THE OTHERING OF THE OTHER
Santiago Castro-Gómez´s Critique of Latin American Reason

Eduardo Mendieta

Part and parcel of the hegemony of an ideology ist that it is assimilated by those whom it is meant to rule. This much is implicit in the notion of ideology; that is, ideology is a way of dissimulating power by making it pervade all dimensions of life. Power is precisely exercised through the very act of locating oneself in social space. The Other can not speak, or represent itself because it sees itself through the eyes of the ruler, of dominant culture. The Other others itself and others. The Other can only see itself in the retina of the eye of ist master. The Other makes itself the other of the one who has made itself the standard of society, while disallowing others to see themselves as more or less than merely a negation of what is taken to be the norm, the normal. The Other others itself and others and in the process it locates, places itself in social space already as the subaltern of someone, or semething that is ruler, and / or ruling. The issue of subalternity, of domination, of subjugation and control is not solely a question of othering, of orientalizing, or even westernizing, but also, and principally I would say, of vacating and disabling the possibility of those who are excluded and marginalized from representing themselves in their own terms. This is what I take Spivak to be suggesting when she writes, glossing Marx, in her seminal essay „Can the subaltern speak?" that to confront them, the subaltern, is the challenge of learning to not represent (Vertreten) them but to represent (Darstellen) ourselves. When we pretend to represent everyone, we abrogate ourselves the function of speaking for all in terms of our own standard while occluding where we stand ourselves. The challenge is to say who we are, where we stand, what we are bound to gain or loose from our place in social space. Indeed, it is as Adrienne Rich put it in one of her poems: „where do we see it from is the question".
I take Santiago Castro-Gómez`s recent book Crítica de la razón latinoamericana to be one of the most subtle, profound, suggestive, and challenging analysis of the discourses of othering that have been developed and ennunciated from Latin America. Indeed, to the othering of the Other there belongs a logic, a reason, and it is Castro-Gómez accomplishment to have developed a critique of this logic, or ratio, as it has developed in Latin America over the last hundred years. Now, clarification is required as to what „critique" means here. As I understand Castro-Gómez`s project, the essays here gathered, although it must be noted that the book has an incredible unity despite having been written over the last five years and for different occasions, constitute a critique in a dual sense: in a Kantian and in a Diltheyian sense. In other words, the colombian philosopher Castro-Gómez is interested in the purported „rational" conditions of possibility of certain claims made by Latin American philosophers concerning the epistemic privilege of the poor, the historical primacy of the people, or the sui generis character of the Latin American experience. On the other hand, Castro-Gómez is also interested in the historicity of reason itself, there is a historiography that belongs to the development of such discourses. The confluence of both notions of critique results in an archeology of the discourses of and about Latin America. Critique, therefore, is meant in the Foucaultdian sense of the excavation after the historical, discursive, and institutional conditions of possibility of certain discourses and claims about the nature of the Latin American experience. This already anticipates the breath and depth of the exercise. For in fact, Castro-Gómez`s book is one of the most sweeping, albeit deep, discussion of the last hundred years of theorizing about Latin America. The author covers the disciplines of sociology, political theory, philosophy, cultural studies, postcolonial theory, and the postmodern debate in Latin America. One may leave unconvinced but certainly not unimpressed by the wealth of knowledge and the argumentative skill of the author.
In the following I would like to provide a very general overview of the essays, for I think that the reader can benefit from knowing about the issues and positions covered in the book (I). I would like to conclude with some remarks concerning the viability of some of Castro-Gómez´s conclusions and even the cogency of the methodological approach.

I

„Critique of Latin American Reason" begins with what I think will become a standard work of reference for the debate on postmodernism in Latin America. While much has been written about this debate in and outside Latin America, nothing compares in systematicity to what Castro-Gómez has offered in this wonderful essay. Chapter one, „The challenges of postmodernity to Latin American philosophy" begins with a discussion of the opponents of postmodernity, Hinkelammert, Roig and Sánchez Vázquez being the most noteworthy, proceeds with a discussion of the development of cultural studies (Canclini, Brunner, Richard, et.al), which aligned itself with a type of „left postmodernism", and concludes with the exorcising, or clearing up, of four major misunderstanding and cliches about postmodernity. These four „cliches" are: the claim that modernity has come to an end, the end of history, the death of the subjekt, and the end of utopia. With respect to the first, Castro-Gómez notes that postmodernity is the self-realization of modernity. Here he refers to Bauman, but he in fact is making claims similar to those that Giddens, Lash and Beck have been making about modernity, namely, that it has become self-reflexive, where postmodernity is merely a new for that new heightened sense of self-awareness of contemporary societies. With respect to the claim that history has ended, Castro-Gómez affirms contra Fukuyama that the postmodern is really the re-discovery of history through the historization of everyday experience. He appeals to micro-history as an illustration of this re-historization of our social outlook, which incidently had been mesmerized by the ineluctability of putative social progress. Against the shibboleth of the death of the subject, our author affirms the possibility of moral positioning that micro-politics offers. Indeed, against either the ethical absolutism of Western humanism or the ethical manicheanism of some liberation philosophies, Castro-Gómez discerns in the postmodern celebration of the decentered subject the possibility of new moral attitudes. Finally, with respect to the claim that postmodernism signals the demise of utopian thinking, the colombian philosopher notes that postmodernism in fact allows for a new type of sober utopian criticism that is neither predicated on the impossible eradication of difference nor on the dogmatic affirmation of absolute otherness. The issue is which differences are tolerable and how are they to be brought into discussion in such a way that their respective claims may be voiced and respected. Here Castro-Gómez echoes the claims that Lyotard has made in Au Juste (Just Gaming).

Chapter two, „Modernity, Rationalization, and Cultural Identity in Latin America" looks at how theories of cultural and social modernization as rationalization have been assimilated and countered in Latin America. The author looks specifically at Pedro Morandé and Cristian Parker as providing exemplary specimens of the discourses that conflate identity with resistance to modernity and modernization. Implicit in the project of homogenization that is entailed by modernization is the dissolution of cultural identity, so the two authors that Castro-Gómez criticizes. Indeed, for Morandé and Parker, we can only find the appropriate resources to face up to the challenge of modernity if we are able to discern the cultural unity and stability of Latin America as a life world or social unit. But discovering the cultural resources that will nurture communitarian values, socialization through rites, face-to-face experience, and a sense of a transcendental Latin American ethos, requires that we commit two major sins. First, that we construct retroactively and felicitously a unified and homogeneous cultural identity that precludes difference. And second, that we in fact caricature Weber, Parsons, and even Habermas. In both cases, Castro-Gómez notes, it would be a sin of misconstruing. It is simply not the case that modernization entails merely the objectification of human relations, the standardization of social interactions, the secularization of religious values, the absorption of ethics into law, in general the colonization of the functional into the mundane and experiential. Modernity as a process of modernization has followed a myriad of paths, all obeying different imperatives and logics, and not all resulting in the complete assimilation of humanity into the cage of rationality of which Weber spoke. Modernity has also opened many horizons of humanization, valorization, and mystification. By the same token, it is just simply not the case that Latin American societies can be analyzed any longer under the rubrics that applied to semi-industrialized societies. Latin American societies are now highly literate, urbanized, and modernized, compared to fifty years ago. Latin America is no longer Macondoamérica; it has become Tama-ramérica (Brunner). A call for some sort of telluric and autochthonous cultural identity is not only an anachronism, it is highly suspect, warns Castro-Gómez.

Chapter three, on „Populism and Philosophy" takes up some of the themes touched on in the prior chapter, but now focuses them on the role or office of the philosopher. No less often than in Europe and in contrast to the professional philosopher of the North American academy, Latin American philosophers and / or intelectuals have aligned themselves with some sort of political project trying to fill the role of being its conscience and critical voice. Castro-Gómez notes that the role of the philosopher and intellectual in Latin America has accompanied and followed closely that of the caudillo. And just like the caudillo thought himself the voice of the people, the philosopher has thought himself the savior or messiah that dispenses the good word to the people. To a large extent, the criticism is levelled, philosophers have made a profession of being soothsayers or eschatons of a people. But this has entailed that they become curators of otherness and arbitrators of difference. They have abrogated for themselves the function of authenticating difference and otherness. They have in turn become what Kwame Anthony Appiah has called machines that produce otherness. Two notions that have commodified this otherness are „pueblo" und „nación". Here our author analyzes, compares and juxtaposes perspicaciously Carlos Cullen und Enrique Dussel. For him they are key representatives of this type of machinating of otherness. But we also find references to Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, Rodolfo Kusch, Vicente Ferreira da Silva, Antenor Orrego, José Vasconcelos, Rafael Rojas, Cintio Vintier, Juan Carlos Scannone, Samuel Ramos and Augusto Salazar Bondy. What has unified these philosophers has been their attempts to diagnoses the causes of the malaise that sickens Latin American society by striving after the origins of the cultural difference that separates Latin America from the West, from Europe. Castro-Gómez concludes this tour de force by undescoring that contrary to the belief that the intellectual in Latin American society has opposed the state, he has always been ist most important functionary. The intellectual, the letrado who „examines the truth of culture and assigns to persons a corresponding identity, is a form of concealment that functions internally in societies organized panoptically, where individuals are monitored and normed by the centralizing action of the state" (p. 97).

Chapter four, „Latin America, beyond the philosophy of history", plays a different note on the same key as before. In other words, this chapter pursues a critique of the philosopher as the arbitrator of difference and the catalyzer of fictitious sameness insofar as he has engaged in a philosophy of history that is pronounced from standpoint of the Latin American historicity. In a lucid and eloquent manner, Castro-Gómez demostrates how the historical discourse about Latin America historicity that has been t-mark of latinamericanists like Leopoldo Zea and Arturo Roig, which was inspired by Ortega y Gasset and José Gaos, presupposes and articulates a „transcendental subject" that as such is given apriorily. Here our author expands on Angel Rama and Michel Foucault to criticize the historicism of the great latinamericanists, who again in the name of some historical experience try to arbitrate the moral tenor and fiber of an invented cultural unity: the Latin American. This chapter harmonizes very well with the prior one in its devastating indictment of the role the philosopher and intellectual have played in Latin America. As disguised agents of the state, they have contributed to the reglamentation of Latin American society by making it the other of Europe and by making it the other of itself. As the shadow of the caudillo, as the archivist of the true history, as the letrado of the city, the Latin American intellectual has watched unseen from the tower of the panopticon.

Chapter five, „The social Imaginary and the Aesthetics of the Beautiful in Hispanic Modernism", Castro-Gómez´s turns to literature and literary criticism, although still guided by some of the ideas that give coherence to the intellectual tour he is granting us. In this chapter the issue in question is the relationship between what Iris M. Zavala has called the Hispanic modernismo and modernity, on the one hand, and high European modernism and modernity, on the other. Now, Castro-Gómez challenges Zavala´s characterization of Hispanic modernism as a poetics of anarchism that is informed by a philosophy of the beautiful that signified the Latin American response to modernity. Our author´s view is that Hispanic modernism was in fact fueled by the aesthetics of the beautiful, but that this actually aligned it with the totalizing, homogenizing imperative that drove modernity itself. This claim is made on the differentiation between the beautiful and the sublime, a distinction that Wolfgang Welsch and Lyotard had worked considerably. Now, in contrast to the European experience of modernity, the Hispanic experience was determined by the dual criticism of underdevelopment, poverty, marginalization, and U.S. imperialism along with its crass ideology of pragmatism. Common to both was a criticism of the leveling and emptying of everyday experience by capitalism. The Hispanic reaction to modernity expressed itself as, and these are some examples, the celebration of Hispanic culture (Rodó, Darío, Henríquez Ureña, etc.), the development of an ideology of Arielism to counter U.S. mediocre materialism, the exaltation of the aristocracy of life, and the yearning to the dominion of „instrumental reason", nevertheless continue to manoeuver within the aesthetics of the beautiful, that is within a totalizing logic that would like to harmonize, synthesize, sublate and assimilate heterogeneity, dissonance and dissent into one, structured whole. „Modernism then was the response to that spiritual vacuum positivism left in the intellectual elites. It was, as Octavio Paz put it, a true romanticism. Hence their yearning after reconciliation and harmony, just as the French and German romantics had done in their own time" (p. 140-141). In short, the romantic reaction of Hispanic modernism, which hark back to the utopian discourses of the 16th century, did not constitute an alternative project of emancipation before the challenge of the hegemony of instrumental reason that came to be associated with modernity. Instead, the simply consisted in a counterpart to it (p. 142).

The sixth and final chapter, „Counter-Modern Narratives and Postcolonial Theories: Walter Mignolo´s Hermeneutical Proposal" brings us to the most up to date theorizing of and about the Americas. In this chapter the issue is the possibility of a critique of the West on the basis of a different standpoint than that offered by the West itself. As Mignolo suggests, while postmodernism has been the criticism of modernity from settler ex-colonies (like the US, Australia, etc.), the postcolonial is a critique of modernity from the deep settler colonies (Latin America, where mestizaje along with syncretism were process of assimilation and / or exclusion) that still live out the drama of the original clashing encounter between Europe and the „natives". The point of this elucidation is to further a pluritopic hermeneutics that is attentive to the different sites of enuntiation from which theories claim to analyse and criticize social reality and the social imaginary. Mignolo`s pluritopic hermeneutics is pursued, therefore, through a re-appropiation of what he considers to be three Latin American postcolonial critics avant la lettre: Rodolfo Kusch, Leopoldo Zea und Enrique Dussel. Castro-Gómez takes issue not with this insightful reading of three important intellectuals from Latin America., but with the claim that what they offer are postcolonial critiques of modernity. Instead, Castro-Gómez claims, these thinkers offer us counter-modern critiques that nevertheless remain within the epistemic horizon of modernity. To this extent, they do not represent true „postcolonial" critiques, much less an exercise of „postcolonial reason". Taking recourse to Luhmann´s systems theory, our colombian philosopher claims that what we have here is a example of second order reflexion that still operates within the autopoietic discourse of the West, or modernity. Such „second order" reflexion, although important and insightful, is still pronounced in the language of Próspero, the transcendental language of historical thinking, the philosophy of origins and first beginnings. Instead, and this is what we ought to be striving after in view of the demolishing critique performed by Foucault of the modern episteme, it is a question of a „third order observation, which not only discloses the existence of observations that have been marginalized and condemned to silence, but also the epistemological order that made possible for this observations to observe themselves and thus to recognize themselves (in a contrasting light) as alterity" (p. 170).

II

It ought to be evident that I am in agreement with Santiago Castro-Gómez´s critique of the metaphysics of alterity that has informed most, if not all, of twentieth, and especially late twentieth Latin American philosophy. The discourses of difference and radical otherness are no more and no less than the discourses of identity in reverse. They are the other side of identity thinking. Similarly, I am in agreement with the general trust of the book, namely its aiming at a cultural sociology and critical theory of Latin American societies that combine self-reflexivity about its own theorizing along with a mix of politics, economic, sociology, and literary criticism. I also share and applaud Castro-Gómez´s resistance to the neo-colonizing gesture that is evidenced in some readings of Max Weber and modernization theory in general. He resists this trust of habermasian universal pragmatics and theory of communicative action by submitting theory to a relentless historization; theory is always the product of certain conditions of possibility, certain social imaginaries, certain national projects. To this extent one would have to say along with S. Lash, M. Featherstone, A. D. King, R. Robertson, and G. Therborn, that there are many „routes to / through modernity".

I am, however, in disagreement on at least the following four points: First, I take it that Castro-Gómez has failed to differentiate between identity and identification, or to be clearer between the logic of individuation through subjection that characterizes modernity, and the logic of individuation through agency that characterizes postmodern, postcolonial, global contexts. One thing is to affirm an identity, another is to construct a discourse about identification. Whereas the first, and Castro-Gómez rightly points this out, assumes a retroactively constructed homo-genous unity, usually a fictitious one, identification is a claim about social power, social control, about who and what has the legitimacy to claim recognition or to grant it. Identification is the issue of a differential social topography. Who has the autority and power to allow certain voices to speak, or to be silenced. Indeed, identification discourses are about representing ourselves (Darstellen), and not about standing in proxy for others (Vertreten). The failure to make this distinction leads our author to overlook the power of self-identifying discourses. The plurality that Castro-Gómez so much celebrates would not have been possible had not a plurality of subjects affirmed and claimed their own identification. Here our author takes for granted a historical process that took a long time to gestate and make its appearance.

Second, in his critiques of Morandé, Parker, Dussel and Scannone, Castro-Gómez fails to register an important, if not the most important, aspect of these thinker´s theoretical contribution. Modernity has been understood to be the epochal condition of society that has resulted from the modernization of society, which in turn has been conceptualized mainly as a process of secularization and disenchantment. Parker, Dussel und Morandé have noted that modernization is disenchantment of certain aspects of society and the re-enchantment of others. Modernity, thus, has become the idolatry of instrumental reason insofar as this has transubstantiated itself into the fetisch of technology and bureaucracy. Dussel makes the more explicit point that modernity as secularization over-values the contribution of Protestantism. The point that these thinkers are making is similar to the one that Castro-Gómez himself makes concerning the different routes through an to modernity. But the more deleterious consequence of this oversight is that our colombian philosopher is thus not able to register the important contributions to a critical Latin American discourse made by liberation Theology.

Third, although Castro-Gómez dutifully registers the importance of Dussel´s critique of modernity, which above all had the merit of having demostrated that modernity was not just or solely an european project, he fails to register that part and parcel of the philosophies of and about Latin America have had this „global" aspect to them - Zea, Dussel, Ribeiro, Arciniegas, O´Gormann, and recently Mignolo are cases in point. Using the vocabulary of Luhmann, and which Castro-Gómez himself appeals to, it is just not the case that the critiques of eurocentrism from Latin America have been a second order reflection made possible by a first order reflection. They have been more than that. They have placed the Americas in a global-historical context and Europa along with it. To this extent, Latin American philosophers and intellectuals have been more cosmopolitan than either their european or United States´s counterparts have been. I think that Santiago Castro-Gómez´s work itself is exemplary of this dual cosmopolitanism and preoccupation with Latin America as a historical and global entity. Now, on the same issue, namely globalization, I would have to also note that Castro-Gómez seems to work with the assumption that modernization is globalization that results in a type of humanistic laissez faire. Here I would have to refers us to the work of Anthony Giddens, David Harvey, Scott Lash and John Urry who have argued, quite convincingly, that modernity is the dual process of homogenization and hybridization, of traditionalization and innovation (see also the impressive collective work by S. Hall, D. Held, D. Hubert and K. Thompson, Modernity: An Introduction to Modern Societies, Cambridge, Blackwell, 1995). In other words, that modernity as globalization brings about not only homogenization but also heterogenization, the affirmation of local difference in view of the threat of assimilation. Modernity is global, to be curt and precise; that is, a process in which the global and the local determine each other. Indeed, one would have to say that just as Latin America was retroactively constructed by the Arielists (Rodó) and even the Calibanists (Fernández Retamar), Europe itself was retroactively constituted in view of the westernization of the world (claim made by C. West, but also by Toynbee and McNeill).

Finally, and fourthly, I am perplexed by the paradoxical effect of not knowing where Santiago Castro-Gómez himself stands. He seems to locate himself outside the map of intellectual history he himself has traced so stark and clearly. I think that this paradox is made most evident when in the last chapter our colombian philosopher refers to a third order reflection, a type of thinking that is beyond modernity, a truly postcolonial reason!. Is Castro-Gómez committing the sin that he himself has denounced in thinkers like Dussel, Kusch and even Mignolo? Is Castro-Gómez appealing to a type of thinking that is beyond the tradition, and that thus harks back to an uncontaminated origin, one not polluted by historicism, the metaphysics of alterity, or identity thinking? I doubt so. Santiago Castro-Gómez is too much the social scientist to be seduced by the purity of thinking that systems theory seems to promise. Yet, this suspicion kept haunting me as I read this disconcertingly brilliant book.