Santiago Castro-Gómez
Translated by Adriana Johnson

In his renowned programmatic article from 1937, Horkheimer established a distinction between two conceptions of "theory" (Horkheimer 1974, 223-271). The first of them refers to a series of propositions whose validity lies in its correspondence with an object already constituted prior to the act of representation. This radical separation between subject and object of knowledge converts theory into a pure activity of thought, and the theorist into a disinterested spectator who is limited to describing the world as it "is". Such an idea of "theory", which considers the object of study to be a series of facticities and the subject to be the passive element of an act of knowing, is identified by Horkheimer as "traditional". To this theory, he opposes a second Model which he designates "critical theory". In contrast to traditional theory, critical theory considers that both science and the reality it studies are the product of a social praxis, which means that the subject and object of knowledge find themselves socially performed. The object is not simply "there", deposited before us and waiting to be apprehended, nor is the subject merely the notary of reality. Both, subject and object, are the result of complex social processes. The fundamental task of critical theory is therefore to reflect upon the structures from which both social reality as well as the theories that seek to account for it are constructed, including, of course, critical theory itself.

Even when Horkheimer's project was conceived as a tool in the struggle against the positivism of his time, it could, it seems to me, be very useful for drawing up a map of modern theories on culture. I will argue then that such theories can be divided into two basic groups: those that perceive culture as "natural facticity", that is, that approach their object as if it were rooted in "human nature"; and those that, on the contrary, consider culture to be a realm structured by praxis, that is, a social construction of which theoretical practice itself is a part. Following Horkheimer, I will call the first group "traditional theory" and the second "critical theory" of culture. In what follows, I will identify some characteristic elements of "traditional theory" and then contrast these with the concept of "Geoculture" developed by postcolonial theories. With this I propose to present postcolonialism as a critical theory of culture in times of globalization or, parodying Jameson's phrase, as a "cultural critique of late capitalism".

1. The metaphysics of the subject and the traditional concept of culture

Any consideration of the traditional theory of culture should begin with the following epistemological reflection: culture becomes the "object" of knowledge only when "Man" constitutes himself as a "subject" of "history". The concepts of "culture", "history", "subject" and "Man" refer to the same genealogical root which, chronologically speaking, emerges and consolidates itself between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before this era, something like culture was not "thinkable", simply because the episteme which made the concept's formation possible had not yet been configured. If we limit ourselves solely to the types of theories arisen in the West, we will see that neither in Greece nor Rome, nor in the Christian Middle Ages, was a theory of culture in its "traditional", much less "critical" sense, possible. This was due to the fact that morals, politics and knowledge were viewed as simple prolongations of cosmological laws, that is, as a set of natural institutions ordered around the consummation of a cosmologically predetermined end (telos).

For Aristotle, truth, goodness and justice are impossible without considering the "basic principles" which govern the cosmos, because the purpose of science, legislation and morals is to manifest "being insofar as being", that is, the natural order such as it "is" and not as it "appears." For Aristotle, the reflection on the social life of men does not pertain to "theoretical sciences", which addresses only the "basic principles" of things, but to a type of minor and less dignified knowledge designated "practical sciences". First philosophy or metaphysics occupies the pinnacle of the entire gamut of knowledges, given that its task is to establish the most universal notions. The object of Metaphysics are the immutable laws that rule the cosmos, and it is for this reason the most abstract, the most exact, and the most general of all sciences. In contrast, sciences like politics and economy derive their general concepts from metaphysics because their object of study (human life) has no autonomy whatsoever in relation to the laws of the cosmos. The same is true for the fields of morality and legislation. Since the laws of social life have a cosmological foundation, independent of human will, the wisdom of the good ruler consists precisely in recognizing this foundation and ensuring that the laws of the polis are organized around the fulfillment of man's "natural dispositions."

The crux of all this is the following: in an epistemological order in which morals, politics and knowledge are thought to be dependent on the laws that reign the cosmos, the emergence of an object of knowledge called "culture" is impossible. It is only when human life in its totality is perceived as a dynamic process governed by laws created by man himself, and which are, therefore, not simple corollaries of natural laws, that it is possible to speak of "culture" in both the "traditional" and "critical" senses of the concept. The modern idea of "Man", understood as a being which produces himself in history, that is, that creates cultural values, can only emerge in the vacuum left behind with the disappearance of classical cosmology.

It is then only during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries that the idea of culture as a space of specifically human values, contrasted to "nature", begins to consolidate itself. Under this idea, culture constitutes that sphere of moral, religious, political, philosophical and technological values that permits man to "humanize himself", that is, escape the tyranny of the "state of nature". If, as mentioned above, the metaphysics of the cosmos turned social life into a purely derivative element, whose dynamics reflected the general laws of the universe, now man saw himself as the producer of his own forms of political and social organization. That is, nature ceased to be the site to which man reverted in order to extract moral lessons or contemplate divine glory, and came to be seen instead as an "object" to be put at the service of human interests. The metaphysics of the cosmos is substituted by the metaphysics of the human. The "world" which modern thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes and Kant referred to was not the Greco-Roman-Medieval "cosmos", in which social life was a simple "reflection" of predetermined laws, but a world created by man in his image and likeness.

But if the world is a human construction and not an inexorable reflection of the lex aeterna, then social life assumes an as-yet unthought dimension: temporality. Neither Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Thomas Aquinas contemplated time as an axis from which human action derived meaning because this was cosmologically predetermined. Since man was not responsible for the creation of something "new", time was nothing but the actualization of potentialities established beforehand and for ever. But when Man was perceived to be the sole architect of his own destiny, then it could be said that humanity lay in the capacity to "humanize", that is, in Man's ability to constitute himself in time through the creation of his own world: culture. The first characteristic of the traditional concept of culture is then the idea that the gradual humanization of the species is a process that occurs in time, in history, and is not already determined from an outside by cosmological laws.

Now then, if through culture man slowly liberates himself from the chains imposed by nature, then cultural forms acquire ever increasing degrees of perfection to the extent that they permit the unfolding of the "spirit", that is, the exercise of human freedom. For Hegel, the cultural forms that most closely resemble nature possess less dignity that those that are more abstract. This is because nature belongs to the sphere of necessity, while spirit is the proper site of freedom. Thus, for example, the religions which practice naturalist cults are inferior to Christianity which possesses a more abstract concept of divinity (God is Spirit). The same is true of artistic manifestations: those which imitate nature or revolve around the purely figurative are inferior to those which privilege pure form, since these latter have managed to escape the tyranny of material contents, which do not befit the free expression of spirit. From Hegel's hand we find thus a second characteristic of the traditional concept of culture: the privilege of so called "high culture" over and above "popular culture". The lettered, or, as Weber would say, "rationalized" forms of culture (musical codification, secularized art, literature, philosophy, historiography) are the most elevated, given that through them man can reflect upon himself and recognize his own spiritual vocation. The human groups that have not been able to accede to the reflexivity of high culture remain rooted in "youth" and find themselves in need of the "illumination" radiating from lettered peoples, particularly philosophers. They, the lettered and the philosophers, are those people who can elevate themselves above cultural contingencies and apprehend their object from the outside, with the same gaze of a Deus absconditus that condescends to contemplate the world.

But if the evolution of culture is the outcome of a historical process, then freedom can also be objectified, particularly in the sphere of political life. A Nation that has reached maturity is one that has not only developed a "high", that is lettered culture, but one that has been able to constitute itself politically as a "Nation-State". For Hegel, the State is the true bearer of culture, of a people's "national spirit". Only in the State does freedom become objective because it is there that all individuals are reconciled with the ethical substance of the collectivity. Individuals must, therefore, subordinate themselves to the State, since it is only through its mediation that they can learn to be conscious of who they are, what they want, and what their destiny is as members of a single nation. Herder, Rousseau, Montesquieu and Fichte also considered the State to be the bearer of a people's national identity. In contrast to the contractualists, they thought the State should be established on the basis of geographical conditions, customs, language and the ways of thinking of the people over which it rules. This brings us to the third characteristic of the traditional concept of culture: the identity between "people", "nation" and "culture." The fullest objectification of culture, understood as freedom from imperatives coming from an exterior, is the historical construction of the national-popular State. Individuals can only experience true freedom as members of a State which juridically reflects what Montesquieu called the general spirit, Hegel the Volksgeist and Rousseau the general will.

2. Postcolonialism as a critical theory of culture

Transferring the distinction introduced by Horkheimer to the present subject, it can be said that the difference between the traditional and critical theories of culture is the recognition, by the latter, that its object of study is not a natural facticity but a social construction. Culture is not discerned, then, as the site of freedom, that which protects us from the tyranny of nature, but as the network of relations of power which produces values, beliefs and forms of knowledge. Theory is, in turn, not taken for a set of analytical propositions uncontaminated by praxis, but as an integral part of this net of inclusions and exclusions called "social power". The theorist is not a passive subject who assumes an attitude of scientific objectivity and neutrality, but he or she is traversed by the same social contradictions of the object under scrutiny. Subject and object form part of the same lattice of powers and counter-powers from which neither can escape.

One of the fundamental tools of critical theory, one which distances it substantially from traditional theory, is the notion of "totality". This concept implies that society is a sui generis entity, whose workings are relatively independent of the activity of individuals composing it. The social group is something more than the total sum of its members and constitutes a system of relations whose properties are different from those of the particular elements that enter into relation with each other. Society's "plus" compared with its individuals lies, then, in the set of relations that individuals establish among themselves, so that what counts for critical theory is the kind of transaction or negotiation that takes place between subject and structure. Neither can the life of the structure do without the subjects, as Durkheim and Luhmann proposed, nor can the life of the subjects do without the structure, as the comunitarians would have it.

This concept of "totality" certainly breaks with the metaphysics of the cosmos, because the laws that structure the life of men are not seen as simple reflections of a divine or cosmological normativity; but it also breaks with the metaphysics of the subject, because social life is no longer considered a transparent extension of human consciousness and will. This means that social life does not free man from the tyranny of nature, guiding him via culture to a gradual humanization, but subjects him instead to a new kind of heteronomy, this time under the form of "systems" that are not entirely under his control. Such systems are "second nature" in the sense that they exert an external coercion on individuals and become, as Giddens demonstrates, the conditions of possibility for human action. But the action of individuals reverts, in turn, on the workings of the systems, impelling their historical transformations.

In contrast to the traditional concept of culture, a critical theory of culture posits, then, that social life is not the reign of freedom but that of contradiction; that, because social life does not depend entirely on the intentionality of consciousness but rather on the dialectic between subject and structure, it generally has "perverse consequences", that is, outcomes that escape all rational planning. It can even be the case, as Beck, Giddens and Bauman show, that these perverse results do not emerge from a lack of rationality, but rather as a consequence of it, as the crisis of the so-called "project of modernity" teaches us (Beck 1986). Organized social relations, which for traditional theory appear to be the way out of the "state of nature" and an entry into the spiritual or "civil" site of culture, are perceived by critical theory as a space of struggle and confronting interests.

In the field of postcolonial theories, the concept of "totality" is used in a category that was coined by the North American social philosopher Immanuel Wallerstein, but has been widely used by such different theoreticians as Mignolo, Dussel, Quijano and Spivak. I am referring to the category of the "world-system". From a hermeneutical point of view, the interest of this category lies in its reference to a structure of global dimensions, broadening thus the interpretative horizon of the "national-society" which functioned as the classical referent of social sciences since the nineteenth-century. The world-system is a sui generis set of social relations configured in the sixteenth-century as a consequence of the European expansion over the Atlantic.

The world-system is a network of interdependencies which covers a single space of social action. Sociologically speaking, this means that, from the sixteenth-century onwards, the life of an ever greater number of persons in the whole world began to be linked by a planetary division of labor, coordinated by smaller systemic units denominated "Nation-States". The differences between groups and societies that integrate the world-system does not depend on their "level of industrial development" or "degree of cultural evolution", but on the functional position they occupy within the system. The differences are thus not temporal but structural. Some of the system's "social zones" occupy the function of "centers", meaning by which that they monopolize the hegemony, while others occupy a "peripheral" function because they are relegated to the margins of the structures of power.

For one sector of contemporary traditional theory, this is an uncomfortable perspective because it casts doubt upon the idea that the cognitive, moral and expressive development of different societies obeys the "unfolding" of specific competencies of the "human species". Even while accepting the idea that the world-system functions as an a priori that quasi-transcendentally organizes the social experience of the three spheres signaled by Habermas, we do not find ourselves before a transcendental invested with anthropological status. It is rather a matter of a historical structure, with a genesis in the "long sixteenth century", a maximum systemic equilibrium between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and which currently finds itself in a moment of instability and disarticulation. From this point of view, the true, the good and the beautiful, that is the set of historic objectifications of human activity we call "culture" is not rooted in the species' transcendental abilities, but rather in relations of power that are socially construed and which have acquired a global character. "Culture" is not then indicative of a level of aesthetic, moral or cognitive "development" of an individual, a group or a society but rather, as Wallerstein affirms, the world-system's field of ideological battles (Wallerstein 1994).

We arrive thus at the second of the characteristics of the modern world-system: the "colonial" logic which since the sixteenth century has conditioned its workings. In effect, the historical formation of the world-system was fueled during a long time by the incorporation or military "annexation" of new geographic zones by States who achieved a hegemonic position within the system. But this process of colonization was something constitutive and not merely additive to its logic of operation, since the basic imperative of the world-system has been, and continues to be, the incessant accumulation of capital. To accomplish this, it was necessary that the hegemonic States of the world-system (Spain and Portugal first, then Holland, France and England, and later the United States) open up new sources of supply for their internal markets, with the goal of increasing the margin of benefits. The power relations configured by the world-system acquired thus a "colonial" character, which affects not only the old European colonies, but also a great number of peoples within the colonizing countries themselves. The Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano has coined the concept of "coloniality of power" to indicate this very situation (Quijano 1999, 99-109).

But what has all of this to do with culture? A great deal, if we keep in mind the fact that the social division of labor between central and peripheral zones, both at the general level of the world-system, as well as in the interior of its basic units, the Nation-States, needed to be legitimized ideologically by hegemonic groups or contested, also ideologically, by subaltern groups. While traditional theory "naturalizes" culture, projecting it into an ideal space in which order and harmony (aesthetics of the beautiful) reign, critical theory emphasizes the political and social, that is the conflictive, nature of culture. In other words, culture is seen as the battle-field for the control of meaning. This means that critical theory does not isolate culture from the process of its social production and from its structural function inside the world-system and its subsystems, but rather advances towards the question of the geopolitical economy of culture. Postcolonial theories radicalize this question, by suspecting that the "cultural logic" of the world-system is traversed by the social grammar of colonization.

Seen from this perspective, "culture" has been the space wherein the "coloniality of power" has been legitimized or impugned from diverse social perspectives. For reasons of space, I will consider only the ways in which the coloniality of power was legitimized in ideological terms since the sixteenth century, and not occupy myself here with the type of contestation to which it has been submitted by what Wallerstein has named "anti-systemic movements". As I will argue, the colonial annexation of new zones of the world-system was accompanied by the birth of two ideologies which served as "cultural pillars" of the modern world-system: racism and universalism.

Although social hierarchies have always been justified on the basis of the presumed inferiority or superiority of some peoples over another, the concept of "race" is a theoretical construction characteristic of the modern world-system. It arises in the heat of the debates which took place in Spain concerning the necessity to submit the American indians to colonial domination, and it takes form in institutions like the encomienda and resguardo. The idea of race served as a criteria for the social differentiation between the "white" colonizers and the "mulatto" or "mestizo" colonized, seen as inferior for their color and social origins. Already in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, once the hegemony of the world-system had migrated from Spain towards France and Holland, the concept of race was incorporated into a theoretical register denominated "philosophy of history". Here, the hierarchical differences between peoples - and, concomitantly, their corresponding "place" in the social division of labor - are justified according to the level of "development", measured on a temporal-evolutionary scale. In consequence, the peoples that appear more "advanced" on this scale could legitimately occupy the territory of the more "backwards" peoples and bestow the benefits of civilization upon them, with no troubling pangs of conscience. Already in the nineteenth century, and coinciding with the consolidation of British hegemony, the concept of race is finally unhitched from the philosophy of history and "scientificized", that is, incorporated into the methodology of positive sciences and the nascent social sciences. The superiority of some races over others is seen as the inevitable result of the evolution of the species; it is an inexorable law of nature, capable of being empirically "verified".

What interests me here is to demonstrate the intrinsic relationship between the colonial idea of "race" and the traditional theory of culture. If the maximization of benefits was the systemic imperative that impelled the territorial annexation of colonies, then it was necessary to justify why their inhabitants needed to be used as inexpensive labor for the benefit of the colonizers. Indians, blacks and mulattos can and should be enslaved because they share a series of values, beliefs and forms of knowledge which impede them from attaining the fruits of civilization on their own. There is something in their "culture", and perhaps in their very biology, which sets them at odds with the universalistic values shared by the white man. There was no point of contact possible between the "culture" of the colonizers and colonized because, they either possessed two different "natures", as Ginés de Sepúlveda posited, or, they possessed a single nature but in different phases of its historical "evolution". In either case, we find ourselves before a naturalist or ideological concept of culture which legitimizes the social and political inequalities of the world-system.

The intrinsically colonial character of the world-system also traverses the second ideology considered in this essay: universalism. If racism serves to legitimize the inferiority of the colonized or subaltern groups in the colonies, universalism sanctions the superiority of the colonizers or hegemonic groups at the national level. As an heir of what I have in this essay called the "metaphysics of the cosmos", modern universalism is, above all, an epistemological posture. It proclaims the possibility of acceding to objectively valid knowledges concerning the physical and social world, once the adequate "method" is found. It affirms that the "validity" (Geltung) of this method is guaranteed by its neutrality in terms of value, since it transcends the motivations historically conditioned by "culture". Its ground is not thus history and its traditions but a faculty shared by all men, independently of race, gender, age or social condition: reason.

Viewed from the perspective of the world-system, universalism is fully integrated into the logic that Max Weber denominated "rationalization". It is not now the inscrutable will of God that decides the happenings of individual and social life, but man himself who, using reason, is able to decipher the inherent laws of nature in order to place them at his service. This rehabilitation of man goes hand in hand with the idea of a domination over nature through science and technology, and whose true prophet was Francis Bacon. In fact, nature is presented by Bacon as man's great "adversary", the enemy to be overcome in order for the contingencies of life to be domesticated and the Regnum hominis established over the earth (Bacon, 1984). The value-free character of science and technology was converted thus into the ideological guarantee of the "modernization" promoted by the hegemonic States of the world-system and, concretely, by the bourgeoisie of these States. The political institutionalization of the Regnum hominis dreamt by Bacon and Descartes becomes thus a problem of technical character, addressed by economists, social scientists, educators, administrators and experts of all kinds. The founding imperative was to eliminate the "cultural" barriers which obstructed the expansion of capital and the maximization of profits.

On an internal level, universalism served as the instrument of juridical and social control within Nation-States. Insofar as it was an integral part of the modern world-system, the structural function of the State was to "adjust" the body and mind of all individuals belonging to a specific territoriality to the global imperative of production. All state politics and institutions (school, constitutions, law, hospitals, prisons, etc.) were canalized towards the disciplining of the passions through work. The purpose was to link all citizens to the global process of production through the subjection of their time and body to a series of norms that were defined and sanctioned by scientific-technical knowledge. In order for this to work, the State needed to be able to guarantee an "impartial" juridical framework within which the people under its jurisdiction could be contemplated as "subjects of law". The juridical-political function of constitutions was, precisely, to invent citizenship, that is, create a formal field of legibility which would, on a micro-physical level, render the macro-structural imperative of the accumulation of capital viable.

At this point it is necessary to clarify the following: although postcolonial theories take up the micro-physics of power analyzed by Michel Foucault, they complement his perspective however, by working with what constituted the French theorists "blind spot": relations of power are marked by macro-physical imperatives of a colonial character. Thus, for example, citizenship was not only restricted to men who were married, literate, heterosexual and proprietors but also, and especially, to men who were "white". In turn, the individuals that fell outside the space of citizenship were not only the homosexuals, prisoners, mental patients and political dissidents Foucault had in mind, but also blacks, indians, mestizos, gypsies, Jews, and now, in times of globalization, "ethnic minorities", immigrants and Ausländern. In this way, the genealogy of the micro-structures of power is broadened by postcolonial theories into a genealogy of the macro-structures of "long duration". It can be said, then, that postcolonial theories take the program of the "ontology of the present", masterfully begun by Foucault, to its ultimate consequences.

I want to conclude by pointing out two things. The first is that, at least until the first half of the twentieth century, racism and universalism configured the dominant "Geoculture" of the modern world-system. Racism is a legacy of what Dussel calls the "first modernity", the Hispano-Catholic one, while universalism is a legacy of the "second modernity", of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its extension into nineteenth-century positivism. Both ideologies created a "representational" site - that is, a "culture" - that legitimated the unprecedented mobilization of the labor force and financial resources, of military campaigns and scientific discoveries, of educational programs and juridical reforms, in short, of this whole set of Faustian politics of social control, never before seen in history, which we know as the "project of modernity". Of course - and this is the other side of the story - the unequal distribution of riches also generated anti-systemic movements which were successful to the extent that they could "negotiate" with the hegemonies created by the system.

The second point is of a diagnostic nature. If one of the characteristics of globalization is to have mined the capacity of the Nation-States to "organize" all of social life, then we find ourselves before a profound structural crisis of the modern world-system. This, as has been noted, was organized on the basis of smaller units, Nation-States, which guaranteed the fulfillment of the imperative that assured the internal equilibrium of the system: the incessant accumulation of capital through the annexation of new territories. But at the outset of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in a situation in which there are no longer any territories to annex and in which social life is organized by supra-national instances. The slightly ambiguous category of "postcoloniality" points towards this situation. The end of territorial colonialism, propelled by hegemonic Nation-States, runs parallel to the exhaustion of the "project of modernity", that is, with the end of the institutional capacity of these States to exert control over the social lives of peoples. But this does not necessarily mean that the world-system is mortally wounded, nor that its structural "geoculture" has ceased to be operational. Rather, we are in a historical moment in which there are no colonizing countries, but only countries colonized by a capital that has become invisible, that has assumed a "spectral" character.

Faced with this new situation, the critical theory of society faces the challenge of recuperating the horizon of totality which contemporary cultural critique seems to have lost in the name of the postmodern attack on meta-narratives, running the risk of converting itself into a new traditional theory. A cultural analysis that limits itself to thematizing the exclusions of gender, race, ethnicity or knowledge, that is the homogenization of differences, is not sufficient to articulate a critic of capitalism. It is necessary to think the world-system that "structured" social subjects and to ask why this historical project of social control ("modernity") has exhausted itself, yielding to new forms of global (re)structuration. In other words, it is necessary to think the historical transformations suffered by the Geoculture of the modern world-system, in its present moment of crisis. This is, to my mind, the main agenda for a social theory that understands itself as a "critical theory of culture."

NOTES
I do not want to emphasize here any "progress" of thought or any historical teleology. Critical theory does not substitute traditional theory after the eighteenth century. What I want to underscore is that it is at this time that the material conditions are created for the emergence of a type of theorization that was impossible beforehand.
Here, "relatively independent" means that the social totality is not an entity that is ontologically prior to the individual elements that constitute it, and in which these simply assume predetermined "roles", as is proposed by classic structuralism, but rather that the reproduction of social life takes place as a process of negotiation between the whole and its parts. Giddens has shown that this process implies a certain "structuration" of subjects but also and at the same time a "subjectivization" of structures.
By "postcolonial theory" I understand a model of theorization that a) interrogates the material conditions of possibility of the production of knowledge in modernity and b) specifically points to the colonial experience as one of these conditions. Although considerations like those of Walter Mignolo, and his distinction between the different critical theories' loci of enunciation are suggestive, they are not relevant for my argument here. (Mignolo 1998).
Both Dussel and Wallerstein have pointed out - confronting other Marxist theorists like Eric Wolf and André Gunder Frank - that in contrast to previous social systems, which revolved around a kind of centralized political unity, we live today in a system which gathers different political units around a single world-economy: capitalism. Furthermore, the modern world-system is the only historical structure in which the incessant accumulation of interests is taken as a value in and of itself. In all other social structures, the accumulation of riches was perceived as a means for obtaining something, and not as an end per se. The maximization of surplus value converts itself thus into individual or collective virtue, rewarded or punished by an institution called the "market".
I emphasize the idea of "social zone", to avoid confusing it with the concept of "geographical zone". By "social zone" I understand a hegemonic set of social relations (what Marx in his moment called "class") which is primarily configured under the political auspices of the national State, but whose structural function transcends in some cases the political limits set down by the State. Thus, for example, the hegemonic social zones in the European countries in the nineteenth century certainly functioned as "centers" of the interior of their own societies, but their economic and cultural hegemony also extended itself to all the peripheral social zones of the world-system. In addition, the appropriation of surplus value, generated by labor in the colonies, was concentrated in these peripheral zones. In this sense, as we shall see, the hegemony of power assumes a "colonial" character.
In order to reproduce itself, the world-system has developed institutional mechanisms (established initially in Nation-States and now in the global logic of consumption) to materially award and punish individuals according to whether or not they adjust themselves to the imperative of the maximization of benefits. Horkheimer and Adorno spoke in this sense of the universalization of "instrumental reason", even if they erroneously extrapolated this concept until it accounted for the totality of human history.
Formulated in this way, the problem we are posing eludes any determinism of the "base" on the economic "superstructure" of society. The critical theory of society proposes a dialectic between subject and structure, in which neither element can be thought independently of the other, since both mutually condition each other. In other texts I have dealt with this idea more extensively (Castro-Gómez 1996; 1998).
Racism and universalism are "ideological knowledges" configured in the sixteenth century and which serve to legitimize and give meaning to Spain's economic and political dominion over her colonies. After the seventeenth-century, when Spain began to cede the hegemony of the world-system to other European powers (France, England) these ideological knowledges began to permeate the "scientific practices" which lie at the origin of what we know today as "social sciences". From this point of view, social sciences, as they were institutionalized in the nineteenth-century and after, did not succeed in establishing an "epistemological rupture" with ideological knowledges such as racism and universalism. Concepts elaborated by the social sciences such as "modernity", "society" and "progress" are founded upon ideological knowledges configured in the sixteenth-century. A genealogy of social sciences and humanities should begin thus in Spain, and not in France or England.
In this sense, Magnus Mörner speaks of a racial "pigmentocracy" based upon the concept of "racial purity" (Mörner 1969, 60-77). This is, then, an ethnicization of the labor force.
In fact, as Edward Said, has demonstrated, social sciences, especially anthropology, ethnology and orientalism generate their languages on the basis of the colonial experience and as a consequence of the occupation of overseas colonies by France and England.
It should be remember that when I refer to "center" and "periphery" I am not speaking only of the relationship between metropolis and colonies, but also of the relationships between hegemonic and subaltern groups within European national states.
Foucault's renunciation of methodological holism impedes him from tracing a genealogy of structures of "long duration". For the critique Foucault will level at the category of totality, see the discussion proposed by Jay 1984: 510-537.
This is the case, for example, of the labor movements in Europe and the United States, or of Third World "national liberation" movements.
This idea of the end of modernity as a "project" of political-social control has been developed in Castro-Gómez 1998, 78-102.

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CONTRIBUTORS´ NOTE
Santiago Castro-Gómez is an Assistant Professor in Philosophy at the Universidad Javeriana de Bogotá and investigator at the Instituto de Estudios Sociales y Culturales PENSAR of the same university. His books include: Crítica de la razón latinoamericana (1996), Teorías sin disciplina (1997) y Pensar (en) los intersticios (1999). He is currently working on a geneology of social sciences and humanities in Colombia.