NOTE: AC stopped working on this aff halfway through
1AC
During the Summit of the Americas, Chavez gave Obama a book—a gift. He
looked confused, expecting it to be one of Chavez’s books. Obama said later
that he was going to give Chavez one of this own. The book was “The Open
Veins of Latin America” by Eduardo Galeano.
[stuff about derrida/a card about the gift]
But this gift can only be returned when the historical structures of violence that
the book describes are dismantled. This is a prerequisite to any form of
economic engagement.
Status quo structures preclude any form of communication with the
subaltern—instead, the first step is listening
Maggio (Lawyer and PhD candidate at University of Florida) 2007
(Jay, “’Can the Subaltern Speak?’: Political Theory, Translation, Representation, and Gayatri
Chakravorty Spivak” Alternatives: Global, Local, Political, Vol. 32, No. 4 (Oct.-Dec. 2007), pp. 419443 )
Several important thinkers have discussed the process of translation in depth. Most notably, Walter Benjamin struggled with the
intricacies of translation. For Benjamin, the "receiver" of translation is a meaning- less concept. No
translation is ever the
"same" as the "original." In other words, a translation cannot "possibly reveal or establish this hid- den relationship."110 It
is not the translator's task to represent the original, for such a representation is impossible:
"Even the greatest translation is destined to be part of the growth of its own language."111 The translator must look at
the interaction between languages, and must explore the "intention underlying each language
as a whole."112 On Benjamin's account, translation is the "coming to terms with" the foreignness of
types of communication, the "getting at" the element of language that creates an aporia.113 Translation is, in a sense, the
"movement" between one hermeneutic moment and another.114 Hence, a translation can actually "elevate" the
original, and the task of the translator is to "echo" the original in a way that helps illuminate the
intended meaning.115 Benjamin suggests that translation is always at the margins of dis- course and that it acts a
kind of "midway" point in intellectual dialogue.116 A translator cannot simply rely on literalness,
on a virtual dãrtelling, because in literal translation there is nothing but emptiness. Literary critic George Steiner explains this notion of translation in the context of expressing
the intentions of the writer so "far as [the translator] is able."118 Roland Barthes also examined the methods of translation. Barthes asserted that culture itself was an artifact
that could be translated into academic discourse. Everyday cultural objects and events - such as commercials, soap powders, cookery, and so forth - create subordinate
connotations, which exist next to their standard meanings. These subordinate meanings subsequently help reinforce the values of the dominant capitalist-bourgeois system. In
translating everyday culture, Barthes is "interested in the semiotically rich resources of an emerging consumer society."119 For example, in trans- lating the meaning of the
image of Greta Garbo's face, Barthes writes: "Garbo offered to one's gaze a sort of Platonic Idea of the human creature, which explains why her face is almost sexually
undefined, without however leaving one in doubt." Barthes sees the meaning of the popular-culture figure Garbo in the context, or language, of Platonic philosophy. This is an
exemplar of translating culture into the language of reason. That being said, Barthes attempts to offer a translation that is a bit too systematic for an accounting of the Spivakian
subaltern cannot be spoken for by a structuralist metalanguage
subaltern. The
. Henri Lefebvre criticized Barthes's theory
of translation for hav- ing a "fetishism of signification."120 Lefebvre argues that an overrid- ing theory is not well suited to interpret culture: "Its desire to pin phenomena down
to textual meaning ... is ill-equipped to deal with the blankness and boredom of daily life."121 In his concluding thoughts, Lefebvre argues that the "everyday needs to be
understood as a series of shifting, interconnecting elements that resist the mod- ern notion that sight offers intelligibility."122 This notion aligns with Steiner's ideas of "language
in perpetual change."123 Steiner writes: But the ordinary language is, literally at every moment, subject to mutation. This takes many forms. New words enter in as old words
lapse. Grammatical conventions are changed under the pressure of idiomatic use or by cultural ordinance. The spectrum of permissible expression as against that which is taboo
shifts per- petually. At a deeper level, the relative dimensions and intensities of the spoken and the unspoken alter.124 ¶ Using this translation of the "relative dimension and
intensities of the spoken and the unspoken," I believe a thinker can express subaltern life with appropriate sensitivity and subtleness.125 Spivak herself has written much about
an earnest listening is the first step to translation.126 Or, to be more accurate,
declaring the subaltern silent is the initial stride toward an "unsilencing" of the subaltern.127
Yet, after a thinker has awareness of the unique silence of the subaltern, then a translation can
take place. Regarding translation, Spivak agrees with Benjamin that one can- not signify the "original":
Translation is a "necessary impossibility. . . . It is not a sign but a mark and therefore cannot signify
an 'origi- nal.'"128 For Spivak, the translator must attempt to "inhabit" the host language.129 She or he must populate "even if
on loan, the many man- sions, and many levels of the host language." In other words, the translator must always
attempt to find the presuppositions of the lan- guage and of the cultures that are
communicating. "The translator should make an attempt to grasp the writer's presuppositions. Translation is not the
stringing together of the most accurate syn- onyms by the most proximate syntax."130 In this
translation. As one might expect,
sense, Spivak's notion of translation again echoes Benjamin's. Yet Spivak is, I think, more willing than Benjamin to expand the social
responsibility of the trans- lator. She writes: "I hope I have been able to at least suggest that this
[negative] state of the
world has something to do with a failure of responsible translation, in the general and the narrow
sense."131 At first glance it may not seem that translation, as I suggest its use, is needed to address Spivak's issue of subaltern
silence. Yet Spivak's framing of her question implies the lack of action on behalf of the subaltern; in other words, Spivak grants a
Kantian yardstick the privi- lege of creating a metastandard by which she measures the subaltern. Despite this lingering language of
Kantianism, Spivak rejects the notion that there is a metastandard at all. Echoing Derrida, she asserts there is no "outside" to which
anyone has access.132 Benjamin's "perfect language" cannot exist; the
Western scholar must always be aware of
the "inaccessibility" of knowledge of the other.133 Yet this inaccessibility could be overcome,
given favorable conditions, by an attempt to "translate" the other, rather than seeking an imaginary
"knowledge." It is possible that this "translation" can be explained as simply as a desire to
"understand," rather than to "know." ("Knowledge," of course, is always linked to power and domination.) In this
sense, Spivak could simply be calling for a deeper analysis of the subaltern, one that recognizes the extent of difference between
cultures. However, I suggest that a slightly more radical approach is necessary. One
must fully recognize that one is
"translat- ing" without an ability to accurately signify the other. If "[c]ul tural translation was always implicitly the horizon
of literary translation," then the translator must recognize the implicated relationship of the Westerner and the subaltern: "If there is a relation to the other as other ... it can
only be an ethical relation," not one based on "knowledge."134 Hence, we must recognize that translation, understood in the broadest sense, can help us understand, respect,
the subaltern. Given an expansive definition of text one can assume that translation "covers a wide variety of activities, most of which are aimed at making texts accessible to
people who do not know the language." I suggest that we expand the notion of translation to apply to all types of culture and social practices. In this sense, one can see "argu-
translation" solves some Spivakian problems by
interpret- ing the subaltern culture of everyday life. If, as noted above, cultural translation has always been implied in literary
ments" in the nonrational and "value assertions" in the aesthetic. This notion of "
translation, then this approach to the subaltern merely takes this implication to its prag- matic conclusion. Of course, translating the culture of the subaltern is a difficult task,
and it takes great patience, empathy, and depth. Spivak notes how hard it is to translate the literary when "the original is not written in one of the languages of northwestern
Europe"; hence, the translation of the subaltern culture would likely be even more difficult.135 Michel de Certeau argues that one should study the cultural prac- tices of daily
culture, the "repetitive tasks people do every day."136 Given his examination of the everyday, Certeau translates the logic of neighborhoods and of cooking: ¶ On the one hand,
living in a neighborhood according to family practices recalls the "swarming structure of the street," which is also the anthill-like structure of activities punctuated by spaces and
relationships. On the other hand, culinary virtuosities estab- lish the plural language of stratified histories, of multiple rela- tionships. On the other hand, culinary virtuosities
establish the plural language of stratified histories, of multiple relationships between enjoyment and manipulation, of fundamental languages spelled out in everyday details.137
¶ As seen in the above-quoted passage, the "everyday" culture of neigh- borhoods and cookery conveys an argument about the nature of life, about the values by which we do,
and should, live. In fact, even bor- ingness and boredom communicate a great deal about cultures.138 "Considering culture as it is practiced, not in what is most valued by
official representation or economic politics, but in what upholds it and organizes it, three priorities stand out: orality, operations, and the ordinary."139 Hence, the everyday, the
the subaltern "silence" can be translated,
either through the literal silence or as a poststructuralist symptom of the ¶ dominant
language.140 With Certeau's notion of the everyday, Lefebvre's ideas about the "series of shifting, interconnecting ele- ments"
unite as a possible underlying mode of translation of the sub- altern.141 In other words, to translate culture is to
translate the "con- stant process of producing meanings of and from our social experience,"
and those meaning are always laden with elements of the political: "Culture (and its meanings and
pleasures) is a constant succession of social practices; it is therefore inherently political, it is centrally involved in
oral, and the ordinary express epistemological, ethical, and ontological values. In this sense,
the distribution and possible redistribution of various forms of social power."142 Hence, to translate culture is a help in
understanding the political logic of the subaltern. Translation is also a useful approach because it renders transparent the ways that
certain forms of communication reinforce definite hierarchies and social chauvinisms. Staten points out that this form/status
connection is apparent in the argument between Derrida and Rey Chow about the phonetic nature of Chinese written language:
"Chow uncritically relies on the logo-phonocentric norm as a value."143 Ironically, Chow criticizes Derrida for marginalizing the
Chinese language, while at the same time affirming the dominant for- mal status of phonetic-based languages. This type of
normative value hidden in the form of the communication is exactly what a "transla- tion" of the subaltern can help mitigate. In
this sense, Spivak's writing - to the extent that it breaks
down the standard barriers of
philosophical/academic discourse - also acts as critique against the standard forms of Western
discourse. Like Sati or Bhanduri's suicide, Spivak's writing operates as a subversive text, one that can be either translated or
interpreted. "[Economic power is both underpinned and exceeded by semiotic power, that is, the power to make meanings."144 In
other words, to translate culture or texts into Western discourse is to implicitly critique the underlying normative assumptions of
different forms of communication. Finally, and possibly most importantly, a notion of translating the subaltern recognizes that the
Western translator is always a self-aware contingent mediator through which the other - the "other" - is understood. This
approach avoids the Spivakian problem of the "fix- ity" of the subaltern because it recognizes the conditional
nature of the constitution of both the dominant group as well as the subaltern. The Western
critic is constituted by the other, or the subaltern, and the subaltern is also constructed vis-àvis its relation to the dominant groups. "[T]here is no such thing as the structure of meanings for him independently
of his interpretation of them; for one is woven into the other."145 This inside/outside relationship takes the form of a Derridean
association. Spivak herself admits her debt to Derrida and to his deconstructive analysis and its reliance on the persistence ¶ of selfpresence.146 In this sense the Western critic/ translator is always in a dialectic relationship with the subaltern - a dialectic that
consti- tutes both contingent entities. Of course, as Benjamin writes, the "pri- mary concern of the genuine translator remains
elusive."147 Yet the translator exists in the context of a historical relationship. In fact, it is "one of the most powerful and fruitful
historical" processes.148 Given this historical process, an
Spivak's call for a
approach of "translat- ing" the subaltern fulfills
more fluid epistemology.149 It also directly allows the understanding of the subaltern to be self-consciously mediated via a
Marxist/Derridean strategy that - somewhat - meets the strict standards elaborated by Spivak.150 Given Spivak's criticisms in "Can the Subaltern Speak?" translation is a more
appropriate role than "representation." As Benjamin, Spivak, and others point out, a "translator" is always keenly aware that she or he is not offering a work that is equivalent
with the "original," nor is she or he offering a wholly "imaginative" translation. In other words, neither dartelling nor vertreten are implied in the act of trans- lation. The
translator is certainly trying to "capture" an aspect of the original and convey that, but is not trying to "represent" (vertreten) or "re-present" (dartelling) the original. This is
implied, to a certain extent, in Charles Taylor's notion of "interpretation," which is not dissimilar to the strategy of "transla- tion" that I am suggesting. Taylor acknowledges that
implies a certain distance,
and in that distance is the space for the subaltern to speak. Using the language of "interpretation," Taylor writes: "A
"there is an important sense in which a meaning reexpressed in a new medium can not be declared identical."151 Translation
successful interpretation is one which makes clear the meaning originally pre- sent in a confused, fragmentary, cloudy form. But how does one know that this interpretation is
with the case of the
subaltern, one must first decide to recog- nize the language of communication as a valid
mode. In other words, we(st) must try hard to listen to people in all of their forms of communication. The subaltern speaks all the time: We are simply unable to hear them. Some might suggest
correct? Presumably because it makes sense of the original text: What is strange, mystifying, puzzling, contradic- tory is no longer so."152 Yet
that it is naïve to advocate a benevolent translator in the West who offers a sympathetic reading of the subal- tern. This criticism is well taken, and it lingers in the thoughts of
this writer. Yet scholars in disparate fields have been attempting this type of analysis. Certeau's examination of residential space and cookery is a good example of this type of
cultural translation. Additionally, Joe Moran' s work also provides a good template for this style of cultural ¶ translation: In Reading the Everyday he investigates the meaning of
such mundane activities as waiting at a bus stop and shopping in malls.153 There is also an intellectual movement, rooted somewhat in Marxism, to read inanimate "things" as if
they communicated ideas.154 This "thing theory" has collided somewhat with the recogni- tion that the study of the subaltern must often examine the hidden texts of popular,
native, or mass culture.155 Of course, subaltern translation must be sensitive to not impose the dominant mode of discourse onto the communication. For exam- ple, Robert
Ray understands the underlying texts of (popular) cul- ture when he writes: "Tutti Frutti' remains more revolutionary than 'Woman is the Nigger of the World': Music's effects
always register less at the level of explicit political content than at the level of sound."156 Hence, music, like most aspects of culture, communicates in a nonexplicit and
nonrational way. It is the Western intellectual's duty - assuming the goal is a discourse with the subaltern - to trans- late the culture and languages of the subaltern, while always
Once this translation takes place in earnest, then the West can, hopefully,
have a somewhat open dia- logue with the subaltern about values, ontology, oppression, and
political theory.
being aware of her role as translator.
Let’s read from Galeano, as he describes the violence
Eduardo Galeano, 1973
The human murder by poverty in Latin America is secret; every year, without making a sound, three
Hiroshima bombs explode over communities that have become accustomed to suffering with clenched
teeth. This systematic violence is not apparent but is real and constantly increasing: its holocausts are not
made known in the sensational press but in Food and Agricultural Organization statistics. Ball says that
it is still possible to act with impunity because the poor cannot set off a world war, but the Imperium is
worried: unable to multiply the dinner, it does what it can to suppress the diners. "Fight poverty, kill a
beggar!" some genius of black humor scrawled on a wall in La Paz. What do the heirs to Malthus
propose bur to kill all the beggars-to-be before they are born? Robert McNamara, the World Bank
president who was chairman of Ford and then secretary of defense, has called the population
explosion the greatest obstacle to progress in Latin America; the World Bank, he says, will give priority in
its loans to countries that implement birth control plans. McNamara notes with regret that the brains of
the poor do 25 percent less thinking, and the World Bank technocrats (who have already been born)
set computers humming to produce labyrinthine abracadabras on the advantages of not being born : "If,"
one of the Bank's documents assures us, "a developing country with an average per capita
income of $150 to $200 a year succeeds in reducing its fertility by 50 percent in a period of
twenty-five years, at the end of thirty years its per capita income will be higher by at least 40
percent than the level it would otherwise have achieved, and twice as high after sixty years."
Lyndon B. Johnson's remark has become famous: "Let us act on the fact that less than $5
invested in population control is worth $100 invested in economic growth." Dwight D.
Elsenhower prophesied that if the world’s inhabitants continued multiplying at the same rate,
not only would the danger of revolution be increased, but there would also be a lowering of
living standards for all peoples, including his own.
The United States is more concerned than any other country with spreading and imposing family
planning in the farthest outposts. Not only the government, but the Rockefeller and the Ford
foundations as well, have nightmares about millions of children advancing like locusts over the
horizon from the third world. Plato and Aristotle considered the question before Malthus and
McNamara; in our day this global offensive plays a well-defined role. Its aim is to justify the very
unequal income distribution between countries and social elates, to convince the poor that
poverty is the result of the children they don't avoid having, and to dam the rebellious advance
of the masses. While intrauterine devices compete with bombs and machine-gun salvos to arrest the
growth of the Vietnamese population, in Latin America it is more hygienic and effective to kill guerrilleros
in the womb than in the mountains or the streets. Various U.S. missions have sterilized thousands of
women in Amazonia, although this is the least populated habitable zone on our planet . Most Latin
American countries have no real surplus of people; on the contrary, they have too few. Brazil
has thirty-eight times fewer inhabitants per square mile than Belgium, Paraguay has forty-nine
times fewer than England, Peru has thirty-two times fewer than Japan. Haiti and El Salvador, the
human antheaps of Latin America, have lower population densities than Italy. The pretexts
invoked are an insult to the intelligence; the real intentions anger us. No less than half the
territory of Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Venezuela has no inhabitants at all. No
Latin American population grows less than Uruguay's— a country of old folk— yet no nation has
taken such a bearing in recent years, with a crisis that would seem to drag it into the last circle
of hell. Uruguay is empty, and its fertile lands could provide food for infinitely more people than
those who now suffer in such penury.
Over a century ago a Guatemalan foreign minister said prophetically: "It would be strange if the
remedy should come from the United Stares, the same place which brings us the disease." Now
that the Alliance for Progress is dead and buried the Imperium proposes, more in panic than in
generosity, to solve Latin America's problems by eliminating Latin Americans; Washington has
reason to suspect that the poor peoples don't prefer to be poor. But it is impossible to desire the end
without desiring the means. Those who deny liberation to Latin America also deny our only possible
rebirth, and incidentally absolve the existing structures from blame. Our youth multiplies, rises, listens: what
does the voice of the system offer? The system speaks a surrealist language. In lands that are empty it proposes
to avoid births; in countries where capital is plentiful but wasted it suggests that capital is lacking; it
describes as "aid" the deforming orthopedics of loans and the draining of wealth that results from foreign
investment; it calls upon big land-owners to carry out agrarian reforms and upon the oligarchy to practice
social justice. The class struggle only exists, we are told, because foreign agents stir it up; but
social classes do exist and the oppression of one by the other is known as the Western way of
life. The Marines undertake their criminal expeditions only to restore order and social peace; the
dictatorships linked to Washington lay foundations in their jails for the law-abiding state, and
ban strikes and smash trade unions to protect the freedom to work.
Is everything forbidden us except to fold our arms? Poverty is not written in the stars; under development
is not one of God's mysterious designs. Redemptive years of revolution pass; the ruling classes wait
and meanwhile pronounce hellfire anathema on everybody. In a sense the right wing is correct in
identifying itself with tranquillity and order: it is an order of daily humiliation for the majority, but an
order nonetheless; it is a tranquillity in which injustice continues to be unjust and hunger to be hungry. If
the future turns out to be a Pandora's box, the conservative has reason to shout, "I have been
betrayed." And the ideologists of impotence, the slaves who look at themselves with the
master's eyes, are not slow to join in the outcry. The bronze eagle of the Maine, thrown down on
the day the Cuban Revolution triumphed, now is abandoned. Its wings broken, in a doorway in the
old town in Havana. Since that day in Cuba, other countries have set off on different roads on the
experiment of change; perpetuation of the existing order of things is perpetuation of the crime. Recovery
of the resources that have always been usurped is recovery of our destiny.
The ghosts of all the revolutions that have been strangled or betrayed through Latin America's tortured
history emerge in the new experiments, as if the present had been foreseen and begotten by the
contradictions of the past. History is a prophet who looks back: because of what was, and against what
was, it announces what will be. And so this book, which seeks to chronicle our despoliation and at the same
time explain how the current mechanisms of plunder operate, will present in close proximity the
caravelled conquistadors and the jet-propelled technocrats; Hernan Cortes and the Marines; the agents of
the Spanish Crown and the International Monetary Fund missions; the dividends from the slave trade and
the profits of General Motors. And, too, the defeated heroes and revolutions of our time, the infamies and
the dead and resurrected hopes: the fertile sacrifices. When Alexander von Humboldt investigated the
customs of the ancient inhabitants of the Bogota plateau, he found that the Indians called the victims of
ritual ceremonies quihica. Quihica meant "door"; the death of each chosen victim opened the door to a
new cycle of 185 moons.
Our articulation of the subaltern is a UNIQUE approach to TEACHING. We must
RESIST the impulse to subsume the aff under a dominant topic. This kind of
liberal inclusionary discourse saps our speech act of revolutionary potential,
destroying it through stasis
Georg M. Gugelberger, Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of
California, “The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse and Latin America”, Introduction,
1996, Google Books, pg. 10-13, TB
The testimonio is placed at the intersection of multiple roads: oral versus literary
(which implies questioning why the literary has always colonized the oral);
authored/authoritarian discourse versus edited dis-course (one author or two
authors?: is the text a product of Rigoberta Menchti or rather of her editor Elisabeth
Burgos-Debray?); literature versus anthropology; literature versus non-literature, or
even against literature; autobiography versus demography (people's writing); the
battle of representationality; the canon debate (is this a work that should be
integrated into the canon and what happens if it is?); "master-piece" of literature
versus minority writing; and issues of postmodern-ity versus postcoloniality. The
scandal of the assignment of Rigoberta Mencluis testimonio in one of the required courses at Stanford University becomes a central focus for the neoconservative assaults on mul-ticultural education and political
correctness. What is the place of such a text in tertiary education generally (regardless of discipline)? And
what happens if we use such a text? Few genres have begged as many questions and
interpellated mainstream discourse to such a degree.
Representative of the oppressed subaltern, the repressed and home-less, the exiled
and the migrant, this genre, which at first resisted a place in the house of genology
(the study of literary genres), is so mobile that permitting it entry into the institution of
higher learning makes the process of learning indeed "unheimlich" (uncanny). The
literary nomad or subaltern speech as that which cannot be really spoken is always
outside of the home/base/canon. Its battlefield is the border area be-tween
transgression and acceptance. If we accept, that is, integrate, the outside work into
the home of the canon, we violate the authenticity of the genre. Yet, if we do not integrate
such genres, we are forced to continue policing the canon with the most conservative policies. The
implications of dealing with this at first harmless genre thereby become paradigmatic for the situation of the
intellectual in today's institution.
The genre of the testimonio seemed at first to cling steadfastly to representationality
and to be outside canonized literature—a nomadic and homeless genre with the hope
for solidarity and community not only in Latin America. It is the homelessness of an
unplaceable genre between disciplines (e.g., literature and anthropology), on the verge of being
autobiography without being autobiography, authored without having an author. It is the genre that
reflected homelessness and poverty and suddenly found an institutional home in the
expanded canon. The genre of the oppressed, of the migrating and impoverished
Indian in Guatemala, turned into (un)comfortable reading material for those in centers
of higher learning. In other words, it changed from product to commodity.8 But it did not
do so because of its content alone, but rather for its perhaps too easy assimilation
into mainstream discourse. When counterdiscourse is co-opted by mainstream
discourse, new problems arise. These problems urgently require to be addressed.
Where do we go from here? If, as indeed it can be shown with ease, institutionalized literary
discourse fights for expansion of the canon (correctly, we might add, but only to a
certain degree) without being fully aware of the implications that canonization entails
(such as merely creating new can(n)on fodder), where do we go if we still hope to
regain use-value for literature rather than the generic exchange-value of in-creasing
commodification? The answer must be a continuous search for ways of subverting
the history of mere canonization reform. In ocher words, we must look for new ways of
understanding this process of co-optation, unless we are satisfied with previous avant-garde
methods of strange-making (Shklovsky's ostranenija). One way to do this certainly is to constantly historicize
the process of canon expansion and integra-tion, restoring to the work that has become a harmless
masterpiece a harmful allegorical quality. And we must continuously find ways to render
nomadic discourses that are homebound; we must keep them nomadic; we must not
allow their return home; we must leave them as "unheimlich" and threatening.
For this necessary interpellation, we can learn from Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari how to
turn the teaching machine into the "war machine."9 Deleuze and Guattari are very aware of the
need for nomadic erosion, of how nomadic deterritorialization is constantly reterritorial-ized by the state
(machine) and the teaching machine. Implicit in my remarks about the subversive elements of
the testimonio, which has be-come reterritorialized in the canon debate (canon =
Institutional State Apparatus), is the expressed need for changing the paradigms of
literary expectancy. If canon equals state and if the masterpieces (of literature)
strengthen the state, the emphasis must be on finding the Sprenguitze, the dynamite
of otherness that nomadic discourse can provide.
What are we to do in "the teaching machine," we who came from the intrinsic study of
literature and moved toward a liberating dis-course, from there even moved "against
literature," once we became aware of the implications of what we had fought for
originally (namely, the expansion of the canon, introduction of marginal discourses, interest in minority,
Third World, and postcolonial literatures, feminisms and marxisms)? Has the struggle been to
achieve merely another list of required readings? Voices of a new disciplinary
mapping already as-sume with confidence that "The frontiers in our profession seem
to exist only to be endlessly crossed, violated, renegotiated" (Greenblatt and Gunn 1992, 7).
We must monitor the system's ever increasing capability and capacity to always turn
the "anti" into the "pro," coun-terdiscourse into discourse, the anricanonical into the
requirement. Needless to say, the first thing is to stay alert, the second is to historicize
rather than to interpret. We need to show in testimonial discourse specifically, as in
Third World literature and minority discourse in general, how this movement from an
authentic margin has been be-trayed by inclusion in the Western canon, which can be
considered as yet another form of colonialization.
But is this all? I propose that we learn more from this: namely, that we not develop an
aesthetic methodology akin to the various avant-gardisms of modernism and most
certainly not the ludic pastiche that characterizes postmodernism, but that we
construct and search for the Sprengatze of the nomadology Deleuze and Guattari
envision. That would imply a continuously shifting emphasis on different discourses
and a willingness to move from a once potentially liberating discourse co another
once it becomes obvious that the integration into the institu-tion has de-energized the
former discourse. This enlarged understand-ing of how capital works forces those
who had illusions about an all too easy redemption (from Benjamin to the present) to once
again real-istically assess the situation of how literary discourse functions within the state.
The increasing co-optation of everything into an irritating, best-selling pluralism of all
disciplines—for example, institutionalized Cul-tural Studies (see Fredric Jameson as discussed by John
Beverley in these pages)—is akin to reterrirorializing everything that previously was
deterritorialized. This process is the taming of the nomad by the sedentary, the
continuous alienation of dis-alienational moments. But the margin at the center may
not be the answer to the problem.
[tag]
Ugo Mattei, Alfred and Hanna Fromm Professor of International and Comparative Law
at the University of California, Hastings College and Professor of Civil Law at the
University of Turin, Laura and Nader, Professor of Anthropology at UC Berkeley,
“Plunder: When the Rule of Law is Illegal”, 2008, pg. 4-8, TB
Western countries identify themselves as law-abiding and civilized no matter what their actual history reveals.
Such identification is acquired by false knowledge and false comparison with other peoples, those who were
said to “lack” the rule of law, such as in China, Japan, India, and in the Islamic world more generally. Similarly
today, according to some leading economists, Third World developing countries “lack” the minimal institutional
systems necessary for the unfolding of a global market that now serves (as in the past) to further the
construction of Western superiority.
We argue in this book that foreign-imposed privatization laws that facilitate unconscionable
bargains at the expense of the people are vehicles of plunder, not of legality. The very
same policy of corporatization and open markets, imposed today globally by the so-called Washington
consensus, was used by Western bankers and the business community in Latin America
as the main vehicle to “open the veins” of the continent, to borrow Eduardo
Galeano’s metaphor, with no solution or continuity between colonial and post-colonial times. It was used
in Africa to facilitate the forced transfer of slaves to America, and today to facilitate the extraction of
agricultural products, oils, minerals, ideas, and cultural artifacts in the same countries. The policy of violently
opening markets for free trade (especially of weapons), used today in Afghanistan and Iraq, was used in
China during the nineteenth-century Opium War, in which free trade was interpreted as an obligation to buy
drugs from British dealers. The policy of protecting Western industry by means of tariffs and barriers to entry,
while at the same time forcing local industries to compete on the open market, was used by the British empire
in Bengal, as it is today by the WTO in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. In all these settings the tragic
human suffering produced by such plunder is simply ignored. In all these settings law
played a major role in legalizing and legitimating such practices of powerful actors against the powerless. Yet,
this use of power is scarcely explored in the study of Western law.
The dominant image of the rule of law, we argue, is false historically and in the present, because it does not
fully acknowledge its dark side. The false representation starts from the idea that good law
(which others “lack”) is autonomous, separate from society and its institutions, technical,
non-political, non-distributive, and reactive rather than proactive: more succinctly, a technological framework
for an “efficient” market. Because of these false representations, good governance that ostensibly
characterizes the law’s purposes becomes the backbone of naturalized professional arguments that are
marshaled to legitimize plunder.
We argue that the rule of law has a bright and a dark side, with the latter progressively
conquering new terrain whenever the former is not empowered by a political soul. In
the absence of such political life, the rule of law becomes a cold technology, and the
dark side can cover the whole picture as law yields to embrace brute violence. The
political empowerment of the bright side of law can stem from a variety of places, not necessarily rooted in
justice. During the Cold War, for example, there was some incentive to practice a democratic rule of law in its
positive functions of order, conflict management, principled and fair decision-making. But the change in the
balance of power after the Cold War nourished the law’s dark side, removing the political bite to the law. The
United States’ ruling elite no longer needed to persuade other countries and people of the values of
democracy and the virtue of the rule of law which after communism, in its Soviet realization, had collapsed
under corruption and illegality. Gradually, incentives for institutional virtues declined in the West. A public
shift from justice to profit, from respects to thefts, followed within an atmosphere of
silenced political debate, overwhelmed by self-congratulatory rhetoric, such as the end of
history, through the 1990s. Later the political silence accompanying plunder was further
normalized by talk of patriotism, “detainees,” “enemy combatants,” and special tribunals reminiscent
of earlier nineteenth- and twentieth-century authoritarians including anti-law phases as in “tort reform” or
torture policies. Such post-September 11 praxis, as well as its perennial power surrender to corporate actors,
takes us a long way from an American model of legality and democracy that, though rhetorical and
hypocritical in many ways, has been admired worldwide and arguably contributed to the ending of the Cold
War.
Because of the scope of our project, we have selected materials and illustrations that include large parts of
the world but are not meant to be comprehensive. In our examples, the uses of the rule oflaw are discussed in
the past and in the present, both domestically and in their international dimension, taking into due
consideration the declining role of states as compared to large corporate actors. When large corporate actors
dominate states or become knitted with them, law becomes a product of the economy, and what was once
“Western” domination is now multinational corporate capitalism. Democracy, rule of law, development,
international human rights, and arguments about “lack” are in the present legal landscape a strong part of the
rhetoric of legitimization of international corporate extraction.
Contemporary mass cultures operate within a short timespan. Most Western intellectuals do not grasp that it
is because of previous expansionist empires that culture become connected with one another and share a
good deal of world history. Worse, many intellectuals do not acknowledge that it is exactly because of the
plunder of gold, silver, bioresources, and more that development accelerated in the West, so that
underdevelopment is a historically produced victimization of weaker and more enclosed communities and not
the disease of less people.
Prevailing short-term and short-sighted opportunism must be overcome. Far too
many politicized people exist in today’s world – as demonstrated by the worldwide
opposition to the US invasion of Iraq – for American imperialism to be sustained. A
narrative history of the imperial adventure rendered in historical and contemporary
legal terms opens up a possibility for a radical rethinking of a model of development
defined by Western ideas of progress, development, and efficiency. A vision of a just
society necessitates that we eschew an idea of freedom that allows for massive inequality because the rule of
law is invariably used to protect the bottom line. Liberation is a better word than freedom.
Liberation cannot exist without authentic democracy, and no democracy exists
without just distribution of resources. Does the rule of law still have a role in attempting to
establish the conditions for liberation?
Perhaps empowering its bright side and fully exposing the dark aspects of the rule of
law can transform it into a tool for taking control of a runaway world, fueled by an
economic dynamic called neo-liberalism. Perhaps the rule of law cannot be reformed and only
revolution can disentangle it from the lethal hug of plunder. In both cases,
understanding plunder is a precondition for action. New directions call for a
recognition of the configuration that has accompanied the different waves of EuroAmerican expansions. A reconfiguration would mean, first and foremost, a clear
rejection of an ideology of inherent superiority of Western culture that does not
recognize that the West is itself part of something much larger. After all, the discovery of
agriculture and three great world religions – Christianity, Islam, and Judaism – had their origin in the Middle
East. Most importantly for our purposes we propose a hard-nosed look at what is behind the rule of law as an
undisputable value of current corporate-dominated capitalism.
Several outstanding thinkers today, in and out of academia, are suggesting that the problems we are facing
are systemic to a several-hundred-year-old system of Euro-American expansion and domination based on
extraction and plunder, a system that is now adopted by India and China. Cultural and material destruction
has proceeded at an accelerated pace at least since the eighteenth century. The two legitimizing strategies,
one motivated by a universal concept of justice, the other by a universal concept of efficiency (the former
commonly associated with colonialism and the latter with modern Americanization) are deeply flawed and no
longer acceptable. The “lack” argument, where a comparative absence is created that can only be remedied
by transferring law from a Western source, is, also, outrageous when seen as yet another imperial move.
Similarly outrageous is law as a social and political tool that empowers local elites to interface with the global
economy in the face of increasing social inequities. Plunder, we suggest, is an important concept
to unify and portray, as the rule, distortions in the model of capitalist expansion that
are at most acknowledged as exceptions.
Perhaps plunder as the rule rather than the exception allows the reader to get
outraged. The Enron scandal, the mutual fund scandal, and other examples portrayed
as exceptions (such as the torture in Abu Ghraib, Guantanamo Bay, Baghram Air
Force Base or the use of illegal weapons of mass destruction in Falluja) in fact are the
rule of corporate capitalist development; workers are victimized; people lose their
savings; innocents are killed; peasants are starved. The distinction between what is legal and
what is illegal blurs in a world in which the rule of law is reduced to a dull rhetoric or to Orwellian doublespeak. How much more suffering do we need to realize that similar tragedies are the rule and not the
exception? How much more time do we need to recognize the civilizing failure of corporate capitalism and the
need to organize radical alternatives to its destructive models of development?
We endorse an opening of the debate space to discuss the structures that cause
economic violence in Latin America.