia.” Nuevo Texto Crítico, 23-24 (1999). ••_____. “Calibán en esta hora de nuestra América.” Ponencia leída en el III Encuentro de Investigadores del Caribe, Mérida, México (8 de julio 1991), 11 págs. ••_____. “Calibán quinientos años más tarde.” Ponencia presentada en Encuentro con el Otro, New York University (octubre 1992), 20 págs. ••Kapur, Ratna. “Dark Times for Liberal Intellectual Thought,” in Profession 2006. New York: Modern Language Association (2006), 22-32. ••King, Anthony D. Ed. Culture, Globalization and the World-System. Contemporary ••Conditions for the Presentation of Identity. Minneapolis: Univesity of Minnesota Press, 1997. ••Neto, Hamilton Magalhaes. Ed. Desarrollo e interculturalidad, imaginario y diferencias: La Nación en el Mundo Andino. 14ª Conferencia Internacional. Río de Janeiro: Educam, 2006. ••Rojo, Grinor, Alicia Salomone y Claudia Zapata. Postcolonialidad y nación. LOM Ediciones, 2003. ••Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. “Nuestra América: reinventando un paradigma [Fragmentos]”, en Casa de las Américas, 237 (octubre-diciembre de 2004), 7-25. ••Vélez Verdugo, Catalina. La interculturalidad en la educación. Reformas curriculares de Ecuador, Perú y Bolivia. Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Corporación Editora Nacional y Abya-Yala, 2006. ••Yapu, Mario. Comp. Modernidad y pensamiento descolonizador (Memoria del Seminario Internacional). La Paz: UPIEB, 2006.

Critical Introduction by Michael Handelsman University of Tennessee

“No hay batalla entre la civilización y la barbarie, sino entre la falsa erudición y la naturaleza.” –José Martí, Nuestra América (1891) “[. . . ] una política de la redistribución no puede conducirse con éxito sin una política del reconocimiento, y viceversa.” –Boaventura de Sousa Santos (2004) “The notion of the sudden engagement between the cultures of center and periphery may thus [. . .] be an imaginative by-product of the late awakening to global realities of many of us inhabitants of the center.” –Anthony D. King (1997)

The following book is a collective effort that examines the contradictory and conflicting nature of globalization, but from an intercultural and transnational dialogue that highlights the engagements and disengagements which frequently define the relationships that exist between the South and North. The volume includes: (1) eleven essays on diverse aspects of globalization as experienced and commented from various geographical spaces, (2) a selection from an unpublished novel about the war in Iraq, and (3) ten illustrations that capture the turmoil surrounding the street demonstrations carried out by school teachers in Puebla, Mexico. Our project incorporates thirteen contributors who are from Argentina, Brazil, Ecuador, Germany, and the United States, all of whom represent a multiplicity of perspectives

26 and experiences that emerge from their work in different languages (i.e., English, French, German, Portuguese, and Spanish) and in diverse professional fields that include publishing, fiction, university teaching, and graphic arts. While it is true that many books about globalization already exist, our volume is anchored in the arts and the humanities, and aspires to alter certain tendencies that deem discourses from the North as fountains of knowledge par excellence while assuming arbitrarily that the voices of the South continue constituting mere objects of analysis that rarely resonate beyond their respective locales. Therefore, the material included in the collection—which alternates between academic essays, testimonials, fiction, and illustrations—builds upon a dynamic that values the origin of each form of thought and each language whose grammar(s) are not understood blindly based on traditional colonial or imperial paradigms. In fact, the contributors from the South and the North assembled here examine globalization from their respective experiences and perspectives that are the product of a transnationalism inspired by the notion that it is essential to think locally in order to act globally. In other words, far from particularities on the one hand, and abstract universalisms on the other, our colleagues move simultaneously between South and North, both in the geographical and cultural sense, and thus, they emerge as actors and interpreters of a globalized world that frequently and painfully loses itself among its own apparitions. Some of the themes treated refer directly or indirectly to: (1) problems and conflicts that the writers from the South feel and live while working in the North; (2) representations of the processes of globalization produced from the South, and in comparison with those of the North; (3) the influence of migratory movements in the creation of a deterritorialized sense of the traditional nation; (4) conflicts and connections among those who live inside and those who live outside of the same country; (5) alternative globalizations; (6) translation as both an ethical and esthetic problem; (7) the cultural meanings of South and North; (8) dialogues across the cultures of the South; (9) the

27 meaning of dissidence in the Age of Globalization; (10) the role of the arts and thought in a world system; (11) colonialism and coloniality; (12) decolonization and decoloniality. Colonialism as the origin of the hierarchy of intellectual relations that have relegated thinkers from Latin America to a position of inferiority vis-à-vis their counterparts from Europe and the United States is implicit in the three epigraphs that begin this volume. While King recognizes an imperial arrogance that has blinded and made the First World insensitive to the many riches of the so-called peripheries where colonial cartographies have too often registered only the areas of extraction and exploitation of natural and human resources, Martí already had denounced more than one hundred years ago this same arrogance and blindness. With regard to the mutual recognition which Boaventura Sousa de Santos has recently championed, one would do well to recall along with the Venezuelan scholar Fernando Coronil: “It is true that Europe transformed America. But it is also true that America transformed Europe” (in Neto 52; my translation). Basically, our project strives for this same mutual recognition that has great difficulty eluding or overcoming policies of assimilation and multiculturalism which, in the name of a celebrated diversity, reaffirm even more strongly—but with novel nuances and subtle stratagems— the colonial structures of old. Therefore, the decolonizing words of Frantz Fanon, cited by Coronil, underscore the conflictive context in which we have conceived this book about the engagements and disengagements of globalization: “Europe is the invention of America” (52; my translation). It is precisely this defiant attitude that we hope to have cultivated while bringing together the materials of our colleagues who, from their varied vantage points, evoke “other” forms of defining and understanding the contradictory and asymmetrical processes of globalization.1 1 Our use of “other” should not suggest the traditional dichotomies that characterize much of modern thought. Using Spanish as our point of departure, we recognize the fundamental difference between “otras maneras” and “maneras otras.” While the first phrase refers to alternatives within a dominant system, the second emphasizes the

28 Despite efforts to demystify globalization in terms of the “flattening of the world” à la Thomas Friedman, one must bear in mind that “the contradiction between underdeveloped countries (países subdesarrollados) and those countries responsible for the former (países subdesarrollantes) not only has conserved its currency, but it also has increased it, and today constitutes the principal contradiction of humanity (Fernández Retamar 4; my translation). Once again, we fall into a colonial heritage that Aníbal Quijano has described as the coloniality of power that “in Latin America is ‘a perverse experience of historic alienation,’ whose principal axis is the permanent and structural reproduction of hierarchical and racialized relationships resulting from the establishment of social practices of domination among identities assumed as positive (Western) and negative (nonWestern) and the effects of the former upon the latter in all the instances of power” (in Vélez Verdugo 14; my translation). By bringing together collaborators who come from diverse geographical spaces and who are products of different languages and cultural modalities, all of which has evolved within some of the abovementioned hierarchies typical of our colonial histories and which our respective academic systems have institutionalized and normativized, we have wanted to juxtapose our differences and similarities and thus simulate critically the fluidity and confluence that characterize the relations of power within and between the South and the North—the two faces of colonialism and, by extension, of globalization. Although we agree with Boaventura Sousa de Santos when he points out that it is more accurate to think in the plural and to speak about globalization(s), the centerpiece of our collection of texts and commentaries is its constant interpellation of that dimension of globalization(s) that, in truth, “is the process of the extension by force (whether of money or of arms) of a particularity, that of international capitalism, and the type of society, politics and culture associated with emergence of alternatives from totally different systems of thought and traditions that are fundamental to understanding the indigenous and Afro movements of Ecuador and Bolivia, for example.

29 it” (Rojo, Salomone and Zapata 137; my translation). Undoubtedly, that “particularity” feeds on its ability “to subalternize the knowledge of others through multiple means” such as “the production of institutional knowledge” (Vélez Verdugo 14; my translation). Furthermore, this same ability of subalternization “is tied to . . . the geopolitics of knowledge” which produces and legitimizes “forms of understanding and hegemonic expressions of knowledge that impose themselves on those considered subaltern” (14; my translation). We repeat once again that it is against that hegemony that we offer our reflections about globalization in this book. In fact, for those who teach in universities in the United States and Europe, principally, the dominant power of certain expressions of knowledge is felt deeply, especially in these globalized times when one might prefer to (con) fuse our multiple differences within a hypothetical and homogenized “global village.” The consolidation of academic programs and the preference for survey courses developed in terms of the “world” (e.g., world literatures, world geography, world languages), instead of those in which the specificities of the different areas and regions of the world are underscored, are a new expression of a long tradition of colonization and subalternization within the Academy. In other words, the decisions made about where to publish, what language to use when writing, and which books to cite, for example, oftentimes determine the fate of future professionals, and many efforts to counter these new empires of knowledge and language are regrettably rejected for supposedly being excessively localist, if not fundamentalist. We do not doubt the wisdom of those who declare that “the recognition of the differences makes possible an interaction in which none of the parts ought to be subjected by the logic of the other” (in Yapu 74-5; my translation). That interaction is precisely our goal which we understand to be a kind of general call to accept the complexities inherent in the relations between diverse forms of thought, many of which have been silenced through the centuries. Consequently, it behooves us to remember what Roberto Fernández Retamar had already proclaimed in 1992: “Because humanity is also

30 an ecosystem, neither the South nor the North will be able to survive separately” (14; my translation). This comment by Fernández Retamar should not be read as a desire to fuse together South and North, but rather as an attempt to deconstruct them first and later to reconstruct them against the hegemonies linked to colonialism and all of its later legacies. South and North are characterized by their historical contents more than by their physical borders, even though their geographies are also the product of those fluid, interconnected and contested histories. Thus, it was not a coincidence when the same Fernández Retamar revisited his seminal essay, Calibán (1971), and explained in 1986: “My aspiration is not, and never was, to present Latin America and the Caribbean as a territory cut off from the rest of the world, but rather as an integral part of the world: a part that ought to be seen with the same attention and the same respect that the others receive, not like a paraphrase of the West” (9; my translation). Essentially, one discovers in these words uttered by Fernández Retamar a vehement defense of identity, which should not surprise us in this era characterized by accelerated processes of “totalitarian globalization” along with “a predatory economic model” that threatens to neutralize all alternative expressions.2 In similar fashion, the indigenous leader from Ecuador, Nina Pacari, has warned that in those homogenized conditions, “the concept of identity offers a sense of belonging and of a community of solidarity. Identity, then, ought to be for countries the backbone that we need to avoid moving about without a sense of direction. Without it, one’s heritage, principles, and values which define, protect, and characterize our lives are lost” (in Castro-Lucic 49; my translation). As for the Catalan sociologist, Manuel Castells, he has emphasized that because of the accelerated pace of the flows of wealth, power and images of globalization, the search for identity has become a fundamental source in the creation of 2 The Chilean scholar, Milka Castro-Lucic, has stated that “the globalization of the capitalist mode that has expanded throughout the universe, in practice has demonstrated that cultural alternatives are not tolerated” (8; my translation).

31 social meaning vis-à-vis an apparent deterritorialization accompanied by the appropriation of traditional social structures, institutions, movements and imaginaries. Therefore, people tend to formulate the aforementioned social meaning, not on the basis of what they do, but rather based on who they are, or who they believe they are (I, 3). Of course, that concern about identities has nothing to do with the essentialisms of the past, nor does it aim to raise walls to isolate differences in these times of uncontrollable fluidity of life experiences and influences. The mutual recognition, the sense of belonging, and the construction of social meaning called for by a Caribbean who thinks from the Cuban Revolution, by an indigenous kichwa leader of the Andes who thinks from the Pachakutik movement, and by a Catalan who thinks from the internal autonomies of Spain and the European Community, constitute a politics of difference (but always thought of in the plural) in a world where, according to Anthony D. King, globalization is not a one-way process, nor does it come from a single source (x). The cultural differences of these three thinkers just cited do not erase the possibility that, from their respective identities, they deconstruct the same history of exclusions and asymmetries embedded in the already mentioned colonialism that is known today as globalization. But that deconstruction is projected as a first step in a long and continuous process of reconstruction and comes from the conviction that another world is indeed possible. Surely that is the lesson that we must learn from the indigenous movements in the Andean Region and also from the massive presence of immigrants who hail from the South and whose presence in the North obliges us to reconfigure the identity maps of the past. In some fundamental way, the tensions that mark profoundly the intercultural engagements and disengagements that crisscross through our histories and territories are a reminder that we live in a world that is still coming of age. Furthermore, even though one might ask if it is possible that communities of such extreme diversity could successfully share the same concepts and criteria when deconstructing/

32 reconstructing our social relations, we remain hopeful that a pluralism that is acknowledged and respected can create a space of negotiation and transformation (King 154) or, in other words, “a dialogue between different forms of knowledge” (Nicolas, en Yapu, 67; my translation). Globalization and its Apparitions seeks to contribute to this intercultural dialogue. Far from dogmatisms and prepotency that still circulate in some publications produced by the Academy and other centers of official knowledge, the materials that follow participate, albeit modestly, in a project that aims to transcend the temporalities and spaces that draw closer and distance the South and the North. Curiously, this same movement of getting closer and then further away is evident in the background of each of the contributors to this volume. Reminiscent of the ethnographers and their informants evoked by James Clifford in his “Traveling Cultures,” our colleagues are true travelers, both in the physical and cultural sense. Thus, the South and the North once again do not emerge as opposite poles, but rather as two spaces intensely intertwined that also continuously move and cross geographic and mental borders, leaving us with the South inside the North and the North inside the South. Nevertheless, one should not read this fluidity as a kind of absolute state of deterritorialization without roots or history. Our contributors know where they are from, even though they are from all places. Humberto E. Robles, for example, has commented more than once that he is an Ecuadorian who has lived most of his life in the United States, has lived in Europe, and has traveled all over the world through different languages and literatures and, despite all of this, he knows that he is Ecuadorian and, above all, from the province of Manabí. Travelers like these are more than sedentary beings who have that sense of belonging that Nina Pacari highlighted, that same sense that ensures that one does not move about without definite direction. And our course continues shaping an entire process of interpellation of dominant attitudes, values, and lifestyles that would dilute and eventually eliminate our plurality that is unsettling in its conflictiveness

33 and that continues to resist all attempts to enclose it in a deceptive “global village” always conceived in the singular. All the comments made up to this point define the context from which we have conceptualized our project and explain why we have not translated all of the essays into one language. Clearly, globalization must be understood as multilingual because passive acceptance of yet another imperial language will only repeat previous policies that have delegitimized and dehumanized those grammars that lie outside of official discourse. In effect, our decision to use both Spanish and English (without translations) is meant to be confrontational; publishers and readers must be encouraged to champion multilingualism over translations to an imaginary “common” language that distorts the plural and conflicting nature of globalization. How else can our “traveling” voices reach their full potential?3

3 The reluctance of many to risk publishing a book with more than one language, however, forced us to make a compromise. The original manuscript included the Bernhard Waldenfels, Thomas Lehr, and Ursula Kocher pieces in German which Olaf Berwald translated to English. Rather than a contradiction of principles and objectives, this compromise underscores the difficulty of overcoming what is referred to as the coloniality of knowledge, a topic treated in several of this volume’s essays. Hopefully our having succeeded in using at least two languages in this publication will be seen as a significant, albeit modest, contribution to the processes of decoloniality that seek alternative globalizations that are indeed inclusive, just and multilingual. (Clearly we are not against translation as a valuable means of communication; however, we do question its uses when it becomes an excuse not to learn/teach other languages.)

34

Contexts and Contents

This book consists of six sections. We begin our journey with a prologue written by the Ecuadorian writer, Abdón Ubidia, and titled “New York y Tampa desde el aire” (“New York and Tampa from the Air Above”). Using skyscrapers and highways as his metaphorical point of departure, Ubidia deconstructs the American Dream, highlighting what he perceives to be solitude and the lack of collective solidarity in the United States. It is not coincidental that this dream is transformed into a nightmare since the focus of Ubidia’s gaze comes from a country in the South that allowed itself to be dollarized in 2000. With this same idea of globalization as dream and promise—albeit placed in doubt—we have included four essays in the following section titled, “El sueño destapado” (“The Uncovered Dream”). The Argentine philosopher and sociologist, Ricardo Forster, offers his “Entre la ruina y la espera: viaje al mundo de las almas” (“Between Ruins and Hope: Journey to the World of Souls”), an analysis of the power of the communication media and what he believes to be the perpetuation of a global morbidity in the face of another’s suffering along with an inability “to delve into the meaning of our own lives.” As for Les Essif, a scholar from the United States whose specialty is French culture, he demystifies the hyperreal world of the United States by elaborating from European film and theater a meticulous cultural reflection that puts into debate an interpellation of the North from the same metropolitan and globalized North, revealing deep fissures and differences within this capitalist and industrialized space. The next piece which I wrote from my vantage point as a professor from the United States closely identified with Ecuador brings into question many of the promises of the advances of new technologies seeing that colonial attitudes and values continue to be prevalent and impede a true democratization at the global level. Nevertheless, I recognize in the essay that there are grassroots and community-based movements emerging that struggle for alternatives capable of cultivating “el sumak kawsay”—or “el buen vivir” (i.e., a holistic lifestyle)—from which a balance will be drawn between material progress, environmental sustainability, and social

35 justice. Olaf Berwald of Germany and professor of German in the United States, and co-editor of this volume, closes the second section by denouncing a growing trend to subvert human rights in the name of security against terrorism and, at the same time, condemns the new xenophobias directed against the migrants who are integrating all of the corners of the developed world. Berwald calls upon intellectuals to create pluricultural alliances that might defeat those complicities that allow the appropriation of the ability of human beings to imagine and to think freely and humanely. “Alteridades internalizadas y asumidas” (“Internalized and Assumed Alterities”) is the title of the third section and opens with an essay by the Brazilian professor, Luciana Namorato, who teaches at Indiana University in the United States. Namorato uses Machado de Assis as a model of intellectual interculturality and puts into debate some of the tensions between the local and the global, especially with regard to the creation of a national imaginary. According to Namorato, the anthropophagy intellectual movement which emerged in Brazil in the 1920s and 1930s continued developing esthetic proposals introduced by Machado whose texts invited readers to reconceptualize the meaning of originality. The following essay written by Michael Beard, a professor of English and translator of Arabic and Persian who hails from the United States, is an analysis of Arabic and its influences on other languages while demonstrating the degree to which all languages contain the seeds and roots of other languages and forms of knowledge. Implicit in Beard’s study is the need to recognize and respect the dynamic presence of other cultures and how they contribute to one another. A similar notion about mutual exchange and influence appears in the text offered by the German philosopher, Bernhard Waldenfels. In light of the conflicts and hostilities that migration is generating throughout the world, Waldenfels takes up the concept of alterity to interpellate it and to underscore its intercultural nature, thus insisting on the cross-fertilization that bonds together our cultural ways with those of others.

36 Humberto E. Robles and Mario Campaña are two Ecuadorians who work from the fields of literature and education and have lived many years outside their birth country. Their reflections on some of the tensions and contradictions pertinent to migration and exile give shape to our fourth section, “Situating Oneself in the Globalized World.” As for Robles, he offers a series of testimonial observations made during a trip to Spain in 2007 where the growing presence of immigrants is re-signifying and remaking the cultural maps of that country—and of Europe as well. In effect, immigrants already play a central role in the reconstruction of the globalized world, and any resistance to this reality will only lead to a general state of chaos. Robles also points out that one of the principal dilemmas that define immigrants is the pain that comes from their deep sense of nostalgia: “Everyone yearns to return. Everyone continues to stay.”4 Mario Campaña, who resides in Barcelona and who feels deeply the complex relationships between South/North and North/South, complements Robles’ travel notes with an essay in which he argues that while it is true that many people from the South have embraced the North as a kind of Utopia, it is equally true that many from the North have found their Utopia in the South. According to Campaña’s thesis, today’s broad and ubiquitous displacement of immigrants is reinventing our utopias and in the process many of the forms of colonialism that have created the already mentioned hierarchical and hegemonic order that the North holds over the South are finally being broken. It is worth repeating that this break does imply a reappropiation of the concepts of national history and identity. In the following section, two Germans invite us to direct our sights towards Asia and the Middle East. Concretely, Thomas Lehr shares a section of a chapter from his forthcoming novel, September, in which he uses fiction to enter into the mind of an Iraqi physician during one of the bombings of Baghdad. Lehr combines interior monologues of two North Americans, one of whom dies in New York’s World Trade 4 Robles’ essay was published in Kipus. Revista Andina de Letras, 23 (primer semester 2008).

37 Center on September 11, and those of two Iraqis. The narrative voices reveal strong affinities in contrast to the counterterrorist imaginary created by the Bush government. With Ursula Kocher, we move from Iraq to India. In her essay she examines the complex concept of authenticity as a kind of palimpsest of many cultural fabrics and, while re-conceptualizing the aforementioned authenticity in the context of India, she insists on the necessity of a more critical and variegated praxis for cultural policies that address our multiple identities. We close Globalization and its Apparitions with the well-known illustrator, Peter Kuper. During the time he spent in Oaxaca, Mexico, he was able to witness the street protests carried out by school teachers and the repression they suffered. Kuper captures this painful chapter in Mexico’s recent history in ten illustrations that hark back to the popular comic form for his testimony. These illustrations not only bring our book to closure, but they also complement the opening text written by Abdón Ubidia. While Ubidia, who hails from the South, expresses his reaction to the dehumanized life of the North, Kuper, who is from the United States, denounces the authoritarianism that still plagues the South—two eyewitnesses of two overpowering systems.

38 Works Cited

••Castells, Manuel. The Rise of the Network Society, vols. 1-2. 2nd ed. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2000. ••Castro-Lucic, Milka. Ed. Los desafíos de la interculturalidad: Identidad, política y ••derecho. Santiago: Universidad de Chile, 2004. ••Clifford, James. “Traveling Cultures,” in Cultural Studies, eds. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, and Paula A. Treichler. New York: Routledge, 1992. pp. 96-112. ••Fernández Retamar, Roberto. “Calibán ante la antropofagia.” Nuevo Texto Crítico, 23-24 (1999). ••_____. “Calibán en esta hora de nuestra América.” Ponencia leída en el III Encuentro de Investigadores del Caribe, Mérida, México (8 de julio 1991), 11 págs. ••_____. “Calibán quinientos años más tarde.” Ponencia presentada en Encuentro con el Otro, New York University (octubre 1992), 20 págs. ••Kapur, Ratna. “Dark Times for Liberal Intellectual Thought,” in Profession 2006. New York: Modern Language Association (2006), 22-32. ••King, Anthony D. Ed. Culture, Globalization and the World-System. Contemporary Conditions for the Presentation of Identity. Minneapolis: Univesity of Minnesota Press, 1997. ••Neto, Hamilton Magalhaes. Ed. Desarrollo e interculturalidad, imaginario y diferencias: La Nación en el Mundo Andino. 14ª Conferencia Internacional. Río de Janeiro: Educam, 2006. ••Rojo, Grinor, Alicia Salomone y Claudia Zapata. Postcolonialidad y nación. LOM Ediciones, 2003. ••Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. “Nuestra América: reinventando un paradigma [Fragmentos]”, en Casa de las Américas, 237 (octubre-diciembre de 2004), 7-25. ••Vélez Verdugo, Catalina. La interculturalidad en la educación. Reformas curriculares de Ecuador, Perú y Bolivia. Quito: Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Corporación Editora Nacional y Abya-Yala, 2006. ••Yapu, Mario. Comp. Modernidad y pensamiento descolonizador (Memoria del Seminario Internacional). La Paz: UPIEB, 2006.

2. Estampa primera… a manera de prólogo/Opening Sketch . . . as Prologue

New York y Tampa desde el aire Abdón Ubidia

A Miguel Handelsman El sueño americano se ha cumplido. Allí está. Puede vérselo desde cualquier lado. Incluso, desde un avión. Ha cobrado su forma definitiva. Lo prueban sus ciudades. Verticales como New York y Chicago. Horizontales como miles de ellas, Los Ángeles y Tampa, por ejemplo. Son las dos caras de un sueño que empezó con “los padres de la patria”, a los que se sumó Whitman, y que terminó por ser totalitario. El sueño global. Un sueño que, incluso nosotros, los del Sur, nos creemos obligados a soñar. Es lo que vemos ahora. De un lado: concentrador y de otro: extendido. De un lado: apretado; de otro: infinito. Impone sus coordenadas: el rascacielos y la autopista lo encarnan. Son metáforas opuestas de la riqueza y la libertad. La riqueza es vertical y jerarquizada. Los pisos se ordenan unos sobre otros y apuntan al infinito. Nadie puede dudar. Un rascacielos es el símbolo moderno. Funcional y explícito. Sintético. Organizado como un panal. Gregario pero estricto. Hecho a imagen y semejanza del orden del mundo. Es la riqueza del mundo en sí. No en vano, los ricos viven o trabajan en sus penthouses. La otra metáfora es la autopista. El automóvil pone la libertad al alcance de los individuos. Es la forma individualista del transporte. El auto no viaja de una estación a otra. Va a todas partes. A cualquier parte. Es la imagen del deseo de fuga y plenitud. Es un no a lo gregario. A lo colectivo. También es un no a la quietud y al orden. El automóvil fuga del rascacielos. Lo niega. Sale de sus parqueaderos subterráneos como si huyera de los infiernos. Y encuentra la libertad, es decir: la autopista.

42 Visto a la distancia, el sueño americano se ha cumplido: la riqueza y la libertad se han logrado como nunca antes en la historia. El rascacielos hace la autopista y al revés. Algo no convence allí, sin embargo. Pareciera que una cosa es la concentración de la riqueza y otra, el disfrute de la libertad. Que unos gozan de la riqueza y otros de la libertad. Pero eso tampoco convence. Porque si la riqueza viaja en helicópteros y aviones privados; entonces la autopista se vuelve la obligación de quienes necesitan salvar grandes distancias para conectar hogares y trabajos o, incluso, sitios preasignados de entretenimiento. No nos engañemos: la riqueza y la libertad están en los penthouses, en una élite cada vez más estrecha. “La mayoría silenciosa” corre por las autopistas, convencida de que es libre. Rascacielos y autopista. Quiero decir, con todo esto, que el sueño americano es el sueño de unos que se concentran y otros que se dispersan. Los más ilustrados dirán que ése no es un sueño humano, sino que así sueña el capital: sólo puede concentrarse tanto porque la sociedad americana no está hecha de ciudadanos, sino de individuos aislados, de individuos “individualistas”. Y allí los vemos: autónomos en sus automóviles, incomunicados, cada vez más, gracias a la tecnología: sumidos en su yo, tapados los oídos por los auriculares del I-pod o del celular que los conectan, sí, con un otro lejano pero que los desconectan de quienes están a su lado. El individuo convertido en autómata. La sociedad hecha de “una mayoría silenciosa” de autómatas. Sólo así el rascacielos podrá crecer y las autopistas extenderse hasta el fin del mundo, darle la vuelta y globalizarlo al fin. No importa lo que cueste ni los recursos naturales y humanos que se consuman. Tal vez esta nota sea injusta: la mirada de alguien del Sur no muy convencido de una civilización así. De alguien que quisiera despertarse de un sueño así.

3. El sueño destapado/The Uncovered Dream

Entre la ruina y la espera: viaje al mundo de las almas Ricardo Forster “Cuando el cristianismo, como una noche de tempestad a la que sigue la luz del día, pasó por sobre las almas, se vio el desastre que, invisiblemente había producido; la ruina que sembró se vio únicamente después que hubo pasado. Entendieron algunos, en verdad, que esa ruina fue provocada por su partida; pero lo cierto es que fue a raíz de su partida que esa ruina llegó a mostrarse en toda su magnitud, y no porque esa partida la hubiese provocado (...). Es así como quedó, en este mundo de almas, la ruina visible, la desgracia patente, sin la bruma que la disimulara con su barniz de ternura falsa. Las almas, entonces, se vieron tal cual eran.” Fernando Pessoa, El libro del desasosiego

1. Como un espantapájaros al que le seguimos teniendo miedo, los habitantes de esta época hipertecnologizada nos horrorizamos ante la posibilidad de morirnos. Mientras los avances espectaculares de la ciencia médica y la ingeniería genética prometen un futuro de inmortalidad, los que aún habitamos en este tiempo de espera hacia el supuesto triunfo definitivo contra la parca y su guadaña no hacemos otra cosa que resistirnos a lo único que todavía es confiable: la llegada inexorable de la muerte. Son pocos, todavía, los que están dispuestos a cruzar la frontera hacia el más allá en nombre de sus convicciones políticas o religiosas; la inmensa mayoría de los seres humanos, sean creyentes fervorosos o ateos consecuentes, seguirá aferrándose con uñas y dientes a la continuidad de la vida, aunque se encuentre postrada o atravesando una enfermedad terminal. Ni siquiera aquellos que están convencidos de una vida después de la muerte y

46 que creen en el Paraíso están dispuestos a abandonar las miserias de la existencia terrenal. Son harto elocuentes las imágenes de Juan Pablo II, arrasado físicamente, imposibilitado de hablar, su rostro demudado y expresando un extremo sufrimiento, que, sin embargo, y siendo alguien que debería tener garantizada la entrada al valle de las almas resurrectas, no está dispuesto, por ningún motivo, a renunciar a su investidura y a correrse de su lugar. Algo en su rostro y en sus gestos desesperados nos devuelve la imagen del miedo atávico que le tenemos, desde los tiempos más remotos, a esa señora de oscuras vestimentas que maneja el reloj de nuestros días en la tierra. Mientras observábamos los esfuerzos de los medios de comunicación por mostrarnos la entereza espiritual de Juan Pablo II, que se resistía denodadamente a hacer mutis por el foro, lo que se percibe es el horror que produce la cercanía de la muerte, sus garras afiladas y heladas que son resistidas, hasta por quien habla, en nombre de una creencia en la vida transmundana. El Papa simplemente no quería morirse, y, en sus gestos, podemos leer ese deseo humano, demasiado humano, que, por gracia de periodistas y sacerdotes, quiere ser convertido en compromiso con su feligresía. Hoy, ciudadanos de un mundo telemático, no hacemos otra cosa que ver morir tratando de que siempre eso le ocurra al otro: muerte violenta en las calles de las metrópolis contemporáneas; muerte devastadora e incalculable en el sudeste asiático, donde la naturaleza nos recuerda que sus actos no dependen de ningún esfuerzo por anticiparlos; muerte blanca en las salas de terapia intensiva, ese lugar en el que los seres humanos han perdido toda potestad y se transforman en meros cuerpos disponibles para ser atravesados por la tecnología y el poder médicos; muerte en guerras hechas en nombre de la civilización, la democracia y la libertad; muerte en nombre de los explotados y los humillados; muerte en nombre de Dios. Todas las formas de la muerte, sin embargo, nos recuerdan una cosa por la que pocos preguntan en nuestros días cruzados por el deseo de la inmortalidad y la persistencia de los mil rostros de la parca: ¿Qué significa vivir? O, mejor aún, ¿cómo prepararnos para morir aprendiendo a vivir?

47 Simplemente, nos hemos vuelto analfabetos ante lo más elemental, aquello que desde siempre ha perseguido e inquietado al espíritu humano. Olvidando lo que significa la construcción de una vida buena, absorbidos completamente por el vacío mercadolátrico y comunicacional, impúdicos fisgones de la muerte ajena, nos desesperamos por perpetuar infinitamente existencias huecas que repiten, día tras día, los rituales de la morbosidad ante el sufrimiento del otro, deslumbrados ante las imágenes de cuerpos devastados y moribundos que se resisten a morir, pero incapaces para interrogar por el sentido de nuestras propias vidas. Nunca, como en esta época, se hizo tan presente la muerte, pero nunca, como ahora, se nos volvió más oscura e incomprensible, alejada por completo de nuestra cotidianidad, allí donde la habita plenamente. En otros tiempos, los diversos modos de la cultura lograron convivir con la muerte; su presencia, absolutamente ordinaria, caía bajo las formas del símbolo y la metáfora religiosa o espiritual; en la actualidad, cuando su circulación es ostentosa y casi inverosímil, no encontramos los paliativos para aceptarla, ni siquiera pareció encontrarlos el sumo conductor de la grey católica, que siguió haciendo desesperados esfuerzos por eludir lo ineludible. En la apoteosis del consumo y el hedonismo individualista, la muerte es una presencia insoportable, el anuncio imposible de cuerpos que dejarán de ser jóvenes y espléndidos para entrar en la noche de su absoluta caducidad. Simplemente, no estamos preparados para morir, porque tampoco lo estuvimos ni lo estamos para vivir una vida digna de ser vivida. Los sacerdotes de iglesias vacías son el testimonio de que ni siquiera hoy ayudan al buen morir. Sus templos y sus palabras han perdido credibilidad o, como la imagen del Papa, se han convertido en la expresión bizarra de creyentes que ni siquiera saben qué hacer con la muerte, que apenas si muestran, con los rostros desencajados, el horror ante lo inexorable. Tal vez uno de los síntomas más elocuentes de la extraordinaria crisis civilizatoria sea, precisamente, la imposibilidad de interrogar por el sentido de una vida que no puede ni quiere eludir su propia muerte. Detrás del sueño biotecnológico de la inmortalidad, se agazapa el propio fin de lo

48 humano, allí donde se olvide el significado fundamental de la muerte para el buen vivir1. Dos imágenes que, al superponerse, nos ofrecen las claves para intentar comprender lo que nos sucede: por un lado, lo ya dicho del Papa y de su calvario mediático, esas imágenes que desbordan toda creencia para entrar en el territorio de la morbosidad y la despiadada lucha por la sucesión, mostrando que, en la imposibilidad papal de hablar, se escondía una metáfora mucho más sutil: la incapacidad de la propio Iglesia para decir algo verdadero en esta época; y por el otro lado, los esfuerzos del neopuritanismo conservador y fundamentalista norteamericano, apoyados por Bush, por hacer de la lucha contra la decisión de desconectar el cuerpo vegetativo de Terri Schiavo una cuestión efectivamente política, mostrando que es posible una alianza entre lo más retrógrado y el esplendor capitalista, que el Imperio americano amenaza con arbitrar vida y muerte de todos sus súbditos apelando a la misericordia de Dios. Para decirlo con otras palabras: que Juan Pablo II pudiera morirse dignamente, como cualquier otro ser humano, liberado, aunque sea en sus últimos minutos, de la telaraña inmisericorde que lo rodea y 1 Jean Baudrillard escribió un pequeño pero significativo ensayo en el que se detuvo ante la cuestión de la inmortalidad, ante el deseo de anular, de una vez y para siempre, la muerte como condición de la propia vida humana y de la vida en general: “Hay algo escondido dentro de nosotros: nuestra propia muerte. Pero algo más está oculto, al acecho, dentro de cada una de nuestras células: el olvido de la muerte. En las células acecha nuestra inmortalidad. Es habitual hablar de la lucha de la vida contra la muerte, pero hay un peligro inverso. Y tenemos que luchar contra la posibilidad de que no muramos. Ante la más ligera vacilación en la lucha por la muerte –una lucha por la división, por el sexo, por la alteridad y, por tanto, por la muerte– los seres vivos se vuelven de nuevo indivisibles, idénticos entre sí e inmortales (...). Después de la gran revolución en el proceso evolutivo (la llegada del sexo y de la muerte) aparece la gran involución: su objetivo es, a través de la clonación y de muchas otras técnicas, liberarnos del sexo y de la muerte. Donde una vez las criaturas vivas se esforzaban, a lo largo de millones de años, por liberarse de esta clase de incesto y de entropía primitiva, ahora nosotros nos encontramos, a través de los avances científicos mismos, en el proceso de recrear precisamente esas condiciones. Estamos trabajando activamente en la ‘des-información’ de nuestra especie a través de la anulación de las diferencias.” Jean Baudrillard, La ilusión vital, Siglo Veintiuno, Buenos Aires, 2002, págs. 7-8.

49 que Terri Schiavo, o lo que quedaba de ella, muriera de una buena vez para que su imposible existencia dejara de ser argumento de la más abyecta reacción. Quizás ambas muertes postergadas nos permitan indagar por el rumbo de la vida actual, iluminar lo que significa hoy el espectáculo entre impúdico y frívolo de una civilización que, al aspirar a la inmortalidad, no hace más que favorecer los múltiples modos de la reproducción de una muerte desatada de su imprescindible compañera: la vida. 2. ¿Se puede separar el estado de las almas de las encrucijadas en las que se encuentra el vivir? ¿Qué sucede cuando el mero transcurrir se ha apoderado de nuestras vidas? Claro que ese transcurrir está signado por una altísima dosis de consumo hedonístico, de supuesto deseo satisfecho y de fascinación ante la espectacularidad tecnológicoinformacional. Lo que parece destituido es el gesto de un interrogar crítico que no se vuelva trivialidad periodística o materia prima de la máquina académica. Es difícil sustraer nuestros actos y nuestras intenciones a esa sensación de sinsentido que atraviesa las prácticas contemporáneas, de un sinsentido que surge de comprobar que nada subvierte efectivamente la marcha triunfal de la sociedad de mercado. Al colocarnos en el andarivel de la crítica, no hacemos otra cosa que ocupar un lugar previsible que, y eso no deja de ser patético, ya nos ha sido previamente asignado. Las escrituras del malestar, prolíficas en esta época de oscuridades múltiples, se adaptan perfectamente a las demandas de un mercado cultural que, cada tanto, necesita confrontarse con sus frustraciones y sus críticos. Los lee con avidez, los discute, los incorpora al canon de los estudios culturales o de género y luego los deja a un costado sabiendo de su inutilidad. De todos modos, la pregunta surge imprescindible, se abre paso dentro de nosotros tratando de interrogar por una actualidad que no ha dejado de transformar cada uno de nuestros supuestos y cada experiencia de la que nos creíamos deudores. Escribir sobre el estado de las almas es toparnos, de frente, con el vaciamiento de aquellas ideas y sustantividades que le dieron forma y expresión a nuestras vidas,

50 es mirar con los ojos cargados de desilusión una escena del mundo que nos devuelve vacío y trivialidad, pero envueltos en una poderosa manifestación de acontecimientos que nos impiden permanecer absortos con nuestras dudas y deudas interiores. Acontecimientos que se multiplican, que nos asaltan y nos dejan atónitos porque nos cuesta incorporarlos a una taxonomía, darles una ubicación en los restos de lo que pudo haber sido una concepción del mundo capaz de abrirnos el horizonte de la realidad de acuerdo a proyectos y sueños, a gramáticas portadoras de una inteligibilidad posible sobre el orden de esa misma realidad, que ahora se nos sustrae, aunque sin dramatismo, como acompañando el silenciamiento del alma, que parece no aspirar a otra cosa que no sea la instalación confortable en la existencia burguesa o en lo que queda de ella. Haber habitado los tiempos de la revolución tiene gravosas consecuencias, nos ha dejado, en gran medida, mutilados de una parte esencial de nosotros mismos, allí donde sus fulgores se han apagado definitivamente en medio de una sociedad que festeja su propia banalidad y su insistente tendencia a la autodestruccción. Descubrimos, sorprendidos a medias, que no estábamos preparados espiritualmente para hacernos cargo de este tiempo de indigencia, que las sutilezas teóricas por las que nos movimos con facilidad y hasta con cierta displicencia no nos permiten, ahora, responder a la sensación abismal que se abre alrededor nuestro. Filosofías, políticas, ideologías: recursos intelectuales que, hasta ayer nomás, sirvieron de brújulas para orientarnos en los flujos y reflujos de la historia pero que hoy se han vuelto raquíticos, insustanciales, fórmulas que todavía parecen tener algún valor en la academia pero que ya no nos cobijan el alma. Espectralmente, sus figuras siguen recorriendo una escena que, mientras tanto, se ha transformado brutalmente. 3. Mientras escribo tratando de indagar por el estado de las almas, por escrutar mi propia sensibilidad en medio de la tempestad de una historia despiadada que nos ha dejado sin el reparo de la esperanza, recordaba el “acontecimiento” que dominó la escena hace muy poco tiempo, aunque la brutalidad de la información se lo haya devorado sin

51 misericordia y hoy nos parezca lejano, el que se difundió masivamente a través de los medios de comunicación, el de la agonía de Juan Pablo II, una agonía que, si podemos inscribirla en el síntoma de la época, talvez nos permita entender algo de lo que nos está sucediendo o de lo que hemos olvidado. No deja de ser imperioso destacar que son muchas las formas del olvido que hoy se asocian a la expropiación de la experiencia de la que hablaba Benjamin cuando Europa se confrontaba con su propia barbarie. Hemos olvidado, en un doble y dialéctico movimiento, lo que significa vivir y lo que significa morir; anestesiados en el instante en que somos bombardeados sistemáticamente por cientos de imágenes del dolor y el desamparo, de infinitas formas de la muerte que señorean el crepúsculo de Occidente, sin embargo, se levantó delante nuestro la inevitable muerte del Papa, una muerte en cámara lenta y cargada de la emotividad, que sólo los lenguajes impúdicos de la industria del espectáculo y la información saben elaborar con meticulosa soberbia técnica. Artesano mefistofélico de golpes de efecto capaces de penetrar el fondo de las masas telemáticas, ese lenguaje de época ha sabido desplazar cualquier otra posibilidad creando las condiciones para un duelo artificial en consonancia con el verdadero vacío que silencia las gargantas de los espectadores. Vale mucho más ese gesto demudado de un Papa moribundo que no puede alcanzar a proferir ni siquiera una palabra que cualquier intento de interpelar el sentido más profundo de una situación de desamparo. Hay algo más que un gesto metafórico en ese grito acallado, en ese dolor que desfiguraba el rostro de Juan Pablo II; en él, a través de él, se evidenciaba la falta de sentido de una religiosidad carcomida por sus propias carencias, huérfana de sus orígenes, de sus fulgores espirituales y convertida, casi exclusivamente, en institución profanadora de los antiguos símbolos redencionales que habitaban el mensaje de Jesús. Son los medios de comunicación los que fijan el clímax, los que preparan a las masas para asistir al calvario telecomunicacional, los que diseñan el paisaje del sufrimiento acotado al lento agonizar de un hombre cuya voz enmudecida replica el enmudecimiento de la cultura contemporánea. Ya no importan las palabras fracturadas antes de

52 pronunciarse, lo que se vuelve dominante y significativo es el instante eternizado por la imagen, la brutalidad con la que el dispositivo técnico puede, en un mismo movimiento de extraordinaria fuerza emocional, proyectar hacia todos los confines del planeta el calvario de un hombre rodeado espectacularmente por un aura de sacrificio y santidad que vale por mil palabras. Lo espiritual ha mutado hacia el universo mucho más elocuente de la imagen teledirigida, construida con la astucia de la manipulación que viene a acomodarse a las necesidades de esos millones de espectadores que abandonaron cualquier otra referencia que no emane del nuevo dios de la época. Es llamativo que, en los días crepusculares del cristianismo occidental, lo que vaya quedando de él como nueva religiosidad adecuada a las demandas de los tiempos actuales sea, vaya paradoja, el dominio de la más absoluta de las idolatrías. La cámara que logra capturar el gesto de dolor extremo y que multiplica esa imagen penetrando en la intimidad más abismal de las multitudes –o aquella otra en la que se ve a un Papa sufriente cargando su cruz, que se mimetiza con la de Cristo, envuelto en un manto de un blanco purísimo, su rostro apesumbrado por los males del mundo, su mano izquierda cerrada vigorosamente sobre el bastón-cruz y el viento que hace flamear el manto y sus cabellos también blancos– es, ¡qué duda cabe!, una obra perfecta de la estética massmediática, el corolario que permite aprehender, en una sola imagen, la totalidad del mensaje que se quiere transmitir ahorrándose palabras y complicaciones. Todo está allí, sin tropiezos ni opacidades, sin las dificultades hermenéuticas que emanan de los textos o de las palabras. Su calvario, su identificación con el hijo de Dios, la espiritualidad más honda, la pureza y la virilidad de la fe, todo sin excepción se encierra en esa bella y sugerente imagen que recorrió el mundo. Si queremos hablar del estado de las almas, la escenificación de la agonía papal constituye una estación ineludible. Talvez no sea una paradoja la apoteosis de idolatría que envolvió el memento mortis de Juan Pablo II, quizás estemos ante el cierre de una parábola que se inauguró con la fusión esplendorosa de cristianismo paulino y helenismo tardío, una fusión que desplazó las raíces

53 veterotestamentarias, las de la letra y su interpretación, las del cosmos organizado por la palabra, por la irrupción de lo iconográfico, por su regreso triunfal después de las estrictas prohibiciones mosaicas. Del pueblo del Libro a la cultura de la imagen, un nuevo universalismo imperial comenzó su despliegue histórico en aquellos siglos en los que la decadencia romana se encontró con la juventud católica. De ese encuentro formidable, especulado imaginariamente por el apóstol de los paganos que se ocupó de crear las condiciones de un nuevo dispositivo institucional-religioso, pasando por la hegemonía medieval y su oscurecimiento moderno-secular, hasta esta extraordinaria chance de renacimiento impulsada por la estética de los medios de comunicación y la sagacidad de un Papa que supo decodificar el sentido de los nuevos lenguajes y su capacidad de construcción de un público disponible para esas nuevas formas de “experiencia”, el periplo de la Iglesia nos permite tomarle el pulso a los diversos ritmos cardíacos de la historia, nos ofrece la posibilidad de apreciar de qué modo somos testigos de una formidable consumación epocal que se cristaliza alrededor de la muerte de Juan Pablo II. Quiero decir que constituye un hito de extrema importancia, una dramática puesta en escena que irradiará nuevas lógicas del sentido y definirá, talvez, nuevas alquimias que modificarán, las actuales formas de la religiosidad y de sus complejos entramados seculares. No es que estemos ante una novedad relampagueante o que nos sorprendamos por la apoteosis mediática organizada alrededor de los últimos días del Papa,es más bien, la consumación de una época y de sus recursos tecnológicocomunicacionales la que se manifiesta con especial potencia, la que brinda la posibilidad de indagar, mejor aún, sobre el estado de las almas en nuestra actualidad. 4. En el comienzo de este ensayo, intenté interrogar por lo que nos está sucediendo con la muerte, sus ambigüedades, sus claroscuros, su presencia al mismo tiempo constante y difusa, una presencia que rediseña la travesía de cuerpos y almas en el marco de una perturbadora ausencia de espiritualidad, que, sin embargo, parece

54 estar eligiendo nuevos modos de reinserción en la trama de una sociedad perpleja ante una deriva que fue vaciando de sustantividad los múltiples lenguajes que buscó para compensar el oscurecimiento de lo sagrado. El largo adiós del Papa, su dramatización espectacular coronada con una muerte asociada al dominio definitivo de los lenguajes audiovisuales, está anticipando, quizás, un giro respecto a los recursos de la religiosidad para reinstalarse en el seno de la vida cotidiana. No deberíamos subestimar la combinación que se está dando entre la sensación de vacío que emana de la sociedad secularmoderna, la incomodidad cada vez más evidente de muchos ante el sinsentido de la vida atrapada pura y exclusivamente en las redes de la economía, la técnica y el mercado, la enorme capacidad de los medios de comunicación para globalizar imágenes y sentimientos nacidos en el laboratorio pero que se corresponden con demandas efectivamente gestadas en el seno de la sociedad y los recursos, aún vigentes, de las instituciones religiosas para apuntalar, en este tiempo de indigencia espiritual, las necesidades vacantes o dejadas vacantes por el fracaso de las ideologías modernizadoras. Desconocer estas alquimias en nombre de una supuesta secularización triunfante implica perder de vista el carácter equívoco, al menos, de los tiempos por los que estamos atravesando; significa, también, desgajar el carácter constructivo de identidades que emana del lenguaje comunicacional, de su inevitable nihilización asociada al dominio de lo fugaz e instantáneo. Colocarnos en el bando de los que, con fascinación acrítica, reivindican la cultura del espectáculo, de aquellos que se apresuran a acompañar el dominio cada vez más extendido de la imagen, supone perder de vista lo que, en un bello e intenso ensayo de finales de los ochenta, George Steiner denominó, al dar cuenta de esta época y del papel hegemónico de los medios de comunicación, “la metafísica de lo efímero”, es decir, el predominio de un lenguaje y de una estética afincados en lo fugaz, en lo instantáneo, en lo que al ser se desvanece para dejar su lugar a la última novedad enmarcada en la lógica del espectáculo periodístico. Para Steiner, el periodismo representa la consumación inequívoca de esta ruptura de la duración y de la tradición, su presencia expandida

55 universalmente agota toda otra percepción del tiempo que no sea la llamada a durar apenas un instante. Ya no se trata solamente de esa metafísica triunfante que diariamente reafirma sus cualidades a través de los medios de comunicación, también, y esto es crucial, se trata de una radical estetización de la vida. Así como Michel Foucault señalaba el giro biopolítico de la modernidad, y Giorgio Agamben, partiendo de esta constatación, desplegaba su crudo análisis de la soberanía y de la nuda vida, el dominio de la forma como síntoma de la modernidad, destacado genialmente por Nietzsche, transformó de modo radical no sólo nuestra idea de verdad, sino que redefinió la trama más profunda de la percepción y de la construcción de la vida en nuestra contemporaneidad. Esta estetización generalizada, que abarca desde el mundo de los objetos hasta la presentación de las ideas políticas o filosóficas y que, obviamente, involucra los fenómenos religiosos, ha adquirido una hegemonía fabulosa al punto de hacer estallar las referencias tradicionales, aquellas que se afincaban en la lógica del contenido o que eran portadoras de valores asumidos como sustantivos. Nada resiste el dominio de la forma bella, nada se sustrae al papel reconfigurador de los lenguajes comunicacionales que se apoyan, fundamentalmente, en el impacto normativizador de los lenguajes estéticos expandidos hacia todos los rincones del mundo y de la vida. En este sentido, las imágenes de Juan Pablo II deben inscribirse en este abrumador dominio del lenguaje de la espectacularización estetizada, que logra crear las condiciones para un impacto fenomenal capaz de instalar, en la escena contemporánea, una experiencia del calvario que se choca de frente con la cultura del hedonismo que habita los deseos masivos de la época. Una nueva mercancía poderosa y aurática surge de esas imágenes del Papa preparando, quizás, el terreno para una fuerte ofensiva de un catolicismo menguado, que puede encontrar, en esa epopeya del sufrimiento y la entrega, una energía de la que últimamente careció. Las imágenes pueden obrar milagros.

56 5. Leni Riefensthal supo captar el pulso de su época al elaborar cinematográficamente las imágenes del congreso del Partido Nacionalsocialista en Nüremberg; descubrió la magia que irradiaba de un montaje capaz de proyectar, de una manera anticipatoria, el fervor de unas masas anhelantes, fascinadas ante la espectacular estetización del Reich milenario y de su Führer, diseñada espléndida y revolucionariamente por quien aprendió a decodificar la nueva escena político-cultural. El régimen utilizó, a destajo, esas imágenes y se apropió del dispositivo inaugurado por el cine, del mismo modo que absorbió, con inusitada rapidez, la invalorable potencia de la radiodifusión para penetrar, sin mediaciones, en cada hogar, aunque fuera del rincón más apartado del país. La sagacidad de Goebbels y la genialidad artística de Leni Riefensthal supieron plasmar la alianza entre medios de comunicación, cine y política de masas abriendo un camino que, independientemente de las diversas características de los regímenes, sería una constante del siglo veinte, cuya apoteosis actual pudimos contemplarla en la agonía y muerte del Papa, la espectacular cooptación que la televisión ha hecho y seguirá haciendo de este momento histórico. Baudelaire, anticipándose genialmente a la consumación de la mercancía como núcleo de la expansión capitalista, comprendió el carácter de fetiche de los objetos exhibidos en las marquesinas, allí donde, por la magia de una experiencia inédita, se lograba escindir el valor de uso, del valor de cambio de las mercancías, rodeando a éstas de una nueva e insospechada potencialidad. En Estancias. La palabra y el fantasma en la cultura occidental, Giorgio Agamben describe adecuadamente esta innovación gestada por el autor de Las flores de mal, que, ante la Exposición Mundial de París, descubre el proceso de estetización de las mercancías, de una nueva poética que emana de la segunda revolución industrial que ya no puede ser vista ni pensada a partir de su reducción a mero fenómeno económico. Así como Marx había señalado las “sutilezas metafísicas” y las “argucias teológicas” propias del reino mercantil burgués, Baudelaire percibió que la “gran novedad que la Exposición había hecho ya evidente para

57 un ojo sagaz como el suyo era que la mercancía había dejado de ser un objeto inocente, cuyo goce y cuyo sentido se agotaban en su uso práctico para cargarse de aquella inquietante ambigüedad a la que debía aludir Marx, doce años más tarde, hablando de su ‘carácter de fetiche’”2. Esta profunda comprensión del núcleo de la sociedad burguesa le permitió, también, visualizar lo que sucedería en la esfera del arte, en la irradiación inexorable de esa nueva fetichización hacia la creación artística. “De ahí también su insistencia en el carácter inasible de la experiencia estética y su teorización de lo bello como epifanía instantánea e impenetrable. El aura de gélida intangibilidad que empieza, desde ese momento, a rodear a la obra de arte es el equivalente del carácter de fetiche que el valor de cambio imprime en la mercancía”3. La consumación de este proceso se dio plenamente allí donde se produjo la conjunción de las formas industriales, las innovaciones en el campo del arte y los lenguajes audiovisuales. Lo que Baudelaire anticipó Nietzsche lo definió a partir del dominio de la forma sobre el contenido y, en los años sesenta, Guy Debord logró aprehenderlo en su “Sociedad del espectáculo”. El siglo veinte terminó de gestar la alianza entre mercancía, industria y estética de masas haciendo de los lenguajes audiovisuales el eje de una nueva construcción del imaginario cultural. Lo que antes era disímil, lo que seguía por andariveles distintos, ahora se conjugó en un mismo escenario, entramando prácticas y discursos, sensibilidades y objetos, volviendo equivalentes lo político y lo mercantil, lo deportivo y lo ideológico, sabiendo que el ojo de las masas se corresponde con las ofertas emanadas de la industria del espectáculo y de la información. Incluso las viejas formas de la emancipación, sus prácticas y sus cristalizaciones históricas quedaron absorbidas, en una medida no menor, por esta lógica emanada de la radical estetización de vida, cuerpos, deseos y utopías. 2 Giorgio Agamben, Estancias. La palabra y el fantasma en la cultura occidental, Pre-Textos, Valencia, 1995, trad. de Tomás Segovia, pág. 86. 3 Ibidem., p. 87.

58 6. En un oportuno ensayo sobre Sigfried Kracauer, Enzo Traverso se interna en la problemática de las primeras décadas del siglo veinte, en ese clima entre apocalíptico y romántico que desnudaba, a su vez, la percepción de un hondo vacío espiritual. El estado de las almas en la Europa de entreguerras tiene más que una similitud con nuestra actualidad, aunque sobre esa época grávida de novedades haya irradiado, de un modo único y arrollador, el frenesí de la revolución y de la guerra, el impacto de las inéditas tecnologías de la comunicación y las subversiones de las vanguardias estéticas. “No se trataba de interrogarse sobre la existencia de Dios –señala Traverso–, sino de aceptar las obligaciones de un mundo secularizado y desencantado, donde el eclipse de lo divino había hundido a los hombres y a las mujeres en una ‘jaula de hierro’ (Weber), obligándoles a vivir en una realidad escindida entre progreso técnico y empobrecimiento interior, condenados a la terrible condición de una vida ‘sin refugio espiritual’ (geist obdachlos)”4. Esa condena a “una vida sin refugio espiritual” no parece ser muy distinta a lo que se percibe en este comienzo de siglo, cuando, y más allá de los mediáticos renacimientos de religiosidades masivas, lo que domina la escena es el descreimiento y el desamparo. Simmel escribió páginas indispensables para pensar acerca de la “tragedia de la cultura moderna”; Weber nos puso en guardia ante el peligro del “regreso de los dioses dormidos”, alertando a una sociedad que parecía dispuesta a dejarse convocar por un nuevo aquelarre pagano; Thomas Mann nos ofreció, a través de la figura emblemática del jesuita Naphta de La montaña mágica, el núcleo de un discurso entre apocalíptico y revolucionario que se estaba gestando en su época; Benjamin, en sus Tesis, simplemente nos hizo tomar nota de la dialéctica entre modernidad y barbarie, haciendo añicos, de una vez y para siempre, cualquier ingenuidad respecto a los lenguajes y las prácticas del progreso; Musil, en El hombre sin atributos, nos permitió fisgonear el absurdo y la descomposición de la cultura vienesa como expresión de una decadencia anticipatoria de la modernidad occidental 4 Enzo Traverso, Cosmópolis. Figuras del exilio judeo-alemán, UNAM, México, 2004, trad. de S. Rabinovich, pág. 259.

59 y Kafka nos ofreció, entre otras cosas indispensables, la terrible evidencia de la soledad del individuo atrapado en los engranajes judiciales, en esa colosal máquina de expropiación asociada al apogeo de una civilización racional-burocrática. Nosotros, nuestra actualidad, somos aquellos que habitamos un tiempo que ha quedado más allá, incluso, de estas críticas propias del clima de entreguerras; críticas que, más allá de sus escepticismos, giraban, todavía, alrededor de una intensidad modernista y de una voluntad transformadora. Nuestra intemperie es, tal vez, mayor, más aguda, más destemplada, y, por eso, seamos testigos de regresos potentes y peligrosos de los “dioses dormidos”. El clima de desconcierto que siguió al 11 de septiembre de 2001, el aterrorizamiento ante la escalada del fundamentalismo islámico capaz de romper todos los límites, las subsiguientes guerras de Afganistán y de Irak, el neopuritanismo encarnado por Bush y sus halcones neoconservadores, la enorme frustración de los millones de manifestantes contra la guerra, que vieron cómo su protesta era acallada por los misiles anglonorteamericanos, son señales de una época cargada de nubes oscuras que, a un ritmo cada vez más intenso, descargan sus tormentas sobre los atribulados habitantes de un mundo sin brújula. Y, en medio de las asechanzas indescifrables, se yergue dominante el dispositivo de las tecnologías de la comunicación y la información, vomitando imágenes saturadoras, crueles, impiadosas, que refuerzan la angustia ante la imposibilidad de eludir los cataclismos bélicos y naturales. Simplemente, las imágenes han reemplazado a las palabras, las han acorralado y devastado imponiendo su lógica y desplegando su intensidad inigualable a la hora de hipnotizar y agotar, de multiplicar y anestesiar, dejando, a su vez, exhaustos a los televidentes globales. Esas imágenes del horror han dado paso, en los últimos tiempos, a su contracara, no menos intensiva y saturadora, la del epílogo del papado de Juan Pablo II, ofreciendo ahora, los rostros renacidos de la devoción religiosa, de la unción espiritual de esas mismas masas, que, en las últimas décadas, llenaron entusiastas los shopping centers. Técnicas importadas de las estéticas de la publicidad y del cine, hijas, a su vez,

60 de algunos logros extraordinarios de las vanguardias artísticas y de los anuncios baudelarianos que señalaron la nueva conjunción de arte y valor de cambio. Nuevas formas del fetichismo que apuntan a llenar un enorme vacío en el alma de la sociedad contemporánea. Escenificación de mitos ancestrales que, como los dioses crepusculares, retornan de la mano de la espectacularización iconográfica, del mismo modo que, en el último mes, vimos cómo estallaban las calles de las principales ciudades francesas abriendo las compuertas para una protesta descentradora de toda antigua gramática emancipatoria, desprovista de esos recursos simbólicos que asociaban, hasta no hace mucho tiempo, la lucha callejera con el ideal transformador. Época sin brújula en la que el prejuicio, el resentimiento, la banalidad massmediática, el fracaso de los mecanismos de integración y el encriptamiento social y cultural parecen haber arrinconado las arcaicas intensidades emancipatorias o, tal vez, preludio de otro tiempo en el que inéditas formas de organización y reclamo, recreen los olvidados dispositivos de los sueños de justicia forjados en los albores de otra modernidad. 7. Cuando, allá por los años ochenta, se anunciaba a los cuatro vientos y con evidente regocijo la muerte de las ideologías, que venía acompañada por la consagración del pragmatismo liberal y su inevitable consumación, que, a su vez, consumaba y consumía los conflictos otrora dominantes en el seno de la historia, lo que no se mensuraba era las diversas estrategias de resistencia a esa consumación, el retorno de lo arcaico pero profundamente transformado por el propio éxito de la modernidad secularizadora. El derrumbe, entre estrepitoso y patético, del sistema soviético, que le dejó el campo libre al capitalismo occidental para apropiarse impune y cínicamente de todos los mercados del planeta, ejerciendo como nunca en la historia un poder casi unívoco, despejó otros terrenos, más oscuros, tal vez olvidados o despreciados, que harían regresar al seno de esa misma historia, supuestamente, aplacadas las voces, dormidas, de inéditas variantes de integrismos religiosos y nacionales fusionados con los dispositivos técnicos de la propia modernidad que se venía a repudiar.

61 Los últimos veinte años aceleraron el despliegue portentoso de las tecnologías de la información, modificando de cuajo las percepciones y el modo de habitar un mundo atrapado, ahora, por las mil formas de la virtualidad y la instantaneidad. Cada acontecimiento, significativo o insignificante, podía convertirse, gracias a esas tecnologías y a la universalización absoluta de los lenguajes comunicacionales, en “el acontecimiento” decisivo, cuya presencia se volvía tan determinante como fugaz, envuelto, como todo acontecimiento en la época actual, por un velo de misterio o atravesado por la fuerza de un azar cósmico. Y, junto a la proliferación de esta verdadera revolución de la vida operada por las innovaciones técnicas, comenzó a manifestarse, con creciente intensidad, un nuevo malestar en la cultura, nuevas formas de inquietud de aquellos habitantes de un sistema global, cada vez más carentes de cualquier referencia cobijadora o portadora de orientaciones para esa vida esencialmente quebrada por la apoteosis de capitalismo y transformación tecnológica. Mientras que los países desarrollados, ricos más allá de toda riqueza, impúdicos en su afán consumista, articularon sus prácticas sociales a partir de la proliferación de un individualismo hedonista, en la periferia de ese mundo de opulencia, en las zonas destinadas a ser los vertederos de los desperdicios de Occidente, se fueron gestando diversas formas del rechazo, de la resistencia o, simplemente, se multiplicaron las voces de aquellos que reclamaban un retorno fantasmagórico y muchas veces alucinado a las genuinas tradiciones repudiadas por las elites gobernantes, que, en su afán modernizador, se deshicieron de lo esencial. En la huella dejada por el fracaso de esos procesos históricos, debe buscarse la actualidad de los retornos integristas. G. K. Chesterton ha calado hondo en la dialéctica de la secularización, de esa búsqueda moderna, ilustrada por destituir el reinado del mito y de las formas arcaicas sobre la conciencia humana proyectando la idea y la práctica de una sociedad articulada alrededor de una racionalidad despojada de los falsos dioses. Ha mostrado de qué modo el deseo de combatir al otro, al ortodoxo, al tradicionalista, en nombre de la libertad y de la tolerancia, suele concluir en la destrucción

62 de esa misma libertad como condición indispensable para combatir a la ortodoxia. Trágica dialéctica de una modernidad atrapada en su propia prisión: Los hombres que comienzan por combatir a la Iglesia en nombre de la libertad y la humanidad terminan renegando de la libertad y la humanidad, si eso les permite combatir a la Iglesia (exactamente lo mismo podría escribirse de los comunistas que combatieron al capitalismo en nombre de la igualdad y la verdadera fraternidad para eliminar ambas, allí donde se esgrimía la necesidad de combatir contra el capitalismo) (...) Conozco un hombre que pone tal pasión en probar que no tendrá una existencia personal después de la muerte que termina por caer en la posición de no tener ninguna existencia personal ahora. (...) Conocí personas que demostraban que no podía existir el juicio divino mostrando que no puede haber ningún juicio humano. (...) No admiramos, apenas disculpamos, al fanático que destruye este mundo por amor al otro. Pero, ¿qué deberíamos decir del fanático que destruye este mundo por odio al otro? Sacrifica la existencia misma de la humanidad a la no existencia de Dios. Ofrenda sus víctimas, no al altar, sino meramente a afirmar la inutilidad del altar y el vacío del trono. (...) Con sus dudas orientales acerca de la personalidad, no nos dan la certeza de que no tendremos una vida personal en el más allá; sólo nos aseguran que no tendremos una vida muy divertida o completa aquí. (...) Los secularistas no destruyen las cosas divinas, pero si les sirve de alivio, destruyeron en cambio las cosas seculares”5.

Lo mismo, obviamente, se puede decir de lo que se hizo en nombre de la misericordia y el amor de Cristo o de lo que hacen los liberales actuales cuando restringen las libertades públicas en nombre del combate contra el terrorismo, que, precisamente, amenaza esas mismas libertades. En todo caso, lo que Chesterton nos está planteando es la dialéctica de un proceso histórico que desemboca hoy en la elocuente evidencia de sus fallas, no allí donde tropezó con resistencias efectivas, sino cuando logró imponerse sin fisuras. En el triunfo de la subjetividad burguesa, debemos encontrar el desfondamiento contemporáneo; en la marcha victoriosa de la secularización, en su entronización, se encuentra la anunciación de su colosal crisis. 5 Gilbert Keith Chesterton, Orthodoxy, Ignatius Press, San Francisco, 1995, págs. 146-147 (citado por Slavoj Zizek, El títere y el enano. El núcleo perverso del cristianismo, Paidós, Buenos Aires, 2005, pág. 54).

63 8. En un libro reciente, Jacques Ranciére se interna en las complejas relaciones de lo que él denomina “el inconsciente estético” y el inconsciente freudiano; se pregunta qué tipo de intercambios y de iluminaciones forjaron la necesidad del creador del psicoanálisis de ir a buscar, en esa otra forma de actividad humana, los relatos, resituados e interpretados con su nuevo arsenal categorial, capaces de abrir una de las vías regias hacia el evanescente territorio del inconsciente. Este libro, escribe Ranciére, intenta sacar una simple conclusión: el arte no es un objeto del psicoanálisis como cualquier otro. Es un lugar de la querella de racionalidades en cuyo seno el psicoanálisis nació y debió redefinir constantemente el sentido mismo de su práctica. Porque el inconsciente estético no es un simple telón de fondo histórico del que se desprendería el inconsciente freudiano. Es una constelación que tiene su dinámica, su filosofía, y su política propias”6.

No es intención de este ensayo internarse por las complejas y laberínticas relaciones de arte y psicoanálisis, lo que se intenta, en todo caso, es abrir una pregunta que logre interpelar a lo que hoy hace crisis en los discursos y las prácticas que, supuestamente, deberían interrogarse por el estado de las almas. Quiero decir, Ranciére nos muestra con sutileza que, sin las irradiaciones del “inconsciente estético”, sin las perturbaciones emanadas del arte y sus reinterpretaciones románticas y postrománticas, sería inimaginable el discurso freudiano y su formulación del inconsciente. ¿Qué querella de racionalidades ocupa la escena contemporánea? ¿Es posible todavía ir a buscar en el lenguaje del arte las iluminaciones que nos permitan aprehender lo que falla en la cultura actual? ¿Buscan las ciencias sociales y las humanidades ese diálogo necesario, ronco y muchas veces conflictivo con el “inconsciente estético”? A lo largo de todo el siglo XIX –sostiene Ranciére–, la novela realista, la ópera wagneriana y el teatro naturalista o simbolista contaron, en esencia, una única historia cuya fórmula filosófica nos fue dada por Schopenhauer: la disolución de las ilusiones de la representación en la fuerza ciega de la voluntad y la disolución 6 Jacques Ranciére, El inconsciente estético, del estante editorial, Buenos Aires, 2005, pág. 9.

64 de esa voluntad en el querer de la nada o la nada del querer que es su verdad última. Esa intriga nihilista, reverso del gran sueño romántico de una nueva comunidad sensible, no sólo constituye el trasfondo histórico de la invención freudiana. También le propone a esa invención su filosofía: la misma que lee en las novedades del arte los síntomas de esa insistencia del fondo oscuro de la civilización que desenmascara las bellas ilusiones del mundo nuevo y la vanidad misma del movimiento por el cual la vida se encarniza en perpetuarse”7.

Para Ranciére, la indagación de este vínculo constituye un paso fundamental a la hora de instituir los mecanismos de una crítica del mundo que no renuncie a las irradiaciones de esos lenguajes emanados del arte. Desde otro lado, Castoriadis, en un ensayo programático de los años ochenta –Transformación social y creación cultural–, sostuvo la sequía creativa que hoy invade al mundo cultural y científico completamente disociado, en su mirada crítica, de los ideales emancipatorios. Dice que seguimos viviendo de las rentas de lo producido en las primeras tres décadas del siglo XX, rentas que, obviamente, se están diluyendo de forma obvia. Discursos autorreferenciales, dominio de una metafísica del instante y la fugacidad, despliegue de nuevas formas de analfabetismo, que, entre otras consecuencias, deshacen los vínculos esenciales de los lenguajes estéticos y filosóficos, dejando a las ciencias del hombre mudas ante las preguntas imprescindibles, que, como bien lo supieron los pensadores de principios del siglo que acaba de cerrarse, Freud entre ellos, encuentran en el arte su núcleo irradiador decisivo. Preguntar por el estado de las almas implica, necesariamente, auscultar la profundidad de esa falla, asumir las carencias de nuestros lenguajes y la banalidad autosuficiente con la que las disciplinas universitarias han abandonado esas querellas indispensables, esas contaminaciones sin las cuales ninguna pregunta alcanza a interrogar nada significativo sobre las actuales condiciones de existencia.

7 Jacques Ranciére, Op. cit., págs. 10-11.

65 9. Baudelaire, ya lo señalé, anticipó lo que Marx luego convertiría en el centro de su análisis del funcionamiento de la sociedad capitalista, la idea de la mercancía como una entidad misteriosa, llena de caprichos y vicisitudes teológicas, un objeto que se desentiende aceleradamente de su valor de uso, de la relación directa para la satisfacción de aquello que supuestamente debe garantizar en tanto que objeto para un determinado fin, pasando a ser otra cosa, la promesa de “algo más”, “la promesa –como escribe Zizek– de un goce insondable cuya verdadera ubicación es la fantasía y toda la publicidad apunta a ese espacio fantasmático”8. Metáfora radical para comprender no sólo la génesis del tiempo burgués, ese momento inicial del siglo diecinueve en el que se iría desplegando un giro esencial en la configuración de lo propiamente humano, sino para intentar dilucidar nuestra actualidad, el dominio, mayúsculo, de la objetivación de los vivientes y de las cosas, hasta configurar una de las claves decisivas para comprender el estado de las almas. Así como es posible buscar el origen del nihilismo en el cogito ergo sum cartesiano, ese punto cero del lenguaje que ha logrado depurarse de cualquier referencia exterior a sí mismo, es imprescindible destacar la relación que, desde un comienzo, se establece entre la nada y la mercancía, esa búsqueda frenética por alcanzar, a través del consumo incesante de objetos prometedores, la satisfacción que, nuevamente, se verá aplazada. Carrera alucinada en la que la meta es el vacío, un hueco que nos devuelve el sonido de la nada y que nos relanza hacia una nueva experiencia de la nihilidad inherente al reino fantasmagórico de las mercancías; quimera que envuelve la vida cotidiana de una sociedad que siempre está apuntando “más allá de sí misma”, como queriendo alcanzar una trascendencia que venía anunciada desde los antiguos lenguajes religiosos, pero que, en la época de la secularización, adquiere la fisonomía pagana e idolátrica de la mercancía. Esa trascendencia ha descendido a suelo profano, se desenvuelve entre formas vulgares, se arracima en las calles de las ciudades del hombre, se ubica en el 8 Slavoj Zizek, El títere y el enano. El núcleo perverso del cristianismo, op. cit., pág. 200.

66 corazón del deseo que no puede aceptar ninguna postergación, pero que permanentemente va sintiendo que nada alcanza a completarlo. Zizek, siempre irónico y consumado bromista, establece una relación directa entre la “Cosa sagrada en su amanecer y la mercancía ridícula en su ocaso”, entre las arduas reflexiones heideggerianas sobre la “vasija griega” en “Das Ding” y el “huevo Kinder sorpresa” en el que culminaría ese viaje desde el origen sagrado a la nada de la mercancía. El huevo Kinder –escribe con desparpajo Zizek– es nuestra vasija actual... Entonces, tal vez, la imagen última que condensa la totalidad de la ‘historia de Occidente’ sea la de los antiguos griegos ofreciéndoles a los dioses en el interior de la vasija... un juguete de plástico del huevo Kinder. Aquí uno debería seguir el procedimiento practicado por Adorno y Horkheimer en su Dialéctica de la Ilustración, de condensar la totalidad del desarrollo de la civilización occidental en una simple línea: desde la manipulación mágica prehistórica a la manipulación tecnológica o desde la vasija griega al huevo Kinder”9. Más allá de las tretas risueñas del filósofo esloveno, y contextualizando la filosofía de la historia que se desprende de la Dialéctica de la Ilustración, no deja de ser oportuno insistir en este vínculo entre caída de lo sagrado y teologización de la mercancía como figura esclarecedora de la sociedad contemporánea, como sustrato invisibilizado que configura la dialéctica entre deseo y nada que atraviesa la vida de los habitantes del reino de las mercancías. Pensar el estado de las almas es internarnos en estas experiencias fantasmagóricas, en este parque de diversiones donde todo parece girar alocadamente mientras los humanos que se trepan en su carrusel no hacen otra cosa que reír frenéticamente de sus propias alucinaciones convertidas, por la magia del instante y la alquimia de la cosa, en la única realidad posible y deseable, la que, en su continuo desvanecimiento, nos sigue lanzando inmisericorde al agujero negro de nuestra nada.

9 Ibidem, pág. 203.

67 10. La escena del parque de diversiones, del carrusel que gira alocadamente, de la raza humana que llora y ríe al mismo tiempo, de los fantasmas que se arremolinan a nuestro alrededor y en los recovecos más profundos de interioridades agusanadas: la frenética danza de las mercancías da cuenta, en una dimensión inevitable aunque oscura, del estado de las almas, de sus encrucijadas y de sus carencias, del enmudecimiento de las palabras para intentar contrarrestar el dominio abrumador de los lenguajes audiovisuales, de la conquista planetaria de una civilización sostenida por estructuras tecnológico-productivas que, en su expansión indefinida, van devorando los restos de autonomía de aquellos mismos sujetos que, supuestamente, fundaron su consagración y desarmaron los lazos que unían el cielo y la tierra sólo para proyectar el dominio abrumador de nuevos dioses. Hace unos años, cuando la desoladora década del noventa parecía interminable en su capacidad de aniquilar todo resto de esperanza, un amigo sentenciaba lapidario: “No hay que esperar que se realice el apocalípsis porque ya aconteció, nuestra realidad es su más evidente manifestación”. Si efectivamente la catástrofe ya sucedió, si la tan angustiosa espera del apocalípsis ha dejado paso a su concreción más allá de que la mayoría de las personas no quiera o no sepa verlo y si el tiempo que habitamos carece, en ese sentido, de salvación porque nos hemos sumergido en el lodazal de la historia, pues, vaya paradoja, se levanta otra oportunidad pero sin ninguna garantía, una oportunidad nacida de la carencia de toda oportunidad que ha sido devorada por el mal radical que cruzó, de lado a lado, el siglo veinte y que sigue expandiéndose en el que acaba de iniciar su derrotero. Una oportunidad que abandona la lógica del proyecto y de su necesariedad histórica, que se recoge a la espera de lo inaudito, de que aquello inesperado haga saltar los goznes de la historia en el sentido de la interrupción mesiánica de la que hablaba Walter Benjamin cuando Europa marchaba hacia la realización de la barbarie exterminadora del nazismo. En ese tiempo de aniquilación y pérdida absoluta, el autor de las Tesis recupera la imagen recogida de Franz Kafka, que funda

68 la salvación en la más radical de las desesperaciones, en la certeza de que los únicos salvados son aquellos que han perdido toda esperanza. “Sólo por amor a los desesperados conservamos aún la esperanza”, escribió Benjamin siguiendo la senda de Walser y Kafka. Nosotros, habitantes del tiempo postapocalíptico, contemporáneos de la “gran desilusión”, permanecemos a la espera pero tratando de guarecernos en medio de la tempestad sabiendo que, tal vez, nuestro presente nos exija, como en otras épocas de la historia, ser guardianes de tradiciones en peligro, pacientes escribas de mensajes lanzados como antaño en una botella al mar del futuro. 11. Mirando su época con los ojos de quien sabe que los vientos de la historia han girado hacia nuevas e inquietantes experiencias del vacío, Fernando Pessoa escribió, en El libro del desasosiego, pensando, de la mano de Bernardo Soares, el estrépito dejado por el derrumbe de la Iglesia de Pedro: Cuando el cristianismo, como una noche de tempestad a la que sigue la luz del día, pasó por sobre las almas, se vio el desastre que, invisiblemente, había producido; la ruina que sembró se vio únicamente después que hubo pasado. Entendieron algunos, en verdad, que esa ruina fue provocada por su partida; pero lo cierto es que fue a raíz de su partida que esa ruina llegó a mostrarse en toda su magnitud, y no porque esa partida la hubiese provocado (...). Es así como quedó, en este mundo de almas, la ruina visible, la desgracia patente, sin la bruma que la disimulara con su barniz de ternura falsa. Las almas, entonces, se vieron tal cual eran”10.

Al comenzar este ensayo, coloqué este mismo fragmento de Bernardo Soares, otro de los heterónimos de Pessoa, como una huella orientadora de mi propia indagación respecto al estado de las almas, asumiendo que aquello que el portugués escribiera sobre las consecuencias de las ruinas dejadas por el ocaso del cristianismo reflejaba, con inquietante proximidad, lo que había dejado tras de sí el derrumbe primero de los ideales emancipatorios del socialismo 10 Fernando Pessoa, El libro del desasosiego, Emecé, Buenos Aires, 2005, trad. de S. Kovadloff, págs. 87-88.

69 y, junto con ello, la crudeza indisimulada del dominio planetario del Occidente capitalista. Ya no queda esa tenue pátina de pudor que otrora cubría el funcionamiento de la máquina del poder; tampoco se sostienen las antiguas ilusiones en prácticas alternativas capaces de abrir un surco de esperanzas en una humanidad que parece contemplar, con inusuales dosis de resignación, el despliegue poderoso de esa misma máquina que ahora ya no necesita crear subterfugios más o menos ingeniosos que le permitan perpetuarse. Todo está ahí, delante de nuestros ojos, sin ocultamientos, directo, asfixiante en su literalidad, como si los juegos eufemísticos del lenguaje ya no fueran necesarios. Y las almas de los habitantes de este tiempo globalizado añoran, cuando pueden, sus antiguos espectros, aquellos sueños forjados en herrerías que han visto cómo se apagaban sus fuegos mientras crecía, a su alrededor, la intemperie. Hamlet y el Rey Lear, cada uno a su modo, se confrontaron con su espectralidad, con la nada de la noche del mundo, con sus alucinaciones; los dos, sin embargo, al agotarse sus propias jornadas dejaron entreabierta la promesa de otro día que, eso sí, jamás podría olvidar las sombras de sus precursores, sus fantasías y sus angustias. ¿Qué será de nuestros fantasmas? ¿Qué figuras del tiempo clausurado seguirán insistiendo en nosotros? ¿Dónde quedarán, en qué rincón de nuestras almas, los sueños que nos inventaron y nos devastaron? ¿Habrá, se abrirá algún día la promesa incumplida que nos remonta milenios atrás, cuando iniciaba su marcha el alma de Occidente? ¿Tiene esa promesa todavía algún sentido? ¿Vale la pena seguir esperando?

Faking/Staking a Village: Hyper-(real?) American Characters in the Supra-Globalized Spaces of French Drama and Danish Film by Les Essif The American landscape has no foreground and the American mind has no background. Edith Wharton

There is little doubt that “America” shapes the way non-Americans live, the way they think, and the ways in which they desire and project their futures. By “America” I mean the “pure” imperial fiction of the cultural imagery as well as the less fantastical sociocultural, political, and economic realities of the U.S. “America” is an attitude that is being increasingly adopted by foreigners (even those victimized by the American empire’s policies of economic apartheid), and this is no less true for the Europeans than it is for the Africans and the Asians. The U.S. has become the focal point of global power and the source of global domination at the same time that the peoples of diverse national communities and distant geographical regions of the world have become more interdependent than ever. World cultures have become inextricably interconnected through media, technology, and especially the globalized economy in terms of production, labor, commerce, and consumerism.

72 In our increasingly postnationalist, transnationalist world, a move beyond the national toward the global assumes some sort of consensus on the notion of nation and the practice of nationhood.1 Yet not all nations, national cultures, societies, economies, and political systems are equal. Perhaps even more important, as Benedict Anderson points out in his seminal work on the invented nature of nationhood and nations as “imagined communities:” “Communities are to be distinguished, not by their falsity/ genuineness, but by the style in which they are imagined” (6). There are, of course, significantly different styles of imagining national community among the non-Western cultures of places like India, China, and Senegal, and these differences and styles are dominate today’s globalization and postcolonial studies. But what about the styles in which Western nations/cultures/communities imagine themselves? Current scholarship on globalization often tends to lump all of Western culture together--and not without some justification, of course. But there is a sense in which, when considered as a monolithic whole, if Western Europe functions as both the cultural and epistemological “other” for the non-Western world, the U.S. is something of the “other” for Europe, and vice versa. The style of Americans imagining the American national community is quite different from the style in which the French and the Danish imagine their own: national health care and social welfare, distribution of wealth, nationalized industries, law and order and the abolition of capital punishment, secularization and the separation of church and state, multiparty political systems tolerant of radical extremes, and so on. What is more, the French and the Danish are more critically and dialectically aware of this fact than the Americans are, and they have a fairly strong interest in the American “style,” which they believe 1 In the earlier part of the twentieth century, the farseeing global humanist Mahatma Gandhi realized that true globalism could only be attained through a recognition of nationalism, on some level: “It is impossible for one to be internationalist without being a nationalist. Internationalism is possible only when nationalism becomes a fact, i.e., when peoples belonging to different countries have organized themselves and are able to act as one man” (87).

73 is setting the broad standard for the world.2 Consequently, in part because of the U.S.’s weight in world affairs, in part because of the Europeans’ critical-dialectical approach to life, the latter tend to spend a lot of time and creative-critical energy imagining and re-imagining American culture. As reductive as this might sound, to most Europeans, “globalization” equals the Americanization of the world: If globalization is the end, Americanization is the means (or vice versa); and, despite the considerable sociopolitical divergences noted above, many people around the world simply no longer know where their culture ends and America begins. To be sure, European nations have had their turns at dominating “world” culture, but at this point in civilization’s history, the U.S.’s imperial grip is distinct in at least two significant ways from those that were orchestrated by say Great Britain or France in the nineteenth century: on one hand, its geographical reach is practically absolute, on the other, the most globally influential facets of the American model are less of the high cultural “enlightened” variety and more mass or popular culture than ever. Notwithstanding the U.S.’s military might, the not so intellectually and humanistically enlightened subcultures of business and consumerism, including the corporate forces of technology and entertainment, play a significant role in determining the U.S.’s image, its power, and its cultural reach. One can only marvel at the technical and commercial “genius” that went into the Americano-universalizing discourses in the form of witty jingles that Pepsi and Coca-Cola have discharged on diverse populations around the globe.3 2 For more on the dialectical nature of European culture as compared to the undialectical nature of American “unculture,” see my “Dialectical Representations” and my “Lost in Space.” 3 The previous political administration in the U.S. represented quintessential American “unculture” (a term I will explain below) in all its guises. It is fascinating to see how the “unculture” of business permeates all facets of the neo-conservative agenda, including the pitch for religious fundamentalism. In a New York Times op-ed piece, Thomas Frank questions the motives of Karl Zinsmeister. Frank tells us that “in right-wing circles” Zinsmeister is “regarded as an intellectual heavy-weight” and

74 Even in the early nineteenth century, before America’s rise to global domination, Alexis de Tocqueville wrote that free intellectual thought and debate were stifled in America by the “tyranny of the majority” (250-56).4 Since the postwar period of the last century, celebrated French writers from J-P Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir to Julia Kristeva and Jean Baudrillard have been equally fascinated and perplexed by what they perceive to be a primary divergence of Americans from the French and other Western cultures: the dynamic yet extraordinarily uncritical collective consciousness of America, a more or less antiintellectual legacy that Baudrillard calls American “unculture.” For Tocqueville as well as for Baudrillard, America’s “uncultured” distaste for (European) ideology, its pragmatic penchant for action rather than thought or analysis, was not entirely negative (as most American critics tend to read Baudrillard) and it held a certain fascination as a counterweight to Europe’s overly intellectualized, rationalistideological approach to the real world. But American unculture led to a sensibility for and a propensity toward the hyperreal, which Umberto Eco has defined as “an illusion of absolute reality,” one involving “the substituting signs of the real for the real itself,” as Baudrillard puts it (Simulations 4). By becoming more real than the real, the hyperreal absolute fake stifles our search for new evolutionary “truth.”5 At he is “currently the president’s chief domestic policy adviser.” Formerly the editor of a conservative magazine, this “intellectual heavy-weight” was evidently responsible for the magazine headline “Things Go Better With God”: “a repurposed Coca-Cola slogan in which the King of Kings was allowed to momentarily occupy the throne of the brand of brands” (A23). Thus, the irrationality that underwrites both faith and capitalism elevates the unculture of business to some sort of critical theology, thereby reducing God to an advertising slogan. 4 See especially “The Omnipotence of the Majority in the United States and Its Effects” (246-261). 5 Europeans by and large do not have the same sensibility for hyperreal simulation largely because it transcends the ideological (and the critique thereof) and represents an extra-ideological state of perception and/or dimension of reality: “Ideology only corresponds to a betrayal of reality by signs; simulation corresponds to a short-circuit of reality and to its reduplication by signs. It is always the aim of ideological analysis to

75 the center of American hyperreality, contemporary Americans have substituted the sign of American culture for the real thing. This sign is what Americans believe they and their country represent and the one they communicate to themselves and to the rest of the world, which Baudrillard tells us is their “achieved utopia” (America 77). Having perfected its own society, America has few qualms about imposing its model on the globe. Consequently, Americans do not recognize or acknowledge the concrete tensions and contradictions between nationalism and globalization as they should and the global village they envision is not global at all, but supra-global (a term I will return to below).6 At the beginning of the twenty-first century when the world is closer than ever to becoming something of a global community, restore the objective process; it is always a false problem to want to restore the truth beneath the simulacrum” (Simulations 48). Hyperreality found fertile ground in the irrationality of American unculture, which itself is closely linked to and generated by America’s dyed-in-the-wool capitalism: “Hyperreality and simulation are deterrents of every principle and of every objective.... [I]t was capital which was the first to feed throughout its history on the destruction of every referential, of every human goal, which shattered every ideal distinction between true and false, good and evil, in order to establish a radical law of equivalence and exchange” (43). Capital operates in the realm of irrational, supra-referential simulation. The “logic” of capitalism is not an “enlightened” one, certainly not from a European point of view. 6 The British playwright Harold Pinter, winner of the 2005 Nobel Prize in Literature, challenged the political consequences of U.S. hyperreality in his Nobel lecture (“Art, Truth and Politics”). He points out that while international atrocities committed by the Soviet Union during the Cold War have been “fully documented and verified” (813), those committed by the U.S. “never happened. Nothing ever happened. Even while it was happening it wasn’t happening. It didn’t matter” (815). Why? Because the U.S. “has exercised a quite clinical manipulation of power worldwide while masquerading as a force of universal good. It’s a brilliant, even witty, highly successful act of hypnosis.” He goes on to call the U.S. “the greatest show on the road.... As a salesman it is out on its own and its most saleable commodity is self-love. It’s a winner. Listen to all American presidents on television say the words, ‘the American people’.... It’s a scintillating strategem. Language is actually employed to keep thought at bay. The words ‘the American people’ provide a truly voluptuous cushion of reassurance. You don’t need to think. Just lie back on the cushion” (815; my emphasis). One could also explain the commodity of “self love” in terms of “achieved utopia,” and America’s “hypnosis” and its “stratagems” in terms of hyperreality.

76 Europeans have serious doubts about the U.S.’s cultural hegemony and its role as a model for the so-called emerging global village. European intellectuals of all sorts--historians, philosophers, sociologists, political scientists, and critical theorists--have written extensively on the risks and the consequences of American lowcultural/ uncultural hegemony. European artists and fiction writers too have raised questions creatively in their work. In this essay, I want to discuss one particular effect of the European perspective on American unculture, one that appears in a French play by Joël Jouanneau, The Crazies of Knoxville (Les Dingues de Knoxville, 1998), and in a Danish film by Lars von Trier, Dogville (2003). Despite differences of artistic genre between the play and the film, and despite some fairly profound stylistic distinctions, both works deal with “Americathe-space” and American “subjects-within-space” in a time of global community. They display “re-imagined” American characters and American spaces that provide radically altered, uncultured models of community in terms of subjectivity and geography. The play and the film present spaces and characters that suggest the national culture of America. However, since the style in which Americans imagine the global community is as flawed as the style in which they imagine their own national community, the communities represented in these works are neither communal nor global. On the whole, the cultures, subcultures, and individual subjectivities that artists and writers depict are integrally and intricately related to the spaces and places they inhabit. In the area of theatre and drama, in a recent introduction to a text on “land/ scape/ theatre,” Una Chaudhuri speaks of “the underlying connections between landscapes and modes of intellection” (“Land/Scape/Theory” 22) and she proposes that we examine landscapes in drama as “culturescapes” (12) that can enrich our critical understanding of the values of the culture that occupies the landscape: “A landscape is built out of inclusions and exclusions; it is a structuring of knowledge and a valorizing of some things at the expense of others” (21). Communities too are formed out of inclusions and exclusions, a practice that constitutes the great “irony of community,”

77 an irony that Baudrillard said is missing in America (America 85), no doubt because America sees itself as an “achieved utopia.” America’s self-invention as an achieved utopia is a paradoxical idea based on “the paradoxical humor of an achieved materiality, of an ever renewed self-evidence, of a bright new faith in the legality of the fait accompli which we [Europeans] always find amazing” (84). For the most part, European intellectuals are all too aware that the concept and the practice of community, whether local, national, or global, are ironic insofar as they are self-contradictory: simultaneously constructed through inclusion and exclusion. America, however, does not seem to look beyond the surface realities of either subject, or geography, or the communal identities they generate. In an earlier, seminal work on the geography/ landscape of modern and postmodern drama, Chaudhuri broached the subject of the well-known loss of subjectivity, especially in nonrealist forms of drama. She was specifically interested in how the “unraveling of that figuration of identity, as something rooted in place, preoccupies the drama of the second half of the century” (Staging Place 98). In contemporary Western drama, subjectivity no longer relates to space as it did in the past, and “America” has a special role in this shift. Chaudhuri further argues that the trope of America, “as a place that denies the deep importance of place and celebrates instead the expansiveness and potentiality of surfaces,” has participated in the transformation of dramaturgy in contemporary theatre, a transformation that works largely by abstraction (Staging Place 116).7 America’s uncultural interest in and promotion of surface over depth-both geographical and ideological--relates to its model of community formation. The French play and the Danish film both betray an underlying fear that the Americano-globalization that seems to set the standard for the new world order, the proliferating conformist unculture of America, 7 See my “Lost in Space” for a theory and an examination of what I call Koltès’s “dramaturgy of abstraction” as it applies to the American space and characters of his play Sallinger.

78 will cast an obscure epistemolgical shadow over the world. This shadow of mass (cultural and subcultural) destruction will threaten not only clear and complex distinctions (diversities) but also innate contradictions among individual identities and places, diversities and contradictions that contribute to the irony of community and that constitute the necessarily hybrid or “creole” nature of any community that would deem itself “global.” Edouard Glissant, for instance, proposes an approach to the “problems of world-totality” (108) that is based on the principle of transnational creolization: The problems of the nation will recede with time before the advance of cultural problems. It is thus a question of creolization.... Creole is not a synthesis but an unpredictable, novel, and unprecedented outcome of these heterogeneous elements. Similarly, creolization is the contact, conflict, attraction, harmony, repulsion, dissemblance, ressemblance between cultures of the world that come together in the world-totality, that come together, cling together, repel each other, etc., and yield unprecedented outcomes. I call this world a chaos-world not because it is a world in disorder, but because it is an unpredictable world. (109)

According to this truly cosmopolitan perspective, citizens of all national communities will have to practice a critical-creative return to being human. Utopian America, with its parochial, chauvinistic beliefs in the exceptional and in many ways exclusive value of its culture (and in the inherent value of being a U.S. citizen), could never subscribe to this principle of unpredictability, to this recognition of contradiction, or to this forecast of ordered “chaos.”8 As we will see, the play and the film manifest two very different image-oriented strains of American hyperreality. Whereas the play represents America through processes of theatrical and cultural abstraction, the film employs theatrical density to depict an American society based on totalitarian conformity. But both suggest that there is no hope for a global “community” in any American imagination 8 I should note that the declared topic of Glissant’s essay is the state of the French language in the face of creolization. However, in reading the essay it soon becomes obvious that Glissant’s larger concern is not France and its language but the world and its cultures, i.e., world-totality.

79 of the term and they do this by demonstrating that the essential irony of community is missing in America. American society tends to simultaneously disregard (an act of inclusion?) and silence (an act of exclusion) diversity in the form of non-standard (“minority”) subcultures within its own national borders. Equally unwilling to recognize and include the deeper cultural diversities of the globe, it subsequently overlooks a more “realist” approach to world-totality in favor of a hyperrealistic world view. So the fictional works treat American space and characters in a way that doesn’t so much move beyond the national into the global, as the prevalent term “transnational” would-“extending or having interests extending beyond national borders or frontiers” (Oxford English Dictionary); they do not really reflect a United States that “operates more like a ‘transnation,’ a ‘switching point’ between different modes of affiliation and identification,” as Arjun Appadurai contends. 9 On the contrary, there is in these works a “leveling of cultural meaning,” as Chaudhuri puts it, whose source is the trope of America, “whose ubiquitous images and values transform other cultures into mere foils to or excrescences on its hegemonic reality,” and this hegemony, “powerful though it is, has the texture of banal stupidity” (Staging Place 128). America’s utopian style of selfimagination--one which completely (and conveniently) transcends and/or suppresses notions of the national and the global--orients the supra-national and supra-global style in which it re-imagines the cultural diversity of the rest of the globe. In the end this suggests that America only envisions the globe insofar as it can re-create it in its own uncultural, non-communal image.

9 Quoted in Paul Giles’s Virtual Americas, p. 20.

80

The French Play

Joël Jouanneau’s The Crazies of Knoxville is a very French nouveau absurdist depiction of some fascinating images of American unculture, images that represent the “other” of Western culture for so many Europeans. Crazies is also a good example of a Westernized version of “global theatre” in that it presents an ensemble of what a Western (or Eastern) audience would understand to be hyper-typical American characters, themes, institutions, and micro-spaces that merge in a rather extraterritorial location to deliver a sublime supra-national experience. One could begin to theorize the Americano-global “community” of this play as an alternative transnational, diasporic entertainment culture as opposed to the diasporic “labor” cultures of Latin America and Africa. The play’s disjointed action is contained in eighteen mostly short, inane tableaux or vignettes, caricatures of American capitalism and the entertainment industry. If the play has any real “story” or primary, motivated action at all, it is located in the first and the final two of the eighteen tableaux. In the first, a character named Morty descends from the sky on a ship’s anchor, suspended by his arm and holding a suitcase in his hand. In a lengthy monologue, he tells the audience the story of his alleged step-father, Jerry Lewis--witness the Jerry Lewis “French connection”--and how Jerry has entrusted him to direct the last scene of Jerry’s last film, and this becomes Morty’s quest. But it is not until the penultimate scene of the play that the site of the studio for the film, The Crazies of Knoxville, actually materializes. But when the filming finally gets staged, Morty is being sent away, and another character, Angie, takes over the direction of the final scene of the film, which takes place in the final scene of the play. Between the beginning and the end of the play, the reader/ spectator is treated to a showcase of psychologically flat, yet theatrically spectacular characters who play out references to hyper-typical, hyperreal American icons or characterlegends. The characters are “characters” in the full sense of the term, and their personal, individual identities are largely undercut by their extravagant behavior, dress, and language, all of which contributes

81 to their enactment of a Franco-European model of “Americanness,” including America’s preoccupation with slapstick, physical comedy (The Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, Jerry Lewis), with business and money, with entertainment, and, I will add, with forms of pseudointellectualism and pseudo-globalism. The short profiles of the characters at the beginning of the text reveal Jouanneau’s intent to transcend conventional referentiality, to take caricature to an extreme and stage some kind of hyperreality. Tom Dooley, for instance, is “the cow-boy from Aubervilliers,” a working-class and largely union-oriented neighborhood in Paris. He’s the “Texan from Zone 2 who is preparing his competitive audition for Disneyland.” Benway (“alias Bibop”) is a hyper-typical representation of an American businessman, for whom “the world is his office, God is his exchange agent, and he believes in Paradise, as long as it’s fiscally friendly.” Finally, Foxy is “The number one detective of the Pinkerton Agency. He’s on the trail of a serial killer whose victim-chopping chain saw is sponsored by Black and Decker” (10).10 Get the idea? Each of the eighteen tableaux has its own evocative title. In “bizness is bizness,” Benway, the extreme businessman, engages in a quasi-philosophical business call while dancing with Morty and trying to ascertain directions to “the nearest metropolis” (14-16). In “The Texan from Zone 2,” Tom Dooley meets Morty and tells him how he plans to audition for Disneyworld. He demonstrates his devotion to the role of American cowboy he wants to land, dressed with “a Stetson on his head, saddle over his shoulder, cowboy boots and spurs,” while studying his manual, “The Wild West in 36 Lessons,” and practicing his lasso and his English, lassoing Morty, and eating a Big Mac. Nevertheless, in one of the rare explicit references to Americathe-place in the play, Tom Dooley admits to Morty that “Fuck You!” is about all that he really knows about “America” (17). The third vignette, “Black and Decker,” introduces the Pinkerton detective Foxy, who is dressed in the style of Groucho Marx. He explains to “the newly consecrated beautiful lady, Daisy, with her knitting in her hand” 10 These and all further translations from the French are mine.

82 (19), how he is on the trail of the Black and Decker chainsaw serial killer. Daisy’s reply: “Aren’t you going to kiss me?” (21). One gets the picture of the mock-melodramatic inanity of this piece, which we can not help but relate to the perceived inanity of America. In the penultimate scene of the play, “What’s the Story Mother?” (the use of English constitutes yet another oblique reference to America), Angie (a blind albino, “blind for having too long stared at the snow,” and who lives in a trailer in the desert of Zanskar) tells Morty that Jerry has ordered the filming stopped because Dean’s (Jerry Lewis’s one-time comic partner, Dean Martin) heart gave out. He tells him that he’ll have to leave. In the final scene, “Final Take,” Angie has taken over the directing. Foxy, the detective, carries out the execution of Tom Dooley by chainsaw: Angie calls, “Final take. The Crazies of Knoxville, last scene!” There’s a blackout. Foxy starts up the chainsaw. Then, “Action,” and “We hear at length the chainsaw doing its job” (72). End of story. Calling his play a “burlesque comedy,” Jouanneau tells us that: I wanted to write this play without points of reference (sans repères) or time differences (décalage horaire). If you still were inclined to go there, which would be a truly suicidal attitude in the stunned world of today, then imagine an itinerant circus. A circus that would set up for one evening in Saint-André’s town square. Imagine nine clown actors, sometime dancers and musicians, relentless tightrope walkers, who, after having surveyed the planet, would bring the latest news of the front to the residents of the region.11

I want to emphasize the author’s universalizing-globalizing intention to create a world without “points of reference,” without landmarks or bearings. It is, of course, impossible to be entirely nonreferential, so, from a formal point of view, let’s call his intention supra-referential (above and beyond conventional referentiality), which, as Baudrillard has claimed is a prime effect of hyperreality: 11 Author’s statement in program for Les Dingues de Knoxville, dir. Dominique Bluzet, Théâtre du Gymnase, Marseille, France, Jan. 19-Feb. 6, 1999.

83 [T]he age of simulation thus begins with a liquidation of all referentials--worse: by their artificial resurrection in systems of signs, which are a more ductile material than meaning, in that they lend themselves to all systems of equivalence, all binary oppositions and all combinatory algebra. It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself.... A hyperreal henceforth sheltered from the imaginary, and from any distinction between the real and the imaginary... (Simulations 4).

Thus Jouanneau takes a hyperreal artistic approach to the hyperreal subject of “America,” and supra-referentiality becomes the poetic spring for the supra-national, supra-social, and ultimately, the supra-global nature of this work. This supra-referentiality is well grounded and it applies to both the space and the characters of the play—both their physical and social identities and their actions. At its most essential, despite all the implicit and explicit references to select features of American pop culture, the text contains no specific, concrete reference to America as a country or a national culture, a lack that contributes to the abstracting “disappearing effect” of American culture. In the absence of any clear geography and any authentic or implied human or social relationships among the characters, the play fails to construct any geographical-spatial boundaries or relationalintersubjective sense of community. First a word about the supra-referential space of this play: a supranational and supra-global, utopian/ dystopian “no-place.”12 Bearing in mind that, unlike Europe, in the U.S. a city name without the state is frequently ambiguous, the first signifier of place is found in the play’s title: “The Crazies of Knoxville.” But far from referring to the American city in the state of Tennessee, Knoxville is both misrepresented or mis-referenced and unrepresented or un-referenced. Misrepresented in the sense that, in an interview published as a prospectus for the play, Jouanneau said the following: 12 The original Greek meaning of “utopia” is “no place,” and the notion of “noplace” recalls the setting of Alfred Jarry’s late nineteenth-century absurdist theatrical tour de force, Ubu Roi, whose action according to Jarry takes place in “Poland, that is to say ‘no place’” (21).

84 Of course we’re dealing with an apocryphal film. (Fort) Knox is the gold reserve of the USA and the city of Uncle Picsou. The title of the play could’ve been “Crazy About Money” (“Les fous de l’argent”). The theme of money is important to this play.13

So it seems that the “Knox” in Knoxville is supposed to suggest money and that Jouanneau evidently was confused about the distinction between Fort Knox, which is in the state of Kentucky, and Knoxville, Tennessee. Knoxville is unrepresented because, within the text itself, other than figuring as the name of the place in the film, the shooting of which is central to the play, there are very few references to Knoxville as a “real,” geographical location, and these are quite obscure, referring only tangentially to Knoxville: “those from Knoxville” (24); “a map of Knoxville” (36); and in loose relation to the American states of Arizona (36) and Texas (50). But the “Clowns without Borders,” the characters who are named as clowns in the play, Yoyo and Lili, do say that the office that sends them all over the world is in Knoxville (51). On yet another supra-referential spatial level, the action takes place in Saint-André-du-Loing, the village which is “in the heart of Zanskar,” an obscure and remote geographical region that functions as the desert landscape of the play. According to the author, the village is an invented place, but Zanskar is a “real, tiny little region of Tibet, about 6,000 meters elevation, and whose very name incites a journey into our imagination.”14 As for the village, St.-André-du-Loing, the town is non-existent but the “Loing” is an actual river, tributary of the Seine that flows through Paris. But, phonetically, the “loing” is a homonym of “loin” that in French signifies “distant, far away,” a reference which reinforces the “otherness,” the utopian suggestion of “no-place” within the vast “Desert of Zanskar.” Baudrillard believes that the desert is the emblematic topographical landscape that best reflects the superficial, undifferentiated qualities of American 13 Interview with Dominque Lacroix. Cited in program notes for Les Dingues de Knoxville, dir. Dominique Bluzet, Théàtre du Gymnase, Marseille, France. Jan. 19Feb. 6, 1999. 14 Interview with Dominique Lacroix, cited above.

85 unculture. He calls the desert “a sublime form that banishes all sociality, all sentimentality, all sexuality.” It is in the “non-referential desert” that the “inhumanity of our ulterior, asocial, superficial world immediately finds its aesthetic form” (America 5, 10). It is not just the physical, geological space that Baudrillard has in mind, but also a “mental desert” and a “purified form of social desertification” (5) that extends to all of America: “One always gets the impression that American cities, wherever they may be, are carved out of the desert” (“L’Amérique, de l’imaginaire au virtuel” 32). Furthermore, as I mentioned above, throughout the action of the play there are no clear spatial points of reference suggested, either in the abundant and detailed explicit stage directions, or in the implicit ones, that is, those located within the dialogue. Three short scenes take place in the village (a saloon, a dance hall, and the square), the two final scenes occur in the studio where the film is being shot, but most of the action evolves smack dab in the middle of the desert space of Zanskar, with references to set components conveyed as the “ruins of the Zanskar Circus” and a circus trailer. Thus the hyperreal, Disneyfied interior and exterior spaces suggesting an anachronistic American West complement the Hollywood movie set to signify places we can call illusion factories. These simulated places are surrounded by the supra-referential “foreign” (frontier) desert, a more or less featureless and undifferentiated natural landscape of illusion. In addition to these hyper- and supra-referential mimetic displays of space (those that are seen, staged), the characters diegetically refer to virtual, non-mimetic (unseen, unstaged) spaces, such as Marne-la-Vallée, the home of Eurodisney. All these spaces disconnect from any geographically or territorially defined sense of place, and this owes to the omnipresent figure of America in the postmodern play. In her examination of the drama of Harold Pinter and other British and American dramatists, Chaudhuri explains how the trope of America “redirects realist dramaturgy:”

86 America appears (here and elsewhere, as we shall see) as self-displacing place, a place in which the association of space with place has been ruptured. It is a place that denies the deep importance of place and celebrates instead the expansiveness and potentiality of surfaces. It is associated ... with limitlessness .... It outlines a style of life and a way of meaning quite other than that based on location. (Staging Place 116; author’s emphasis).

Either despite or because of the hyperreal mimetic references and allusions to a superficial, nominal “America” on one hand, and the rather gratuitous and casual diegetic references to actual places throughout the globe (Zanskar, the Philippines, Japan, Columbia, the African continent, and so on) there is an extraordinary absence of community in this play, one which I will explain through the notion of circus and the notion of clown, the individual at the very center of the circus space. For the French and other Europeans, the true clown has a metaphysical, supra-referential essence, one which is evidenced by a great number of American artists and entertainers, such as the Marx Brothers, Charlie Chaplin, and Jerry Lewis, and which is not entirely grasped by the American public, critics, and scholars alike. Americans in general are quite miffed by the French fascination for the slapstick antics of Jerry Lewis, and, on the whole, American scholars of theatre have not responded to Antonin Artaud’s early twentieth-century writings about the metaphysical dimension of the Marx Brothers’ comedy, especially their comic gestures. The poet Henri Michaux, best captures the Franco-European sensibility for the supra-referentiality of the clown in his poem, titled, quite simply, “Clown”: “Drained of the abscess of being someone.... Lost in a distant place (or not even that), with no name, with no identity” (782-83). The inauthentic, hyper-typical persona of the clown fails to develop a subjective identity and therefore short-circuits all forms of inter-subjectivity as well. So Jouanneau’s rather extreme clown-like representations of American characters have a profound metaphysical grounding that ultimately makes ideological sense.15 15 From a more empirical point of view, while American unculture itself does not

87 Being of a French design, the characters who inhabit the space of the play have a metaphysical edge, even as they impersonate the most consumed form of American culture. They are all “clown actors” (as Jouanneau puts it) in the act of clowning, and not just any sort of clowning but one that enacts a wholly foreign-European view toward American values: Benway (clownishly) plays business, Tom Dooley (clownishly) plays cowboy, Foxy (clownishly) plays Pinkerton detective. They are not “American” characters per se but, in all evidence, self-possessed foreign actors consumed by the role of playing, reproducing (or, shall we say “clo[w]ning”?) American icons, both off and on the movie set. They have no real history,16 they belong to no identifiable national culture, and they share no common interest or goal besides money and some unexplained need to negotiate its acquisition. Their actions, even those that inexplicably deliver them to the movie set in the final scene, are unmotivated. Another aspect of the play and “character trait” that makes the play more “American” is the fact that, despite its location far from American soil, there is absolutely no encounter with any local or indigenous population-and none is missed by the reader/ spectator, since indigenous people would imply indigenous culture/ community, which has no place in this supra-global “no-place.” However, there is an ironic twist to the collective clown-like nature of the characters. Yoyo and Lily, a one-armed black man and a onelegged tiny female, who appear only once in a brief scene about half way through the story, are “Clowns without Borders.” At the beginning of the scene, the principal characters are all involved in their private respond to the deeper non-identity of the clown, postmodern Americans seem increasingly to resort to some form of clownishness and not only because of their insatiable desire to be comically enter-tained in all their media: film, television, periodicals, the Web. And has anyone ever heard a political speech without a joke? This is not without social, political, and uncultural consequence. 16 This lack of “personal” history applies as well to the protagonist Morty who, in a long monologue of the first scene of the play, presents a nonsensical account of his personal history, his relation to Jerry Lewis, and his intent to carry out Jerry’s wish and produce the last scene of the film.

88 activities: Angie is shaking his piggy bank, Benway is calculating with his calculator, Foxy is pursuing his investigation, Dooley is studying, and Daisy is knitting. The stage directions ironically indicate that “The days are passing happily.” Following a drum roll, the “true” clowns, Yoyo and Lily, appear before the entire cast of self-involved characters with the following ironic lines: “People are having fun here” and “We’ve come at the right moment.” Then Yoyo declares: “I feel that you need us” (44). Apologizing for taking “such precious time” from the others, they tell a series of short and quite unfunny stories, and at the end of each they laugh together, but alone. The stage directions tell us that “That makes them laugh. But alone....And they laugh and they laugh. Still all by themselves” (47). At this point the reader/ spectator will realize that, despite the comic nature of the American hyper-types of the play, they themselves do not indulge: they never laugh. This realization is intensified by the image and words at the very beginning of the scene (noted above). Later, after another drum roll, the “true” clowns admit that the real reason they called on these good people was “because we’re lost” and they need help in finding their way (49). When asked where they are headed they confusingly utter first Rwanda, then Goma, then Zaïre, and then they say that they “must go wherever they are told to go... by the central office of Clowns without Borders... at Knoxville... in Texas” (49-50). Following an acrobatic routine called “Hurrah for life!” (“Youpi la vie!”) in which they both “miraculously” regain the use of their other limbs, they ask for some “loose change,” which they don’t receive. They are given some nonsensical directions to Goma... or Zaïre. When they ask if they can borrow a mule, Tom Dooley says “Ass’le, fuck you!,” draws his gun and chases them away (52). There is a great irony in this clown community of two: though named and functioning as “clowns”--and, more specifically, they are “clowns without borders”, a designation that increases their transnational, global nature--these two individuals manifest the only evidence of human relationship (a sense of community) in the play. Unlike the other characters who are essentially loners, they travel and

89 work together amiably and toward socially positive ends. Transcending the necessarily metaphysical dimension of the clown, who is “drained of the abcess of being someone,” from their “globalized” position, they confront a supra-global, non-community of hyperreal American icons and they act, in part, as a foil to it. They belong nonetheless to an itinerant, supra-global culture and a space “without borders.”

The Danish Film

Lars von Trier’s 2003 film Dogville is set in an isolated American town in the Rocky Mountains in the post-Depression 1930s. The story concerns a young woman, Grace (Nicole Kidman), on the run from mobsters, who winds up in the dead-end former mining town of Dogville, population 15. With the help and encouragement of the town’s young philosopher and spokesperson, Tom Edison Jr. (Paul Bettany), she is reluctantly harbored by the townspeople on a “trial” basis to determine whether her presence will not jeopardize the integrity, the economy, and the assumed unity of the small community. When a sheriff appears in the town--“for the first time in memory,” the narrator tells us--to post a wanted poster for the fugitive, the “good people of Dogville” demand a better deal from Grace (in terms of labor) in exchange for the risk they are taking in harboring her. After a second appearance of the law, Grace gets seriously violated. She becomes a slave to the needs of the townspeople and a body for the sexually deprived male characters to relieve their frustrations (some very disturbing rape scenes). When she attempts to escape with the ambivalent, wishy-washy assistance of Tom, she is chained and shackled and repeatedly harassed and raped. In the rather shocking conclusion of the story, the self-righteous townspeople learn that Grace had a secret, a very powerful and fatal one. While they knew she was a fugitive, they did not realize the all-powerful mobster boss she was fleeing was her father. On the order of their victim, they are all massacred by the mob. The beginning of the film will remind many viewers of the theme, the tone, and the theatricality of Thornton Wilder’s 1938 play Our Town,

90 a naturalistic and rather sentimental portrayal of life in small-town America. Despite the play’s outmoded thematics, it was theatrically quite innovative with its self-conscious narrator, flashbacks, and direct monologues through which the characters reveal themselves to the audience. Dogville too has a semi-omniscient, opinionated narrator who organizes the story somewhat novelistically into “chapters.” But it is a very theatrical film. Furthermore, if, as Elinor Fuchs believes, Our Town stands as the exemplar of American landscape plays, producing “the landscape stage” on which “landscape itself is the central object of contemplation” (12),17 the landscape design of Dogville is so theatrical that one might call the work a play-film. It’s about an American space, not the concrete place or the distinct national culture themselves, but the (mediated) impression these have made on the Danish director, who has never visited the U.S.; and I will argue here that its theatrical form is key to the conveyance of the film’s non-communal, supranational, supra-global message about America. This film is very different from The Crazies in its style of reimagined non-community, in its construction of an uncultured, pseudo-communal “Americanness.” In fact, the constructions of the character identities and the configuration of space counterpose those that we’ve seen in the play. Yet the filmmaker does with concentration, condensation, and static immobility--from a spatial point of view as well as from the point of view of the subjectivities of the characters--what the playwright has done with dispersion and displacement. In contrast to the abstraction of the desert and to the hyperreal community of ludic clown-characters who don’t so much inhabit it as perambulate its seemingly limitless surface area, the film presents the compaction of an introverted small-town America whose citizen-occupants are densely designed tragic figures, firmly bound to the limited space of 17 In The Death of Character, Fuchs asks “What happens to the presentation of time and space when we are no longer in a theater of character, when the human figure is no longer the single, perspectival ‘point’ of stage performance?” She responds, in part that “on the landscape stage time is emptied into space. This spatial stage is almost a necessary consequence of the waning of interest in character moving through narrative” (12).

91 their tiny community, constituting a different sort of hyperreal culture. While the hyperreality of the characters in Crazies (hyperreal icons of American showbiz and business cultures) functions primarily in the realm of the aesthetic, the characters of Dogville are primarily socially stigmatized hyper-types: stock figures from the American heartland, conscripted from the folk mythology of small-town Americana.18 In scene 6 of the film, Tom introduces the “good people” of Dogville to Grace in the following terms: Well this is where Olivia and June [the town’s two black residents] live. June is a cripple... They live here as a token of my dad’s broadmindedness. Chuck and Vera have seven children and they hate each other. Next door we have the Henson’s. They make a living from grinding the edges off cheap glasses to try to make them look expensive.... In the old stable Ben keeps his truck. He drinks and he visits the whorehouse once a month and he is ashamed of it. Martha she runs the mission house until the new preacher comes which will never happen. That leaves Ma Ginger and Gloria. They run this really expensive store, where they exploit the fact that nobody leaves town.

Then, pointing to sculpted figurines in the store window, Tom says: “Those awful figurines say more about the people in this town, than many words.” And like the sculpted figurines, the Dogvillians are on display in the “store window” of the Dogville sound stage. In contrast to Crazies, which treats a certain diaspora of American “characters,” the film demonstrates diaspora in reverse: the Dogvillians are trapped and deeply embedded in their “theatrical”-communal space, and this is one way it undermines notions of community in terms of the local, the national, and the global. This is certainly not a community in the 18 In semiotic terms, whereas the characters of both the play and the film are actants with the same actantial function within their respective “stories,” which is to create an image of America as illusionary hyperreality, they are, on the whole, different types of actors (not to be confused with the actual human individual playing the role). “Actor” relates to the particular traits of the character leading to the same actantial objective. In Crazies, the characters “act” (they are “actors”) as Disney characters whereas in Dogville they act as small-town, small-minded Americans. For a more thorough explanation of these semiotic terms see Michel Pruner’s L’Analyse du texte de théâtre, chapter 5.

92 sense that James Howard Kunstler defined it in his book on the loss of (the geography, architecture, and design of) community in the U.S. (The Geography of Nowhere): “a living organism based on a web of interdependencies” (186). There is nothing organic about Dogville, where the centripetal forces of geo- and socio-centricity inflict substantial tears in the web of communal relationships. In Dogville, we are at the very core of American unculture, the black hole of a totalitarian, moralistic and moralizing, conformity. Vertically isolated (perched on a mountaintop), the town is completely, notoriously severed from the rest of America as well as from the world. Furthermore, the spectator is treated to one heck of a com-prehensive view of the isolated Dogvillian micropolis. The set, consisting of the streets, houses, stores, and meeting house of the town, is not built but simply suggested out of chalklines. In this townwithout-walls suspended in unmarked, undifferentiated (unmediated, immediate) space, at the will of the camera the spectator can see all the characters in their respective “private” spaces at once. In response to this scenic design, the NY Times reviewer A. O. Scott (in a review titled “It Fakes a Village”) says that “everyone lives in a fundamental state of isolation, but no one is ever alone... even the most secret moments seem at the same time to occur in full public view.”19 The character-citizens of Dogville live in a “communal solitude” of American space, a consequence of American society’s investment in creating an illusion or simulacrum of community instead of the “real” thing. The relatively humorless, affectless characters are tragically aware that they are Dogvillians. Living alone together, so to speak, and unculturally in-bred, the density of their socio-centrism undermines any deep, differentially-defined, subjective identity. The resulting density in space and character identity is every bit as undifferentiated and hyperreal as the itinerant clowns in the vast desert of Zanskar. 19 One could likewise substitute the principle and practice of freedom for isolation and loneliness and say that in Dogville everyone lives in a fundamental state of freedom, but no one is ever free... even the most private actions seem at the same time to occur (or not) according to some public moral imperative.

93 Dogville is also different from Crazies in its suggestion of the supra-global. The American town is not deterritorialized, delocalized, or de-nationalized by virtue of the dispersed, extrinsic, non-distinct foreignness of its landscape and the supra-referential non-identity of its characters. On the contrary, it is simultaneously Americanized and supra-globalized by virtue of the oppressive weight of its social landscape and its characters. Like Crazies, there is little explicit reference to the U.S. or its culture. (The only evident, direct reference to American culture is the quite unfestive communal dinner for the July 4th holiday.) Life is reduced to a bare minimum and there is an extraordinary absence of reference to religion, to politics, and to pop culture (sports, music, etc.). But in Dogville the characters and the space suggest “America” by their heavy-handed moralizing and moralistic behavior, by their constant references to individual initiative, self reliance, money, work ethic, and commerce (a “quid pro quo” economy, Tom Edison remarks) rather than by any explicit references to America-the-place or America the (un)culture. Another suggestion of the supra-global dimension of the film is realized when the mob boss (Grace’s father, the Big Man) reveals that he, his daughter, and his henchmen exercise no less than absolute power over the life and the death of the townspeople of Dogville and probably any other community the mobsters decide to visit.20 Yet, from a European perspective, Dogville is a model of a paradoxically universalized American space. Reviewer A. O. Scott (quoted above) makes the following observation: What makes Dogville so fascinating, and so troubling, is the tension between the universal and the specific. “You mean, why not just call it Denmark?” Mr. von Trier responded, mockingly, when asked about his choice. Because, of course, it couldn’t possibly be Denmark. It’s America.... But the clothes and folkways of Dogville harken unmistakably back to the land of John Steinbek, Mark Twain 20 Roland Barthes understood the divine universality (supra-globality?) of the gangster world as portrayed in the cinema, a world where “‘cool” is the surest sign of effectiveness” and the “cool” is communicated through gesture rather than through words: “gangsters and gods do not speak, they nod, and everything is fulfilled” (45).

94 and Sherwood Anderson, whose observations have been filtered through Mr. von Trier’s equally unmistakable European sensibility. The movie presents a curious blend of the alien and the familiar: it is a fantasy of America, but not an American fantasy.

Von Trier has written a story about a “specific” American town at a historical time when the U.S. had yet to become the imperial power that it was in 2003.21 The story confronts the provincial, chauvinistic Dogvillians with the cosmopolitan “foreign” intrusion of Grace and her mobster cohorts. Curiously, the European sensibility of the filmmaker suggests that the attitude and the behavior of post-Depression America hardly differs from those of America the superpower. The Dogvillians are socioculturally introverted and one-dimensional in the sense that their subjective identities are tied to the common denominator of their belonging to the town. Consequently, they flatly refuse to recognize, accept, or to learn from the “strangeness” of the other, and they deal with the problem of Grace on their own exploitative terms. She can only be integrated into the community on the quid pro quo basis of her service to the “community” of Dogville. A thorough analysis of space and characters in this film is well beyond the scope of this already lengthy essay. So let me return to my focus on the theatrically reinforced presence of this space, a strategy the filmmaker employed to thrust the unculture of this non-community in the face of the international audience he expected. Despite the abstract quality of the set, the entire communal space is represented on stage, not just a building or two; it is uniquely and theatrically (re) presented as a space delimited only by the obscurity of its borders, and it is theatrically presented, or better ostended, to the audience. Umberto Eco wrote about theatrical presence as a form of ostension, where more or less real or actual things get “picked up among the existing physical bodies” and shown or ostended. Just as a man asking 21 In fact, Dogville is the first of a trilogy. The second in the series, Manderlay, which appeared in 2005, takes place in the same historical timeframe. It’s about Grace’s intrusion into an isolated, ingrown American non-community of post-Emancipation African-Americans who are still enslaved by their masters.

95 his wife for advice on how he should dress for the evening might show his tie framed by his jacket and say, “Like this?” According to Eco, “Ostension is one of the various ways of signifying, consisting in derealizing a given object in order to make it stand for an entire class” (103). So let’s consider theatre’s unique ability among the arts to “ostend” not just things but places that contain things and characters, and its ability to transform and de-realize the “real” stuff the world is made of, including communal space. Let’s consider the importance of ostending (“Like this?”) the entire town and all its human and architectural components, not just the room of a house, the square of a town, or the inside of a shop--the part to suggest the whole--as in traditional theatre. In this expansive stage space, we get the impression that we are dealing with “real space” (without the artistic or technological filter of cinematic naturalism), just as the action of some plays and films conform to “real time”--a two-hour play, for example, covers action that would take two hours in “real” life. Not despite but owing to the absence of the walls (allowing for the simultaneous display of both interior and exterior life, action, inaction, and objects, all of which are on-stage and on view for the duration of the film), and despite the schematic chalklines representing the external borders of homes, buildings, and streets, one feels that the characters (and the actors) do “live” here and that this is their entire world.22 For Umberto Eco, theatre offers a de-realized “real” model of a thing. In Dogville the film, uncharacteristically, the “thing” that is theatrically ostended is the contents of the stage: 22 In the director’s commentary that is included with the DVD version of the film, Von Trier asserts his intent to more or less “authenticate” the communal effect of his community of actors: “The team of actors will be on stage all the time, because there are no walls between the buildings. We are going to live together.” This strategy is apparently in accord with the “Dogme 95” school of filmaking, of which Von Trier is one of the pioneers. The Dogme 95 “anti-bourgeois” methods inlcuded the use of a handheld camera and a ban on the use of technology and technique--such as sophisticated optical work and filters, superficial action, and extraneous sound and music--to create illusion and commercialize the end product.

96 the life of the town in its entirety. If the theatrical presentation of the town is to a certain extent denaturalized by abstraction (note the chalklines), it also acquires an extraordinary form of “absolute” and hyperreal authenticity through the comprehensive completeness of its presentation. Consequently, the simultaneous blend of realization and de-realization contributes to the hyperreality of Dogville: the absolute illusion of the cloistered, reclusive community. Furthermore, Von Trier employs additional strategies to simultaneously redouble the sense of the community’s socio-centric autonomy (a collective version of rugged egocentric individualism) and the hyperrealist ostension of Dogville. Exits from and entrances to the town, by Dogvillians as well as outsiders, are exceptionally limited. (As noted above, when the sheriff visits Dogville to post the wanted poster for Grace, the narrator tells us it is “for the first time in memory.”) Few townspeople ever leave town and they rarely speak of life on the outside. More acutely, within the space of the town, the mission house, where all the citizens of Dogville physically (and grudgingly) come together to discuss the “problem of Grace” (no pun intended), functions as a concentrated space within an already concentrated space, one which ostends and reveals the morally rotten yet self-righteous core of this coreless community. As an additional theatrical device, Dogville uses a central character to essentially define the space. As I argued above, this is a “landscape” play-film, one which foregrounds space over character. In this type of work, the primary character-function de-emphasizes the psychological to reveal the configuration and the content of space. At the very beginning of the movie, Tom Edison Jr. assumes this function by guiding the spectator through the town and acting as a liaison between the various spatial components (streets, dwellings, gardens, mission house). He’s a writer-philosopher-spokesperson of the community who organizes weekly communal gatherings at the mission house, “meetings on moral rearmament,” as the narrator puts it in scene 1. In the first scene we see him stroll from one residence to another greeting the townspeople and confirming their intent to be present at the evening’s town meeting, where, in his writer-philosopher way,

97 he will gently chastise the community for its lack of “acceptance” and “openness” and its refusal to be communal. Almost immediately, however, after Tom convinces the townspeople to harbor Grace (ostensibly, in order to “illustrate” their failure to be communal), he begins to surrender his function as spatial liaison and community catalyst to Grace. In Dogville, Grace embodies foreignness, one that only fits the local culture to the extent it can conform to it and be exploited by it. Not so much despite her condition as a refugee outsider as because of it, Grace becomes the community’s common interest. From the moment of her arrival, all the town meetings (the coming together of all of the town’s individuals) will deal with the question of the presence and the condition--the “inclusion” and/or the exclusion--of Grace. When the townspeople decide to allow her to work to repay their generosity for allowing her to stay among them, she galvanizes what seems to be a genuine communal spirit, inspiring the townspeople toward “authentic” action, albeit action that exploits her labor and her sexuality. But Grace “unites” the individual places and individuals themselves in a way that contrasts with Tom’s passive, pseudointellectual approach to the same objective. In scenes reminiscent of the ones in which Tom earlier made his rounds though the town, Grace links the individual “family” units in an active way, i.e., by her labor. As the story progresses and it becomes evident that there are risks involved in the harboring of the fugitive, the townspeople seize the opportunity to significantly increase their share of the quid pro quo. When the exploitation becomes extreme, the camera offers us, in accelerated motion, a high angle God’s eye view of Grace as she works her way from residence to residence, job to job. The story and the community undergo a number of structural shifts, all of which are remarked by the narrator and effected with respect to Grace. In effect, the common bond among Dogvillians will be determined by their joint acceptance, exploitation, or rejection of Grace, bearing in mind that the “acceptance,” or “inclusion,” of Grace is always provisional and contingent upon her ability to fit the “quid

98 pro quo” economy of Dogvillian culture and to evolve in response to the “needs” of the community. First, after a short period of social tension when the self-reliant townspeople insist they are in no need of any kind of help, Grace is accepted grudgingly and on a trial basis. Second, once the people realize the benefit of her labor, she is accepted openly, and, in scene 11, Grace tells Tom she really likes it in Dogville. Third, following a visit by the sheriff who is looking for Grace, from a “business perspective” she becomes more risky and therefore more “costly” to the town. She toils harder and for longer hours and less pay, and the men take a bonus dividend by repeatedly raping her. Fourth, she is shackled and held prisoner after she attempts to escape. Finally, with Tom’s encouragement, a town meeting is called and Grace tells the group the “ugly truth” about themselves and the community. In response to Grace’s “truth,” the entire community (including Tom, who had previously avowed his affection for Grace) betrays Grace and calls the mobsters for two reasons: to rid themselves of the truthbearing refugee and to receive a reward. Little do they know that the Big Man (head mobster or godfather) is her father, who is trying to draw his daughter back to the life for which she was evidently destined: the supreme power to change the world, the power to punish. In the concluding philosophical (theological) discussion with her father over the sin of hubris and the frailty and moral acountability of human beings, Grace tells him that there is not as great a difference as he’d like to believe between his mobster community and Dogvillians. To the audience, however, it becomes manifestly clear that there are at least two significant differences. The first is that, like the metaphysical Clowns without Borders of Crazies, the deified, universalized group of mobsters seem to constitute more of a true “community,” one based on real human relationship and interdependencies, trust, and on a sense of irony present in the tensions and contradictions in the constitution of their social group and the source of their supreme power. The other difference, of course, is their absolute power, and, as Roland Barthes saw it, the “cool gesture” through which they apply that power.

99 After a protracted discussion with her father about Grace’s preference for the doctrine of forgiveness and her refusal to resort to revenge and punishment, Grace changes her mind and decides that “If there’s any town this world would be better without, this is it.” A form of “Old Testament” divine retribution wins out and, with Godlike indifference and a number of cool gestures, the townspeople are massacred and the town is burned down. At the end of the theatrical film, following the massacre of each and every “good citizen of Dogville,” including the young children and a baby, all the structures and the chalklines are erased from the space, and all that remains is the chalkline of the dog, Moses. Grace spares him and says, “He’s so angry because somebody took his bone.” So: Who put the “dog” in Dogville?

Conclusion

Like Crazies, we see in Dogville a European fabrication of an imagined American “community” in a given space, and in the case of Dogville, the space is more unambiguously an American one. In Crazies the space is remarkably supra-referential, highly suggestive of the hyperreality of Disneyworld and Las Vegas so dear to the critical theories of Eco and Baudrillard--an “absolute fake” desired and preferred by the cultural consumer-subject--and the characters, played presumably by nonAmericans, represent American hyper-types, that is, not individualized social beings but iconic American figures who aesthetically play with and within a transposed American hyperreality. In Dogville, the space (a tiny, dense, and tragically flawed American non-community) and the characters (more dreadfully and absolutely American than “realistic” American individuals) are not supra- but hyper-referential. The film has a didactic dimension that the play does not, or at least one that Crazies conceals well below its recreational and ludic surface. Consequently Dogville’s hyperreality issues largely from its oblique resemblance to TV-vérité, or reality TV, which Baudrillard has referred to as a “‘truth’ experiment,” which produces “an excess of meaning”

100 (Simulations 50). As re-imagined through European eyes, Dogville’s excess of meaning reverses the hyper-ideality of U.S. utopia. The Danish filmmaker decided to erase the uncultured American “good citizens” of Dogville from the face of the earth because they were guilty of a number of moral iniquities that had universal and global repercussions, i.e., on the scale of world-totality. Their greatest crime was living too locally while thinking supra-globally. They refused to ponder the world without--not only Grace but all extra-Dogvillians-on its own terms. A kind of hyperreality emerges from their uncultural, socio-centric belief in an American brand of utopia (their claim to communitarianism), one that was self-invented, based as it was on the self-satisfaction derived from seeing themselves as good, honest, hardworking, simple folk who mind their own business. As communal martyrs, they shared the dubious communal “values” of poverty, self reliance, and rugged individualism. While the result is not quite the hyperreality of Disneyworld or Las Vegas, the irony of community is still missing, because the presumptuous, self-righteous individuals of the community have no doubts about who they are and what they and their community represent to the world. In the grotesque utopia of Dogville there is a marked absence of self doubt. This was evident in the community’s reaction to Grace’s “truth” speech. The resistance to self doubt was acutely apparent in Tom Edison, the town’s pseudo-intellectual, mock-eloquent spokesperson. As Grace put it--not without a touch of irony--just before Tom betrayed her to the gangters, “It’s not a crime to doubt yourself, Tom, but it’s wonderful that you don’t” (scene 42). Living locally and attempting to write universally, Tom is also a spokesperson for the greater American community of today, the one whose self love prohibits it from thinking globally in the mode of world-totality, as Edouard Glissant might put it. From a global point of view on the “world situation,” Edouard Glissant believes that we must “accustom ourselves to the idea that we can no longer live as we once did in the mode of our unique root identity,

101 which kills everything around it. We have to get habituated to the idea that if I can change my own identity by exchanging it with some Other, that does not mean that I will disappear as an identifiable person. It does not mean that I will disappear into some gaping hole.” Instead, we should “get use to the idea that the identities of human peoples today are relational identities--what I call rhizomatic identities, that is, the root that digs down but that also extends its branches laterally toward other roots” (112; author’s emphasis). Edward Said says much the same thing when he cites a “hauntingly beautiful passage” by Hugo of St. Victor, a twelfth-century monk from Saxony. In an attempt to profile the ideal cosmopolite, Hugo affirms that the quintessential global citizen is neither he who remains attached to his homeland, nor he who accepts every foreign place as his own, but “he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign place” (335). Therefore, the first duty of the global citizen is to acknowledge and accept the contradictory nature of all cultures, including his/her own, and to see the whole world as a strange place/community with “relational identities” that require a constant critical, intellectual vigilance, if not struggle, in which selfdoubt is of the essence. Despite some reservations stemming from his postmodern uncertainty, Baudrillard would concur with Glissant and Said. Employing the notion of “truth” in his version of the problem of world totality, Americans, he says, have an “ignorance of the evil genius of things,” preferring to see the dynamics of human culture as “plain and straightforward.” Consequently, “Americans are fascinated by the yellow-skinned peoples in whom they sense a superior form of cunning, a higher form of that absence of truth which frightens them” (America 85). The Oriental’s superior cunning derives from a belief and an acceptance of the absence of truth, implying self doubt. As with Hugo’s perfect global citizen--a special, hybrid type of “clown without borders”--success in the making of a world culture will not result from either a belief in or a search for the truth, but from a recognition and understanding of its absence. The Europeans believe that, in opposition to their own dialectically oriented cultures, the undialectical unculture

102 of America sees it otherwise: You’re either with the U.S. or you’re with the enemy. So in the end, European artists seem to be saying that America has something to learn from a European style of imagining culture, beginning with a dialectical and ironic sense of one’s own national community, one that can be extended to the globe.

103 Works Cited

••Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Rev. Ed. New York: Verso, 1991. ••Barthes, Roland. The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies. Trans. Richard Howard. Berkeley: U of California P, 1997. ••Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Trans. Paul Foss, et al. New York: Semiotext(e), 1983. ••---. America. Trans. Chris Turner. New York: Verso, 1988. ••---. “L’Amérique, de l’imaginaire au virtuel.” L’Amérique des français. Ed. Christine Fauré and Tom Bishop. Paris: Ed. François Bourin, 1992. 29-36. ••Chaudhuri, Una. “Land/ Scape/ Theory.” Land/ Scape/ Theater. Ed. Elinor Fuchs and Una Chaudhuri. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2002. 11-29. ••---. Staging Place: The Geography of Modern Drama. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1995. ••Dogville. Dir. Lars von Trier. Lions Gate DVD, 2003. 177 min. ••Eco, Umberto. “Interpreting Drama.” The Limits of Interpretation. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1990. 101-10. ••Essif, Les. “Dialectical Representations of (Undialectical) American ‘Unculture’ in Late Twentieth Century French Drama.” Dalhousie French Studies 67 (Summer 2004). 143-54. ••---. “Lost in Space: American Characters as Creatures of a Culture/Dramaturgy of Abstraction in Koltès’s 1977 Play Sallinger. Mosaic 39:1 (March 2006). 79-97. ••Frank, Thomas. “Thus Spake Zinsmeister.” New York Times 25 August 2006, natl. ed.: A23. ••Fuchs, Elinor. The Death of Character: Perspectives on Theater after Modernism. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1996. ••Gandhi, Mahatma. The Words of Ghandi. Ed. Richard Attenborough. New York: Newmarket Press, 1982. ••Giles, Paul. Virtual Americas: Transnational Fiction and the Transatlantic Imagery. Durham, N.C.: Duke UP, 2002. ••Glissant, Edouard. “French Language in the Face of Creolization.” French Civilization and Its Discontents: Nationalism, Colonialism, Race. Ed. Tyler Stovall and Georges van den Abbeele. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003. 105-13. ••Jarry, Alfred. “Discours d’Alfred Jarry.” Tout Ubu, Paris: Livre de Poche, 1985. 19-21. ••Jouanneau, Joël. Interview. With Dominique Lacroix. Theatre program for Les Dingues de Knoxville. Dir. Dominique Bluzet, Théâtre du Gymnase, Marseille, France. Jan. 19-Feb. 6, 1999. ••---. Les Dingues de Knoxville. Arles, France: Actes Sud, 1999. ••---. Les Dingues de Knoxville. Dir. Dominque Bluzet. Théâtre du Gymnase, Marseille, France. Jan 19-Feb. 6, 1999. ••Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993. ••Michaux, Henri. “Clown.” The Penguin Book of French Poetry 1820-1950. New York: Penguin, 1990.

104 ••Pinter, Harold. “Art, Truth and Politics.” PMLA 121.3 (May 2006). 811-18. ••Pruner, Michel. L’Analyse du texte de théâtre. Paris: Nathan, 2001. ••Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism. New York: Vintage, 1994. ••Scott, A. O. Rev. of Dogville, dir. Lars von Trier. New York Times Online 21 March 2004. 14 Feb. 2006 . ••Tocqueville, Alexis de. Democracy in America. Ed. J. P. Mayer. Trans. George Lawrence. New York: Harper Collins, 2000.

Nuevas tecnologías y gramáticas viejas. Decolonialidad y globalizaciones alternativas Michael Handelsman “El problema de las sociedades democráticas en la época global no es tener insuficiente información o insuficiente acceso a la información, sino tener demasiada información de la que comprendemos demasiado poco”. —Benjamin Barber “La democracia requiere reflexión, paciencia y reconsideración”. —Benjamin Barber

Sin duda, el interés en el tema de las comunicaciones globales y las nuevas tecnologías se puso de relieve en marzo del 2007, cuando gran parte del mundo de hispanohablantes celebró los ochenta años de Gabriel García Márquez, junto con los cuarenta años desde la publicación de su obra maestra, Cien años de soledad. Se recordará que García Márquez comenzó esa novela al referirse a una familia de gitanos que llegaba cada marzo a Macondo con las nuevas invenciones del mundo. Al enterarse de los imanes, José Arcadio Buendía decidió dedicar sus esfuerzos a la extracción del oro del centro de la tierra, una empresa fútil, pero que prefiguró una fascinación con la tecnología que determinaría, en no poca medida, el destino de Macondo. Aún más sugerente, tal vez, que las noticias sobre los imanes, lo fue el telescopio instalado durante una de las visitas de marzo en la

106 entrada de una de las carpas de los gitanos y que, por sólo cinco reales, permitía que la gente del pueblo contemplara a una de las gitanas sentada al otro extremo de Macondo, pero que parecía estar tan cerca como la mano de uno. Melquíades, el jefe de esta banda de gitanos, proclamaba: “La ciencia ha eliminado las distancias” (10). De hecho, según Melquíades: “Dentro de poco, el hombre podrá ver lo que ocurre en cualquier lugar de la tierra, sin moverse de su casa” (10). A pesar de las advertencias de Melquíades acerca de las limitaciones de algunas de las invenciones más nuevas, como, por ejemplo, los imanes o largavistas, José Arcadio Buendía no sería jamás el mismo; la tecnología y las ciencias se convertirían en su obsesión, pese al disgusto sentido por su esposa práctica, Úrsula Iguarán. Lamentablemente, ya se había decidido el futuro de Macondo. Casi cuarenta años después de que Melquíades apareciera en Cien años de soledad, otro libro fue publicado en el que se anunciaron parecidas novedades de los avances tecnológicos. Me refiero a Thomas L. Friedman y su bestseller titulado The World is Flat (2005), en el que también proclama que las ciencias —es decir, la informática— han eliminado todas las distancias, ya que el hombre tiene ahora acceso a todos los conocimientos habidos y por haber, todo lo cual está a la mano y disponible desde las comodidades de la casa de uno. Concretamente, se lee: “Nunca antes en la historia del planeta ha tenido tanta gente —independientemente— la capacidad de encontrar tanta información sobre tantos temas y sobre tantas personas distintas [. . .]. No hay mayor nivelador que la idea de poner todos los conocimientos del mundo a la disposición de todos, en todo lugar y a toda hora” (178; traducción mía). En efecto, solamente el descubrimiento del hielo —“el gran invento de nuestro tiempo” (23)—podría haber eclipsado la fascinación que José Arcadio Buendía seguramente hubiera sentido al conocer Google,¡el gran invento de nuestro tiempo! La lección que se le escapó a José Arcadio, y a los muchos otros José Arcadios que poblarían las múltiples historias de todos los Macondos, tanto del pasado como del presente, fue que: “La tecnología no puede salvarnos de nosotros mismos; sólo puede reflejar, con todo candor,

107 quiénes somos” (Barber 62; traducción mía). De la misma manera, otro escritor colombiano, Germán Arciniegas, comprendió muy bien la atracción de la tecnología y sus peligros cuando, en 1931, escribió un ensayo sobre las maravillas del automóvil —todavía otro “gran invento de nuestro tiempo”— y proclamó: “Jamás máquina alguna ha producido una transformación tan profunda como el automóvil” (257). De hecho, “el automóvil es veloz. Ha hecho al mundo más activo”. Pero, debajo de “este brillo” y nuevo poder de trasladarse de un lugar a otro, “lo que hay es el vértigo. El vértigo que ha contagiado hasta a los humildes. El automóvil ha sido el instrumento popular de esta modalidad de nuestro tiempo. Quemar las horas y los días, tirar de viejas ideas, renunciar a ciertos escrúpulos, echar a un lado algunos detalles de moral. El asunto es pasar etapas, devorar millas” (261). Sea que estemos hablando de imanes, telescopios, automóviles o computadoras, Benjamin Barber ha señalado que “aunque nos gusta pensar en la tecnología como un modificador radical —hasta como un determinante absoluto— de cómo está formada la sociedad, las nuevas tecnologías tienden, más bien, a reflejar y no a alterar las sociedades que las producen”. Es decir, “si los momentos dominantes de la sociedad moderna […] son primordialmente comerciales, privados, materialistas y consumistas […], pues las tecnologías también serán comerciales, privadas, materialistas y consumistas” (62-63; traducción mía). Queda claro que, mientras las viejas gramáticas del comportamiento y pensamiento siguen definiendo cada ola de las nuevas tecnologías, éstas sólo exacerbarán las distancias que continúan separando a la humanidad, formando ineluctablemente dos grupos distintos: los que tienen y los que no tienen. Mi referencia a las gramáticas viejas ha de leerse en el contexto de la colonialidad; es decir, los vestigios de un sistema colonial fundado en paradigmas racistas y racializados que establecieron las principales relaciones sociales del poder, del saber y del ser de la modernidad. Aníbal Quijano, entre otros, ha puntualizado que la colonialidad del poder y la colonialidad del saber jerarquizaron las identidades sociales entre seres humanos y naciones, basándose en una perspectiva

108 eurocéntrica vinculada al capitalismo y al proyecto de la modernidad (Walsh y León 1). Si entendemos por tecnología otra forma de lenguaje que nos condiciona a interpretar, valorar y construir identidades sociales y relaciones de poder, aprehenderemos la medida en que dicha tecnología tiene que ver tanto con el poder y la dominación como con las oportunidades y el acceso. Esta distinción marca, en efecto, un camino resbaloso por el cual se nos enseñan los significados del progreso, la libertad, el desarrollo, el bien y el mal. Por lo tanto, es esencial que se contextualice social y culturalmente la tecnología. ¿De qué otra manera hemos de interpretar la celebración que hace Friedman de las ventajas y oportunidades universales inherentes a la amplia red de la informática, que supuestamente está nivelando al mundo? Concretamente, este nuevo mensajero del “gran invento de nuestro tiempo” constata: “Detengámonos aquí por un momento e imaginemos lo beneficioso que sería para el mundo, y para América, si la China rural, la India y África se convirtieran en pequeñas Américas o Uniones Europeas respecto a la economía y a las oportunidades” (465-66; traducción mía). Además de la aceptación contundente de Friedman de la centralidad de lo europeo y de los modelos supuestamente “americanos” de “la vida y la busca de la felicidad”, algunos lectores talvez se vuelvan incrédulos al descubrir que los líderes de aquellos países que han aceptado, con éxito, el desafío del Nuevo Orden Mundial con mercados abiertos y democracia —post 1989 y la caída del Muro de Berlín—: […] hicieron frente […] al hecho irrefutable de que más mercados abiertos y competitivos son el único vehículo sostenible para que una nación salga de la pobreza, porque son la única garantía de que nuevas ideas, tecnologías y mejores prácticas llegarán con fluidez a su país y que las empresas privadas, y hasta el gobierno, tendrán el incentivo competitivo y la flexibilidad para adoptar esas nuevas ideas y convertirlas en empleos y productos (399; la traducción y lo subrayado son míos).

109 Por abrazar un solo paradigma de pensamiento —el consumo como un sine qua non absoluto—, Friedman no solamente reduce la pobreza a sus componentes más superficialmente económicos, sino que también confunde lo que él repetidamente llama “nuevas ideas” con las gramáticas viejas del saber y del poder. Para muchos latinoamericanos, la pobreza no es solamente una cuestión de “empleos y productos” o “mejores prácticas”. Los derechos territoriales, la autonomía, las prácticas ancestrales, la educación bilingüe, la interculturalidad y la decolonialidad son algunas de las fuerzas que impulsan muchas de las luchas populares del continente por la justicia social y por los cambios sistémicos fundamentales de las maneras tradicionales de participación, propiedad y ciudadanía. Indudablemente, hay una división fundamental entre el mundo nivelado de Friedman y las aspiraciones de muchos latinoamericanos, que buscan otro tipo de soluciones o alternativas a los problemas de siempre. Por un lado, hay lo que Leslie Sklair señala como “la culturaideología del consumo”, que ha sido promocionada por una revolución de los medios de comunicación (171) cuyos orígenes datan, en parte, desde un informe preparado en 1964 por el Comité de Asuntos Exteriores de Estados Unidos y titulado Ganando la Guerra Fría. La ofensiva ideológica de Estados Unidos. Se lee en dicho informe: Respecto de los asuntos exteriores, ciertos objetivos se realizarán mejor mediante el contacto directo con la gente de otros países y no con sus gobiernos. A través de las técnicas y los instrumentos de los medios de comunicación, hoy es posible llegar a importantes sectores de mucha influencia de los pueblos de otros países, para informarles, afectar sus actitudes y, talvez, lograr encaminarlos hacia algunas acciones determinadas (171)1.

Según Sklair, gran parte del comportamiento preferido que se describe en el informe mencionado arriba se llevaría a cabo mediante aquellas innovaciones específicamente diseñadas para promover el consumo como un modo de vida anclado en las formas más extremas del individualismo. Hay que tomar en cuenta que el análisis de 1 Sklair identifica a Armand Mattelart como su fuente para esta cita.

110 Friedman acerca del mundo nivelado se fundamenta en la capacidad de los individuos de aprovechar plenamente sus oportunidades: “Los individuos que nunca se habían imaginado que pudieran tener una presencia en el espacio virtual […], de repente, descubrieron que pueden tener un efecto global en el mundo, como individuos” (232; traducción mía). Aunque Friedman hace una que otra referencia a la colaboración y a la comunidad, su insistencia en el individualismo como principio determinante para el éxito y la democratización —un principio que normalmente él subraya cuando celebra la nivelación del mundo— parecería confirmar la noción de que “la nueva tecnología maravillosa se ha convertido, rápidamente, en un elemento más que fortalece una vieja y comercial sociedad de consumo” (Barber 68; traducción mía). Hay que tener en cuenta que este paradigma de individualismo y consumismo va en contra de muchos de los movimientos sociales más significativos de América Latina que actualmente están desafiando las gramáticas viejas de la colonialidad. El bestseller de Friedman es un doloroso recuerdo de que “la democracia representativa, fundada en el pluralismo de intereses y de grupos, y arraigada en el individualismo y la teoría de los derechos, presta muy poca atención a las comunidades en primera instancia, y sus defensores difícilmente se considerarán beneficiados de cualquier bien que la nueva tecnología pueda realizar en nombre de dichas comunidades” (Barber 65; traducción mía).2 La distancia que separa a los del mundo nivelado de los movimientos sociales progresistas de la decolonialidad, que actualmente se encuentran en tales países como Bolivia y Ecuador, se resume claramente en el libro de James Petras titulado Los intelectuales y la globalización. Al referirse a lo que él clasifica como la cuarta ola de las luchas populares de Latinoamérica, luchas unificadas por su 2 De nuevo, citar a Friedman es pertinente cuando se trata de los esfuerzos por contrarrestar un individualismo que merma alternativas locales diseñadas para confrontar las fuerzas de la globalización: “En el futuro, la globalización va a ser impulsada cada vez más por los individuos que comprenden el mundo nivelado, que se adaptan rápidamente a sus procesos y tecnologías y que comienzan a caminar adelante… (215; traducción mía).

111 oposición común ante los intentos de Estados Unidos de recolonizar América Latina mediante su estrategia de libre comercio —o ALCA como se la conoce en América Latina—, él resalta una propuesta muy diferente para tratar los problemas de la pobreza y la marginalización ya mencionadas en este ensayo. En vez de “las nuevas tecnologías” y “las mejores prácticas”, estos movimientos sociales alternativos son de una singularidad destacable debido a “su independencia del control de partidos electorales, su alcance de amplitud continental, su poderosa red internacional de solidaridad a través de varios foros sociales y organizaciones” (61). Pero aún de más importancia, “son su profundo enraizamiento en movimientos locales y su participación en luchas concretas, basados en un análisis derivado de las especificidades de la historia, cultura, estructura de clase, características étnicas y de género de cada país” (61).3 Para los propósitos de mis reflexiones sobre “Nuevas tecnologías y gramáticas viejas. Decolonialidad y globalizaciones alternativas”, lo que más llama la atención con la lectura de Petras acerca de esta cuarta ola de insurgencias populares en América Latina es la obvia convergencia entre iniciativas locales comunitarias y tecnologías basadas en la web. No cabe duda que su referencia a “la poderosa red de solidaridad internacional” ha de ser el producto de la conectividad del Internet. Por consiguiente, la decolonialidad como práctica y proceso no debe sugerir una negación o rechazo de la tecnología, sino, más bien, hay que comprenderla como una apropiación crítica de sus usos. Pero dicha apropiación marca un camino resbaloso. Como ha puntualizado Aram Aharonian, periodista uruguayo y director de Telesur: Nadie duda de la necesidad de impulsar medios comunitarios, espacios realmente horizontales de información y formación que sean constructores de ciudadanía. Estos medios son un paso en la dirección de la democratización, pero, por sí 3 El carácter antiimperialista de estas luchas populares es un aspecto integral de la interpretación de la globalización que hace Petras: “La lucha por las reformas en este movimiento está ligada a cambios estructurales del imperio y, en algunos casos, del régimen de propiedad” (256).

112 mismos, no son suficientes. Podemos tener centenares de medios comunitarios, pero si el 93 por ciento de la audiencia está controlada por una estructura monopólica de los medios corporativos, será poco lo que habremos avanzado hacia la democratización (137).

Una vez más, vemos la necesidad apremiante de contextualizar la tecnología y sus usos en lo que respecta a las relaciones sociales de poder, tanto nacional como transnacionalmente. No hemos de pasar por alto la advertencia de Aharonian sobre los medios y los monopolios que minan la democratización; de hecho, Leslie Sklair ha puesto de manifiesto estas mismas preocupaciones al analizar la naturaleza contradictoria de la informática y del desarrollo que existe en los países del llamado Tercer Mundo. Luego de reconocer la importancia de tales innovaciones como: (1) computadoras más eficientes en base a sus costos, (2) la miniaturización que “ha hecho las computadoras más prácticas para los pequeños usuarios”, (3) los avances con la programación que “han aumentado la adaptación del software a las necesidades de los usuarios y que han mejorado las posibilidades de que la tecnología informática apunte a los problemas de desarrollo de los países del Tercer Mundo” y (4) “la integración de la televisión, las computadoras y las telecomunicaciones que haría posible una red global para la transmisión de información y que abriría nuevas posibilidades para los países del Tercer Mundo, que carecen de adecuados recursos y tecnologías”, Sklair no ha vacilado en recordar a sus lectores que “la globalización capitalista ha creado una separación digital, señalando que el efecto de la polarización de clases opera en las comunicaciones como también en muchas otras áreas de la existencia cotidiana” (180; traducción mía). Parecería que la capacidad de superar aquella separación digital, y las muchas otras separaciones que le restan poder a gran parte de América Latina, emergerá cuando las comunidades desarrollen sus propias estrategias para pensar localmente mientras actúan globalmente, a diferencia de pensar globalmente mientras actúan localmente. Esta distinción es crítica. En su introducción a Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media, Shohat

113 y Stam ha planteado: “Si bien es cierto que las comunidades sin poder pueden descodificar la programación dominante mediante una perspectiva de resistencia, lo pueden hacer solamente en la medida en que su vida colectiva y memoria histórica hayan proporcionado un marco alternativo de entendimiento” (5; traducción mía). Este mismo mensaje ha sido expresado por Aram Aharonian, director de Telesur: “Estamos convencidos de que no hay ninguna forma de cambiar la realidad si no comenzamos a verla como es, porque para poder transformarla, hay que empezar por asumirla” (134-35). El significado de “asumir la realidad” es un componente integral de la decolonialidad y la creación de globalizaciones alternativas. Según Catherine Walsh, de la Universidad Andina Simón Bolívar, Sede Quito: La decolonialidad no es algo necesariamente distinto de la descolonización; más bien, representa una estrategia que va más allá de la transformación —lo que implica dejar de ser colonizado—, apuntando mucho más que a la transformación, a la construcción o a la creación. […] La decolonialidad encuentra su razón en los esfuerzos de confrontar desde “lo propio” y desde lógicas-otras y pensamientosotros a la deshumanización, el racismo y la racialización, y la negación y destrucción de los campos otros del saber. Por eso, su meta no es la incorporación o la superación (tampoco simplemente la resistencia), sino la reconstrucción radical de seres, del poder y saber, es decir, la creación de condiciones radicalmente diferentes de existencia, conocimiento y del poder que podrían contribuir a la fabricación de sociedades distintas (24).

La explicación que ofrece Walsh acerca de la decolonialidad se concentra en su trabajo con organizaciones comunitarias afroecuatorianas de Esmeraldas y del Valle del Chota y, en particular, con Juan García, una figura prominente de las comunidades de afrodescendientes quien prefiere identificarse como “un trabajador del proceso”. El énfasis que Walsh pone en la reconstrucción de las relaciones sociales, realizada desde un pensamiento-otro y desde epistemologías y filosofías-otras, todo lo cual apunta al pensamiento y a las epistemologías y filosofías de ruptura y desestabilización (Walsh y León 11), evoca la descripción que hace Aharonian del objetivo

114 principal de Telesur:

Se trata de promover la diversidad cultural con el fin de fortalecer la memoria histórica y la identidad colectiva de nuestros pueblos, de fomentar la participación protagónica, la organización y articulación de los pueblos, mediante la creación de espacios para la difusión de las voces de nuestras organizaciones sociales. Se trata de democratizar la producción de contenidos para garantizar esa diversidad y pluralidad (137)4.

La distancia que separa esta descripción de la democratización y la tecnología de la perspectiva de Friedman sobre el mundo nivelado pone de relieve la diversidad y las iniquidades que siguen caracterizando los procesos de globalización a través de todo el mundo. Además, resalta la necesidad de reconocer lo pertinente del llamado que Felipe Quispe hizo desde el altiplano de Bolivia de “indianizar a los k’aras” o del proyecto Casa Adentro, de Juan García, de autodescubrimiento y autoafirmación entre los afroecuatorianos.5 En ambos casos, el principal tema de discusión tiene que ver con crear los ya mencionados espacios “otros” del saber, desde los cuales se podrán (re)construir sociedades caracterizadas por justicia y libertad para todo ciudadano. De nuevo, es esencial que no se distorsionen los objetivos de estas luchas comunitarias al sugerir que su principal propósito es separatista, ya que, supuestamente, se quiere convertir lo local en una suerte de gueto y aislarse de todo cambio social, el mismo que viene 4 Aharonian identifica claramente el carácter contestatario de Telesur como proyecto político y estratégico al escribir: “El objetivo es desarrollar y poner en funcionamiento una estrategia comunicacional televisiva hemisférica, de alcance mundial, que impulse y consolide los procesos de cambio y la integración regional, entendidos éstos como una herramienta frente al proceso hegemónico de globalización” (134). 5 Estas ideas, promovidas por Quispe y García, coinciden con la noción que tiene Dipesh Chakrabarty acerca de “provincializar Europa”. Como José Luis Saavedra ha señalado: “Esta ‘provincialización’ también connota la necesidad de desprendernos de las adherencias eurocéntricas, producto y resultado de la dominación colonial. Se trata de una tarea de largo aliento, es decir, estratégicamente comprendida en una perspectiva política de descolonización de las maneras habituales de pensar y de producir conocimiento. Es la única manera mediante la cual se puede exponer la problemática de la subalternidad ‘al mismo tiempo desmantelar a Europa’” (11).

115 impulsado por las nuevas tecnologías y los sistemas de comunicación. Juan García, por ejemplo, ha sido firme al defender la urgencia de trabajar primero “casa adentro” para, luego asumir frontalmente los desafíos de “casa afuera”. Es decir, las comunidades locales —especialmente aquellas que han sido borradas de sus respectivas historias nacionales— no podrán ser influyentes y efectuar cambios más allá del ámbito local sin primero reinventarse como sujetos dentro de los procesos de la decolonialidad. Para los afrodescendientes del Ecuador, a quienes todavía se les enseña que sus formas tradicionales del saber no tienen legitimidad y que los mayores de sus respectivas comunidades no son la voz de la sabiduría y la experiencia, la verdadera lucha, con todo lo apremiante del caso, tiene que ser necesariamente un retorno a los mayores ya reconocidos y aceptados como maestros y diseminadores de formas valiosas del conocimiento y, eventualmente, según Juan García, insertar una visión propia de la historia y del saber en el proceso educacional (Walsh y León 10).6 En efecto, la lucha que Juan García realiza desde el Ecuador pretende, al fin de cuentas, posibilitar el pensar localmente para actuar globalmente. Además, no se debe perder de vista la convergencia de objetivos y estrategias que, consciente o inconscientemente, vincula el Proceso de Comunidades de los afroecuatorianos con el proyecto transnacional de Telesur citado arriba, que procura fortalecer la memoria histórica e identidad colectiva de las comunidades nacionales de Sudamérica.7 6 Un comentario del boliviano José Luís Saavedra (“intelectual qolla de habla quechua”) es pertinente para comprender plenamente el proyecto de Juan García: “El despliegue del ‘universalismo’ euro-occidental está basado en la dominación, la violencia, la represión militar y la opresión ideológica, al cual no basta oponerle un relativismo cultural, menos un esencialismo de las tradiciones (más o menos arcaicas), sino que es absolutamente necesario construir una voluntad política con la suficiente determinación contrahegemónica” (11). 7 No estará de más señalar aquí que el Proceso de Comunidades es un movimiento transnacional que une a comunidades afro del Ecuador y Colombia para formar lo que se conoce como la Comarca del Pacífico. Sin duda, la Comarca del Pacífico ha emergido como una expresión alternativa de identidades locales que son simultáneamente locales y globales y que han asumido la diáspora africana como un componente

116 Es difícil determinar la medida en que la informática puede y debe constituir una herramienta útil, tanto para los movimientos sociales impulsados por iniciativas de Casa Adentro como por los de Casa Afuera. Marc Becker, un historiador de Estados Unidos, que es especialista en los movimientos indígenas de la Región Andina, ha observado que, hoy día, ningún movimiento social respetable se encontrará sin email y una página web (14). Pero, como Becker explica: La lengua continúa siendo uno de los principales problemas que las comunidades indígenas tienen que enfrentar […]. Hoy, el acceso a muchos recursos y herramientas del internet se dificulta cuando no hay conocimientos del inglés. Activistas indígenas dependen, muchas veces, de académicos de Europa o Norteamérica para traducir sus documentos dirigidos a públicos globales” (14; traducción mía). Hay también otros problemas y obstáculos. Aparte del asunto de los costos, por ejemplo: Los cyber-activistas actuales requieren ayuda técnica con codificar HTML, obtener espacio del web en un servidor y registrar un URL. No se trata de conceptualizar o de articular una lucha, sino la parte mecánica de enmarcar y presentar cuestiones de una manera que llegue a un público externo. Aunque no es de ningún modo imposible para que un movimiento social logre esto por sí solo, el proceso se facilita mucho con asistencia externa. Por eso, activistas indígenas tienden a postergar la construcción de sus propias páginas, o recurren a terceras (14; traducción mía).

Finalmente, Becker acierta al anotar: “Lograr control directo y autonomía sobre estos medios de comunicación por parte de los indígenas es una meta vital” (14; traducción mía). Pese al optimismo que Becker siente respecto al potencial que los indígenas tienen para controlar las nuevas tecnologías y lograr una autonomía frente a ellas, hay que leer su análisis con cierto cuidado. Al fin y al cabo, sus comentarios se refieren, sobre todo, a la creación de páginas web, que harán posible que “los activistas hablen directamente integral de sus identidades compartidas.

117 con el mundo sin interferencia de intermediarios” (14; traducción mía). Lamentablemente, hay todavía otras cuestiones sistémicas de base que deben hacernos reflexionar, especialmente si la meta definitiva es la decolonialidad y la creación de globalizaciones alternativas.8 Con ese fin en mente, conviene poner de relieve algunos de los comentarios que ha puesto en el Internet el actual ministro de Educación, Raúl Vallejo, que también es un escritor y docente reconocido. Aunque Vallejo se refiere específicamente al contexto ecuatoriano al reflexionar sobre la globalización y la informática, sus observaciones son una reacción a la misma colonialidad del saber, del poder y del ser que sigue afectando a todos los que compartimos este mundo globalizado de nuestra actualidad. Concretamente, mientras advierte que no será productivo satanizar las nuevas tecnologías, él sí resalta la necesidad de asumir una actitud crítica frente a las estrategias que las empresas transnacionales emplean esas tecnologías para “imponer no sólo una manera de ver al mundo sino, también, lo que es peor, una uniforme actitud de ser en el mundo vestida de manera perversa con la máscara de la libertad de elegir” (http://acoso-textual.blogspot. com). Para Vallejo, verdaderas perspectivas críticas, las que son un prerequisito para cualquier acción efectiva o cambio fundamental, solamente podrán emerger de sistemas educacionales que sean capaces de realizar un balance entre la construcción de las identidades locales y el establecimiento de una presencia global a través de una participación creativa. Por consiguiente, Vallejo escribe: Nuestra educación, en este mundo de economía global y homogeneización de la cultura planetaria, tendría que asentar sus cambios en la construcción de una identidad nacional sólida, incorporar la tecnología necesaria para su funcionamiento en la comunicación global pero, sobre todo, resolver de manera urgente los problemas básicos del aparato educativo que no tienen que 8 James Petras insiste en que “la llamada ‘revolución informática’ es […] nada más que una nueva herramienta en el fomento de la influencia imperial, histórica. Lejos de derribar las fronteras nacionales, aumentan el alcance imperial de los poderes hegemónicos y refuerzan la división del mundo entre países imperiales y dominados, acreedores y deudores, especuladores y productores locales” (223-24).

118 ver principalmente con el uso de computadoras o con el estar conectado o no a Internet —aunque esto, obviamente, sea una ayuda importante en determinados niveles del sistema— sino con la comprensión del proceso educativo como una tarea de la sociedad en su conjunto a través de un compromiso de continuidad y profundización para el mediano y largo plazo. (http//acosto-textual.blogspot. com; lo subrayado es mío).

Las referencias que Vallejo hace a un proceso educativo que ha de ser la responsabilidad de una sociedad en su totalidad reconoce claramente la participación esencial de aquellos grupos sociales que, hasta ahora, han sido excluidos de los proyectos anteriores de la construcción nacional. En el contexto del Ecuador, queda por verse hasta qué punto los pueblos indígenas y las comunidades de afrodescendientes, entre otros grupos, ejercerán una influencia significativa en la transición hacia la decolonialidad. Desde el punto de vista de tales dirigentes claves como Luís Macas y Juan García, romper con las gramáticas viejas del saber y del poder no ha de confundirse con las formas tradicionales de integración o asimilación. Las comunidades indígenas y afroecuatorianas aspiran llegar a una dinámica social y política muy diferente, la misma que la sociedad oficial talvez no esté dispuesta a abrazar. Pero esa resistencia no ha de sorprendernos. En cierta manera, las palabras que José Martí escribió hace más de cien años (1891) siguen teniendo resonancia: “No hay batalla entre la civilización y barbarie, sino entre la falsa erudición y la naturaleza” (Nuestra América). Sea como fuera, a menos que se transformen las gramáticas viejas y, al fin, que sean reemplazadas por “otras” gramáticas más incluyentes y democráticas, no hay duda de que las nuevas tecnologías tendrán poca influencia positiva en la creación de las deseadas globalizaciones alternativas. De hecho, las disparidades e iniquidades que atraviesan todo el mundo globalizado son tan formidables que uno tiene que cuestionar lo liberadoras que pueden ser dichas tecnologías para el futuro no lejano. Hasta el mismo Thomas Friedman tuvo que confesar, después de haber escrito 460 páginas sobre la nivelación del mundo: “I know the world is not flat” (460). Además, continúa diciendo:

119 “Por más impresionante y visible que sea el sector nivelado de la alta tecnología de la India, no se hagan ilusiones. Representa sólo el 0.2 por ciento del sector laboral en la India. Al agregar a aquellos hindúes del sector manufacturero para la exportación, se llega a un total de 2 por ciento de empleo en toda la India” (470; traducción mía). En lo que respecta a Latinoamérica, James Petras nos recuerda que más del 70 por ciento de los latinoamericanos vive en la pobreza y casi el 40 por ciento vive con menos de $2 por día (81). Por cierto, estas disparidades e iniquidades no están confinadas al llamado Tercer Mundo. A pesar del crecimiento inaudito de las tecnologías informáticas, el New York Times reportó en 2005 “que la capacidad de leer y escribir en inglés entre los americanos que se han graduado de la universidad, como promedio, ha declinado significativamente durante los últimos dos lustros” (citado en Friedman, 339; traducción mía). Una vez más, las observaciones agudas de Benjamin Barber acerca de la tecnología y la globalización sirven para ubicar estos temas en una perspectiva global: ¿Para qué darles a los niños iletrados acceso a todas las bibliotecas del mundo? ¿Ayudamos a los jóvenes que no tienen la capacidad de investigar, de leer o escribir, de discriminar entre materiales pertinentes y los que están fuera de lugar, cuando los colocamos delante de computadoras conectadas a un universo de información difusa y sin orden? Pensándolo bien, tal vez les sería más beneficioso a los jóvenes y a la democracia si se cortaran los cables y se exigiera que leyeran y comprendieran un solo libro […]. El déficit dentro de nuestras escuelas no es informacional, sino un déficit de conocimientos y de la capacidad de pensar críticamente (67; traducción mía).

Cuando todo esté dicho y hecho, para entender plenamente la relación entre la globalización, la diversidad y las desigualdades que marcan a América Latina, junto al papel que juegan las tecnologías informáticas para la eliminación de esas mismas desigualdades, pero sin destruir la diversidad, hay que encontrar mecanismos para resistir la comercialización descontrolada de la tecnología, especialmente en cuanto se está pregonando la tecnología como la principal vía que conduce al saber. Por supuesto, “la tecnología tiene potencial

120 para la educación y la cultura, pero su realidad es comercial” (Barber 63; traducción mía). Benjamin Barber continúa su argumentación advirtiéndonos de los peligros de esa realidad: Sí, [la tecnología] puede promover la democracia y los múltiples usos junto a la propiedad competitiva, pero su realidad, hoy día, definida en términos de portales, plataformas de software y contenidos es monopólica. Su dimensión técnica es abierta y accesible, pero su verdadero uso produce tanta división y desigualdad como la sociedad que la rodea […]. ¿Es realmente una sorpresa que el 95 por ciento del uso del Internet sea comercial (con casi un cuarto de esa cantidad dedicada a la pornografía)? La ley federal de comunicaciones de 1996 de Estados Unidos privatizó las nuevas tecnologías, dejándolas en manos de las fuerzas comerciales del mercado. Por lo tanto, el potencial democratizante de las nuevas tecnologías está desplazado en todas partes por las desigualdades de la sociedad, y una ‘división digital’ que refleja las desigualdades educativas y económicas se vuelve inevitable. El monopolio y la desigualdad ponen en jaque el potencial para el pluralismo y el acceso sin restricciones (63; traducción mía).

De modo que, ¿en qué quedamos con todo lo comentado hasta aquí? Rubén Darío escribió, en su poema titulado “Los cisnes”, “aún guarda la Esperanza la caja de Pandora!” Me gustaría pensar que aquella Esperanza es un aspecto integral de los movimientos sociales de la actualidad en América Latina, que parecen apuntar a lo que me he referido como la decolonialidad y la construcción de las globalizaciones alternativas. Concluyo estas reflexiones con una observación que hice en otra ocasión: […] no fue una mera casualidad que el filósofo italiano Gianni Vattimo haya comentado durante el Congreso sobre la Latinidad, celebrado en septiembre 2006 en Quito, que los latinoamericanos parecen ser los que más posibilidades tienen para crear verdaderas alternativas de pensar ante las fuerzas peligrosamente homogeneizantes de una hiperrealidad globalizada que privilegia la imagen construida para el consumo más que la vida misma.9 Es en este sentido urge 9 Lo que Vattimo ha intuido ya había sido planteado por Boaventura de Sousa Santos, quien escribió que, “a diferencia del Manifiesto comunista, los nuevos manifiestos no serán el logro de científicos particulares que observen el mundo desde una perspectiva privilegiada y única. En cambio, serán mucho más multiculturales, estarán en deuda

121 hoy como nunca un pensamiento crítico capaz de llevar la resistencia a la reconstrucción, la descolonización a la decolonialidad. Talvez esta transición establezca la verdadera centralidad del pensamiento crítico de América Latina, un pensamiento enquistado desde hace mucho tiempo en un sistema mundo donde lo local y lo global convergen, borrándose mutuamente y, en el proceso, dejan abierto un espacio de esperanza para un pensamiento crítico latinoamericano realmente “otro”, tanto por su producción como por su recepción (14).

con diferentes paradigmas de conocimiento y emergerán, en virtud de la traducción, como redes y mestizaje, en ‘conversaciones de humanidad’ (como dijera John Dewey), involucrando a científicos sociales y activistas comprometidos en luchas sociales por todo el mundo” (21).

122 Obras citadas

••Aharonian, Aram. “Telesur, el añejo sueño de la integración comunicacional,” en Desafíos y alternativas para la integración andina en el nuevo siglo. Eds. Heinrich Meyer and Consuelo Ahumada. Bogotá: Observatorio Andino, 2006. (págs. 13338) ••Barber, Benjamin R. “The Uncertainty of Digital Politics. Democracy’s Uneasy Relationship with Information Technology,” en D. Stanley Eitzen and Maxine Baca Zinn, eds. Globalization (The Transformation of Social Worlds). Belmont: Thomson and Wordsworth, 2006 (págs. 61-69). ••Becker, Marc. “Indígenas, Indigenistas, Tinterillos, and Marxists,” LASA Forum, xxxvii, 4 (Fall 2006), 13-15. Friedman, Thomas L. The World is Flat. A Brief History of the Twenty-First Century. rev. ed. New York: Farrar, Strauss, and Giroux, 2006. ••García Márquez, Gabriel. Cien años de soledad. 27° ed. Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1971. ••Handelsman, Michael, “Latin American Critical Thought: A Poetics of Resistance and (Re)construction,” unpublished paper, 1-16. Petras, James. Los intelectuales y la globalización (De la retirada a la rendición). Quito: Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2004. ••Saavedra, José Luís. “Chakrabarty y su propuesta de historiografía descolonizadora,” ••Pukara (Cultura, Sociedad y Política de los Pueblos Originarios), I, 4 (7 de febrero-7 de marzo de 2006), 10-11. ••Santos, Boaventura de Sousa. “Nuestra América: reinventando un paradigma (fragmentos),” Casa de la Américas, 237 (octubre-diciembre de 2004), 7-25. ••Shohat, Ella and Robert Stam, eds. Multiculturalism, Postcoloniality, and Transnational Media. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2003. ••Sklair, Leslie. Globalization: Capitalism and its Alternatives. New York: Oxford University Press, 2002. ••Walsh, Catherine. Ed. Pensamiento crítico y matriz (de)colonial (reflexiones latinoamericanas). Quito: Univesidad Andina Simón Bolívar y Ediciones Abya-Yala, 2005. ••Walsh, Catherine y Edizon León, “Afro Andean Thought and Diasporic Ancestrality,” unpublished paper, 1-15.

Recolonizing Reason: Torture and the Globalization of Indifference by Olaf Berwald “[…] anti-ethos, absolute indifference not only toward the fellow human being, but also toward one’s own sense of being human.” Hermann Broch, “Trotzdem” (1950)1 “Atormentamos hombres y mujeres / para lograr el triunfo de la bondad / o el fracaso del Mal (ségun convenga).” José Emilio Pacheco, “Anfiteatro” (1986)2

How can pluricultural local/global sympoetic initiatives resist today’s dominant regressive abuses of reason, its recolonizations into onedimensional dichotomies, and its dissolutions into forgetfulness? What kinds of (networks of) nuanced dialogic projects will be conducive to strengthening global justice, and what can become the co-creative uses of the arts and the “humanities” in this regard? Systematic applications of torture constitute the lowest common denominator between the Global North and South in the twentieth and 1 Hermann Broch, “Trotzdem: Humane Politik. Verwirklichung einer Utopie” (1950). In H.B. Kommentierte Werkausgabe 11: Politische Schriften. Edited by Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1978. 364-96. Here: 383: “[…] die Gleichgültigkeit des Nicht-Ethos, des Wider-Ethos, die vollkommene Gleichgültigkeit gegen den Nebenmenschen und schliesslich gegen das eigene Menschentum.” 2 José Emilio Pacheco, “Anfiteatro” (1986). In ibid., City of Memory and Other Poems. Transl. by Cynthia Steele and David Lauer. San Francisco: City Lights, 1997, 170.

124 early twenty-first century. For example, in 2008, having suspended habeas corpus, and ignoring the Geneva Convention, the United States of America’s regime continued to violate international human rights.3 The corporate-military-media complex fuels what Gore Vidal calls “the United States of Amnesia.” Torture is cynically rebranded as “enhanced interrogation,” and new layers of administrative secrecy, such as “controlled declassified information,” exhibit the moral bankruptcy of democracy in the Global North. The euphemism “enhanced interrogation” inadvertently triggers associations with “enhanced milk,” reminiscent of lethal and lethetic force-feeding procedures with what the Shoah victim’s voices in Paul Celan’s poem “Todesfuge” (“Death Fugue”, 1946), address as “black milk” (“Schwarze Milch”). In our era of global iconic hygiene and systematic distortions of language and thought, poets, novelists, artists, translators, scholars, and teachers, all experts of how images and the written word can help us understand what it might mean to be human, have to co-create, share, and spread regional and global responsiveness. When one of the few modern revolutions that we have in writing, the American Constitution, is reduced to friable and increasingly undecipherable fragments, it is useful to think through the hard questions of global citizenship. What happens to the citoyens of a fragile and fascinating minor planet when torture is unashamedly embraced and outsourced by power- and market-driven global players, and supinely covered (up) by complicit corporate media? What kinds of joyfully self-surprising alliances are needed to strengthen ethical, aesthetic, and social literacies? Seriously playful dialogic approaches to crafting decolonized modes of perceptive solidarity, of ethics and aesthetics in unstoppable 3 Recent accounts of torture committed or outsourced by the United States include Alfred W. McCoy, A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, New York, Henry Holt, 2006, and Steven H. Miles, Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror, New York, Random House, 2006.

125 co-creative North/South alliances are contingent on careful and inventive searches for nuanced vocabularies that resist being leveled off and obliterated by mainstream manipulations. Indispensable onomasiological projects of finding precise and flexible words to begin with,4 can work in fruitful collusion with the semasiological task of critical examinations of (the remains of) meanings, semantic shifts, and contradictions that inhabit what have become increasingly empty signifiers, including “democracy,” “freedom,” “free markets,” “trade agreements,” “higher education,” and “humanities.” The mid- to late twentieth century saw painful palimpsests of superimposed layers of migratory exchanges between Germany and Latin America. For example, not only victims of the Nazi regime, such as the social psychologist Erich Fromm, escaped to Latin America, founding a psychoanalytic movement in Mexico, but also the most wanted Nazi medical torturer and killer, Josef Mengele, found his way to Argentina, Paraguay, and Brazil, where he died, drowning in the ocean in 1979. Often sheltered by Latin American regimes, German Nazis helped their new employers by sharing torture techniques and technologies (for example, as playwright and novelist Peter Weiss points out, the Auschwitz torturer Boger’s favorite tool was used during the Brazilian dictatorship). Shortly before he was admitted to a mental hospital/prison in Tübingen (a building in which the humanist Melanchthon taught and lived in the early sixteenth century, today the “Alte Burse” houses the Eberhard-Karls-University’s philosophy and art history departments), where he was subjected to a series of torture experiments (including sensory deprivation with newly designed equipment), a treatment that left him irreversibly incapacitated for the remaining decades of his life, the German poet and philosopher, Friedrich Hölderlin, whose early project of finding postreflexive modes of non-violent thought had 4 The necessity to “find a new language” is accentuated by the German playwright, novelist, and painter Peter Weiss, in the context of the Shoah and the wars during the “Cold War,” see Peter Weiss, Notizbücher. II/2, 859: “Gefangene der Sprache […] müssen ganz neu anfangen […] eine neue Sprache finden […]”

126 inspired his fellow students Hegel and Schelling, composed fragments of his “Mnemosyne” project. This poem’s various simultaneous voices constitute a fluid palimpsest that can be read as a careful definition avant la lettre of what might be called our globalized numbness concerning torture in the twenty-first century: “One sign we are, / Void of interpretation. Painfree we are / And have almost lost / Language in exile” (“Ein Zeichen sind wir, / Deutungslos. Schmerzlos sind wir / Und haben fast / die Sprache / In der Fremde verloren”). Hölderlin’s project of providing non-violent ways of conceptualizing post-Kantian theories was adapted by Friedrich Nietzsche, who insisted on the need to move beyond dichotomic thought patterns. Regarding nationalism and militarism, Nietzsche laconically notes in 1884, “the way in which Europeans established colonies proves their predatory nature.”5 Nietzsche’s observation was amplified by Hermann Hesse, another productive reader of Hölderlin. Shortly after the end of the Second World War, Hesse unequivocally ascribes historical responsibility to European empires: “Western Christianity is responsible for terrifyingly uncanny, diabolic, and insanely cruel crimes […] the brutal annihilation of the South American peoples and cultures.”6 In his Nobel Prize acceptance speech (2005), the British playwright, Harold Pinter continues Nietzsche’s and Hesse’s criticisms by highlighting war crimes and human rights violations 5 Friedrich Nietzsche: Werke VII/2. Nachgelassene Fragmente Frühjahr bis Herbst 1884. Berlin/New York 1974, 52: “Wie der Europäer Colonien gegründet hat, beweist seine Raubthier-Natur.“ Ibid., 49: “Die Europäer verrathen sich durch die Art, wie sie colonisirt haben -“ Ibid., 57: “Der Character der Europäer zu beurtheilen nach ihrem Verhältniß zum Ausland, im Colonisiren: äußerst grausam.“ Translation O.B. 6 Hermann Hesse, letter to Wilhelm Gundert, August 1948, in H.H. Sämtliche Werke, edited by Volker Michels. Band 15: Die politischen Schriften. Eine Dokumentation. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 2004. 683: “[…] die Epoche, in der die abendländische Christenheit zum erstenmal das Ungeheuerliche, das Teuflische und irrsinnig Grausame auf sich nahm, in der Inquisition und, noch ärger, in der blutigen Vernichtung der südamerikanischen Völker und Kulturen.” Transl. O.B. Harold Pinter, Nobel lecture, “Art, Truth & Politics (2005): http://nobelprize.org/nobel_ prizes/literature/laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html.

127 committed, and outsourced, by the United States from the beginning of the Cold War until today, reminding his global audience that “[t] he United States supported and in many cases engendered every right wing military dictatorship in the world after the end of the Second World War. […] Indonesia, Greece, Uruguay, Brazil, Paraguay, Haiti, Turkey, the Philippines, Guatemala, El Salvador, and, of course, Chile.”7 The Austrian-Jewish mathematician, philosopher, and novelist, Hermann Broch (1885-1952), who survived the Nazi regime in American exile, provides one of the most sustained diagnoses of how systemic indifference enables crimes against humanity. In a letter written to Volkmar von Zühlsdorff on August 9, 1945, Broch’s reflections on the end of the Second World War culminate in his insistance on German “guilt by indifference” (“Schuld durch Gleichgültigkeit”).8 Both in his novels and in a series of essays and studies, Broch laments the global disintegration of ethical values and interprets this seemingly irreversible phenomenon as the result of their gradual compartmentalization into various professional fields that have ceased to be in dialogue with each other.9 Shortly before his suicide, the anonymous affluent protagonist A. in Broch’s “novel in eleven stories” Die Schuldlosen (1950, “The Guiltless”) utters a lucid analysis in the form of a “confession” to a mysterious visitor, an elder of mythical qualities: 7 Harold Pinter, Nobel lecture, “Art, Truth & Politics” (2005). Quoted after the Nobel Foundation’s website: http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/ laureates/2005/pinter-lecture-e.html. 8 Hermann Broch, Kommentierte Werkausgabe 13/2. Dokumente und Kommentare zu Leben und Werk: Briefe 2 (1938-1945). Edited by Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1981, p.472. 9 Hermann Broch, “Theologie, Positivismus und Dichtung.” In: H.B. Kommentierte Werkausgabe 10/1: Philosophische Schriften 1: Kritik. Edited by Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1977, pp.191-239. Here: p.237: “Die Werte sind zersprengt. Kein Wertgebiet kann sich mit dem andern verständigen. Die Welt ist stumm.”

128 […] even in the face of the slaughtering […] we close our eyes and let it happen. Indifferent to the suffering of others, indifferent to our own fate, indifferent to the self in the human being, to its soul. […] I am responsible for the killings […] that will increase in gruesome ways, committed by others, committed without my participation. Because immersed into the unlimited with our dispersed self, and lacking any ego-boundaries, we have become a coldly magical unit, for the very reason that we have lost are void of any social bonds – coldy welded together in continuous irresponsibility and indifference.10

In his 1937 “League of Nations Resolution,” Broch emphasizes that indifference towards injustice suffered by others at the same time constitutes a lack of interest in one’s own loss of dignity, and “even though in principle, the indivual is capable of understanding global mania and name it as such, it has always been and continues to be eager to obediently conform.”11 Far from pretending to resolve or reconcile them, modernisms in the Global North and South have left us with the task to examine productive tensions between two complementary and mutually irreducible definitions of art as direct action and resistance on the one 10 Hermann Broch, Kommentierte Werkausgabe 1: Die Schuldlosen. Roman in elf Erzählungen. Edited by Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1994 [first 1974, Rhein Verlag 1950]. [Steinerner Gast] 267: “[…] selbst vor dem Morden […] schließen wir die Augen und lassen es geschehen. Gleichgültig gegen fremdes Leid, gleichgültig gegen das eigene Geschick, gleichgültig gegen das Ich im Menschen, gegen seine Seele.” Ibid., 271: ”Ich bin verantwortlich für die Morde […] die sich ringsum grauenhaft mehren werden, begangen von anderen, begangen ohne mein Zutun. Denn zersprengten Ichs im Grenzenlosen und bar der Ich-Grenzen, sind wir gerade wegen unserer Gemeinschaftslosigkeit zu einer kalt magischen Einheit geworden, kalt zusammengeschweißt in durchgängiger Verantwortungslosigkeit und Gleichgültigkeit.” 11 Hermann Broch, “Völkerbund-Resolution” (1937). In H.B. Kommentierte Werkausgabe 11: Politische Schriften. Edited by Paul Michael Lützeler. Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp, 1978. 195-232. Here: 217: “Vom Fatalismus Nicht nur gleichgültig gegen den Nebenmenschen, sondern auch gegen sich selbst, nicht nur unempfindlich gegen fremdes Leid, sondern auch gegen die eigene Entwürdigung, ist das Individuum, obwohl an sich durchaus imstande, den Weltenwahnsinn zu erfassen und ihn als solchen zu bezeichnen, allzeit bereit gewesen und heute nicht minder bereit […] sich […] einzufügen […]”

129 hand, and as non-instrumentalizable and unpredictable explorations of the imagination and the limits of rationality on the other. Learning from, and working on the next chapters of traditions of breaking with tradition does not only necessitate revitalizations of democratic principles of accountability in all areas of public life, but also a thoroughly dialogic rethinking of conflicts, and of collusions between new beginnings in art and ethics. In order to examine the global grip of anesthetic compliance, it is useful to revisit oscillations between a radical interest in the unconscious and the desire to contribute to social justice, a palinodic thread that sustains the work of many modernist European writers. Fruitful tensions between political advocacy on the one hand, and an emphasis on the radically experimental (and temporarily unconscious) nature of aisthesis on the other, provoked an unavoidably palinodic poetical praxis. In a letter to Georges Bataille from 1962, Maurice Blanchot outlines a “twofold movement” he feels forced to constantly respond to, a compulsion consisting of “two equally necessary but irreconcileable” drives. On the one hand, Blanchot’s epistolary voice admits to an unstoppable desire to “confront, oppose, and negate” conditions that are not made explicit in this letter. His other, equally urgent project, Blanchot continues, is to listen to, and perhaps inhabit “the word that speaks before anything else, and that inhabits a place outside of everything, the primeval word that is not subsumeable under any concordancy or confrontation,” a word inhabiting, or rather embodying, precarious “atopoi,” in transformative pursuit of the radically different and not-yet-known: One [word] names and wills the possible. The other word responds to the impossible. Between these two movements, at once necessary and incompatible, there is a constant tension […].12 12 Maurice Blanchot, letter to Georges Bataille, January 24, 1962, in: Georges Bataille. Choix de lettres 1917-1962. Ed. Michel Surya. Paris: Gallimard, 1997. 595-96. “[…] double mouvement il me faut toujours répondre, necessaires tous deux et cependant inconciliables. […] l´un en parole d´affrontement, d´opposition, de négation […] Mais l´autre est parole qui parle avant tout, et en dehors de tout, parole toujours première, sans concordance, sans confrontation et prête à accueillir

130 Pursuing a similarly restless palinodic project, Henri Michaux summarizes his aesthetic program in 1962. Michaux emphasizes alternating, and superimposed, phases of “a need to attack” and of playful exposure to what he perceives as the mysterious presence of alterity.13 In Peter Weiss’s triptych novel, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands (1975-81, The Aesthetics of Resistance), the teenage protagonist Horst Heilmann, both a resistance fighter against the Nazi regime, and a lover of Hölderlin and Rimbaud, discusses with his friends (all of these protagonists are based on historical resistance fighters who eventually were tortured and hanged in Berlin-Plötzensee) the individual’s as well as the collective right to pursue not only “unequivocal transcriptions of seemingly irrational developments for the sake of examining facts,” but also a radically different kind of perceptiveness that “pulls the ground from beneath our feet.”14 The narrator in Weiss’s trilogy refers to Franz Kafka as a useful source for l´inconnu, l´étranger (par où passé l´exigence poétique). L´un nomme le possible et veut le possible. L’autre répond à l´impossible. Entre ces deux mouvements à la fois nécessaire et incompatibles, il y a une constante tension, souvent très difficile à soutenir et, en vérité, insoutenable.” Translation O.B. 13 Henri Michaux, Vents et Poussières. 1955-1962. Paris: Flinker, 1962. 77-83: “Le champ de ma conscience.” Ibid., 78: “Dans le champ de ma conscience […] Des périodes viennent. Des périodes passent, périodes qu´il me fallut apprendre à connaître, qu´il faut à temps savoir reconnaître, car la faute contre la période blesse et annule.” Ibid., 79: “Dans l´une j´attaque, j´ai besoin, ma santé est d´attaquer. Dans l´autre, je joue. Je lance sans colère des pierres à tout ce qui bouge. […] Dans l´une, je travaille. Dans l´autre je suis le fils de l´espace. […] Dans l´une je vis sans rein en face. Dans l´autre le mystère des autres me pénètre. Il n´y a plus ma vie. Il n´y a plus que leur vie, que je cherche avec vigilance à comprendre et à ressentir.” Ibid., 80: “Complexe le dedans. Complexe le dehors, le dehors toujours renouvelé.” 14 Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands I, 58: “Als wir überlegten, ob poetische Geheimsprachen, Bildchiffren und magische Symbole zur Schilderung dunkler, scheinbar vernunftloser Vorgange angebracht seien oder ob angesichts des Schwerverständlichen grade eine eindeutige Übertragung notwendig wäre, kam Heilmann hinzu […] Beides ist richtig, meinte Heilmann, sowohl der Griff, der uns den Boden wegreißt unter den Füßen, als auch das Bestreben, einen festen Grund herzustellen zur Untersuchung einfacher Tatsachen.”

131 anyone who seeks to comprehend the degree to which conscience and consciousness had been disfigured in order to instill compliance with a dictatorial regime, “how many had already been […] so destroyed that they did not even recognize the distortions to which they were subjected.”15 Radicalizing Freud’s notion of “das Unheimliche,” the social psychologist Max Hodann, another voice retrieved in Weiss’s Aesthetics of Resistance, the narrators (and the author’s) fatherly friend who committed suicide after the war, analyzes the ubiquity and effectiveness of orchestrated daily-life psychological deformation: The uncanny, he repeated […] is not the horrifying, which we are capable of seeing if we try hard enough, but our inability to recognize the trivial and compactly unmoveable. […] this gigantic unapproachable order, which hardly utters anything disturbing, which is just simply there, making its impact assuredly, determining everything that in the long run […] strangles and annihilates us. […] The nightmarish aspect of all this was that a seemingly unreal formation insisted on being the only valid manifestation of reality.16

With lyrical precision and analytic rigor, Hodann’s outline of a society that is willfully oblivious to the suffocation of democracy describes not only parts of Europe in the 1940’s, but also the United 15 Peter Weiss, Die Ästhetik des Widerstands I, 171: “[…] wie viele schon […] so zerstört, dass sie die Verunstaltungen, denen sie anheimfielen, nicht einmal mehr erkannten, das hatte mit grosser Detailschärfe einer beschrieben, dessen Werk [...] ich in der Buchhandlung am Marktplatz fand.” See Olaf Berwald, An Introduction to the Works of Peter Weiss, Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2003, 118. In this monograph, Weiss’s theater plays on Portuguese colonialism in Africa, and on the Vietnam war, are also discussed. 16 Ibid., III, 47; II, 167: “�������������������������������������������������� Das Unheimliche, wiederholte er […] ist nicht das Grauenhafte, das wir doch, wenn wir uns anstrengen, zu sehen vermögen, sondern unsre Unfähigkeit, das banale, kompakt Unverrückbare zu erkennen. […] diese riesige, unnahbare Ordnung, die kaum etwas Beunruhigendes von sich gibt, die einfach nur da ist, mit Selbstverständlichkeit fortwirkt und all das bestimmt, was uns dann schliesslich, auf weit verzweigten Umwegen, erwürgt und vernichtet. [...] Das Alpdruckhafte lag darin, dass ein irreal erscheinendes Gebilde Anspruch darauf erhob, die alleingültige Wirklichkeit zu vertreten.”

132 States (among other nations) in the first decade of the twenty-first century. What we need to bring to the fore, in pluridisciplinary alliances of social sciences, the so-called humanities, and the arts, are ways to work through and overcome compliance and helplessness in the light of the gradually obliterated individual. Embracing the risk of being out of place, teachers, writers, painters, filmmakers, etc. are still capable of tarrying with conflicting layers of what it means to be on the outskirts, a palimpsest inhabited by Socrates in Plato’s dialogues (Plato describes the vanishing point of ethical inquiry and aesthetic and social praxis as “atopos”). Can we overcome hermeneutic helplessness? Are we cultivating listening voices? It is useful and enriching to distinguish sharply between simply identifying and subsuming data under prefabricated rubrics, and the more risky and unpredictable undertaking of theoretical and ethical experiments, exploring and inhabiting a perspective whose consequences are not already calculated: Is it possible to resist not only emboldened racisms, but the temptation of a systemic regression into a self-absorbed realm of (ob-)literary studies? Inviting and trying our hands and hearts and minds at sustained soundings of consumer complacency and media compliance, one of our jobs is to vigorously co-create a pedagogical praxis that nourishes lucid, self-critical minds and that emphasizes the reciprocity of pluridisciplinary research and inventive pedagogical praxis. Stimulating the mutual sharpening of critical and creative thought, we can unapologetically contaminate sanitized discourses of indifference with the indispensable civic virtue of relentless dialogic curiosity. Otherwise, we would exemplify what Jacques Dupin, in his 1978 poetry volume, Histoire de la lumière, calls “the cruelty of consent” (“cruauté de l’accord”). We would fail to live up to our task of proliferating the philia of thinking, reading, and an ever more precise self-perception, and Dupin’s translator Celan’s observation, “they translated our whinneying into one of their illustrated languages” (“sie logen unser gewieher um in eine / ihrer bebilderten sprachen”) would denote the state of our profession. Only if we begin to wean ourselves

133 off tempting but reductive obsessions with identification games (which consisted in commodifying even seemingly open-minded keywords, authors, and figures of thought), unassuming and therefore liberating acts of understanding will be capable of providing contours of what Dupin addresses as “the space of open action” (“espace de l’action ouverte”).17 As an exemplary excursus, let us briefly consider one of various methods at the disposal of contemporary writers whose art touches upon the continuation of torture. Rewriting mythological stories of torture and violation, and, so to speak, declassifying the Ovid files and its sources, still constitutes a highly promising aesthetic strategy whose ethical potential continues to appear inexhaustible. In the nexus of late twentieth-century German authors, Peter Weiss’s incorporation of the sufferings of Heracles in his summum opus Die Ästhetik des Widerstands, as well as the elliptic presentations of rape in Christa Wolf’s novel Cassandra (1983) are to be mentioned first in this regard. Anja Utler’s poetry offers recurring evocations of mythological traumatic events surrounding sexual violation, torture, and loss. The long poems in Utler’s latest volume, brinnen (2006), consist of, and insist on, multiple superimposed, simultaneous listening voices and lyrical narrative threads in the vein of Hölderlin’s “Mnemosyne” palimpsests. This volume was preceded by münden – entzüngeln (2004, “flow, anastomose - de-lambency”). Injecting “immediate” urgency into mythological traditions, Utler’s poetry pursues the simultaneous project of teasing out and performing soundings of the materiality of (the German) language. Like her twentieth-century predecessors Tsetayeva, Rilke, Broch’s lyrical novel Der Tod des Vergil (1945, The Death of Virgil), and Paul Celan’s poems, works with whom her texts share intertextual correlations, Utler often employs words that simultaneously suggest geological, sexual, botanical, and anatomical lexical threads. 17 Jacques Dupin, Coudrier, Paris: P.O.L., 2006, S. 43, 47.

134 Utler’s texts expose acts and processes of speaking and listening as both symptoms of violence and attempts to overcome it. Refusing to merely write “about” a theme, Utler’s poems preclude any complacently omniscient fabrications of distance. Her reader is immediately pulled into the scenarios. Utler’s poems present fragile yet resilient voices that cling to the spoken word in order to survive persecution and torture. Often turning to mythology as what she called, during a poetry festival in Bremen in 2005, her “sparring partner,” Utler has explored, like her American colleagues Jorie Graham and Alice Fulton, the myth of the attempted or actual rape of Daphne (in Utler’s version, Daphne speaks while she is raped). Another Utler cycle has been dedicated to Kronos. But it is the myth of the flaying of Marsyas that runs through both of her last two poetry volumes. At times reminding of a film script, this cycle offers soundscapes of the protagonist’s execution by gradual skinning. The reader becomes an eye and ear witness, exposed to acoustic and visual close-ups of the torture performed on Marsyas. According to Greek mythology, the satyr and flute virtuoso Marsyas challenges the god Apollo to a musical competition. They agree that the winner will have full control over his antagonist’s body. Cunningly changing the rules to his advantage, Apollo wins and punishes Marsyas’s alleged hubris by having him slowly flayed alive. In a notebook entry from 1911, Kafka laconically mentions Raphael’s fresco, Apollo and Marsyas (1509-11). Raphael’s work presents a triumphant Apollo mocking his immobilized victim right before the torture begins. Titian’s oil painting, The Flaying of Marsyas (1575-76), on the other hand, exhibits the cruelty of the slow murder and emphasizes the enthusiasm of its voyeuristic bystanders. Utler’s poem, a radical rehearsal of the spoken word, not only forms productive tensions with these pictorial traditions and with literary predecessors from Alcaios to Zbigniew Herbert (1957), but also suggests correlations with musical versions of the Marsyas myth, for example Patrick Bebelaar’s and Frank Kroll’s jazz composition from 1997.

135 The penultimate stanza of Utler’s poem sequence, “Marsyas, umkreist” (2004, “Marsyas, encircled”), into which non-verbal linguistic markers are injected in order to indicate painful breathing, culminates in the verse, “Vom entsetzen entbunden,” whose translations into English have to oscillate between “released/ unbound/delivered from terror,” and “released, abdicated, delivered by terror.” Internalized terror is presented both as midwife and maternal body.18 “Entsetzen” takes on simultaneous roles as perhaps an oath and a mother, and connotations of birth in this segment are shifting between, or thinking together, liberation and unbearable exposure. Scholars of what it might mean to be human can find it acutely useful to work on/in their own listening voices capable of responding to mental and physical force-feeding procedures. Co-creating cultures takes dialogic courage. Open and perceptive conversations constitute a form of direct action. Con/Versations are nourished by, and in turn cultivate, changing perspectives. To develop a voice that listens is an acutely needed art, which is threatened by extinction in an era of mediated interpassivity. Cultures can be usefully approached as, and in, multilayered dialogues to be reconfigurated and co-created in constant movement. Cultures cannot breathe without the sustained public praxis of a kind of perceptiveness that nourishes what F.W.J. Schelling calls “das Incoercible.” Public reason begins where suffocating dichotomies are dissolved, or at least bracketed. Poets and historians, sociologists and novelists, scholars and artists, the “soft” and the “hard” sciences have to work together across national and genre boundaries. For the sake of our physical, as well as our moral, intellectual, and creative survival, we urgently need plurigeneric aesthetic collaborations in search of the participatory project of global citizenship. Affirmative acts of unwriting that embrace and invite post-mimetic ways of inventive listening, these texts are embedded in, and exposed to, each other. 18 Anja Utler, münden – entzüngeln. Gedichte, Vienna, Edition Korrespondenzen, 2004. 72-81. Here: 79.

136 While various kinds of juntas in the Global North and South command and outsource torture, and while corporate media and academies have more or less played along, symphilologia, the contagious desire for fresh thought along, through, and against the grain of intercontinental textual traditions, can become a resonant path to more multi-faceted kinds of perceptiveness. Across and along artificial geostrategic tectonic lines, it is not impossible to vigorously co-create a pedagogical praxis that nourishes lucid, self-critical minds. Unframing and enacting reciprocities of pluridisciplinary research and inventive pedagogical praxis, writers, visual artists, musicians, and teachers can stimulate what Wilhelm von Humboldt calls “energeia” in our respective languages and poetic idioms (and their palimpsestlike translatability into one another). In the spirit of, and through traces of recognizable echoes of our near-extinct lettered communities, a mutual sharpening of critical accounts of human rights abuses on the one hand, and unpredictable creative thought on the other, can still generate a bit of breathing space. No apologies are needed for joyfully contaminating commercially sanitized discourses of indifference with the civic virtue of unruly dialogic curiosity.

4. Alteridades internalizadas y asumidas/Internalized and Assumed Alterities

Machado de Assis Digested? A Case of Cannibalism in Brazilian Twenty-First Century Literature by Luciana Namorato

Labeled by many critics as a universal writer, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis (1839-1908) was never ashamed of his debt to foreign--and, mainly, European--predecessors. Blaise Pascal, Voltaire, Laurence Sterne, Xavier de Maistre, Denis Diderot, and Arthur Schopenhauer are a few examples of authors with whose texts he kept constant and subversive literary dialogues. It is exactly this intertextual aspect of his works that has been used by some critics as the main proof of his alleged detachment from Brazilian national roots.1 1 Machado de Assis has been accused of a lack of interest in racial issues, while he himself was of black origin. “Em seus escritos, retratou principalmente o ambiente de pessoas da classe média, branca, onde o negro se infiltrou apenas como elemento decorativo” (In his writings, he portrayed mostly the lives of middle-class, white people, in which black people appeared only as decorative elements), criticizes Kabengele Munanga (Rediscutindo a Mestiçagem no Brasil: Identidade Nacional Versus Identidade Negra (Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, 1999), 96). Machado de Assis´ works, however, do address the injustices of Brazilian society, but his texts do not idealize the oppressed: “Os oprimidos não são melhores do que os opressores: assim que o libertam, o escravo Prudêncio, que o menino Brás maltratava, chicoteia sem piedade o seu próprio servo; os criados de Virgília se desforram espionando-lhe o adultério” (The oppressed are not better than the oppressors: as soon as he becomes a free man, the slave Prudêncio,

140 Almost a century after his death, however, Machado de Assis has become the most celebrated Brazilian writer, both in Brazil and abroad. Has he managed to fool Brazilian readers into living a European fiction? How have his works endured the sometimes militant search for--and creation of--a Brazilian national identity that took place, for example, in the 1920s? Has Machado de Assis perhaps deceived critics into reading his appropriations of non-Brazilian “originals” (in fact, many of his literary sources were French translations of German and English texts2) as a spontaneous generation of philosophy in the tropics? By bringing non-Brazilian literary traditions to the forefront of his works, he affirmed his right to invent and sustain dialogues with different cultural traditions on the basis of equality and creative freedom. For Machado de Assis, a productive reception of European texts constitutes neither continued subordination nor a denial of Brazilian culture’s ability to resist foreign domination. His texts provoke the reader to radically reconceptualize originality and to disentangle this precarious term from a linear logic of precedence and superiority. A dynamic nexus of voices emerges not only between Machado de Assis and his predecessors, but also between the characters of his novels and short stories, as well as between his work and its reader. Machado de Assis stresses heterogeneity and refrains from obliterating alterities for the sake of one-dimensional solutions.3 the boy whom Brás Cubas used to mistreat, mercilessly whips his own slave; Virgília´s slaves take revenge on her by spying her acts of adultery) (José Guilherme Merquior, “O Romance Carnavalesco de Machado,” introduction to Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, by Machado de Assis (São Paulo: Ática, 1997), 5). 2 See José Luís Jobim, ed., A Biblioteca de Machado de Assis (Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Letras, 2001). 3 Carlos Fuentes describes Machado de Assis’ work as a “mestizo literature.” According to Fuentes, Machado de Assis relives Miguel de Cervantes’ voice by transplanting “La Mancha’s tradition” to Brazil (Machado de La Mancha (México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001), 9-10). This tradition combines different literary genres in order to create a polyphonic text. It also points out the distance between texts and the reality that they refer to, calling the reader’s attention to the process of fictionalization and

141 Fourteen years after Machado de Assis’ death, the Semana de Arte Moderna (Week of Modern Art) inaugurated a shift in the selfinterpretation of Brazilian culture through an emphasis on subversive appropriations of foreign cultural products and their use as ingredients for an emerging Brazilian national identity. This event, which took place in São Paulo in 1922, reflected a new form of interpreting Brazilian arts and, by extension, works of art produced in other former colonies. A large number of Brazilian modernist works performs a double task: they fight against traditions, as well as reexamine and redefine the image of a Brazilian past in search for concrete historical facets of it that had been excluded from and by official historiography in the preceding four hundred years.4 In their fight against the imposition of foreign rules, Brazilian modernist writers and artists looked for an affirmative way to interpret and to express their feelings towards their country’s construction of cultural identities. “La tradición de La Mancha no tiene más vida que la de su texto, haciéndose en la medida en que es escrito y es leído” (La Mancha´s tradition has no life besides its textual existence, and it creates itself while it is written and read) (Carlos Fuentes 13). 4 Lêdo Ivo emphasizes the importance of literary movements that preceded the Semana de Arte Moderna to the development of a national literature in Brazil: “Não faltarão [. . .] vozes [. . .] a propalar ou aceitar a versão de que o modernismo de 22 exerceu a missão incomparável de instaurar a nossa autonomia literária, poética e artística, num evidente menosprezo à importância seminal dos movimentos anteriores: o romantismo [. . .] libertando-nos do cultismo arcádico e peninsular; o parnasianismo [. . .]; os vários feixes de um realismo que nos deu um Machado, um Raul Pompéia [ . . .]; e o simbolismo que, realçando a evidência de uma crise do verso (ou no verso), abriu o caminho subterrâneo para uma modernidade na atoarda de 22” (We will never be short of voices that spread and accept the version that the modernism of 1922 took for itself the task of establishing a literary, poetic and artistic autonomy, and completely ignore the importance of previous movements: the romanticism that freed us from an arcadian and peninsular cult; the parnasianism; and the various currents of a realism that gave us a Machado [de Assis], a Raul Pompéia; and the symbolism that, by bringing to the forefront an evident crisis of the verse (or in the verse), carved a subterranean way towards a modernity amongst the rumours of 22) (Modernismo e Modernidade (Rio de Janeiro: Livraria São José, n.d.), 13-14).

142 history.5 The singularity of Brazilian Modernism when compared to the European modernist movements is found in its double intent: to affirm the specificities of Brazilian identity by stressing its differences from other cultures and to introduce European parameters to Brazil’s economy, politics, and culture. Oswald de Andrade, one of the organizers of the Semana de Arte Moderna and a member of the Movimento da Antropofagia (Movement of Anthropophagy), uses the image of the cannibal in order to describe Brazilian culture.6 Far from adopting the xenophobic rhetoric of nationalist factions of modernist groups such as Verde-Amarelo (Green-Yellow) and Anta (Tapir), Oswald de Andrade’s programmatic poetics of anthropophagy values foreign elements as integral features of Brazilian culture. The Grupo da Antropofagia (Anthropophagia Group) calls for disobedient and inventive reception techniques: literary sources should be adapted to Brazilian reality, and not naively imitated or ignored. By cutting and editing texts taken from Western 5 The interest in the creation of a Brazilian identity can be traced back to the Brazilian Baroque (1602-1768). Basílio da Gama, in 1763, for example, used the word “americano” (American, meaning “a native of America”), instead of “português” (Portuguese) to refer to his own nationality. Brazilian natives were the main characters of Basílio da Gama´s and Santa Rita Durão´s works. These two authors emphasized the particularities of Brazilian nature in their literary production (Fábio Lucas, Expressões da Identidade Brasileira (São Paulo: EDUC, 2002), 63-66). Romanticism was also a literary movement that focused on the particularity of Brazilian territory, culture and people. However, differently from modernist view on nationalism, the romantic awareness of a national identity was closely connected to the agenda of the Brazilian movement for political independence. 6 The metaphor of anthropophagy was initially used by Oswald de Andrade and Tarsila do Amaral as a joke, while having dinner with a small group of people (Raul Bopp, Movimentos Modernistas no Brasil: 1922-1928 (Rio de Janeiro: São José, 1966), 70-71). For more details on this event, which also explains the choice of the title Abaporu (in Tupi, meaning “the one who eats”) for one of Tarsila’s paintings, see Raul Bopp, Vida e Morte da Antropofagia (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1977), 40. For more details on the Movimento da Antropofagia, see the chapters “Uma Sub-Corrente Modernista Chamada “Antropofagia” (61-94) and “Inventário da Antropofagia” (95-99), in Bopp 1966.

143 cultures, and by adding his own signature to the product, Oswald de Andrade undermines the concept of cultural property.7 Andrade proposes a subversive way of reading influences. The contradictory elements of a former colony’s culture facilitate unexpected turns in its social, economic, and cultural history. Because texts are open to multiple relationships with other texts, every appropriation gives them meanings that carry the shadow of colonial oppressive discourses while at the same time fight against oppression. Grafting multiple historical counter-fictions onto literary classics, they pluralize canonical texts and contaminate narrative orders with cunning contingency. The ruse of receptive reason enables each reading and rewriting, each creative rearrangement, to rescue literary sources from chronic arrest and ossification within the narrow frame of the social and cultural status quo that defined the time of their production.8 By breaking the rules of temporal linearity, those texts can joyfully modify and co-opt voices whose former function might have been to reduce the value of or erase Latin American voices. Machado de Assis was a man who diplomatically avoided confronting his literary enemies. His tranquil personal life stood in opposition to the chaotic nature of the subterranean men and women hidden under the compromising social masks of his characters. In his library, however, the founder of the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Letters) became a cannibal, consuming and digesting 7 In Décio Pignatari’s words, Oswald’s poetry is “a poesia da posse contra a propriedade” (the poetry of appropriation versus ownership) (“Marco Zero de Andrade,” Suplemento Literário de O Estado de São Paulo, 24 October 1964). 8 According to Silviano Santiago, a large number of Latin American discourses dismantle “the principles that posited it [a text, any text] as an irreproducible and wholly unique object” (The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture (Durham: Duke UP, 2001), 34). They multiply past texts by a variety of historical times, since each reading and/or rewriting rescue them from the prison of the moment in which they were produced and give it additional meanings. Therefore, they create posterior spaces in which “alternative forms of understanding history are realized” (Santiago 7).

144 texts that fascinated him, therefore putting into question rigid binary oppositions such as cause and consequence, original and copy, subject and object, colonizers and colonized nations. Such a belated writer who reads, reinterprets, displaces, in short, incorporates another text into his own work can be compared to a guest who enters a house but does not submit himself to its rules. In the words of J. Hillis Miller, “a host in the sense of [. . .] both a friendly visitor in the house and at the same time an alien presence who turns the home into a hotel, a neutral territory.”9 And in Machado’s texts, the narrative voices invite the reader to do the same. Machado de Assis presents the reader with characters whose personalities are disintegrating and whose actions are unpredictable. He investigates and denies the possibility of literary realism by insisting on the uncontrollable, hidden aspects of selfhood, as well as on the disguised intentions and motivations behind a character’s acts. The unpredictability of narrators and characters reveals the constitutive limitations of human perception. Unable to understand the characters completely, the reader becomes aware of the limitations of his own view. This dialogic process between reader and author, and a radical insistence on singular, individual voices mutually enrich each other. In most of Machado de Assis’ texts, the narrator embraces the absence and impossibility of interpretive coherence in the face of every reading act. His narrators constantly rehearse and reflect contingency through metafictional passages that open up the text to the point-ofview of the reader. Machado de Assis’ narratives present collusions of various possible meanings, most of which can be created by the reader in the same way in which their author recreates his predecessors’ texts. This recognition of the active role of the reader is both an invitation to coauctorial reading strategies and an exhibition of the process of writing. By emphasizing the reader’s manifold interpretive options, Machado de Assis contradicts those who believe that he 9 “The Critic as Host,” in Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al. (New York: Seabury, 1979), 221.

145 does not have a real voice, but is merely echoing past and foreign influences.10 It is therefore not a coincidence that one of the most intriguing contemporary fictional works that openly addresses literary influences, the novel Braz, Quincas & Cia. (2002)11, by Antonio Fernando Borges, also enacts dialogues with Machado de Assis’ prose. Braz, Quincas & Cia., a fiction in which Machado de Assis appears as a character, can be read as an allegory of the dynamics of inventive literary reception. Imagining the world as the site of a battle between individual desires and the interests of the majority, Antonio Borges, narrator and protagonist of Braz, Quincas & Cia., is convinced of his irrevocable loss of individuality. Even though all events experienced by the narrator point to a loss of individuality, an emphasis on memory as a source of recreation and on the role of the reader in constructing and continuing the stories shows that individual voices will never disappear. Antonio’s attempt to define his own identity mirrors the writers’ desire to find a place among other writers whose voices are inseparable one from the others, and are constantly intermingling. 10 The creative rewriting of past texts “even jeopardizes the possibility of subsequent use, because, as we know, an imitated trait is immediately branded in advance, becomes vaguely ridiculous, verging upon self-caricature. Pushing things to the limit, we could say that the pastiche [. . .] is also sterilizing for its victim, who is condemned to rehash stereotypes endlessly or to abandon them altogether, and thus become someone else” (Gérard Genette, Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997), 79). In the process of textual appropriation, both domination and the desire to know are present, as well as admiration and aggression, violence and respect, ritualized submission to, and criticism of the text that is read. 11 Antonio Fernando Borges, for example, has made clear in interviews his strong debt to his predecessors, such as Machado de Assis and the Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). In his novels, one can find a literary version of such comments. In his first book, the short story collection Que Fim Levou Brodie? (Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1996), he presents his reader with short stories that incorporate and suggest close readings of the works of Jorge Luis Borges.

146 The narrator Antonio Borges describes himself as a recluse old writer who was unlucky in his four marriages and whose great-uncle was Machado de Assis. One day, Antonio faces a disturbing situation: a mysterious man, Faustino Xavier, knocks on his door. After praising the narrator’s literary talents, Xavier reveals the reason of his visit: he intends to reprint a specific book, and needs Antonio to examine the text. The book is titled Os Perigos do Individualismo: Um Tratado (The Dangers of Individualism: A Treatise), and was presumably written by an unknown author named J. Deus & Silva (Braz 27).12 Initially unsure about collaborating with the stranger, Antonio decides to accept the offer and calls Faustino Xavier, only to find out that the telephone number given to him by the stranger belongs to an elderly home. This fact makes the narrator even more curious and leads him to a desperate attempt to uncover the secrets behind this mystery. Regardless its plot, Braz, Quincas & Cia. is not simply a mystery novel. The unexplained appearance and disappearance of Faustino Xavier and the mysterious origin of the book form a mere background for a bigger question that resonates throughout the novel: the definition of the dynamics between individuals and the group to which they belong. Even though a sequence of disturbing coincidences gives the impression of a constant danger surrounding the protagonist, the fear for the narrator’s future is overshadowed by a philosophical inquiry about the role of the individual in society. After Antonio has read the book left at his apartment, he starts to suspect that the uniqueness of each human being is threatened by a contemporary tendency to favor the opinion of the majority. In 12 In the name of the presumed author of Os Perigos do Individualismo: Um Tratado, J. Deus & Silva, one can already find a suggestion of the main ideas present in the book. The abbreviation of the first name--“J”--and the very common last name “Silva” suggests anonymity. The use of the commercial symbol “&” adds impersonality to the name and refers to the association between two or more people. The name “Deus” (God) can refer to the author’s intention of presenting the reader with a new system that would dominate the whole world in a short period of time, save men from the pain in which they live, and transform Earth into a paradise.

147 the book left to Antonio’s scrutiny, the words were, according to the narrator, “difíceis de engolir” (difficult to swallow) (Braz 55). The text was a description of what its presumed author believed to be the ideal of a paradise on Earth: the complete equality among human beings. According to Antonio’s interpretation of the book, “só a coletividade saberia produzir, em larga escala, energia e matéria pensantes” (only collectivity would know how to produce, in large scale, energy and thinking matter). For this reason, “a sociedade só se tornaria feliz depois que o indivíduo se dissolvesse no amálgama racional da coletividade” (society would only become happy when the individual has dissolved in the rational amalgam of collectivity) (Braz 62, emphasis in the original). Antonio then remembers his recent past and concludes that this tendency is not exactly new. It reminds him of people and events in his past that already suggested the same ideal, such as Faustino Xavier and his habit of talking always using the “we” form, and Maria Inês, the narrator’s fourth wife, who is described as a woman who sees privacy as “uma barreira inconveniente que ela dribla sempre com uma habilidade e um empenho compulsivos” (an inconvenient barrier that she always tricks with a compulsive ability and determination) (Braz 34). The behavior of strangers in the novel also suggests the loss of individual voice.13 13 For example, in a book signing, Antonio offers wine to a stranger, who dislikes the drink. The woman asks if he had any idea about how bad the wine was, which he answers with a “yes.” The reaction of the woman is one of anger: “‘Então, como tem coragem de oferecê-lo a mim [. . .]?!’” (“So, how do you dare to offer it to me [. . .]?!”) (Braz 37). The narrator justifies his act by saying that he is not responsible for the bad quality of the drink. The woman then replies that “O indivíduo é uma ilusão!” (The individual is an illusion!) and that “[a] culpa pela má qualidade deste vinho é de todos! Então, é sua [the narrator’s] também!” (everyone is responsible for the bad quality of the wine! So, you are also responsible!) (Braz 38, emphasis in the original). This episode reminds the narrator of what had happened three weeks before, in a café. A group of young people enters the place and starts to make a loud noise. Disturbed by the group’s attitude, the narrator complains with the waiter, who, after some minutes, returns and explains that the group was the majority, and that, for this reason, they had the right to act the way they want. The waiter also mentions that the group was

148 This apparent tendency to erase any difference among people and to ignore personal interests is put to extreme when the narrator goes to pick up his passport only to find out that, according to the police, he is officially dead: Depois de apertar muitas teclas com a elegância estudada de que sabe que a observam, a jovem tratou de conferir meu nome mais uma vez. Quando repeti [. . .] ela me olhou irritada, ou mesmo vagamente ofendida: [. . .] “O número confere... Mas, pelos nossos registros, já faz duas semanas que o senhor está morto” (After hitting many keys with the studied elegance of someone who knows that she is obseved, the young woman checked my name one more time. When I repeated it [. . .] she looked at me annoyed, or even slightly offended: [. . .] “The number is the same... But according to our records, you have already been dead for two weeks.”) (Braz 133-34)

At the end of the novel, the narrator finds out that some of these intriguing events14 that suggest the domination of the group over individuals had been planned and put into practice by a group of people who wanted to spread the ideas of the narrator’s grandfather, Machado de Assis’ brother o Velho (The Old Man). The intention of bothered by the presence of Antonio and that he should leave the place. The waiter justifies it by saying that “‘[i]sso se chama… democracia!” (“this is what is called… democracy!”) (Braz 41). In a similar episode, the narrator crosses a street without paying attention to the traffic light, and is followed by a woman. Scared because the cars almost run her over, the woman falls. She then accuses the narrator of being an individualist and repeats the same sentence already said to Antonio: “‘O indivíduo é uma ilusão!’” (“The individual is an illusion”) (Braz 82). Surprised by the stranger’s reaction, the narrator asks himself whether this sequence of similar events is the result of chance, or part of a secret plan to eliminate the value of single individuals from society. 14 Besides the fact that the narrator “tinha deixado, oficialmente, de existir” (officially, had stopped existing) (Braz 135) due to an apparent mistake in the computer system, his importance as an individual is also diminished by the clerk’s behavior. She never recognizes his right to complain about the mistake, and she is not even slightly worried about the old man’s personal feelings when facing this situation.

149 the group was to put into practice a “game,” presumably described in a book written by o Velho, a book that had never been found. Sobre o nome do Jogo, consta que o Velho pensou, a princípio, em simplesmente chamá-lo Jogo do Número, ou Jogo do Todos-em-Um--mas, por requintes de ironia, teria preferido batizá-lo com nomes tirados dos livros de Tio Maria [: Braz, Quincas & Cia.]. (Regarding the title of the Game, o Velho thought, at first, in simply naming it Game of the Number, or Game of All-in-One--but in order to be ironic, he would have preferred to give it names that came from the books written by uncle Maria [: “Braz, Quincas & Cia.]). (Braz 154)

In the game proposed by o Velho, during the initial stage, the players examine one the others, “‘buscando descobrir os pontos igualitários e coletivizantes’” (“trying to find aspects in common”). The next stage, “obriga os participantes ao ‘ataque benéfico’,[. . .] [a gestos de] ‘imitação e submissão’, para que as distinções somáticas e psíquicas vão se tornando progressivamente indistintas’” (forces the participants towards the “benefic attack,” [to gestures of] “imitation and submission,” so that any somatic and psychic distinction progressively becomes undistinguishable”). In the last stage, “ocorre a ‘absorção planejada’ de todas as equipes numa companhia única--a ‘Cia.’ do título” (what occurs is the “planned absorption” of all teams into a sole company--the “co” of the title) (Braz 152).15 The objective of the game is to make the individuals equal one to the others, and to completely transform them into a homogeneous collectivity. O Velho’s game can also be interpreted as a personal defense against other people’s apparent superiority, and, for this reason, as an affirmation of his existence as an individual. The judgments of other people put o Velho’s self-esteem in danger. He could not continue to accept that he was not as valuable as his brother, Maria (Joaquim Maria 15 The game is described as consisting of three stages that are named after the stages experienced by Humanitas, according to Quincas Borba’s philosophy, the Humanitismo, as presented in the novel Quincas Borba (1891), by Machado de Assis.

150 Machado de Assis). What is o Velho’s struggle to avoid humiliation but an affirmation and a defense of his own value as an individual? Why would o Velho bother to create a game that would erase any trace of personal existence if not to revenge himself on those who were considered more talented by society? His strategy had more of a personal revenge than of a thought of doing something good for the future of humanity as a whole. The very reason that justifies the creation of the game functions as a counter-text that stands in opposition to the ideas explicitly defended by the group that plays it. On the one hand, one has a defense of the erasure of individuals through the act of playing the game, but on the other hand, the tool that is intended to be used in order to achieve this objective--the “game of the progressive equality”-is the result of its author’s personal anger, as well of his desire not to be considered inferior. His desire to eliminate any difference among people rises from a desire to be respected as an individual. In the narrator’s opinion, the battle between individuals and the group had been won by Faustino Xavier. Remaining officially dead, and without any desire or sense of capacity to change his status, Antonio admits the victory of the so-called “pacifying collectivism” (Braz 163). However, a close analysis of Braz, Quincas & Cia. reveals that this novel is not the story of the victory of the mass over individuals. The narrator explains his need to write a story by affirming that memory forces him to tell what happened. In his opinion, “a memória é eterna, como um castigo implacável” (memory is eternal, like an implacable punishment) (Braz 122). Memory differentiates one person from the others. Even though the narrator affirms to have lost the fight against anonymity, the very fact that the he is telling a story is already a proof that his role as an individual was not completely annulled. Antonio is considered dead by society, but he continues to affirm his existence through the very act of writing. The ideas that occupy his mind and fill up two notebooks (which compose the novel itself) prove that collectivism did not win. Throughout Braz, Quincas & Cia., the narrator puts into question his own as well as the mysterious group’s sanity. Madness is associated

151 to a lack of individuality and to the attempt to create a society without individuals. Such connection is also present in Machado de Assis’ “O Alienista” (The Psychiatrist, 1882), a short-story that is mentioned in Braz, Quincas & Cia., and that presents a similar description of madness. In “O Alienista,” the definition of madness follows a path that goes from the slightest difference in relation to other people to an extreme conformity to social rules. The protagonist Simão Bacamarte is a doctor who dreams of finding a cure to madness. He plans to separate mad people from normal people, and to put the former group in a house specially created for this purpose. At the beginning of the story, Bacamarte considers crazy everyone who is somehow different from the others. He then describes as mad anyone who completely conforms to social rules, and who does not distinguish him/herself from other people by any peculiar behavior. Sanity becomes therefore the perfect lack of equilibrium of the mental faculties, a natural and inherent mental imbalance.16 Bacamarte is a man of science who believes in the possibility of conducting objective research and arriving at irrefutable conclusions. His work is organized around the idea that it is possible to establish rules that can be applied to all human beings, and that every single act practiced by each single person can be predicted, explained, and justified. At the beginning of the story, Bacamarte believes that life in society would reach a perfect stage when there were no divergences between people. Regardless the turnabout in his theory, Bacamarte remains faithful to the idea that madness differentiates a minority that does not conform to the majority of citizens. According to Bacamarte, difference is the evil element in society and causes disagreement, conflict, and instability in social life. At the end of the story, the doctor retires himself to the madhouse after concluding that he is the only crazy person in the town. Bacamarte’s attempt to reduce individuals to mere actualizations of universal laws reveals itself as an impossible 16 Machado de Assis, “The Psychiatrist,” in The Psychiatrist and Other Stories, trans. William L. Grossman (Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1963), 43.

152 task. In both “O Alienista” and Braz, Quincas & Cia. the defense of equality among individuals is presented as an unattainable dream of lunatics. In Braz, Quincas & Cia., the acknowledgement of the existence of individual voices also originates from the fact that the protagonist is a writer. Even though Antonio sees his narrative as a history made of other people’s ideas and words (Braz 171), it is through writing that the protagonist affirms himself as an individual. By writing, he proves that his individuality was not erased, because he still has his own interpretation of the world, an individual way of editing the events, and a personal desire to convince others of the accuracy of his pointof-view. Differently from the atemporal, impersonal, and immutable human being that he believes to have become, the narrator of Braz, Quincas & Cia., becomes an individual through his text, a narrative that privileges the multiplicity of voices and contrasts between various point-of-views.17 At the beginning of his narrative, Antonio mentions a party during which guests question the role of art in a controlled and supposedly perfect society. They conclude that art would have no place in such a society: “Lugar nenhum! A arte não passa de um fruto da imperfeição do indivíduo” (No place! Art is nothing more than the product of the imperfection of an individual) (B 64). Antonio’s act of writing is a denial of the establishment of a perfect and predictable society, such as the one dreamed by Simão Bacamarte in “O Alienista.” It is an affirmation of himself as an individual whose voice is a means of intervention and participation in a world of differences. The emphasis on the voice as well as on the creative capacity of individuals that is present in Braz, Quincas & Cia. and in the works of 17 Regardless the fact that a work like Braz, Cubas & Cia. is neither imprisoned to one sole, unique author, nor to a “correct” meaning, the place of the author--or narrator-as a source of ideas and opinion remains. As J. E. Gracia states: “Texts without authors are texts without history, and texts without history are texts without meaning, that is, they are not texts” (“Can There Be Texts Without Historical Authors?”, American Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1994): 252).

153 Machado de Assis makes the reader of these texts aware of their capacity to participate in the construction of the text. By inviting--even to the point of submitting to--the reader’s own interpretation, Machado and Antonio Fernando Borges suggest that, even though there are many works embedded in their palimpsest-like texts, these works were recreated. In Braz, Quincas & Cia. and in the works of Machado de Assis, individual voices survive a public opinion that ignores their very existence. They resist threats of being cut, summarized, distorted, generalized, or erased. Such resistance, however, may do more than justify the originality and autonomy of rewritings. It may tell us more about cultural exchange and shed light on the limitations of the very metaphor of cultural and textual cannibalism. Considering the process of writing as putting into question formerly given versions of texts18, Antonio Fernando Borges’ dialogue with Machado de Assis underlines the relationship between the latter and the Brazilian modernist discourse on cultural cannibalism, while at the same time resists attempts to simplify such a relationship and its outcomes. To be satisfied with an harmonizing entombment of Machado de Assis into a history of the Brazilian struggle for the establishment of a national literary identity would mean to succumb to one of the cannibal’s biggest fears: the “fear of consuming something that cannot be digested,” and that could later talk back.19 After recognizing the empowering presence of a living being (or a text) inside one’s own belly (or discourse), the least productive step is to play deaf to the 18 As described by Gérard Genette, for example, one can “make up a Flaubert by Proust,” which we must take in both possible senses of this formula: Flaubert as read by Proust, Flaubert as written by Proust (not including a third, perhaps the most important: Flaubert as read by us through Proust, or by way of Proust, as one goes to the Guermantes by way of Méséglise--it´s the prettiest way” (Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree (Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997), 103, emphasis in the original). 19 Brian Greenspan, “Cannibals as the Core: Juicy Rumors and the Hollow Earth Chronotope in Ian Wedde’s ‘Symmes Hole,’” in Eating Their Worlds: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity, ed. Kristen Guest (New York: SUNY P, 2001), 157.

154 productively disturbing background noise in the prose of Machado de Assis, who constantly examines “the man on the verge of madness due to his internal contradictions, his inability to harmonize appetites, values, and inclinations.”20 In Machado’s short story “A Igreja do Diabo” (The Devil’s Church, 1883), for example, the devil compares virtues to queens whose velvet cloaks are trimmed with cotton fringes, and plans to “pull them by those fringes and bring them all to his [newly created] church.”21 The devil’s plan, which includes replacing traditionally defined virtues with the ones that, in his opinion, would be the natural and legitimate one (such as vanity, lust, sloth, avarice), fails. He soon notices that his followers soon began practicing the old virtues. “The cotton cloaks now have silken fringes, just as those of velvet had cotton fringes. […] It’s the human contradiction,” explains God.”22 The description of Machado as a cannibal of texts--of cultures, and histories--leaves remnants that cannot be overlooked. To use the metaphor developed in “A Igreja do Diabo,” how can one resist the temptation to tear off the cotton fringes from our velvet cloaks? How can we ignore the acquiescent and suffocating implications of self-congratulatory good literary theory for the oppressed? Would such an undertaking not share disturbing similarities to Machado’s devil’s “marvelous idea” of founding his own church and installing his doctrine, his “good news to mankind” under the auspices of God’s church (or, in our case, within the framework of foundational texts)?23

20 Massaud Moisés, Machado de Assis: Ficção e Utopia (São Paulo: Cultrix, 2001), 32. 21 Machado de Assis, “The Devil’s Church,” The Devil’s Church and Other Stories, trans. Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu (Austin: U of Texas P, 1984), 30. 22 Assis, The Devil’s Church, 35. 23 Assis, The Devil’s Church, 28 and 31.

155 The very metaphor of the cannibal, while on the one hand refreshingly inventive and useful, confronts us with some problematic leftovers. Stories of cannibalism are traces of a “missed encounter” and sometimes stand in place of a lack of communication between different peoples, of the void or silence that has marked their contact.24 The discourse on cannibalism has been used as a convenient excuse for the lack of exchange between different peoples, an incomprehension that stems from seemingly incompatible social constructions. The phenomenon of cannibalism has also been used as an ideological tool in order to suppress debates on, or even to justify, foreign exploitation and the extermination of local cultures. Is it possible to transform this absence into cultural appropriation? One must consider the gains of those (authors, texts) that became meals, and, perhaps, willful, cognizant, and thinking beings within a cannibal’s belly. What can be the political agenda that drives these human--and textual-sacrifices? Can consumption be the means to avoid discussions on cultural exchange, or perhaps an indication of the permeability of any culture? Machado de Assis’ emphasis on the sometimes perverse and always selfish motivations of singular characters, while empowering individual voices--and as a consequence, any voice that disrespects and destabilizes domination and hegemony--can nevertheless be also interpreted as a consequence of egotistical drives, void of any subversive power. The question emerges whether Machado suggests that one writes in order to avoid oblivion--of oneself, and not of a cause, a group, or a nation. The most reverberating passages of Machado’s prose are not public and grandiose acts of resistance, but solitary agonies and ecstasies: Pestana’s unfulfilled dream of writing a classical composition in the short story “Um Homem Célebre” (A Celebrity, 1888)--“Why couldn’t he compose just one immortal 24 Sanborn, Geoffrey. “The Missed Encounter: Cannibalism and the Literary Critic,” in Guest, 93.

156 page?”25--, Nogueira’s reminiscences of a conversation with a woman when he was seventeen years-old in “Missa do Galo” (Midnight Mass, 1894)--“I have never quite understood a conversation that I had with a lady many years ago, when I was seventeen and she was thirty.”26 And for the story of Cândido Neves, a free man and jobless father who captures a pregnant runaway slave, who due to the fight aborts her child, Machado de Assis chooses the title “Pai Contra Mãe” (Father Versus Mother, 1906) and avoids the use of politically charged terms such as free, slave, white, black, or even man or woman--even though Cândido Neves’ and his wife Clara’s names (meaning “candid snow” and “clear”) do not allow the reader to overlook the racial conflicts that determined whose child would survive. What matters to Machado and his narrators is to investigate passions that move men from inside out, and modify their behavior independently from their social status. As Raymundo Faoro points out, in Machado’s works, “one does not find a reality [. . .] whose structures penetrate the characters’ souls.”27 It is impossible to bypass the turmoil of personal disputes and petty ambitions that marks Machado’s characters. Reading them hastily as--or catapulting them unconditionally into--confrontations with foreign (national, or any form of) oppression might be an all too easy interpretive move. The task is to think through and experiment with a style of subversive appropriation that endows texts and writers with the plasticity of men as defined by Brás Cubas: a “thinking erratum,” given that “every season of life is an edition that corrects the one before.”28 Are we condemned to search for signs that foreshadow our current agenda? If so, Machado’s text resist, and the reader becomes 25 Assis, The Devil’s Church, 109. 26 Assis, The Psychiatrist, 94. 27 Raymundo Faoro, Machado de Assis: A Pirâmide e o Trapézio (São Paulo: Globo, 2001), 545. 28 Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas (New York: Oxford U P, 1997), 57.

157 Bentinho, the protagonist of the novel Dom Casmurro (1900). Every time he attempts to find the little Capitu in the woman that he married, he is paralyzed by a pair of gypsy’s eyes (the eyes of a nomadic character without a past, heading towards an uncertain future? A mirror-like object that reminds Bentinho that he is also the object of his own gaze?). Like his characters, Machado de Assis’ texts are not to be read without suspicion, without an eye for what was chosen to be omitted and could not be stated. In the short story “Cantiga de Esponsais” (Wedding Song, 1883), Romão is a conductor who dies unable to fulfill his life project of translating his conjugal happiness into a musical composition. Fragile and imperfect, words are, nevertheless, resilient and audacious in their fight against speechless realities. Words enjoy the advantage of being able to point at their own deficiencies and limitations, to allow their opposites to constantly clash against the surface of the text. In the last chapter of Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas (1881), for example, the narrator and protagonist Cubas shares with the reader his sadness despite his description of his lack of children as an advantage: “I had no children, I haven’t transmitted the legacy of our misery to any creature.”29 It is in the space of what is not written that Machado de Assis’ texts come alive.30 To what extent would these indispensable absences between the lines become 29 Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs, 203. 30 As the Brazilian critic Alceu Amoroso Lima states, Machado de Assis “writes more between the lines than on the lines. He suggests more than he says. He evokes more than he manifests. And he never writes without an ulterior meaning” (Quoted in William L. Grossman, introduction to The Psychiatrist and Other Stories, by Machado de Assis (Berkeley: U of California P, 1963), viii). Machado de Assis´ characters and narrators often fall short of their attempts to represent life´s events through words. Brás Cubas, for example, is challenged by an audacious note written by his lover: “The wall is low on the alley side,” only to find out later that it was an old note from his lover (Machado de Assis, The Posthumous Memoirs, 156). “I had a strange sensation. [. . .] It was indeed an old note of Virgília´s received during the beginning of our love affair, a certain meeting in the yard, which had, indeed, led to my leaping over the wall, a low and discreet wall… I put the paper away… I had a strange sensation” (156).

158 obliterated when we simply feed Machado de Assis’ works into chains of textual cannibalism? It is not wise to ignore the fractures of our discourse on cannibalism and cultural exchange. What if we reflect on Brazilian literature without considering its dialogue with foreign literatures? What if we temporarily suspend our categorization drive and displace these literary works outside the logic of oppression and subordination? How can we account for lacks--of explicit political and social awareness, for example--, other than classifying them as deficiencies? We would perhaps begin to ask, as Machado de Assis suggests in his fiction, whether the most interesting part of a story--and, we might add, of history--is exactly that which could not be said (or should not have been said). We would perhaps notice that the hermeneutic richness of texts and literatures are partly sponsored by their limitations. We would possibly face other limitations in resistance projects that do not necessarily have to do with economic and political constellations. Machado de Assis’ texts alert the reader to an individual’s capacity to also be responsive to, and for, an unsociable and isolated basis, which is not necessarily less politically useful than participating in collective struggles. A similar idea resonates in a passage from Oswald de Andrade’s “Manifesto da Poesia Pau-Brasil” (Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry, 1924): “A suggestion of Blaise Cendrars: You have the train loaded, ready to leave. A negro churns the crank of the turn-table beneath you. The slightest carelessness and you will leave in the opposite direction to your destination.”31 This passage focuses on a single man, who is able to turn the driving handle into another direction, and take his passengers--his so-called masters?--towards an unknown and uncontrollable destiny. Every text that is alive--and every text, when read and passed on comes to life--asks to be challenged by the reader. Challenged into generating discussions beyond the author’s control, confronted with 31 Oswald de Andrade, “Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry,” trans. Stella M. de Sá Rego, Latin American Literary Review 14.27 (1986): 185.

159 questions that might not have been the questions of its time. For this reason, one must offer Machado de Assis’ prose to the sacrifice of a cannibalistic ritual, even though, and indeed because, his texts are indigestible.

160 Works Cited

••de Andrade, Oswald. “Manifesto of Pau-Brasil Poetry.” Translated by Stella M. de Sá Rego. Latin American Literary Review 14.27 (1986): 184-187. ••de Assis, Machado. The Devil’s Church and Other Stories. Translated by Jack Schmitt and Lorie Ishimatsu. Austin: U of Texas P, 1984. ••---. Dom Casmurro. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 1988. ••---. Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas. São Paulo: Ática, 1997. ••---. The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas. New York: Oxford UP, ••1997. ••---. The Psychiatrist and Other Stories. Translated by William L. Grossman. Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1963. ••---. Quincas Borba. São Paulo: Moderna, 1994. ••Bopp, Raul. Movimentos Modernistas no Brasil: 1922-1928. Rio de Janeiro: São José, 1966. ••---. Vida e Morte da Antropofagia. Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1977. ••Borges, Antonio Fernando. Braz, Quincas & Cia. Rio de Janeiro: Companhia das Letras, 2002. ••---. Que Fim Levou Brodie? Rio de Janeiro: Record, 1996. ••Faoro, Raymundo. Machado de Assis: A Pirâmide e o Trapézio. São Paulo: Globo, 2001. ••Fuentes, Carlos. Machado de La Mancha. México: Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2001. ••Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests: Literature in the Second Degree. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 1997.

161 ••Gracia, J. E. “Can There Be Texts without Historical Authors?” American Philosophical Quarterly 31 (1994): 245-53. ••Greenspan, Brian. “Cannibals as the Core: Juicy Rumors and the Hollow Earth Chronotope in Ian Wedde’s ‘Symmes Hole.’” In Eating Their Worlds: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity, ed. Kristen Guest, 149-65. New York: SUNY P, 2001. ••Ivo, Lêdo. Modernismo e Modernidade. Rio de Janeiro: Livraria São José, n.d. ••Jobim, José Luís, ed. A Biblioteca de Machado de Assis. Rio de Janeiro: Academia Brasileira de Letras, 2001. ••Lucas, Fábio. Expressões da Identidade Brasileira. São Paulo: EDUC, 2002. ••Merquior, José Guilherme. Introduction to Memórias Póstumas de Brás Cubas, by Machado de Assis. São Paulo: Ática, 1997. ••Miller, J. Hillis. “The Critic as Host.” In Deconstruction and Criticism, ed. Harold Bloom et al., 217-53. New York: Seabury, 1979. ••Moisés, Massaud. Machado de Assis: Ficção e Utopia. São Paulo: Cultrix, 2001. ••Munanga, Kabengele. Rediscutindo a Mestiçagem no Brasil: Identidade Nacional Versus Identidade Negra. Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, 1999. ••Pignatari, Décio. “Marco Zero de Andrade.” Suplemento Literário de O Estado de São Paulo, 24 October 1964. ••Sanborn, Geoffrey. “The Missed Encounter: Cannibalism and the Literary Critic.” In Eating Their Worlds: Cannibalism and the Boundaries of Cultural Identity, ed. Kristen Guest, 187-204. New York: SUNY P, 2001. ••Santiago, Silviano. The Space In-Between: Essays on Latin American Culture. Durham: Duke UP, 2001.

Za is for Saffron: from a book on the Arabic alphabet by Michael Beard

If the alphabet could talk, what would it say to us? It serves long stretches of its time mute, unobtrusive, passively attending to the meanings of the people who use it. We know it is there, but once we have mastered it we also learn to ignore it. It carries our message for us and beyond that we take it for granted, but like unobtrusive servants noticed only by newcomers or by children, the letters are still there, and right in the foreground. Sometimes a calligrapher makes us notice them again. Perhaps all this time they are mumbling among themselves. Ouch that ragged-edged pen hurts Oh great, there’s that dull pencil again. Be careful where you put those dots. And different alphabets might have different things to say. The project this article comes from takes its cue from books by two classicists, Alexander and Nicholas Humez, called From Alpha to Omega: The Life and Times of the Greek Alphabet and ABC et Cetera: The Life and Times of the Roman Alphabet. In a book which develops a comparable discussion of the Arabic alphabet, the letter Za would come eleventh. (In Persian it would come thirteenth.) I

164 mention its position in the list because I want to open with a word about its predecessor: Ra (the tenth letter, or in Persian the twelfth) is the minimal shape, proverbial for smallness as iota is proverbial for the slight and diminutive in Greek, a simple swoop from the midpoint of the line downward. Drawn with a pen it thickens slightly half-way down and narrows again as the angle changes to the angle of the reed. Add a dot overhead and you have the variation which is our subject for this essay. Add three dots and you have the sound added by Persian speakers in the 15th century, zha. Of the many confused matches between sound and letter in the alphabet English speakers use, our alphabet that is, is the Z sound, sometimes written Z and sometimes written S, according to rules which I’m sure make sense phonologically but must be a dilemma for people studying English. But if we don’t take into account those S’s which get thickened in the course of daily discourse (“was,” “does,” “is”), English Z’s are not that common. (Latin Z was useful only for loan words; the Romans didn’t have an indigenous voiced sibilant.) In English too letter Z seems a letter for loan words. This is also true of French: in Barthes’s S/Z, Z it is the letter of castration, an S with sharp dangerous edges. The verb zébrer in French, strictly speaking the verbal form of the animal zèbre, suggests drawing stripes like those on a zebra, and yet I think it is for most readers, like the English verb “zigzag,” an imitation of the shape of that peripheral letter Z. Arabic and Persian Za, on the other hand, is in the middle of the alphabet, and it has a rather rounded form, the slim curve of râ with a dot overhead. Sadeq Hedayat’s extraordinary novel Buf-e kur, The Blind Owl, opens with a famous sentence based on two basic Za words: Dar zendegi zakhm-hâ-î hast ke mesl-e khure ruh-râ âheste dar anzevâ, mikhurad va mitarâshad. [In life there are wounds which, like leprosy, gradually, in solitude, eat away at the soul and whittle it down.]

165 The standard translation by D.P. Costello renders this sentence more effectively than I have (“There are sores which slowly erode the mind in solitude like a kind of canker”), but less literally, transforming leprosy into canker and leaving out the first two words (“in life”) altogether. There is a lot to say about that extraordinary sentence, its subtle symmetries and its play of consonants, and the way it sets up the nightmarish progress of the narrative which follows. A literal version allows us to see that part of its effect is the juxtaposition of two basic Za words, zendegi and zakhm, life and wound. The physical intensity of “wound” (zakhm) playing against the vague affirmative zendegi (“life”) may register on the ear as a conceptual shock. It is the kind of juxtaposition which generates proverbs. Zendegi, a Persian noun related to the adjective zenda, “living,” and the verb zistan, “to exist,” “survive,” hit the ear as Indo-European stems extending to the Greek stems for life, záô, “to live” and zôos, meaning zenda—the Greeks having an indigenous z sound and a letter for it. The word zakhm, from an Arabic root meaning “to fester or rot,” represents a wound in a vivid way. To say that the wound works slowly and in solitude (literally dar enzevâ,“in a corner”) offers the promise of a quest, a search to make the wound visible. Enzevâ, “solitude” or “isolation,” is in fact a ZA word. It will show up again. There is a less serious zakhm in Persian classical tradition, though just as scary. The 12-century Persian chronicler Nezâmî-ye ‘Aruzi of Samarqand tells a series of anecdotes about the life at court and in his “Four Discourses” (Chahâr maqâla) and the extremes of tact to which the royal companions were often put. Tuqân Shâh of Nishapur (d. 1186-87), one of the Seljuk monarchs known for his bad temper, was playing high-stakes dice with his companions. E.G. Browne, in his edition and translation of the passage, tells you the rules of the game they were playing, but the important thing is that the poet Abu Bakr Azraqi was a nadîm (the term traditionally translated “boon companion”) present when Tuqân was desperate to throw two sixes, and threw two ones instead, “whereat,” E.G. Browne translates, “he was mightily vexed and left the board, while his anger rose so high and

166 reached such a pitch that each moment he was like to put his hand to his sword, and his courtiers trembled like the leaves of a tree” (71). Azraqi had the proper response, however, in the form of a rubâ`î: Gar shâh dow shesh khâst dow yek zakhm aftâd, Tâ zann nabari ke ka‘batayn dâd na-dâd, Ân zakhm ke kard rây shâhenshâh-e yâd Dar khedmat-e shâh ruy bar khâk nahâd.

E.G. Browne translates: Reproach not Fortune with discourteous tricks [zakhm] If by the King, desiring double six, Two ones were thrown; for whomsoe’er he calls Face to the earth before him prostrate falls.

It is curious that gambling appeals to people with strong wills, because it is a conscious decision to circumscribe one’s will, to follow the dictation of controlled accidents. The paradox is that by consciously granting to a contingent detail power over one’s life one feels—and every one who has gambled has felt this—in touch with some numinous source of power. It is no wonder that Muhammad decided that gambling would be forbidden in his community, because the self-consciously undue attention to the details of fate constitutes a threat to the higher forms of awe. On the other hand it’s no wonder that nudamâ’, would find gambling an appropriate way to kill time, because tying your fortune to the whims of an arbitrary authority is probably very much like tying it to whatever surface of a cube lands face upright. The beauty of the poem is in imagining that the dice are bound by the same laws as the nudamâ’, making the rules of chance and the rules of the king’s whim overlap for the space of four charming lines. The zakhm becomes not the inevitable, the perversity of fate, but the dice’s mistaken attempt to show their respect. They know that six on top is right-side up but they have to invert themselves in the presence of Tûqân Shâh. (Part of the beauty of the poem for a modern

167 reader is realizing that the configuration of dots on dice was the same in the eleventh century as it is now.) Remove the dot from the Kh in zakhm and we get another za` word, the Arabic stem z-h-m, the verb which describes being pressed in by a crowd, constrained, the feeling of entering a crowd or constraining oneself inside a claustrophobic space. The noun form zahmat, as loan word in Persian, is used to describe trouble and effort. Zahmat keshidan is what hosts do when they go out of their way for the guest. The adjective form mozâhem is common in Iran to describe a word for a person who gets in the way, who causes trouble. The guest is likely to say “I hope I’m not being a mozâhem,” a source of trouble. There is a standard answer: “Noqteh-râ bar dâr,” “Take away the dot,” meaning you’re not a mozâhem at all but a morâhem, an adjective from r-h-m (“womb”) which means a blessing. The Arabic word for dice does not in fact appear in Abû Bakr Azraqî’s poem. (He uses the Arab term ka‘ba, “cube.”) Strictly speaking the word for dice is zâr, a Za-word which has made its way into the western languages, but under cover, haphazardly, and hard to spot. The French word hazard, “chance,” comes to us quite directly from al-zâr. The great risk-taking stylist Mallarmé knew this, and the etymology hovers over the opening passages of his poem “Un coup de dés,” where the mysterious description of a shipwreck is scattered in subclauses around a base sentence written in large capitals: “Un coup de dés jamais n’abolira pas le hazard,” “a throw of the dice will never defeat chance.” Thus a specific artifact which is used to graph the habits of chance is made by synecdoche to represent chance itself. Western readers are more likely to know the word zâr as the name of the dance & ritual, usually attributed to the southern rim of the Islamic societies, by which music in a kind of dionysiac exorcism casts out the sources of a sickness. There is an account of the other kind of zâr in the opening chapter of Mahfouz’s eccentric, 1975 novella Hikâyât Hâratinâ, “Stories of our neighborhood” (translated Fountain and Tomb) when Umm Zaki (her name an old respecteda Za

168 word for growth and purity) falls ill, the family arranges the ceremony, and the narrator, a child, watches from above: The heralded day of the zar arrives. Our neighbor’s house is packed to bursting with women. The smell of incense is everywhere. A troop of mysterious Sudanese women dominate the house with shadowy secrets. I peek through the skylight and see my friend in a new scene. In a robe gaudy [muzarkhasha, from the fourconsonant Za verb zarkasha, to adorn] with sequins and bangles, she sits on a throne. An ivory crown dangling with beads of every color perches on her head, and her legs soaked in a deep basin of rosewater with green coffee beans in the bottom. The women thump huge tambourines , their brassy throats cast out shivering songs. The breath of demons fills the air, and each demon grabs a guest for a dancing partner. The room shimmers with their gyrations and vibrates with their wailing moans as human and ghost melt together. In the middle of it all, Um Zaki writhes wildly as if caught again by the mad frenzies of youth. She wheezes sharply through her golden teeth, then begins to run around the throne. But her run becomes a frightening rush, round and round, whirling faster and faster until she starts to wobble in exhaustion and falls at last unconscious. (Hikâyât Hâratinâ, 8-9; trans. as Fountain and Tomb, 14)

Playing with dice is an attempt to divide a fixed sum by invoking the authority of chance, watching inanimate objects land on the ground. The other kind of zâr is an act of cooperation, trusting that the world of spirits will keep separate company from the world of humans if we enter their world momentarily, evoking the collective power of music and dance as the middle ground between human worlds and the realm of the spirit. In the next paragraph of Hikâyât Hâratinâ Umm Zaki is carted off in a donkey cart to the government hospital where she will die of her illness. Umm Zaki is presented as an appealing character, whose loss colors the opening of the story, not like the zakhm which erodes life at the opening of Hedayat’s Blind Owl but like one of those reminders of mortality designed to make us appreciate the physical world. Hedayat represents a skeptic’s material vision of the world. To turn to the other pole of language, an evocation of the world beyond that of matter, two Za words take a prominent place in one of the most celebrated passages of the Qur`ân, the mishkât al-anwâr or “Niche

169 of Lights” passage of the sura called “Nûr,” “Light.” It takes the form of an extensive metaphor, in which God’s light is given a mathal, a parabolic explication: The parable of His Light [mathalu nûrihi] Is as if there were a niche And within it a lamp [misbâh] The lamp enclosed in glass [zujâja] The glass as it were A brilliant star: Lit from a blessed tree, An olive [zaytûna], neither of the east Nor of the west . . . (24.35, Yusuf Ali trans.)

Even in translation it is easy to see why this passage has been so widely memorized and admired. There has even been a book-length analysis by the eleventh-century mystical scholar Abû Hâmid alGhazzâlî (that’s al-Ghazzâlî with two z’s). (Digression for classicists: al-Ghazzâlî’s analysis is reminiscent of “Cave of the Nymphs,” the Neoplatonic reading by the third-century Porphyry’s startling reading of a passage from book13 of the Odyssey, usually referred to by its Latin name De Antro Nympharum.) Al-Ghazzâlî’s reading has to do with the hierarchy between faculties of perception, but short of that we can concentrate on the Za words, zujâja (glass) and zaytûna (olive). It is as if each image added an initial intermediary between human perception and the source of light. We look at the niche with its lamp, thinking ourselves at home in that cozy space, and then the zujâja materializes in front of us. From the lamp to the fluid burning in the lamp we move to the tree that provided that oil. The oil is zayt; the collective noun for olives and olive trees is zaytûn, a particular tree a zaytûna. Zaytûn has much the same cachet in Arabic culture as in Greece, where it (the elaia) occurs as an emblem of solidity. (Odysseus’s bed is carved from a live olive tree.) The mishkât al-anwâr locates the olive near the center of the divine vision. When olive orchards are destroyed in the West Bank there are many reasons to be angry, but the feeling that there is something holy in the plant itself can only give that pain an

170 additional edge. So even when we move to the discourse of devotion our imagery is material, palpable, tangible, tactile. In the Bible the most material imagery is in the Mazâmîr, the Psalms, which in Arabic as in Hebrew derives from a word for a wind instrument, Arabic zamâra. The opening of Kipling’s Kim is justly famous. He sat, in defiance of municipal orders, astride the gun Zam Zammah on her brick platform opposite the old Ajaib-Gher, the Wonder House, as the natives call the Lahore Museum. Who hold Zam-Zammah, that “fire-breathing dragon,” hold the Punjab, for the great green-bronze piece is always first of the conqueror’s loot. There was some justification for Kim—he had kicked Lala Dinanath’s boy off the trunnions—since the English held the Punjab and Kim was English. (Kim, 49)

The cannon is real, and in fact it still exists. A footnote to the Penguin edition tells us that it was constructed in 1757. Kim is often read as a guide to the religious cultures of northern India—Hindu, Islamic, Buddhist, and the opening centers us on the Islamic world, with the cannon, but across from the center of British cultural power, the museum. (Kipling’s father was in fact curator of that museum from1875 to 1894.) One could argue from the very fact of the cannon being in retirement, fought over by children in a public park, that it no longer represented Islamic power. But the name was ironic already, another of those places where the divine world and the material world combine, since the source is zamzam, the Arabic adjective with a fourconsonant stem meaning copious, abundant or overflowing, also the name of a famous well in Mecca. Maybe it’s something about Za words, because there are so many that focus on the appeal of the physical world, the realm of the Persian word zibâ, the “beautiful.” In Persian the word zan, “woman,” memorialized in English by the Anglo-Indian borrowing zanana (zanâna, women’s quarters) is surrounded by a cluster of terms for zibâ’i or beauty. The zolf, the lock of hair—fragrant, tangled, unruly, hypnotizing--in whose tangles the observer’s soul is lost may be the most popular metonymy in Persian poetry. (Look up zolf in the

171 concordance of Hafez’s poetry and you find 175 entries.) The Arabic verb zâna, “to decorate,” gives us zayn, “beautiful,” and zayna, “ornament” A characteristic phrase in the Qur’ân is 37.6 (Al-Saffât): “Annâ zayn-nâ li-samâ’ al-dunyâ bi-zaynat al-kawâkibi” (“We have indeed decked [zaynâ] the lower heaven with beauty [zayna] in the stars”—trans. Yusuf Ali) or, multiplying Za words a passage in the Sura of Jonah, where the rain brings forth abundance until the earth is clad with its golden ornaments (zukhruf) and is decked out with beauty (azaynat) (hattâ idha akhadhati al-ardu zukhruf-hâ wa azaynat watana ahluhâ—Yûnis, 10.24). For some reason four-consonant stems like Z-M-Z-M are abundant in the list of ZA words. The verb zarzara means to chirp, and in its noun form zurzûr it means “starling.” Zaqzaqa, to peep, chirp, but also to feed, gives us a noun form zuqzûq, a lapwing. (In its plural form, Zaqâzîq, it is the name of a city in the Nile Delta.) The character of the garrulous barber in the story of the Hunchback in the Thousand and one Nights is a ZA’ word with an M prefix, muzayyin. Zar in Persian is gold, and as a loan word we see it regularly: with the prefix bâ (with) it gives us the most widely known Persian word, bâzâr, meaning “market,” sûq or bazaar, the place where gold is used. A zumrud in Arabic is an emerald; zaraq is blueness (from the adjective azraq). The costumes of the Zouave (synonymous today with flamboyant uniforms, like those of the Papal guard) were based on those of Algerian troops sponsored by the French in 1830, said to be from a Kabyle tribe called the Zwâwa. The Arabic stem z-r-‘ is to sow or spread, and the vocabulary of agriculture (zarâ‘ah) derives from it. ZA -words often suggest growth: zâda (z-î-d), a synonym of zakâ, is the verb for growing and increase— thus Arabic ziyâda, surplus or addition, and in a Persian loan word, ziyâd, “a lot.” “Zaydînî `ishqan,” sings the popular Iraqi singer Kâzem Al-Sâhir, showing the imperative of the same verb, “Increase your love for me” in lyrics by the popular poet Nizâr Qabbânî. In Persian proper names –zâda is the suffix for “child of,” like -oghlou in Turkish or –ski in Russian. The source is the verb zâdan, to give birth.

172 Widely distributed in Persian and Arabic are the terms derived from the Arabic stem z-w-j, meaning “to combine,” “put in pairs,” giving us izdivâj, “marriage,” zawja, “wife” and zawj (Turkish zevç), “husband.” At least one observer (Arthur Jeffery in The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’ân) has suggested that we are not dealing with an indigenous Arab term, but with another widely spread Indo-European loan, a relative of Greek zeûgos (from yeug-, an Indo-European stem meaning “to join”), extending east to Sanskrit yuga, a yoke connecting two beasts of burden. If we accept the Indo-European origin of the verb for marriage, there is some baggage that comes with it. Flowers are a Za-word in Arabic: zahr (from z-h-r, the stem for “to shine, to give light”). The name of the major theological university in Cairo, Al-Azhâr, comes from that stem. The flower of universities. The city built by `Abd al-Rahman III, conceived in 929 as an extension of the Abbasid caliphate now exiled in Spain, begun in 936, destroyed by Berber armies in 1009, was named Madinat al-Zahra, supposedly after ‘Abd al-Rahman’s favorite concubine. The zanbaq is a lily. To extend the garden image, a zanbur is a bee. A zabîb is a raisin. (In an etymology I cannot explain, zabîb seems to derive from zibb, a word for penis.) Meanwhile, a zabîba is the mark on the forehead caused by the repeated pressure of intense prayer. A zahra is an individual flower: voweled differently, it becomes Zuhra, the name for Venus. There are not a lot of Za words in the sky, but a zîj (a level such as masons use) gives us the book Al-Zîj, an ephemerus or astronomical almanac, like the famous Zij-e Elkhânî compiled for Hulagu by Nasîr al-Dîn-e Tusi. Zahl is Saturn. Beta virginis, the second brightest star in the constellation Virgo, is named Zavijava, in the Arabic almanacs al-Zâwiya, “the corner.” The unfinished story of Sir Thopas in the Canterbury Tales is set just across the channel in Flanders. It is not one of the places where we find references to the Islamic world. It isn’t even exotic. It is famously a tedious narrative. In fact the narrator or Chaucer figure who tells the story is interrupted after a handful of stanzas because the story is going so badly. But when he describes his hero Sir Thopas (“Yborn he was in

173 fer contree, / In Flaundres. Al biyonde the see . . .”) he gives him the complexion of a local boy (“His heer, his berd was lyk saffroun”) with a comparison that reaches way out east. Saffron is in the Arab word za‘afrân. Saffron, proverbial for the deep yellow color of the pistils, is one of those words it is easy to trace as it travels west. Za‘afrân may or may not be an Arabic term originally, but you can feel it behind all the European loan words. Spanish azafran carries the traces of the Arabic definite article. Italian zafferano keeps the z sound. Wycliffe’s 1382 translation of the Bible into Middle English, contemporary with Chaucer, includes a saffron moment in Lamentations 4.5, where he describes those raised in luxury now in poverty: “qui nutriebantur in coccinis, amplexati sunt stercora”— “that weren nurshid in fair clois of saffroun biclippiden toordis”—that those who once were nourished in coccus, scarlet or purple, are now embraced by the dung heap. (The King James Bible of 1611 gives us a literal reading: “they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills.”) It is possible that Sir Thopaz’s complexion is not the yellow we know from saffron in rice; the word may have migrated further than the plant, or Chaucer may have been familiar with the plant itself, whose flowers are red, and Sir Thopaz’s coloring may be that of a flushed northerner’s face. Then again, in the 1392 version Wycliffe writes “that were nurshid in cradels,” a rendition that seems further still from any known meaning of coccus. Zanjabîl in Arabic is one of those plants whose names resonate not just through the neighbors’ languages, etymologically, but also internally, since in the Qur’ân the zanjabîl is one of the flavors which characterizes the cuisine of the next world: Wa yusqawna fîhâ ka’san kân mizâja zanjabîlan. ‘Aynan fî-hâ tusammâ salsabîlan. (Al-Dahr [Time], 76.17-18) And they will be given to drink there a cup mixed with zanjabîl. (Dahr, “Time”— Yusuf Ali trans.)

174 I first became aware of the word at an upscale confectionary in Amman named Zanjabîl. Of all the Za words it seems to have had the widest geographical spread. Arabic folk etymology considers zanjabîl a plant from Zanzibar, the land of the zanj, the term used for blackskinned people. Zanjabîl shares the z-sound with the Greek ziggíberis; Latin kept the z when it borrowed the word as zingiber (Italian zenzero), but further west it thickens to the g of Portugese gingibre or English ginger. (Europe started importing it early; the OED lists a use of the word in early English as early as 1000 CE.) The roots of the word are further east still, where they start with an sh- sound, as in Middle Persian shangavîr and Sanskrit sriñgavera, which Yule in HobsonJobson wrangles to the ground by identifying a visible etymology sriñga, “horn.” (The Humez brothers translate “horn-body.”) The giraffe which Egyptian ruler Muhammad ‘Ali presented to Charles X, to live as an ornament in the Jardin des Plantes arrived in Paris 1827. It was accompanied by the biologist Étienne Geoffrey St. Hilaire, who had been one of the scientists Napoleon shipped to Egypt in 1798, founder of the National Museum of National History in 1793. There is an entire book about that giraffe and its ziyâra or pilgrimage up the Nile and across the Mediterranean, by Michael Allin. He even gives it a name: “Giraffe, girafe, giraffa (English, French, Italian) from the Arabic Zerafa, a phonetic variant of zarafa, which means ‘charming’ or ‘lovely one.’ I named the giraffe Zarafa and imagined her wading through a field of sunflowers somewhere in France” (5). I suspect he mistakes zarâfa, the word for giraffe in Arabic, with its zarâfa, “elegance,” “grace,” “charm,” an homonym for “giraffe” in many dialects. As for the ungainly English word giraffe, it is another example of a Za word which has thickened into a G. The word zamin (earth, ground), the platform for all this zayna and zibâ’i, is a fundamental one in Persian. As zamindâr, a landowner or landlord it was a common loan word in Anglo-English zemindar, attested as early as 1684. Eventually zamin would take on a political context. The Iranian poet Lâhuti wrote a famous poem in1923

175 responding to the 1917 revolution in Russia and describing it as a zalzala, an earthquake: Nâgâh zamin larzid va-z dar falak tarsid chun dâd derafsh-e sorkh bar mahv-e setam farmân. (Suddenly the earth trembled, and dreaded the vicissitudes of the sky [i.e. of fate] when the red banner commanded the extinction of tyranny. Cited in Munibur Rahman, 157-58)

Hafez’s patron the regional ruler Shah Shujâ` was not an insubstantial poet, though he is better known for a family rivalry. The story goes that he fought against his brother and constant rival Mahmûd and memorialized the news of Mahmûd’s death with a chilling quatrain, the ultimate zamin poem: Mahmud barâdar-am shod shir-e makin, Mikard khasumat az pay-ye tâj o nagin. Kardim do bakhsh tâ bar âsâyad khalq, U zir zamin gereft o man ruy-e zamin.

In E.G. Browne’s translation: My brother Mahmûd, lion-like crouched low, For crown and ring was my relentless foe. At length we shared the earth that men might rest: I took the surface, he the realm below. (Literary History 3.166-67)

A rihla (previous chapter) is one way to cross the surface of the zamin. A ziyâra is the term for a more goal-oriented ambulation, a visit to a friend or a pilgrimage, perhaps to the city of Zamzam or to a zawiya or Sufi center. Ibn Battuta used zawâyâ, zawiyas, throughout his travels as a kind of hostel. They were at one time the logical substitute for a hotel. The concept spread so far that the word exists as a loan word in French, zaoïa (meaning a hermit’s cell). Etymologically a zawiya is a corner, and it is with this meaning that the form inziwâ it

176 is a loan word in Persian, enzavâ, meaning solitude, which is the third Za term in the quotation from Hedayat’s Blind Owl. *** I think a lot about imitative form, and sometimes I fancy I could create a discourse which imitates the shape of the letter Za, curving down in a kind of chute, as the lists of zaynât flow downhill. After making that Ra shape we go back and make the dot. Perhaps what follows is the dot. A Za word I haven’t mentioned is zamân, “time” in both Persian and Arabic. Min zamân, simply means “a long time ago,” and our concluding Za words take us back before there was an Arabic alphabet, so a kind of alphabetical vanishing point sets in with our last examples. Nietzsche was a philologist at a time when philology was still a heroic enterprise and a vista of great discoveries. His first publication, The Birth of Tragedy (1871), came out only a hundred years after the famous French translation by Anquetil-Duperron of the Zend-Avesta, the commentary on the Zoroastrian prayers (1771). Six years after The Birth of Tragedy, another northerner, Robert Nobel, who had an interest in the Middle East in the sense that he had an oil interest in Ajerbaijan, developed the first oil tanker to transport oil from the Caspian to Astrachan, where one could entrust the product to the Russian train system. (This kind of oil by the way is not called zayt, but naft, probably from Greek naftha.) Oil has been an economic disaster for every Middle Eastern community where it has shown up; no nation has yet proven a way to diversify their economies and use the zamin more practically, but at least Nobel showed sensitivity to the local culture because he named the tanker the Zoroaster. (The historical Zoroaster is said to have come from further west of the Caspian, near Lake Urmiya.) Robert Nobel’s tanker may not have influenced Nietzsche, but it was only a few years later that Thus Spoke Zarathustra appeared. Zoroaster is commoner pronunciation (coming to us through a Greek form), but Zarathustra is closer to the Persian name. Today he is

177 known in Persian as Zardosht (a variant of Zartosht), one of those zâ words which sends us back to Iranian antiquity. I have never heard a good explanation of why Nietzsche attributed his philosophy of 188385 to Zardosht, but Nietzsche knew a good deal about Indo-European philology. The place I feel closest to pre-Islamic Iran when I read Nietzsche is actually in The Birth of Tragedy. In order to refute the enlightenment vision of classical Greece, characterized by their optimism and clarity of vision, he famously cites a story about King Midas: There is an ancient story that King Midas hunted in the forest a long time for the wise Silenus, the companion of Dionysus, without capturing him. When Silenus at last fell into his hands, the king asked what was the best and most desirable of all things for man. Fixed and immovable, the demigod said not a word, till at last, urged by the king, he gave a shrill laugh and broke out into these words: “Oh, wretched ephemeral race, children of chance and misery, why do you compel me to tell you what it would be most expedient for you not to hear? What is best of all is utterly beyond your reach: not be born, not to be, to be nothing. But the second best for you is—to die soon.” (Birth of Tragedy, 42)

It is one of many stories about Midas’s abduction of Silenus, and its appeal is understandable. The idea of finding an informant with insider’s knowledge of another world, the E.T. narrative, has a deep appeal. It is the unspoken mainspring of anthropology. The Roman historian Aelian says that Silenus wandered into Midas’s rose garden and, once captured, played a role like Anquetil-Duperron’s and told the court stories of a continent unknown to Europeans. In Ovid’s account, in Book Eleven of The Metamorphoses, Midas’s golden touch is the reward for letting Silenus loose. A variant in which two shepherds, Chromis and Mnasyllus, find Silenus asleep in a cave, is the subject of Virgil’s sixth Eclogue, where Silenus bargains for his freedom by singing more beautifully than Apollo or Orpheus. Silenus’s somber wisdom in Nietzsche’s account occurs in an essay attributed to Plutarch, called “Consolation to Apollonius,” where it is attributed to Aristotle. Cicero (in the Tusculan Disputations 1.114) quotes it, as does Lactantius.

178 Silenus’s advice for mortals is today a barely thinkable philosophy. Optimism is the contemporary style, and deviations are traditionally called blasphemous or unpatriotic, but that was true of Nietzsche’s time as well. And Nietzsche may be right that it was a sentiment current in Attic Greece, without the Silenus story. Theognis (b. 540 BCE) includes among the counsels of his elegies (1.1013-16) the idea that it is better never to have been born, and the chorus of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus repeats the same philosophy (1224-26): “Not to be born at all is best . . . next best, once born, to turn back . . .” Readers of Ferdowsi’s Shâhnâma, the great 11th-century epic chronicle of Persian legendary history, a verse narrative centered before the days of Islam, will remember that the sorcerer Jâmâsb says much the same thing when the king Goshtâsb asks him about the future. It is shortly after the death of Goshtâsb’s brother Zarir, who has died defending the new faith of Zardosht. Goshtâsb asks whether his son Esfandiyâr will have a long life and Jâmâsb replies: Marâ kâshki pish-e farrokh Zarir Zamâneh fekandi beh changâl-e shir Vagar khod nakoshti pedar mar marâ Nagashti beh Jâmâsp bad akhtrâ “I would that in the presence of the blessed Zarir destiny had cast me into the claws of a lion, or that my father had slain me before a baleful star had been destined for Jâmâsb” (Reuben Levy trans., 195). Few of Ferdowsi’s sources in Middle Persian are extant. Chronicles of pre-Islamic Iran form narrow the pass through history until they taper to the sharp edge we find on the shelves of our libraries, at the beginning of the PK section. There is one remaining work in Pahlevi which predates Ferdowsi and deals with the period of Goshtâsb (Old Persian Vishtâspa), the heroic narrative entitled Aiyâdgâr-e Zarirân, dating from the 5th century BCE. In it, Jâmâsb appears already, using the same elocution answering a slightly different question. Vishtâspa/ Goshtâsb asks which of his sons and brothers will die in an impending battle against nonZoroastrians. Jâmâsb replies in a series of formulas apologizing for the bad news. One of them is familiar to us: “Fortunate is he who is not born of his mother, or if born dies immediately or to whom the measure of long duration has not reached” (trans. Modi,19).

Zarir is killed (treacherously) in battle and dies (heroically), but what sticks in the memory is the sense of gathering doom established early in the story by Jâmâsb’s prediction. The events of Zarir’s death would have taken place a millennium previous to the Aiyâdgâr-e Zarirân, but we do have a dialogue between King Goshtâsb and Jâmâsb which

179 is counted among the major surviving texts of Zoroastrian tradition. Jâmâsb Nâmak, the story of Jâmâsb, clearly doesn’t trace back to the time of Zoroaster (Antonino Pagliaro judges it later than Aiyâdgâr-e Zarirân), but it does include a series of apocalyptic predictions of a dark tone like the Jâmâsb who predicts Zarir’s death. Jâmâsb is not the source of Nietzsche’s Silenus, but he may be a link to the old pre-Islamic stoicism which is often cited (without much explanation) as an influence on Sadeq Hedayat’s dark vision. Hedayat’s distrust is often aimed at politics or social issues, but at there are times when he seems to distrust the very well springs of existence, zistan at its roots. Not surprisingly, the Jâmâsb-Nâmak (nâmak being cognate with present day nâma) is one of the works Hedayat translated from Pahlevi into contemporary Persian in 1944. Perhaps the most surprising judgment on Nietzsche is in a great Persian poem by the Indo-Persian poet Muhammad Iqbal. Iqbal published in 1932 a verse narrative, based on Dante’s Divine Comedy, in which the poet Rumi gives him a tour of the afterlife. It is at a rather high level in the trip that they encounter a presence, a suffering soul with “a voice full of agony” (sadâ-ye dardmand). It is Nietzsche, whose reed pipe contains an ancient melody, who saw the same glimpses of reality that the great mystics saw, but “There was none in Europe who knew the Way” (Mard-e rah dâni na-budand andar-e Farang), and in the absence of a Sufi path that glimpse drove him insane. Masti-ye u har zujâji râ shekast Az Khodâ beborid-o ham az khowd gosast. His intoxication shattered every glass; He broke from God, and was snapped too from himself. –trans. A.J. Arberry

So if Nietzsche turned to an Iranian prophet for a mouthpiece to articulate his own late philosophy, we can conclude symmetrically with Nietzsche, absorbed right into the center of the spiritual vision of the poet evoked as the father of Pakistan. Iqbal evidently knew the famous passage in The Birth of Tragedy where Nietzsche speaks of the soul

180 trapped in the glass bell of its individuality, but had in mind the zujâja of the 24th sura of the Qur’ân, that intermediary between God’s light and the perception of humans. Who could have predicted that Muhammad Iqbal, the spiritual father of Pakistani national aspirations would locate Nietzsche at the center of his divine comedy? That unlikely conjunction allows us to conclude with two unlikely acts of ventriloquism twinned like two sides of a coin, or perhaps like the six dots and the single dot on opposite sides of a cube of dice. From the version delivered [1 July 04] My thanks to Albert Bickford apply on many levels, not least of them because my subject isn’t quite linguistic. I don’t really have a name for the category I’m aiming at with this lecture, or with the book from which it is drawn. It is just over the boundary from linguistics, but it is not epigraphy, archaeology or the history of scripts. I don’t think it is grammatology either. RA’: Many of you may know that there are two sequences in which the Arabic alphabet can be taught. The one used pedagogically, the order you find in dictionaries, groups them according to shapes, and the letter I’m discussing today is sandwiched in between RA and SIN (R and S being linked for our alphabet too—it all comes from Pheonician). In Persian, there are three such shapes, RA, ZA and ZHA with three dots. Zâ’ Zâ’ is for (in Arabic) zamân, zandaq, zuhd, zanbur (bee) Za’ is for a lot of peculiarly Persian words: -zâdeh, zendegi, zendân, zemestân, “winter” In Spanish there is aceituno, an olive tree.

181 Works Cited ••Allin, Michael. Zarafa: A Giraffe’s True Story, from Deep in Africa to the Heart of Paris. New York: Delta, 1999.

••Barthes, Roland. S/Z: An Essay. Trans. Richard Miller. New York: Hill & Wang, 1974. ••Browne, Edward G. A Literary History of Persia, 4 vols. Cambridge: University Press, 1902, rpt. 1969. ••Hafez. The Ghazals of Hafez: Concordance and Vocabulary. Ed. Daniela Meneghini Correale. Rome: Cultural Institute of the Islamic Republic of Iran in Italy, 1988. ••Ferdowsi. The Epic of Kings: Shah-Nama: The National Epic of Persia. Trans. Reuben Levy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1967. ••al-Ghazzali, Al-Ghazzâlî’s Mishkât al-anwâr (The Niche of Lights). Trans. W.H.T. Gairdner. Lahore: Ashraf Press, 1924, rpt. 1952. ••Hedayat, Sadegh. The Blind Owl. Trans. D.P. Costello. New York: Grove Press, 1957. ••---. Buf-e kur. ••The Holy Qur’ân: Text, Translation and Commentary. Trans. Abdullah Yusuf Ali. Washington, D.C. The American International Printing Co., 1946, rpt. 1934. ••Humez, Alexander and Nicholas. ABC et Cetera: The Life and Times of the Roman Alphabet. Boston: Godine, 1985. ••---. From Alpha to Omega: The Life and Times of the Greek Alphabet. Boston: Godine, 1983. ••Iqbal, Muhammad. Jâvidnâmeh, Delhi: Matba‘ Jâme‘a Milliya Islâmiyya, 1934. ••Jeffrey, A. The Foreign Vocabulary of the Qur’ân. Baroda: Oriental Institute, 1938. Gaekwad’s Oriental Series, no. 79. ••---. Javid-nama, trans. Arthur J. Arberry. London: Allen & Unwin, 1966. ••Kipling, Rudyard. Kim. New York: Penguin, 1987. ••Mahfouz, Naguib. Hikâyat hâratinâ (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1975); ---. Fountain and Tomb. Trans. Soad Sobhy, Essam Fattouh and James Kenneson. Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1988. ••Nizâmî-yi `Ârûdî-yi Samarqandî. The Chahâr Maqâla of Nidhâmî-yi Ârûdî-yi Samarqandî. Trans. E.G. Browne. London: Luzac and Co., 1921. ••Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy and The Case of Wagner. Trans. walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage, 1967. ••Porphyry. The Cave of the Nymphs in the Odyssey. Ed. and trans. Seminar Classics 609. Buffalo: Arethusa Monographs, published by the Department of Classics, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1969. ••Rahman, Munibur. Post-Revolution Persian Verse. Aligarh: Institute of Islamic Studies, Muslim University. 1955.

182 ••Yar-Shater, Ehsan. Selected Episodes from The Epic of Kings (The Shahnameh). Washington, D.C. Foundation for Iranian Studies, 1977. ••Yule, Henry and A.C. Burnell, Hobson-Jobson: A Glossary of Colloquial AngloIndian Words and Phrases, and of Kindred Terms, Etymological, Historical, Geographical and Discursive. Ed. William Crooke, 4th Edition. New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal Published Pvt. Ltd., 1984 (1903).

Alterity as Experience, Image, and Place: Phenomenological Perspectives on Interculturality by Bernhard Waldenfels

It is obvious that interculturality is in many ways characterized by trade relations, political contracts, and international law, by collaborative research initiatives and technology, by cultural contacts and – unfortunately it has to be included – by military conflicts. If we start from a broadly conceived notion of culture, all this has something to do with interculturality. If we speak today of a cultural turn or of Cultural Studies, the plurality of cultures is implied as well as the plurality of languages. However, interculturality implies more than cultures that co-exist or collaborate. It rather denotes an entanglement or interwovenness that transcends or undermines existing borders in dramatically grown currents of immigration and emigration. Insofar as migration is violently enforced through expatriation and persecution, it contributes to an alteration of otherness into hostility. Intercultural exchange and intercultural debates, terms that have become ubiquitous, begin to gain depth in a radical mode of experiencing alterity, which becomes noticeable as permanent restlessness in the

184 respective sphere of one’s own. The following reflections provide preliminary soundings of this experience of otherness.1

Principal Witnesses of Alterity

In order to familiarize ourselves with the motif of alterity, I preliminarily refer to a few well-known figures that, each in his own specific way, bear witness to alterity. It is no coincidence that all of them were born in the Central European region that during the period of the Austrian empire was characterized by what might be called a maze of borders. First, I mention Edmund Husserl, the founder of modern phenomenology, whose house of birth is located in former Moravia, today part of the Czech Republic. This philosopher gives special importance to alterity as experience. He presents it in the form of a paradox, as “accessibility of that which in its originary sense is inaccessible” (“Zugänglichkeit des original Unzugänglichen,“ 1950, 144), in other words, a distance that is not merely preliminary but belongs to the object like its own shadow. The originary experience of, and as, alterity goes hand in hand with a distinction between “home world” and “foreign world” from the earliest moments on. To begin to feel at home and to become a stranger are two sides of the same coin. The next one to be mentioned is Emmanuel Levinas, the JewishFrench philosopher who as a young man emigrated from Lithuania to France, and who later, in the shadow of the Holocaust, in the course of which most of his family members were murdered, developed an ethics of the other. This ethics is characterized by an uncompromising claim whose voice emerges from the human face, and from a sense of hospitality that receives the stranger in one’s own house. Now I want to direct our attention to Sigmund Freud, also born in Moravia. He discovers a particular form of alterity within the unconscious. Alterity begins “in one’s own home,” as an “internal foreign country,” as 1 Regarding the phenomenology of alterity and its broader horizons, compare my books Der Stachel des Fremden (Waldenfels 1990), Topographie des Fremden (Waldenfels 1997), Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden (Waldenfels 2006), and The Question of the Other (Waldenfels 2007).

185 the uncanny of our own history, “that form of the terrifying which is linked to that which has always been well-known and familiar” (“jene Art des Schreckhaften, welche auf das Altbekannte, Längstvertraute zurückgeht,” 1966, S. 231). Finally, I want to mention Joseph Roth, whose novel Radetzkymarsch provided a eulogy for the multi-ethnic alterity of the Hapsburgian monarchy, and whose path led him from distant Galicia via Vienna to an equally distant exile in the Rue de Tournon in Paris. It is no coincidence that all the authors just mentioned were part of the Jewish world, whose members had for many centuries remained exiled into internal alterity and had again and again been forced into external foreignness. These examples illustrate a willingness to risk selfexamination and self-defamiliarization, a positive European character trait. This quality can most likely be found in every culture that reflects on itself without resting on its laurels.

Space-In-Between

In the realm of interculturality, the other opens itself in a specific manner. Using the term “inter-culturality” means to refer to a spacein-between. The in-between that emerges here provides resistance against monoculturalism, i.e. against the assumption that there is only one comprehensive culture that encompasses all other cultures, or pushes them to the margins of irrelevancy. Such a culture results in centralization, but who occupies the center? We, our own ethnos, our own nation. This is asserted by Herder, even though he is at pains to transform the formation of peoples into a formation of humanity: “[…] every nation carries its center of happiness inside, as every sphere contains its center of gravity!” (“[…] jede Nation hat ihren Mittelpunkt der Glückseligkeit in sich wie jede Kugel ihren Schwerpunkt!” 1967, S. 144-45) If a group’s very own “we,” whose formation took place along traditions, remains the focal point, we speak of ethnocentrism. That which is different moves to the periphery. Eurocentrism offers a particularly sophisticated version in which Europe moves into the center, but neither as a racial formation

186 postulated by an ideology based on biologism, nor as one cultural region among others, which would give free reign to collective narcissism and self-preservation. Instead, it moves into the center as a shelter for reason, true religion, moral conduct, world revolution, or world trade. “They say God, and what they have in mind is calico,“ Theodor Fontane ironically pointed out. This is the origin of the dark traces that Europe’s history has left, with the fight against Barbarians, heathens, Huns, Turks and gypsies, and with the enslavement of whole peoples. Even if the centrist claim emerges elsewhere, and in a different guise, this diagnosis remains valid. On the other hand, the in-between also offers resistance against a simplistic form of multiculturalism. I use this term not to denote an appreciation of the plurality of cultures, but for a way of thinking that levels off any nuances or differences, a perspective that results in deeming one’s own culture merely as one arbitrary culture among others. This view is not completely mistaken, but it only delivers a half-truth. Not unlike the way in which the native language means or constitutes (“bedeutet”) an originary language (“Ursprache”) for each of us, the home country means an originary region. This does not imply at all that a native language and home country occupy the center, or an uninhabited mountain top. What is implied is rather that what is discussed here is language and place of, and as, beginning (“Initialsprache,” “Initialort”). Both constitute an unavoidable point of departure, and, like our own face and our own body, neither one is subject to choice. This is not to deny that the native language only becomes our own language in contrast to other languages. Like one’s first culture and foreign culture, one’s first language and foreign language emerge from an originary separation that resists both the primacy of “one’s own” and that of alterity. The preference that, in the course of distinguishing oneself from the other, allows the familiar to emerge as the place of differentiation, does not precede the difference. What precedes it is a profound indifference.2 2 On this point, compare my Antwortregister (Waldenfels, 2007), 202-210.

187 Neither reducible to unity nor to plurality, the in-between does not conceive of itself as a space-in-between, as if there was anything inbetween that, in its neutral stance, cannot be ascribed to either side. In contrast, it denotes an intermediate sphere out of which singular elements and individuals emerge in their singularity. This can be illustrated by an example that is both intercultural and interdisciplinary. The Japanese psychiatrist Kimura (1995, S. 119 ff.) links the idea of the in-between, which, in his view, Martin Buber reduced to the interpersonal relation of I and You, to the Far Eastern motif of ki. Deriving from the Chinese chi, this word carries manifold meanings: Air, wind, breath, spirit, mood, and also a social atmosphere in which the respective self takes shape but also assumes pathological features. What has to be noted here is the contextual sensibility of the Japanese language that provides different forms of “I,” according to situation, rank, or gender of the dialogue partner. One could imagine an intercultural dialogue of the following sort. Descartes: „Cogito ergo sum.“ A Japanese responds: „What kind of “I” is thinking, and where is it thinking?“ One could complicate the dialogic situation further by having Descartes switch from Latin to French, thus making room for intra-European idiolects that form an intracultural multilingualism. In each case, an exchange of experiences occurs. The verbal exchange can be compared to glances that meet, without converging in a unitary point of view. What happens between individual persons also happens, with some modifications, between representatives of different cultures. Our first conclusion: Something emerges between us which none of us could produce alone and whose development is not manipulated by a third party.

188

Interweavement of “One’s Own” and Alterity

The figure of interdependence or interweavement (“Verflechtung”) is very useful for inquiries into connections between “one’s own” and alterity. In his text Die Gesellschaft der Individuen (“The Society of Individuals”), in which he criticizes modern Cartesianism, the sociologist Norbert Elias describes social interconnectedness as follows: “In such an interweavment, there are singular filaments that are interconnected. However, neither the whole of this interweavement, nor the shape that the singular filament assumes, can be understood by focusing on one filament alone, or even on all filaments, but exclusively by examining their connection, their relation with one another.” (“Es gibt in einem solchen Geflecht viele einzelne Fäden, die miteinander verbunden sind. Dennoch ist weder das Ganze dieses Geflechts noch die Gestalt, die der einzelnen Faden darin erhält, von einem Faden allein oder auch von allen Fäden für sich zu verstehen, sondern ausschließlich von ihrer Verbindung her, von ihrer Beziehung zueinander.” 1987, S. 54). In a similar manner, phenomenologist Maurice Merleau-Ponty, in his late work Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare (1986, S. 182), uses the term “entrelacs,” which denotes intricate intersecting ribbons that we know from Roman capitals or Celtic book illuminations. In similar contexts, Husserl simply speaks of an intertwining (“Ineinander”) of one’s own and foreign intentions. Unravelling these interweavements would result in the destruction of that which only endures in the state of being interwined. The transitory figure of interweavement excludes two extremes. A social texture does not imply complete congruity of “one’s own” and alterity. Organicist social theories, that use the idea of an indivisible whole as their point of departure, become as obsolete as fundamentalist attempts at tracing back all differences to one cohesive, usually religious foundation. The ideal of a pure culture or a pure race to which nothing foreign would be added stems from a manic obsession with purity. However, a radical disparity of “one’s own” and alterity is also excluded. An absolutely foreign language would not be

189 a language at all anymore, it would be like a twitter of birds, or even a mere sequence of sounds. The interweavement that we examine is not uniform. It reaches a varying degree of closeness and distance, of being related and foreign. For example, the Dutch language is closer to German than French, whose distance is incomparable to the extreme distance of a still undeciphered Maya language. Therefore, alterity as irredeemable distance and absence does not mean that all alterity is equally inaccessible. Intercultural experience does not only include elective affinities, but also elective dissimilarities. Our second conclusion: We encounter alterity not only in the outside world, but already inside, in our own house, in our own country, and in our own culture, in varying degrees of strangeness. For a colorfully speckled multiethnic state like the old Austria, or for genuine immigration countries like the United States, this might be taken for granted, and this also applies to European border states such as Eastern Galicia oer Western Alsacia. But upon closer inspection, this is also true for that which we call European culture as a whole. What would it be without the participation of the Jews, who never completely felt at home in Europe? What would it be without the influx of Arabic medicine, Arabic architecture, and Arabic Aristotelianism in the Middle Ages? What would it be without the repercussions of the discovery and conquest of the American continents, and the varying attraction of Far Eastern cultures? Once again, language offers a model for intercultural interferences and crossovers. According to Russian literary theorist Michail Bakhtin (1979), an internal polyphony operates within language. “One’s own” and foreign voices penetrate one another to the extent that they become indistinguishable. Our language is rich in implicit quotations, for example when “oikos,” the ancient Greek household, resonates in modern economy and ecology. These reflections engender fruitful hybrid formations, whose potential surpasses any stubbornly purist parochialism. But we can even go a step further. In our earliest childhood, we experience our mother tongue (“Muttersprache”) as a foreign language, as the language of the others, whom we know from hearsay and with whom we gradually

190 become familiar, not unlike the way in which we familiarize ourselves with new music. The “infans” starts out as “ens audiens.” The interweavement of “one’s own” and alterity leads to an osmosis between intra- and intercultural alterity. This implies a number of frictions. Alterity turns out to be the more fascinating and dangerous, the more it touches upon “one’s own.” Its impact is enhanced when it touches upon something that has been ignored, forgotten, suppressed, something that articulates itself in symptoms, for example as a nationalism that is hysterical, or loaded with angry sentiments.

From Image of the Stranger to Image of the Enemy

The aura of experience of, and as, alterity that is constantly shifting and slipping away takes shape in recurring images of alterity that have completely ambivalent characteristics. Do they produce strangeness, or do they make it disappear? Apparently, they do both. We are eager to use representations and constructions, as if alterity and the familiar are reducible to mediated and conceptual identifications.3 Let me see your ID, and I tell you who you are. In order to prevent this all too fast processing of alterity, I prefer to speak of the presentation (“Darstellung”) of alterity. Presentations can make use of various means, including pictures and paintings, mimetic forms, signs, symbols, and finally language, which not only contains the explicit “representative function” (“Darstellungsfunktion”), but also includes elements of all other media. Before the foreign disappears into an ocean of media, several important differences need to be taken into account, which are already outlined in Husserl’s works. Presentation (“Darstellung”) means that something that is not already constituted in a pictorial or linguistic mode, is brought into the picture and put into language. Sentences such as “Everything is language” or “everything is an image” are examples of speculatively charged universal propositions that do not hold water when subjected to a 3 Compare my “Paradoxien ethnographischer Fremddarstellung“ (in Waldenfels 1999).

191 genetic examination. The same is true for images of alterity, in which we are interested. The experience of alterity is not congruent with the images, conceptions and denotations of alterity. It is more than all this. Let us consider the seemingly simple example of the body image, which contributes to the physical experience of the stranger. When we see blacks (nobody uses the term Negroes anymore today) and whites, when we see yellows and redskins, as they were called in old Westerns? This is already a reductive and misleading parlance. It leapfrogs the conceptual and expressive process (“Ausdrucksprozess”), and relies on established expressive contents (“Ausdrucksgehalte”). Strictly speaking, we do not see blacks, but we see someone who meets us, looks at us, talks to us, or attacks us as a black man or woman, and of course vice versa. Drawing on “seeing as…,” which can be learned from both Husserl and Wittgenstein, has a salutary impact, because it prevents us from confusing the image that we produce with the issue itself. This is repeated when we qualify foreign behavioral modes. Someone talks and gestures like an Italian, someone is orderly like a German, ingenious like a Frenchman, stingy like a Scot, to name but a few clichés. Clichés are like alterities put on ice. This way, they can be easily learned and used, like traffic signs. Let us take the treatment of national character in Kant’s Anthropologie (Ausg. Weischedel, VI, 658-671) as an example. The characterization of the Germans and the French that we find in Kant’s work is still light-years away from nationalistic fever. The French nation, Kant writes, “is courteous, civil, and polite (“höflich”), especially with regard to a foreigner who visits them, even if nowadays, it is unfashionable to be courtly (“höfisch”). The Frenchman is not courteous out of personal interest, but because of the spontaneous aesthetic need to share a conversation.“ A “contagious spirit of freedom” (“ansteckender Freiheitsgeist”) is ascribed to the French, but a spirit that “also brings reason itself into play.” The German, Kant continues, is characterized by honesty and domesticity, “not very glamorous qualities.” However, a certain cosmopolitanism is ascribed to the German: “More than any other people, he studies foreign

192 languages, is […] a wholesale trader (“Großhändler”) of erudition, and often, his scholarly and scientific findings are later used and noisily exploited by others. He has no national pride. As a cosmopolitan, he does not cling to his homeland. At home, however, he treats foreigners more hospitably than any other nation (as Boswell admits).” Kant himself characterizes his essays as daring. He pays more attention to the mistakes and to deviations from the norm than to those flattering qualities with which every people likes to adorn itself. The sketch-like presentation, more reminiscent of William Hogarth’s caricatures than of glorifying historical paintings, precludes the fabrication of clichés. However, the writing stops at the margins of Europe. Kant does not discuss the Russians who do not yet, the Polish who do not anymore, and the Turks who never possess what the formation of a certain national character requires. Therefore, Kant argues, it is “appropriate that they are passed over (“füglich übergangen”). Apart from the simplifications that the fabrication of images is inclined to provide, we have to keep in mind that which we turn into an image are not mere data, but something that touches us emotionally by astonishing or terrifying, attracting or repelling us, by not leaving us indifferent. Images that carry such pathic traces have the effect of images of desire or terror. This goes hand in hand with a certain ambivalence that determines the modern image of the savage; as the good savage, he inspires curiosity and longing, as the evil savage, he evokes terror and repulsion. Political pictorial propaganda, for example the Nazi caricatures of “Eastern subhumans” who house in primitive cabins, but also the drastic series of pictures that systems of slavery and colonialism used to fabricate a good “civilizing” conscience, falls under the same category. Finally, images are not restricted to the present. As images of remembrance and anticipatory images, they prestructure the temporal horizons of alterity as experience. They shed light on the darkness of the past and the future, in which we are on the verge of losing ourselves. But they also have a tendency to immobilize alterity in an image, be it by monumentalizing the past, or by presenting the future exclusively as utopia. Nietzsche already polemicizes against this

193 tendency, in his “Zweite Unzeitgemäße Betrachtung;” he does this in the name of life, but indirectly also in the name of the other, by which life is irrevocably marked. The ambivalence of images that present alterity by simultaneously reducing it to a pictorial form provides the medium for another ambivalence. Alterity as image easily turns into images of an enemy, whose seductive power is enhanced by their unambiguousness. One knows whom one has to confront. Hostile images are images that pin the other down to fixed qualities. This procedure makes it easy to debase the other as a carrier of qualities, who can be used, exploited, labeled and if necessary also tortured and exterminated. One defines the other, as Aristotle does, as a slave, an “animated tool” that serves, as a Barbarian, primitive or savage, incapable of exercising reason, as a class enemy and obstacle that stands in the way of a final realization of reason and freedom, or as a non-believer to be delivered to the furies of a holy war. This way, one insulates oneself against any protest from outside. The fight against alterity begins with the fabrication of the other as image including icons of hatred (compare Waldenfels 2005a). The imagination that enjoys fabricating images of an enemy, reaches its limitation when a peculiar “imagelessness” (“Bildlosigkeit”), reminiscent of religious bans of images, emerges amidst the image of, and as, alterity (“Fremdbild”). The stranger of that which is foreign approaches us with a foreign claim, when the face that shows itself to us refuses to be translated into a picture in the mist of an image-driven world. Alterity points toward something invisible inside the visible, to something inaudible within the audible, as we also intimately know from the border crossings of the arts. The ancient sentence, “You shall not make images” has to be understood as simultaneously saying, “You are not capable of making images,” because the other is beyond our grasp, even if we disregard or kill him. Levinas (1987, S. 283286) calls this ethical resistance, which has to be distinguished from physical resistance, and which is conceptualized in the sentence: “You are not going to kill me.“ With this concept, the problem of alterity

194 reaches an ethical dimension that reaches deeper than any question of understanding alterity and mutual dialogue. This is the source of specific ways of dealing with alterity. Every culture, every nation, every era can be characterized by an idiosyncratic style of alterity (“Fremdheitsstil”). The response to alterity is part of each culture’s core, and is as manifold as language, without being subject to arbitrary impulses.

Departure, Emigration, and Expulsion

The intermediate zone of interculturality begins to move when individuals or whole groups excange their home for a foreign place. Migration, as wandering from one country into the other, means more than a mere change of place, as if something would simply switch its container without being changed at all. The modern understanding of space, which strictly separates the questions who and where somebody is, has been proven to be a spatial construct with very limited use even for understanding physical nature. Self-identity and local identity cannot be separated from one another like two independent rubrics. But this further implies that we become strangers when we enter and stay in a foreign place. Changing from country to country, from culture to culture, can be limited to a temporary undertaking. This is true for the traveller or traveling salesman (“Reisenden”), for business trips, vacation or conference trips, but also for invasions and military campaigns. Travelers enter a foreign country as a host country that they will sooner or later leave again. Often, the traveler only achieves the status of an onlooker. The journey to a distant place ends in the return home. However, the repatriate who has spent a longer period of time far away faces a twofold alterity. He feels like a stranger in his own home country, since it has changed in the meantime, as he himself has also changed. We are familiar with this phenomenon not only from our own experience, but also through its presentations in a wide range of literary texts. Odysseus is the archetype of a repatriate who has been through a lot of suffering. Disguised as an old man, he enters the palace

195 of his home island Ithaca and finds his way home in a most fundamental way when he is greeted by the decrepit dog, a track hound that he left behind. With his Odyssey, Homer offers us a great travel epic that contains a rich array of seemingly exotic miracle stories. As is wellknown, already beginning with Herodot, travel accounts constitute primary sources for ethnographic research. We speak of emigrants only if someone tries to get a foothold in a foreign country with a long-term perspective in mind. This attempt undergoes the transformation from immigrant to becoming naturalized, including the strenuous praxis of learning a new language and new customs. A foreign country can be defined as a place where other landmarks have a meaning, and where a different way of measuring time and a different holiday calendar are used. The two transitory figures of the stranger and the repatriate have been examined in two insistent essays byAlfred Schütz (1971), who had to emigrate from Vienna via Paris to New York. The decisive feature is a specific mode of duplication (“Verdoppelung”). The migrant embodies both the immigrant and the emigrant. In his home country, he leaves acquaintances behind and remembers them, and in the foreign country, he encounters strangers who only rarely expect him. In any case, there are already other inhabitants in the immigrant’s new country. You cannot immigrate into a desert. The European conquerors of both American continents did not feel they were immigrants, because their reasoning was based on the fiction that they set foot on a kind of no man’s land. The natives seemed to be incapable of formally occupying a piece of land. In the same manner, the Greeks perceived the ancient Barbarians as incapable of governing. Apart from such political sophistries, the transition from one language into another one operates within the frame of a country of departure and a country of destination. Like the interpreter, the emigrant/immigrant is a transitory figure; he is located between two countries, without being able to gain a foothold, and to settle down in the in-between. This intermediate status constitutes a peculiar source of conflicts. The following question emerges: When we speak different languages,

196 who is to be considered a foreigner, I or the other? If we both call ourselves foreigners, it will be as true, but also as pointless, as stating: We are both an “I.” In this manner we talk together about strangers without ever speaking as a stranger, and in the other case, we talk about the “I” without saying “I.” But who is the stranger, if performative speech constitutes a decisive factor? A stranger is the one who in a case of emergency, for example in a municipal office, in court, or even in church, is forced to speak the language of the other, so that the other “calls the shots” (“das Sagen hat”). In the case of immigration, this other is the one who already inhabits the country. He represents the reference field in which the immigrant, whether he wants it or not, has to fit, and to which he has to accustom himself. However, this dual transformative process, which causes somebody to feel at home where he used to be a stranger, and to become a foreigner where he used to feel at home, implies more than changing an algebraic sign. It implies more than a formal procedure, as if one would reset the watch, or receive a new passport. We are dealing with a process that can be described in a dual manner – as the familiar becoming foreign (“Fremdwerden des Eigenen”), and as the foreign becoming familiar (“Eigenwerden des Fremden”). In this process, neither the familiar can be substituted by the foreign, nor the foreign by the familiar. Both fit into each other like reticules and are superimposed upon each other like strata. This results in an alterity gap between inhabitants and immigrants as well as between immigrant generations. One belongs more or less to the country which one inhabits. These differences cannot be smoothed over by an emphasis on citizenship and equality, and they cannot be silenced with the help of banners and anthems. As important as official names and rituals that prevent a disintegration of community are, they cannot alleviate us from the necessity to endure tensions, and to work through conflicts. In our European countries that increasingly become immigration countries, we experience the problems that derive from this every day, some more, some less. Here, interculturality shows its political face. Clear differences emerge, regarding the willingness and ability to host foreign immigrants, as well as with regard to the

197 willingness and ability to take part in the host society (“sich in das Aufnahmeland einzuleben”). If the willingness and ability are not strong enough, the result is a stagnant co-existence or mere “nextto-each-other” (“Nebeneinander”), which in the long run is not only sterile but can lead to conflicts. The history of German emigrants in the United States gives sufficient examples for a successful symbiosis, but also for merely waiting for a return. For migration movements, the specific kind of borders that have to be overcome is a decisive factor. Crossing the ocean used to constitute a deeper incisiveness than land travel, for example the journeys that brought people in search of work from Eastern to Western or from Southern to Northern Europe. The change in traffic conditions has altered the importance of this factor, but geography and geopolitics have not completely ceased to play a role in this regard. Finally it is impossible to discuss emigration and immigration without taking their conditions and reasons into consideration. A migration movement can occur peacefully. If it involves violence and force, we do not speak of immigration and emigration, but of banishment, expulsion, or forced resettlement (“Verbannung, Vertreibung, Zwangsaussiedlung oder Umsiedlung”). Admission into a camp implies deportation from home and home country, which transforms the traveler into a refugee. The nomenclature often serves to gloss over violence, for example the “Germanization” of Eastern parts of Poland such as the Warthegau, the Russian resettlement (“Umsiedlung”) of Galicians of Polish heritage to Silesia oder die expatriation (“Aussiedlung”) of the Sudeten Germans by the Czech. There are also mixed forms, including those who are persecuted because of their religion, like the French Huguenots, who populated Berlin or Erlangen, and economic refugees who emigrated overseas, or pushed into industrial regions such as the Ruhr area, in search of a job. These developments continue today on a global scale. If we go one step further, we encounter the stranger as Georg Simmel understands him. He enters the stage not “as the wanderer who arrives today and leaves tomorrow” („als der Wandernde, der

198 heute kommt und morgen geht”), “but as someone who arrives today and stays tomorrow, the potential wanderer, so to speak” (“sondern als der, der heute kommt und morgen bleibt – sozusagen der potenziell Wandernde”). It is the guest who, transgressing all rules of hospitality, becomes sedatory as a guest, constantly‚ “always on the go,” as we call it. According to Simmel, the sociological kernel of this flexibility can be found in the merchant who works along the way, the European Jew, for whom it is illegal to be a “land owner,” and finally in the sociological observer, who internalizes and embodies a specific “formation of distance and closeness, of indifference and engagement” (“Gebilde aus Ferne und Nähe, aus Gleichgiltigkeit und Engagiertheit,” Simmel 1992, S. 764-771). The state of hoveringin-between takes on a constrained form in the case of displaced persons, who belong nowhere and who have been, as Hannah Arendt shows in her analysis of totalitarianism (1951, Kap. 9), deprived of human rights, because they lack a place from which they could claim those rights. By setting up a camp like the one in Guantanamo, the responsible administration makes use of exterritoriality, in order to produce an unlegislated area for terrorists. In earlier times, this was called counterterror, today it constitutes a means in the war against the enemies of mankind. At the most peripheral margins of migration, zones of being-in-between emerge. Using an old religious term, we can call them “limbus:” An inescapable place between the heaven of freedom and the hell of damnation.

Places of Alterity in the Shadow of World Culture

Our reflections, which have examined the zone between “our own” and alterity, culminate in reflections on the global place of the other. What does the other become when it finds itself in the vortex of a world culture? I use the term “alterity as place,” or “places of otherness” (“Fremdorte”) in a manner that is similar to uses of “common places,” or “commonplaces” (“Gemeinorte,” “Gemeinplätze”), but this term

199 has a rather unusual punch-line.4 According to experts, for example in systems theory, the difference between that which is one’s own and that which is different and strange is leveled off in the wake of globalization. If we are all foreign, nobody is foreign. I am not interested in fueling the conflict between what Umberto Ecco calls “the apocalyptics” and “the integrated ones” any further. The elementary motif of alterity is not a useful tool for such an installment of frontlines. Globalization is an irreversible trend that also opens new possibilites from an intercultural perspective. This process produces an in-between of a specific, technological kind; the “inter-net” can serve as one example for the general possibility of network space. Obvious advantages can be seen in the fact that being rooted in one place, which used to be caricatured as “pile dwelling citizenship” (“Pfahlbürgertum”), gives way to a new mobility, that a growing number of technical possibilities for establishing personal contacts results in an increased radius of communication, and that the reduction of distances triggers a new kind of planetary neighborhood and public. The shift from ascribed to acquired forms of status also has spatial impacts. It destabilizes a person’s and a group’s sense of belonging to a place. The downsides cannot be overlooked. To use a distinction employed in Robert Musil’s novel Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (“The Man without Qualities”), overextending the sense of the possible results in a weakening of the sense of reality. The fixation on the “here,” which forces traditional cultures into stagnation, is on the verge of turning into a volatilization of the Here, which ends with a diffuse “everywhere and nowhere.” This set of problems can be illustrated by the need for location/ site, where not only professional life, but also cultural life as a whole takes place. One could conveniently brush this question aside by literally mobilizing all forces and exchanging everything for everything, from thoughts, emotions, stocks, or patents to so-called human capital or indispensable know-how. Where everything has its price, dignity (“Würde”) is reduced to, as Karl Kraus already 4 Compare my „Fremdorte“ (in Waldenfels 1997), and „Anderswo statt Überall“ (in Waldenfels 2005b).

200 remarks, the conditional “would” (“würde”), good enough only for Sunday speeches. The mere exchange value would be indeed located in an “anywhere,” and the whole world would be one immense stock exchange. Facing this kind of technologically remodeled neoidealism that deprives things and persons of their materiality and renders them outlaws like dreamlike thoughts, it is useful to be reminded the meaning of “being-here.” Here is the place where our ancestors originate, where one physically lives, the place where one is born, where one lives (or seeks refugee status), where one works (or is unable to find work anymore because whole regions are made desolate), where one ages and dies, where our successors continue to live. The fact that this “here” has its varied history does not change its situational character. Without being occasionally bound to a “here,” there would not be any immigrants or emigrants, to be precise, there would also not be any inhabitants. All this applies as long as human beings are not reducible to a bundle of functions, and as long as the way we live our life cannot be summarized like a bank account. Being different, strange, and alien is vital sign as unmistakeable as being-oneself. Modifying Nietzsche’s well-known statement, one could say: “Simultaneously with the foreign world, we would also have acquired our own.” We would lose places that welcome strangers as guests (“Gast-Stätten”). Hospitality, “habitability” (“Wirtlichkeit”), as Kant still calls it in his Vom ewigen Frieden, would give way to a self-made inhabitability and “inhospitable behavior” (“inhospitablen Betragen”) (Ausg. Weischedel VI, 213 f.). A diffusion of the “here” into an “anywhere” cannot be prevented by clinging to a coherent “we,” and rejecting otherness. These are excuses of a reactive thinking that lacks the courage of exposing itself to that which is different and new. Walls with which we exclude others lock us in like prison walls. An alternative offers itself when we take a simultaneous “Here” and “Elsewhere” as our point of departure, a placelessness at a specific place, the kind of atopia that Plato ascribes to Socrates. This “atopos” is not a dropout who observes the world from his barrel like Diogenes. He is and remains until his bitter end an engaged citizen of Athens; he belongs to the polis, but not exclusively.

201 In the face of the threatening “moral of the herd,” he maintains a trace of otherness, with respect to himself as well as for his fellow citizens. With this alterity, not only a crack is opening in order to break open that which we take for granted in our own tradition. A space for cultural hybrids is also opening. The same repeats itself elsewhere in a different way, for example, when Western utensils appear on African apartment walls, when elements of the Kabuki theater enter the closed audience space of Western “peephole theater” (“Guckkastentheater”), when music that originates in cotton plantations migrates into the cities, when visions emerge, for example in the work of the Austrian poet Ingeborg Bachmann, who interweaves Shakespeares Winter Tale with the hopes of the Prague Spring: “If Bohemia is located at the sea, I will trust the oceans again, / And when I trust the sea, I hope for land.” (“Liegt Böhmen noch am Meer, glaub ich den Meeren wieder, / Und glaub ich noch ans Meer, so hoffe ich auf Land.”)5 In conclusion, let us remember Robert Musil again. The sense of the possible that he holds against a stubborn clinging to reality means something, but not everything. What has to be added is a sense of the impossible, a sense of that which is different and transcends out own capabilities, a sense that penetrates into the distance, and outweighs every “tele-presence,” even if it is arranged in the most sophisticated manner, by offering a “tele-absence.” Looking into the distance, or listening for intermediate sounds, allows us to discover that which is our own and which does not disappear into normalcy. That which is our very own has always been interwoven with alterity. The odyssey begins here and now, as it does in James Joyce’s Dublin, or anywhere else. Translated by Olaf Berwald

5 The poem “Böhmen liegt am Meer“ (1978, 167-68) was composed in 1964.

202 Works Cited

••Arendt, Hannah (1951), The Origins of Totalitarianism, San Diego, New York, London: Harcourt Brace & Company. ••Bachmann, Ingeborg (1978), Werke, edited by Ch. Koschel u. a., Bd. I: Gedichte, München/Zürich: Piper. ••Bachtin, Michail M. (1979), Die Ästhetik des Wortes, edited by R. Grübel, transl. by R. Grübel und S. Reese, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ••Elias, Norbert (1987), Die Gesellschaft der Individuen, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ••Freud, Sigmund (1966), „Das Unheimliche“, in: Gesammelte Werke, Bd. XII, Frankfurt am Main: Fischer. ••Herder, Johann Gottfried (1967), Auch eine Philosophie der Geschichte zur Bildung der Menschheit, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ••Husserl, Edmund (1950), Cartesianische Meditationen (Husserliana I), Den Haag: Nijhoff. ••Kant, Immanuel (1956), Werke (in sechs Bänden), edited by W. Weischedel, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. ••Kimura, Bin (1995), Zwischen Mensch und Mensch. Strukturen japanischer Subjektivität, transl. by E. Weinmayr, Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. ••Levinas Emmanuel (1987), Totalität und Unendlichkeit, transl. by W. N. Krewani, Freiburg/München: Alber (French original edition 1961). ••Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (1986), Das Sichtbare und das Unsichtbare, transl. by R. Giuliani und B. Waldenfels, München: Fink (French original 1964). ••Musil, Robert (1978), Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Reinbek: Rowohlt. ••Schütz, Alfred (1971), „Der Fremde“, „Der Heimkehrer“, in: Gesammelte Aufsätze II, Den Haag: Nijhoff.. ••Simmel, Georg (1992), Gesamtausgabe 11: Soziologie, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ••Waldenfels, Bernhard (1990), Der Stachel des Fremden, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ••– (1994), Antwortregister, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ••– (1997), Topographie des Fremden, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ••– (1999), Vielstimmigkeit der Rede, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ••– (2005a), „Freiheit, Gastfreundschaft und Feindschaft“, in: links (Rome) V, S. 31-40. ••– (2005b), Idiome des Denkens, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ••– (2006), Grundmotive einer Phänomenologie des Fremden, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. ••– (2007), The Question of the Other, Hong Kong/New York: The Chinese University Press/SUNY Press.

5. Situándose en el mundo globalizado/Situating Oneself in the Globalized World

De “La Moraleja” a “La Milagrosa” (Apuntes de viaje por España) Humberto E. Robles

Hace poco leía en “Babelia” (24.11.07), el suplemento literario del periódico madrileño El País, un reportaje firmado por Antonio Muñoz Molina, resultado de una visita a Colombia que eventualmente llevó al reconocido escritor español a Cartagena de Indias en marzo del 2007. Habiendo visitado esa extraordinaria ciudad caribeña en más de una ocasión, y habiendo transitado por los polvorientos caminos de la Costa de mi Ecuador de origen, lo que más me llamó la atención de los apuntes de Muñoz Molina fue que lo que a él le parecía algo distinto, diferente, y sin duda por eso lo destacaba, a mí me sonaba familiar, cotidiano. ¿Y qué de ello?, me dije, recordando que Henry Fielding señaló en su The Journal of a Voyage to Lisbon (1775) que las crónicas de viaje no tienen otro propósito que informar al lector sobre lo que otros quizá no han visto o conocido. Así, en mi último viaje a Madrid, ciudad recorrida más de una vez, las experiencias que más me impactaron no fueron ni El Prado –con sus interminables colas esperando entrar a reconocer el nuevo anexo del museo– ni el Thyssen-Bornemisza –al que concurría el

206 entusiasmo de espectadores en busca de Durero, de Cranach y de la última exposición de dibujos de artistas varios. (Sí vale glosar, dicho sea, que los marcos en que estaban expuestos esos hermosos dibujos eran realmente estupendos.) El impacto surgió, más bien, de algún rótulo divisado en los diarios: “¿Por qué no te callas?”, “En menos de un año se duplica la población rumana en España y supera ya el medio millón”, “El alcalde de Madrid participa en la celebración de la Virgen de la Almudena, patrona de la ciudad”. El asunto entre el presidente de Venezuela y el rey de España ya es cosa rezongada y trascendida, manoseada por intereses políticos. No menos por aquellos ciudadanos españoles, separatistas algunos, que cuestionan la existencia de la monarquía. En los otros titulares cabe hacer pausa. Pasear por la ciudad es fijarse que en esquinas estratégicas se observan hordas que, de repente, brincan, por así decirlo, sobre los parabrisas de los automóviles. Entre el rojo y el verde del semáforo, cuatro o cinco individuos se apresuran a limpiar cristales. Aguardan la propina… Cuando no les dan nada, proceden a embarrar lo que habían limpiado, dejando el original en peores condiciones. ¿Quiénes son esos invasores? El taxista de turno prorrumpe, no sin cierta inquietud en su deje, que son rumanos…, ¡gitanos!, añade. Pasando por el antiguo Barrio de los Austrias, se observa cantidad de gente cual en paro, en desempleo. ¿Quiénes son? Rumanos fue la respuesta. Viven amontonados en pisos descuidados. Desde que Rumania forma parte de la Comunidad Europea, han llegado a España en números insólitos. En menos de un año, figuran por todo el mapa de la Península. Grandes concentraciones hay en el Sur (Extremadura, Andalucía). Se teme una repetición de la delincuencia que llevó a que Italia los expulsara en masa. Por eso, quizá, menos se oye hablar hoy de inmigrantes “sudacas” en Madrid. Pero allí están, y no menos los ecuatorianos. No obstante, la nueva ola es la de los rumanos. En efecto, en los hoteles pareciera que las mucamas rumanas empiezan a desplazar a las latinoamericanas. Televisión Española transmite el 10 de noviembre una voluminosa procesión conmemorando a la patrona de la ciudad. Se trata de la

207 Virgen de la Almudena (= Al Mudayna = “nuestra ciudad, alcázar”, del árabe). Virgen morena. No es la única, sea dicho, que exhibe esas cualidades en España. También está la de Guadalupe que luego habría de pasar a México, pero esa es una historia cultural, y política, larga y complicada. Lo que sorprende es la cantidad de feligreses. Acuden de todas partes. El fresco de la luz otoñal destaca los colores negro, blanco y púrpura de las sotanas, capas y birretes de curas, de obispos y de algún cardenal, cuya mitra lo distingue. No falta tampoco la autoridad civil. El alcalde transforma su discurso en una arenga política y aprovecha para pedir tolerancia para los inmigrantes. Nadie esperaría ver tanto fervor religioso en España, pero allí está a ojos vista. La multitud de creyentes impresiona. El espectáculo del contoneo de la virgen en andas aparece yuxtapuesto con el de la devoción de los fieles. Sacude esa presencia en una nación que presumíamos, más y más, agnóstica. Almudena es un nombre que figura en más de un lugar de Madrid. No por coincidencia, al taxista le pido, otro día, que nos lleve al cementerio de La Almudena. Pronto avisa que es el más grande del mundo. (Quizás así sea. ¡Quizás!) Está en el barrio de Las Ventas. Impresionante e inmenso es el camposanto. Para evitar pérdidas, está dividido en cuarteles. Por eso el taxista no quería dejarme al garete. Fácil extraviarse en ese laberinto de tumbas y mausoleos. Famosos y desconocidos allí reposan. Las flores y los deudos abundan por doquier. ¡Cuánta vida allí sepultada! ¡Cuánta historia! Por eso es que investigadores actuales estudian, cada vez más, los anales de esos recintos, igual que también se centran en la vida de claustros y conventos. Este no es el Madrid de los bulevares, teatros, almacenes y museos, del destape y la movida. Es el Madrid de una población más pausada y sobria, que rinde culto a sus difuntos. ¿Qué ocurrirá en el futuro? Madrid crece y crece y hay menos espacios para restos de mortales. El taxista habla de tanatorios. No sabe la etimología de la palabra. Se la explico, haciendo referencia a eso de Eros y Thanatos. Vaya, vaya, dice, yo no sabía el significado. El futuro, parece, está en los crematorios y los tanatorios.

208 ¡Vaya futuro! Por eso mismo, quizás le pido llevarnos al barrio más exclusivo de la capital española, “La Moraleja”. Otro laberinto. Las casas de “los pelucones” españoles están sobre esas colinas. Sus palacetes yacen ocultos detrás de rejas, tapias y cipreses. Casi no hay manera de verlos. Todos disfrutan de amplias superficies que los apartan y enclaustran. Se vive hacia adentro. Siempre sorprende ese embovedarse. En ciudades como Guayaquil, alguna vez, incrustaron pedazos de vidrio sobre los muros para mantener fuera a los intrusos. Hoy, claro, se habla de ciudadelas cerradas, con sus propios sistemas de seguridad. “La Moraleja”, no hay duda, reitera lo que se observa en tantas metrópolis. Rancia paradoja: los privilegios excluyen, encierran, encuartelan y dizque protegen a los favorecidos detrás de vallas, de cámaras y guardias. A lo mejor, ese sentido del espacio sea, también, algo cultural, heredado. Recuerdo aquellos patios andaluces donde aún se vive puertas adentro. Lo cierto es que lo que se alcanza a ver por “La Moraleja” son portones y murallas. Calles desiertas, bien cuidadas. Y acaso también un antiguo Bentley descapotado que su dueño habría sacado a pasear, como para que calentara sus cilindros, mientras él llevaba gorra de lord inglés, chaqueta escocesa y gafas de sol norteamericanas. Emblema acaso del poder, del consumo conspicuo, de lo que dicen que es “la buena vida”. Alguna lección se oculta por allí, entre el cementerio de La Almudena y ese barrio señorial. El poder, sin embargo, no relega jerarquías. En algún momento, el gobierno de USA tuvo a su cargo gran parte de los terrenos de ese contorno. Ecos de la base militar de Torrejón rondan por allí todavía. Tantos de los chalés que siguen en pie fueron ocupados por los oficiales del Ejército norteamericano. Hoy pertenecen a nacionales. No están a la altura de las apenas inferidas estancias de la pudiente y oligárquica “La Moraleja”, pero están en “La Moraleja”, si bien en la parte menos opulenta de ese enclave. Todo eso contó el taxista. Finalmente, nos acercó a un restaurante del Barrio de Salamanca, distinguido, dizque, por la calidad del cocido madrileño que sirven. Que aprovechéis, nos dijo. No os puedo esperar. Tengo convite en casa. Si queréis seguir recorriendo la

209 ciudad en “coche”, yo ya no puedo hacerlo. Todo ello lo dice con ese aire de gran señor y rajadiablos que sugiere que lo importante es llegar a su hogar, sin más. En el restaurante, está de mesero un paisanito quiteño que se mueve y “parla” con acento más madrileño que el de los de Madrid. ¿Pretende esconder así, acaso, sus señas de identidad? Vaya uno a saber. En cuanto al idioma, lo cierto es que tan pronto uno desembarca del avión tiene que reajustar su realidad idiomática: deja uno de oír carro o auto y empieza a tener que vérselas con coche; el tuteo se impone, se habla de “zumo” en vez de jugo, de “infusión” en vez de té, de “al punto” en vez de término medio / no muy cocida, en lo que a carnes se refiere. Las palabras groseras no son, aquí, las de uno. El deje de origen se confunde con el de los de Madrid/Madrí/Madriz. A pesar del desajuste y el sentirse fuera de onda, uno se obstina y se defiende, pero, pronto, oye el acoso de otro ritmo en su decir. Quizás el mozo ecuatoriano no haya tenido otro escape que cantar con igual desaliño que los de casa. Se desenvuelve con aplomo y ha aprendido a navegar la carta al dedillo. ∆ La monstruosidad del terminal aéreo de Madrid aconseja cancelar el viaje por avión a Pamplona y emprender, “a todo trapo”, el recorrido por coche. Guadalajara, a lo lejos. Luego, La Alcarria. Viaje a La Alcarria. Sigüenza se anuncia en un letrero al borde de la cuneta. Asociaciones. Don Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora, “Petrarca indiano”, promotor de una nueva conciencia en la Nueva España. Empieza el ascenso. Se divisan colinas, cual cuerpo de mujer, diría Neruda. Se proliferan los nidos de cigüeñas. Se apresura el otoño. Se impone la monotonía. La paleta no ofrece grandes contrastes. “¡A la sierra!… ¡A la sierra!...” clamaban los hombres de Macías en Los de abajo. ¡A la sierra! Mil metros sobre el nivel del mar. El aire se pronuncia más fino y transparente. Cambia la luz. No, no estamos en los Andes. El entorno, no obstante, es otro que el del ya lejano Madrid. La geografía preanuncia a Soria. En el horizonte, se divisa “la mole del Moncayo”, pienso en Leonor y El Espino, espacio del que también hace memoria,

210 en primavera, desde la andaluza Baeza, Antonio Machado en su carta / poema a “A José María Palacio”. Pienso en la Sierra de Cazorla, en los manantiales del Guadalquivir y pienso que no es primavera, que estamos en pleno otoño y casi en el centro de Soria… –Señora, ¿podría usted sugerir un buen mesón?… –¡Gracias!… No olvide cerrar su coche, no sea que algún transeúnte se aproveche de que usted está desprevenida… –No os preocupéis –responde–… ¡Estamos en la Sierra! ¡En esta tierra, no hay ladrones! Pendones y estandartes con los nombres de Machado y de Gerardo Diego cuelgan en la plaza central y se ondulan inmensos en el aire. Asombroso reconocimiento público a dos grandes poetas. En el recomendado restaurante, disfrutamos del mejor y más tierno cochinillo asado que en el tiempo ha sido. Un deleite al paladar, el pobre. Venga un buen vino. Estamos en tierras próximas a las riberas del Duero. La ensalada, delicia de lechugas aliñadas a perfección. El trato y las cortesías, impecables. Soria es memorable por la mesa y por aquel mencionado poema de abril de 1913 que signó Machado. Todo en movimiento. Destino Pamplona. Un camino largo… Allá, más allá, hacia la distancia recóndita, hacia la comunidad de Aragón, está la infinitud y la soledad del desierto de los Monegros, cuyos atributos, me dicen, son únicos en toda Europa. Allá atrás, más atrás, queda, en El Espino, la terca y tierna memoria del amor de un extraordinario poeta. ∆ Estella se anuncia, recuerdos de Shanti Andía y sus inquietudes, señal de que ya vamos cerca de la capital navarra. La aurora del crepúsculo baña de luz solar los molinos de viento modernos que circundan las colinas de Pamplona y que se han convertido en eólico emblema, en divisa actual de la vetusta ciudad. Pamplona se sienta en el fiel de la paradoja que junta lo tradicional y lo moderno. Navarra entera se nutre de esa imagen. Hay en esas tierras una historia milenaria que no olvida ni a burgos ni a navarros, ni sus divisiones. Sigue hoy. La navarrería se bifurca entre lo vasco y lo español. La endogamia, dicen, contribuye

211 a que se reiteren arquetipos y dolencias. La mitología de la tribu y el clan está en el aire. Algo hermético se trasunta de los pamplonenses. Trajinan las rúas casi sin ajena curiosidad. Nada distrae su mirar. Es como si la novedad del otro no existiera, y menos el coqueteo. No obstante, inmigrantes hay de todas partes. Albañiles ecuatorianos. Mucamas de diferentes latitudes. Algún chofer sudamericano. Mozos y mozas de bares. Enfermeras. Profesionales ya arraigados. Hablan todos de lo difícil que es compenetrarse con la cultura local. Otra vez son los taxistas los que informan y miden el pulso de la presencia forastera. “—Llévanos a conocer los sitios memorables de Pamplona”. “–Aquí no hay mucho que ver –musita indiferente–: esta es la Ciudadela, este es el casco antiguo, esa es la Clínica Universitaria, esta es la Universidad de Navarra, El Corte Inglés es nuevo, en Arazuri, junto a Zizur Mayor, está la fábrica de Volkswagen, y este barrio que empieza a destartalarse se llama “La Milagrosa”. Está repleto de inmigrantes, especialmente ecuatorianos. (Se nota el descuido. Se nota que la gente vive aglomerada en pisos. Empieza a sentirse en el ambiente algo de lo negativo asociado con los guetos.) ¡La Milagrosa! Allí los inmigrantes buscan, valga decirlo, el milagro, el logro de algo. Allí sueñan, viven su personal quimera. Allí se pronuncia el grotesco de los encuentros y desencuentros de culturas. Allí rondan los éxitos y los sinsabores. La regla es que la mayoría de esos inmigrantes esté al margen. Hay otros, sin embargo, que ganan relativamente bien, pero no viven con holgura. La vivienda, ya alquilada o adquirida, es cara, agota la bolsa. Por cincuenta metros cuadrados, exigen unos 700 euros mensuales de alquiler. Un piso de unos ochenta metros no deja de costar entre 300 y 400 mil euros, y no necesariamente en las mejores ubicaciones disponibles. En Pamplona, la propiedad cuesta. Consta entre las más caras de España. La crisis de la vivienda y las hipotecas es alarmante a lo largo del territorio nacional. Los precios sacuden. Se inflan y disparan. El taxista nos habló de que la licencia para su taxi, no el valor del taxi, le costó doscientos mil euros cuando la obtuvo, y que el permiso para conducir le valió más

212 de mil quinientos. Después he confirmado que la primera cifra es hoy más espantosa aún. Para entender bien el coste de vida, no se olvide que el dólar pierde terreno. Es un milagro la supervivencia. Por eso, quizá, buscando escape, repica una y otra vez el estribillo de la fe y la esperanza: –Me gusta, estoy bien aquí, pero ¡no hay como la tierra de uno!… Todos ansían volver. Todos se van quedando. Inmigrantes de oriente y occidente traen su empuje y conocimiento a estos suelos. No todos son bien aprovechados. La fuga de cerebros para sus países de origen es un enorme déficit. Valga el caso de Sulel, la mucama cubana. Apenas tiene 22 años. Acaba de llegar. Extraña su trópico. Sus amigos. Su comida. Su ritmo. Se queja de la falta de chispa e inventiva de los navarros. Su historia es compleja. Nieta de españoles, su condición legal la ayuda. Su charla simula el acento local. Una vez que rechaza el disfraz, se entrega con gusto a conversar con el peculiar deje suyo. Es otra persona. Se torna desenvuelta y resulta una cómoda amiga del “choteo”. Habla de lo bueno y de lo malo de su país de origen. Ella sí vino a quedarse. Tiene planes y proyectos. Desecha el sueño americano de Miami. Lleva más de once años tocando el violonchelo. Once años que quizá Navarra y España desperdicien. ¡Quizá! Sigue practicando su instrumento. Ahorra para comprar uno de mejor calidad. Se ríe ante los nombres de alimentos que ha tenido que aprender. Son los mismos que los nuestros, dice, pero ellos les dan otro nombre. ¡“Ellos”! Comentamos que, en El Corte Inglés, ya hay una sección dedicada a víveres latinoamericanos. El comercio en Navarra absorbe los efectos de las zonas de contacto culturales. Radio Tropical, con ritmos que parecen fuera de lugar, se anuncia en el cuadrante de la radio. Navarra se transcultura. Brota la matidez. Uno de estos días, las alubias y judías tendrán que vérselas con los fréjoles y frijoles. Y la vinagrera / aceitera quizás opte por ceder a la alcuza: ésta, con la ayuda de los de allende el mar, anuncia y solicita la vuelta a su “país de origen”. Igual les pasa a otros “arcaicos” vocablos. Hay inmigrantes bien conectados con el engranaje del cuerpo empresarial de la zona. China desarrolla su presencia en el campo de la energía solar. Asistimos a una boda nada menos que en la sala

213 llamada de Felipe II, que está en la Ciudadela. La mayor autoridad de la ciudad estaba allí presente: se hizo cargo y ejerció los detalles legales. El lugar era acogedor, íntimo, exclusivo. Occidente y Oriente se daban la mano en aras del comercio. Madariaga y Benedetti, y algún eco de Confucio, sonaron sus voces en ese ámbito claustral. En una de las recepciones que prosiguieron, una de ellas en los salones ejecutivos de alto lujo de una nueva fábrica, me enteré de lo que es un “seguidor solar”. Impresionó la eficiencia. Las posibilidades que existen para la energía renovable. El ámbito tenía algo de visionario. Recordé que no había visto nada tan futurista desde que visité la fábrica de Volkswagen en Arazuri. En ese entonces, recapacité en que los detalles que exige la organización de una fábrica actual sólo son comparables al levantamiento de esas catedrales medievales. Así son de impresionantes, casi hasta el espanto, los centros en que uno pisa la moderna coyuntura. ¿Por qué venir a Pamplona a construir paneles solares? ¿No sería preferible estar más cerca de un puerto para reducir el coste de transportes? Pronto, me entero de que, en Pamplona y Navarra –a pesar de que no cuentan, dígase, con los beneficios de luz solar de la Florida–, el 80% de la electricidad procede de fuentes de energía renovable. Inmensa infraestructura. Sorprende, por otro lado, que en Florida ocurra lo opuesto, y el carbón sea la fuente principal. Parece que el turismo, vestigio acaso de Ponce de León, no está dispuesto a aceptar modernos molinos de viento en su horizonte. El riesgo, se cree, es que esa presencia en una tarjeta postal ahuyentaría a los fieles de las palmeras, a los peregrinos que buscan la arena, el mar, el sol…, ¿la juventud? Pamplona es una curiosa sorpresa. Por un lado, la tradición, los Sanfermines, los chupinazos, las jotas y cierto tribal encerramiento; por el otro, la presencia y pujanza de lo moderno. Y no sólo en cuestiones de energía renovable y de automóviles. También está allí la Clínica Universitaria. Independientemente de gustarle o no gustarle a uno que la administre el Opus Dei, esa clínica cuenta entre lo mejor de lo mejor en España y no cede su espacio a otras parecidas de Europa. La investigación, el trato a los pacientes, la eficiencia y la preocupación

214 por el detalle no le piden favor a centros médicos más afamados de allá o acullá. Pamplona se presta a la caminata. En el meollo de su ser, bullen conflictos y nacionalismos. Por encima de ello, se nota, sin embargo, la buena mesa y el buen vino que brinda. Baste con mencionar el ambiente de Don Pablo y su ensalada verde, su pichón de Araiz o su cordero confitado; no hablar de las degustaciones que ofrece El Corte Inglés. Este superalmacén, que remonta sus orígenes, dicen, a la idea que tuvo un cubano, ya es parte de la iconografía de España. Al igual que el Ave, el tren de alta velocidad que corre entre varias ciudades españolas, El Corte Inglés es parte de las señas de identidad de la modernidad de las ciudades que pesan en España. Pronto habrá también Ave entre Madrid y Pamplona. A ésta se le viene irremediablemente encima la globalización. La sensación que produce a veces es la de una urbe en que su gente pareciera yacer estancada en el pasado, incapaz de hacer aun una total transición a la modernidad. Uno se siente vivir en el fiel de lo antiguo y lo postrimero. Quizás allí radique su entrañable encanto. ∆ Vuelta a Madrid. El fin de un viaje contiene, siempre, algo de objetivo y de final. Van quedando los sabores, los olores y las voces de conocidos y desconocidos que uno encontró. Se divisa el retorno a casa y un nuevo recomenzar. En una cervecería-restaurante de las afueras de la capital española, hacemos pausa para almorzar. Ecuatorianos se insinúan otra vez. Abundan los coterráneos. Alguno de clase media alta está allí en la lucha. Gustoso atiende a su paisano. Entusiasta y en control de la carta, sugiere que aproveche la calidad del pan, que pruebe un boletus con foie, una ensalada especial, un arroz con bogavante y el rioja de la casa. Magnífico consejo. Duro es el vivir para este joven fino y resuelto que procede de un privilegiado estilo de vida que se vino abajo debido a cosas suyas, tácitas y a causas relacionadas, acaso, con las tantas circunstancias de su patria en crisis. Está de pie de siete a siete. Necesita del mejor calzado. Su mujer también labora. Ella, asistiendo, por horas, a alguna discapacitada. Historias hay sobre los

215 usos, abusos y usurpaciones de este último tipo de relaciones. No en este caso. Entre los dos aportan unas 130 horas semanales de trabajo, y con ello apenas pueden vérselas. Siembran y esperan cosechar. Se preparan. Saben que saldrán adelante. Tienen cultura. Tienen roce. Nada de complejos. Los distinguen y tratan bien. Todo es cuestión de tiempo. Admirable su tesón y pujanza. Ellos también son parte del coro: ¡no hay como la tierra de uno! Aquí soy uno más. Allá…, bueno… allá… ¡usted sabe! Entre ese allá y las empresas cotidianas de Madrid, transcurre la vida de tantos. En cualquier recorrido turístico por la ciudad, el esplendor del Palacio Real y el poder que emana del Palacio de la Moncloa parecieran insensibles, indiferentes a los trajines de esos tantos. Pero allí están éstos y sí que agitan y sí que modifican el entorno y sí que afectan las decisiones del orden social y político. Todo lo que hay que hacer es darse una vuelta por la Puerta del Sol para constatar el revoltijo que constituye a la más reciente realidad española. El cosmopolitismo de etnias y de idiomas que allí circunda apenas se lo divisa desde Pamplona. Más y más inmigrantes vienen en busca de mejores horizontes y cruzan, de un lado para el otro, la metafórica Puerta del Sol. No parece haber solución de continuidad. Las tasas de natalidad sugieren que el componente futuro de la nación española, conforme existe, cambiará radicalmente. Los latinoamericanos, y los de otras latitudes, abrirán surcos, fraguarán un remozado mestizaje hispánico con nuevos matices. Llegarán gentes de otras partes. Se propagarán. Habrá retornos, habrá choques y habrá frutos. Unos dirán que no quieren volver. Otros, rezumando nostalgia, rabia y melancolía, seguirán con su invocación ontológica de que ¡no hay como la tierra de uno! Todos, o muchos, se irán quedando y, con ellos, nuevas devociones y cultos. Hasta la Virgen de la Almudena siente ya el acoso de las migraciones. En un predio elegante, pleno de serenidad, se anuncia la réplica de un santuario: es el de la Virgen de Schoenstatt, movimiento apostólico que surgió hará casi un siglo en Alemania, movimiento que se instala y hace labor proselitista en España. Otro día, la pantalla

216 capta imágenes de una romería en Madrid que celebra a la Virgen del Quinche, acompañada de galas, estandartes y banderas ecuatorianos. La transculturación es evidente. Las migraciones impactan y revolucionan. Hasta por Hermosilla, Lagasca, Velázquez, Goya, Serrano y tantas otras calles del exclusivo Barrio de Salamanca, uno cree escuchar aquel paradigmático decir: ¡no hay tierra como la de uno! Marco de pensares y deseos es todo lo que es ese decir. Cada día, la unanimidad del universo borra más ese canto atávico, pronunciado desde tiempos inmemoriales. Algo de vestigio, de inventiva y de verdad hay, sin embargo, en ese: ¡no hay tierra como la de uno!… Y no importa doquiera que uno esté. Ese es el milagro y la moraleja que yace en el fondo de las confrontaciones y estremecimientos que se dan hoy en la política y que quizás apuntará la historia. Dicen que las utopías han tocado su fin. Eso dicen. Quizás, a lo mejor, ese fin esté vivo, cual siempre, en las quimeras de aquellos que aún no alcanzan ni El Prado ni el Thyssen-Bornemisza, ni leen artículos en “Babelia” sobre Cartagena de Indias, sobre un cuento inédito de Cortázar o un poema hológrafo, recuperado, de García Lorca. Ni se les ocurre visitar librerías ni escudriñar estantes para comprobar cuán invisibles están, en este caso, los clásicos o las promociones actuales de escritores de su Ecuador de origen. ∆ Más allá, para llegar al Terminal 4 del monstruo en que se ha convertido el aeropuerto de Madrid-Barajas, esperan taxis, autobuses, túneles, puertas, ascensores, colas inmensas y registros y más registros antes de abordar el avión del regreso. Esa es la otra realidad que ni en los museos ni en los apuntes aquí signados acabamos de entender. Las migraciones, acusa algún subtexto ideológico, están ligadas a esos registros que sirven para justificar y ejercer todo tipo de batidas: ¿oportunas réplicas o cínicas manipulaciones del poder, debido a querellas e intereses económicos, culturales y religiosos? Cunde la zozobra. Cunden las nuevas cruzadas. La tolerancia va en retirada. “Vencen los bárbaros”. Vencen los sectarios. La inocencia que

217 permitía jugar líricas batallas de “cometas en el cielo” se da sólo en filmes y entre infantes. Otro es el juego… Descalzo, agachado y a punto de amarrarme los zapatos, oigo que alguien saluda: –¿Cómo les va?... Miro… Una mujer, con una sonrisa oblicua, lateral y con “voz lenta y triste”, responde: –Vamos, vamos…, mientras volvamos..., estamos… Diciembre, 2007

Escribir en el Norte. Memoria, culpa, utopía, simonía. Mario Campaña

GeorgeSteiner,ensayistayprofesorfrancés,declaróenciertaoportunidad que, en América Latina, la historia aún no había comenzado; era una tesis conectada, sin duda, con el hegelianismo, que hizo de la historia el movimiento ascendente de un espíritu que se había ido encarnando en las diferentes civilizaciones hasta alcanzar su forma absoluta. Para Hegel, la historia había llegado a su fin con la civilización germánica y con el triunfo de Napoleón, que representaba la modernidad y la libertad. Y fue Fukuyama quien, desde los Estados Unidos, popularizó el postulado según el cual la historia había terminado. Así, pues, de acuerdo al esquema de algunos intelectuales norteños, un ciudadano del sur que vive en el norte está condenado doblemente, por un desajuste temporal, a la carencia de un atributo sustancial de toda persona: su historicidad. Procedente de un lugar prehistórico por anticipación, ha llegado, por retraso, a uno poshistórico: llegó demasiado temprano al sur y demasiado tarde al norte. Ese es sólo el punto final de una vieja equivocación, el resultado de un esquema categorial que no hacía otra cosa que convertir el mundo

220 real en una fábula, según la expresión de Nietzsche. Los hombres del norte han terminado por aceptar el mundo sensible como aquel en que comienza y termina todo, y los del sur continúan deliberando –a veces a ciegas– no acerca del sentido de su devenir, sino de las vías o procedimientos para reapropiarse de su mundo, de su pasado, su presente y su futuro, de los que los separa, precisamente, el tejido conceptual que el norte propagó indiscriminadamente. La experiencia del hombre del sur que escribe en el norte pone de relieve, creo, las diferentes, las infinitas circunstancias y dilemas a las que el sur se ve abocado en esa, su tarea de recuperación. Señalaré cuatro de ellas.

I Memoria

En el año 2000, mientras yo vivía en Escocia, fui contratado como consultor para una nueva edición del diccionario Larousse de la lengua castellana, que, en esa ocasión, deseaba incorporar un amplio registro de vocablos de uso particular en Hispanoamérica. Debía ocuparme de los ecuatorianismos. Acudí a material técnico, a fuentes bibliográficas diversas (estudios linguísticos, diccionarios, novelas, cuentos) y a mi propia experiencia como hablante. Acumulé así un primer registro de palabras hipotéticamente originadas entre los ecuatorianos. Pronto reparé en que las anotaciones más numerosas procedían de mi memoria, de la que, en ese trance, en cierto momento, había empezado a borbotear de manera lenta y sin pausa, como una fuente silvestre, un flujo de locuciones viejas que conservaban, para mi sorpresa, una carga emocional considerable. Eran palabras que formaban parte del idioma de mi infancia; era ese tiempo, encarnado en la lengua, el que acudía de modo intempestivo, precisamente cuando me encontraba entre las tenebrosas brumas invernales de uno de los extremos del mundo, lo que, para un hombre de la línea ecuatorial, tenía un significado real. Fue el comienzo de una movediza indagación que no ha terminado pero ya me ha dado momentos de íntima satisfacción, repercutiendo en mi escritura poética y haciendo así de este duro oficio algo más entrañable para mí.

221 Durante el trabajo para el diccionario, recordé que en mi adolescencia solía sentirme aturdido y avergonzado ante el escarnio de que eran víctimas los campesinos u obreros –por lo general, hijos de campesinos– de mi región. Desde el púlpito de la docencia, desde el balcón de un periódico o una estación radial, o desde la pura ingenuidad o la arrogancia de un urbanita cualquiera de clase media, se estigmatizaba a quienes, con la total naturidad que da lo propio o lo heredado, utilizaban vocablos añejos que estaban empezando a desaparecer. Para esos campesinos y trabajadores, ese era el idioma de sus antepasados y ese era el que yo escuchaba a diario en la casa familiar. Y, sin embargo, si ellos cometían la imprudencia –y la cometían a menudo– de soltar en público vocablos como ‘vide’ en lugar de ‘ver’; ‘aguaitar’ en lugar de ‘mirar con atención’; ‘jachudo’ en lugar de ‘terco’; ‘viada’ en lugar de ‘velocidad’ o ‘curcuncho’ en lugar de ‘harto’ eran enseguida corregidos y despreciados: eran palabras propias de campesinos, es decir, de iletrados, de “montubios”, como, con intención de agravio, se decía entonces. Así como el sistema social, político y económico desplegaba sus poderes para arraigar la creencia en un Estado ecuatoriano, blanco o mestizo, ignorando la realidad de la población indígena y negra, con todas las repercusiones culturales y sociales que se pueden prever, notablemente la constitución de lo blanco como lo superior, lo mestizo como lo aceptable y lo negro o indígena como despreciable, así el sistema educativo se empeñaba en desterrar el idioma usado espontáneamente en las regiones rurales costeñas por una mayoría de campesinos numerosos pero pobres, cuya cultura, al fin y al cabo, no contaba en el momento de elaborar los programas educativos. Era una actitud y una política tanto más injustificada y absurda cuanto que la lengua repudiada era la misma que la de los repudiadores blancos, pero más castiza. La palabra ‘aguaitar’, por ejemplo, aparece ya definida en la edición de 1726 del Diccionario de la Academia Española, el entonces llamado “Diccionario de la Lengua Castellana”; ‘aguaitar’ equivale a “acechar, observar con cuidado y cautela los movimientos y pasos de otro, para darle asechanzas”. En 1726, la academia advertía

222 que se trataba de una “palabra antigua, que ya no tiene uso”. Y, sin embargo, entre nosotros, en el cantón Milagro, donde vivía yo con mi madre y mis abuelos en los años setenta, esa palabra se usaba. Algo parecido cabe decir del ‘vide’. El verbo latino ‘video’, que significaba ‘ver’, tenía ‘vidi’ como su primera persona del indicativo. No conozco la lengua latina, pero la historia de la lengua castellana nos enseña que ‘vidi’ pasó a ‘vide’ en los siglos XII y XIII. “Las formas vide y vido –dice el linguista Manuel Alvar en su libro Morfología histórica del español, de donde tomo estos datos– están vivas en toda América, en las hablas rurales de España y en judeo-español, como herencia de unos usos que fueron habituales en castellano antiguo”1. Lo mismo ocurre con el lenguaje que las clases populares crean en su vivir cotidiano o que son de su uso preferente. Ese idioma, pese a venir legitimado por una numerosa comunidad de hablantes, sólo difícilmente alcanza la dignidad de lo literario. Por causas sociales, no difíciles de desentrañar, las lecciones que el siglo de oro español dio sobre el uso de la lengua popular cayeron en saco roto. La lengua popular sólo ha sido utilizada en literatura –con excepción de la generación del 30, en Guayaquil– de forma desafiante, casi exhibicionista y frívola, como si los escritores, en realidad, carecieran de fe en las virtudes estéticas de esa lengua. Sin duda hay excepciones, como la ya señalada de los escritores del 30 o la del poeta peruano Carlos Germán Belli2. Tardé mucho en darme cuenta de que todo hombre, y, por tanto, también todo poeta, tiene derecho a utilizar la lengua de sus mayores, cualquiera que ésta sea, y que ese derecho se negaba entonces –y talvez 1 Manuel Alvar y Bernard Pottier, Morfología histórica del español, Gredos, Madrid, 1983, págs. 259-260. 2 Ejemplo de Belli de uso estético del lenguaje popular podrían ser estos versos del poema “Amanuense”, que combinan notablemente lo culto y lo popular: “Ya descuajaringándome, ya hipando/hasta las cachas de cansado ya,/inmensos montes todo el día alzando/de acá para acullá de bofes voy/.../ya a más hasta el gollete no poder”: en El pie sobre el cuello, Lima, La Rama Florida, 1967.

223 se niegue aún ahora a las personas que no han hecho su aprendizaje del idioma en las aulas de los colegios ni en las páginas de los libros y los periódicos–; se negaba, y talvez se niega aún a las clases más pobres, el derecho a practicar la lengua con la que han crecido y en la que hicieron su educación sentimental; una lengua, la popular y materna, que, sin duda, es uno de los tesoros de todo escritor. Se trata de una reivindicación legítima cualquiera que sea esa lengua –insisto– y cualquiera que sea la norma de esa lengua que, pretendidamente, se viola en su uso popular. Es evidente que las víctimas del expolio son las clases pobres, cuya cultura no prevalece en la sociedad y cuya forma de expresión no utiliza la palabra escrita como vehículo privilegiado. Es una forma más de la opresión que han sufrido secularmente. Con el redescubrimiento de la lengua de mi infancia, llegó el descubrimiento de lo que a mí me parece una de las más lamentables limitaciones de mi escritura poética anterior, que me privó de un “tiempo en estado puro”, cuyo hallazgo o recuperación, sin duda, es una de las formas de la felicidad. Las puertas de ese tiempo pueden empezar a abrirse de muchos modos: en el crujir de una baldosa desigual pisada accidentalmente o en el trasiego de una magdalena en el paladar que hace relampaguear en la mente de una persona esquirlas del pasado, explosivas y vivificantes, compuestas de un tiempo ya despojado de todo peso fáctico. Sin lugar a dudas, otra de las puertas de ese tiempo en estado puro son los vocablos de la infancia. Sin darme cuenta, yo había renunciado a todo aquello al negarle entrada a esa lengua en mi escritura poética. La actitud libre hacia la lengua es una conquista, algo por lo que todo escritor debe batallar, pero en Hispanoamérica esa lucha es especialmente cruenta. En ese continente, todos empezamos nuestra vida de escritores en el interior de un idioma culto, el castellano literario, un idioma que no es exactamente el nuestro. No lo digo porque nuestra lengua materna sea otra, pues la mayoría de los escritores ecuatorianos no hemos nacidos en el ámbito de las lenguas indígenas, sino porque nuestra lengua “propia” –si cabe llamarla así– está felizmente contaminada. El castellano antiguo, las diferentes lenguas

224 amerindias, las voces africanas, la invención verbal popular, el coro linguístico que fluye a través de los incontables puertos marítimos y fluviales y así recorre toda América, etc., han ido haciendo de nosotros hablantes muy impuros, y es esa impureza –llamada “ecuatorianismos” o “americanismos”– la que brilla felizmente con una luz más pura ante los ojos fieles de la memoria. Es obvio que “nuestro castellano” no es la misma lengua que ha protegido siempre la Academia Española, erigida durante un tiempo demasiado largo en guardiana de la pureza del idioma. El premio Real Academia Española, convocado con todo cuidado para la obras que “de manera señalada contribuyen al mejor conocimiento de la lengua”, es una manera elegante de premiar la fidelidad a la pureza. Afortunadamente, todo ello empieza ahora a cambiar. Con lo dicho, pretendo presentar uno de los tantos movimimientos internos suscitados en un escritor por el hecho biográfico azaroso que consiste en haber nacido y crecido en el sur y escribir en el norte.

II Culpa

Pero no he sido invitado a relatar sólo mi propia experiencia. Hay varios casos de colegas que han llamado poderosamente mi atención. Voy a referirme, primero, al del poeta, novelista y dramaturgo ecuatoriano Jorge Enrique Adoum. En 1972, el escritor uruguayo Mario Benedetti publicó en la Biblioteca de Marcha, de Montevideo, entrevistas a diez poetas latinoamericanos que tenían en común el hecho de ser lo que el mismo Benedetti llamó “poetas comunicantes”3. El volumen tenía la intención de cerrar filas en torno a la estética aludida en el título. Entre las páginas 65 y 96, viene una entrevista a Adoum, fechada en París, 1972. En cierto momento de esa entrevista, Benedetti pregunta a Adoum si experimenta un sentimiento de culpa por haber estado lejos del 3 Mario Benedetti, Los poetas comunicantes. Roberto Fernández Retamar-Juan Gelman-Nicanor Parra-Ernesto Cardenal-Carlos María Gutiérrez-Roque Dalton-Idea Vilariño-Gonzalo Rojas-Eliseo Diego-Jorge Enrique Adoum, Biblioteca de Marcha, Montevideo, 1972.

225 país en los años pasados. Adoum asegura que no, pero la naturaleza de sus respuestas permiten descubrir ese sentimiento latiendo en él; un poco apurado, se siente obligado a recordar que él había afirmado ya que “Debe de ser muy triste no ser latinoamericano, y debe de ser más triste ser latinoamericano y vivir definitivamente fuera de América latina”. Enseguida continuaba diciendo: “Yo tendré que volver, pero eso no depende sólo de mi voluntad, sino de muchísimas condiciones, que intervienen en las decisiones de cada uno de nosotros”. Cuando el entrevistador le pregunta por esas condiciones, Adoum contesta: “Me refiero a las únicas razones posibles: las de mi país y mi pueblo. Desgraciadamente, tal como están las cosas ahora, no veo qué puedo hacer en mi país que sea de más utilidad que lo que hago estando en Europa. Si en algún momento mi presencia física en Ecuador pudiera contribuir a la liberación de mi pueblo, inmediatamente regresaría”. Aparte del inesperado chauvinismo (“debe de ser muy triste no ser latinoamericano”) y del paternalismo (“mi pueblo”), las respuestas de Adoum merecen atención para cualquiera que pretenda reflexionar sobre el fenómeno de la inmigración de los intelectuales latinoamericanos. A lo largo de toda la entrevista, Adoum asegura, en definitiva, que se queda en Europa, en París, por amor a “su pueblo”: “Si algún aporte puedo dar a mi pueblo –dice– o a la gente que hace más que yo por mi pueblo es tratar de escribir, y creo que en Europa puedo escribir, por ahora, mejor que en Ecuador, concretamente”. Adoum habla de compromiso, del escritor comprometido que decía ser, y de su ejercicio consecuente: su compromiso con el pueblo, dice, lo cumplía con su obra y su obra sólo se podía desarrollar en Europa. Son declaraciones características de algunos escritores de la llamada generación del compromiso, que tuvo en América numerosos representantes auténticos, poetas y narradores que murieron en batalla, y tuvo también representantes que hicieron del compromiso un recurso filisteo, aquel grupo que el siempre mordaz Cardoza y Aragón caricaturizó con una anécdota que a él le gustaba contar: vio, decía, a Miguel Ángel Asturias en un restaurante de París, sirviéndose

226 un banquete, y le preguntó cómo le iba; Asturias le habría contestado, con gesto lastimero: “Aquí, probando la amarga langosta del exilio”. Menciono las declaraciones de Adoum sólo para establecer una diferencia sustancial entre aquel tiempo –los años setenta– y este. El malentendido de los años setenta, según el cual un escritor tenía un “pueblo”, del que, desde luego, él no era parte pero ante quien debía responder por lo que hiciera o dejara de hacer, ha terminado: el pueblo, si existe, no es de nadie, ni necesita la presencia física de ningún escritor. La acción política de un autor ni dignifica ni envilece su obra, que puede ser valiosa o desleznable y favorecer o negar un proceso liberador, cualquiera que sea el comportamiento de aquel en tanto ciudadano. Hoy, la historia literaria conocida impediría formular un interrogatorio como el de Mario Benedetti. Ya no se puede pasar por alto una verdad simple y elemental, difícil de rebatir: toda persona tiene o debería tener derecho a vivir donde quiera, y todo artista, a buscar las condiciones que necesite para el desarrollo de su arte. Ejercer esos derechos no puede ser objeto de recriminaciones morales ni obliga a nadie a perdir perdón ni a redimirse de ninguna culpa. El valor del arte y la cualidad moral de una persona, en suma, nada tienen que ver con el lugar de residencia del artista. Y, desde luego, nadie creería en la coherencia de una persona que dice vivir y escribir fuera de su país por un compromiso político y moral con sus compatriotas4.

III Utopía

Quisiera referirme ahora al caso del escritor chileno Roberto Bolaño. El suyo no tiene nada que ver con la lengua. Desde el punto de vista del idioma, Bolaño es un escritor sin rasgos personales, sin una personalidad destacada; su lengua más bien debería ser asociada a la “prosa espontánea” que preconizó Jacques Kerouac. Por otra parte, Bolaño pertenece a una generación que se deshizo de la bandera del compromiso, entendido en el sentido en que Adoum o Benedetti o 4 Como el lector puede imaginarse, hay contemporáneos de Adoum, como Efraín Jara Idrovo o Carlos Eduardo Jaramillo, que no se fueron de Ecuador y sin embargo han hecho una obra poética de primer orden.

227 Fernández Retamar, entre otros, lo postulaban en América Latina en los años sesenta y setenta. Para el caso, quisiera destacar en Bolaño lo que podríamos llamar su “utopía underground” que, sin duda, nació, creció y fructificó en el norte, tal y como lo indica la biografía del autor. Voy a empezar tirando de un cabo suelto. Es sabido que Bolaño hizo de la historia del movimientro infrarrealista mexicano el asunto central de su novela Los detectives salvajes, seguramente una de las novelas latinoamericanas más leídas desde su aparición en 1998, que le valió al autor el premio Rómulo Gallegos. El movimiento se fundó hacia 1976, en Ciudad de México; Bolaño, que entonces vivía en la capital mexicana –México significó para Bolaño el primer norte–, fue uno de sus inspiradores y líderes. Es por demás evidente –y así lo han confesado algunos de sus miembros– que los infrarrealistas estaban influidos por la generación beat de Estados Unidos. En México, en 1979, Bolaño publicó en la editorial Extemporáneos (nótese la alusión en el nombre al grupo “Contemporáneos”) una antología de poesía hispanoamericana titulada Muchachos desnudos bajo el arcoiris de fuego, y daba, de ese modo, un paso adelante en la ideal configuración del movimiento poético infrarrealista, es decir, en su proyección continental: incluyó a once poetas de seis países: México, Chile, Cuba, Ecuador, Nicaragua y Perú. El título parece inspirado en En la carretera, la novela de Jacques Kerouac. Los muchachos de la novela de Kerouac, es decir, Dean Moriarty (Neal Cassady), Sal Paradise (Jacques Kerouac) y sus amigos Carlo Marx (Allen Ginsberg) o “el viejo Bull” (William Burroughs) están todos marcados, incluso por sus nombres o sus apelativos, por el arcoíris, que no es otra que el símbolo de la utopía. En la novela de Kerouac, Carlo Marx/Ginsberg llamaba a Dean Moriarty “hijo del arcoíris”, y Ray, el hijo de Bull/ Burroughs, “andaba por el patio completamente desnudo: era una criatura rubia surgida del arcoíris”. La metáfora aparece varias veces en la novela aplicada al grupo o sus descendientes. Los muchachos del arcoíris de Kerouac no querían “combatir la sociedad” –y así lo declara el narrador, quien afirma que sus amigos neoryorkinos estaban

228 “en la posición negativa de pesadilla de combatir la sociedad”–, sino “evitar que los canallas impongan su estilo de vida”: evitar que lo impusieran en la vida de ellos –seres ávidos “de pan y de amor”–, no en el mundo. Para impedirlo, la fórmula utópica era sencilla pero irreductible: salir a la carretera. “Movernos –dice el narrador– era nuestra única y noble función del momento”. El movimiento de los jóvenes estadounidense no carecía de dirección: se dirigían al sur: su utopía (la utopía del norte) era el sur. México, la selva amazónica, los Andes vieron llegar, en efecto, años después de la publicación de En la carretera, a Kerouac, Burroughs y Ginsberg. En la novela Los detectives salvajes, de Roberto Bolaño, la utopía es similar, pero tiene una dirección inversa y termina frustrada. Al cabo de un viaje hacia el norte, al desierto de Sonora, los líderes de los poetas realvisceralistas o infrarrealistas de México, es decir, Arturo Belano, alter ego de Bolaño, y Ulises Lima, que evoca al poeta Mario Santiago, deciden escapar hacia adelante y partir a Europa e Israel. Después de un recorrido desquiciado por Tel Aviv, París, Barcelona, Roma, Viena, la frustración es patente: al término de la novela, queda en claro que Arturo Belano abandonó Europa y, después de deambular por varios países africanos, se dispuso a hacerse matar en una aldea de Liberia, en un desesperado intento de redención, mientras Ulises Lima sucumbía ignorado, extraviado, ahogado en las aguas pantanosas y depredadoras de la capital. El destino del escritor latinoamericano, al menos de los escritores nacidos en los años cincuenta, como el autor se cuida bien de señalar, queda subrayado en la novela con las historias de “un poeta peruano” y “un cuentista cubano”, en los que es fácil reconocer a Enrique Verástegui y Reynaldo Arenas, respectivamente: “Los dos creían en la revolución y en la libertad. Más o menos como todos los escritores latinoamericanos nacidos en la década del cincuenta”5, se dice en la novela. Unas páginas más adelante, se anota: “Mi generación leyó a Marx y a Rimbaud hasta que se le revolvieron 5 Bolaño, Roberto, Los detectives salvajes, Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 1998, ver págs. 497 y 528.

229 las tripas”. La suerte corrida por “el poeta peruano” (Verástegui) y “el cuentista cubano” (Arena) es bien expresiva de la visión del autor: la utopía fue aplastada; el poeta enloquece después de residir en Barcelona y París y volver a Lima, y el narrador se suicida en Estados Unidos después de huir de la represión a que fue sometido por los dirigentes de la revolución cubana.

IV Simonía

Para todo escritor originario del sur, escribir en el norte supone, en primer lugar, la oportunidad de descubrir hasta qué punto el norte –es decir, Europa y Estados Unidos– ha llevado a cabo dos operaciones inéditas y únicas en la historia: 1. la constitución de sociedades sin dioses, sin seres supraterrenales salvadores (los europeos fueron los primeros en la historia de la humanidad en vivir sin dioses, y Europa y Estados Unidos son hoy los únicos lugares del orbe sin seres inmortales, sagrados). Es una realidad que no necesita demostración alguna: Zaratustra lo proclamó cuando la devoción era ya mera estrategia social y la fe se había disuelto en el aire; y 2. la transformación de bienes espirituales en mercancías: la simonía, visiblemente ejemplificada en la famosa venta de indulgencias, que llegó a su apogeo en los años quinientos en Europa, con el príncipe Alberto I, arzobispo de Maguncia –un humanista y favorecedor de las artes, que apoyó a Lucas Cranach y a Grûnewarld– y el papa Leon X –hijo de Lorenzo El Magnífico y gran promotor de las artes–, tiene en esta época, hoy, en el norte, su realización mayor: el norte ha conseguido hacer de la poesía y de todas las artes –de las mayores manifestaciones del espíritu humano colectivo– una mercancía más. Leer un poema o escuchar una sinfonía debería ser tan libre y gratuito como contemplar un crepúsculo o pasear por una playa o un bosque, pues las necesidades espirituales sólo pueden ser colmadas en forma libre y por bienes espirituales, no con el dinero (los bienes espirituales y públicos no pertenecen, por su naturaleza, a la esfera mercantil). Roland Barthes llegó a asegurar que existía un derecho humano a la

230 poesía6. Pero he aquí que el norte, pleno de cultura y arte, ha dado a aquellos bienes el mismo estatus que a una mercancía, zapatos o tijeras, por ejemplo. Hoy –tiempo de las comunicaciones instantáneas y de las transnacionales del libro–, en términos generales, el norte no es ni el mejor ni el peor lugar para escribir. La mejor novela latinoamericana –tal vez de la lengua española– del siglo XX, es decir, Pedro Páramo, se escribió en México y la escribió un hombre que nunca vivió fuera de su país; y el crítico y poeta Américo Ferrari ha escrito, en un ensayo sobre el poeta peruano Carlos Germán Belli, que el mejor lugar para un poeta es su propia ciudad. En la singular esfera estética y ética creada por la literatura y en la que ella misma acontece, el sur puede ser la utopía del norte y el norte la del sur. La utopía es el lugar donde no estamos. Memoria perdida y buscada, compromiso y culpa, utopía deshecha y necesidad de redención quizá sean tres modos de escribir en el norte, pero tal vez sean también, para todos o para muchos, modos de estar en esta época. En el norte y en el sur, las personas y las ciudades se reinventan. Aquella sentencia de Spinoza que tanto gustaba a Borges, según la cual, lo propio del hombre es perseverar en su ser, necesita un complemento que tenga en cuenta que los hombres no podemos seguir siendo lo que somos, si no nos transformamos, si no nos reinventamos continuamente. Ocurre con cada uno de nosotros tal y como ocurre con las ciudades, con Berlín o Barcelona, por ejemplo, pero también con Guayaquil o Medellín: caen o caemos, se rehacen o nos rehacemos forjando, cada vez, una parte nueva, inédita, que sólo el aprendizaje de la vida pasada ha podido propiciar. No vivimos ahora el tiempo del fin de la utopía, sino el del fin de una utopía del norte; éste, como el sur, 6 “Necesidad, hoy, de luchar por la Poesía: la Poesía debería formar parte de los Derechos del Hombre”, dice un apunte de Roland Barthes, citado por Antonine Compagnon, en Les antimodernes. De Joseph de Maistre à Roland Barthes, pág. 437.

231 sabrá reinventarse, forjar nuevas utopías que proyecten lo que no hay, ese no lugar que ni está ni puede estar fuera de nosotros. Los hombres y los pueblos no sabemos ni podemos vivir de otro modo.

6. Asia y el Medio Oriente imaginados desde Alemania/ Asia and the Middle East Imagined from Germany

A Selection from the forthcoming novel, September. Fata Morgana by Thomas Lehr Author’s note: The novel, September. Fata Morgana, is a meditation on the historical events of September 11, 2001 and the subsequent war of the United States against Iraq. In the mode of a chamber play, in four voices, the historical events are narrated by two German-American and two Iraqi characters. In the following excerpt, the Iraqi medical doctor, Akram al-Khalil, remembers the First Gulf War.

Jasmine’s hands reach for my hands through the ductile green mesh of the schoolyard fence she is barely seven therefore too young my friend to know anything yet about Muhammad Schams ad-Din whom you call Hafiz and in a school where every teacher has to be a PARTY member she won’t learn anything anyway about the true reasons for the war in a country whose supreme representative equals supreme military leader equals PRESIDENT thinks in the same way it is written in the angry ancient book of his uncle equals corrupt mayor of Bagdad Jews flies and Persians God should not have created them the attack against the Persians is under way this is what the monster wants that crawled out of the monster PARTY pasted with medals like a green flytrap very soon he will receive a brave new insecticide factory from the German experts (toxicologists from Leipzig lab designers from Frankfurt am Main) he pulls ten thousand arms up in the air with swords and is already everywhere and as if definitively pasted on every

236 wall into every book into all rooms onto the screens bills clock faces of watches almost on the water buffaloes’ asses in Basra’s brackish canals and into each tiny grain of the yellow solar eclipses’ sand veils that devour street by street in the summer and only spit them into the daylight hours later incrusted by dust through the fence I sense Jasmine’s soft small fingers wet with sweat and my face (still young only 35 years old) appears more terrifying to me than all fatherly faces of my own childhood none of which hovered over me with the imposition to comprehend to accept that it had to disappear into a war now the veils the white light cloth in front of your face whipped by the storm tear apart your apartment in the elegant neighborhood of new buildings you moved into with your family the recently opened medical practice the club in whose pool Jasmine floundered about with a rubber toy while you took a drink with colleagues while charcoal smoked in the background and further behind the cranes poised concrete girders into the high future the PRESIDENT swam in oil (of which his party applauded by the whole country had relieved the British) gave away refrigerators and TV sets brought electricity sent tractors to remote villages wandered like a god arm in arm with the communists for socialist Arabia to the next corner where he immediately disposed of them the veils were stained with blood on the verges lower your head read the fatherland’s newspapers the Sumeric empire’s rebirth under the true King Saddam airports schools shopping malls hospitals spring up like mushrooms we already have new universities we have increased salaries for soldiers policemen doctors and torturers the best time ever is the glamour of Iraq’s progress washed over with gold and oil and the blood of its dissidents

237 there is a war nobody wants barely anyone takes seriously in the beginning since Baghdad is building as if this were an architecture competition as if the mullahs in Teheran responded with nothing but counter construction sites and only wanted to win with the best high rise and the most ritzy luxury hotel we are at war because the PRESIDENT believes that the revolutionary black birds on top of the Shah’s razed palaces were weak therefore the opportunity to settle old scores and to avenge the wounds and horrors that the great Persian peacock (stuffed up to his neck with America’s gorgeous weapons) was able to inflict on us especially that grasp for our thin udder Sindbad’s harbor river Schatt al-Arab our only access to the sea and the plan also included to thoroughly terrify and humiliate the mullahs so that they did not give us revolutionaries a reverse revolution and did not ignite the fire beneath our Shiites in three weeks already the PRESIDENT explained we would stand in Teheran two months later on the loading space of the military truck I was bandaging the first wounds (caused still only by accidents during deployment) and daydreamed stunned between the soldiers that I drove to the war with them towards Sindbad’s city no bird Rukh that feeds its young with elephants ripped us upward and out of (we were already too gaunt and miserable) the game To-Live-and-Be-Annihilated together with these young men still breathing still laughing smoking on the roughly jarred loading space onto which low benches have been screwed (some of them returned as a dead body in a cab quite extravagantly following an order from the PRESIDENT whose truck fleet couldn’t keep up) I wanted to see all that while in Paris on a news screen at the Gare dy Lyon or in front of an electronics store in the 20th arrondissement stuffed with junk or from the assistant medical director’s office in an ultramodern

238 Baghdad hospital primarily built for party cadre members where perhaps I would have made my way if Ali’s friend Khalid a PARTY guy and excellent surgeon and still a philanthropist had not explained to me that my indifference towards the PARTY that at fist had only blocked my hospital career began to threaten my life and strangle me originated in a weakness a sudden realization a true gift the need for practical concrete action therefore I immediately left the hospital in order to join a family practice with the explicit help of Prof. Dr. Khalid Yussef most likely he saved me from a prison cell but not from being sent to the front three times to serve as a doctor in the longest and most tenacious war of the century look one more time Basra in its Venice-of-the-Arabian-Gulf reputation’s twilight of the gods and look how (the volumes of a classical edition next to Abu Nuwas next to AlMutanabbi and Abu Alla Al-Maari in my grandfather’s library) Hafis (Farida told the story of how as a child she brought tea dates and bread to the Persians who spent the night in tents outside the city on their long way to Najaf and Kerbela with their children and their dead) is dying with a headband the luminescent embroidered ticket to paradise Mahdi give me strength – For You Hussein – Every Day is Kerbela they drank the wine of death like addicts in the minefields the head luminescent from afar wrapped in green orange red they jumped on the enormous sputtering barrels they tore the effervescent goblets out of each other’s hands they could not be stilled not be held back they piled up they drank with their mouths and bellies torn open they exploded and the wine poured out of their bodies but they wanted

239 even more death even more paradise young men highschool students apprentices children with toys came closer waving and laughingly threw hand grenades until they were also shot at grandfathers and their grandchildren as if the gates of a terrifying factory a gloomy school a gigantic prison had opened so that they threw themselves exultant and screaming into the barbed wire’s high vine and people piling up as waves because the president did not keep in mind that all revolutions can set fire to their children sending them into an echelon of blood and flames as long as it is their turn the incinerations of the present for the blinding illusions of a better future but the mullahs know it and they have realized that nothing is more useful to them than having the blood barrel roll martyrs upon martyrs the martyr waves in front of our dugouts that had been cut into the yellow clay desert like ventail slits through which the earth drank blood and entrails I assisted the frontline surgeon I myself had to cut patch set drainages in the glow of oil lamps I saw with trembling knees and surprisingly steady hands Marcel Cassin’s pale toad face always only seemingly sleepy as if Gabriel the angel had given him a video channel from a Pitié Salpêtrière operating room straight into my brain surgery residency I, II, III (Abbas! An aorta is not a nargileh tube! But at least this man uses the acus like generations of carpet weavers and stands still like a dromedary and he is right gentlemen because calmness is everything and a suture is nothing short of a business card!) this is how he still directed me I had to (in the nights between screaming moaning soldiers) remember the bachelor dining hall of another venerable hospital where I had seen Cassin for the last time in front of me at

240 the table and once as a satyr violating a masked black woman amidst other chief physicians and assistant medical directors as participants in an orgy immortalized by students who were called upon there was a tradition of obscene pictures the AYATOLLAH lifts his arm (see the ring on his small finger) the PRESIDENT with a Bedouin headscarf and a child on his arm even in the sick bays he stares at the wounds that are hailing him one day he was pasted on the lid of a traschcan in the operating room and opened the muzzle for bloodied band-aids and bandages (a small finger half of a right hand) be silent work be silent like the soldiers who did not display any physical damage who were leaning in the dugouts as if frozen who had not been able to endure it anymore to pile up corpses in front of them and who became insane without any sound out of the front pocket of the uniform of one of the dead (an enemy dead: as if even in paradise we would slaughter one another for the sake of triumph in the next paradise) a thirty year old man from Shiraz perhaps (or one of the other cities we attacked with French fighterbombers while I tried to preserve the life of the instruments of death using the familiar injections hollow needles bandages pads drugs made by Aventis / Rhône-Poulenc / Sanofi young men following old men’s orders to kill young men like that Persian shot leaving almost no trace) a poetry volume slipped Persian ghazals by Hafiz and Rumi in Arabic scripture (think of Hölderlin and Rilke in the trenches at Verdun my friend finally we caught with European culture) The Beloved of my heart is a child / one day he will playfully / kill me and the law / won’t find him guilty of spilling blood bleeding children with black turbans bleeding child in green uniform a people creates the monster whose childishness kills its children bleeding old men who open the trapdoor for their grandchildren

241 every people is afraid of the other people’s monster is that why we fought at Khorramshar until even the air was bleeding I returned I stood at the same schoolyard fence (in disbelief like a dead) again my hands clasped around Jasmine’s small hands almost at the same spot she received permission to go home with me instead of learning another song to the PRESIDENT by heart the new Saad ibn-Abi Waqqas who after 1300 years had to defeat and convert the Persians once more the repetitions of history are always a farce I learned this (through Ali) from Marx who did not know to what extent of a lust to kill the farces would be capable of emulating their modest models I led Jasmine through the July heat through the construction sites of Baghdad still rich hammering drilling pulsating hoisting itself into the chaotic modernity of those who came belatedly Baghdad for which the war was still almost like a TV show something like a storm in a different country that the PRESIDENT overpowered just about alone on a distant TV frontline I feared Jasmine might sense the coldness of death in my hand through my flesh I sweated in the uniform of the MADMAN whom we most likely could not shake off anytime soon (one summer later the Shiites attempted it in the village Dujail which consequently was almost completely obliterated from the map)) two more times I went to war I saw the faces eaten away by (our) German poison gas and as if encrusted in mustard halfway dissolved the limbs of our soldiers who were not brought back from the danger zone in time and soon afterwards the Iranians returned with gas masks made in Germany when things went bad for the PRESIDENT and the next onehundredthousand moribunds (I was never injured it was as if to make even for the enemy in the war ministry who sent me to the front I had an invisible friend in the war who protected me there) when HEWHOWASPLASTEREDONEVERYWALL chased tens of thousands into the marshland to cut reed at in the

242 heat at 120 degrees so that it could not camouflage the advanced enemy anymore (while he himself was crawling around in ever new bunkers and ever new absurd palaces) when HE sent the luxury hotel waiters to the front and demanded more overtime from everybody finally also aggressively more reproduction for the sake of having more cannon fodder Farida so terrifyingly on time as if following this order with her unique mysterious and always irresistibly erupting force to live had children at the age of 37 and 38 you crazy heavenly children as if she had decided to call me back into life in this absolute manner or better not to release me from there shortly before you were born Muna the Americans came to Baghdad and brought new fighter-bombers for the war of the cities (kills from the air men and women and children in their houses where they populate the area most densely) we were not able to escape I was registered I was monitored and drafted Farida was breast feeding Muna was breast feeding Sami amidst the exasperation hope’s slow disintegration in the head you receive stupendously physically almost inevitably absurd two breathing screaming laughing reasons to live to heal to curse don’t pile up too many wishes onto the fragile body of a child was a passage by al-Ghazzali in my grandfather’s library and not too much fear Farida said I saw the burning oil-tankers in the gulf the fire balls above the oil platforms and the birds of paradise marked with green frontlets who were searching for the transition to their promised better homeland dashing on their swiftboats through the burning black ocean the war threatened to ignite the whole gulf the fat oil barrel on which we and the Persians killed ourselves and finally the tanks from Russia the

243 airplanes from France the Saudis’ money the Kalashnikovs from Egypt the CIA’s satellite maps were further complemented by the large international fleets that protected our coast and the PRESIDENT and his OILy discharge Jasmine was pulling your stroller Muna over the naked marmorial glacis of the mighty split blue onion reminiscent of the martyr maker’s airhead and the four right hands on the PRESIDENT’S four half forearms as if adhering to the Sharia chopped off for the theft of life of one million humans grew upwards on the sides of the parade street and crossed their sabers to form triumphal arcs high above the center of our life I let my arms sink Muna roughly like this I can describe it even before the end of the war I walked through life through death with my arms hanging down even when I bandaged patched up sutured worked until I could have slept while standing I didn’t need to move my arms at all there was (and is) a kind of liberation and lightness in this the PRESIDENT pulled up the sabers and celebrated his victory over his subjects’ life with gas over Halabja only ten years later (in Paris) I read about the 5000 Kurds a day who did not find the way to Baghdad into our shabbier more miserable life the shabbier more miserable patients whom I vetted with hanging arms defenseless mending as well as I was capable of Translated by Olaf Berwald

India Revisited?; or, How Do We Know What India Is? by Ursula Kocher

Today’s globalized gaze is increasingly focused on India. But India already occupied the literary imagination in the Middle Ages. Scholars often emphasize that different countries generate disparate assessments of, and perspectives on, India. The British are assumed to have always approached India from a more utilitarian perspective than the Germans, whose understanding of India is believed to be still prestructured by Romanticism. Georg Forster, in the preface to his 1791 German translation of the classical Indian play, Sakuntala, considers it an advantage of the Germans to be capable of exposing themselves to Indian culture free of economic interests, and to be able to intuitively understand other nations: […] nothing is more understandable than the intense curiosity with which the British approach knowledge about and the states of mind of a people of which fifteen million are under British imperial rule. […] In Germany, this is different. We do not have a capital, nor do we have any concrete interests that could charge the works of the Indian mind with any external current importance.1 1 Georg Forster, “Vorrede zur Sakontala.” In: ibid., Werke 3: Kleine Schriften zu Kunst, Literatur, Philosophie, Geschichte und Politik. Edited by Gerhard Steiner. Frankfurt a.M.: Insel, 1970, 289-91. Here: 289. Translation O.B.

246 Since every country had its idiosyncratic qualities, Forster argues, the Germans had the advantage of being able to approach India in a singular way, undistorted by colonial interests. The argument implied in this statement, that the Germans inhabited an exceptional point of view because they did not have colonies in India, is hardly tenable. Furthermore, this statement presupposes that clearly defined national borders simultaneously enclose cultural spaces and therefore ways of thinking that do not allow for permeability and fluid transitions. In a “globalized world,” this conception has become obsolete. According to German sociologist Ulrich Beck, globality means that we live in a global society, “in the sense that the notion of closed spaces has become illusory.”2 Therefore, the singular human being constantly experiences multiplicities without any unity and without being able to ascribe his experiences to a clearly enclosed purview. At the same time, globality is irreversible. Individuals’ ideas about, and perspectives on, other countries are not specifically tied to one culture anymore, but universalized through a global perspective. Any event or subject matter that an individual approaches is already covered with inescapable prefabricated topical thoughts and ideas. The more universal these ideas are, the more difficult it is for the individual thinker to find refuge in a realm of strangeness or in the possibility to experience the other, or rather the familiar in the other because, in a way, there is nothing familiar anymore that would still be sufficiently distinguishable from the other. All that remains are nuanced differences in individuals’ ensembles of topoi. While not without convincing appeal, this view has to undergo a twofold critique, fueled by objections that can be articulated along the lines of a vertical (part I) and a horizontal approach (part II).

2 Ulrich Beck, What Is Globalization? Translated by Patrick Camiller. Cambridge: Polity Press, 2001, 10.

247 I. When societies historicize a culture, they constantly produce new ideas while still continuing to carry old ones. The name of a country evokes certain connotations in any given society. These connotations change in the course of history, but can also remain resistant to modification for long periods of time. While it is the case that global perspectives and correlated approaches exist, they form a cluster with a conglomerate of old images that have stubbornly persisted for a long time. India is currently discussed along the lines of numerous key notions: It is considered an emerging nation on its way to becoming a world power, the home of information technology experts and highly specialized labor forces.3 An economic perspective on India prevails, triggering political interest, is not much different from the ways in which India was regarded in the last centuries. For a long time, for instance, India has been associated with hunger and poverty, furthermore, organized around the symbol of Gandhi, with resistance and perseverance, notions that also ultimately denote economic and political viewpoints. However, there are also statements regarding India that have been passed on in specific cultural areas for centuries and that can be uncovered with the means of discourse archeology. Especially in the case of Germany, these perspectives are interesting because they go beyond the economy and politics. Since the end of the eighteenth century, German writers have been particularly interested in India as a place of religion and wisdom. Numerous German authors have been fascinated with Brahmanic teachings and there have been intense efforts to produce reliable translations of the “sacred scriptures,” especially the Vedas and Upanishads. Georg Forster already refers to the “ancient sacred Indian language” and praises the exquisiteness of their writings.4 In Germany, this fluctuating but sustained fascination 3 On computer technology in India, see Dietmar Rothermund, India: The Rise of an Asian Giant. New Haven/London: Yale UP, 2008. 4 Georg Forster, “Vorrede,” 291.

248 with religious and philosophical aspects of India still persists and has always been peculiarly entwined with a strong interest in Buddhism. Even though early on, Buddhism migrated to other parts of the world, especially Thailand and has to be considered the religion of a minority in India, the German imagination continues to locate it in India as its prehistorical place.5 In this manner, the notion of “India” underwent a series of attributions whose condensation almost preclude a clear view of modern India. A striking example for German literature’s treatment of sacred India is the recurring topos of the sacred cow, which is used to symbolize both Indian ethics and a way of life. In German literary text, the sacred cow usually makes its entrance in sublime moments and has even entered the German language in the form of a proverb. When “a sacred cow is slaughtered” (“eine heilige Kuh geschlachtet wird”) in a corporate company or institution, this is an indicator of bad times ahead, since sacred cows must not be touched, they are taboo and therefore of intense interest. In the meantime, this central leitmotif in the German literary reception of India since the eighteenth century is intriguingly fused with modern viewpoints. One recent example is award-winning German writer Martin Mosebach’s India novel, Das Beben (“Tremor,” 2005). A chapter in the second part of this work is entitled “Anbetung der heiligen Kuh” (“Adoration of the Sacred Cow”). In this chapter, the first person narrator is fixated on the Indian cow and is fixated by her. Although he is aware of the fact that all the cows that he sees cannot be one and the same, he considers all cows that he encounters manifestations of a “cow principle:” All of them are “equally meek, equally introspective.”6 There is no place without a sacred cow, and all of them are equally 5 In this context, it also needs to be highlighted that Indian religion can only be understood as pluralities. Survey works that cover Hinduism artificially predetermine their study object by using the least common denominator of the most diverse religious manifestations. 6 Martin Mosebach, Das Beben. Munich/Vienna: Hanser, 2007, 115. Translation of all quotations from Mosebach by O.B.

249 sacred. Embodying patience and sacredness, these cows are nonviolent, pure beings: “Comprehensive non-violence has to go hand in hand with complete indifferentism. The cow taught me this. She was not a hypocrite. She was pure.”7 Instead of presenting landscapes and human beings, the traveler desribes the Indian cow. Everything “Indian” is condensed in one image: “I have learned that the sacred cows are a treasure to be appropriated by the whole world.”8 The grotesque dimension of this idea become apparent when the narrator transfers his thought experiment to Germany: “Just to imagine what the arrival of the sacred cow in Germany would mean, what kinds of happiness and blessings would emanate from omnipresent sacred cows!”9 They would stand along highways, crunch tabloids, run through television studios, soil the streets and suburbs, interrupt politicians’ speeches. And all of a sudden, the narrator imagines, hierarchical structures would be transformed: “Very little in our world would bear up against the sacred cow’s presence. Sacredness has the power to generate or regenerate the just order of things by its mere presence.”10 This reflection demonstrates how little is gained by highlighting a universality of images in a globalized world. Of course, the Indian cow is an image that everyone instantly recognizes and that appears to be immediately linked to India. In this respect, it can be called universal. However, everything else that the recipient associates with, or imputes to, this image is crafted by an individual decision which in turn is fostered by a specific cultural background. The Indian cow is charged with values that Germans traditionally associate with India, and this conglomerate is then combined with an image field that is anchored in language. These emerging conglomerates should be studied more extensively, since they can provide a more nuanced view of globalized streams of images. 7 Ibid., 117. 8 Ibid., 118. 9 Ibid., 118. 10 Ibid., 119.

250 II. Even if we assume that there are no local traditions of topoi, we will have to examine whether universal ideas inevitably have to generate unified images. One is tempted to apply a popular bonmot to India: “Of everything you say about India, the opposite is true as well.” If taken seriously, this statement implies that it is impossible to speak of “true” versus “false,” and that the term “authentic” has become obsolete. The alleged authenticity of an idea can then only be determined by the extent to which it correlates with a general, constructed image. In a globalized world, what matters is no longer whether a reflection on a country approximates “reality,” but how this reality is constructed in a way that makes it acceptable as true and “authentic.” Texts, pictures and films construct the seemingly authentic shape of a country, a mechanism that suggestively guides any individual’s understanding of a country. This opens a wide field of exploration not only for literary scholarship, but for literature. In his volume, India: From Midnight to the Millennium (1997), Shashi Tharoor answers the question about what a genuine Indian is by stating that he or she does not exist.11 Born in London and raised in Mumbai and Calcutta, having studied in Delhi and migrated to the United States, and now living in many countries, Tharoor’s own biography exemplifies the complexities of plural globalized identities. What is to be negotiated here also concerns the enthralling question of who is entitled in which particular situation to make statements about India. Does it suffice to be a citizen of India, even when one has left the country a long time ago? One has to keep in mind that most authors who mediate insights into India through their literary texts do not live in India. Another fact to be considered is that almost all “Indian” texts that are translated worldwide are written in English rather than in one of the many languages spoken in India. This raises the question whether someone who “only” writes in English can be the spokesperson for 1.1 billion Indian citizens? In an article published in 11 Shashi Tharoor, India: From Midnight to the Millenium. New York: Arcade, 1997.

251 Süddeutsche Zeitung, one of the leading German newspapers, Shashi Tharoor reflects on this very question: I live in the United States and write about India using English, a language which, according to the most recent statistical surveys, only 2% of all Indians understand. This question contains an unspoken allegation against myself: Do I not violate the imperative of authenticity by writing about my country exclusively for foreign readers?12

The answer I suggest is – of course not. Apart from the question whether “the” English language even exists anymore13, it would be difficult to decide which of the numerous languages in India should be assigned “authenticity.” Sharoor sees no need to apologize for writing in English: We Indian authors who write in English, are supposed to consider ourselves uprooted. Why? Or rather: Why does being uprooted have such negative connotations? […] We uprooted writers do share a cultural matrix, but it is not marked with sandalwood paste. What we have in common is an urban education and an international view of Indian reality. I do not believe that this view is less authentic than the worldviews of authors who publish in other Indian languages. […] There is a plurality of very different Indias, more than the sum of its parts. This manifoldness can be better articulated in English than in any other Indian language because the English language is not rooted in any particular region of India.14

In this passage, Tharoor implicitly uses arguments that play a vital role in debates of globalization. At the end of the article, he asks the reader not to consume his and other Indian writers’ books just because 12 Shashi Tharoor, “Das Sandelholz der Entwurzelten. Zum Indien-Schwerpunkt der Frankfurter Buchmesse: Warum ich auf Englisch schreibe.” In Süddeutsche Zeitung, September 20, 2006, 16. Translation by O.B. 13 Recent scholarly works indicate a consensus regarding the necessity of acknowledging the importance of Indian English, see Jyoti Sanyal, Indlish: The Book for Every English-Speaking Indian. New Delhi: Viva, 2006. Binoo K. John, Entry from Backside Only: Hazaar Fundas of Indian-English. New Delhi: Penguin, 2007. 14 Tharoor, “Sandelholz…” (see footnote 12), 16.

252 the authors are Indian: “Read our books because they deserve to be read, whether they are composed in English or in any other Indian language. And please do not ask me for whom I write every time you hold my books in your hand. I write for you.”15 In a 2006 interview with the German newspaper Tagesspiegel, Vikram Chandra, one of today’s best-known Indian authors, mentions that the language question was less politicized today than it was a generation ago. However, Chandra maintains: At the same time, English is the language of advancement. Even the poorest person knows: If your child is to have a chance it has to learn English. Indians who write in English reach a larger audience. Readers from the middle class mostly buy English books.16

This phenomenon also impacts the European book market, which favors works from India, or by Indian authors, that are written in English. There are several reasons for this: It is much easier for the publishing houses to find translators for texts from English to German than from Hindi, Marathi, Bengali, and other languages. Translations from English can be proofread more easily. And finally, publishers believe that Indian works originally written in English are less “foreign” for European readers. To recapitulate, India is primarily mediated through literary and non-fictional texts written in English, as well as through various other media, such as film (“Bollywood”). These texts and images do not necessarily correlate with the India one experiences firsthand as a traveler. The question of what constitutes an Indian also has a long and complex history in India itself. Nineteenth-century European ideas of a nation state are incompatible with Indian realities, even though fundamentalist movements such as the Hindutava would like to foster these views. In India, neither language nor religion nor political borders can be used as unifying factors: 15 Tharoor, ibid., 16. 16 “Interview mit Vikram Chandra,” in Tagesspiegel, October 1, 2006, Sonntagsbeilage, 1.

253 So Indian nationalism is a rare animal indeed. It is not based on language […] Nor on religion, since India is a secular, pluralist state that is home to every religion […] Not on geography, since the natural geography of the subcontinent – the mountains and the sea – was hacked by the Partition of 1947. And not even territory, since, by law, anyone with one grandparent born in pre-partition India is eligible for citizenship. Indian nationalism has therefore always been the nationalism of ideas.17

Keeping this insight in mind, it is fruitful to use the case of India as a touchstone for theories of globalization. For Ilija Trojanow’s and Ranjit Hoskoté’s thesis that culture can only emerge as a kind of confluence and that in this regard, there is no such thing as cultural purity, India offers a decisive example: “The works we consider a classical part of the canon are based on hybridities that we have forgotten, or that have been pushed into oblivion.”18 In the age of globalization, the task of literature can be defined as reintroducing forgotten traditions. Just like in his novel, Martin Mosebach unfolds the nexus between the Indian cow, modern German society and a specific German view of India, ideas and ideals whose function and significance are not always clear can be rendered more transparent in literary texts. However, market demand dictates the book market. Every author who seeks to sell many books will cater to the perceived wishes of the readers. The result can be an enormous 17 Sashi Tharoor, The Elephant, the Tiger and the Cell Phone: Reflections on India. The Emerging 21st-Century Power. New York: Arcade, 2007, 1314. 18 Ilija Trojanow / Ranjit Hoskoté, Kampfabsage. Kulturen bekämpfen sich nicht – sie fließen zusammen. Munich: Blessing, 2007, 21. Translation by O.B. Compare Avikit Pathak, Modernity, Globalization and Identity: Towards a Relfexive Quest. Delhi: Aakar, 2006, 72: “Yet, the idea of a ‘pure and eternally stable culture,’ I wish to argue, is more mythical than real. Cultural boundaries are not like iron walls. Instead, cultures often meet, interact, overlap and overcome ethnic/linguistic/territorial boundaries.”

254 hodgepodge of bits of knowledge, conglomerates designed to present wit and fast consumption. One example out of many is David Safier’s German bestselling novel, Mieses Karma (“Bad Karma,” 2007).19 This work of fiction harks back on the Indian karma teachings in a rather simplifying manner in order to present a career woman’s personal development across various rebirths. One does not have to attack the author for not even having made the slightest effort to understand karma teachings at least in a rudimentary fashion. What is more remarkable is the kind of construction employed by an author who only renders what he believes to know and probably has heard repeatedly. Since Hinduism, in contrast to Buddhism, has never received much interest in Germany, the book coarsely mixes Hinduism and Buddhism by introducing Siddharta Gautama as a character. Of course one could lament the bestseller status of such novels and the fact that they will not improve the readers’ knowledge of India and Asian philosophy. What would be more important is an analysis of what kinds of ideas are retraceable within the framework of global streams of images, in order to make the public aware of these correlations. Because of its volatile history, the manifold perceptions it continues to evoke in others and its enormous heterogeneity, India can serve as a touchstone of globalization. Nobody can define “what India really is.” Of course, there is no such thing as an “authentic” India. What can be recorded are the various ideas and images that are mediated by texts, pictures and films and that form an amalgam of fusions and differences with traditional topoi. To understand these cultural mixtures is the task of literary scholarship in a globalized age. Translated by Olaf Berwald

19 David Safier, Mieses Karma. Reinbek b. Hamburg: Rowohlt, 2007.

7. Estampas ilustradas… a manera de epílogo/ Illustrated Sketches . . . As Epilogue

Colaboradores/Contributors Olaf Berwald y Michael Handelsman, coeditores. Berwald, nacido en Alemania, es profesor asociado de alemán en la Universidad de North Dakota; Handelsman es profesor de literatura hispanoamericana y Estudios Latinoamericanos en la Universidad de Tennessee. Ambos tienen a su haber extensas publicaciones sobre literatura y cultura. Michael Beard, estadounidense, es profesor de literatura comparada en Universidad de North Dakota; es traductor de árabe y persa. Mario Campaña es un poeta ecuatoriano que vive en Barcelona, donde dirige la revista literaria, Guaraguao; además de su producción poética, Campaña ha publicado una biografía crítica sobre Charles Baudelaire, ha preparado varias antologías de poetas de Latinoamérica y es traductor de Mallarmé. Les Essif es profesor de francés en la Universidad de Tennessee en Estados Unidos; Essif se especializa en el teatro francés y ha escrito dos libros: el primero es sobre el teatro del absurdo y la relación entre los espacios y los personajes, y el segundo es sobre métodos pedagógicos relacionados con la enseñanza y recepción del teatro. Ricardo Forster es filósofo y sociólogo argentino; trabaja de profesor titular en la Universidad de Buenos Aires y ha sido profesor invitado en numerosas instituciones académicas de Europa, Estados Unidos y Latinoamérica. Ursula Kocher es de Alemania y es profesora de alemán en la Universidad de Wuppertal; Kocher ha sido profesora visitante en diferentes universidades de la India en muchas ocasiones.

258 Peter Kuper es de Estados Unidos y trabaja como ilustrador gráfico; Kuper cofundó la revista gráfica de política World War 3 Illustrated y ha enseñado en la Escuela de Artes Visuales de Nueva York desde 1986. El trabajo artístico de Kuper ha aparecido en Time, Newsweek, The New Yorker, Mother Jones, The Nation, Harpers and MAD. Su último libro gráfico se titula Diario de Oaxaca y cubre su permanencia de dos años en México. Thomas Lehr es uno de los más notables novelistas de Alemania en la actualidad; su próxima novela se titulará Septiembre y es su respuesta a la guerra en Iraq. Luciana Namorato, nacida en Brasil y profesora asistente de portugués en Indiana University en Estados Unidos. Humberto E. Robles es catedrático emérito de Northwestern University en Estados Unidos, donde enseñó literatura latinoamericana por más de treinta años; Robles nació en Ecuador y ha vivido y trabajado en Estados Unidos, España y en su país natal. Es autor de varios libros, y sus ensayos han sido publicados en prestigiosas revistas académicas de América Latina, Europa y Estados Unidos. Abdón Ubidia es ecuatoriano y dirige la Editorial El Conejo en Quito, Ecuador; Ubidia es uno de los principales narradores de cuentos y novelas del Ecuador, donde ha ganado numerosos premios nacionales. Su última novela, La Madriguera, fue seleccionada para el premio Rómulo Gallegos de Venezuela. Bernhard Waldenfels es uno de los más reconocidos filósofos de Alemania en la actualidad.

Para este número se han usado caracteres Bodoni, creados por Giambattista Bodoni (1740-1813).