The Everyday Atlantic: Time, Knowledge, and Subjectivity in the Twentieth-Century Iberian and Latin American Newspaper Chronicle

Conclusion: (Digital) Knowledge and the Everyday Atlantic Subject as Palimpsest, From Chronicle to Blog

As the past few chapters have shown, the chronicle allows us to rethink the colonialities of power and the force of the nation-state over the subject by taking into account the temporality of thought and the non-discursive ways of knowing that the reading process includes. In chapter 1, I suggested that this means recognizing the simultaneity of thought that occurs in certain moments of reading, rupturing the ideological imposition of knowledge over the subject, at least temporarily. I argued that taking the momentary flow of thought into account allows us to rethink the supremacy of a hierarchical epistemology of power that upholds constructs like the nation-state, (neo)colonialism, and globalization in the everyday Atlantic. I then showed through the work of Eugeni d’Ors how ideology is challenged by the structure of repetition it presumes and, with Arciniegas, how ethically community and individuals intersect in asymmetric ways that belie the supposition of a homogenous imagined community in the national or Atlantic space. I further revealed how some cronistas, like Lispector and Monsiváis, seem to appropriate the gaps between thought and discursive or imagistic representations of power in order to rethink epistemology and community as affective and beyond discourse, or as virtual and ephemeral. Having addressed these simultaneous and multiple epistemologies in terms of corporeality, ideology, ethics, affect, and the virtual, this chapter concludes the discussion by showing what happens when we think of the subject as a momentary non-knowing subject. Conclusion (Digital) Knowledge and the Atlantic Subject as Palimpsest, From Chronicle to Blog 217  *  218 THE EVERYDAY ATLANTIC Not knowing is also part of theorizing the palimpsestic subject of the everyday Atlantic. As with the chronicle, moreover, the simultaneity of meanwhile reading in the blog is representative of the epistemological multiplicity of the palimpsestic subject, alongside the practiced and discursive hierarchy that has been a constant in the Ibero-American Atlantic newspaper for over a century. Considering the palimpsestic reading subject of the blog, alongside that of the chronicle, is important for rethinking the contours of the Atlantic space for two reasons. First, focusing on new media reflects the contemporary perspective of poststructural , postmodernist approaches to literature that, as I detailed in chapter 1, have contributed to the development of postcolonial theory and the Ibero-American Atlantic as a space of study in the first place. Second, the blog shows how today’s reading practices can inform and help us rethink the critical methodology of meanwhile reading for understanding the temporal epistemology of reading and power. The blog, like the chronicle, allows us to think about subjectivity as reflecting a momentary gap in normative epistemology. I show here that this gap—in addition to reflecting meanwhile knowledges that are corporeal, affective, ethical, or virtual—can also be thought as a momentary lack of knowledge that occurs in the moment of meanwhile reading. As Jodi Dean has written in her book Blog Theory, while on the one hand the Internet has produced an abundance of knowledges, at the same time, “[t]he lack of a capacity to know is the other side of the abundance of knowledge” (111). Here I argue that in the high-speed world of the digital newspaper, there are moments of rupture between the dominant discourses that are circulating in the everyday Atlantic world and the way in which subjects to whom they are addressed assimilate or reformulate that information; with information moving so quickly, these ruptures may produce a repeating sense of belatedness for the reader. Instead of viewing belatedness in this context in terms of being behind in the race to modernize, however, it is the key to a different understanding of subjectivity that, thought temporally, cannot be wholly inscribed in the homogenous, empty non-time of national, global, or other hierarchies of power.1 To begin this discussion, it is important to consider the presumed changes in reading and epistemology that have occurred with the advent of the Internet, since some of these presumptions have determined the way in which critics think about the blog in an increasingly globalized space of power. Taking this approach helps us understand how to think Conclusion 219 about the chronicle and the blog together. I then offer a brief overview of the blog situation as it relates to the newspapers of the Ibero-American Atlantic today, particularly those I analyzed in the preceding chapters. Finally, I make a case for thinking...