Comparative Cultural Studies and Latin America

Towards a Map of the Current Critical Debate

149 Towards a Map of the Current Critical Debate Julio Ortega (Translated from the original Spanish by Sophia A. McClennen and Corey Shouse ) In the current post-theoretical scene, where what Ernesto Laclau calls a “contamination ” between theory and the empirical is taking place, intercultural studies has acquired a distinctive role (vii). Laclau establishes a positivist solution to the current dilemma: The destiny of theory in our century is a peculiar one. On the one hand we are certainly witnessing the progressive blurring of the classical frontiers which made “theory” a distinctive theoretical object : in an era of generalized critique of the metalinguistic function, the analysis of the concrete escapes the rigid straitjacket of the distinction theoretical framework/case studies. But, on the other hand, precisely because we are living in a posttheoretical age, theory cannot be opposed by a flourishing empiricity liberated from theoretical fetters. What we have, instead, is a process of mutual contamination between “theory” and “empiria.” (vii) Probably the first characteristic element of the post-theoretical period is a prudence , even reticence, before the temptation to propose another theoretical model as superior, syncretic and summary relief. At the same time, there is a serious challenge to the critical possibility of a space of dialogue—a dialogue less determinate and vertical, where new reencounters come to play between reading, text, context and discursive genre. This time that interplay produces another object (a literary and cultural object conceptualized as process) that shows and demonstrates itself to be as porous as it is persistent, as dense as it is free. This rush to resignification is, moreover, in such a fluid state, that it casts a parodic emphasis over recent theoretical hyperinterpretation. We might con- Julio Ortega 150 clude that, as the century drew to a close, the predominance of grand theoretical models was exceeded by their own conversion into a system of authority. But this would not have been possible without the intense questioning of the will to truth that these models exercised from their centralizing position; they wound up as current currency, mere academic power, and mediatic novelty. Tilottama Rajan affirms in “The University in Crisis: Cultural Studies, Civil Society, and the Place of Theory” that “theory today has become an endangered species” (8). Cultural theory has been displaced in this age of economic predominance by cultural studies. The conceptual premise of cultural studies would be based, according to Rajan, on the notion of “absolute transparency ” and on “total communicability.” Rajan distinguishes between two types of “cultural studies”: on the one hand, the tendency that comprises postcolonialism , gender, popular culture, and forms of everyday life; on the other hand, the tendency that includes technology, science, and conceives of itself as part of the process of globalization. The first dedicates itself to identitarian politics, the second to economicism. Both forms, ultimately, leave out literature and theory; they are a simulacrum of the social sciences from the humanities, and their “presentism” is grounded on the idea of an “end of history.” Although this faith in cognoscente rationality seems to have taken to extremes the optimism of the legible that distinguishes semiology, it is also typical of the operativity of a contextualizing reading, whose principle of articulation presupposes the transparency of objects formed by a disciplinary field. The demonstrative lesson of this reading implies a political voluntarism (because it turns its demonstration into a norm) and privileges the heroic role of the subject among historied objects. But this perspective, characteristic of the social sciences, also carries nostalgia for a self-sufficient politics: it turned the document into the original scene of denunciation. In the rhetoric of denunciation, objects were converted into topics. From the Latin American perspective, nevertheless, the crisis of the disciplines as methods of monologic reading has been forging the theoretical experience of critical reading. “Cultural studies,” dedicated to the media and mass consumerism; “cultural history,” dedicated to the social configurations of memory; and “postmodern” relativism, dedicated especially to placing in doubt institutionality, are some of the critical practices in tension with models from the academic Archive that, since the 1980s, illustrate disciplinary limits— limits, that is, of an objectivity overcome by the flux of signification of new objects and by liminal readings of the new. When disciplinary fields tried to reconvert themselves into an archive of genealogies or into the cultural field of markets and consumption, it was clear that the normative gaze of the disciplines had lost sight of the objects of anticanonical displacement and fluid mixing...