Posthegemony, Deconstruction, Infrapolitics

Over at the Infrapolitical Deconstruction Collective, an important project with which I have been (so far) rather peripherally involved, Alberto Moreiras comments on Bram Acosta’s Thresholds of Illiteracy. Specifically, he comments on that book’s introduction, which sets up a dichotomy between John Beverley’s Latin Americanism After 9/11 and my own Posthegemony. Acosta suggests that these two books “are already being used to establish the terms and grounds of cultural debate in Latin America for the next several years” (19). And yet it soon emerges that, in Acosta’s eyes, this would be a serious mistake. For despite their differences and even apparent disagreements, they are both, he argues, complicit in the same founding gestures. First, Beverley and I “identif[y] and conflat[e] deconstruction and subaltern studies” (20-21). Having done so, we then proceed on “the same disciplinary premise: the rejection or presumed exhaustion of deconstruction as a critical practice” (22). To which Moreiras adds that the two of us both “play to a choir of bedmates.” So there’s apparently quite a crowd under the sheets, and a noisy one too, illicitly consorting together.

Now, I’ve already written at some length about Beverley’s book, and don’t plan to do so again. Suffice it to say, however, that I would point to differences between his project and my own that Acosta doesn’t even mention, not least a very different approach to politics. As I put it, and against Beverley’s trenchant defense of Latin America’s so-called left turns, in my view “politics is about indeterminacy, possibility, and potential. It is about what is not written or predetermined. Politics is about strategy, surprise, critique, and a fundamental dissatisfaction with the present state of things.” It might also be worth saying that I make this point in the light of an affirmation of subalternity, which I define both here and in Posthegemony in terms of “the possibility of betrayal, even self-betrayal” (cf. Posthegemony 266). In my book, indeed, I concur with and quote Moreiras on precisely this point: in arguing that “the subaltern is beyond representation, an insurgent betrayal of constituted power” (Posthegemony 234), I cite his characterization of “subaltern negation” as posthegemonic in that it is a “refusal to submit to hegemonic interpellation, an exodus from hegemony” (Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference, 126). I’m not sure if this makes Alberto a bedmate or part of the choir, but it does complicate things a little. As, for that matter, does the fact that the “deconstruction” that Beverley rejects is firmly intended to include me and my work. Indeed, according to Beverley I am “a product of deconstruction”. Even, then, if we were both rejecting deconstruction, it’s fairly obvious that it’d be rather different things we’d be turning our backs on, rather different partners we’d be kicking out of the bed.

Yet for what it’s worth, I may reject many things, but not deconstruction. When Moreiras refers to the notion that “Beasley-Murray and Beverley may not be now quite where they were a few years ago,” he may be thinking of my more recent “Rogue’s Take” in which I declare, perhaps to Beverley’s delight, that “I am now and always have been a deconstructionist.” But the most cursory reading would evidence that in Posthegemony, too, it is simply not true that (as Acosta argues) “the source of the problem” is deconstruction (21). Else why would I have spent so much time arguing about hegemony theory and civil society? Moreover, it should be equally obvious that, far from a rejection of deconstruction, let alone subalternism, my claim and my aim–in which of course I may or may not be successful–is to build on some of their key insights. In fact, in the introduction to my book on which Acosta’s reading mostly relies, what I am trying to establish is rather a genealogy of the concept of “posthegemony” that is absolutely indebted to both of them, and to the work of Moreiras (and Gareth Williams) in particular. Of course, I do indeed state that I am “not content” with deconstruction, but one doesn’t write books out of a sense of contentment.

Frankly, however, none of this seems especially interesting to me. I like Acosta’s book, and I think it is important and significant–perhaps even vital–in a number of ways. I hope to give a fuller account of it here at some stage. But I don’t think that this initial framing of its argument is either helpful or illuminating. Indeed, it does the book a disservice. Setting up my book and Beverley’s as conjoined twins that have somehow both (as he says specifically of Posthegemony) “misse[d] the point” (22) is essentially a rhetorical gesture that seems to clear the field for his own intervention. But it’s an artificial and unnecessary settling of accounts that relies on what is ultimately the straw man that together our two books have truly “establish[ed] the terms and grounds of cultural debate in Latin America for the next several years” (19). I may perhaps in my wildest dreams wish that this were so, but I’m rather aware of the many other positions and approaches that this backhanded compliment willfully obscures… not least, after all, the work of people such as Moreiras or others whose take on deconstruction is (arguably) less “rogue” and more unambiguous. Significantly, Acosta’s book, having set up and demolished its straw man in its introduction, then proceeds on the whole to ignore both Beverley and my work in what follows, probably much to its own benefit. Our books end up no more than what Moreiras calls “specter[s authors] must fight in order to establish their own legitimacy.”

But the more interesting question, I think, is this one, which would encourage a less spectral and more productive discussion: not so much that of the relationships between posthegemony, illiteracy, and deconstruction, than that of their mutual (possible) contributions to the notion of infrapolitics. “Infrapolitics” is a term that neither Acosta nor I employ, but I would argue that Posthegemony is indeed fundamentally concerned with the concept. It is so in the sense that infrapolitics is a matter of the non-political without which the political itself would be unimaginable or impossible. This is something that has long been a constant in my own work: the curious could consult a very early essay on “Ethics as Post-Political Politics”; or you could take Gareth Williams’s I think fair capsule summary of Posthegemony as a “critical discussion of the relation between the concept of the multitude and the underpinnings of the political.” The specific question then of Acosta’s book would be to what extent “illiteracy” is also an attempt to think infrapolitics, and then what this would say about the relationship between (il)literacy and politics in Latin America and perhaps elsewhere. The broader question would concern the varieties of infrapolitics and the extent to which posthegemony can inform (as well as be informed by) our notion of the infrapolitical. Presumably infrapolitics is not solely the domain of deconstruction (or at least non-rogue deconstruction, if there is such a thing). What arrangement of beds or bedmates, choirs or singers, does infrapolitics then suggest or allow?