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Santiago Castro-Gomez, Adriana Johnson

Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 1, Issue 3, 2000, pp. 503-518 (Article)

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Traditional and Critical

Theories of Culture

Santiago Castro-Gmez

In his renowned 1937 programmatic

article Traditionelle and Kritische Theorie [Traditional and critical the-ory], Max Horkheimer (1974 [1937], 223-71) established a distinction be-

tween two conceptions of theory. The first of them refers to a series of

propositions whose validity lies in its correspondence with an object already

constituted prior to the act of representation. This radical separation be-

tween subject and object of knowledge converts theory into a pure activity

of thought, and the theorist into a disinterested spectator who is limited to

describing the world as it is. Such an idea of theory, which considers the

object of study to be a series of facticities and the subject to be the passiveelement of an act of knowing, is identified by Horkheimer as traditional.

In opposition to this theory, he describes a second model that he designates

critical theory. In contrast to traditional theory, critical theory considers

that both science and the reality it studies are the product of a social praxis,

which means that the subject and object of knowledge find themselves so-

cially performed. The object is not simply there, deposited before us and

waiting to be apprehended, nor is the subject merely the notary of reality.

Both subject and object are the result of complex social processes. The fun-damental task of critical theory is therefore to reflect upon the structures

from which both social reality as well as the theories that seek to account

for it are constructedincluding, of course, critical theory itself.

Even when Horkheimers project was conceived as a tool in the

struggle against the positivism of his time, it could, it seems to me, be very

useful for drawing up a map of modern theories on culture. I will argue

that such theories can be divided into two basic groups: Those that perceive

N e p a n t l a : V i e w s f r o m S o u t h 1.3

Copyright 2000 by Duke University Press

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culture as natural facticity, that is, that approach their object as if it were

rooted in human nature; and those that, on the contrary, consider culture

to be a realm structured by praxis, that is, a social construction of which

theoretical practice itself is a part. Following Horkheimer, I will call the first

group the traditional theory of culture and the second the critical theory

of culture. In what follows, I will identify some characteristic elements of

traditional theory and then contrast these with the concept of geoculture

developed by postcolonial theories. With this I propose to present postcolo-

nialism as a critical theory of culture in times of globalization or, parodying

Fredric Jamesons phrase, as a cultural critique of late capitalism.

The Metaphysics of the Subject and the Traditional

Concept of Culture

Any consideration of the traditional theory of culture should begin with the

following epistemological reflection: Culture becomes the object of knowl-

edge only when man constitutes himself as a subject of history. The concepts

of culture, history, subject, and man refer to the same genealogi-

cal root, which, chronologically speaking, emerged and consolidated itself

between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before this era, something

like culture was not thinkable, simply because the episteme that made

the concepts formation possible had not yet been configured. If we limit

ourselves solely to the types of theories arisen in the West, we will see that

neither in Greece nor Rome, nor in the Christian Middle Ages, was a the-

ory of culture possible in its traditional, much less critical, sense. This was

due to the fact that morals, politics, and knowledge were viewed as simple

prolongations of cosmological laws, that is, as a set of natural institutions

ordered around the consummation of a cosmologically predetermined end

(telos).

For Aristotle, truth, goodness, and justice are impossible without

considering the basic principles which govern the cosmos, because the

purpose of science, legislation, and morals is to manifest being insofar as

being, that is, the natural order such as itisand not as itappears. For Aris-

totle, the reflection on the social life of men does not pertain to theoretical

sciences, which address only the basic principles of things, but to a type of

minor and less dignified knowledge designated practical sciences. First

philosophy, or metaphysics, occupies the pinnacle of the entire gamut ofknowledges, as its task is to establish the most universal notions. The object

of metaphysics is the immutable laws that rule the cosmos, and it is for

this reason the most abstract, the most exact, and the most general of all


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Castro-Gmez . Traditional and Critical Theories of Culture

sciences. In contrast, sciences like politics and economy derive their general

concepts from metaphysics because their object of study, human life, has no

autonomy whatsoever in relation to the laws of the cosmos. The same is true

for the fields of morality and legislation. Since the laws of social life have

a cosmological foundation, independent of human will, the wisdom of the

good ruler consists precisely in recognizing this foundation and ensuring

that the laws of the polis are organized around the fulfillment of mans

natural dispositions.

The crux of all this is the following: in an epistemological order in

which morals, politics, and knowledge are thought to be dependent on the

laws that rule the cosmos, the emergence of an object of knowledge called

culture is impossible. It is only when human life in its totality is perceived

as a dynamic process governed by laws created by man himself, and which

are, therefore, not simple corollaries of natural laws, that it is possible to

speak of culture in both the traditional and critical senses of the concept.

The modern idea of man, understood as a being that produces himself

in history and creates cultural values, can emerge only in the vacuum left

behind with the disappearance of classical cosmology.

It is, then, only during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries

that the idea of culture as a space ofspecifically humanvalues, contrasted to

nature, began to consolidate itself.1 Under this idea, culture constituted

that sphere of moral, religious, political, philosophical, and technological

valuesthatpermittedmantohumanizehimself,thatis,escapethetyranny

of the state of nature. If, as mentioned above, the metaphysics of the

cosmos turned social life into a purely derivative element whose dynamics

reflected the general laws of the universe, now man saw himself as the

producer of his own forms of political and social organization. That is,

nature ceased to be the site to which man reverted in order to extract moral

lessons or contemplate divine glory and came to be seen instead as an object

to be put at the service of human interests. The metaphysics of the cosmos

was substituted by the metaphysics of the human. The world that modern

thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, and Kant referred to was not the Greco-

Roman-Medieval cosmos, in which social life was a simple reflection of

predetermined laws, but a world created by man in his image and likeness.

But if the world is a human construction and not an inexorable

reflection of the lex aeterna, then social life assumes an as yet unthoughtdimension: temporality. Neither Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Thomas Aquinas

contemplated time as an axis from which human action derived cosmo-

logically predetermined meaning. Since man was not responsible for the


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creation of something new, time was nothing but the actualization of

potentialities established beforehand and forever. But when man was per-

ceived to be the sole architect of his own destiny, then it could be said that

humanity lay in the capacity to humanize, that is, in mans ability to con-

stitute himself in time through the creation of his own world: culture. The

first characteristic of the traditional concept of culture is then the idea that

the gradual humanization of the species is a process that occurs in time,

in history, and is not already determined from an outside by cosmological

laws.

If through culture man slowly liberates himself from the chains

imposed by nature, then cultural forms acquire ever increasing degrees

of perfection to the extent that they permit the unfolding of the spirit,

that is, the exercise of human freedom. For Hegel, the cultural forms that

most closely resemble nature possess less dignity than those that are more

abstract. This is because nature belongs to the sphere of necessity, while

spirit is the proper site of freedom. Thus, for example, the religions that

practice in naturalist cults are inferior to Christianity, which possesses a

more abstract concept of divinity (God is spirit). The same is true of artistic

manifestations: those which imitate nature or revolve around the purely

figurative are inferior to those which privilege pure form, since these latter

have managed to escape the tyranny of material contents, which do not

befit the free expression of spirit. From Hegels hand we find thus a second

characteristic of the traditional concept of culture: the privilege of so-called

high culture over and above popular culture. The lettered, or, as Weber

would say, rationalized forms of culture (musical codification, secular-

ized art, literature, philosophy, historiography) are the most elevated, since

through them man can reflect upon himself and recognize his own spiri-

tual vocation. The human groups that have not been able to accede to the

reflexivity of high culture remain rooted in youth and find themselves

in need of the illumination radiating from lettered peoples, particularly

philosophers. The lettered and the philosophers are those people who can

elevate themselves above cultural contingencies and apprehend their object

from the outside, with the same gaze of adeus absconditusthat condescends

to contemplate the world.

But if the evolution of culture is the outcome of a historical process,

then freedom can also be objectified, particularly in the sphere of politicallife. A nation that has reached maturity has not only developed a high,

that is lettered, culture, but has been able to constitute itself politically as a

nation-state. For Hegel, the state is the true bearer of culture, of a peoples


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national spirit. Only in the state does freedom become objective, because

it is there that all individuals are reconciled with the ethical substance of

the collectivity. Individuals must, therefore, subordinate themselves to the

state, since it is only through its mediation that they can learn to be conscious

of who they are, what they want, and what their destiny is as members of

a single nation. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Rousseau, Montesquieu,

and Johann Gottlieb Fichte also considered the state to be the bearer of a

peoples national identity. In contrast to the contractualists, they thought the

state should be established on the basis of geographical conditions, customs,

language, and the ways of thinking of the people over which it rules. This

brings us to the third characteristic of the traditional concept of culture: the

identity between people, nation, and culture. The fullest objectification of

culture, understood as freedom from imperatives coming from an exterior,

is the historical construction of the national-popular state. Individuals can

experience true freedom only as members of a state that juridically reflects

what Montesquieu called the general spirit, Hegel the Volksgeist, and

Rousseau the general will.

Postcolonialism as a Critical Theory of Culture

Transferring the distinction introduced by Horkheimer to the present sub-

ject, it can be said that the difference between the traditional and critical

theories of culture is the recognition, by the latter, that its object of study

is not a natural facticity but a social construction. Culture is discerned not

as the site of freedom, that which protects us from the tyranny of nature,

but as the network of relations of power that produces values, beliefs, and

forms of knowledge. Theory is, in turn, taken not for a set of analytical

propositions uncontaminated by praxis, but as an integral part of this net of

inclusions and exclusions called social power. The theorist is not a passive

subject who assumes an attitude of scientific objectivity and neutrality, but

an active subject who finds himself or herself traversed by the same social

contradictions of the object under scrutiny. Subject and object form part

of the same lattice of powers and counterpowers from which neither can

escape.

Oneof thefundamental tools of critical theory, onewhich distances

it substantially from traditional theory, is the notion of totality. This con-

cept implies that society is a sui generis entity whose workings are relativelyindependent of the activity of individuals composing it.2 The social group

is something more than the total sum of its members and constitutes a sys-

tem of relations whose properties are different from those of the particular


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elements that enter into relation with each other. Societys plus compared

with its individuals lies, then, in the set of relations that individuals estab-

lish among themselves, so that what counts for critical theory is the kind of

transaction or negotiation that takes place between subject and structure.

The life of the structure cannot do without the subjects, as Emile Durkheim

and Niklas Luhmann proposed, nor can the life of the subjects do without

the structure, as the communitarians would have it.

This concept of totality certainly breaks with the metaphysics of

the cosmos, because the laws that structure the lives of men are not seen

as simple reflections of a divine or cosmological normativity; but it also

breaks with the metaphysics of the subject, because social life is no longer

considered a transparent extension of human consciousness and will. This

means that social life does not free man from the tyranny of nature, guiding

him via culture to a gradual humanization, but subjects him instead to a

new kind of heteronomy, this time under the form of systems that are not

entirely under his control. Such systems are second nature in the sense

that they exert an external coercion on individuals and become, as Giddens

demonstrates, the conditions of possibility for human action. But the action

of individuals reverts, in turn, to the workings of the systems, impelling

their historical transformations.

In contrast to the traditional concept of culture, a critical theory

of culture posits, then, that social life is not the reign of freedom but that

of contradiction; that, because social life does not depend entirely on the

intentionality of consciousness but rather on the dialectic between subject

and structure, it generally has perverse consequences, that is, outcomes that

escape all rational planning. It can even be the case, as Beck, Giddens, and

Bauman show, that these perverse results do not emerge from a lack of

rationality, but rather as a consequence of it, as the crisis of the so-called

project of modernity teaches us (Beck 1986). Organized social relations,

which for traditional theory appear to be the way out of the state of nature

and an entry into the spiritual or civil site of culture, are perceived by

critical theory as a space of struggle and confronting interests.

In the field of postcolonial theories,3 the idea of totality is ex-

pressed in a categorythe world-system that was coined by the North

American social philosopher Immanuel Wallerstein (1994), but has been

widely used by such different theoreticians as Walter Mignolo, EnriqueDussel, Anibal Quijano, and Gayatri Spivak. From a hermeneutical point

of view, the interest of this category lies in its reference to a structure of

global dimensions, broadening thus the interpretative horizon of the tex


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national society that had functioned as the classical referent of social sci-

ences since the nineteenth century. The world-system is a sui generis set of

social relations configured in the sixteenth century as a consequence of the

European expansion over the Atlantic.4

The world-system is a network of interdependencies that covers

a single space of social action. Sociologically speaking, this means that,

from the sixteenth century onward, the lives of an ever greater number

of people began to be linked by a planetary division of labor, coordinated

by smaller systemic units denominated nation-states. The differences be-

tween groups and societies that constitute the world-system do not depend

on their level of industrial development or degree of cultural evolution,

but on thefunctional position they occupy within the system. The differ-

ences are thus not temporal but structural. Some of the systems social

zones occupy the function of centers, meaning that they monopolize the

hegemony, while others occupy a peripheral function because they are

relegated to the margins of the structures of power.5

For one sector of contemporary traditional theory, this is an un-

comfortable perspective because it casts doubt upon the idea that the cog-

nitive, moral, and expressive development of different societies obeys the

unfolding of specific competencies of the human race. Even while accept-

ing the idea that the world-system functions as an a priori mechanism that

quasi-transcendentally organizes the social experience of the three spheres

described by Jrgen Habermas (1973), we do not find ourselves before a

transcendental structure invested with anthropological status. It is rather a

historical structure, with a genesis in the long sixteenth century, a maximum

systemic equilibrium between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that

currently finds itself in a moment of instability and disarticulation. From

this point of view, the true, the good, and the beautiful, that is, the set of his-

toric objectifications of human activity we call culture, are not rooted in

the species transcendental abilities, but rather in relations of power that are

socially construed and which have acquired a global character. Culture

is indicative then not of a level of aesthetic, moral, or cognitive develop-

ment of an individual, a group, or a society, but rather, as Wallerstein (1994)

affirms, signifies the world-systems field of ideological battles.

We arrive thus at the second of the characteristics of the modern

world-system: the colonial logic that since the sixteenth century has con-ditioned itsworkings. In effect, the historical formationof theworld-system

was fueled for a long time by the incorporation or military annexation of

new geographic zones by states that achieved a hegemonic position within


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the system. But this process of colonization was something constitutive and

not merely additive to its logic of operation, since the basic imperative of

the world-system has been, and continues to be, the incessant accumulation

of capital.6 To accomplish this, it was necessary that the hegemonic states

of the world-system (Spain and Portugal first, then Holland, France, and

England, and later the United States) open up new sources of supply for

their internal markets, with the goal of increasing the margin of benefits.

The power relations configured by the world-system thus acquired a colo-

nial character, which affected not only the old European colonies but also

a great number of peoples within the colonizing countries themselves. The

Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano (1999, 99100) has coined the concept

of coloniality of power to indicate this very situation.

But what has all of this to do with culture? A great deal, if we

keep in mind the fact that the social division of labor between central and

peripheral zones, both at the general level of the world-system, as well as

in the interior of its basic units, the nation-states, needed to be legitimized

ideologically by hegemonic groups or contested, also ideologically, by sub-

altern groups. While traditional theory naturalizes culture, projecting it

into an ideal space in which order and harmony (aesthetics of the beautiful)

reign, critical theory emphasizes the political and social, that is the con-

flictive, nature of culture. In other words, culture is seen as the battlefield

for the control of meaning. This means that critical theory does not isolate

culture from the process of its social production and from its structural

function inside the world-system and its subsystems, but rather advances

toward the question of the geopolitical economy of culture.7 Postcolonial

theories radicalize this question by suspecting that the cultural logic of

the world-system is traversed by the social grammar of colonization.

Seen from this perspective, culture has been the space wherein the

coloniality of power has been legitimized or impugned from diverse social

perspectives. For reasons of space, I will consider only the ways in which the

coloniality of power was legitimized in ideological terms since the sixteenth

century, and not occupy myself here with the type of contestation to which

it has been submitted by what Wallerstein (1994) has named anti-systemic

movements. As I will argue, the colonial annexation of new zones of the

world-system was accompanied by the birth of two ideologies that served

as cultural pillars of the modern world-system: racism and universalism.

8

Although social hierarchies have always been justified on the basis

of the presumed inferiority or superiority of some peoples over others, the

concept of race is a theoretical construction characteristic of the modern


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world-system. It arises in the heat of the debates that took place in Spain

concerning the necessity to submit the American Indians to colonial domi-

nation, and it takes form in institutions like theencomiendaandresguardo.

The idea of race served as a criterion for social differentiation between the

white colonizers and the mulatto or mestizo colonized, seen as infe-

rior for their color and social origins.9 In the seventeenth and eighteenth

centuries, once the hegemony of the world-system hadmigrated from Spain

toward France and Holland, the concept of race was incorporated into the

theoretical register philosophy of history. Here, the hierarchical differ-

ences between peoplesand, concomitantly, their corresponding place

in the social division of laborare justified according to their level of de-

velopment, measured on a temporal-evolutionary scale. In consequence,

the peoples that appear more advanced on this scale could legitimately

occupy the territory of the more backward peoples and bestow the bene-

fits of civilization upon them with no troubling pangs of conscience. In the

nineteenth century, coinciding with the consolidation of British hegemony,

the concept of race was finally unhitched from the philosophy of history

and scientificized, incorporated into the methodology of positive sciences

and the nascent social sciences.10 The superiority of some races over others

was seen as the inevitable result of the evolution of the species; it was an

inexorable law of nature, capable of being empirically verified.

What interests me here is the intrinsic relationship between the

colonial idea of race and the traditionalconcept of culture. If the maximiza-

tion of benefits was the systemic imperative that impelled the territorial

annexation of colonies, then it was necessary to justify why their inhabi-

tants needed to be used as inexpensive labor for the benefit of the coloniz-

ers: Indians, blacks, and mulattos could and should be enslaved because

they shared a series of values, beliefs, and forms of knowledge that im-

peded them from attaining the fruits of civilization on their own. There

was something in their culture, and perhaps in their very biology, that set

them at odds with the universalistic values shared by the white man. There

was no point of contact possible between the culture of the colonizers and

colonized, because either they possessed two different natures, as Juan

Gins de Seplveda posited (1987 [1892], 2728), or they possessed a sin-

gle nature but in different phases of historical evolution. In either case,

we find ourselves before a naturalist or ideological concept of culture thatlegitimizes the social and political inequalities of the world-system.11

The intrinsically colonial character of the world-system also tra-

verses the second ideology considered in this essay: universalism. If racism


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serves to legitimize the inferiority of the colonized or subaltern groups

in the colonies, universalism sanctions the superiority of the colonizers or

hegemonic groups at the national level. As an heir of what I have in this

essay called the metaphysics of the cosmos, modern universalism is, above

all, an epistemological posture. It proclaims the possibility of acceding to

objectively valid knowledges concerning the physical and social world once

the adequate method is found. It affirms that the validity of this method

is guaranteed by its neutrality in terms of value, since it transcends the moti-

vations historically conditioned by culture. Its ground is not thus history,

and its traditions, but a faculty shared by all men, independently of race,

gender, age, or social condition: reason.

Viewed from the perspective of the world-system, universalism is

fully integrated into the logic that Weber called rationalization. It is not

now the inscrutable will of God that decides the happenings of individual

and social life, but man himself who, using reason, is able to decipher the

inherent laws of nature in order to place them at his service. This rehabili-

tation of man goes hand in hand with the idea of a domination over nature

through science and technology, whose true prophet was Francis Bacon. In

fact, nature is presented by Bacon as mans great adversary, the enemy

to be overcome in order for the contingencies of life to be domesticated

and theregnum hominisestablished over the earth (Bacon 1984 [1620]). The

value-freecharacter of sciences andtechnologies wasconverted thus into the

ideological guarantee of the modernization promoted by the hegemonic

states of the world-system and, concretely, by the bourgeoisie of these states.

The political institutionalization of theregnum hominisdreamt by Bacon

and Descartes becomes thus a problem of technical character, addressed by

economists, social scientists, educators, administrators, and experts of all

kinds. The founding imperative was to eliminate the cultural barriers

that obstructed the expansion of capital and the maximization of profits.

On an internal level, universalism served as the instrument of ju-

ridical and social control within nation-states. Insofar as it was an integral

part of the modern world-system, the structural function of the state was

to adjust the body and mind of all individuals belonging to a specific

territoriality to the global imperative of production. All state politics and

institutions (school, constitutions, law, hospitals, prisons, etc.) were canal-

ized toward the disciplining of the passions through work. The purposewas to link all citizens to the global process of production through the sub-

jection of their time and bodies to a series of norms that were defined and

sanctioned by scientific-technical knowledge. In order for this to work, the


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state needed to be able to guarantee an impartial juridical framework

within which the people under its jurisdiction could be contemplated as

subjects of law. The juridical-political function of constitutions was pre-

cisely to invent citizenship, that is, create a formal field of legibility which

would, on a microphysical level, render the macrostructural imperative of

the accumulation of capital viable.

At this point it is necessary to clarify that although postcolonialthe-

ories take up the microphysics of power analyzed by Michel Foucault, they

complement his perspective by working with what lurked in the French

theorists blind spot: relationsof power aremarked by macrophysical imper-

atives of a colonial character.12 Thus, for example, citizenship was not only

restricted to men who were married, literate, heterosexual, and proprietors,

but also, and especially, to men who were white. In turn, the individuals that

fell outside the space of citizenship were not only the homosexuals, prison-

ers, mental patients, and political dissidents Foucault had in mind, but also

blacks, Indians, mestizos, gypsies, Jews, and now, in times of globalization,

ethnic minorities, immigrants, andAuslndern(foreigners). In this way,

the genealogy of the microstructures of power is broadened by postcolonial

theories into a genealogy of the macrostructures of long duration. It can

be said, then, that postcolonial theories take the program of the ontology of

the present, masterfully begun by Foucault, to its ultimate consequences.

I want to conclude by pointing out two things. The first is that,

at least until the first half of the twentieth century, racism and univer-

salism configured the dominant geoculture of the modern world-system.

Racism is a legacy of what Dussel calls the first modernity, the Hispanic-

Catholic one, while universalism is a legacy of the second modernity,

the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its extension into nineteenth-

century positivism. Both ideologies created a representational sitea

culturethatlegitimatedtheunprecedentedmobilizationofthelaborforce

and financial resources, of military campaigns and scientific discoveries, of

educational programs and juridical reforms; in short, of this whole set of

Faustian politics of social control, never before seen in history, which we

know as the project of modernity. Of courseand this is the other side

of the storythe unequal distribution of riches also generated antisystemic

movements that were successful to the extent that they could negotiate

with the hegemonies created by the system.

13

The second point is of a diagnostic nature. If one of the character-

istics of globalization is to have mined the capacity of the nation-states to

organizeallofsociallife,thenwefindourselvesbeforeaprofoundstructural


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crisis of the modern world-system. This, as has been noted, was organized

on the basis of smaller units, nation-states, which guaranteed the fulfillment

of the imperative that assured the internal equilibrium of the system: the

endless accumulation of capital through the annexation of new territories.

But at the outset of the twenty-first century, we find ourselves in a situation

in which there are no longer any territories to annex and in which social

life is organized by supranational instances. The slightly ambiguous cate-

gory of postcoloniality points toward this situation. The end of territorial

colonialism, propelled by hegemonic nation-states, runs parallel to the ex-

haustion of the project of modernity, that is, with the end of the institutional

capacity of these states to exert control over the social lives of peoples.14 But

this does not necessarily mean that the world-system is mortally wounded,

nor that its structural geoculture has ceased to be operational. Rather, we are

in a historical moment in which there are no colonizing countries, but only

countries colonized by a capital that has become invisible, that has assumed

a spectral character.

Faced with this new situation, the critical theory of society faces

the challenge of recuperating the horizon of totality that contemporary

cultural critique seems to have lost in the name of the postmodern attack on

metanarratives and runs the risk of converting itself into a new traditional

theory. A cultural analysis that limits itself to thematizing the exclusions of

gender, race, ethnicity, or knowledge, that homogenizes differences, is not

sufficient to articulate a criticism of capitalism. It is necessary to think the

world-system that structured social subjects and to ask why this historical

project of social control (modernity) has exhausted itself, yielding to new

forms of global (re)structuration. In other words, it is necessary to think the

historical transformations suffered by the geoculture of the modern world-

system in its present moment of crisis. This is, to my mind, the main agenda

for a social theory that understands itself as a critical theory of culture.

Translated by

Adriana Johnson

Notes

1. I do not want to emphasize here any progress of thought or any historical teleology.

Critical theory did not substitute for traditional theory after the eighteenth

century. What I want to underscore is that at this time the material conditions


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were created for the emergence of a type of theorization that was previously

impossible.

2. Here, relatively independent means that the social totality is not an entity that

is ontologically prior to the individual elements that constitute it, and in

which these simply assume predetermined roles, as is proposed by classic

structuralism, but rather that the reproduction of social life takes place as a

process of negotiation between the whole and its parts. Giddens (1994 [1979])

has shown that this process implies a certain structuration of subjects but

also and at the same time a subjectivization of structures.

3. By postcolonial theory I mean a model of theorization that (a) interrogates the ma-

terial conditions of possibility of the production of knowledge in modernity

and (b) specifically points to the colonial experience as one of these condi-

tions. Although considerations like those of Walter Mignolo (1998)and his

distinction between the different critical theories loci of enunciationare

suggestive, they are not relevant for my argument here.

4. Both Dussel and Wallerstein have pointed outconfronting other Marxist theorists

like Erik Wolf and Andr Gunder Frankthat in contrast to previous social

systems, which revolved around a kind of centralized political unity, we live

today in a system that gathers different political units around a single world

economy: capitalism. Furthermore, the modern world-system is the only

historical structure in which the incessant accumulation of interests is taken

as a value in and of itself. In all other social structures, the accumulation of

richeswasperceivedas a meansforobtaining something, andnot as an endper

se. The maximization of surplus value converts itself thus into individual or

collective virtue, rewarded or punished by an institution called the market.

See Dussel 1992 and Wallerstein 1994.

5. I emphasize the idea of social zone to avoid confusing it with the concept of geo-

graphical zone. By social zone I mean a hegemonic set of social relations

(what Marx called class) that is primarily configured under the political

auspices of the national state, but whose structural function transcends in

some cases the political limits set down by the state. Thus, for example, the

hegemonic social zones in the European countries in the nineteenth century

certainly functioned as centers of the interior of their own societies, but their

economic and cultural hegemony also extended itself to all the peripheral

social zones of the world-system. In addition, the appropriation of surplus

value, generated by labor in the colonies, was concentrated in these peripheralzones. In this sense, as we shall see, the hegemony of power assumes a colonial

character.


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6. In order to reproduce itself, the world-systemhas developed institutional mechanisms

(established initially in nation-states and now in the global logic of consump-

tion) to materially reward and punish individuals according to whether or

not they adjust themselves to the imperative of the maximization of benefits.

Horkheimer and Adorno (1994) spoke in this sense of the universalization

of instrumental reason, even if they erroneously extrapolated this concept

until it accounted for the totality of human history.

7. Formulated in this way, the problem we are posing eludes any determinism of the

base on the economic superstructure of society. The critical theory of

society proposes a dialectic between subject and structure, in which neither

element can be thought independently of the other, since both mutually con-

dition each other. In other texts I have dealt with this idea more extensively

(Castro-Gmez 1997, 1998).

8. Racism and universalism are ideological knowledges configured in the sixteenth

century that serve to legitimize and give meaning to Spains economic and po-

litical dominion over her colonies. After the seventeenth century, when Spain

began to cede the hegemony of the world-system to other European powers

(France and England), these ideological knowledges began to permeate the

scientific practices that lie at the origin of what we know today as the social

sciences. From this point of view, social sciences, as they were institutional-

ized in the nineteenth century and after, did not succeed in establishing an

epistemological rupture with ideological knowledges such as racism and

universalism. Concepts elaborated by the social sciences, such as modernity,

society, and progress, are founded upon ideological knowledges config-

ured in the sixteenth century. A genealogy of social sciences and humanities

should begin thus in Spain, and not in France or England.

9. In this sense, Magnus Mrner speaks of a racial pigmentocracy based upon the

concept of racial purity (Mrner 1969, 6077). This is an ethnicization of

the labor force.

10. In fact, as Edward Said (1995) has demonstrated, social sciences, especially anthro-

pology, ethnology, and orientalism, generate their languages on the basis of

the colonial experience and as a consequence of the occupation of overseas

colonies by France and England.

11. It should be remembered that when I refer to center and periphery I am not

speaking only of the relationship between metropolis and colonies, but also of

the relationship between hegemonic and subaltern groups within Europeannational states.

12. Foucaults renunciation of methodological holism impedes him from tracing a ge-

nealogy of structures of long duration. For the critique Foucault will level


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at the category of totality, see the discussion proposed by Martin Jay (1984:

51037).

13. This is the case, for example, of the labor movements in Europe and the United

States, or of third world national liberation movements.

14. I have developed this idea of the end of modernity as a project of political-social

control in Castro-Gmez 1998, 78102.

References

Bacon, Francis. 1984 [1620].Novum Organum. Madrid: Sarpe.

Beck, Ulrich. 1986.Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne. Frankfurt:

Suhrkamp.

Castro-Gmez, Santiago. 1997. Los vecindarios de la ciudad letrada: Variaciones

filosficas sobre un tema de Angel Rama. InAngel Rama y los estudios

latinoamericanos, edited by Mabel Moraa. Pittsburgh, PA: University of

Pittsburgh Press.

. 1998. Latinoamericanismo, modernidad, globalizacin: Prolegmenos a una

crtica poscolonial de la razn. InTeoras sin disciplina: Latinoamericanismo,

poscolonialidad y globalizacin en debate, edited by Santiago Castro-Gmez

and Eduardo Mendieta. Mexico City: Porra.

de Seplveda, Juan Gins. 1987 [1892].Tratado sobre las justas causas de la guerra contra

los indios. Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura Econmica.

Dussel, Enrique. 1992.1492, el encubrimiento del otro: Hacia el origen del mito de la

modernidad.Santaf de Bogot: Antropos.

Giddens, Anthony. 1994 [1979].Central Problems in Social Theory: Action, Structure, and

Contradiction in Social Analysis. Berkeley: University of California Press.

Habermas, Jrgen. 1973.Erkenntnis und Interesse. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp.

Horkheimer, Max. 1974 [1937]. Teora tradicional y teora crtica. InTeora crtica.

Buenos Aires: Amorrortu.

Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1994.Dialctica de la Ilustracin:

Fragmentos filosficos. Madrid: Trotta.

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Mignolo, Walter. 1998. Postoccidentalismo: El argumento desde Amrica Latina. In

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Quijano, Anibal. 1999. Colonialidad del poder, cultura y conocimiento en Amrica

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Said, Edward. 1995.Orientalism: Western Conceptions of the Orient.London: Penguin.

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World-System. London: Cambridge University Press.

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