Dancing Jacobins , livre ebook

Dancing Jacobins

 
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Sánchez, Rafael, 1950–
Title: Dancing Jacobins : a Venezuelan genealogy of Latin American populism / Rafael Sánchez.
Description: First edition. | New York : Fordham University Press, 2016. | Includes bibliographical references and index.
Identifiers: LCCN 2015030357 | ISBN 9780823263653 (cloth : alkaline paper) | ISBN 9780823263660 (paper : alkaline paper)
Subjects: LCSH: Venezuela—Politics and government—1999– | Populism—Venezuela—History. | Crowds—Political aspects—Venezuela—History. | Chávez Frías, Hugo. | Presidents—Venezuela—Biography. | Politicians—Venezuela—History. | Public relations and politics—Venezuela—History. | Political culture—Venezuela—History. | Latin America—Politics and government. | Populism—Latin America—History. | BISAC: SOCIAL SCIENCE / Anthropology / Cultural. | POLITICAL SCIENCE / History & Theory. | HISTORY / Latin America / South America.
Classification: LCC F2329 .S257 2016 | DDC 987.06/42092—dc23 LC record available at http://lccn.loc.gov/2015030357
Printed in the United States of America
18  17  16    5  4  3  2  1
First edition
 
for Patsy
 
CONTENTS
List of Figures
INTRODUCTION : Populist Governmentality
Overture
  1.    Archaeologies
  2.    Bullying for Independence
  3.    Statues and Statutes
  4.    Theater for the Masses
  5.    Monumental Governmentality
Interlude: Dancing Jacobins
  6.    The French Repertoire
  7.    Scenes of the Imaginary, I: The Fragile Collection
  8.    Scenes of the Imaginary, II: Bolívar Superstar
  9.    The (Bolivarian) People Is in the Army
10.    “In My Image and Likeness”
EPILOGUE : Dancing and the Return of the Crowds
Acknowledgments
Notes
Works Cited
Index
 
FIGURES
  1    T-shirt with the gazes of Simón Bolívar
  2    Equestrian statue of Simón Bolívar with dedication by Guzmán Blanco
  3    Drawing of the Plaza Mayor by Federico Lessmann, 1850–1852
  4    Print depicting an idealized Plaza Bolívar by Ramón Irazabal, 1845
  5    Photograph of Plaza Bolívar with arcades recently demolished
  6    First map of the city of Caracas, 1578
  7    Watercolor of Plaza Bolívar by Ramón Bolet Peraza, 1880
  8    Gigantic statue of Guzmán Blanco in Caracas’ Parque El Calvario
  9    Photograph of equestrian statue of Guzmán Blanco
10    Lithograph of Guzmán Blanco Square in Caracas
11    Portrait of Antonio Guzmán Blanco by Martín Tovar y Tovar, 1880
12    Cartoon from Figaro , September 19, 1878
13    Cartoon from Figaro , September 9, 1878
14    Cartoon from El Charivari , June 27, 1878
15     Stairs with Chávez’s eyes
 
The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.
—Scott Fitzgerald
“… solemn face, sassy ass.”
—Venezuelan proverb
 
INTRODUCTION
Populist Governmentality
[T]he state … would be organized around this exclusion; it would be erected upon this empty place or installed around it.
—Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Typography
It may be that one cannot speak about that Caribbean republic without echoing, however remotely, the monumental style of its most famous historiographer, captain José Korzeniowski.
—Jorge Luis Borges, “Guayaquil”
He likes to indulge in sarcasms upon absent persons, reads only light French literature, is a bold rider, and passionately fond of waltzing. He is fond of hearing himself talk and giving toasts.
—Decoudray Holstein, quoted in Karl Marx, “Bolívar y Ponte”
BOLÍVAR’S DANCE
Simón Bolívar, Liberator of Venezuela and four other Latin American nations, loved to dance. So great was his love that in a series of instructions for the education of his nephew Fernando, he included dance among the useful knowledges and skills that, with geography, history, and calculus or geometry, should form the repertoire of any well-rounded, virtuous education (Bolívar 1997, 240–42). Praising it as “the poetry of movement,” he alluded to dancing’s ability to “bring grace and fluency to the person while also being a hygienic exercise in the temperate climates” (ibid., 242). 1 An abundance of testimonies suggest that far from being casual or isolated, this remark exemplifies the high regard in which throughout his career Bolívar held dancing. And when the opportunity arose, Bolívar himself “plunged into the dance” with relish and intensity (Harvey 2000, 206). One contemporary referred to him as “a very quick, but not a very graceful, dancer” (quoted in Harvey 2000, 208). Among numerous other allusions to his dancing, the somewhat “fantastic and surreal … spectacle of the Liberator waltzing, late into the night, around the campfires of his men” (Harvey 2000, 169) in Angostura, where for a few agonizing months his troops had been stranded, has made it into the record. But beyond all empirical evidence, Bolívar’s own mention of dancing as part of a well-rounded education attests to the preeminence in which he held this activity. In keeping with the Enlightenment ethos of this avowed Rousseau disciple, education—a school of citizenship—formed the bedrock of the virtuous republics that he was busy founding at the time.
But it is not dancing that comes to mind when the Liberator is evoked today. By and large the Bolívar that the Venezuelan public overwhelmingly recalls is an epic warrior and austere tribune of the republic, forever wrapped in his glory and suspended for posterity in one or another exemplary gesture of supreme republican virtue. Pictured as a forbiddingly monumentalized, exemplary persona in the nation’s currency, heroic iconography, civic commemorations, and official historiography, the figure of the Liberator is universally apprehended in Venezuela as the supreme embodiment and manifestation of the Venezuelan “people”—what this people necessarily looks like when contemplated whole, as a fully present, synchronic totality.
This figure is the result of a historiographical operation that amounts to a chiasmatic exchange between history and iconography. Although also happening elsewhere, especially among the so-called Bolivarian nations, 2 it is especially conspicuous in Venezuela. This operation is an exchange without loss or possible remainder between images and texts: on the one hand, iconic images construed as adamantly synchronic, thus allegedly purged of any temporal traces that might hamper their ability to convey the timeless, truly monumental truths presumably intrinsic to the figure of the Liberator, and, on the other, those diachronic texts recounting the hero’s life from cradle to grave in often excruciating detail. It commands the audience to “read” the Liberator’s exemplary story in his iconographic representations and to “see” the hero’s statuesque iconic persona, and especially his face, emerging whole from the many historiographical writings documenting his glorious life and deeds. 3
These quid pro quo exchanges absorb absence into full, self-contained presence and temporality into synchronic simultaneity, rendering every single moment of the Liberator’s existence, from his birth to his untimely death in neighboring Colombia, into one totalizing, timeless truth: the Liberator as sole founder and creator of the nation and as the sublime, necessary embodiment or manifestation of its people’s putatively pre-existing essence as an indivisible, seamless, homogeneous whole unified by bonds of equality. Thus charged with the truly monumental task of representing the nation as a timeless entity, staying identical to itself across time and space, what else, if not thoroughly statuesque, could such a figure possibly be?
Given that the Venezuelan postcolony is as intensely differentiating as it is—that it is a space of radical alteration where for complex historical reasons that I address in this book any putative originals, along with the claims to precedence and authority that often accompany them, are continuously defaced through relentless differentiation and spacing—to be effective, the above-mentioned operation, aimed at absorbing reality in its representations or the people/nation in the many monuments or effigies of Bolívar as if the two were equivalent, must be insistently iterated across time and space. Examples of this iteration are the myriad civic festivities and commemorative rituals that, with numbing regularity, are officiated around the many busts and equestrian or standing statues of the Liberator occupying the center of the many Plazas Bolívar that, in turn, are the symbolic and geographic center of every single Venezuelan town, no matter its size. Every time, these ritual occasions bring together texts and images, effigies and enveloping proclamations and ceremonies in a mutually constitutive relation that canonizes the figure of Bolívar as both the father of the people/nation and as this people’s truest, most faithful reflection or representation. One would have to add the numerous portraits of the hero adorning public offices everywhere, the backdrops of Bolívar portraits over the years grown monstrously large that dwarf Venezuela’