This paper was presented in the final discussion of the research group "Cultural synchronicities" in Stanford University. Hector Hoyos thank the invitation, hospitality and the forum, Pheng Cheah, Joan Ramon Resina, Diana Sorensen, Neil Larsen, Elmer Mendoza, Jorge Rufinelli, Will Corral and all the others present for the wonderful conversation and Marcela Junguito and Adam Morris the titanic work of organization
Utopias, Those Ideals Both revered and disdained, Inhabit Sometimes the corners of the literary canon. One Can Certainly remember the utopias Elaborate That filled the advent of cultural modernity, from the delusional dreams of El Dorado and the New Jerusalem, passing through Thomas More’s excessively normative world, all the way to Jonathan Swift’s brilliant but ultimately obnoxious archipelago. Still, those comprehensive utopias, which Karl Mannheim ambiguously dismissed as “incongruous with the state of reality” while recognizing their need for deep social change, are only a part of the complex history of the idea, particularly when one considers that, at least in many cases, it carried nothing less than colonialism in its underbelly. Still, more promising utopias lie sometimes in the forgotten corners of textual traditions, buried in the marginal writings of major figures, ignored by the critical whirlwind that monumentalizes their authors. I want to start this intervention by one such moment, a striking assertion that promises a utopia without describing it, and an engagement with centuries of political and literary thinking that leads to a crucial statement:
The normal state may be passivity; but the frequent state, the constant one that gives humanity its seal, and that, for the same reason, deserves to be called, even practically, the human state, is that of protest. If man had not protested, there would not be history –history in the common sense of the word. The dawn of history is an imbalance between the environment and human will, just like the dawn of consciousness was an imbalance between the spectacle of the world and the human spectator. Man smiles: consciousness arises. And man is nurtured by the elements provided by the environment. Does he smile a second time? He protests: nature is no longer enough. Does he emigrate, or sow, or conquest, or form the bandwagons in a circle like a tribal trench against the attacks of fierce animals? So then he starts civilization and starts history with it. While no one questions the master, nothing happens. When the slave has smiled, the duel of history begins.
The master and the slave come from a familiar source, Hegel’s Phenomenology, only that in here the consciousness of the slave does not lie at the end of the dialectic, but at its outset, a smile that marks the consciousness of the slave as the foundational act not only of civilization, but of history itself. In this assertion we do not see utopia defined, but the necessary gesture at the beginning of every utopian intervention.
The source of this paragraph is a little-known essay entitled “La sonrisa,” included in a 1917 book called El suicida . Its author is Alfonso Reyes, a foundational figure of the tradition of thinking known as Latin Americanism, which may be defined as the constant attempts to assert Latin America as a site of critical thinking and to think the region as an articulation of projects of emancipation vis-á-vis modernity and colonialism. The historical background of Reyes’s essay is not trivial either: “La sonrisa” was written in the wake of the Mexican Revolution, from a self-imposed exile in Spain and France, as one of the first attempts to theorize the emergence of a large array of social sectors into a form of historical agency and subjectivity previously denied by the Porfirian elites. The historical implications go even further: it is important to note that Reyes, the son of a prominent Porfirian general who died in the revolt that overthrew the first Revolutionary regime in 1913, was nonetheless ideologically sympathetic to the Revolution. Being a man of letters, Reyes was part of a group of intellectuals strongly committed to translate the social force of the Revolution into a spiritual transformation of Mexico at large. In this terms, “La sonrisa” is an almost unique effort to understand the Mexican Revolution as a philosophical category of emancipation, thus departing from the work of many of his contemporaries, like Manuel Gamio or José Vasconcelos, who opted to understand it in racial terms, as the triumph of the mestizo, thus inaugurating a line that favored anthropology and identity as the key languages to articulate it. “La sonrisa”, despite a very recent wave of critical interest, became a minor text in part because it chose to engage a question of the spirit rather than a question of race.
Today, I want to use “La sonrisa” in particular and a set of essays by Alfonso Reyes in general, to rethink the critical and political potentials of Latin Americanism, by addressing, in what I hope is a new critical light, one of its crucial notions: utopia. To speak of utopia is no easy feat, considering the various legacies of the notion, from its Christian articulations after Augustine to the different socialist/ communist paradigms. Since engaging the notion “at large” is a challenge beyond the scope of my current analysis, I will use utopia as it has been circumscribed in the tradition of thinking followed by Reyes: an appropriation of the idea of the American continent as a site of projection of a future to-come by European colonizers, in order to use it as a political claim that establishes Latin America as the vanguard continent in history. More on this in a minute. The other point to make before fully engaging in my analysis is the fact that speaking of Latin Americanism today is also not a self-evident act. In the last twenty years, a wide set of interventions in Latin American studies, from cultural studies to subalternism, have advocated the idea of transcending Latin Americanism, due to its roots in the practices of the so-called “lettered city”, in order to engage those sectors of society excluded from lettered practices. In addition, many thinkers within Latin American studies started questioning the very legacy of intellectual Latin Americanism. Santiago Castro Gómez, for instance, proposed a “critique of Latin American reason”, while Nelly Richard spoke of “Intersecting Latin America with Latin Americanism”. Perhaps the most relevant critique to a return to Reyes is that of Román de la Campa, who argued in a 1999 book that Latin Americanism is based on an episthetic mechanism, that is, on the acceptance of the necessary relation between aesthetics and epistemology, which is the reason why people like Reyes, whose base intellectual practice was literature, were the foundational figures of the field.
The return to “La sonrisa” I propose here acknowledges these interventions, but also seeks to provide a way to re-activate Latin Americanism in contemporary critical practice, considering that we are at a point where the critical potentials unveiled by cultural studies, postcolonialism and subalternism seem to be normalized, institutionalized, widely accepted and, perhaps, exhausted. The two crucial results of this process are in my view incontrovertible: the recognition of many subjective voices silenced by decades of colonialism and eurocentrism and the end of the reification of literature as the core discourse of critical practice. By returning to Reyes, a founding figure of Latin Americanism, after the critical paradigms of the past three decades is, in my view, necessary, in order to bring back the unexplored critical potentials of a tradition that, in its time, was also monumentalized and institutionalized. By returning to obscure corners of the canon, we may actually unveil forms of thinking that, before the interventions of cultural studies, we were simply too blind to notice.
The “smile of the slave” is, in these terms, a telling image, considering the role that Hegelian phenomenology has in the articulation of many contemporary critical interventions. We may be reminded, for instance, that Hegel’s slave may have been the result of his attempts to come to terms with the historical emergence of colonized peoples as it was unveiling in his time. In her recent and provocative Hegel, Haiti and Universal History , Susan Buck-Morss has suggested that the dialectics of the master and the slave was Hegel’s way of systematizing in his philosophy the unthinkable event of the Haitian revolution, where the very black slaves that would lack historicity in other parts of his philosophy became agents of radical social transformation. In re-reading “La sonrisa”, such suggestion is not trivial: considering that Alfonso Reyes was in the early stages of a critical thought geared towards the active intellectual decolonization of the Americas. “La sonrisa”, I would argue, unmasks a new emancipatory potential out of Hegel’s phenomenology, through a reading of one of its main concepts in a textual network constructed by Reyes himself rather than by tradition. The key here then is to unpack the notion of the smile, to understand the workings of Reyes’s text, before moving on to more of his works. An earlier assertion in the text may help in illustrating this point “The smile is, after all, the sign of the intelligence that liberates itself from the inferior stimuli; the lay man laughs; the cultivated man smiles. Caliban ignores Ariel’s profound joys. Caliban is a “sad animal”.” At first sight, this quote seems to be a mere reproduction of the notion of civilizacion and barbarism, where Ariel and Caliban follow closely the actualization of those famous Shakespearian characters by José Enrique Rodó and Rubén Darío. Still, the key words here are joy and sadness: they come from a very precise and very telling philosophical source, Spinoza’s Ethics. In Proposition LV of the Third Section, Spinoza argues: “When the mind imagines its own impotence, it is saddened by it” (Mens suam impotentiam imaginatur, so ipso contristatur). The important word here is “mind”: Caliban’s mind is sad, because it’s colonized. In these terms, the smile is, in part, the result of a process of emancipation of the mind, consciousness.
In these terms, Reyes constructs a discrete theory of bondage, one based upon the capacity to intersect different elements of intellectual tradition by terminological continuity. This way, the Hegelian slave becomes Caliban and his bondage is at the same time, the Spinozan sadness and Etiénne de la Boëtie’s voluntary serfdom. In another plane, the smile of the slave equals not only Spinozian joy but also the knowledge of Ariel and Henri Bergson’s laughter. In this set of endless contiguities lies one of the essential mechanisms of Reyes’s work, the essay. Reyes’s intellectual generation understood the Revolution, in part, as a mandate to overcome the hegemony of positivism inherited by the Porfirian regime. The essay provided a way to think beyond the scientific imperatives of positivist scholastics and to open the door to the very intellectual traditions deployed by Reyes in his essay: Spinoza, Bergson and many other thinkers in the sidelines of the Enlightenment legacy. In addition, in the wake of Rodó’s reinvention of Latin American humanism, the essay allowed authors like Reyes the full articulation of the very episthetics identified by De la Campa at the core of Latin Americanist critique. What we attest in an essay of “La sonrisa” is both the emergence of the essay as a form that restitutes aesthetics as the core of critical practice, after decades of obsession with science, and the consequent construction of an alternative archive that would connect these early forays of Latin Americanist and utopian thinking with a provocative form of cultural cosmopolitanism. The first of these questions, the re-connection of aesthetics and practice, was theorized by one of Reyes’s most interesting contemporaries, the young Georg Lukács, whose early essays on this very question were written exactly at the same time as Reyes’s first works. In his well-known introduction to Soul and Form , Lukacs poses an idea central to understanding Reyes’s task: “The critic’s moment of destiny, therefore, is that moment at which things become forms –the moment when all feelings and experiences on the near or the far side of form, receive form, are melted down and condensed into form. It is the mystical moment of union between the outer and the inner, between soul and form”. This is how the smile emerges: as a form that evolves from a simple facial gesture to the very act of emancipation, precisely in the mystical moment when the Hegelian spirit, or the Spinozian joy, are, as Lukacs puts it, melted down and condensed into literary form. Influenced by the same German Idealism as the young Lukacs, Reyes finds in the aesthetic a fundamental space of redemption, which, from or Ariel and Caliban, is nothing else but decolonization and the emergence of an American consciousness. As I will show towards the end of this presentation, this is exactly the episthetic procedure of Latin Americanism as created by Reyes, the spirit of America that encounters the utopian form in the literary union of the essay.
Before arriving to this point, it is important to briefly delve on the question of which archive is the source of Reyes’s reflections of quotes. Presumably, the idea of “world literature” comes to mind here, not only due to its origin in another space of German Idealism, Goethe’s latter writings, but also due to the way in which the term has experienced a revival as a methodological panacea for comparative literature. While many things could be said about the models proposed by authors such as Franco moretti, Pascale Casanova or David Damrosch, I simply want to raise an impasse illuminated by Reyes’s work. World literature is, first and foremost, a spatial category, which can emerge in many ways, from the transatlantic diffusionist model deployed by Franco Moretti’s cartographic methodologies to the construction of imagined territories, such as Casanova’s “World Republic of Letters” where literature is ultimately a matter of center and periphery. Even Latin American readings of this concept readily assume its spatial nature: it is no wonder that Juan de Castro, in a text where Reyes lurks in key passages, speaks of “The Spaces of Latin American Literature” and the “criollo positionality” within the world. The problem here is that, when reading the canon presented by “La sonrisa”, these spatial models overlook two essential issues, rendering these versions of “world literature” insufficient for the understanding of an author like Reyes. First, in terms of the pure circulation of cultural capital and ideas, world literature theories tend to ultimately be theories of influence, useful to understand unidirectional circulations of ideas, but not to recognize the creative deployment of the cosmopolitan archive by the Latin American intellectual. This is why these authors’ work is so focused on the novel, where this logic indeed explains the emergence of literary modernism. However, it is not quite clear from these perspectives why Reyes would read Spinoza and Bergson rather than Rousseau or Feuerbach. Second, and perhaps more importantly, world literature theories tend to accept the intellectual division of labor constructed by colonialism and neocolonialism as a given fact. While this makes sense when understanding the circulation of literature as a market commodity, as Casanova does, it has little to say about cosmopolitanism as an instrument of thinking. In an author like Reyes, whose aim is precisely to use a cosmopolitan stance to decolonize Latin American intellectual practice, this is a crucial point, since Latin American originality tends to be identified simply by the universalization of regionalism, as Moretti’s praise of García Márquez and Casanova’s appreciation of Mario de Andrade show. In these terms, I would claim that one of the central questions behind the idea of “cultural synchronicity” that frames this colloquium lies precisely in moving beyond the paradigms of world literature as presented by these authors in order to construct a notion of cosmopolitism tied to decolonization rather than coloniality.
In the spirit of this task, I want to dedicate the final minutes of this talk to intersecting Reyes to a theoretical intervention in the conceptual realm of world literature that, in my view, may potentially aid in constructing such notion. In her suggestive 2006 book Through Other Continents , Wai Chee Dimock introduces a notion of world literature and cosmopolitanism articulated temporally rather than spatially. This is done through the notion of “deep time”, which Dimock constructs to highlight “a set of longitudinal frames, at once projective and recessional, with input going both ways, and binding continents and millennia into many loops of relations, a densely interactive fabric”. In other, perhaps Deleuzian, words, Dimock proposes world literature as a rhizomatic set of flows that interact in more complex nodes and topographies than those presented in the Wallersteinian diffusionism of transatlantic theories of World literature. Dimock’s examples include, for instance, the intimate connections between the Baghavad Gita and Henry David Thoureau as a new platform to understand the emergence of American notions of liberty. Sadly, Dimock’s focus of attention is the field of American studies and, in her work, Deep time is mostly a category aimed at breaking with the nationalist focus of studies on US literature. By restricting her conceptualization to the narrow issue of academic practice in English departments, Dimock does not quite allow deep time to flourish in all its theoretical potential.
This notion, however, offers a quite potent way to reconceptualize literary cosmopolitanism and is particularly useful when engaging someone like Alfonso Reyes. If one fully extrapolates the concept out of the question of U.S. literature, the notion of cosmopolitanism behind deep time opens the door to a new understanding of the uses of archive in Alfonso Reyes. Dimock suggestively argues that “Literature is the home of nonstandard space and time”, a place that goes beyond that lived experience Benedict Anderson called “The time of the nation”. Reyes comes close to a similar idea in his 1932 essay “La Atlántida castigada”, or “Atlantis punished”, where he sets one of the bases of his utopian thinking. In this essay, Reyes argues that subterranean and disappeared cultures, like that of Atlantis, become a fertile ground for cultural speculation, which results in the widening of the historical horizons of intellectual practice. “La Atlantida castigada” is thus an attempt to capture the notion of world culture emerging from the many different cultures unveiled by the archeology of his time. At the beginning of the text, Reyes cites the accadians, the hitites, Crete, Pre-Sudanese art, Toltec pyramids and the Zapotec tombs in Monte Albán to argue that these discoveries “come towards us to show us that our picture of civilizations was incomplete and that there are other ways to conceive life”. In fact, Reyes compares this transformation to Bergson’s discoveries of different operations of the brain and to Einstein’s revolution in our understanding of the physical world. At this juncture, where the Mexican Revolution of his early work has been substituted by the epistemological revolutions of the world at large, Reyes uses the essay and a cosmopolitanism firmly grounded in deep time to create sense of this new world and to define America’s place beyond the colonial legacy. Atlantis becomes thus the site of Reyes’s essayistic ruminations, the form in which Reyes will frame this newly expanded cosmpolitanism. In these terms, “La Atlántida castigada” is an astounding intellectual edifice, where Atlantis emerges as an empty cultural signifier that the essay fills out with the semantics of diverse traditions of critical engagement, from Ancient thought and Platonic philosophy to the futile attempts of the Enlightenment to encompass the world. In his early essays, Reyes developed a cosmopolitan practice firmly ground in a peculiarly selective engagement with Western culture. Spinoza was not a common reading amongst mainstream Latin American intellectuals, but his work became part of Reyes’s canon insofar as it provided a language to articulate notions of freedom and consciousness capable of breaking with the strictures of positivist determinism. By the 1930s, though, as Reyes became worldlier through his travels and readings, and as archeology and philology unveiled cultures that put into question the very foundations of coloniality as an epistemological enterprise, he began crosslisting Western traditions to a widening set of cultural references. In here, “deep time” provides an essential insight into this practice, since Reyes becomes fully engaged into the same process described by Dimock, the binding of continents and millennia into a literary practice founded in nonstandard space and time. Atlantis here is a crucial essayistic device, since it gives intellectual form to this very process, by becoming the space of rhetorical encounter of the different flows and frames of cultural history informing Reyes’s work.
It is important to note here that, unlike most of his Mexican contemporaries and his successors, Reyes did not read the archeological discoveries of Pre-Columbian cultures as a language to claim the mythical origins of the nation into an idealized past. This operation, taken to its utmost consequences by Octavio Paz in his poem Sunstone , was contrary to the spirit of Reyes’s cosmopolitanism. Instead, Reyes conceived Pre-Columbian cultures as part of an expanding sense of the globe. This alternative view has important consequences in the understanding of Latin Americanism as a tradition of decolonization, precisely because it locates the break-up with the intellectual legacies of colonialism in a quite different textual practice. A long tradition of Latin Americanism has argued for decolonization as a possibility that emerges from the valoration of indigenous and marginalized perspectives of Latin America. Born perhaps in Vasconcelos’s idea of the cosmic race, a line of thinkers that includes Rodolfo Kusch, Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo has forcefully asserted the need of non-Western, or even post-Occidental epistemologies as a necessary step for intellectual decolonization. Without questioning the worth of this posture in the project of rethinking Latin Americanism, I would argue that cosmopolitans like Reyes offered an equally central stance, by understanding decolonization as the possibility of directly intervening in the world by breaking with notions such as peripheral modernity or alternative epistemology, which tend to highlight Latin America’s colonial position. In other words, rather than locating the originality of America in that historical outsideness postulated by Hegel and embedded in Octavio Paz’s notion of eccentricity, and rather than displacing the cosmopolitan historicity of the Americas into the mythical suspension of time embedded in the reification of indigenous cultures, Reyes proposes to be worldly without any qualifiers. The only way to achieve de-colonization is by acting fully as a citizen of the world, as he would claim in his famous essay “Notes on American intelligence”. If you allow me for a second, and last time, some Deleuzian jargon, one could say that, while Vasconcelos and Paz opt to understand cultural decolonization as a territorialization of historical subjectivity into the time of the nation, Reyes firmly believes that the step that follows the emancipatory moment embodied in the smile of the slave is the deterritorialization of the new conscious subject into the space of the world. This is why Atlantis becomes the formal receptacle of the worldly culture deployed in his work. By refusing to locate the world in a “real” territory, by placing the flows of deep time in a place both utopian and ghostly, Reyes shows that the ultimate emancipation of the American subject lies in the potentialities that constitute its cosmopolitan future.
In closing, I would argue that deep time is a crucial framework to understand the implications of this cultural wager. Reyes places at the very origin of Latin Americanism two essential operations that have vanished from cultural history but that must be recovered for a true understanding of cultural synchronicity as a critical category. First, as I hope to have shown in “La sonrisa”, Reyes is perhaps the sole major figure of Latin American thinking to propose a theory of pure emancipation, and to construct a philosophical canon around that theory that, in my view, still short-circuits our understandings of Latin American traditions of emancipatory literature and philosophy. Second, as understood under the light of Atlantis and deep time, a return to Reyes puts forward the question of cosmopolitanism, in its most radical and radically political form, as a necessary point of inflexion and reflection to overcome the theoretical impasses left behind by the cultural studies paradigms. If Latin Americanist critique of the past thirty years has rightfully shown the importance of marginalized subjectivities and popular affects in the understanding of Latin America’s long struggle with the colonial legacy, I believe that oscillating the pendulum towards a reconsideration of cosmopolitanism not as a set of influences but as a truly critical practice is one of the most important tasks of the years to come. By sidestepping the world in cultural studies, Latin Americanism has unfairly obscured a set of emancipatory ideologies and conceptualizations essential to understand not only our intellectual legacies, but also the ways in which we can re-think Latin America in a scene where worldliness may be one of the few spaces to counter the sprawling advance of that new, pervasive form of colonialism known as globalization. What Reyes understood in the 1930s is similar to our challenges today. Against the grain of the simplistic binary of the global and the local, the site of struggle today is not so much the plight of territorialized cultures resisting the deterritorializing strength of capital. The true challenge lies in the competing notions of the world. In the modest but always promising realm of literary studies, this means we must rethink our notions of world literature, moving our methodologies from their descriptions of the status quo of Eurocentric globalization to the study of cosmopolitanism as a worldly alternative to such globalization. “Deep time” is a methodological step into that direction, and the revival of figures like Reyes is, I hope, a way to think the world in a different, more democratic way, where the smile of the slave and the promise of Atlantis may be a constant reminder of the bond that we may, not without nostalgia, call the human.
I want to conclude by returning to someone who was, in my view, a kindred spirit to that of Reyes, even though deep time did not quite create a direct link between them: Edward Said. In his famous essay “Travelling Theory”, where, incidentally, a slightly older and quite more Marxist Lukacs is the starting point of the intellectual journey, Said expresses much better than I do the promise behind the reconsideration of the world: “To measure the distance between theory then and now, there and here, to record the encounter of theory with resistances to it, to move skeptically in the broader political world where such things as the humanities or the great classics ought to be seen as small provinces of the human venture, to map the territory covered by all the techniques of dissemination, communication and interpretation, to preserve some modest (perhaps shrinking) belief in noncoercive human community: if these are not imperatives, they do at least seem to be attractive alternatives. And what is critical consciousness at bottom if not an unstoppable predilection for alternatives?” In this spirit, I believe that cultural synchronicities and cosmopolitanism reach their strongest, most powerful, most suggestive instances when they work towards those alternatives. Alfonso Reyes, whose death in 1959 left many of his ideas behind, in unexplored shores of prose, was constantly engaged in such alternatives, facing everyday the double task of thinking decolonization while tirelessly working in constructing the cultural institutions and ideologies to make it possible. A return to Reyes, which I have advocated and will continue to advocate in my own work, is an attempt to restitute the humanities with such an ethos in an age where they Are under siege. This is a long task, with future Many Labors to eat. In the Meantime, I am grateful to all of you for your Attention.
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