Blood, Ink, and Culture

Bartra Roger Bartra, Healey Mark A. Healey

Description

Pens and swords, words and blows: for Roger Bartra, the culture of ink and the culture of blood offer two contrasting approaches to the political transformations of our time. In this compilation of essays, Bartra thinks through these transformations by tracing the complex interplay between popular culture, nationalist ideology, civil society, and the state in contemporary Mexico.Written with verve over a period of twenty years, these essays-most translated into English here for the first time-suggest why Bartra has become one of Latin America's leading public intellectuals. The essays cover a broad range of topics, from the canonical forms of Mexican culture to the meaning of postnational identity in a globalizing age, from the repercussions of the 1994 Zapatista uprising to the 2000 election of Vicente Fox and the end of the PRI's seven-decade rule. Across this range of topics, Bartra imparts astute insights into a critical period of transition in Mexican history, stressing throughout the importance of democracy, the complexity of identity, and the vibrancy of the Left. In Blood, Ink, and Culture, he provides a stimulating inside look at political and intellectual life in the southern reaches of North America.

Sujets

• Histoire
• México
• Cultural studies
• History of the Americas
• Mexico

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 12 juillet 2002
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822383369
• Langue: English

Extrait

Blood,

Ink,

and

Culture

d u k e u n i v e r s i t y p r e s s

BLOOD,

INK,

AND

CULTURE

Miseries and Splendors of

the PostMexican Condition

ROGER BARTRA

Translated by

Mark Alan Healey

d u r h a m a n d l o n d o n 2 0 0 2

2002

Duke University Press

All rights reserved

Printed in the

United States of America

on acid-free paper

Typeset in Trump Mediaeval

by Wilsted & Taylor

Publishing Services

Library of Congress

Cataloging-in-Publication

Data appear on the last

printed page of this book.

Contents

Preface

vii

I. Blood and Ink The Mexican Office: Miseries and Splendors of Culture3 Tropical Kitsch in Blood and Ink15 The Bridge, the Border, and the Cage: Cultural Crisis and Identity in the Post-Mexican Condition44 Method in a Cage: How to Escape from the Hermeneutic Circle?

II. The PostMexican Condition The Malinche’s Revenge: Toward a Postnational Identity61 Missing Democracy65 The Political Crisis of1982 78 Journey to the Center of the Right90 The Crisis of Nationalism104 From the Charismatic Phallus to the Phallocratic Office133

III. Miseries and Splendors of the Left Our Own Nineteen Eighty-Four139 Between Disenchantment and Utopia155 Nationalism, Democracy, and Socialism160 Is the Left Necessary?180 Lombardo or Revueltas?191 Marxism on the Gallows203 Great Changes, Modest Proposals216

51

Postscript The Dictatorship Was Not Perfect

Glossary235 Bibliography239 Index245

223

Preface

There is a culture of blood and a culture of ink. These two cultures confront each other and intertwine with each other. I would like to say we are leaving an age of blood behind, to enter into an age of ink, but there is little basis for such opti- mism. At best, we might think that the space of ink has spread considerably. In fact, it seems to me that—with ideologies in crisis—we can see a return, and per- haps a strengthening, of this tragic duality. The culture of blood exalts identity, religious fidelity, revolutionary struggle, and the defense of the fatherland. The culture of ink praises the multiplicity of writing and drives its arguments home on printed paper, not on the battlefield. The culture of blood is stained with the red color of life, but it is willing to trade that life in, for the good of the class or the homeland. It contrasts with the black- ness that stains the minimal arguments of writers, although sometimes the cul- ture of ink exchanges its ideas for a plate of beans. To strengthen these meta- phors, we could turn to the ancient Nahua’s images of black and red ink(tlilli, tlapalli)in a legendary land, the country of wisdom. But even there, in the inks that the wise used to paint the codices, this unsettling duality made its appear- ance, confronting the dangerous mysteries of the night with the bloody forces 1 of life. Obviously, the essays in this book are the result of drinking ink, as Shake- speare put it, and eating paper. Many writers and intellectuals have abandoned the old activism of the political culture of blood, and our texts sprinkle ink over the history pages that others would print with tides of violence. We no longer

1. On Nahua uses of red and black ink in codices, see Elizabeth Hill Boone,Stories in Red and Black: Pictorial Histories of the Aztecs and Mixtecs(Austin: University of Texas Press,2000). [Trans.]

live in the region of the open veins, not because exploitation and misery have come to an end, but because we believe that not everything in this world is rivers 2 and swamps of blood. We are no longer pleased by the invocations of a revolu- tionary Eucharist that transforms the bread and wine of daily life into martyred bodies and sublime hemorrhages. Yet with the collapse of political dogma, part of the Left has unfortunately drawn closer to religious symbolism, feeding the broken idols of traditional orthodoxy with the blood of the suffering. Back in the eighties, we could still describe cultural battles as a confrontation between what I called, using the mythology dreamed up by Julio Cortázar, the 3 ‘‘cronopyof thefamas’’and the‘‘famisticsof thecronopios.’’The division was between epicurean exuberance and chronicles of barbarism (also known as mag- ical realism) on the one side and a refined serenity of gothic souls and iron-bound structuralism on the other. This opposition could divide, to put it crudely and schematically, Gabriel Garcı´a Márquez or Carlos Fuentes from Jorge Luis Borges or Octavio Paz. By contrast, at century’s end what is more dominant, it seems to me, is the opposition between the cultures of blood and ink, although that ear- lier duality has not disappeared. A series of events has set a new dynamic in mo- tion: the collapse of socialism and the rise of ethno-religious regional conflicts; the erosion of authoritarianism and the expansion of democracy and globaliza- tion; the wars in Iraq and the former Yugoslavia. In Mexico the end of the millen- nium is marked by the rupture of1988, the appearance of Zapatista guerrillas in 1994, and the terminal crisis of the authoritarian political system in2000. The images of blood and ink were imposed on me by the course of events, espe- cially the Zapatista uprising in Chiapas. The Zapatista army threatened to wash the country in blood, but what it actually produced was a vast ink stain: fortu- nately, more letters than bullets came out of Chiapas. Since then, the metaphors about the battle between blood and ink have showered down on us. Some seemed to take their unsettling exclamations from the Koran: ‘‘If your enemies attack you, wash them in their own blood.’’ Some of us replied: ‘‘Let’s wash our- selves in the enemy’s ink.’’ That is to say: let’s listen to others’ arguments, let’s learn to read inks of various colors, and let’s dip our pens in pessimistic inks be- fore we plunge them into the sanguine optimism of coagulated identities.

2. This is a reference to the sixties leftist classic by Eduardo Galeano,Open Veins of Latin Amer ica: Five Centuries of the Pillage of a Continent,trans. Cedric Belfrage (New York: Monthly Re- view Press,1973). [Trans.] 3 . The terms are drawn from Julio Cortá zar, Cronopios and Famas,trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Pantheon Books,1969). Roughly speaking,cronopiosare intuitive, effusive, spontaneous, expansive, temperamental, and disorganized;famasare rigorous, restrained, prudent, scientific, dispassionate, and ordered. [Trans.]

viii

Preface

Of course, the exaltation of ink has its risks. Next to the learned stand a legion of pen pushers; the unpleasant experts in friendly inks conceal disputes; and multicolored plurality is often diluted into halftones of opportunism and inco- herence. Once one sets out to sweat ink, the arduous labor of putting ideas down on paper often ends up producing blank pages. But a blank page after nights of sterile sleeplessness is far better than the fire-eating verbiage of bloody-minded politicians ready to bleed civil society dry in the slaughterhouse of the father- land. I prefer a useless ink sucker to a bloodsucker who lives off the consanguine loyalties of political mafias. And even worse are those leeches of ethnic identity who call for battle against neoliberal vampires: the result is the atrocious war that tears Balkanized societies apart. All this is done in the name of the blood with which borderlines are drawn between cultures and religions, tongues and nations. These essays revolve around themes of identity, intellectuals, and the politi- cal culture of the Left. They form part of larger polemics, and they welcome de- bate. They open with an essay offering a critique of the Mexican calling—that nationalist will to define Mexicanness—and its worship of blood. Another essay is articulated around irony, referring to the Zapatista movement as ‘‘Tropical Kitsch,’’ that cloying form of the art of politics which takes advantage of the pop- ular taste for sensationalism and sentimentalism. Since this essay was cooked up over seven years (1994–2001), it is soaked through with the debates it pro- voked or responded to. In one way or another, the essays gathered in this book critique the culture of blood: they celebrate the post-Mexican condition, they re- ject the wailing wall some want to substitute for the fallen Berlin Wall, they crit- icize nationalism, and they praise the Left—but as a democratic luxury, not a historical necessity. And they include, as a guide for the perplexed Left, some thoughts on how to escape from the hermeneutic cage. In closing, I should confess that I have spilled a few drops of blood into the inkpot I dip my pen into. I have noticed that without those drops, the ink never dries. They say the same happens with those who invoke blood rights: if they don’t mix the life-giving fluid with ink, it evaporates without leaving any trace. This mix, and others, are what keep hope alive.

Preface

ix