Constructing the Criollo Archive

Introduction

1 Introduction Introduction The Question of the Subject One of the key issues raised by contemporary criticism and theory has concerned the philosophical category of the subject. This line of investigation has focused upon the figure that grounds the epistemology and value system of modernity, as it has been articulated in Western Europe, sometimes producing consideration of its trajectory with respect to non-European geographicalcultural spaces within the dynamics of imperialism.1 Significant moments in the interrogation of the category of the subject are Martin Heidegger’s critique of phenomenological thought, and the more recent critical projects of Jacques Lacan, Jacques Derrida, and Michel Foucault, which, in the Anglo-American world, have tended to become grouped, albeit problematically, under the banner of poststructuralism.2 Following differing paths and with often divergent motives and outcomes, these three thinkers have sought to destabilize or fragment the imputed coherence of the transcendent, autonomous subject of Western philosophy and reason as established in the work of a series of thinkers, among whom René Descartes and Immanuel Kant stand out as the principal architects. In Lacan’s account the philosophical subject of consciousness and reason is trapped in a structure of méconnaissance, or misrecognition, its self-image as the autonomous purveyor of knowledge being nothing more than a manifestation of the mechanisms underpinning the instantiation of the ego.3 This appearance of coherence and self-sufficiency is irrevocably undermined by the division of the subject between the realms of the imaginary and the symbolic, and by the destabilizing effects of the dynamics of desire.4 In Derrida it is the logic of 2 Introduction the figurative aspect of language, or différence, that is mobilized with a view to exposing the rationale of the “metaphysics of presence.” Through the unfolding of Derrida’s writings, this subject is shown to be dispersed, and the semantic coherence of the thought and knowledge it expresses is endlessly undermined .5 The significance and transformational potential of the Derridean critique is still the question of much debate, but its influence and implications have had wide-ranging effects.6 The work of Foucault tends to relativize and render visible the contradictions immanent to the position of the subject— understood again as the guarantor of modern Western epistemology and philosophy—as it is brought into tension with its mirror reflection: the subject, in the sense of the individual who is subjected to the complex mechanisms of power that are characteristic of modernity.7 Somewhat problematically, the trajectory of Foucault’s research is often divided into two stages by his interpreters. In the first, he is seen to deploy the concepts of archaeology and the archive in order to track the process of the subject’s emergence within modernity and then project its subsequent immersion and dispersal within discourses. This line of thought is articulated most forcefully in The Order of Things, culminating in the pronouncement of the disappearance of the subject (386–87), and in The Archaeology of Knowledge.8 Later, Foucault moves on to develop the mechanism of genealogical investigation in order to argue that the subject’s imputed location at the center of the paradigm of Enlightenment is overdetermined by its coetaneous envelopment within a penal economy of darkness and shadow.9 This picture is drawn most strikingly in Discipline and Punish, in which the subject is displaced from its position of autonomy and transcendence, and fragmented into a multiplicity of gazes, a network of subjects who are all continuously surveilling and policing each other, caught in the structure of the panopticon (195–228). Subjects of Hispanism The investigation of the category of the subject in Spanish and Spanish American literary studies is rendered complex and problematic by a series of divergences in the trajectories of modernity in the Hispanic world with respect to the classic 3 Introduction paradigm of the history of Western metaphysics and modernity. The course of Spain’s history, along with that of its colonies over the period loosely classified as early modern (c.1500– 1800), tends to be marked by a more sustained resistance on the part of traditional, or substantive, matrixes of authority and reason than in paradigmatic cases of modernity such as those of England, France, and Germany.10 The issues bound up with this problematic have been cogently explored by Anthony Cascardi (The Subject of Modernity; “The Subject of Control”) and George Mariscal...