(Post-Contemporary Interventions) Martin Hopenhayn - No Apocalypse, No Integration - Modernism and Postmodernism in Latin America-Duke University Press Books (2002)

No Apocalypse, No Integration
Post-Contemporary Interventions
Series Editors: Stanley Fish and
Fredric Jameson
A Book in the Series
Latin America in Translation
en Traducción
em Tradução
Sponsored by the Duke-
University of North Carolina
Program in Latin American Studies

R NO APOCALYPSE, NO INTEGRATION
Modernism and Postmodernism in Latin America
Martín Hopenhayn
Translated by Cynthia Margarita Tompkins
and Elizabeth Rosa Horan
Duke University Press Durham and London 2001

∫ 2001 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $
Typeset in Galliard by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear
on the last printed page of this book.

Contents
Preface to the Spanish Edition vii

Preface to the English Edition xi
1 The Day after the Death of a Revolution 1
2 Disenchanted and Triumphant toward the 21st Century:
A Prospect of Cultural Moods in South America 13
3 Neither Apocalyptic nor Integrated
(Eight Debatable Paradoxes) 36
4 Realism and Revolt, Twenty Years Later
(Paris 1968–Santiago de Chile 1988) 47
5 What is Left Positive from Negative Thought?
A Latin American Perspective 55
6 Postmodernism and Neoliberalism in Latin America 77
7 The Crisis of Legitimacy of the Planning State 94
8 Is the Social Thinkable without Metanarratives? 119
9 Utopia against Crisis, or How to Awake from a Long Insomnia 142
Index 155
Preface to the Spanish Edition
A thread, tough and slender, runs through the following pages.

It’s not the thread of disenchantment. What I mean is that the collective
dreams that gave way to the rigors of history ask the survivors not to give
way, in turn, to the temptation of the usual litany. Such laments might be
lucid, yet avoiding them could be the most sensible way of mourning these
corpse-like histories. Despite their rubble, these histories extended much,
all-too-human hope.
Nor is this the thread of euphoric amnesia, which has proclaimed the
end of hard times and the coming of the soft and cool paradise. I don’t deny
that it’s healthy to forget, when doing so refreshes thinking and liberates
new, constructive drives. But the form in which forgetting tends to be
invoked these days, in the wake of its invitation to plasticity and liberty,
reeks of the consecration of injustice.
The thread need be tough then, and slender, very fine, doubled, to unite
these pages since the speed (and not the collapse) of the times makes the
grave-digger a midwife and vice-versa. The thread needs to establish what
is irrecoverable and, in a single operation, size up what can be recycled.
viii No Apocalypse, No Integration
If some myths of emancipation or development seem to have shattered

into a thousand pieces—as much in Latin America as in other regions—
fragments of those myths will always remain. Such shards and tatters
furnish part of the raw material for elaborating new collective projects.
But the ambiguity doesn’t end there. Social condition and existence may
seem damned by the absence of a motivating narrative, yet they are never
totally deprived of hope. There is always reason to debate alternatives, be
they simulacra of promise, rituals of anticipation or constructive theory.
Of course social existence in this part of the world has never been easy.
Indeed, it’s always been full of voluptuous nuances. Ethical complexity
and expressive richness live together in our social ties, inhabiting our
embraces and aggressions. This ambivalence in sociability reappears under
new figures. Grassroots communities live side by side with postmodern
tribes of urban youth; the expression of violence in the large cities com-
bines with the call for greater participation on the part of citizens, and the
demand for greater political transparency coexists with politics turned
into televised spectacle or show business.
The essays contained in this volume look to capture these new forms of
ambiguity, to establish the breaks but above all the threads, tough and
slender, that crisscross the gaps, that go through fire, not emerging intact,
but not totally disintegrating either. Such is the leitmotiv here: break and
re-creation in Latin American sociability.
In what tones is this song sung? The reader might find the following
references worthwhile in pondering the theoretical range that the follow-
ing pages travel.
The reevaluation and recomposition of the cultural dimension of de-
velopment shows a more than anthropological, almost metaphysical re-
spect for the symbolic; an unprecedented popularity of stories regarding
our heterogeneity and diversity; an enthusiastic reconsideration of indige-
nous, rural tradition and of furious urban rockers; a broad consensus with
regard to the necessity of considering the cultural variable in development
proposals and discourse.
There’s a compulsive equation that identifies secular common sense
with the spirit of the private. Its most disquieting symptom, complacency
about the fever for economic privatization, contrasts with endogenous
impulses toward communitarianism, mythic thought, moral traditional-
ism, popular religiosity, and millenary customs. These premodern im-
pulses are either excluded from or absorbed by privatist secularization.
In the almost unanimous exaltation of political democratization as an
Preface to the Spanish Edition ix
institutional requisite for actualizing old emancipatory ideals there is a

desire, by way of democracy, to open a flank where personal and group
dreams might have public visibility. This is coupled with the defense of
institutional democracy as the order of ‘‘life’’ against exclusion, authoritar-
ianism and the cultures of death.
From the day-to-day recovery of the logic and strategies of social move-
ments, grassroots organizations, counter cultures, and popular expres-
sions of resistance there appears, in the end, a curiosity with regard to
peripheral conditions and existence. These are no longer present as folk-
lore but as the rule of partial, even tribal spaces where ideals of autonomy,
participation, and the development of human potential enter into play.
Amid the massive suspicion regarding great ideals appears a truly mas-
sive loss of belief in large-scale projects, collective stories, and soci-
etal utopias. This suspicion arises together with an urgency to counter the
new waves of political pragmatism and individual cynicism, by way of illu-
sions and proposals infused with new content, perhaps with greater hu-
mility and fewer pretensions than the previous utopias, but not ine√ective
for this.
A consequence of the worldwide eruption of a rational delirium is that
the speed of operations, inversions, reconversions, ramifications, renova-
tions, incorporations, speculations, and tides has increased exponentially,
beyond human grasp, far beyond any kind of voluntary control. Any cen-
tralized e√ort at imposing order would be interpreted as suicidal.
And at the same time—or as part of the same—we’re confronted with
the multiplication of options for integrating or marginalizing ourselves,
with software for all tastes and all perversions, and with the temptation to
reconstruct ourselves (cybernetically, computationally, telecommunica-
tionally) freed of the weightiness of being. It’s as if we could get rid of
thinking for ourselves by devotedly or playfully appropriating technology,
if we set all of our intelligence towards nourishing the euphoria of this
techno-wave that can really irritate us when we’re in a bad mood.
These pages observe a postmodern disenchantment with ideals such as
the constitution of the subject, progress as the engine that drives history,
the encyclopedic and academic tendencies of the highly literate, the ten-
dency towards a kind of teleology in the social sciences, the commitment
to systemic change—ultimately, everything that finished by making us
ine√ective because we wanted to be absolutely consistent.
The delegitimation of the State as the propeller of development and the
builder of society likewise shapes these pages. With that delegitimation
x No Apocalypse, No Integration
comes the subsequent loss of prestige and influence for normative state
planning and of revolutionary strategy. These no longer provide the link
between political action and social reflection. They are no longer convinc-
ing with regard to creating a nexus between science and progress. They
have lost support, in the street as in the universities, the parliament, and
literature.
These are crises of enlightened reason, utopian reason, historical reason.
The crisis of reason would be understood, just like that, as modern reason,
but also as modernity embodied in the patterns and discourses of modern-
ization in Latin America. Crisis as inflection, a place for the new, a meta-
morphosis of the spirit of a new epoch.
The essays that follow wish to put pressure on that spirit that wavers
between agony and transfiguration. Under the pressure of new, hyper-
contemporary secularization, lo nuestro, ‘‘our own,’’ seeks to materialize as
renewed identity. That identity combines the expectation of superconnec-
tion with the menace of loss.
How to resignify the collective future, beyond the invocation to demo-
cratic coexistence? From what point or place to rethink the imaginary-but-
tense link that unites subjectivity with power? What happens to the drive
to freedom once the stories that crystallize it have died? These questions
have been resonating for a good many years now, in Latin America. Their
answers, luckily, are not univocal: they pu√ through these pages precisely
because of the ambivalence that they provoke.
The texts that follow this preface are generational, almost excessively so.
Here is a slender thread that touches on new forms of narrating the spirit
of a lost generation of Latin Americans that arrived late to the epic of the
60s and that managed to breathe the stale hangover of that era, subse-
quently becoming disenchanted and fearful, without resigning itself to
cynicism or nihilism at the century’s end. It is a generation that reclaims
the act of dreaming despite or because of the radical depopulation of
collective dreams. But at the same time it claims that right without too
much shouting or resorting to violence, be it for an aesthetic rejection of
bad taste, a phantasmagoric fear of chaos, or a more concrete fear of losing
a job.
This is a text, all in all, that would like to raise public consciousness and,
from this end-of-the-millennium collapse, to insinuate a profile emerging
from the ruins. Most of all, it would like to bear witness to the many
deaths of God occurring in such short time.
Preface to the English Edition
The essays constituting this book are variations on a pair of questions.

What are the outward forms of the crisis of modernity in the Latin Ameri-
can periphery? In a continent marked by thwarted modernization, new
waves of privatization, the exclusion of great masses of people and pro-
found sociocultural heterogeneity, how is the postmodern criticism of
Enlightenment and Utopianism understood?
Such is the context for the texts that follow. They deal with three pro-
found crises that have shaken Latin America since the onset of the 1980s,
crises that are the foundation of its incomplete or poorly resolved incor-
poration into modernity. There is the crisis of utopias, especially the so-
cialist utopia, which promised to deliver social change. There is the crisis
of state modernization and development discourse, operating from the
end of World War II until the end of the 1960s. These crises feed yet
another, concerning the role of the social sciences and intellectuals.
The object of this preface is to present an overview of each of these
crises. Drawing ideas from the texts comprising this edition, this preface
aims to familiarize the reader with the subjects under consideration.
xii No Apocalypse, No Integration
The Crisis of Utopias Promising Social Change

The promise of revolution (socialist, nationalist, anti-imperialist) contrib-
uted to the prospect of radical change within the collective consciousness
of Latin America. This prospect or hope proposed that intense social
mobilization and political struggle would o√er future redemption from
social injustice, poverty, exclusion, external dependency, and capitalist
alienation. There is no country on the continent that did not at some point
in time internalize this image of the possible future, which transformed the
bounds and appearances of political discourse, mingling with the ‘‘dance of
the symbols’’ already afloat in diverse Latin American societies. While
enlightened readers understood the promise of the socialist revolution as
historically necessary, the popular sectors seized that promise as a clear-cut
hope for liberation. Redemption through massive social change, the end of
hard times, and the coming of the kingdom of the poor entered into the
popular imaginary. Images of general resurrection, with wagon loads of
pilgrims pouring into unprecedented rallies, and divine justice descending
to distribute goods, produced an almost drunken giddiness in leftist intel-
lectuals as well as ordinary folk. Political discourse was rearticulated, as was
the ideology of progress and art, in a dialectic like that of a Greek chorus in
which the tragic hero was very much a messiah. That messiah had various
names: Che Guevara, Camilo Torres, Salvador Allende.
But these expectations of liberation and redemption were violently frus-
trated. The political defeat of the left and of ‘‘progressive movements’’
during the 1970s, as well as the delegitimation of socialism and develop-
ment discourse in the 1980s, left national societies bereft of utopias. For
society, the erasure from the future, from even the insubstantial realm of
hope, of the image of social change along with prospects for liberation
from poverty and alienation, constitutes a form of death and of cultural
transfiguration.
The collapse of true socialist governments, the hard apprenticeships
under the dictatorships, the overthrow of Ortega in Nicaragua and the
deterioration of the image of Fidel’s regime in Cuba, along with the ratio-
nalization of markets and the triumph of pragmatists in the political arena,
brought the strength of the utopian images to an end, so that intellectuals
were left without a committed science, militants without a vital cause, and
the marginalized, more alone than ever.
Explanations for the defeat of the great utopias of social change abound.
More provocative are the questions regarding the possibility of new plans
Preface to the English Edition xiii
for liberation. What is happening today with that mass of energy that
came together to support the socialist wager; where is that energy headed
today? Does it make sense to seek new roads toward integration, new syn-
theses between personal desire and large-scale projets, ultimately seeking a
new dialectic which puts alienation aside, a≈rming liberty and justice?*
The defeat of the revolutionary or egalitarian utopia entails a search for
alternative forms of gratification and self-a≈rmation. Facing a future in
which the fleshed-out image of social revolution has lost the appearance of
truth, liberating energies dissipate in a cloud of alternatives that don’t add
up to a single project or total discourse. Rather, they bring to society the
fresh air of new searches: popular religious feeling, grass roots move-
ments, diversified consumption in the growing cultural industry, adhesion
to a broad menu of esoteric doctrines and programs for personal develop-
ment, identification with small groups that call for citizens’ solidarity,
struggles to expand democracy in limited, local spaces, the ‘‘postmodern
tribalization’’ of urban youth. These and other dynamics summarize the
dispersed energy, deprived of utopias, that thirsts for meaning.
These alternatives did not emerge as the reformulation of a great histor-
ical synthesis, but rather, as diverse forms of expression and smaller coop-
erative projects. Emerging from this framework are values such as plural-
ism, respect for di√erences, and the exaltation of diversity. Shall these
values be the stu√ of a new discourse of liberation?
The Crisis of State Modernization and Development Discourse

The mid-1970s signaled the irruption of various phenomena which would
have a devastating e√ect on the state-centered development paradigm that
had dominated Latin America from the postwar period to the early 1980s
economic crisis. Standing out among these phenomena are the growth,
within post-industrial capitalism, of ‘‘financial’’ (as opposed to ‘‘produc-
tive’’) capitalism, the stagnation of national economies, the crisis of legit-
*On ‘‘integration,’’ see Umberto Eco’s Apocalípticos e integrados ante la cultura de masas
(Spain: Editorial Lumen, 1965); however, Eco’s work is more closely tied to the culture
industry and its impact on mass culture. To some extent my work’s use of these terms
‘‘apocalyptic’’ or ‘‘integrated’’ includes Eco’s work, but in a broader sense. That is, ‘‘apoc-
alyptic’’ not only refers to those who regard mass culture as alienating, but to those who
regard the so-called ‘‘end of utopias’’ with a postmodern fatalism, who feel that globaliza-
tion represents the triumph of raw, unbridled neo-liberalism. The ‘‘integrated’’ refers not
xiv No Apocalypse, No Integration
imacy facing the political system of state-driven development, and the new
orientations proposed by the political economists known in our continent
under the archetypal figure of the ‘‘Chicago Boys.’’
All these phenomena have undermined the legitimacy of the so-called
‘‘development policy’’ of the preceding decades. The paradigmatic formu-
lation known as ‘‘the import substitution model’’ is attributed to cepal
(the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean). More
than an institutional or academic artifact, development policy was a syn-
thesis coined from historical experience. Its objective, which had always
enjoyed political, technical, and social consensus, was to accelerate the
movement of societies and national economies towards higher levels of
development and industrialization. State development policy kept this
future in mind as it tried to reach a series of objectives required for acceler-
ated modernization. These objectives included the promotion and diversi-
fication of domestic industry; the expansion of internal markets; the mod-
ernization of human resources and agrarian economy; economic stability
and growth; and social integration by way of modernized labor, educa-
tional expansion, urbanization, and access to basic services.
The substitution of domestic products for imports turned out to pos-
sess less integrative capacity than originally imagined. The problem owed
as much to domestic deficiencies as to exogenous forces. It also produced
corrosive e√ects: in the name of modernization it destroyed the cultural
roots of sectors that were marginalized and excluded from development
even as those now-informal sectors adopted the expectations of an indus-
trial culture. But these deficiencies or trade-o√s in the model did not
require a consecration of the neoliberal prescription, which had no rem-
edy for the dynamic deficiencies of this ‘‘peripheral capitalism’’ (which
cepal had forewarned for quite some time). Nor did neoliberal prescrip-
tions remedy the economic growth without social equity that has charac-
only to those who can participate in mass culture and the consumption of media icons but
also to those who reap the benefits of the Third Industrial Revolution, those who are
comfortable with the new style of ‘‘possessive individualism’’ that characterizes neoliberal-
ism’s new sensitivity and who share the consumerist aspirations that are induced by com-
mercial globalization. The fact that this book is titled No Apocalypse, No Integration is an
echo of Eco, or an anti-Eco. The idea is that it’s no longer easy to locate oneself in one or
another of the two trenches, of the apocalyptic or of the integrated. Rather, the majority
participates in various mediations and intermediary strategies between the two.
Preface to the English Edition xv
terized our countries even in times of shared enthusiasm with respect to

the modernizing paradigm.
The crisis in the state development model has forced a revision of the
role of the State in Latin American societies, for this model was always
associated with an ideal of the State as driving the economy and construct-
ing the actors of development. So-called ‘‘State Planning’’ in Latin Amer-
ica has been decreasing for some time, eroded from many sides. Among
the objections to this Demiurgic State—driving force of modernization,
impartial arbitrator of social conflicts and great political totalizer—are
that it is both utopian and formalist, erratic and rigid, capitalist and an
obstacle to capitalism, vulnerable and hypertrophied. Its very conception
is considered to have been an error, illusion, or failure. The crisis of the
1980s (with the following decade lost to development) e√ectively killed a
project that was, until the 1970s, still the functional formula for mixed
(half-state, half-private) economies. The development model was attacked
by the new right and by the new left, by ideology and economics (and
ideology packaged in economics), by politics and by culture.
The defeat of the model of development based on the substitution of
domestic goods for imports and on State Planning created a huge gap, an
open space into which neoliberal o√ensives have rushed in to promote the
hegemonic ideology of the strong market. This is an ideology that runs
through politics, the sensitivity of the intelligentsia, and the mass media.
The gap nonetheless created an opening for alternative proposals and
perceptions. The revalorization of democracy in a post-ideological context
has enabled new topics for political debate. These include the diversity of
cultures and of values, concern for greater equity in opportunities for
professional and personal development, and the construction of more
representative channels for processing social demands in the political sys-
tem. The enhancement of democratic governability in situations of social
fragmentation brings with it the decentralization of public management.
With change in political economies comes the more democratic and par-
ticipatory use of the growing culture industry. Sooner or later those topics
should acquire greater prominence in national debate within Latin Ameri-
can countries.
It’s also worth noting, in this sense, the emergence of social movements
as bearers of new forms of political practice. The crisis of legitimacy in the
party system and of the Centralist State has given way to a new search for
political renewal. Within this framework, social movements appear as the
xvi No Apocalypse, No Integration
most direct and democratic alternative for processing demands. Attrib-

uted to them is the ability to express collective identities in public spaces,
and to better represent people’s real interests. On another plane, new
social movements have been considered as embryos of alternative social-
ization. New understandings of shared identity, greater cooperative par-
ticipation, and greater democratization of social life and local spaces
spring from them. While pondering the influence of new social move-
ments on the construction of political consciousness is no easy task, their
emergence poses a motivating challenge, one that calls for the rescue of
popular creativity and for alternative development discourses.
Those who once shared enthusiasm for state development policy and
are now searching for alternatives to the status quo are asking themselves:
in what measure can social movements, political heterodoxy, and the ex-
pansive impulse of democracy serve as a base for a di√erent, more just,
more appropriate model? And in what measure can dispersed energies
come together to call for questions, in political and cultural terms, to
interpellate that status quo?
Crisis among Intellectuals and Social Scientists

The destiny of the ‘‘intelligentsia’’ and of the Latin American social sci-
ences was strongly conditioned by theories of social change. Most intellec-
tuals and social scientists were seen, over the decades, as closely committed
to development discourse and to the leftist agenda of a possible revolu-
tion. It is not strange, then, that the crisis of state development policy and
the failure of the socialist wager on revolution would have an especially
strong impact on the figure of the intellectual and the social scientist.
This book o√ers insights into the consequences of this impact. It gauges
the transition presently running through the social sciences and ‘‘well-read’’
social thought. The political defeats, which overthrew the enlightened
pretensions of social science, have left social scientists and intellectuals in an
impasse marked by a double crisis: of ‘‘intelligibility’’ and of ‘‘organicity.’’
By the crisis of intelligibility I refer to the di≈culties that critical social
thought has experienced in attempting to grasp the new political, cultural,
and social scenarios that have emerged on the Latin American map. The
interpretive capacity of the social sciences was overwhelmed by the hege-
mony of neoliberalism, the complexity of the social fabric, and the ex-
hausting e√ects of the culture industry. Comprehensive structural ex-
Preface to the English Edition xvii
planations of reality were overtaken by scenarios requiring new, more

heterodox, nuanced readings. Perplexity was making itself more evident in
the figure of the social scientist to whom, until recently, was attributed the
power of reading and extracting from history the last word in explana-
tions. This is clearly shown in the loss of relevance of the three most
significant paradigms dominating social scientific practice from the 1950s
to the 1970s in Latin America: ‘‘cepal-ism’’∞ (or development policy in
its ‘‘original’’ meaning), orthodox Marxism, and the paradigm of the so-
called ‘‘dependency theorists.’’
The crisis of organicity involves breaking the link between knowledge
production and practical intervention. This break is very significant, since
the social scientist and the intellectual have, for various decades, justified
their roles, to others and to themselves, as a function of their practical
contribution to social change. The political and cultural defeat of the left,
plus the political and technical defeat of development policy and its na-
tional variants, dismantled the Latin American social sciences’ greatest
source of legitimacy, which was its claim to the organic (or supposedly or-
ganic) articulation between knowledge production and the radical trans-
formation of social structures.
One need not be postmodern to understand the exaggeration with
which the Western Enlightenment, matrix of the producer of knowledge
was incarnate in the model of the Latin American social scientist as mod-
ern, progressive, and endowed with an almost mythical ability. Capable of
deciphering the nature of reason, the model social scientist would then
identify the rational movement of history, and finally use reason to recog-
nize the best future direction. Certainly one need not resort to the anti-
utopian discourse of disenchantment in order to feel the psychological and
even spiritual costs imposed when the image of a possible revolution was
ground into dust. Even if that revolution were to be situated in some
uncertain future, as an image, it has definitively lost its force for mobilizing
the masses; as a discourse, it has lost the appearance of reality.
Casting doubt on the great projects of modernization previously con-
stituting the basic material of political-symbolic consumption in Latin
America (whether in terms of national development or in socialist terms)
moves intellectuals and social scientists to wonder about how their own
knowledge production contributes to future social and political change.
On the other hand, disenchantment and the lack of confidence generated
by political failures and the discrediting of paradigms of social interpreta-
xviii No Apocalypse, No Integration
tion lead to much higher stakes of heterodoxy in the means of grasping

reality. The result is that it becomes di≈cult to define current boundaries
between heterodoxy and eclecticism in the Latin American social scien-
tist’s interpretive practice. As a result of the need to resort to tools from
distinct analytical currents, and the abandonment of globalizing categories
nourished by strong ideologies, theory has been exposed to the most
hybrid formulations.
How to exercise social criticism in Latin America today? What could its
objectives be, avoiding self-pitying pessimism or paralyzing fatalism? Is it
possible to uncover a mode of reflection for suggesting and rescuing new
liberating features in social reality, to create a space for hopes oriented
towards a more humanized order, to promote a more a≈rmative and less
heteronomous culture?
The current options would seem to indicate new mediations between
the social scientist and the scientist’s object, between the intellectual and
reality. A bit of Enlightenment and Utopianism is needed to counter-
balance the overly pragmatic and functionalist bias that threatens to co-
opt the production of knowledge, or to limit the uncritical apologies for
the virtues of the market. It is necessary to delve into society’s cultural
production, into new life strategies, into the irreducible cultural mixing
that subsists and survives in Latin America. It is necessary to speak in the
plural, in terms of perspectives and alternative scenarios, to be more hum-
ble in the transmission of knowledge, but more adventurous in experi-
menting with that knowledge. To carry the value of pluralism from politi-
cal to epistemological options, to be pluralist as social scientists. To modify
forms as well as contents, personal attitude as well as object. To convert
oneself, for a time, into the very object of investigation, to immerse oneself
in the very emotions of disenchantment and personal perplexity, of one’s
neighbors and equals. To discard nothing as irrational or irrelevant. To
behold, from close up, the new hues and profiles of collective identity, the
features of sensibility and of personality, such as never occurred to a de-
velopment policy planner or scientist of the revolution.
The disenchantment that succeeds perplexity in these crises has two
faces: entropy and alchemy. The former paralyzes and undermines the
creative imagination. The latter accepts failure as an opportunity for con-
ceiving new forms of utopian invention and libertarian mysticism. The
author of the present book looks at the second face, not in order to give
answers, but to stir up the embers of the search-fires.
Preface to the English Edition xix
Note
1 The term cepal-ism refers to the development strategies proposed by cepal-eclac
(Comisión Económica para América Latina y el Caribe, Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean) in the 1950s and 1960s. These strategies are based on
accelerated industrialization, import substitution and the stimulation of domestic de-
mand, with the strong participation of the State in economic action.
No Apocalypse, No Integration
1 R The Day after the Death of a Revolution
We are, without doubt, crossed by interwoven uncertainties. These uncer-

tainties are reflected in expressions such as the crisis of the Welfare State
(and its Latin American variant, the Planning State), and the loss of the
centrality of class struggle to the historical imagination. In expressions
such as the new dependency, in our experience of social and cultural frag-
mentation, in our disenchantment facing a humbled economy and a hum-
ble democracy, we awake as if from a pleasant dream—and why not,
possibly from a nightmare too—called revolution. All of these expres-
sions contribute to the moral atmosphere of doubt. Facing them, doubt
nags away at us: are we still looking for some form of totalization, for a
new comprehensive explanation, for another subject hearkening to the
universal, for an unprecedented and inevitably energizing impulse toward
utopia? There exists, of course, a strong reservation facing the prospect
or hope that political renovation or sustained modernization would re-
motivate a fantasized historical synthesis. What the societies of Latin
America most share today are social deterioration, formal democracy, pri-
vatizing euphoria and shock politics. These terse coincidences can hardly
2 No Apocalypse, No Integration
be said to constitute the raw material for meaningful emancipation, for

creating a future and for absorbing the dormant memory of the ‘‘people.’’
In view of the above, the following pages might seem skeptical. They
don’t indicate new avenues for change nor do they revitalize old impulses
for radical transformation. Rather, they trace the crisis and the conse-
quences following the shattered dream of integration. The shattering of
that dream has profoundly a√ected culture, daily life, and the pursuit of
happiness.
Culture Ablaze
If the revolution were imagined in social terms as a hot blaze in which the
basic structures of dependency capitalism were to be consumed and re-
gress to an earlier stage, we would now confront the congealed ashes of
the very idea of revolution. It’s more than just a question of political,
strategic, or ideological turnarounds. To abandon the image of a possible
revolution is a cultural mutation, a peculiar way to die.
To die for the lack of events. The revolution was conceived as moment and
momentum, when history would fall apart through conscious and collec-
tive action, an inflection and change of course toward the foundational
appropriation of the present. Without revolution, we’re left without the
emotion of the great event.
To die for the lack of redemption. The revolution, while made by a few,
would redeem all of us from capitalist alienation, from the small and
mu∆ed dramas of bourgeois individualism, and from the viscous contam-
ination of exploitation. Party or proletariat were seen as particular sub-
jects, with the ability to act as pivots, to make universal emancipation turn
around. Our doubts and shames would be left behind. Without a revolu-
tion, we’ve no choice but to put up with them.
To die for the lack of fusion. The image of a possible, meaningful revolu-
tion supposed the full integration of personal with communal life. The
seamless communion of one’s life projects with one’s world project pro-
vided the rounded, succinct justification of one’s own, personal existence.
The image of oneself tossed out into the street, fused into a seething mass
that lays waste to all vestiges of an order verging on decay, could prove
almost ecstatic.
With no prospects of revolution, present life loses its epic potential.This
would lead to a range of consequences, among which it would be useful to
The Day after the Death of a Revolution 3
single out the ones that most contribute to a culture of disenchantment

and chilliness of temperament.
In the first place, there’s the necessity of remaking and resignifying∞
personal existence. That existence was previously based on a sum of ‘‘minor
reasons’’ that never constituted a ‘‘total reason.’’ Even so, those ‘‘reasons’’
somehow managed to conjure, partially, temporarily, the loss of the earlier
metahistorical referent. Almost without realizing it we substitute the sin-
gle program for a collection of ‘‘software’’ that we select depending on the
occasion: the software of personal growth, of political pragmatism, of
career advancement, of social recognition, of moral transgressions. For
lack of coherence, we replace the emphasis on the substantive with the
satisfaction of style. Some of us adhere to some small scale, minor caliber
collective projects. The word ‘‘individualist’’ no longer strikes us as sinful;
it has become more musical than the word ‘‘collectivist.’’
In the second place, we pass from the utopian thinking to the ad hoc.
The lack of a final condition of total reconciliation has led us to constant
readjustment, using strategies not as the means to achieve a glorious end,
but as the end in itself. Even in politics, form has become content. If the
image of revolutionary action may be seen against a clear and distant
horizon, in the absence of that image, vision tends to settle for minimal,
short term change, regression into the interstices, the spaces in between.
The lack of utopias is not only the dissolution of dreams, but also the
perpetuation of a drowsy, pointillist insomnia.
In the third place, we’ve renounced the wish to break away. Previously,
the categorical imperative could always be found in a necessary assassina-
tion, real or symbolic, of the bourgeois, capitalist, or imperialist. Today we
toy with these figures, justifying ourselves through them, and, at most,
joking around with them in nocturnal rituals or waking fantasies. The verb
‘‘to break’’ has lost its once irresistible charm, its once implicit violence as a
verb that could be sheathed in beauty: Fanon, Guevara and Ho Chi Minh
were the very examples of this aestheticization of violence. The mere inev-
itability of a radical break constituted a relief, in and of itself. Now it’s all
too clear that this is less inevitable than it once seemed.
In the fourth place, socialism no longer appears as the possibility of
social synthesis or full integration between State and society. This means
accepting two divergent perspectives: we’re induced to recognize social
fragmentation as an inexorable reality, or to accept a new kind of totaliza-
tion, the result of the transnationalization of the economy and the re-
articulative impact of new technologies and the flourishing cultural indus-

try. We nonetheless know that both interpretations, both perspectives, can
be one and the same: until now, the remapping, in global terms, of the
international economic scenario has heightened the processes of social
fragmentation already evidenced by the styles of development promoted
in Latin America over the past three or four decades, consecrating a status
quo where the (internationally) integrated are starkly juxtaposed with the
(nationally) excluded. The alternative to these possibilities has so far been
unspecified stammering about ‘‘endogenous development.’’ The develop-
ment alternatives are likely to be reduced to appeals to vague principle or
molecular integration that turn the actors into great heroes to themselves
and little monads to the rest.
Ultimately, the recomposition of the worldwide economic system
and the globalization of communications provokes an accelerated de-
territorialization, which makes it very di≈cult to maintain a stable identity
associated with the territory in which one lives and the nation to which
one belongs. It’s not easy to evaluate the impact on collective projects of
phenomena such as the relocation of productive activities beyond the
countries’ borders, planet-wide simultaneity in the interchange of infor-
mation, and the displacement—at the speed of light and with uncontrolla-
ble destinations—of the symbolic products of local origin. On television
screens, identities jumble together in a worldwide dance of mutant, rap-
idly obsolescent symbols. The globalization of markets and communica-
tions provokes a growing permeability and a porosity of imaginaries that
nobody could rationalize. Expressed as a caricature, the currently reigning
ideology can last as long as a commercial announcement or an ethno-
graphic program on the television.
Following the revolution’s diluted horizons and the broken promises of
sustained modernization’s integrative potential (for it failed to integrate as
expected, even when it was e√ectively sustained), questions about the
meaning and axis of the continent’s present history become di≈cult even
to formulate. Beyond political viability or will, it’s a question of what is—
or is not—culturally possible: the pulverization of large-scale projects, the
loss of conviction in homogenous, universally beneficent progress, the
turn towards seeking shelter in life’s small business, exchanging the sub-
stantive for the procedural in our symbolic order, the inability to imagine
radical change or large-scale initiatives, a certain complacency towards
discontinuity and fragmentation in all walks of sociocultural life, and fi-
nally, the preeminence of a kind of exclusionary transnationalization that

is neither national nor popular. Don’t these circumstances make it di≈cult
even to think of roads to development that might seduce and mobilize our
old and new masses? From what utopia, or with what ends in mind, is the
epic of history conceivable once the bonfire of revolutionary dreaming is
quenched, along with the spectacle of mass liberation and the promise of
sustained progress?≤
The Smouldering Ashes of the Everyday

Devoid of the Great Project, the everyday turns into what it is: the life of
each and all days. Healthy minimalism? Maybe so. We all have our little
projects, filling up and justifying the day, the week, the month, the year at
most. Academics, with their research projects, organizers with their action
projects, members of the informal sector with their community develop-
ment projects, political activists with their realist projects, yuppies with
their fortunate transactions. The old utopian Great Project turns into
these smaller missions that are disseminated by way of programs, initia-
tives that are born and die: local proposals. None of them last very long,
yet the multiple possibilities and e√ects of that underlying initiative are
inscribed everywhere and in everything. Shall we sing an elegy or spell out
an apology for the discontinuity that we all endure in the day-to-day? A bit
of each, mixed up and turned around.
How is an everyday life constituted and made meaningful when it’s
characterized by the little project and discontinuity, in a sequence of jux-
taposed routines that don’t necessarily add up to a whole? How to think of
a process of integration along the macro-scale, when even the micro-scale
seems incapable of integration? Maybe it would be a kind of integration
which replaces meaning with the administration of the diverse, merely a
matter of control and of defining boundaries.
It’s no coincidence that ever since the death of the image of the revolu-
tion (with its beatific mode of integration and universalist vocation),
everyday life in Latin America has been increasingly studied. There’s a
growing attempt to find, in the porosity of that molecular life, the discreet
charm of possible rites, latent magic, booming identities. It’s quite clear
that the everyday becomes the natural repository for expectations that
have had to abandon the pasturelands of total liberation. It’s in this private
terrain that postmoderns, for example, want to find a field for ongoing
experiment and a ludic passage between fashions, languages, and expres-

sions throughout time. Does the play of forms substitute for modernizing
or revolutionary integration?
Surely all of this suggests a vision of the everyday as permanently and
doubly marked. On the one hand, the rich diversity of experience, but
also the exasperating evidence of non-transcendence. On the other hand,
ashes, nothing solid built on them, although they’re soft and fresh to the
end. Such is the dual face of the superficial creativity and underlying
hybridity.
Doubtless, everyday life is not the same for everyone. Today more than
ever, Latin America demonstrates a fundamental divide that cuts through
even its tiniest routines. It is the divide of social contrasts. In absolute
numbers there are more impoverished people today than there were a
decade ago, and the distribution of income is less equitable than at the
beginning of the 80s. Curiously, the end of the dream of revolution is
produced in circumstances in which the contradictions that previously
made the revolution (or structural change) a totalizing, inescapable event
now appear more acute, while social injustice and dependency are greater
and more dramatic than ever. In vast sectors of the population, the gap
between expectations for consumption and the impossibility of filling
them is an ever-widening one. It’s not for nothing that violence has en-
tered in, as an everyday reality, in many a Latin American metropolis. No
longer can this violence be moralized as revolutionary violence or reduced
to the counter-expression of an exclusionary model of development. It
gains increasingly in public visibility.
For the sectors excluded from development, the insecurity of existence
is an everyday occurrence: physical insecurity in the big cities, job insecu-
rity, insecurity with respect to income and promised-but-frustrated social
mobility. All these factors bring with them a sense of the everyday in which
life turns into a fragile thing. Even the body itself can be experienced as an
object of dubious strength. The uncertainty e√ect becomes a climate.
In contrast to the insecurity of the excluded, those who are integrated
experience the everyday dimension of life through progressive diversifica-
tion by way of consumerism and a swift incorporation of the latest tech-
nological advantages. In the social strata of the so-called fortunate, the
everyday is populated by new services, the exotic stu√ of science fiction,
and a certain spirit of cool in using and acquiring new goods and services.
The possibility of information technology and telecommunication facili-
tates permanent connection to the world, unlimited access to information,
and diversified exchange with diverse peers. So is everyday life networked,

and those who benefit from development increasingly reach a perfect mu-
tual understanding. This leads to a ceaseless mobility of receivers and
emissors, to a vertigo-inducing, ever-changing cross-talk among rotating
subjects, and to an accelerated innovation in the manipulation of objects
and communication between subjects. Here, the provisional e√ect becomes
a climate.
What’s precarious for some is temporary for others.≥ The former, lived
as a drama without any prospect of resolution. The latter, a slight commit-
ment aired out and set afloat. In Brazil, for example, the world’s fourth
largest transnational television network coexists with 19 percent illiteracy
and millions of children living in the streets. Of course, heterogeneity
crosses the uncertain as much as the provisional. For the excluded, hetero-
geneity appears under the form of an astounding proliferation of roles for
surviving and strategies for not succumbing, and of continual displace-
ment from one strategy to another. For the integrated, heterogeneity ap-
pears in the diversified consumption of objects, in the use of services and
of kinds of investments, and in the connection with a greater variety of
peers. But everyday life recomposes itself, whether in terms of imposed
uncertainty or as a chosen provisionality. This de-centering allows the
inference, even if only by way of speculation, of the following e√ects:
1. It isn’t all that easy, anymore, to associate the everyday with continuity.
Uncertain or a provisional existence causes the everyday to lose some of its
character of ‘‘progressive excavation.’’ It loses depth and grows wider. The
material of the everyday becomes more random, less predictable, less read-
ily planned. The flexibility of images, codes, languages, and rules in the
new industrial-cultural complex also permeates everyday life, giving rise to
an ongoing metamorphosis of images, symbols, and traditions. This be-
comes more contingent than ever in a world eternally reinventing itself on
a diskette or on a video-game tape.
2. The reiterative dimension of the everyday, may not, by definition,
disappear, but it can at the least become attenuated. It’s no longer that easy
to see the everyday as the substrata of repetition that prolongs us, in a
circular fashion, through time and across space. Insecurity in employment
contributes to this by forcing a more intense circle of work activities.
Other factors include the acceleration of technical change, with its e√ects
in productive routines and in objects and services that are consumed; the
volubility of familiar roles, whether on account of cultural changes or
pressures to survive; and the recomposition of the economic scene, in
which accumulation rests less in the continuity of a business than in a

certain ‘‘sense of opportunity.’’ Nothing seems to be repeated anymore.
Everything is recreated and reprogrammed without pause in the all-
embracing language of computing and in the communicative extroversion
of the mass media. The transvestism observable in new cultural markets
suggests to us that the everyday is no longer repetition, but a series of
removes. It ceases to provide a circular substratum to time.
3. Owing to the preceding, the importance of speed for everyday life is
greater today than ever before, in order to survive, to progress, to be
informed, and to capitalize on all additional advances brought about by
way of technical supplies.
4. The short term has become the permanent, total horizon of daily life,
as much through uncertainty in some and provisionality in others, as for
the acceleration of change in all walks of everyday life. This might appear
to be a characteristic innate to the field of the everyday, which is, in the
long run, the field of the immediate. Nonetheless, it’s not the same thing
to live the immediate towards a horizon felt to be for the long term as to
experience it as a horizon in and of itself.
Finally, minimalism has been converted into a well-regarded value for
daily action. All big projects are dismissed as pretentious or unrealistic.
The value attributed to nuance, detail, and the circumstantial returns. This
minimalism is fleshed out in the logic of software, which each person
creates or interchanges according to preference, situations, or objects, and
where there is no horizon other than the moment’s required operation.
In synthesis, the everyday comes marked by the signs of decreased con-
tinuity and repetition, by increased speed and an exacerbation of the short
term, plus a certain minimalist complacency. All of this intersects with the
double face of the social, involving the uncertain and the provisional, the
forced and the chosen, the excluded and the integrated.
Once again, the unanswered question: How, with these aspects of the
everyday, to conceive an idea that will e√ectively spur eventual collective
emancipation? How to do so from the revival of individualism, disconti-
nuity, uncertainty, and the provisional quality of daily life? How to do so
considering the fugacity of social ties, superficial creativity and underlying
hybridity, the institutionalization of violence, the inability to predict, the
di≈culty of planning, the pathos of fragility and insecurity, the exaltation
(or lament) of the ephemeral, the loss of social sensibility, the abdication
of the middle and long term speed and the solidification of minimalism as
norm and value? Which raw material of everyday life is open to becoming
a unifying material for historical life?
Life’s Cool Joy

How does this di≈culty of integration—a di≈culty translated into mini-
mal dreams, pulverized utopias—intersect and modify the forms in which
we procure life’s joy? In what manner do the new signs of everyday life and
sensitivity intersect with consciousness’ bent toward happiness?
Can one speak of a lesser disposition to life’s joy, through the workings
of conditions such as the death of a redeeming utopia (with its subjective
consequences), greater socio-cultural fragmentation, and the renuncia-
tion of integration by way of modernizing development? Is it possible to
think that one may take greater joy in life, thanks to the return to individu-
alism, the increased weightlessness that discontinuity o√ers, the small but
more frequent achievements that minimalism dispenses, and the aesthet-
icizing spectacle of diversity? What promise to the ecstasy of body and
spirit is inaugurated through the virtual images that seemingly o√er us, for
a couple of coins, synesthesia via voyages in submarines, space ships or
time tunnels?
Enthusiasm as much as unease are possible reactions to so uncertain and
mobile a picture as that of the disarticulated underclasses of Latin Ameri-
can societies. Even in pessimism one may encounter a certain dose of
pleasure, insofar as exercising renunciation can supply a liberating e√ect
for the one practicing it. On the other hand, optimism likewise can be a
subproduct of pessimism: facing the loss of utopias, one renounces that
critical action that commits itself to change. Attention is displaced towards
the small pleasures that a world in decomposition can o√er. The optimist
is, to some extent, a transfigured pessimist, capable of ‘‘reading’’ reality
with an ingenious mixture of candor and acuity, thus avoiding the heavy
weight of pending integration, the guilt caused by the system’s injustices,
and concern with the exclusions emanating from the styles of development
current in Latin America. Proof of the vastness of the changes required to
escape from these problems is that they require almost limitless power and
they dead-end in conflict. From this proof, one decides—quickly forget-
ting that a decision is involved—to concentrate on the immediate: one’s
body, one’s peers, one’s current project.
Nevertheless, the question remains open: From what place to center
life’s joy in this discontinuous, uncertain, fragmented, shifting scenario?

Some conjectures follow.
Life’s joy lies in turning change into ecstasy. On whatever scale, in
whatever media, everything changes with growing acceleration. Tech-
nological impact, ecstasies of communication, the globalization of mar-
kets and social deterioration are some factors responsible for this accelera-
tion. Facing this, two possibilities: either die of vertigo, or enjoy vertigo.
It would be necessary to develop the second of the two possibilities, to
learn how to enjoy the ceaseless recompositions of the backdrop, to de-
light in the cadence of change. Nonetheless, the urgent is still pending: is it
possible to enjoy the vertigo of the excluded?
Life’s joy lies in the lightness of ties. There’s no firm tie to the fu-
ture, today’s job, the present moment’s interlocutors. Everything can be
changed tomorrow and we’ll find ourselves in another, uncalculated mo-
ment, in another job and in close communication with new people. Facing
this, two possibilities: either die of living a provisional existence, or im-
merse oneself in it. The second requires extraordinary plasticity, not only
to resituate oneself in this sequence of provisional ties, but to be able to
identify oneself with them while they last.
Life’s joy lies in occupying the interstitial areas, the areas in-between.
Facing a reality which is simultaneously fragmented and enormously resis-
tant to structural changes, one can substitute the reconciliatory, liberatory
joy promised by revolution with enthusiasm for little utopias or gaps
within a disenchanted world. This enthusiasm can spur one to lead an
initiative of communal participation; to identify oneself with the ephem-
eral and circumstantial symbols used by those who reject the status quo,
the Establishment; to come and go between new social movements that
are born and die; to sporadically transgress a social norm; to ridicule
power in complicity with some peers; or to capitalize, taking advantage of
the gaps that macroeconomic disequilibrium creates. All this can be a
source of rejoicing, however briefly.
Life’s joy lies in rescuing from romanticism the bet on passion. Lacking
redemption through revolution or integration, there remains the pos-
sibility of a passion that temporarily inhabits the field of fantasy that
carries the body to an almost mystic reverberation. In this sense, a re-
surgence of romanticism shouldn’t be surprising.
Finally, life’s joy can come from taking pleasure in forms. Diversity
brings with it a proliferation of images and sensations. If the culture of
revolution—and integration—subordinates form to content and means
to ends, this subordination is not evident in the culture of disenchant-

ment. The skin becomes a second form of consciousness, and from the
skin it is possible to contemplate the environment cinematographically,
since the environment is displaced and modified according to a rhythm
closer to cinema than to old-fashioned reality. The primacy of the substan-
tial gives way to the contemplation of the diverse.
Once again, the question lies in wait: Do these motives of joy—seduc-
tion by vertigo, the lightness of ties, the interstitial adventure, the adven-
ture of in-between places, the bet on individual passion, the exaltation of
forms, and the consequent loss of substantiality—favor social, national,
Latin American integration? Is integration conceivable from vertigo, light-
ness, the in-between, passion, the aesthetic? Or, on the contrary, is there no
more solid directionality, no firmer connection required?
Provisional or uncertain, disenchanted or integrated, the moods of
Latin America are not clear. Perhaps the revolution is, after all, a concept
that endures, although orphaned of an image capable of fleshing it out, in
the collective consciousness. Perhaps the integration of the peoples—
among themselves and with others—is a still-pending task that will have
to be taken up again, after this poor Sunday that we are living. In the
meantime, I believe that the commentaries spilled out here speak of a
certain cultural tempering, operating at large, in the air.
Unless my subjectivity, dear reader, has nothing to do with yours.
Notes
1 During the sixties, the seventies, and the beginning of the eighties, the political culture
of the left fostered the notion of revolution within which personal existence was mean-
ingful insofar as it was fully consecrated to the radical change of the social order. From a
strong project with a substantial utopian content, individual life appeared redeemed
and charged through with meaning. Today, with the so-called end of utopias and
strong ideologies, the personal life of many has to seek other channels to ‘‘justify itself ’’
or to give it sense. Thus the ‘‘necessity of giving new meaning to personal existence,’’ no
longer by way of maximalist discourse or projects, but in a postmodern climate in
which the grand narratives have been weakened, and in which meaning is more closely
linked to the day-to-day, to the molecular, to the human scale.
2 The idea of ‘‘integration’’ appears and circulates throughout development discourse in
Latin America in the years following WWII. ‘‘Integration’’ refers to processes in which
di√erent social groups move progressively closer to participating in the dynamics and
benefits of progress and of modernization. In this way, integration has been systemati-
cally understood as occurring at the nexus of various discrete phenomena. These phe-
nomena include: progressive participation in the economically active population, in

modern, active employment positions that are increasingly productive and at higher
salaries; access to higher education and thus to greater possibilities of future socio-
economic mobility; expanding consumer power, which implies access to a growing and
diversified range of goods and services; improved housing, that is, access to housing of
a higher quality that is more connected to the modern infrastructure; institutionalized
access to health services and social security. The opposition between ‘‘the integrated’’
and ‘‘the excluded’’ has been understood, in Latin America, in relation to realizing, or
not realizing, these goals. Closely tied to the idea of social mobility and of adjustment
to norms, the concept of integration only recently incorporates new aspects such as the
cultural a≈rmation of ethnic minorities, the variable of gender and the strengthening
of social capital.
3 In the first place, the precarious is always provisional, but not vice versa. The best way
to define the precarious is ‘‘with high social vulnerability,’’ that is, alluding to social
groups that lack social security and have low educational levels, unstable or persistent
unemployment, and weak social networks. The provisional best refers to the ‘‘new
style’’ of those who are integrated into the hyped-up rhythm of globalization. They are
not committed to long term projects, they easily change direction in their economic
activities, they are relatively secularized in their daily life—and as such, their values are
more ad hoc.
2 R Disenchanted and Triumphant Toward the 21st Century:
A Prospect of Cultural Moods in South America
Bewildering Politics
In the beginning of 1989, who could have foreseen that the rise of fuel
prices in Venezuela would trigger a descent of the excluded from the hills
to Caracas, with Carlos Andrés Pérez’s return to power bringing the first
popular response, sketched across the skin of the continent’s most schizoid
capital: the taboo image of a city sacked by its excluded members?
Who would have imagined that in Ecuador, in June of 1990, under the
governing image of the highly literate, much praised, stu√y Borja, indige-
nous peoples from the mountains all over the country would emerge, like
furtive phantoms, to paralyze the highways and settle accounts according
to their own vernacular customs?
Who would have thought that a silent, oriental figure with no political
experience, would become, over the course of an evening, the president
that Peruvians would choose, through a popular vote, to show them the
way out of the quagmire?
Everything’s explicable, once the deeds are done. But the surprises of
politics in South America share a common characteristic: from indigenous

revolts to the eruptions of popular movements in the precarious peace of
the cities, to the named and unforeseeable preferences of the electorate,
social energies are di≈cult to rationalize. The collective imaginary is popu-
lated by passions, desires, and images that exceed the political calculus,
inundating it with surprises. No one fails to recognize that South Ameri-
can societies have been normalizing in very heterogeneous ways, in their
productive structure as in their symbolic order. If something distinguishes
them, it’s precisely this mixture: culture whisks together the ingredients of
secularization and normalization in the strangest ways.
Despite everything, South American modernization has undeniably ac-
quired renewed impetus. No one can pull together the force and will
su≈cient to contain, revert, or undermine it. A new secularizing crusade
imposes a code of universalistic pretensions. Its gaudiest manifestations
are an updated, instrumental rationality, accelerated privatization, the
opening of markets, and a race against time to modernize what can be
modernized and to administrate what can’t be modernized. Yet the li-
bretto repeatedly falls apart, for it’s undeniable that this sham seculariza-
tion lands in the airports, businesses, and masses of the South American
continent, who elect as their governors beatific administrators such as
Fujimori, television technocrats like Collor de Melo, Hollywood patriots
like Menem. The devout and the bandits are incorporated into the dy-
namic of transnationalized markets without ceasing to be devout or ban-
dits. The sacked city or blockaded mountains are gestures of the same
masses. The returns to democracy in the Southern Cone begin in fiesta and
continue in litany. And the more this secular modernization extends, the
more churches of every sort proliferate.
That all this has been said before doesn’t make it less true. For reasons
di√erent from those of development-based modernization, open market
modernization fractures on the side of culture. We must situate ourselves
within that fracture in the course of the following pages, trying to com-
pose a map where the disenchanted and the triumphant fill our countries
with new cultural signs. From within this fracture we will ultimately at-
tempt to bring together, as much as possible, the art of sleight of hand and
the science of anticipating the future.
Disenchanted and Triumphant 15
From the Side of the Disenchanted: Where Are

the Desires for Emancipation Headed?
The death of the image of a possible revolution struck at the militants of
the left, critical intellectuals, and a nucleus of politically conscious work-
ers. It erased from the future, even in its di√use range of hope, the image
of social change as capable of bringing about liberation from poverty and
alienation. This erasure is a form of death and cultural transfiguration
in society.
In South America, no country exists that has not, in its moment, inter-
nalized this image of the possible future. Its incorporation not only trans-
formed the forms and limits of political discourse, but also intermingled
with the ‘‘dance of symbols’’ afloat in heterogenous South American soci-
eties. Popular culture’s syncretic assimilation of the left’s proposals prob-
ably—and contradictorily—originated in what Marx called the opium of
the people: popular religiosity. There, famished for content, were the
eschatological feelings, messianic and geared towards redemption, of a
people with a Christian soul. While highly literate social critics could feel
the promise of the socialist revolution as an historic necessity, the people
took that promise as the concrete hope of liberation.∞ Redemption by way
of Massive Social Change, the end of hard times, and the advent of the
Kingdom of the Poor thus came to form part of the popular imagination.
To enter into the set of causes that finished o√ this ‘‘concrete utopia’’ is
now beside the point. Military coups, the boom of neoliberal ideology,
real socialism’s collapse, the rationalization of the market, and the prag-
matist’s triumph in the political arena are all visible signs draining both
the hope and historical necessity of revolution. At one extreme, neoliberal-
ism appropriated the word ‘‘revolution,’’ stu≈ng it with the euphoria of
worldwide capitalism in the making.≤ The questions, then, are as follows:
What’s presently happening with the mass of cultural energy that flowed
towards the bet on a socialist liberation, and where does this mass of
energy seem aimed in the future?
A suggestive hypothesis is that the withdrawal of physical and discur-
sive forces of socialist liberation has provoked a deployment of diverse
spaces for variously reinserting the energies mentioned above. These
spaces promote the accelerated expansion of popular religious currents in
which individual liberation is quite independent of collective change, and
the di√use presence of Christian base organizations that seek liberation in
the neighborhood’s everyday life. The fragments of a theory of the revolu-
tion metamorphose into reasons for a theology of liberation. Aren’t these

the ways in which the ‘‘liberatory-redemptive drive’’ is exercised nowadays
as partial relays of a possible revolution? And how much of the epic energy
of the socialist revolution is conserved in these interstices?
Other, less beatific, exits are in use. Cynical hedonism overlooks the
vacant screen, marginal hedonism cracks it. The scenario formally oc-
cupied by the emancipation of the masses is now populated by the restless
signs of esotericism, for now there are no longer any masses. Yet it as-
suredly guarantees that personal life will be filled with a new richness of
meaning, a near obesity of meanings. The Tarot, the I Ching, orientalist
currents, Zen or Nostradamus return us to the exercise of permanent
interpretation and the tranquility of having an imminent catharsis. But
again: without masses. On the other extreme, a guerrilla force became,
during the 1980s, more and more impermeable, syncretic, eschatological,
and, paradoxically, even more lacking of a future.
There’s more on the map of the revolution’s orphans: a revival of the
popular communitarian spirit in which former leftist militants, converted
to a secularized discourse of the culture of solidarity, coexist with small
base organizations that recognize this discourse as their own and involun-
tarily reappear within it as new redeeming agents for social change. Within
these same neighborhoods lives a more explosive drive, a new form of
urban revolt (announced in Santiago de Chile in 1983–84 and in Caracas
in 1989) where accumulated discontent motivates looting. Under the im-
age of a looted city, the fire of apocalypse bursts into flame. Frustration
and everyday humiliation may be the motives, yet the scenic e√ect sug-
gests a bit more: the work of a spirit wreaking justice, unleashing its
menacing lightning bolts on supermarkets and other symbols of exclu-
sionary modernization.
This surely isn’t all, nor is it all so well defined. But exaggeration helps
illustrate the idea that secularization in the South American continent
didn’t make a blank slate of the popular imagination. The promise of
socialist revolution (like other programs for mass emancipation, proposed
by leftist Enlightenment as one more secularizing step, perhaps the most
ambitious step of all) channeled a torrent of energy that wasn’t totally
secularized. One might confuse, but not deny the syncretisms involved in
this synthesis of the future with the past. The interstices in which this
torrent of energy presently relocates itself, maintaining the vitality of its
hopes and its flows, aren’t very clear either. The preceding description
hints at contradictory de-secularizing pressures moving underneath the

triumphalist display of market ideology as the last relay of the race towards
a secularization with universalist pretensions.
Whether housed in a church building or not, today almost all churches
acquire or open up spaces for communion. The very space of culture,
understood as a space in which values are created, recreated, and used,
loses its so-called homogeneity. This fissure could be an antidote to the
secularizing crusade of world capitalism, but at the same time it shunts all
‘‘alternative’’ spaces into the category of the interstitial.≥ De-centering has
its luminous side in the installation of diversity, and its impotent side in
the fragmentation of collective dreams. And the more porous the society,
the more disparate and diverse the promise of emancipation. The empty
pigeonhole of social revolution need no more than fall apart into frag-
ments, in order to return to fill up again.∂
This de-centering accelerates with the new impetus of the culture indus-
try. Global communication and increasingly diversified access to new cul-
tural goods dissolve the limits. Many believe that in this new cultural
consumption they can encounter a new figure for the utopia of diversity.
The illusion of a subject-producer-of-the-world can be rediscovered in the
new interactive forms of the culture industry, where each receptor of mes-
sages easily moves on to emit them. The ideal of autonomy becomes
associated with the facility for loading goods and services tied to one’s own
personal menu within the cultural industry. But once again, the dubious
impact on societies with low levels of social integration is unknown. The
unresolved division between those who are modern and those who are not
is exacerbated by the gap between those who are computerized and those
who are not. The segmentation between the modern and the traditional is
defined less by the topics consumed (for the limits between low and high
culture are erased) than by the level of ‘‘performance’’ in each sector.
The corollary of the previous treatises is that with regard to a future in
which the fleshed-out image of social revolution has lost verisimilitude,
emancipatory energies are reabsorbed by new capitalist modernization.
Or their current is redirected, as a pendulum, towards segmented and
transfigured forms of de-secularization, or they look to channel a new
ideal of cultural diversity through new forms of symbolic consumption
(especially in the segmented connection with the cultural-industrial com-
plex). Some of the contents of that new ideal or those new forms turn
explicitly religious. Other, more apparently secular ones likewise resist the
exclusionist secularization consecrated as status quo, whether for the pres-

ent or as a new historical necessity for the future. It is from this type of
secularization, which constitutes the central point of the next topic, that
the new triumphant culture is made.
On the Side of the Triumphant: Booming Culture at the

Crossroads of the Market and Instrumental Rationality
Capitalism occupies the prophecy that Marx served for socialism: to real-
ize its utopia, it becomes world capitalism. The opening of markets is
imposed, in rapid steps, all over the world. South America revises its
comparative advantages and response to the stabilizing regulations dic-
tated from the North. With the political spectrum, the displacement to-
wards what is euphemistically termed the center at once hides and reveals
this option: accepting the rules of the game of transnationalized markets
requires forgetting redistributive reforms of a structural character and
using pragmatic rationality to guarantee the democratic order and safe-
guard its institutions. The adjustment programs don’t especially vary from
candidate to candidate, or from country to the country. It’s clear, however,
that the pact’s instruments vary, as do the reforms of legislative power, the
formulas of administrative decentralization, and the rhythms of political
and economic opening.
Two cultural phenomena underlie this shared symptomology. On the
one hand, technological innovation has accelerated exponentially, and
the expansive rhythm of instrumental rationality has penetrated multiple
spheres, from the most public to the most private spheres of human life.
On the other hand, the institution of a market without borders as the axis
of social integration exacerbates use relations. The zeal for lucre no longer
goes against the current of social cohesion, of ideology converted into
system. On the contrary, it returns as the virtuous individual motivation
for competition between businesses, not just in classical texts of political
economy, but in everyday life.
These characteristics aren’t new. Their critics have exhaustively de-
nounced them. But the new worldwide hegemony of the market and the
new di√erentiating powers of technology can exacerbate them to unprece-
dented degrees. The ‘‘dominant mode of secularization’’ is seated, today,
on two axes: exhaustive use of technology and privatization. It’s pertinent,
then, to break them down, by means of analysis.
The culture of instrumentalization

Instrumental rationality penetrates in very uneven ways, in South Amer-
ica. Just compare the computing infrastructure in elite schools with its
absolute absence from public education. In the former, the student men-
tality is increasingly oriented to a logic of achievement, which would be a
productive rationalization of education on the South American scale.
Meanwhile the public schools remain entrenched in an anachronistic,
third-rate encyclopedism.
In the sphere of work, the logic of achievement is like an invisible hand
underlying the growing di√erentiation of productive processes. The stark-
est expression of this logic appears in the maxim of competitiveness: be
more productive or leave the market. While it’s certainly true that South
American business culture spuriously incorporates this rationality, its mid-
range perspectives seem conditioned by the imperative of e≈ciency above
all. If ‘‘easy money’’ was the upper classes’ parasite formula during the
boom of financial capitalism,∑ the 1990s insinuated a turn away from ‘‘easy
money’’: either businesses augment their productive-competitive capacity
in real markets, or no amount of speculation will save them. The magic
word, e≈ciency, figures not just in courses for business executives. Mass
media and political discourse also conform to the logic of e≈ciency.
I am not trying to deny the importance of productivity for develop-
ment, particularly in societies such as ours that have not managed to
forge a business culture capable of putting itself above the temptations of
‘‘rentismo,’’ living from one’s investment income. What’s disquieting, in
the mid-range, is the conditioning of the value assigned to productivity in
the symbolic order. In what measure will the value assigned to productiv-
ity be capable of absorbing the ties of solidarity between (and within)
social groups?
In industrialized countries, this new secularization has been absorbed as
the promise of greater individual development. Insofar as the individual’s
relation to his or her surroundings is increasingly mediated through oper-
ations of ‘‘e≈cient use’’ of information, the possibilities of individual de-
velopment are expanded, rather than leveled. Instrumental reason seems
not to inhibit the di√erentiation of identities, but rather to constitute a
cultural heritage capable of putting itself at the service of personality de-
velopment. This is, at the least, a defense of pro-technological discourse.
To each of us according to our specializations, and from each of us accord-
ing to our motivations. Almost like a game. The culture of software per-
mits the translation of instrumental reason into personal passion. Individ-
ualism and the progressive use of technology in private and public lives
become compatible in time, at least, as a possible utopia.
South America insinuates a scenario where other contradictions render
this reconciliation less thinkable. In Brazil, the country central to the
continent’s industrialization, the promises of technological individualism
will be fleshed out, with luck, among the third of the population that has
been modernized, by leaps and bounds. Among the other two thirds,
lower levels of income and minimal access to modernity’s benefits con-
stitute an impenetrable wall against which the expectations for personal
di√erentiation shatter into a thousand pieces. Even as Brazil produces
computers and exports nuclear technology and cultural industry, in the
country’s rural Northeast the population’s life expectancy is sixteen years
below that of the population in the South. In all the countries of South
America, the requirements for bringing about a macroeconomic equi-
librium and to modernize what can be modernized, added to tremendous
historic, productive, and social heterogeneity, impose a giant question
mark on the happy confluence of individual development with the in-
creased use of technology. In an economy overflowing with contingents of
the excluded, where the mediations between their collective organization
and public power are fragile, the logic of e≈ciency increasingly penetrates
all spheres of life, thus increasing the potential for the manipulation of the
excluded by the integrated. Societies as inequitable as ours can increase the
use of technology. Even as such high levels of exclusion remain, the in-
creasingly modernized management of poverty will be one of the most
fertile fields for technological modernization, responding as much to
the technology owner’s zeal for lucre as to the operator’s instrumental
rationality.
Another phenomenon makes this di√usion of technical rationality more
problematic. In the culture industry, the modern is no longer defined by a
hierarchy of cultural genres or by the size of factories, but by the incor-
poration of impalpable technology in the production of messages. For
example, a canned TV program is more modern than a cultural program, if
the former manages to integrate itself into international programming and
the latter only appears locally, with low ratings. Or the inverse: a cultural
program is more modern than a soap opera if it has introduced more
counterpoints, a greater variety of discursive planes and iconic combina-
tions, better optical definition, and/or a more dynamic thematic treat-
ment. In other words, the most recent e√ects of communicational global-

ization and technological diversification in cultural-industrial complexes
mean that the idea of modern culture is linked not to modern contents but
to the capitalization of technological supplies (which include production
and a sense of opportunity). The modern is defined more by performance
than by content, more by technological packaging than by message, more
by the rhythm of innovation than by the product’s specificity.
This mutation carves its new signs in the cultural imagination. Editing
becomes more important than the plot, e√ect more sought after than
substance. The mestizaje (intermixing) of cultures is subordinated to dra-
matic logic on the monitor, and the recognition of diversity increasingly
resembles a ‘‘chronomatic mercantile’’ optimization for circulating infor-
mation. The new industrial-cultural complex subordinates cultural diver-
sity and identities to the logic of Disney.
The vision summarized in the preceding paragraphs doubtless smacks
of Manichean tendencies. The divide between integrated and excluded
isn’t so clear-cut. Technological expansion can also come, in lesser degrees,
to the less productive population. It’s worth noting, however, that the
previous paragraph exaggerates for the purpose of illustration. As an e√ect
(though not a guarantee) of the deployment of instrumental reason and
technological expansion, individual development is conceivable only to
the extent that social integration in South American societies makes it
viable. Yet, the e√ects of this deployment tend to the reverse—to intersub-
jective manipulation, consecrating relations of use and command within a
highly inequitable social order.
The culture of privatization

A phantom circles the globe: privatization. To list its causes and motives is
to reiterate what has been said above: ine≈ciency of the public sector,
entropy of the State as benefactor and businessman, capitalism’s ideologi-
cal and productive hegemony, and/or legitimate demands for greater au-
tonomy among social actors. But what have been the impacts of this
privatizing wave on culture in South America? In what senses are people’s
lives and values modified?
The internalization of culture that accompanies privatization can’t im-
pact distinct social segments in a homogeneous manner. In the modern
business sectors, privatization is likely accompanied by an intensified feel-
ing of being in the limelight of national life. This, too, is reflected in the
current proposals for development, where private agents from the busi-
ness sector occupy the best seats. The desire to expand the business sector
seems revitalized by an apparently limitless field of private action. Within
that field, the diversification of activities and inversions multiplies the
network of peer relations. These relations can be provisional and ‘‘tactical’’
in a world where the leading actors are themselves defined as fields of
continual change. The feeling of opportunity becomes more acute than
ever. The flow of capital accelerates and the eye should keep a close watch
on these sleight-of-hand games. Rapid and lucid decisions make for a
good, modern businessperson.
Within the field of consumption, the upper classes internalize the same
pattern of diversification and acceleration. With redoubled speed, the
globalization of national economies spurs the imitation of consumer
norms among potential peers from the industrialized world. In order to
capitalize on the o√er of a growing range of goods and services, the upper
sectors have to maintain the same hyperkinetic activity of consumption
and investment. All of life is rationalized in order to fill the everyday with
multiple special e√ects: tennis tournaments, courses on stress reduction,
gyms with sophisticated technology, the production of home videos, com-
puter games, communication with international networks from a terminal
at home, group tours, and the immortal television.
The feelings of prominence and of provisionality coexist in the new
spirit of the booming classes. In a dissolving movement, privatization
individualizes yet submerges the links between prominence and provi-
sionality. The market’s density lightens ties. Private life is divided into
many lives, with distinct reference groups, united by the slender thread
of complicities. The word ‘‘superficial’’ is disguised with the maxim, ‘‘up
to date.’’
The proposed description doubtless smacks of caricature. But, once
again: the exaggeration helps illustrate, by contrast, the temper of the
times.
Among the poor, the privatizing wave is internalized with very distinct
e√ects. The Welfare State fades away, as do some consecrated mechanisms
of social mobility, whether e√ective or symbolic. This fading away gener-
ates contradictory tendencies in the orbit of the excluded. The culture of
survival is expressed in the solidarity of the barrio and in the jungle of
anomie. Uncertainty with respect to the future has more to do with fear
than with creativity, yet the need to vanquish fear fosters creativity. The
private is necessarily far more public among the poor than in the upper
sectors: the street is the place for resolving the most pressing needs, and
for attacking or joining one’s neighbors. Here, the provisional changes its
name and becomes simply, fully uncertain. Lightness becomes orphan-
hood; diversification becomes fragmentation.
What happens to sensitivity? With the culture of poverty exacerbated as
‘‘the culture of restricted reproduction,’’ disenchanted introversion, ag-
gressive extroversion and spasmodic communitarianism all follow. Priva-
tization simultaneously creates an obligation to action and a condem-
nation to subsistence. At one extreme, in the widening gap between
expectations and achievements, self confidence is fractured; reality be-
comes more unreal. Democracy is converted, for a period of time, into the
symbolic substitute for social mobility. It can exercise social identity by
way of political participation, communitarian initiative, television connec-
tions, and freedom of expression. But without social mobility or prospects
for gaining access to acceptable levels of well being, democracy itself de-
motivates the poor. The private becomes privation.
Situations of massive exclusion also generate a massive frustration of
expectations. What happens to the historical promise of development
that for various decades looked to dynamize and integrate the peoples of
Latin America? The longer it’s postponed, the more the frustration grows
among those who are perpetually postponed. Our region of the world is
distinguished by the special discontinuity of its material progress and by
its scarce capacity for relatively equitable distribution. Time exacerbates
rather than mitigates the di√erences, widening the gap between expecta-
tions and achievement. The discourse of development makes promises
and promotes aspirations which are internalized without creating access
to mobility and consumption. This is particularly acute in the masses of
young people who su√er the worst combination. They experience greater
di≈culties with regard to joining the labor market in a job position corre-
sponding to their level of education; a prior process of education in which
the economic value of their own formation has been injected and subse-
quently denied by the lack of opportunities for work; and great identifica-
tion, by way of cultural consumption, with new and varied goods and
services to which the great masses of young people cannot gain access,
even as these goods and services constitute symbols of social mobility.
We confront, then, a paradoxical inversion of signs. There is asynchrony
between increased di≈culty and discontinuity in the processes of socio-
economic integration. (That di≈culty is now associated with crisis, ad-
justment, and economic conversion.) There is furthermore a tendency
towards intensified integration on the symbolic-cultural level (which is an

e√ect of a political openness occurring primarily by way of cultural and
communicative consumption). Thus synchrony and intensified integra-
tion could, over the next few years, constitute a significant change in
development’s meaning and discourse, in our continent.
The scarcity of food in impoverished households coexists with the obe-
sity of messages consumed on television. This abundant impoverishment
among the poor contrasts with the provisional quality of the always ‘‘in
good shape’’ condition of those who benefit from the new pattern of
growth.
Again I exaggerate or generalize. And again, the dramatization helps to
illustrate the feeling of the times in which we live. Surely the cultural
trauma of the continent isn’t exhausted by the two extremes on the social
scale. Rather, these extremes suggest the limits of the discourse universe.
The terror of uncertainty and the temptation to diversify operate as two
great cultural phantoms, situated in the antipodes of a horizon of refer-
ence that permits individuals and collective actors to formulate their
own mediations.
Playing with Prospects

Referring to the contradictory features stressed in the preceding pages,
what cultural mutations await us now that South America has crossed the
year 2000? The following hypotheses are useful for letting the imagination
run loose.
Privatizing secularization, clothed in transnational, technologizing

rationality, brings all kinds of fundamentalisms in its wake.
The new secularizing impulse that comes with the greater di√usion of tech-
nical rationality, mass media’s explosive impact, the globalization of mar-
kets, and the defeat of socialism as the last total utopia in western politics all
provoke defensive and fundamentalist reactions in many sectors. These
reactions vary from one region to the next. The case of Islam, for example,
not only illustrates how religious fundamentalism impacts economic and
political relations, but also, inversely, how the lack of social integration
(involving the modernizing and secularizing dynamic) reinforces cultural
integration (by way of messianic traditionalism). In India, the emergence
of the Hinduist movement only partially rejects the universalist aspects of
modernization. Instead, it proposes to constitute an alternative, replacing

the secular, pluralist tradition of the Congress Party. In the former Yugo-
slavia, and in the formerly Soviet Caucasus and in Russia, antimodern
cultural identities acquire greater impetus in the face of the dissolution of
statist and centralist secularization. These identities oscillate between irra-
tional nationalisms and new forms of religious messianism. In the South
American scene, Shining Path in Peru was an extreme case of how an end-
of-the-millennium discourse, mixed with Andean myths and pro-Chinese
communism, channels social frustration by way of a stark violence. Across
this diversity, there nonetheless exists a marked tendency to global-scale
dissipation of the ideological war between capitalism and socialism, and to
the reinforcement of the secularizing wave by way of markets and the
barrage of mass media. This causes forms of ‘‘anti-secular entrenchment’’ to
flower, founded less on political-ideological discourse than on closed cul-
tures. The Persian Gulf War, the conflicts in Bosnia-Herzegovina, the
Armenian-Azerbaijanian dispute, the enmity between Pakistan and India:
all these are clashes between entrenched cultural identities.
In the case of our continent the increasing impact of Catholic funda-
mentalism can be observed and is exhibited in various countries, among
the middle and upper sectors, channeled, above all, by Opus Dei. This
fundamentalism doesn’t oppose the privatizing and mercantilizing wave,
although it does oppose the liberality of customs that said secularization
provokes. Reaction to the menace of the ‘‘death of God’’ is an e√ect of
capitalist secularization that tends to be charged with moral traditional-
ism, without being any less pro-capitalist. The more marked the e√ect of
secularization, the greater the possibilities of cultural rootedness that fun-
damentalism will have in reaction to that secularization.
Motivating this traditionalist reaction is the dissolving impact of vari-
ous processes, including the deregulation of economic life (with its e√ects
of social fragmentation) and the expansion of a technological rationality
that depletes the present of transcendental values and the future of ulti-
mate ends, thus reinforcing the provisional nature of social ties (e√ected
by a kind of cost-benefit rationality that sooner or later will begin to
undermine even family ties). Facing anomie in sectors marginalized by
development, and the softening of customs in the sectors integrated into
the new modernity, the expansion of Catholic and Protestant fundamen-
talism will be the dominant receptacle for mitigating these deaths of God,
not just because of fundamentalism’s historical presence in South Amer-
ica, but also because of the power it presently wields through its social
networks, its power in the means of mass communication, its financial

resources, and its pressures on key points in the state apparatus.
The consequences of this rise of Catholic fundamentalism in the field of
culture could provoke acute contradictions between tradition and liber-
ality. Young people on the continent could radicalize towards these two
extremes. Ascetic isolationism and frantic hedonism could form the cul-
tural prototypes in a new scenario of confrontations, above all, among
young people. Catholic fundamentalism isn’t the only kind of fundamen-
talism with the propensity for expansion over the coming years, although
it could well be the one with the greatest power and cultural influence.
Countries with high degrees of disintegration could also see violent mes-
sianic movements from the left. These movements will probably be mar-
ginal, with no prospects for altering the pattern of capitalist development,
yet they would disrupt the public order and the security of citizens. Shin-
ing Path has been the extreme example. The validity of the continent’s
democracies will probably guarantee that these movements don’t reach
the magnitude or disruptive capacity of Shining Path. The option for a
fundamentalism of armed leftists could nonetheless constitute a means for
channeling the accumulated discontent and the lack of utopias supplied in
political discourse.
A first motive for violent messianic movements from the left would
consist of belonging to a group with an accentuated degree of collective
identification. Facing social exclusion and democracy’s lack of material
responses over a sustained period of time, organic belonging to an insur-
rectionary movement could serve as a strategy of social identification. A
second motive would be the adoption of a world outlook reconciled to a
personal life project. Unreserved identification with an eschatological uto-
pia can work as a form of inclusion within exclusion. Facing hopelessness
and a lack of referents for collective identification, insurgency rises in the
margins: the margins of society, of law, of democracy. The same messianic
and redemptory sediments scattered when the images of mass emancipa-
tion toppled. Those scattered sediments, added to the persistent structural
conditions of social exclusion, could provide a breeding ground for these
kinds of dispersed groups.
Another fundamentalism that could spring to life would be one with
indigenous content, rooted in Andean countries. Its forces are probably
based in the Andean countries with the greatest degree of ethnic segrega-
tion: Peru, and to a lesser degree, Ecuador and Bolivia. In these countries
there exists a cultural and ideological tradition that could provide a foot-
hold for indigenist fundamentalism. Facing a pattern of secularization
with exclusionary social e√ects, this tradition could be radicalized, un-
earthing the historical memory of pre-Hispanic or anti-Hispanic Andean
utopias. Indigenist fundamentalism’s expansion could lead to a cultural
reaction against both secularization and modernization, located at the
farthest remove from Catholic fundamentalism, but with an analogous
fastening to tradition. Marginalized urban populations, esoteric groups,
and disenchanted intellectuals could adhere to the indigenist vanguard.
Antimodern and antiwestern cultural entrenchment could result in a
highly confrontational scenario in the field of culture, and a disruptive
e√ect on the political order.
A final fundamentalism could be anchored in the very heart of secular-
ization: instrumental-capitalist rationality. New technocracies will cham-
pion the technological utopia, the redemptive goodwill of the market, and
the providential triumph of administrative logic. Back in modernity’s
origins, Francis Bacon imagined such a technological utopia, which he
named The New Atlantis, but its totalitarian bias led subsequent individu-
alism and liberalism to consign it to oblivion. The present euphoria of
capitalism’s apologists could reconcile technological and liberal utopias.
It’s no accident that Francis Fukujama’s fragile essay, entitled The End of
History, found such widespread acceptance, resonating through the liber-
alizing right wing of academia and politics.
The triumphalist proclamation of capitalism as the world order, and the
uncritical optimism that exalts the virtuous impacts of technology, are
anchored in the modern business sector, in the well remunerated public
technocracies, in the networks of consultants to booming business and in
the many intellectuals who’ve been orphaned of grand-récits. This un-
critical triumphalism announces the end of ideologies and of utopias even
as it tries to construct itself as the only ideology and utopia. Its fundamen-
talist drift could be due its own need for self-ratification in facing other
more cautious (or more critical) interlocutors. Or it could be a cultural
strategy for consolidating its hegemony. While the exhaustive globaliza-
tion of the capitalist order and of instrumental rationality appear as histor-
ically necessary (at least in the consciousness of its new apologists), the
tendency towards a liberal-technocratic fundamentalism could become
reality. In a new, modern, and pacific crusade, the death of God would be
deified at last.
Lacking utopias of popular emancipation, lacking stable channels

for social mobility, the violence of the excluded could unleash a culture of death.
The loss of normative referents among the excluded, an e√ect of the fading
of stable channels for social mobility and shared hopes for mass emancipa-
tion, will foment fragmented forms of ‘‘inverted’’ socialization. These
could be expressed through the proliferation of marginal subcultures that
turn on self-a≈rmation by way of violence.
The lack of emancipatory utopias furthermore coincides with an histor-
ical inflection: discontinuous development and the resultant lack of social
integration widen the gap in expectations. Contributing to this gap are
unjust distribution of the fruits of growth, the greater regressive impact of
crisis and adjustments on the wages of low- and middle-wage workers, and
permanent visual contact with goods displayed by the television screen.
Among the excluded sectors there is a growing feeling that those who
benefit from this distributive injustice of goods enjoy a certain socio-
economic impunity, just as the wealthier sectors or the dominant politi-
cal forces can come to enjoy impunity in their abuse of subordinated
groups. Because of the lack of distributive justice in development, the
lack of penal justice with regard to abuse and discriminations, and of
emancipatory utopias to channel this massive discontent, it’s quite likely
that the response from the marginalized will open across a range of re-
active violence.
Criminal violence in the cities o√ers the most visible case of marginal
subculture. Within a logic of reciprocity, criminal violence o√ers the ex-
cluded a way of processing their exclusion. Facing a juridical, cultural, and
socioeconomic system of laws that excludes them, criminal delinquents
a≈rm a legality of their own in which they see themselves simultaneously
as protagonists and beneficiaries. By way of their action they construct an
order in which the violated and abused is the other, the possible victim. In
this way the relation of exclusions is both inverted and preserved: the
delinquent is integrated into a community of peers in which mechanisms
of mutual recognition, shared slang, and ‘‘active disenchantment’’ all exist.
Delinquent violence thus manifests the implicit violence of structural ex-
clusion, violating those same exclusionary structures.
The expansion in the tra≈c and consumption of drugs among poor
sectors will function as an unprecedented multiplier within this subcul-
ture. Especially among the young, access to barbiturates and cocaine de-
rivatives will exercise an annihilating e√ect on minimal norms of socia-
bility. The same lack of prospects for social integration or occupational

mobility constitute the detonator. Under the e√ects of drugs and alcohol,
the subjects experience a symbolic compensation in which they recover, in
a substitute and counterproductive way, part of their lost self-esteem.
Among television actors or high-ranking executives, the drug subculture
has very di√erent connotations than among the popular sectors. In the
latter, it nourishes the subculture of delinquency, aggravated by the kind
of crimes that an addict commits, which are always disproportionate to
the booty: a murder for a modest sum, su≈cient for that night’s fix. Most
addictive drugs bring their victims to total devaluation of the other, con-
stituting a rapid road into delinquency and the loss of basic norms of
respect for the rest, e√ects which cities such as Lima, Medellín, Bogotá or
Rio de Janeiro are already beginning to feel. Drug cartels may have pro-
duced a way of life in Colombia among young people from the age of
thirteen hiring themselves out as murderers, but the proliferation of such
murder-for-hire belongs to a subculture of crime where patronage also
mitigates exclusion.
The risks of the upcoming years aren’t only the increased volume of
delinquents but also the absolute devaluation of their potential victims’
lives. Widening drug rings and the murderer’s ‘‘normalization’’ could like-
wise extend into other circles of marginality. This deviant symptom is the
underside of a triumphant culture’s exaltation of the market and technol-
ogy, both of which reinforce social gaps. The triumphalism of the inte-
grated will have to confront this deviant answer among the excluded.
This will have alarming e√ects. The culture of death, overflowing the
margins of South American societies—no longer as State terror, but the
absence of the State—spills into the city centers and rich neighborhoods.
Self-a≈rmation through negating the other (including the life of the
other) will be the starkest, most fearsome shape that instrumental ra-
tionality will assume, among all of its exclusivizing e√ects. The constant
threat to personal, bodily integrity won’t be a problem just in Rio de
Janeiro or Caracas. The drama of citizens’ insecurity will be extended
towards traditionally peaceable cities—as is now happening in Buenos
Aires or Santiago de Chile—and it will give a very concrete foundation to
the general paranoia. Its consequence would be a spiraling rise in everyday
aggression. People’s dwellings will take on the appearance of fortresses.
Life in open spaces will be seen as restricted by an increasingly complex
network of provisions and precautions. The private will become increas-
ingly hermetic and the public, increasingly policed. Death by way of phys-
ical aggression will circle like a phantom in people’s dreams. The reaction
from below, to a violence that is institutionalized, or implicit in the unjust
distribution of wealth will be superseded by a new pitiless counterreaction
from above. Public or private policies will enter into a logic of death, most
chillingly expressed in the massacre of street children in Rio de Janeiro, in
a species of preventive rationality that deprives life of value: street children
are murdered in order ‘‘to reduce future delinquency.’’ The logic of death
here unites with a dehumanizing form of instrumental reason.
This hypothesis smacks of apocalyptic thinking. It’s certainly possible
that democracy in the continent will open channels of political and sym-
bolic integration for the masses of excluded young people, preventing the
consecration of violence in the form of constituted, extended subcultures.
But recent years show us a progressive tendency towards criminal vio-
lence. Extrapolated towards the future, it becomes alarming.
Diversification with fragmentation (of spheres of competency,

of collective participation, and of consumption) will be the most
important cultural e√ects of secularizing modernization.
This might be the scenario of postmodernity in South America. Once the
images of the emancipation of the masses, the totalizing utopias and the
norms of a unitary culture are diluted, then the secularizing e√ects of
the market and instrumental rationality might e√ect the dispersion of
social life. Ties will become provisional and precarious, with each person
following his or her own personal life project and tastes. The expansion of
a professionalized culture market might open segmented options, within
which a wide variety of micro-societies could be constituted.
Within this context of producers and consumers in the culture industry,
the mass displacement of professionalism is evident when we observe how
in industrialized countries millions of children operate computers with an
ease that once (not long ago) seemed reserved to engineers and those on
the cutting edge of technology. As apprenticeships become quick and
diverse, little training is required to move from neophyte to initiate. The
di√usion of these new cultural practices might permit a positive expansion
of the forms of symbolic belonging and of cultural self-a≈rmation. De-
centering the emission of messages in the culture industry might even
democratize symbolic consumption in the region.
This would be countered by a tendency to introversion in the poor
sectors, whose communitarian networks would change into parallel so-

cieties where the culture of survival would barely touch the State, spaces
of greater public visibility, and other social groups. Participation in the
cultural-industrial complex would appear to be restricted by the lack of
access to the new knowledge and know-how that allows active linkages
with the new forms of cultural consumption.
Indi√erence towards other groups would be countered by provisional
but strong cohesion with the peer group. Some tactical alliances of an
instrumental sort could serve as communicating vessels: artists with public
relations people, social scientists with businesspeople, writers with jour-
nalists, politicians with communicators, scientists with educators, workers
with professionals, pornographers with psychologists, poor people with
poor people. The social fabric would appear simultaneously fragmented
and enriched by a web of sensitivities, languages, specializations, and life
strategies that would, in turn, acquire a segmented visibility in the means
of mass communication. The dispersing force would conspire with the
solidity of democratic institutions in order to mediate, on the public level,
the multiple fragmented demands emanating from that dispersion. Politi-
cians would likewise have to professionalize in order to address the di≈-
cult task of creating an equilibrium between cultural diversity and social
peace.
This cultural density would permit an equal relativization of both disen-
chantment and triumphalism. On one hand, emancipatory energies would
encounter channels of sublimation in many varied spheres: the neighbor-
hood community, creativity in whatever professional field, development
in production and cultural consumption, etc. On the other hand, the
fragmenting logic of the market and of instrumental rationality would,
in these same spaces, possess an e√ective counterweight. While culture
might well operate as an axis for relativizing cost-benefit rationality, it’s
also the case that this rationality would look to culture to consolidate itself
(following the much-touted Japanese model). This tension of reciprocal
uses between cultural consumption and the culture of consumption could
constitute itself in a battlefield whose participants were perpetually dis-
posed to come up with new ideas for mediation and transaction.
Generalized individualism would combine with the permanent search
for peers in the micro-environment. Each person could thus be turned into
an administrator-administratee, and administrative rationality could be
internalized without threatening the diversity of relations. But once again,
the masses of the excluded could become victims and disruptors. There,
fragmentation redounds to the benefit of manipulation and violence.
Just as development allows the diversity of the private to combine

with a public sphere that has strong, symbolic e√ectiveness, which
processes demands from a wide range of social actors, so would democratic
culture enrich itself via a ‘‘mode of widened secularization.’’
This ‘‘widened secularization’’ constitutes the optimistic scenario for cul-
ture for the upcoming years in South America. It would imply the de-
velopment of two complementary tendencies: first, through redistributive
policies, the greater political participation of less integrated actors, and the
extension of the benefits of modernization to excluded social strata; and
secondly, the diversified incorporation of cultural forms and symbols of
identification that don’t submit to instrumental reason or to the logic of
the market.
It might be enough to project the first tendency as an e√ect of democra-
tization’s opening of new channels for political participation and making
economic growth compatible with social equity. The combination of these
factors could guarantee greater levels of social integration. The opening of
channels of participation to emerging actors would amplify the spectrum
of agreement and consequently augment the power of the most margin-
alized sectors’ influence on decisive moments in the formulation of poli-
tics. The redistributive struggle would be more equilibrated, without de-
teriorating the general consensus required to guarantee social peace and
political stability. This might be made viable through the combination of a
series of actions: administrative decentralization with an e√ective decen-
tralization of power and resources; a system of political parties capable of
absorbing demands not represented in less organized groups; a parliament
capable of legislating the use of public resources with redistributive ef-
fects; the management of political economy oriented towards expanding
productive employment, and greater participation of the poor in orienting
and executing social policies. Thus combining economic development and
social integration would be the mainspring of a ‘‘secularization of solidar-
ity’’ whose values of social integration and national development would
have meaning and reality. Democracy would then have an expanded cul-
tural support, granting it greater legitimation. The feeling of belonging to
a national unity and to joint development projects would channel eman-
cipatory energies towards an image of integrated modernity, of sustained
overcoming poverty by way of gradual, positive changes. This same image

could serve as a spring towards reestablishing values of responsibility and
social solidarity within individual entrepreneurial agency. The gap be-
tween the excluded and the integrated would be gradually narrowed, and
the meaning of national unity and social progress would be the best anti-
dote to social violence, the fresh outbreak of fundamentalisms, and the
fragmenting e√ects of the market.
To the degree that secularizing modernization impacts societies that are
socially integrated and more politically participative, the field of culture
and communication would have to be a legitimate receptacle for di√eren-
tiation and individuation. An e√ect of the opening of markets for cultural
goods and services is the amplification of symbols of identification and of
collective referents of belonging. Democratic stability and social integra-
tion would also be the necessary substrata for a culture to transcend the
restricted limits of instrumental reason and the exaltation of the market.
The channels of social communication would enable the opening of public
life to multiple forms of expression by diverse sociocultural actors. Urban
art, neighborhood development groups, communication and computing
networks, popular and classical theater, extracurricular education, currents
for esotericism and personal growth, spaces for cultural promotion on
television, city newspapers with community participation, sports activities
in the neighborhoods, popular holidays, the expansion of countercultural
proposals with access to public di√usion, peace conferences, folklore, the
di√usion of vernacular cultures, diversified o√ers for the consumption of
culture and communication: the options for di√erentiation within a con-
text of amplified secularization would be rooted in all of these.
Within this field, technology could fill a function subordinated to per-
sonal development, which ever-increasing sectors could reach. The field of
culture will likewise receive the creative reconfiguration of emancipatory
dreams, turning the subversion of norms into a diversity of expressive
norms, in order to counter the fragmenting e√ects of the market with
multiple o√ers for group interaction. New public services would be cre-
ated, incorporating the less integrated sectors into interactive computing
networks, thus linking them with their distant peers. To the extent that
costs decrease, national institutions for aiding in the production of popu-
lar videos and community radio stations will multiply. Extended educa-
tion schools for adults will be created in order to disseminate codes for the
use and consumption of new goods in the cultural and mass media mar-
kets. Public libraries will have terminals installed in homes and schools. A
high dose of imagination and creativity will be destined to improve and

expand cultural action. This action will consist of combining financial, tax,
commercial, and technological instruments in order to optimize the access
of distinct socioeconomic and sociocultural segments to the channels
through which the society’s messages circulate. The ongoing reduction in
the size and costs of new cultural consumption and communication hard-
ware and the reduction in operating costs and space requirements will per-
mit a vast field of action for democratizing access to the cultural market.
Just as the hypothesis of violence might be apocalyptic, this scenario of
cultural integration might be utopian. Once again, the exaggeration helps
to visualize the limits within which the trajectory of possibility opens
towards a future of uncertain signs.
Finally . . .
What’s been put into relief here are the limiting images for diagnosis and
the art of sleight of hand. The present tendencies aren’t limited to dis-
enchantment regarding the loss of emancipatory social mysticism and
privatist-instrumental triumphalism. Such disenchantment and trium-
phalism are the limits within which many possible combinations coexist.
They do not occupy the center of discourse. Rather, they signal its ex-
tremes. They are walls encircling the city, within which a multitude of
symbols shift around and visions of the world compose an intricate mesh
of collective sensitivities.
In the same way, in this anticipatory essay I have tried to sketch out
images of the border. Let’s not wait until one of them, whether utopian or
hellish, is installed in the coming years. Rather, let’s meet the mixture of
these distinct components, for the weight of each element is currently
unknowable. Diverse fundamentalisms, cultures of violence, the diversifi-
cation of human environments and values, and new guidelines for coexis-
tence will probably form part of the cultural dynamics in South America in
the coming years. These pages have sought to suggest a game of limits and
ingredients for the coming years, without getting into the material that
establishes them or the combination that will bring them to life. Here the
phantoms have been stepped up, while the real bodies that they encircle
remain far from clear.
Between phantoms and real bodies, blessed mediations will save us
from those extremes.
Notes
1 Likewise the models of so-called development discourse: proposals for rationalized
development founded in the enlightened knowledge of some elites were based on the
premise of development’s necessary directionality toward the general welfare.
2 In Chile, Joaquín Lavín, with his orchestrated best-seller, La Revolución Silenciosa (The
Silent Revolution); in the industrialized world, Fukuyama provided The End of History
and the Last Man (1992) as the symbol of this new capitalist crusade.
3 I’m referring to spaces o√ering an alternative to a status quo of secularization founded
on a technocratic pattern focused on modernization.
4 Here, it’s necessary to resolve a long debate between enlightened ‘‘critics’’ and post-
modern ones: although multiple wills for emancipation persist, they are dispersed, not
subsumable to a ‘‘truncated’’ project of modernity.
5 Financial capitalism, an aspect of post-industrial capitalism, is characterized by a max-
imization of profits deriving more from the management of money as merchandise
than from the production of physical merchandise. In financial capitalism, the value of
financial transactions in the international markets in the present day world is many
times greater than the value of investment and commerce.
3 R Neither Apocalyptic nor Integrated
(Eight Debatable Paradoxes)
First Paradox: As Confusion Is Aired, Misery Overheats

The impact on the present cultural climate of technology, the globaliza-
tion of the market, the dismantling of real socialism, the lack of engaging
alternatives to development, and the eruption of a segmented society of
masses have all become almost tedious to point out. For the disenchanted,
a kind of cool confusion rules, softened through the shift from visceral
experience to discourse. For the apocalyptic, the prophets of doom, there’s
the loss of the prestige that ‘‘blasting criticism’’ once gave them vis-à-vis
the status quo. Their former fellow travelers have branded the few that are
left as dramatists, thickheaded, obsessive, or, simply, out of place. Here,
the tragicomic, recognizable outcome: negative thought no longer mobi-
lizes students yet it’s been captured in well-produced books, almost collec-
tors’ items, at inaccessible prices.
On the reverse of the same coin, the utopians experience a similar fate:
simulacra of dialogue is the most they can aspire to in the court of ‘‘enlight-
ened’’ public opinion. At this point in time, invocations such as ‘‘the
Neither Apocalyptic nor Integrated 37
universal unfolding of human potential’’ are attributed more to the dimen-

sions of rhetoric and hysteria than to hope and history. Those who look at
the few remaining apocalyptic and utopian thinkers as if they were a
residue of chronic anachronisms assume a lack of clarity regarding the
processes that regulate the world as almost one more piece of data. The
idea that this lack of clarity doesn’t matter is then incorporated into the
metabolism. There would be some cynicism in this, yet not enough to be
scandalous.
But this disenchanted tempering doesn’t lower the volume for those
who are miserable. Even as confusion is aired, misery keeps on overheat-
ing. Urban marginality, rural deterioration, the regressive distribution of
income, the persistence of informal sectors—categories that aren’t anach-
ronistic at all—coexist, undiluted, with categories of stochastic complex-
ity, multivariate processes, planning for uncertainty, comparative advan-
tages, virtuous and vicious discontinuities. Those ominous realities that
strengthen the discourse of the prophets of apocalypse are more shining
than ever, while, paradoxically, the discourse invoking them sounds rather
outdated. There could be a thousand explanations for this, yet one thing
would be irrefutable and symptomatic: as confusion is assumed with
growing disdain, misery’s temperature rises.
Second Paradox: Now It Turns Out that Integration Disintegrates

All e√ective forms of social integration have probably generated, in their
time, some degree of disintegration. But beyond this possible law about
social nature, the currently disconcerting situation: in twenty years, the
mechanisms of integration have acquired an exponentially multiplied
speed, simultaneity, and coverage even as their disintegratory e√ects bear
the same rhythm and exhaustiveness.
A benevolent interpretation would promote segmented integration as
the solution for sustaining mass society and at the same time prevent any
sacrifice of the modern appetite for individuality. The combination of
crossed temporalities within a single society, where premoderns, moderns,
and hypermoderns all live together, would be the new form of integrating
without homogenizing. The new cultural-industrial complex would pos-
sess the virtue of respecting the tastes and sensibilities of individuals and
groups incorporated as producers and consumers. This postmodern trib-
alization would be ethically sustainable in a postindustrial order where
cultural fragmentation placidly rests on a stable, democratic political sys-
tem, acceptably funded unemployment insurance, and citizenship status

for all. But this doesn’t even occur in the vast majority of so-called opulent
cultures, where the ‘‘minor’’ problems are increasingly ‘‘major.’’
In our region, the flourishing cultural-industrial complex seems to pro-
mote new impetus for symbolic integration. But that impetus shatters
against the opaque wall of social integration. The segmented access to new
goods of communication and information maintains a great part of the
society in a position of relative backwardness, and risks widening distances
in terms of productivity levels, access to new markets, and the develop-
ment of the capacity to adapt to change. On the one hand, there is the
promise of greater integration through price reductions on new goods in
the culture industry, whose malleability allows for penetrating di√erent
sociocultural scenes. On the other hand, new forms of cybernetic illiteracy
threaten to close in on the ample contingent of Latin Americans who lack
access to any form of computing.
Those who are most deprived of access might be consoled by the fact
that speed and segmentation prevent anyone from ever managing to inte-
grate completely. The disenchanted might console themselves with the
certainty that integration no longer represents a positive value or utopian
potential in itself and that the best thing is not to get one’s hopes up. But
beyond these justifications there emerges an inescapable phenomenon:
never before has there been a greater combination of options for integra-
tion, via the communications revolution, the widening of markets, global
interconnections, and cultural exchange. Never before has there been,
either, greater disintegration: call it the crisis of development, the frustra-
tion of expectations for social mobility, gaps in productivity, fragmenta-
tion following the demobilization of the masses, the loss of collective
referents, or a blurring of the future. The anti-psychiatrists’ scandalous
thesis that schizophrenia is a social production takes on a new figure as a
metaphor for this double movement.
Third Paradox: Accumulation as Synchrony

Various events substantially change the industrial image of accumulation,
associating it with constant and continual processes of productive invest-
ment. One of these is the rise of financial capitalism and its primacy over
productive capitalism, especially since the boom of petrodollars in the
1970s. Another, the vertiginous, decisive, and hypercompetitive role that
large businesses have assigned to technological innovations in order to
ensure their survival and expansion. Another, the subordination of the

rationality of endogenous development to the ‘‘rationality of insertion,’’
within a world ruled by comparative dynamic advantages in a globalized
mercantile order with high levels of uncertainty.
These three phenomena are only part of the architecture of a paradox
that can be formulated as follows: the more we disconnect ourselves from
the past, the more agile our possibilities for accumulation. The self-made
man increasingly resembles a poker player: rather than the will to ac-
cumulation, the management of simultaneous combinations held in hand.
It’s no coincidence that game theory enters so strongly into economic
theory today. The greater capital is to be integrally connected to the move-
ment of capital around us—more than investments, operations, and even
‘‘gambles’’ or bets, more than an increment in the series, its diversification.
Adaptation becomes the formula for persistence. In this, the prosperous
businessperson from a rich country and the urban participant in the infor-
mal sector from a poor country mirror one another, although each one has
a di√erent fate.
Millions of springs for jumping into opulence, out of trickery, or into
bankruptcy are created and closed o√ every day. The most profitable con-
tinuity is to continually attune oneself to this phenomenon. Swift, precise
information is worth more than steel. This goes not only for economic
investments: at least, in an analogous sense, new synchronic reason per-
meates politics, aesthetics, and a person’s ties with the rest. The Bonfire of
the Vanities has primacy over The Waste Land, the opportune alliance over
the strategic proposal, the gallery over the museum. Only the ephemeral
transcends. In order to progress, better erase the footprints, feeling no
nostalgia or feeling a cheerful, light nostalgia.
The new modernity in underdevelopment, drunk on amnesia, looks to
straighten itself out between its intoxicating air and its dynamic develop-
ment. As if this dynamic equilibrium were always obliging it to keep on
moving, advancing, inventing. Inertia tends to regression: more contami-
nation, density, tra≈c, and alienation. More progress, greater energy in
the flight forward is always needed to counter it. To distance oneself from
the past is the war cry against entropy and stagnation. Like a gigantic
factory, the Latin American metropolis only shows itself as productive
when it is smoking. Centrifugal impulse and opening towards the ex-
ogenous are announced as the promise of a new identity. The absurd
prejudice is imposed: that disconnecting the tube that connects us with
our own history is the easiest way of synchronizing ourselves with the
constant movement coming from outside. The promise of new identity is

not accumulative.
But whose identity, if the substance of biography has been erased to ease
this adjustment, and there’s no voice of one’s own left, no decision capable
of self-a≈rmation from outside of the magnetic field of imitative inertia?
And it’s necessary to recognize that many of those who don’t accede to this
field of real and symbolic consumption seek only to forget what they have
been and accede to the material forms that make viable those profoundly
styleless lifestyles. In this transition from an ideal of modernity made of its
own singular synthesis to a new transnationalized ideal that seemingly
enjoys a rootless contingency, whose specific place on the map already
turns out to be indi√erent, what happens with our territory? How, fol-
lowing this loss of memory, shall we return to question our desire for
modernity?
Surely there’s some attraction to the idea that learning is unlearning, to
the invitation to contemporaneity, to the vitality of forgetting. Yet do we
propose this lightness as an aesthetic for life?
Fourth Paradox: The More We Develop, the More Critical

Does Our Quality of Life Become
Is it worthwhile, or not, to clamber onto the train of this modernity, which
is so freighted with corrosive e√ects on our quality of life? The progressive
frequency of environmental and psychosocial catastrophes in our cities
makes the terms modernization and quality of life seem increasingly dis-
harmonious in the silent evaluations that we all formulate. The historical
equation is inverted so that improving the quality of life no longer appears
as a positive-dependent variable of the process of modernization.
For some decades now, we have identified modernization with expan-
sive dynamics, so that despite its many costs and sacrifices, it would allow
greater collective access to the satisfaction of basic needs. These basic
needs would include more modern employment, better incomes, greater
access to goods and services, growing rates of schooling, better attention
to health for the city’s entire population, the expansion of social security,
and prospects for better housing. But the frequency and gravity of en-
vironmental catastrophes, the social costs provoked by the new patterns of
open economies, and the nervous wear and tear that human life entails
amid modernity all wind up destroying this positive correlation between
modernization and quality of life. The notion of quality of life is less and
less reducible to rates of schooling, life expectancy at birth, or the re-
duction of infant mortality rates. It extends to dimensions with strong
territorial, environmental, and psychosocial overtones. The catastrophe
displaces quality of life towards other objects: our air, rhythm of life,
proximity or distance from nature, our historical rootedness.
For those who were and are integrated, as well as for those few who
used to be apocalyptic but subsequently converted and are now well o√, as
well as for those who are ambiguous (a group that includes many formerly
apocalyptic, and a few formerly integrated burn-outs who subsequently
converted), quality of life currently problematizes this equilibrium of
compensations amid the newest modernizing wave. The waste or dregs of
progress is so very visible in the gray-black color that grips the contami-
nated air in Mexico City, Santiago de Chile, or São Paulo, that it is very
hard to avoid a constant calculation of the pros and cons of development
and modernity. For some time now, an inversely proportional relation
between two variables, proximity to the urban nucleus and quality of life,
has been insinuated in the social imagination.
This inversion of terms floats in the air: the term ‘‘quality of life’’ be-
comes very conflictive for those who’d rather clamber onto the chariot of
progress. This chariot not only crosses the city. It also disfigures it. Multi-
ple congestion isn’t a good stimulus for opening the present towards the
desiring imagination. Utopian invention, its modern version included,
tends to see itself as having been cornered as space becomes tighter and
denser. To avoid apocalyptic premonitions, it’s better to think that as this
density borders on catastrophe, the question for survival irradiates to-
wards questioning the meaning of our historical options, thus turning to
activate the search for new horizons.
Fifth Paradox: Thirsting for Projects but Lacking a

Foundational Metaphysics for Action
It isn’t easy, these days, to think of a concept of action that can help us to
reconceive ourselves as true historical subjects. The loss of repertoire
comes from many flanks. We shall look at only a few examples.
The Hegelian matrix, by virtue of which we were formerly able to recog-

nize and progressively complete ourselves by recognizing a world that we
were progressively completing and improving, now seems unsustainable.

Now the world seems to be completing itself through others, and coming
apart for us. Discontinuity, as much in our manner of articulating our-
selves as in reality itself, makes it di≈cult to take hold of the idea of
synthesis between the subject and history.
I’m referring not just to the much noted collapse of socialism, but to the
weight of forces that regulate the world order, from which local orders are
also regulated: one could speak of technological impact, the market, the
transnationalization of culture. Could we feel, however remotely, that we
are crafting some of these forces, and are responsible for their e√ects, or
that we are the humble subjects of a dialectics of history? The new logic
neutralizes, but also seduces: to intervene is no longer to subvert but
to combine.
With respect to the matrix of Guevara, the working class hero and Fanon:
Who now could resolutely throw themselves into proclaiming anti-
colonial, anti-imperialist, anti-bourgeois action, knowing that these mod-
els of ‘‘consistent struggle’’ are hardly even filmic? The only current exam-
ple of real confrontation with the world order is called Hussein. Only
there do we find, in recent years, a negation of the North and West with
real global impact, signed and sealed by an irrationality that turns our
stomachs, whose messianic violence reeks of holocaust. Would we be
disposed to assume this only real model as our own?
And regarding the matrix of radical action, where the negation of the
world runs alongside our personal surrender: the vengeance of the shat-
tered, the mad bomber, the acrobat, and the anti-urban now provoke
more curiosity than identification. Artaud, Burroughs, Hendrix and Co.
aren’t models of imitation but, at most, objects for study.
Which model of action should we adopt, then, if we want to preserve
the idea that in action there is something that goes beyond its immanence
and its contingency? Where can we find today, in relation to any of the
above-mentioned matrices, an exemplary action that allows the defense, as
epic or lyric, of action itself as manifestation of a meaning? Curiously, we
continue to inhabit a world (and a discourse) that is hyperkinetic, and
that looks to action for justification, a world in which the word ‘‘project’’ is
repeated like a twentieth century mantra. Homo faber inhabits us now
more than ever, but chasing and biting its own tail.
Sixth Paradox: Seeking the Centrality of the Peripheral

Facing this crisis of models of action, of integrations that disintegrate,
accumulation without a past, airing confusion and overheated misery, the
image of a possible revolution likewise seems displaced, less prefigured as
the center of the future, more projected into the periphery of the present.
Now the image of a possible revolution is also marked by synchrony: it
seeks to give expression to simultaneous worlds, in the margins of an
unacceptable general order, whether postindustrial, industrial, or prein-
dustrial, to create pockets of utopia. The crystallization of this image of
qualitative change aims not towards a redemptive future, but towards the
gaps or hollow spaces freed up in the present, in its ‘‘dynamic complexity.’’
In this tonic of contiguous orders, some exalt the rationality of a world
defined as popular, holistic and in solidarity, situated in the periphery of
the cities of undeveloped countries and in rural areas. Such a world vision
denies dominant rationality without dissolving it or inverting its hege-
mony. The invocation of gender, sexuality, and non-hegemonic cultures
also gets strengthened. Still, in these invocations there’s no pretension of
passing on to hegemony, but rather to living on under the very sign of
resistance. Others would rather bet on spaces that the logic of the market
of cultural goods or the reigning sensibility cannot recover: art-actions,
‘‘installations,’’ or swift ‘‘interventions’’ in the everyday bone and gristle of
the cities, fragments of a cryptic aesthetic that decides in an almost tribal
fashion its own codes for interpretation, thus making itself incomprehen-
sible to those who don’t belong to the tribe.
Others resolutely bet on personal change by mining esoteric veins
which likewise possess a synchronic character. The Tarot, the I Ching,
meditation, astrology, runic stones, biodance, Jungianism, and Tai Chi
don’t seem to exclude but rather to bring people together in an ‘‘other’’
mentality. It has nothing to do with adhering to a single tradition or
school, but rather with discovering, amid that vast o√er of search options,
the best combination for exorcising, on the personal plane, the full weight
of social alienation.
In those attempts to establish relative autonomies, rather than to pull
down the system’s structures, the revolution is no longer conceived in
terms of great temporal changes. The revolution is recognized as small and
significant changes in space. Versions are smuggled in from synchronic
rationality, turning the esoteric into the exoteric, tribal withdrawal into
the folds of this extroverted urbanity at the century’s end. The long voyage
from Genesis to Apocalypse is compressed in everyday experiences, joined
up with that ‘‘other reality’’ of the periphery where vulnerability is exacer-
bated and conjured on a daily basis. Gra≈ti, the rituals of witches (eso-
teric rituals) or the base community (grassroots action) are all equally
provisional. The alternative is announced in slender places, slim gaps,
tepid disorders, where the symbolic reach is already almost su≈cient.
But for whom, and for how many?
Seventh Paradox: The More We Escape from

Alienation, the More We Return to It
And in the middle of these forces in tension, the logic of performance and
of the market also cut into the tra≈c on the heavily traveled roads towards
emancipation. Then a total discourse appears, full of new hierarchical
relations, evaluating each of us in a new ‘‘ranking’’ of the quality of life:
gyms, tennis at hand, weekend psychotherapies, workshops for facilitating
communication and expression, workplace services for weighing the anx-
ieties of its members and reducing tension at work. A whole new market
emerges to match the expectations related to quality of life and its optimi-
zation, with a culture of optimization alongside ‘‘healthy growth,’’ per-
sonal development, overcoming our karma.
Our atavistic spirit of piety doesn’t get conjured away. To the contrary:
it is revived in workshops for personal, spiritual, and communicative
growth. New Age sensitivity, which gives us the possibility of refreshing
our utopian vocation by way of a holistic narrative with more light and
more sex appeal, is furiously incorporated into the culture industry and
the market exchange of rapidly obsolescing goods and services. O√ers of
emancipation take people’s busy lives into account, considering the pos-
sibility that they might be able to devote some time at night or on week-
ends. Instead of thinking of changing one’s life, better to avoid getting
overheated from the air. Chaplin’s Modern Times can displace alienated
labor onto the cult of personal development: a rationalization of time
accompanies the in-between options through which we resist alienation
and seek to humanize ourselves. We run from our hour of gestalt therapy
to a tennis match, from there to a conference on family gatherings. All this,
without taking our eyes from the minute hand on the watch.
It wouldn’t be strange to expect a new form of represssive desublima-
tion (an expression that apocalyptic ones cherish): quality of life as an
ideal that internally reproduces a new hyperkinesis for achieving the max-
imum number of points in this incipient ladder of ‘‘personal develop-
ment.’’ No one debates the pertinence and urgency of new spaces for
personal growth, for disseminating, on a planetary scale, an ecological
mentality and a full reconsideration regarding what is meant by quality of
life. But neither should we become pseudo-ecological fanatics of asepsis,
or go around, pu√y-cheeked, preaching spiritual vigor. We have acquired,
in our stride, tripped up by modernity, a quota of hedonism and taste for
autonomy that we cannot renounce, which inoculates us against these new
versions of the fakir, the Calvinist, or the utopian of total surrender.
Eighth Paradox: For Consistency’s Sake,

Dare to Be Inconsistent
Amid these paradoxes—from which I do not exempt myself—I am sizing
up heterodox formulas and seeking through language so many other para-
doxical expressions in order to try to come up with a foundation for
action, a ‘‘link to otherness’’ with the world, or at least to sketch out an
approach. I try out rhetorical combinations that are more ingenious than
e√ective, and thus I make ambiguous references to a fecund disenchant-
ment, menacing resignation, healthy irony, subverted inconsistency. In
the end, there’s nothing to think about as a new foundation for univer-
salizable actions.
Skepticism might be the diet of intelligence, but it shouldn’t be intel-
ligence itself. Overstaying that visit could turn into a lamentable excess of
coherency, a new form of obesity. Better, perhaps, to seek another form of
coherence in this synchronic temper of the contemporary where nothing
is too coherent, which seems and surely is a contradiction.
But it’s not a question of renouncing hope for another form of integra-
tion, or for the possibility of an action whose transformative meaning
reinforces our fantasies of the world. Rather, the intent is to recognize, in
the first place, that these fantasies have yet to redefine themselves and that
we can’t, at the same time, suspend all action while we process that re-
definition. Perhaps being consistent requires submerging oneself in a de-
cided inconsistency: to celebrate this orphanhood of comprehensive nar-
ratives and to visit, without prejudice, some partial narratives that may not
totally convince us, but could pertain to an itinerary whose outcome is
clearly uncertain. Why not explore the discourses of di√erence, the inter-
stices of politics, esotericism and its proliferation of meanings, symbolic
action, popular culture, suggestive intuitions, spasmodic revolt, econo-

mies of the displaced, the hermeticism of vernacular and postmodern
tribes, passion’s reasons, intimist conversation? And why not do it with
childish curiosity, without expectations of surrender or performance, with
shameless vitality? Why not venture to create a bit of literature with the
surroundings and with one’s own biography, even if only to shu∆e the
cards all over again?
Neither apocalyptic nor integrated.
4 R Realism and Revolt, Twenty Years Later
(Paris 1968–Santiago de Chile 1988)
May 1968 in France survives as a model and as a myth of contemporary

revolt, as what has happened and as what cannot be repeated. Its inscrip-
tion in our memory is therefore ambivalent. It provides us with the living
example of a social movement, more intensive than extensive, capable of
putting into play all the will for massive rupture that political pragmatism
postpones. Suddenly, that May in France—and from there, Germany,
Italy, North America, Japan—erupted into the field of the public, pol-
iticizing everything in a politicization that would be, in turn, a radical
change in life. ‘‘To break’’ was the heroic verb in which existence found an
almost aesthetic justification. The bridges of metaphor, action, spontane-
ous insurrection were built for the gap between the real and the impossi-
ble, between desire and its realization. Su≈cient to consider the citizen
as artist, and politics as generosity. The paving stone that leapt, almost
through osmosis, from pavement to barricade and from there was thrust
towards an unforeseeable future, became part of the catapult for getting to
the bottom of one’s own, suddenly collective, dreams. For an instant,
nothing was discarded as delirious. Even the old passionate utopias of
Charles Fourier were parried about, in that agenda for the future which
was being remade from day to day, in the heat of events.
Collective memory, which better retained the happy marriage of aes-
thetics and politics, softened the dose of violence, sweat, or impatience
that accompanied those laborious days. Later, the new folds of power,
always more plastic than their opponents, put the bolts on the revolt. In
the industrialized world the bourgeois order regained control with no
showy display of physical force. Of course, there were changes: the au-
thoritarianism of educational institutions and of families was rigorously
questioned—an interrogation that, at least in France and Germany, came
to form part of common sense. Sexuality, already quite emancipated for
the time, became even more liberated. Marxism found itself obliged to
revise its principles. But the bourgeois order did not die. To the contrary, it
widened its tolerance, even integrating the apparently indigestible: it inte-
grated the productive rationalization of late capitalism with the growing
di√erentiation in the field of subjectivity.
May went by. And June, and the summer, and many years now. Uncer-
tain revolutions, toppled or distorted, peopled some non-industrialized
corners of the earth, while the First World maintained a status quo of con-
servatives, liberals, and social democrats respectively venturing changes so
slight that the optic of the revolt stigmatized them as ‘‘shameful continu-
ism.’’ The old revolutionaries of May then became pro-Chinese; anti-
Stalinism emptied its currents into neoliberalism. Taking advantage of the
new left’s self-critical tendency, the market apologists, with their ongoing
project of cultural hegemony, engulfed large contingents of people who
felt deceived by the revolt.
What in Europe seemed an ideological defeat, in our corner of the
world was produced with all the violence not exposed in the European
capitals.∞ There, the consolidation of capitalism claimed no victims, or so
few that they were lost under the basic structure. There was, of course,
cultural crisis, and perhaps there still is, although it is resolved between
‘‘civilized people’’: political changes are sublimated into intellectual fash-
ions, and the growing internationalization of the market has permitted the
invisible hand to be withdrawn from the coatrack, clothed with new ener-
gies. The slogan ‘‘technology anywhere, any time, for any need’’ inaugu-
rates the obsolescence of the conflict. The noisy revolt has nothing to do
with Fukuyama’s End of History, with that implacable march. Even as the
imposition of this asepsis leads conflicts to disappear under the euphoria
of the market, courtesy is violently shattered once again, not because of
Realism and Revolt: Twenty Years Later 49
political confrontations between the centers, but because of irrepressible

regional and/or fundamentalist wars, call them Hussein or Sarajevo.
In Chile, as in other countries of Latin America, this silent revolution
has been preceded by terror and the brutal colonization of bodies and
souls. The chronology of that cultural change, the so-called end of the old
struggle between the classes, opens with the physical crushing of collec-
tively figured dreams and socially undertaken projects. Only the cynicism
of technocrats and businesspeople could induce the disremembering of
this sinister origin which is, at the same time, a style and a trajectory. In
these regions of ours, the narrative of the revolt was not attacked in a
civilized fashion, that is, through the politics of debilitation and disrepute,
but with all the archaism that underlies the modern: with the cross and the
sword, with the guillotine, and the ideology and practice of internal war.
The revolt of May was, at the same time, denouement and élan for the
narrative of radical change. That paradox marks its ambiguous position in
our present moment. As denouement, the unexpected—explosive, implo-
sive—succeeded just as the ephemeral failed. May was poetry: a narrative
which hoped to crystallize what it evokes, which flourishes only in its
failure.
But to what extent has the defense of that May, or better yet, of the
values underlying it and the critical judgments implied, been erased by
distance and the passage of time? Would it be anachronistic or out of
place, perhaps, to question the politics of capitalist power, crowd morality,
the pious spirit, authoritarian culture, reproduction of conventional fam-
ily values, competitiveness and social injustice, the rhetoric of conven-
tional politics? Would it be irrelevant to carry into programmatic discus-
sion the connection between political repression and the repression of
desire, between private property and sexual discrimination, between sci-
ence and the will to rule, between ideology and self-interest, between the
control of bodies and the control of consciousness?
We know very well that none of this has lost its current importance, and
that such questionings can’t be discarded as irrelevant. On the contrary, in
di√erent countries of Latin America, first the experience of military power,
then the regressive e√ects of the crises and the adjustments, have made
those distinct faces of domination both very evident and unmanageable.
The strategy of maximizing the moderate, making explicit the implicit,
shows (at the same time, and perhaps to one’s own disadvantage) that
arriving at that repressive extreme constitutes no more than making evi-
dent the previously hidden, which at the moment of revolt was deprived
of its most attractive task, that of unmasking. If May in France deciphered
the system’s hypocrisy (that is, it turned that hypocrisy into irrefutable
truths), in Chile the disguised has been self-revealed with such absolute
aplomb that there is no longer anything left into which to delve. Here
we’re presented with the violent, classist character of power: liberal ideol-
ogy’s repressive potential, the alliance between the State and the capitalist
project, between morality and repression, the psychological dimensions of
the exercise of authority, and the manipulation of unconscious phantoms
for the purpose of social discipline. The military regime realized all of these
with such obviousness that no opponent would surpass its ability to estab-
lish the fallacy of bourgeois peace.
The preceding has made possible a perverse dialectic. On one hand, the
course of events confirmed the truthfulness of the critical contents with
which May contests the system. But on the other hand, that same con-
firmation rendered the movement impractical for two reasons: because
nothing is left to be unmasked (and, by the same measure, the revolt loses
one of its principle challenges and gratifications), and because nothing can
really be broken (on maximizing capitalist power in all its facets, or on
widening its capacity for integration, the revolt becomes an impotent
caricature). The dynamic of liberalism, even the spurious versions that it
acquires in Latin America, contested the dynamic of the revolt with its
captivating dialectic of unmasking and rupture.
Late capitalism has turned out not to be entropic, but elastic. Entropy
apparently resides in the critical spirit: we all know how to practice the art
of suspicion, yet it doesn’t mobilize us to rebel. We all know that the real
or symbolic outcome of breaking is a murder, whether of God, of the
father, or of the bourgeois. Even so, we doubt that this murder will e≈-
ciently eradicate relations marked by domination. The condition of lu-
cidity coexists with being overloaded; our dexterity is confused with our
clumsiness. None of us has any confidence in the recourse of or to utopia,
yet we also know that without utopia, pragmatic logic will keep on admin-
istering our cultural dramas as if they were economic problems. And they
will continue, with their unperturbed stride, equating the terrain of power
with technical operations.
Facing this perplexity, we evoke May 1968. Isn’t pragmatism and real-
ism therefore contested, showing its reactionary bias? Wasn’t there an
allusion to the play of alliances between economy and culture, power and
technical skill, the dominant morality and the phantasmal fear of chaos?
The fact is that nothing remains to be unmasked: yet is this su≈cient cause
to demotivate the revolt? Or might it not oblige a reformulation of the
very model of revolt?
On one hand, total exteriorization of the system reduces the political
debate to the criteria of e√ectiveness: convenient alliances, inadequate
tactics, situational positions, lesser evils, viable negotiations. Everybody
knows what there is to know. The denunciation that hangs over the in-
stitutions, and over the terror exercised by some of them, is ratified by
those in opposition, while the supporters don’t change their position. The
‘‘oppositional gesture’’—be it the street demonstration, the university sit-
in, the hunger strike, the vigil, banging on pots and pans—would seem
self-consuming, incapable of getting past the fence of self-reference. Every-
body knows everything and nobody convinces anyone. May becomes
winter in waking memory.
But the will to break ought to seek, imperiously, new forms. Pragmatic
solutions founded in negotiation and political realism invite the revolt to
exceed them. That invisible revolt, which cannot be located in the political
aspect or in what the political parties o√er, perhaps doesn’t correspond to
the model of the ‘‘occupied street,’’ to the dialectics of the paving stone and
of unmasking.
May’s revolt was, perhaps, the greatest (and last) expression of the politi-
cization of the will to break, a will with which we still can identify, albeit
partially and in reflecting on what can’t be recovered. The university went
into the street, confronted the police, put the government into check.
Laborers and the working classes, the exploited and the repressed, joined
in, expectant, with the street’s living theater. Young people made their
generational identity the battleground for power, and not merely a con-
frontation with teachers in the classroom or with their parents in the living
room. Politics, clearly overtaken by utopian will, was forced to widen its
confrontation scenarios. At present, however, few believe in politics as a
vehicle for radical change. The ruling realism has been emptied of utopias
and expectations for structural change. The revolt has correspondingly
lost its right to exteriorization. The will to rupture, that the French May
crystallized in the eruption of ‘‘the other’’ in the middle of the public—
fully politicizing the other—has been made interstitial, peripheral, frag-
mentary, partial, or local.
Neither curses or dreams can be scrawled on the wall of political recon-
struction. Only formulas for negotiation, retractions, terribly sensible ap-
peals, variations on a single theme. Politics has lost its totalizing range,
which might be good, but with it, part of its seductive power. Nobody
believes that in the short or middle term it can recover its capacity for
giving meaning to citizenship. What remains is a sensation of political
simulacrum in which, with distinct nuances and in the interest of achiev-
ing modest gains, the actors of the regime and of the opposition intervene.
At this point, the political news is more centered on performance than on
value: the clumsiness of one, the ingenuity of the other, the e√ectiveness of
the third, the anachronism of the fourth, the convincing quality of the
fifth, the tactical blindness of the other one, the sixth, and for the seventh,
the smell of the goal. It’s not that the field of politics is any less real for
intensifying its technical-theatrical component. But it’s only as real as ‘‘the
persistence of the same,’’ a game already played, which o√ers only the
possibility of interpreting or adjusting the moves, without breaking or
disrupting them.
Given the loss of politics’ interpellative potency, how to reorient the
model of the revolt so that the will to rupture can continue to be exercised?
Suppose the political revolt, as collective imagination and as e√ective out-
come, sealed its fate when the last students of May, real or metaphorical,
French or Latin American, let the paving stone slip from their hands.
Rather than risking or tossing it towards an uncertain future, suppose they
returned to their classrooms. In that case, what model of revolt are we in
the process of gestating now?
Ultimate values could remain for us from May 1968 although with
distinct forms of elaborating and fleshing them out. Maybe these forms
and those procedures don’t provoke and produce, in their turn, other
ultimate values. Aren’t the utopias that the street demonstrator had in
mind in Paris 1968 di√erent from those of a community organizer in 1988?
How is that di√erence explained? We know all too well what separates us
from those who supported Pinochet’s regime. There are no secrets on that
ground. There’s a total exteriorization of the conflict: everybody knows
everything and nobody convinces anyone. But what separates us from
what we were, from the examples that once were, but no longer are worth
imitating? What can we o√er or generate in lieu of the political roads of
totalization, the Statist narrative, and/or the masses as the producers of
meaning?
Suddenly we discover that ‘‘di√erence’’ signifies and that, under a cer-
tain perspective, aspiring governors can remain together on the same side
of the dividing line on the political map. On the other side of that dividing
line there remains, provisionally, a huge question mark, because govern-

ments, just like political classes, coincide in realist criteria: in the centrality
of performance in the political and of the political in the cultural, and
in the eradication of the will to break outside the limits of the political
game. This puts them, from the optic of di√erence, within a shared uni-
verse of discourse, where the narrative of political totalization continues to
dominate.
But what if this political totalization were turned into a synonym of
preservation—that is, irreconcilable with the will to break? What place can
the latter occupy? The subject and the predicate, that in May of 1968 are
assembled in a single sentence, have separated from one another. The
revolt is left helpless, then, orphaned of a narrative.
What is, or should be, the narrative of a generation that lived the experi-
ence of the military coup in Chile or Argentina during adolescence, or that
lived through unrest in the university, and now, with democracy restored,
doesn’t identify itself with the party system of political practice? What is or
should be the narrative of a generation that lived the myth of May in
France, the hippie movement, political revolt as the ‘‘libidinization’’ of the
public sphere, and facing all this oscillates between skepticism and nostal-
gia? What is or should be the narrative of a generation that embraced
dreams of moral and social rupture from an eruption of the passionate and
the popular in the political, but now surprises itself by reproducing the
fears and zeal for security that it initially condemned? What is or should be
the narrative of a generation that once fantasized about becoming mar-
ginal, proletarian, guerrillas, ascetic, or orgiastic, and now regards these
same fantasies as stereotypica—a generation that flocked to the banner of
the Great Cause and now looks to small interstices and final peripheries to
reconquer the new life?
May should remain as a spirit of revolt, as scenification and/or material-
ization. We don’t seek the unmasking function in its vestiges. Nor do we
seek political totalization. Metamorphosing it into other kinds of crys-
tallization is necessary to give it currency.
‘‘To break’’ has surely been turned into a verb without yesteryear’s
magic. Deferred to the past and to the future, it is also deprived of the
present. This distances us from May just as reality is distanced from myth.
We can’t play at pretending it’s May. No theatrical capacity is available in
that direction. The di√erence ventures out, taking roads that are humbler,
not as massive and perhaps more dispersed, where the cultural, the local,
the molecular, the peripheral are more rewarding than the political, the
national, the integrated, the center. The images become more urgent than
the definitions, the expression more revealing that its contents. The her-
meneutic of symptoms is turned into the perspective from where reality is
interpreted.
But there’s nothing, from that perspective, to be unmasked. The body is
not understood as hidden, or as work’s demiurge. Rather, the body is now
set upon the very surface of work, stretched and wounded, doubled and
shamelessly exalted. This embodiment becomes evident in the preoccupa-
tion with form, texture, appearance (‘‘essential’’ appearance), in the de-
ideologization of the alternative or of the di√erent, in the distrust for the
dialectic of integration, whether highly cultured or savage, European or
our own, or more serious yet, from the left or from the right.
This generation doesn’t know the paving stone. Exteriorization is its
problem, and its search. It has verified—or intuited?—that the real exteri-
ority of political totalization that occurred under the dictatorships, negat-
ing itself as the possibility of revolt. The public was closed o√. Expression
ceased to be a right and a practice.
Something irreversibly changed. What uncertainty! Twenty years is
more than nothing. Feverish glances set afire the landscape that they once
tried to illuminate. Now recently, perhaps, the Nietzschean challenge of
the death of God comes to life: let’s seize our orphanhood instead of
letting ourselves be overwhelmed by it. Indeed, May counterattacks. Let’s
get real. Breaking—it’s possible.
Notes
This article, written during the second-to-last years of the military government in
Chile, has been slightly updated following changes in the political map of that country.
1 In Mexico, the student revolts of 1968 had their chilling culmination in the massacre of
Tlatelolco.
5 R What Is Left Positive from Negative Thought?
A Latin American Perspective
Without attempting an exhaustive revision of critical theory or negative

thought as conceived and developed in its moment by some exponents of
the Frankfurt School, the following pages seek to establish analytical links
between the contributions or dilemmas of negative thought and the chal-
lenges that critical reflection currently confronts in Latin America.∞ Such
an exercise requires being (at least) somewhat critical of critical theory,
especially in light of decisive phenomena such as the crisis of socialism in
events, in ideas, and in the dissolution of a revolutionary social imagina-
tion that in past decades, for many intellectuals, managed to articulate a
commitment to radical social change in the region.
The present chapter opens with a summary of some elements of critical
theory and negative thought from the Frankfurt School, whose rescue or
questioning could turn out to be important right now, in light of the
phenomena noted above. These elements are then confronted with the
crisis of the revolutionary referent in Latin America. Finally, some impli-
cations are formulated regarding possible connections between negative
thought and the current critical function of the social sciences in our
countries. These possible connections appear in the light of the crisis of

Latin American development and the theoretical and practical search for
alternative modes and approaches to development.
Negative Thought and Critical Theory: Elements

to Recall with A√ection, Irritation, or Worry
Critical theory and the moment of negation
The critical theory that the Frankfurt School developed some decades ago
tried to reformulate the functions and meanings of social theory. Keen to
link social theory to an emancipatory ideal of modern humanism, it re-
sorted to the dialectical concept of negation, from there seeking to negate
(to object to, to contest) the relations of domination ruling in a ‘‘non-
free’’ world.
But this moment of negation is complex and only can be understood by
taking into account the three meanings that Frankfurt School philoso-
phers ascribe to it, which they scarcely bother to clarify: the negation of
pure theory, that is, working towards a reflection capable of transcending
the world and closely identifying with the collective struggle for the ex-
pansion of real liberties; the problematization of that close identification
between critical theory and the commitment to the real transformation of
the structures of domination; and the negation of the existing order of
things, which implies, on the one hand, challenging society and its forms
of coercion and, on the other hand, a≈rming the possibilities which are
contained and repressed by that same society.
Negation is, in short, the mobilizing exercise of criticism. It is by means
of negation that things are revealed in their capacity for being other than
the way that they appear to us, susceptible to profound unmasking and rad-
ical transformation: ‘‘To comprehend reality,’’ indicates Marcuse, ‘‘means
to comprehend what things really are, and this in turn means rejecting their
mere factuality. Rejection is the process of thought as well as of action.’’≤
Not very di√erent from this is the following, more hermetic meaning:
‘‘Negation plays a crucial role in philosophy. The negation is double-
edged—a negation of the absolute claims of the prevailing ideology and of
the brash claims of reality.’’≥
The moment of negation in critical theory can also be understood as the
relativization and contextualization of the objects upon which it reflects.
This means that what we think about takes on greater clarity when we
What Is Positive in Negative Thought? 57
think about it in interaction with a combination of relations which that

same object establishes with others, whether other objects or other sub-
jects. The object of our reflection is thus explained in a frame of contradic-
tions and is left, in turn, exposed in the falsity of its claims to the absolute:
‘‘Philosophy,’’ says Horkheimer, ‘‘takes existing values seriously but insists
that they become parts of a theoretical whole that reveals their relativity.’’∂
In a similar sense, Adorno looks to understand criticism as contextual-
ization put into perspective when he indicates that dialectic ‘‘criticism
retains its mobility in regard to culture by recognizing the latter’s position
within the whole. Without such freedom, without consciousness tran-
scending the immanence of culture, immanent criticism itself would be
inconceivable: the spontaneous movement of the object can be followed
only by someone who is not entirely engulfed by it.’’∑ With this, Adorno
looks to turn the critical attitude itself into an object of critical thought.
He contextualizes critical theory, showing its tense relation with the domi-
nant culture: this relation is where he believes that the necessity of critical
theory’s defining itself as distinct from gregarious culture is discovered.
Then he postulates the necessary independence that this critical vision
should maintain with respect to the dominant culture, for if this di√erence
did not exist, criticism would identify with the status quo, and this identi-
fication would leave no space for the progress of freedom.
It’s important to prove that in Horkheimer’s meaning as much as in
Adorno’s, critical theory understands negation as the constitutive moment
of dialectical thought, by means of which this thought manages to de-
ideologize itself, to situate itself outside of the ‘‘temptation to appear-
ances,’’ to capture the reality of the moment as a moment within reality.
Dialectical negation thus becomes, in its turn, the decisive moment of
critical thought, in which the mediate is worked out behind the immedi-
ate, the presence of the all, behind the part, and the non-absolute of a
reality, behind the deceitful appearance of the absolute.
One might think that critical theory repeats the old dualism between
hidden essence and deceitful appearance. But the tension between ap-
pearance versus essence here has two connotations that in no way refer to
metaphysical dualism. In the first place, appearance constitutes a contra-
dictory moment of essence within itself, an incomplete part of its own
movement. Appearance is not, as in Platonism, the realm of the false or of
the corrupt, but the road that essence itself travels (and crystallizes) in
order to move forward, completing and historicizing itself. In this, critical
theory is indebted to Hegelian dialectic. In the second place, the criticism
of appearance should be understood as part of the criticism of totalitarian-

ism and fetishization. What is objectionable, then, is the character of re-
ification and ideology that appearance acquires. Not as mere ‘‘falsehood’’
in the Platonic sense, but as manipulation and alienation, as false con-
sciousness and keen perception simultaneously: the expression of a will to
domination that presents the existing conditions of domination as eternal.
Critical theory—and negative thought, more forcefully and with greater
specificity—recognizes the world as not free, as that which isn’t really as it
is, or that is given only in an incomplete way.∏ This is evident where
Marcuse argues that ‘‘Dialectical thought starts with the experience that
the world is unfree, that is to say, man and nature exist in conditions of
alienation, exist as ‘other than they are.’ ’’π Marcuse sees in Hegel’s dialectic
the most important referent for making reason a way of seeing the world in
its ‘‘incompleteness,’’ that is, as a world that incubates a yet-unrealized
freedom, and whose movement necessarily exceeds its present moment—
its appearance: ‘‘The matters of fact that make up the given state of af-
fairs, viewed in the light of reason, become negative, limited, transitory—
they become perishing forms within a comprehensive process that leads
beyond them.’’∫
In this way the act of unveiling reason is, at the same time, the act of dia-
lectically negating the world. The emancipation of humanity is contained,
behind appearance, in humanity itself, and reason’s task is to break the
circle of appearance in order to mobilize the world for the sake of its own
emancipation. That is the will that animates critical thought, and also its
enlightened matrix, in the proper meaning of the term. This happy coinci-
dence endures, in negative thought, as long as happiness endures in the
midst of misfortune. The emancipatory function of unveiling, which the
Frankfurt School awards to reason, is immediately distorted by an old re-
active trauma that reduces unveiling to an all-pervasive suspicion of all that
is irrational, instrumental or mystical. The precautionary obsession con-
cludes by expelling that will to freedom from the terrain of critical thought.
The gradient of negation

In principle, dialectical negation is negation of negativity, that is, refuta-
tion of the alienated, the repressive, the not-free, and at the same time,
a≈rmation of the possibilities of overcoming that which is refuted. Dialec-
tical thought defends itself against the alienation that it attributes to the
world: it defends hope (present, in thought) and utopia (future, in the

world, but never closed or predetermined). Nonetheless, thought should
also protect itself from the ‘‘spurious’’ freedoms and ‘‘false hopes’’ of the
reified world (which is alienated, not free). For Marcuse, the amalgam of
freedoms and subjection of industrial society requires freedom to show
itself as opposition to current progress. It’s doubtless a problem for free-
dom, to have to appear under the form of the negation of progress. For
Marcuse, freedom is a≈rmed, then, as a break in the line of capitalist
progress—that is, as liberation. In this sense, and in contrast to other
more despairing Frankfurt School philosophers, the negative character of
freedom does not, for Marcuse, contradict the possibility of freedom. This
is as evident in his battle text, An Essay on Liberation,Ω as in some earlier
passages: ‘‘The total mobilization of society against the ultimate liberation
of the individual, which constitutes the historical content of the present
period, indicates how real is the possibility of this liberation.’’∞≠
According to Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘‘the cultivation of ‘hopes’ in the
very midst of false totality is a form of complicity and collaboration with
the oppression and repression of totalitarian societies today. Only the
renunciation of hope can, paradoxically, permit hope itself to survive amid
all that continuously denies it.’’∞∞ This dramatic contradiction will be, at
the same time, the identifying mark and gravestone for negative thought.
By means of this operation, a range of features are attributed to that world
filled with negativity. Among these features are the perverse capacity to
absorb hopes and utopias, to neutralize their transformational potential,
and to convert them into ideologies of preservation. By means of this
operation, then, critical thinking begins to chase and bite its own tail: its
lucidity becomes its excess. Philosophy is restricted to a kind of attitude
which is extremely consistent and extremely bare. Nothing is left to it, but
to act—with action as attack and disturbance—in a world that philosophy
itself has previously qualified as impermeable to all disturbance. In this
way, critical thought is more gesture than action, more symbolic than
e√ective. Its pessimism can be understood—and thus defended—as a
form of provocation, although it necessarily, according to the very pessi-
mism of negative thinkers, bounces against the thick layer of the false
consciousness of the social. To evade its reification, criticism must infi-
nitely duplicate itself as criticism of criticism, and criticism of criticism of
criticism, and so on, successively.
‘‘Reason’’ should be negated by non-mystified reason in order not to fall
back into a metaphysics of history. The criticism proposed by Adorno and

Horkheimer is very consistent and lucid regarding the concept of histori-
cal necessity forged by Enlightenment: such criticism doesn’t aim to over-
come Enlightenment, but rather to protect it from its own totalitarian
risk: ‘‘Its [Enlightenment’s] untruth does not consist in what its roman-
tic enemies have always reproached it for: analytical method, return to
elements, dissolution through reflective thought; but instead in the fact
that for enlightenment the process is always decided from the start.’’∞≤
Nietszche had already arrived at the conclusion that modern Reason is
contradictory on this point, since on the one hand it proclaims the histor-
ical and ethical necessity of the autonomy of its subjects, while on the
other hand, turning it into ethical and historical necessity subsumes all
true desire for emancipation within a universal law, in which no autonomy
is possible. Nietszche saw in this contradiction the craftiness of the ‘‘crowd
spirit’’ at work behind the metanarratives of modernity: the dialectic of
Enlightenment winds up guaranteeing, behind its liberational appearance,
the imposition of a crowd morality. But Adorno and Horkheimer are
closer to Weber than to Nietszche, for they are alarmed that the uses of
reason are restricted to the deployment of a formal rationality that annihi-
lates subjectivity by way of the mechanism of instrumental rationalization.
Finally, Marcuse synthesizes these two critics of Enlightenment with an
inevitable question that Enlightenment itself is condemned to leave unan-
swered: ‘‘How can slaves, who don’t even know that they are enslaved,
free themselves?’’∞≥
The reaction of Frankfurt School thinkers to this theoretical-practical
problem is anything but uniform. On one extreme, Marcuse himself
sought to break the circle of the negative, identifying negation with certain
actors or possibilities that he glimpsed in the rebellion of the 1960s. His
manifesto, An Essay on Liberation, is the faithful expression of that attempt.
But this same gesture could be interpreted by critical negative thought as
inconsistent with the imperative of negative thought. On the other ex-
treme, Adorno wound up closed in by way of the abstract a≈rmation of
his own negative capacity, strongly objecting to those very actors that
Marcuse, in his moment, defended. The theoretical conflict facing nega-
tive thought can be evidenced from this di√erence between the two, when,
on the one hand, negative thought a≈rms the emancipatory possibility of
reality and of critical theory itself and, on the other hand, it announces, in
an apocalyptic way, the universalized reification of reality, which ends up,
in its totalitarian march, swallowing critical consciousness itself.
Negative thought and critical paranoia

In the light of some of the texts of Horkheimer and Adorno, it can be de-
duced that negative thought is not merely critical, but critical in a paranoid
way.∞∂ The more flattering the criticism, the more it moves towards paral-
ysis. It isn’t strange, for example, to find medical metaphors in the exercise
of negative thought, something like the messianic-paranoiac speeches
which so repelled the very philosophers of the Frankfurt School, as illus-
trated in the following passage from Horkheimer’s Critique of Instrumen-
tal Reason: ‘‘The disease of reason is that reason was born from man’s urge
to dominate nature, and the ‘recovery’ depends on insight into the nature
of the original disease, not a cure of the latest symptoms.’’∞∑
A clarifying observation appears in Martin Jay’s meticulous historical
reconstruction of the Frankfurt School. For the ‘‘founding fathers’’ of
critical theory, the experience of German Nazism in the 1930s was so
traumatic that consciousness subsequently could do no more than mea-
sure the degree of potential fascism in every contemporaneous form of
social organization.∞∏ The problem here is that, carried to its extreme,
negative thought bites its own tail, breaking the very link between social
critique and political action insinuated as one of its promises. This is
expressed in Horkheimer’s and Adorno’s mistrust regarding the expres-
sions of radical politics in the 1960s, expressions that could well be inter-
preted (as Marcuse seemed to do, in his moment) as the crystallization of
critical theory. As one of the leading chroniclers of the Frankfurt School,
Martin Jay expresses it: ‘‘The desperate hopes of Horkheimer’s wartime
essay on the ‘Authoritarian State’ soon gave way to a deepening gloom
about the chances for meaningful change . . . That imperative for praxis,
so much a part of what some might call the Institut’s heroic period, was no
longer an integral part of its thought. Adorno’s much quoted remark,
made shortly before his death in 1969, that ‘when I made my theoretical
model, I could not have guessed that people would try to realize it with
Molotov cocktails’ . . . reflected instead a fundamental conclusion of the
theory itself: negation could never be truly negated.’’∞π
This critical purism finds its most extensive expression in Adorno, in
whom the critical-hermetic tendency seems exacerbated with the evolu-
tion of his thought. At the end of this evolution, he gives the impression
that consciousness can do no more than take precautions, to dedicate itself
to establishing a distance from all alienated consciousness, even at the
price of solipsism: ‘‘If philosophy is still necessary,’’ he proclaimed in 1962,
‘‘it is so only in the way it has been from time immemorial: as critique, as
resistance to the expanding heteronymy.’’∞∫ Facing a world increasingly
ruled by the law of reification, by the alienation of work and of power, by
the spells of merchandise and of consumption, and by the authoritarian-
ism of institutions, philosophy can do no more than be critical, and this in
two senses: as refutation, irreconcilable with its object, and as a mode for
situating said object as framed by the conditions that explain it and make it
possible. Even as it is understood as an exercise of commitment to reality,
philosophy winds up elevating itself above reality, like an aseptic entity
that cannot mix itself with anything that might contaminate it: ‘‘Philoso-
phy resigns by equating itself with what should in fact first be illuminated
by philosophy.’’∞Ω Purified, exacerbated, or inverted Enlightenment? In the
end, philosophy might seem to recognize that instrumental reason wins
the battle inside Enlightenment, negating the only foundation for hope:
namely, that in the Enlightenment project it was possible to turn back the
dominant and dominating tendency of history.
Some Scattered Connections between Negative Thought

and Latin America, To Be Taken, Depending on the
Occasion, with Enthusiasm, Caution, or Dismay
The huge distance between Frankfurt and Latin America
The negative thought of the Frankfurt School found its favored fields for
circulation among circuits of well-read intellectuals in the universities of
industrialized countries (above all in Germany and in the U.S., where the
School operated in distinct moments). It has scant di√usion in Spanish-
speaking countries because it came to our countries by way of expensive
publishers. It was in industrialized countries, above all in the 1960s and the
beginnings of the 1970s, where the type of political processes, social mobili-
zations, forms of systemic rationalization and massive questioning of the
status quo could find theoretical support in some strands of critical thought
from Frankfurt.
But this empathy was ephemeral, given that negative thought evi-
denced, at its peak, an intrinsic di≈culty with regard to formulating the
proposals outlined in the preceding paragraphs. Owing to the state of
development in this era in Latin America, the theoretical models most
susceptible to being converted into platforms for social mobilization came
from a less heterodox Marxism and from theories of dependency formu-
lated from and towards Latin America, and from development discourse
that had very little to do with the sensitivity of negative thought. Critical
reflection within the region incorporated, at most, some considerations
regarding the social impact of the culture industry and the manipulative
power of mass communication media, whose analytical precedents were
formulated by social scientists quite close to the spirit of the Frankfurt
School. But they withdrew according to the political-ideological confron-
tations of the 1960s and 1970s, which in our region were lived in a particu-
lar manner. They did not take into account the principal connections that
critical theory postulated in this regard, namely, the culture industry’s full
functionality for systemic rationalization.
The application of critical theory to social reflection in Latin America
never constituted a significant theoretical project. It is nonetheless possi-
ble, today, for modern critical theory to weave a series of connections,
demonstrated through practice itself, without the intention of proclaim-
ing itself to be the heir of the Frankfurt School. The search for socio-
cultural spaces that can revive a will for collective emancipation persists as
much in the industrialized world as in the Latin American periphery, but
under new forms and with new actors. The tension between rationaliza-
tion through technology and the market, on the one hand, and the will of
collective subjects for proposing their autonomy with regard to this sys-
temic logic, on the other hand, always finds new expressions (despite the
apocalyptic outbursts of the late Adorno). Within these tensions, critical
theory always o√ers concepts that can shed new light on contingency. The
following paragraphs attempt such an exercise, aimed at an expanded
perspective on some current social processes in Latin America.
Negative thought, crisis of exteriorization,

and loss of an emancipatory imagination
The glimmers of hope in negative thought dissolved when the implicit dia-
lectic of exteriorization lost meaning. Industrial society made its contradic-
tions evident and consistent, along with its subordination to instrumental
reason, its contained and functional violence, its forms of repression and
substitutes for freedom. Yet it didn’t take its destiny into its own hands, nor
did it seek mass emancipation. Exteriorization worked through one of its
moments, namely, as the unmasking of domination; but it did not do so in
its other moment of ‘‘the negation of appearance by being,’’ as the over-
coming of alienation, as the subversion of the repressive by the repressed.
In this way, theory was choked by its critique. Critical discourse has been
updated in direct measure to its superfluity: contradictions were demon-
strated, leaving no place for the noble e√ort of unmasking. As already
indicated, nothing is more dismaying than criticism without emancipa-
tion. The problem stopped being the alienation of the spirit on the side of
reality, and crystallized in the impotence of the spirit on the side of theory.
For Latin America, nonetheless, exteriorization had already been, al-
most from the onset, part of the very process of development. The real had
always been exteriorized: it was seen in political violence, in military dic-
tatorships, in cultural and ethnic discrimination, in misery and exclusion.
In Latin America, ‘‘being’’ does not hide itself: it expresses itself as much in
the repressed as in the repressor, in the integrated as in the excluded.
Domination is and has always been public, visible, in an exteriorization
that only connotes higher or more unpolished degrees of misery and of
coercion, and never emancipation. Negative thought is inscribed in real-
ity, almost as a stigma.
On the other hand, negation supposes, in its a≈rmative version, an act
situated in an undetermined point in the future, by means of which a
collective subject incarnates freedom and substantially changes the direc-
tion of history. In Latin America the referent for that moment of negation
was, for a long time, a revolution self-defined as anti-capitalist and/or anti-
imperialist. This revolution was thought, devised, and felt by those who
assumed this moment of necessary negation as a point of inflection that
would fill not just personal life, but the world, with meaning. In this
manner the image of the revolution bestowed full coherence on personal
activity (political, intellectual) insofar as the former worked towards that
moment of mass emancipation. To work towards that instance of libera-
tion, that irreducible event, was to bestow plenitude on life itself. Re-
demption and negation were a single thing under the threshold of revo-
lution. The moment of the inversion of order—and not so much the
subsequent order—was what mattered.
But that image, so seductive and so capable of inviting the sacrifice of
one’s own life and of generating an invisible but sublime tie among those
who shared the image of revolution, was destroyed without being carried
out, or relegated to minuscule groups and messianic delirium. The col-
lapse of real socialism, the hard apprenticeship under the dictatorships, the
crisis of paradigms in social theory, the defeat of Ortega in Nicaragua, the
deterioration in Fidel’s image in Cuba, and the most rudimentary analysis
of correlated forces finished o√ the strength of this image (not of utopian
order, but of utopian event). The intellectual was left without a com-
mitted science, the militant without a vital cause, the marginal, more alone
than ever. And with the depleted dialectic, so dear to the Frankfurt School
thinkers, the following questions arose, almost by way of afterthought: Is
it possible to situate the a≈rmative moment of negation at another point
and to preserve, within that moment, the capacity for mobilization, per-
sonal mysticism, the promise of freedom, the possibility of a fusion be-
tween personal action and mass irruption?
In the light of the death of these images and the oft-mentioned crises of
development, of social articulation, and of alternatives: should we expect
new roads for integration, ways to make being and appearance coincide,
for producing a new form of societal synthesis, a new dialectic of exterior-
ization that negates alienation and a≈rms freedom, in a strong sense? Is it
possible, in all, to think of a way committed to a movement negating
structures which are dominant, exclusionary, manipulative? Or now, de-
prived of eventual revolutions and attractive models of development, is
Latin America ready for its most lucid intellectuals to vindicate the closed
version of negative thought, rejection-without-a-project, snubbing the
very concept of projects?
The postmodern position also rejects all projects, although from a
totally distinct perspective, which any Frankfurt School thinker would
brand as reified thinking. What is certain is that the lack of confidence with
regard to metanarratives doesn’t begin with The Postmodern Condition by
Lyotard,≤≠ but rather, at the very least, with the Dialectic of Enlighten-
ment. While Adorno and Horkheimer question its implications, Lyotard
and the postmoderns question its current validity. While critical theorists
flow into a critical paranoia, the postmoderns turn it into ludic schizo-
phrenia. The demystification that the critical theorists so often asked for
arrives with postmodernity, but with such a degree of disintegration that
no collective project would overcome the pulverizing e√ect that the new
secularization would exercise over any discourse and project. Today, de-
mystification does not guarantee freedom, but hurls itself into an extreme
condition of contingency.
The place of criticism given the crises of intelligibility

and of articulation in social theory
As we have already suggested, the alluded loss of the utopian referent and
of the horizon of communion between theory and practice, and between
the individual and history, leaves the Latin American social sciences in a
place of estrangement. As long as dependency theory had influence and
currency, the images of development discourse or a possible revolution
could be understood in a convincing articulation between the social sci-
ences’ idea of the socially intelligible on the one hand, and political activ-
ism’s idea of social intervention on the other. Substantial changes in theo-
retical reflection, such as the waning of militant science, the fragmentation
of knowledge that previously worked towards integration within a consis-
tent whole, or the crisis of development discourse centered in planning
and sustained modernization, undermined the ‘‘emancipatory mysticism’’
of the social scientist. Today’s sacred words would have been sacrilegious
during the years of big dreams: micro-project, interstice, small spaces,
short term, low-profile, competitiveness.
On the one hand, casting doubt on the large-scale modernization proj-
ects that constituted the basic material of political-symbolic consumption
at other moments in Latin America (whether in development discourse or
in socialism) leads social scientists to question the place that their own
knowledge production occupies within the orientation towards future
social and political changes. On the other hand, the disenchantment and
mistrust generated by the shattering of institutions, political failures, and
social dismembering all lead to greater degrees of heterodoxy in the forms
of apprehending reality. It currently turns out to be di≈cult to establish a
limit between heterodoxy and eclecticism in the interpretive practice of the
Latin American social scientist. Between the need to resort to tools from
a very wide range of analytical perspectives, and the abandonment of
globalizing categories that drew from strong ideologies, theory is exposed
to the most hybrid formulations.
Totalization and synthesis lose their privileged place, not just within
theory, but especially within the fusion of theory with politics, and of the
intellectual with the masses. The field is freed, so that instrumental reason
may uncoil itself freely through the spheres of social life. One could also
think that the growing professionalization of the sociologist and of the
political scientist in the present day, as well as a greater bias towards the
pragmatic and technical in their theoretical practice, reflect this tendency.
Criticism, as an intellectual function exercised from a socialist project—of
individualism, selfishness, inequality of wealth, the production of goods,
and political domination—now appears drastically cut back.≤∞ The ques-
tions can’t be put o√: How to exercise criticism from the perspective of
social theory in Latin America today, in a meaningful way, and what
contents might it establish, avoiding self-pitying pessimism or paralyzing

fatalism? Is it possible to recover a mode of theory and practice in which
criticism implies, in its turn, the potential for freeing features within social
reality, the space for hopes oriented towards a more humanized order? Is it
possible to promote a more a≈rmative, less heteronymous culture? Is it
possible to socialize an ethic capable of ‘‘materializing’’ development? If
this were the case: what are, even now, the signs emanating from the
practice of the social scientist that portend new, creative forms of criticism
in the sense just indicated? The following represents a first attempt to
answer these questions.
New spaces and new approaches for exercising critical

thought facing the fractures of modernization
New political, economic, and technological conditions make it increas-
ingly di≈cult to imagine how particular projects will come together, unit-
ing to transform society. On the one hand reality ratifies the suspicions
of negative thought, given that in Latin America there is discrediting
or widespread antipathy towards whatever ‘‘prescription’’ or recipe for
emerging from the quagmire. But on the other hand, in this lack of a
future, reason loses its possibilities for emancipatory articulation between
the particular and the general.
Alternative proposals and/or perceptions nonetheless appear, which
attempt, in a tentative and interstitial way, to negate the dominant para-
digms of conventional modernization, without, on that account, becom-
ing identified with the status quo dictated by the march of the market.
Some of the values emerging in such perceptions merit a fuller, more
exhaustive explanation.
First, the valorization of democracy as an order in which conflicts are
resolved through dialogue, negotiation, and consensus, and as a necessary
context for the least coercive possible articulations between the State and
civil society, in ways that privilege communicational rationality. Democ-
racy is also valorized as a political foundation for the reconciliation of
conflicts such as those between the technical versus political dimensions of
development, between planning and the market, between the local and the
national. Finally, democracy is valorized as a spring for social participa-
tion, the decentralization of decisions, and creating a culture of citizen-
ship. It’s no mere chance that some Latin American political scientists,
occupied with reflecting on the processes of re-democratization in our
countries, today incorporate into their interpretive baggage the theory of

communicative action elaborated by Habermas, the last great paladin of
Frankfurt. The concern with communicative transparency (in the ra-
tionality of dialogue through the unfolding of a democratic order, and in
its articulation with political logic and with the use of public space) has
important theoretical precedents in the tradition of critical theory (espe-
cially in the renovation of critical theory via Habermas).
Second, the revalorization of social movements and of the social fabric,
and, in the same sense, the revalorization of civil society as ‘‘polymor-
phous’’ in facing the State’s homogenizing action. The State, in its turn,
responds to the will of a few, conceiving new forms of doing politics,
which would be less subject to the interference of party politics or the prac-
tices of specific clients, and more centered in the cultural determinations
of its actors. The so-called new social movements (or grassroots, base
groups, or popular organizations) acquire special emphasis in this sense.
For their marginal or interstitial space within society and with regard to the
State and the market, they can materialize ‘‘counter-hegemonic’’ logics
where solidarity, resistance, cooperativism, autonomy and/or collective
participation predominate. From there, social energies stretch outwards,
without being absorbed by instrumental reason by the politics of co-
optation from the political system, or by mercantile logic. It isn’t easy to
ponder the degree and extensiveness of this phenomenon, or to what
measure it tends to turn into an idealized construction for social scientists
seeking new actors for new utopias. But beyond this spurious condition,
which is always present and is best taken as a given, the rescue of the
‘‘counterhegemonic’’ flows of the social movements (eventually subject to
new logics, not submitted to systemic rationalization) likewise resonates
in critical theory. One could similarly evoke Marcuse’s rescue of the coun-
tercultural movements of the 1960s, as well as Habermas’ more recent
defense of worlds of life, facing systemic reason. If in those social move-
ments everyday life counts for more and the electoral battle for less, and if
the strength of the territorial-neighborhood dimension is greater than that
of the political-institutional insertion, and if the weight of symbolic-
cultural vindication equals that of material demands, then they constitute
themselves as small ‘‘promises of emancipation’’ in the eyes of critical
theory.
These perceptions embody a vision of reality which is critical, but not
fatalistic: the rescue of the new social movements demonstrates a concern
lest the constitution of collective identities fall into the stigma of reifying
social actors. To prefer social movements as opposed to the traditional

political parties is to privilege logics which are less instrumental forms of
political practice, and more autonomous with regard to the social dy-
namic. The revalorization of democracy in a broad, deep sense further
implies the intent to mold a democratic culture, and not just a majority-
elected government—that is, an ideal of citizenship inscribed in the con-
structive discourse of Enlightenment.
Alternative forms of sociability, processing demands and horizontal
communication, would bestow increasing value on these spaces. There,
they might start constituting new central points for critical humanists who
are sailing along, bereft of large-scale narratives, adrift in a sea of post-
ideological disenchantment. The democratization of society could become
a new version of some historical ideals of critical thought: progressive de-
hierarchization of the relations between distinct social actors across the
field of the economy of solidarity and of new social movements; a growing
cultural pluralism that is opposed to the exclusivist slant that modernizing
rationality imposes with respect to endogenous cultures; and a growing
communicative fluidity oriented towards democratizing the processing of
demands in public space, towards converting the excluded into new ‘‘com-
municating subjects’’ within this public space.
In this new perspective, the exercise of criticism is grouped into a series
of functions di≈cult to order hierarchically. On one hand, the exercise of
criticism is fleshed out as the denunciation of totalitarian danger in tradi-
tional sociological and sociopolitical interpretation of the subjects. From
this trench for criticism appears the censure of the functionalist and de-
velopmentalist tradition, for example, and of social subjectivity’s submis-
sion to quantifiable and comparable terms. The censure argues that such
submission redounds in the manipulation of social actors from a force that
tries to situate itself on top of them (call this force the State, the party,
social or intellectual science). There is a censuring of the Marxist tradition,
on the other hand, in its tendency to construct social subjects by way of
their ‘‘structural’’ determinants, reducing the specificity of some to the
generality of others. There’s an objection, as well, to Marxism’s historical
tendency to impel a kind of social change with visions of deterministic and
closed worlds. The criticism that followers of Nietszche, Heidegger, and
the Frankfurt School have made, from di√erent perspectives, of the pri-
macy of modern ratio (commensurating reason, which on account of
being constrictive-constructive, is very exclusivizing) is applied with spe-
cial force to the Latin American left and to the normative planner. That
criticism is applied to the left because it fell into the temptation of judging,
measuring, and reducing everything according to the canon of its own
ideology. That criticism is applied to the planner for having fallen into the
illusion that social reality was intrinsically measurable, rationalizable, and
directible from a so-called science of development. (This idea is developed
at greater length, in this text, in the chapter entitled ‘‘Is the Social Think-
able without Metanarratives?’’)
Another field from which to exercise criticism, with important theoret-
ical referents in the tradition of critical theory, is that of the culture indus-
try. Within this frame it is argued that the ceaseless tensions between
cultural identity and modernity could be resolved with integrative e√ects
through the new communicative potential of the culture industry. The
e√ective deployment of the culture industry nonetheless can also take on
more conflictive indications, owing to high levels of social disintegration,
segmented access, and to the close link between the culture industry and
transnational economic power. Because the impact of communicative and
informative globalization on endogenous cultures is uncertain, critical
consciousness has a key role to play in this area of our societies. The
culture industry, and within it, the information industry, penetrate the
collective imagination in a systematic, everyday manner. Its power over
personal subjectivity is thus seen as facilitated by the spontaneous ten-
dency towards the a-critical acceptance of its messages. As a spokesperson
for negative thought might express it, the culture industry and the power
of information are embodied forms of dominant ideology and institu-
tionalized practices of systemic rationalization: it is in this manner that the
dominant culture invisibly but e√ectively penetrates the skin of all the
other cultures. The invisible and systemic nature of its manipulation
merits the application of critical unmasking. So much the better if behind
every unwary television watcher there were a Frankfurtian Superego,
warning against the possibly alienating e√ects of the culture industry.
The exercise of criticism consists, then, in unmasking the reductive
rationalities of the models of knowledge and the predominant forms of
culturization and social action. These rationalities and forms are, by their
very reductiveness and predominance, alienating, dehumanizing, and all
the negative epithets that one might conceive from within the trench of
critical humanism. The criticism of dominant rationalities is diversified in
various criticisms: instrumental or manipulative rationality, economic or
economist rationality, ‘‘professionalized’’ rationality of power, and the eth-
nocentric biases in the rationality of progress.
That this form of criticism has its precedents in the critical theory of the
Frankfurt School becomes even more evident in touching on the oft-
mentioned concept of alienation. The wealth—or indeterminacy?—of
this concept proves advantageous, given its significance in the field of
culture, sociology, politics, and psychopathology. It is advantageous that
the concept of alienation, according to its uses, leads to another series of
neighboring concepts frequently appearing in criticism of the rationalities
of domination: reification, instrumentalization, domination, coercion,
manipulation, co-optation, denaturalization, passivity, inauthenticity, etc.
All of them clearly carry a negative connotation.
Finally, these critical approaches seem to share a metavalue repeated
throughout its scattered discourses, that could be defined as the option for
an exhaustively democratic order, with ‘‘exhaustive’’ indicating that the
relations susceptible to being democratized aren’t just those that mediate
between the State and civil society, but between all kinds of institutions
(families, municipalities, schools, workplaces, public institutions, and ser-
vices), and in the most varied planes (the political, social, cultural, eco-
nomic, and technological). In this context, the expansion of critical con-
sciousness appears as a phenomenon multiplying across all the spaces of
social interaction, from the familiar to the political, from the plane of per-
sonal communication to that of public action, and from the field of culture
to that of economy. It shouldn’t seem strange, then, that in the epistemo-
logical opinion of those who share this metavalue of exhaustive democra-
tization, interdisciplinarity and participative research would also appear as
favored practices.
‘‘Another Development’’ and the critique of instrumental

reason and of Enlightenment reason in Latin America
The instrumentalist model attributed to the prevailing modernization in
Latin America has been questioned from the entrenched heterodoxy of al-
ternative discourse known as ‘‘Another Development.’’≤≤ This critique
comes from social scientists situated outside of the sphere of the state.
Many of them are closely involved with ngos (non-governmental organi-
zations) engaged in research and activism, dedicated to study and to pro-
moting communitarian forms of social organization, appropriate technol-
ogies, participative social politics, organic relations with the surrounding
environment, the expansion of popular culture, respect for autochthonous
identities, and/or greater attention to local phenomena and grassroots
groups. These social scientists argue that the dominant development

model (initially, a discourse of encouraging development or nationaliza-
tion, which subsequently gave way to the neoliberal model) neglects the
qualitative dimension of social life, sidesteps endogenous expressions and
ethnic and regional identities, and tends to emulate models of develop-
ment of industrialized societies which exercise a disastrous e√ect on the
environment. In contrast with this, the paladins of Another Development
welcome experiences which are communitarian, autochthonous, partici-
patory, and that undo the hierarchies involved in promoting development.
They privilege development which is social, cultural, and local over that
which is economic, technological, and national. The relativization of in-
strumental reason leads to standing apart from the terrain of the great
conflicts of central power, limiting itself to minimal spaces of social interac-
tion, where it seems more viable ‘‘to purge’’ relations of their propensity to
manipulation.
The critical social scientist’s preoccupation with new social movements,
countercultural initiatives, ethnic minorities, experiences of communi-
tarian development, and small scale projects demonstrates that the critical
function does not close itself o√ in pure negativity. Negativity, as the
moment of rejecting the dominant logic (as manipulative, instrumental,
coercive), seeks its positive complement in small actors within the social
fabric. That’s where the researcher dedicated to an unconventional kind of
research (call it action-research or participant-research) wants to encoun-
ter instances of alterity with regard to the system. Negation’s a≈rma-
tive instance then appears not as tomorrow’s generalized utopia but as
today’s everyday, in-between reality. This is the reality of shantytown
dwellers building their own housing, of community soup kitchens, back-
yard vegetable gardens, agricultural communes, self-managed workshops,
programs for adult education, popular medicine, the defense of nature,
and many others. There, the instrumental is submitted to an ethical princi-
pal, not made explicit, but which the researcher unravels (or imagines?)
over the course of these small-scale practices. It’s nonetheless worth ques-
tioning the degree of mystification incurred when the paladins of Another
Development defend these interstitial experiences. That is, do counter-
hegemonic logics (of solidarity, anti-hierarchical, participatory) really ex-
tend, day by day, throughout the social fabric? Or is that mystification an
expression of the researcher’s own desire and urgent need to construct a
new social actor with emancipatory potential? It’s worth asking, maybe
even more suspiciously, if it is possible to design and construct a distinct
societal order departing from the multiplication of those interstices all the
way across society.
But despite these reservations, various elements draw this new current
of social scientists, set on a critical intellectual project, into association
with critical theory of the Frankfurt school:
They begin by exposing to critical artillery the very practice of knowl-
edge production, and by this route they question their own place as social
researchers. The wager for new modes of understanding research (as ac-
tion or participation) e√ectively reflects an e√ort to adopt, in their own
experience, the challenge of criticism, without implying an ‘‘Adorno-like’’
withdrawal from the worldly din.
There exists a determination to recover the ideal of the social scientist as
engaged in processes of emancipatory social transformation, and to locate
theoretical practice in that direction, precisely by means of an e√ective
proximity between the researcher and the actors whom that researcher
regards as agents for change. That proximity can be achieved by way of
what’s been described as action-research or participant-research.
In this emerging production of knowledge and new perception, nega-
tion has two parts: critique of the totality (of the general order) and the
a≈rmation of what denies the totality (the interstitial, the peripheral).
One might nonetheless object that no dialectical relation exists between
the two parts of the negation: dominant reason is not seen as overcome or
freed by the sparks flying from the interstices. Rather, the ‘‘emancipatory-
in-between’’ coexists with the ‘‘coercive-general,’’ neither abolishing it or
coming to dispute its hegemony.
In this way, negation does not free itself from the negated, that is, from
the general order. Rather, it only recognizes spaces in which that order is
resisted. From this perspective, there is no absolute co-optation on the
part of dominant reason. Neither is there a process of transcending said
reason on the part of contrahegemonic logics, always confined to micro-
spaces.≤≥ So is this critical function of social knowledge situated in the
middle of the road, between the more optimistic Marcuse and the more
pessimistic Adorno: the counter-hegemonic does not expand to the point
of producing a generalized emancipatory movement, nor is there a total
closure of the world from the dominant order. The theoretical referent
most adjusted to this perspective could be found today in Michel Fou-
cault’s celebrated theory of power, according to which the discourses of
power and its distinct forms of rationalization ceaselessly generate dis-
courses and forms of resistance on the part of the subjected, without this
tension between powers and resistance’s taking on a necessarily dialectical

solution, through which the logics of resistance accede to power.
In conclusion: Common leitmotivs in critical theory

and in critical social research in Latin America
Passing over distances, objects of study, modes of insertion in the produc-
tion of social knowledge and intellectual strategy, points of a≈nity exist
between critical theory and the emerging tendencies of Latin American so-
cial research. Both cases engage in a constant exercise of interpretation that
‘‘denounces’’ reality, which seeks to unveil the operation of dominant ra-
tionalities (formal, instrumental, co-active, commodity fetishism) within
distinct boundaries: in the statist exercise of power, in the family structure,
in educational institutions, in culture and in everyday life. In both cases
the notion of alienation is used, in its diverse meanings, to mark the
distance between the general order and that which negates it. In both cases
there exists a certain passion for social rationality, and the implicit or
explicit conviction that the social possibilities of emancipation or of clo-
sure are played out on the plane of that rationality. In both cases there
exists an almost Manichaean vision of politics, or at least of the current
forms of politics, understanding that this is, above all, a field of domina-
tion and of alienation, and that institutionalized politics ‘‘taints’’ the one
who performs it. In both cases, the social functions that theory desires for
itself are the critique of the hegemonic order and the recognition of sub-
jects and practices with emancipatory signs. This would deal with utilizing
theory towards the dissemination of critical consciousness and of knowl-
edge that would permit greater comprehension and autonomy for social
actors with ‘‘emancipatory potential.’’ It would also deal with restoring
and consecrating those actors and social practices that eventually bear
counter-hegemonic logic.
It is also clear that there are important di√erences between the critical
theory of the Frankfurt School and the critical social research emerging in
Latin America. The thinkers of Frankfurt, parodying an expression of
Kafka, could brand the preoccupation and rescue of interstices and small
logic, so very characteristic of Latin American alternative thought, as one
more knot in the master’s whip. And Adorno’s purity could be ironized in
turn from the ‘‘social cauldron’’ of Latin America, where misery’s exten-
sion and profound intercultural crossbreeding constitute an opaque wall
against which the subtleties of criticism shatter into fragments.
But it is not my intention to spin too fine a thread in this sense. Instead, I
am only trying to provide an overview of the terrain so that Latin American
critical reflection can recover something positive from negative thought
and the critical theory of Frankfurt. Even if it’s only to stir up the fire and
from there, to venture new wagers.
Notes
1 Especially T. W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, and, in some moments, the thought of
Herbert Marcuse, for example his criticisms of Soviet socialism and the alienation of
labor in The One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society
(Boston: Beacon Press, 1964).
2 Herbert Marcuse, Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory (Boston:
Beacon, 1960), ix.
3 Max Horkheimer, ‘‘On the Concept of Philosophy,’’ Eclipse of Reason (New York:
Seabury, 1974), 182.
4 Horkheimer, ‘‘On the Concept of Philosophy,’’ 183.
5 T. W. Adorno, ‘‘Cultural Criticism and Society,’’ Prisms 29 (London: Neville Spear-
man, 1967).
6 While the limits that separate both concepts—critical theory and negative thought—
aren’t totally clear, in the following pages negative thought is associated with the more
closed version of critical theory, which, in Adorno and Horkheimer especially, leaves
less and less space for an a≈rmative moment in reflection.
7 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, (Boston: Beacon, 1960), ix.
8 Marcuse, Reason and Revolution, (Boston: Beacon, 1960), 312.
9 Marcuse, An Essay on Liberation (Boston: Beacon, 1969).
10 Marcuse, ‘‘Supplementary Epilogue,’’ Reason and Revolution (New York: Humanities
Press, 1954), 401.
11 Qtd. in Castellet, Lectura de Marcuse (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1971), 48.
12 Adorno and Horkheimer, ‘‘The Concept of Enlightenment’’ in The Dialectic of En-
lightenment, trans. John Cumming (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972), 24.
13 Herbert Marcuse, Etica y revolución, trans. Aurelio Alvarez (Madrid: Taurus, 1979),
146.
14 For example, in Horkheimer, A Critique of Instrumental Reason, modernity assumes
the figure of an airplane without a pilot that blindly falls. In The Jargon of Authenticity
(Evanston, Ill., Northwestern University Press, 1973), Adorno interprets the philos-
ophy of Heidegger discovering ‘‘semantic traps’’ on all sides. Even in the extensively
celebrated concept of repressive desublimation in Marcuse, there is no advance in
freedom that is exempt from degenerating into a new mask of repression.
15 Horkheimer, ‘‘On the Concept of Philosophy,’’ 176.
16 ‘‘Thus, for example, the Frankfurt School’s critique of American society sometimes
appeared to suggest that no real distinction existed between Nazi coercion and ‘the
culture [or critical] industry.’ In fact, so some of its critics would charge, the Nazi
experience had been so traumatic for the Institut’s members that they could judge
American society only in terms of its Fascist potential’’ (Martin Jay, The Dialectical
Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute for Social Research, 1923–
1950, [Boston: Little Brown, 1973], 297).
17 Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 256, 279.
18 In Adorno, ‘‘Why Still Philosophy,’’ a radio conference transmitted originally in 1962
in Germany. See the compilation Critical Models: Interventions and Catchwords (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1998).
19 Adorno, ‘‘Why Still Philosophy?’’ in Critical Models, 11. If Adorno is referring here to
the dangers of positivism, it su≈ces to consider his final texts and interventions aimed
at extending it to all thought which is committed to and identified with situational
positions.
20 Jean-Francois Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition (Minneapolis: University of Min-
nesota Press, 1984).
21 According to Agnes Heller’s perspective, synthetic and clear for these pages’ aims,
socialist criticism can be divided into four groups of objectives: selfishness, individual-
ism, and a lifestyle based on oppression; inequality in wealth, the production of
goods; and political domination. In correlation, the emancipatory model then sup-
poses the following characteristics: new forms of life based on immediacy, commu-
nity, direct democracy, the elimination of the division of labor; the provision or
abolition of property, elimination of poverty, control of the assignation of goods and
services; the abolition of the State and of the division of labor, the end of fetishism and
manipulation, the free development of personal capacities; and the abolition of the
State and all political institutions—that is, the centralization of power—or the restric-
tion of individual freedom by way of self-restriction. (See Agnes Heller and Ferenc
Feher, Anatomía de la izquierda occidental [Anatomy of the Western Left], Spanish trans-
lation by M. A. Galmarini of the original, unpublished English version [Barcelona:
Ediciones Península], 46–47).
22 See, for example, Fernando Henrique Cardoso, et al. Another Development: Approaches
and Strategies. Ed. Marc Nerfin. (Uppsala: Dag Hammarskold Foundation, 1977)
and Manfred A. Max-Neef, Human Scale Development: conception, application, and
further reflections; with contributions from Antonio Elizalde, Martín Hopenhayn;
foreword by Sven Hamrell (New York: Apex Press, 1991).
23 Starting from the contributions of this current critique, it isn’t easy to reconstruct a
universal model that breaks with the negative moment of criticism. Rather, there are
many dispersed forces, with multiple meanings, involving, among other things, the
impact of the sensitivity of other social scientists and politicians, and proposals for
projects, self-managed and going in multiple directions.
6 R Postmodernism and Neoliberalism
in Latin America
The debate about postmodernism has, at its extremes, two opposite posi-
tions: on the one hand, that of ‘‘postmodern enthusiasts,’’ who proclaim
the collapse of modernity, of its cultural bases, and of its paradigms in the
social sciences, politics, art, and philosophy; on the other hand, the posi-
tion of the ‘‘critical modernists,’’ who recognize the crisis of modernity as a
point of inflection that does not suppose the obsolescence of modernity,
but rather forms part of its inherent dynamic. From this perspective, post-
modernism is no more than modernity reflecting on itself and explaining
its unresolved conflicts.∞
The critical modernists see in the postmodern enthusiasts an intellectual
fad of the decade of the eighties, which, like all fads, is marked by frivolity
and inconsistency. The postmodern enthusiasts, on the other hand, see in
the idea of the crisis of modernity the reflection of a wide range of political,
intellectual, and cultural phenomena that transcend the academic field and
permeate the sensibility of the people, daily life, and models of communi-
cation.≤ In the following pages, we will situate ourselves in an intermedi-
ate position, one of ‘‘criticism without renunciation’’ of modernity, but
conceding to the postmodernism debate a series of political and cultural

implications that prevent us from simply dismissing it pejoratively as an
intellectual fad. What I intend is to incorporate the postmodern perspec-
tive in order to enrich or recreate postponed challenges within modernity
itself. I will summarize the positions of postmodernism in a schematic
manner, emphasizing its ideological ambivalence and its di√erences from
the paradigms and options of modernity. Then, I will attempt to survey
the challenges that postmodernism poses in Latin America in particular by
shifting the emphasis from the so-called crisis of modernity to the equally
important question of the crisis of styles of modernization, which will lead
me to consider the connections between postmodernism and the current
influence of neoliberalism in Latin America.
In Lyotard’s well-known definition, postmodernism is the crisis of
metanarratives. Metanarratives are understood as the transcendental cate-
gories that modernity has invented in order to interpret and normalize
reality. These categories—such as the advancement of reason, the eman-
cipation of man, progressive self-knowledge, and the freedom of the
will—spring from the project of the Enlightenment and function to inte-
grate, in an articulated direction, the process of the accumulation of
knowledge and the development of the productive forces and of so-
ciopolitical consensus and control. They all refer, in turn, to an idealiza-
tion of the idea of progress—that is, the conviction that history marches in
a determined direction in which the future is, by definition, an improve-
ment on the present. The metanarratives constitute the cognitive param-
eters that determine intelligible, rational, and predictable reality. Percep-
tive thought consists of using the faculties of reason to get to the bottom
of phenomena—be they of nature, of history, or of society—in order to be
able to predict their behavior ‘‘rationally.’’ In this way, the metanarratives
authorize us to describe and normalize; they show us how things are,
where they should lead to, and how to resolve the gap between what is and
what should be. In this sense, both classical liberalism and Marxism are
inspired by a shared, Enlightenment origin, invoking universal principles
that have, for a long time, exhibited enormous mobilizing capacity.
The postmodernists question the force of the metanarratives of moder-
nity. They point out that such axiomatic categories have lost explanatory
capacity and legitimizing force. They associate this obsolescence with di-
verse causes, among which the following stand out: the revolution of
paradigms in the exact and natural sciences and its subsequent impact on
the social sciences; the acceleration of technological change and the conse-
Postmodernism and Neoliberalism 79
quent diversification of processes and products, which prevents the per-

ception of society as homogeneous and extended unities and imposes
increasingly higher degrees of complexity, movement, and flexibility on it;
the microcomputer revolution, and the resulting di√usion of data process-
ing, which brings a proliferation of signs and languages that pulverizes the
single model of rationality (our situation becomes interpretable from
many possible perspectives, according to the software we use to deal with
di√erent problems we confront); the loss of the centrality of the subject in
a historical period in which the complexity of cultural structures and frag-
mentation makes the idea of a generic human identity—necessary for proj-
ects of human emancipation, collective self-consciousness, or any global
utopia—inconceivable; the depersonalization of knowledge through its
conversion into the strategic input of new productive processes, and the
multiplication of information to totally unmeasurable levels, which im-
pedes preserving the idea of the subject as the ‘‘bearer’’ of knowledge and
makes any ideology that pretends to integrate available knowledge into a
comprehensive interpretation of the world impossible; and finally, the
‘‘communicative ecstasy’’ (Baudrillard) caused by the combined e√ects of
data processing, capital flows, and telecommunications, by virtue of which
national frontiers and regional identities are dissolving under the dizzying
pace of communication.
The discourse of the postmodern situates itself in a position of consum-
mated facts. It does not present itself as an attempt to demystify modernity
but rather as an ex post facto verification of the fact that modernity has
already lost its mystique. The postmodernists, at least explicitly, do not
pretend to precipitate the entropy of the concepts and visions that govern
modernity, such as the rationality of history, progress, and integration via
the homogenization of values. Rather, they claim to recognize this en-
tropy in the condition of the present. Nevertheless, for those who have
followed the debate, it is not clear whether this crisis and decline of the
metanarratives of modernity is merely being described or whether it is be-
ing provoked ‘‘from outside’’ by the postmodern enthusiasts themselves.≥
This ambiguity comes out of the contingent ideological functions that
postmodern discourse tends to assume, which we will examine later on.
The principal targets of postmodern discourse are, in summary:
—The idea of progress. For the postmodernists, history does not march
in an ascending path; it is discontinuous, asynchronic, pregnant with
multiple directions and with growing margins of uncertainty about the
future. There is no internal and specific rationality that regulates the move-
ment of history but, rather, multiple, incongruous forces that give results
that are unexpected, provisional, partial, and dispersed.∂
—The idea of a vanguard. Since there is no single rationality or direc-
tionality to history, even less recognizable and legitimate is the aspiration
of a group that appropriates for itself the rational interpretation of history
and that deduces a normative directionality on a global scale based on this
interpretation. Whether in politics, science, art, or culture, and whether
the vanguard is the party, the state, the educational elite, or an aesthetic
movement, no one can claim to constitute the group chosen or destined to
establish totalizing orientations. Once the category of the directionality
and rationality of history is questioned, all vanguards seem to be invested
with authoritarian and discretionary power.∑
—The idea of modernizing integration or of integrating moderniza-
tion.∏ According to the criteria of modernization, being in step with the
times involves increasing productivity, developing ever-higher levels of
formal education in the population, and incorporating an enlightened
sensibility into the masses. This is rejected by the postmoderns. The En-
lightenment and the industrial utopias that are the basis of modernity and
that permit the understanding of development as a progressive process of
homogenization are put into doubt by ascribing to them an excess of
normativity, an ethnocentric bias and a pretension to cultural cohesion
that proves anachronistic in light of the ‘‘proliferation of variety’’ of the
‘‘new times.’’
—Ideologies. To the preceding is added, for good measure, the dis-
qualification of all ideology, understood as an integrated vision of the
world that allows one to explain a great diversity of phenomena from a few
basic principles, or from which a desired image of order, considered uni-
versally valid, can be projected. The disqualification of ideologies auto-
matically brings with it the disqualification of utopias, understood as im-
ages of an ideal social order that possess an orienting force for decision
making in the present and that provide a unified directionality toward the
future. If utopian thought has been considered, from Renaissance human-
ism to modernism, as an exercise of the freedom of spirit, in postmoder-
nity it seems more like an authoritarian ruse.π
If the ‘‘postmodern narrative’’ declares the obsolescence of the idea of
progress, historical reason, vanguards, integrating modernization, and
ideologies and utopias, what is it that it proclaims in exchange? Basically,
the exaltation of diversity, aesthetic and cultural individualism, multi-
plicity of languages, forms of expression and life-projects, and axiological
relativism. The vagueness of this proposal does not disturb its supporters,
since it fits in perfectly with the idea of the indeterminacy of the future,
which, according to them, sets the tone of the times.
In these general orientations, the postmodern narrative borrows from
multiple disciplinary sources. From anthropology and ethnology it takes
cultural relativism and the critique of ethnocentrism. From philosophy it
takes the critique of humanism and of the centrality of the (universal/
particular, free/conscious) subject, and from semiotics the primacy of
structures and signs over subjects. From antipsychiatry and the ‘‘radical’’
variants of psychoanalysis it takes the exaltation of polymorphous desire
and the critique of ‘‘philogenetic reductionism.’’ From political theory it
takes the idea that society is composed of an inextricable interweaving of
micropowers and ‘‘local,’’ rather than universal, power games. From aes-
thetics it takes the taste for combining heterogeneous and asynchronic
styles (the classical and the romantic, the baroque and the functionalist,
the rococo and the futurist). And from sociology it takes the recognition
of the heterogeneity and complexity of social dynamics.
All of this might lead one to think that postmodern discourse is a sane
antidote to the excessively ethnocentric, rationalist, and mechanist ten-
dencies of modern society. If that is the case, postmodernism could be
thought of as an internal movement of modernity itself, a critique moder-
nity puts into e√ect in order to exorcise its entropy. But, in fact, postmod-
ernism frequently acquires very di√erent pretensions and functions: In
e√ect, it transforms itself into an ideology, disguising its normative judg-
ments as descriptions, and ends up seeing what it wants to see.
The ideologization of postmodern discourse may be glimpsed when
one focuses on the service that it lends to the political-cultural o√ensive of
the market economy. Neoliberalism has profitably capitalized on post-
modernist rhetoric in order to update its longed-for project of cultural
hegemony. This project, the dream of liberalism in its formative stages,
was frustrated by the universalist ethic of modern humanism, by political
mobilization, and by social pressures. What many neoliberals saw, espe-
cially in industrialized countries, is the possibility that reculturization, via
a seductive postmodern narrative, could serve to legitimize the market
o√ensive of the eighties—in other words, could make the desires of the
public coincide with the promotion of pro-market policies and with the
consolidation of a transnational capitalist system. It is no accident that
elements of what we are calling the postmodern narrative have been dis-
seminated, at least in good measure, by neoliberals and disenchanted left-
ists seduced by anarcho-capitalism.∫ What are the connections between

postmodern critiques and the project of neoliberal cultural hegemony?
The exaltation of diversity leads to the exaltation of the market, consid-
ered as the only social institution that orders without coercion, guarantee-
ing a diversity of tastes, projects, languages, and strategies. Only by ex-
panding the reach of the market can the interventionist and globalizing
excesses of the state be avoided. The state itself should be restricted to
subsidiary functions in places where the market shows itself to be insu≈-
cient. Economic deregulation and privatization appear as almost ad hoc
policies for the full realization of the ‘‘ludic individualism’’ heralded by
postmodern discourse. Deregulation is the correlative in the practical
sphere of the theoretical celebration of diversity. In the face of this wager,
in which everything is potentially permissible, problems of social dis-
parity, structural heterogeneity, insu≈cient development, and the like lose
relevance.Ω
The critique of the vanguards translates into: a critique of the transfor-
mational function of politics, unless the transformation is in the direction
of privatization and deregulation (anarcho-capitalism);∞≠ and a critique of
state planning and intervention in the organization, regulation, and direc-
tion of the economy (by reducing the state to the status of one social actor
among others, in order to then object to its interventionism as involving
the will to domination of one actor over the rest).
Without an emancipatory dynamic that runs beneath events or that
guides the actions of humanity, nothing permits the questioning of con-
sumer society, waste, the alienation of work, the growing split between the
industrialized and developing countries, social marginality, technocracy,
or the way in which productive forces are misused.
The critique of ideologies culminates, in particular, in a criticism of
Marxism and its humanist-socialist variants; the critique of utopias tends
to focus in particular on egalitarian utopias or on any ideal that proposes,
as a task of the present, the redistribution of social wealth and power.
The critique of modernizing integration transforms structural hetero-
geneity into a healthy example of diversity and relativizes conventional
indicators of development, such as expanded and improved services in the
fields of health and education.
The synchrony between the market o√ensive and a cofunctional post-
modernist cultural sensitizing is noteworthy. It is here that our analysis
requires precision. The defense of a status quo governed by unequal com-
petition, social inequality, the will of the transnationals, and the discre-
tionary self-policing of finance capital cannot be automatically deduced

from the verification of the crisis of the models of modernity. The discur-
sive astuteness of postmodern neoliberalism resides in its e√ective articula-
tion of euphemisms, which the interests of the centers of political and eco-
nomic power, and of sectors identified with the ‘‘free’’ economy, can use to
cover themselves with an aesthetic aura that undoubtedly makes them
more seductive. It is more attractive to talk about diversity than the mar-
ket, about desire than the maximization of profits, about play than con-
flict, about personal creativity than the private appropriation of economic
surplus, about global communication and interaction than the strategies
of transnational companies to promote their goods and services. It is more
seductive to speak in favor of autonomy than against planning, or in favor
of the individual than against the state (and against public expenditure
and social welfare policies). In this way, the social contradictions of capi-
talism, accentuated on the Latin American periphery, disappear behind
the exaltation of forms and languages. The economic crisis—the worst we
have experienced in this century—is hidden under the euphemism of a
beautiful anarchy, and structural heterogeneity is converted into the cre-
ative combination of the modern and the archaic, ‘‘our’’ peripheral incar-
nation and anticipation of the postmodern.
The above suggests some of the ways in which postmodernism can be
used to produce a ‘‘strategic’’ package of euphemisms that dress up the
neoliberal project of cultural hegemony, which is the ideological correla-
tive of the transnational o√ensive, in a way that penetrates the sensibility
of the public. It does this, basically, by opposing an aesthetic fascination
with chaos with an ethical concern with development. Negligence of the
future assumes the appealing figure of a passion for the present. The
postmodern narrative, however, is susceptible to many interpretations and
uses. It cannot be reduced to the market o√ensive and to the ideological
uses that some neoliberal strategies make of it.∞∞ This is so for a number of
reasons. In the first place, many enthusiasts of the postmodern narrative
are politically situated at a considerable distance from neoliberal posi-
tions.∞≤ In the second place, positions such as the passion for the present,
aestheticism, the exaltation of diversity, the rejection of ethnocentrism, the
desire for open societies, the return to pluralist individualism, cultural
polymorphism, and the prioritization of creativity can be adapted to polit-
ical projects of another kind. In the third place, the questioning of cultural
paradigms and matrices, in light of emerging scenarios, does not neces-
sarily lead to the defense of anarcho-capitalism. Finally, the critique of
paradigms that have directed the styles of modernization and develpment

has also generated alternative proposals and/or visions that, far from unit-
ing with the deregulating o√ensive of the market, seek to mobilize social
creativity in totally di√erent directions. The following considerations, ori-
ented to Latin American reality, may be indicative of such directions.
The industrial model, centered in the substitution of imports, was dis-
covered to have less integrating capacity than was supposed at its be-
ginning, as much in terms of its internal insu≈ciencies as of exogenous
variables (the heritage of Catholicism, etc.). The model also produced
destructive, collateral e√ects, especially by imposing an imitative pattern
in which, in the name of modernization, questions of cultural identity and
ecological preservation were relinquished to sectors that incorporated the
values and expectations of industrial culture, at the same time leaving
other sectors in a position of frustrated expectations, condemned to social
marginality and economic informality by the same model of development
that saw the desired benefits of growth pass them by. The insu≈ciencies or
trade-o√s of this model do not, however, have to impel us towards a
neoliberal alternative. The dynamic insu≈ciencies of accumulation, noted
by the Economic Commission on Latin America (cepal) for a long time,
and the process of economic growth without social equity, which has
characterized our countries even in times of relative consensus regarding
the modernization paradigm, do not find a remedy in the neoliberal pre-
scriptions. On the contrary, such prescriptions sharpen the regressive ten-
dencies in matters of social integration and balanced growth instead of
blunting them. Finally, neoliberalism massively promotes imitative pat-
terns of consumption that have very little to do with the exaltation of
diversity and the criticism of ethnocentrism. To promote, in particular, a
diversity in the consumption of goods and services may well be a form of
promoting, in general, a specific, and implacable, economic logic.
The styles of modernization in Latin America have shown an excessive
privilege for instrumental rationality over substantive rationality. Conse-
quently, they have delegated instrumental knowledge and power to elites
who have not acquired representative legitimacy and who have often
tended towards technocracy. The predominance of technical reason has
frequently resulted in the sacrifice of social participation in decisions and
measures, and in a democracy restricted by the power of ‘‘expertise.’’ Curi-
ously, the uncritical exaltation that postmodern neoliberals make of the
new technologies does not reverse this tendency but rather celebrates it,
under the pretext that the new technologies are ‘‘spontaneously’’ de-
centralized. Faced with a similar ‘‘technologist’’ triumphalism, the warn-

ings of the Frankfurt school to the e√ect that the crisis of modernity does
not have its cause in a supposed entropy of substantive rationality or of
collective utopias, but rather in the growing predominance of instrumen-
tal reason over the values and utopias characteristic of humanism, acquire
full force in Latin America.∞≥ The nature of the corporate interests in-
volved in the deregulation of the acceleration of technological change and
the productivist euphoria that accompanies it does not annul but rather
confirms these ‘‘modern’’ suspicions.
It is essential to examine the role of the state in Latin American societies
in more than one aspect. In the economic aspect, the centrality of the state
in stimulating development has entered into a crisis of e√ectiveness. It is
not necessary to be neoliberal to object to state hypertrophy, the gigantism
of the public sector, or the rigidity of the bureaucracies. In the political
aspect, the examination of the state’s role is related to the new vitality of
the theme of democracy, its principles, and its most appropriate forms.
The emphasis on social agreement, citizen participation, decentralization,
civil society, and autonomy on a local or regional scale aims to minimize
the coercive e√ects of the state and to increase its social legitimacy as an
articulator of di√erent social actors.
All of the above does not suppose the alternative of laissez-faire, how-
ever. The market has not proven to be the most e≈cient mechanism of
decentralization, democratic participation, and autonomy. Undoubtedly,
the market has made important contributions to economic dynamism
under certain circumstances and in some countries. But frequently, it has
required the help of authoritarian and repressive governments to avoid the
conflicts generated by its discriminatory e√ects in matters of access to
goods and services.
It is important to reconsider the role of planning in the economic and
social ordering and directionality imposed by development. This supposes
the critique of normative planning, the incorporation of new perceptual
inputs in the exercise of the planner, the revision of the dominant ra-
tionalities sedimented in the practice of planning, and a greater coherence
in articulation between the technical and political dimensions in the deci-
sion processes.∞∂ These critiques and revisions, however, do not force the
renunciation of planning nor the reduction of it to its minimal expression.
Nor do they suppose that all planning is the negation of diversity, the
predominance of a technocratic caste, or the inhibition of autonomy. Plan-
ning is opposed to the negligence of the future,∞∑ but it does not have to
sacrifice passion for the present. This future directionality can, provided it
finds its appropriate forms of application, give meaning to the present. It
is not a question of doing away with planning but of designing it in new
ways to meet the challenges of postmodernity.
In tandem with the previous point, the critique of the directionality of
our present history does not have to be confused with the rejection of all
directionality. What is in question are the styles of linear development that
use the present state of the advanced industrial ‘‘center’’ countries as the
guiding model for the future. This is so for two reasons: in the first place,
because of growing di≈culties caused by the disproportional demands for
investment capital, for industrial reconversion, and for competitive re-
search and development, and the impossibility of servicing the foreign
debt and stimulating internal growth at the same time; in the second
place, because the social and cultural costs of an imitative development are
too high and unethical under the pressure of the crisis. This crisis of
directionality, however, is not resolved through deregulation. On the con-
trary, deregulation is simply the new version of development with a still-
imitative model and, for the same reason, a specific directionality.
New political, economic, and technological conditions make ever-more
di≈cult the desired confluence of individual projects in a joint project for
the transformation of society. The progressive demystification of socialist
experiences, the social disarticulation caused by the installation of repres-
sive political regimes and by workforce recomposition, the substitution of
insurrectional options by arranged or negotiated settlements in the resolu-
tion of political conflicts—these have taken the mobilizing force away
from the idea of revolution. The proliferation of corporate interests, the
disintegration of the traditional working-class image, the fragmentation of
identities, which makes the unitary image of a ‘‘people’’ seem almost meta-
physical, accelerating informalization, and the proliferation of the most
varied strategies of survival—all of these factors weaken the formulation of
global projects of structural change capable of motivating vast social sec-
tors. Once again, however, the crisis does not suppose the collapse of but
rather a challenge to planning. The collapse will occur when the crisis of
projects leads to a kind of laziness disguised as pragmatism, in which
politics is converted into the mere administration of crisis: an unethical
and unaesthetic alternative.
Among the alternative proposals and/or perceptions that attempt to
find a solution to the crisis of modernization in Latin America without
identifying with the neoliberal program, it would be fitting to mention the

following:
—The reappraisal of democracy for its intrinsic value and as an indis-
pensable frame for dynamically joining a plurality of social interests and
demands. Political theory certainly o√ers diverse conceptions of democ-
racy. But faced with the growing complexity of the social fabric and the
consequent crisis of authority, the kind of democracy posited as desirable
is one based on extensive social agreement.∞∏ Such an agreement is con-
ceived as a platform for resolving conflicts between sectors with a mini-
mum of coercion and for articulating in the most harmonious way the
relations between the state and civil society, the technical and political
dimensions of development, planning and the market, the micro and the
macro, and the local and the national. A democracy with articulatory
capacity would permit the optimization of levels of social participation,
the decentralization of decision-making processes, the apportionment of
resources among the various agents of development, and the equitable
distribution of the benefits of growth. Finally, a democracy founded on
social agreement is the most appropriate means for encouraging a culture
of civic coexistence that could conceive projects with social legitimacy.
—The reorientation of planning in tune with the new scenarios of social
crisis and complexity. This supposes the relativization of mechanistic para-
digms and requires working with growing levels of uncertainty about the
future, open outcomes and ongoing, continuing adjustments, the activa-
tion and coordination of dispersed social energies, fields of multiple inter-
action, and mechanisms of cohesion that can articulate social projects
without homogenizing.
—The change of perception and attitude of social scientists in the face of
reality. In the decade of the sixties, the analytical exercise of sociology was,
in good measure, determined by the idea of a ‘‘militant science’’ that was
identified with a model of the state and social organization that projected
an extreme normativism in questions of the styles of development. At
present, a considerable number of social scientists in the region have opted
for greater disciplinary humility, from which they seek to comprehend the
complexity of dynamics that are created between multiple social actors. In
a sense, the risk of global projects has been substituted by the ‘‘prudent’’
observation of intrasocietal articulations.∞π
—The reappraisal of social movements above political parties as pro-
tagonists in the rearticulation between civil society and the state.∞∫ Such an
option follows from, in good measure, the relative incapacity of the tradi-
tional system of political parties to fulfill the function of mediation be-
tween social demands and the state apparatus. The crisis of the party
system has given place to a search for new forms of doing politics, or at
least for the diversification of political practices. In that context, social
movements appear to be the bearers of new or di√erent logics of collective
interests, in contrast to the hierarchical uniformity that characterizes party
organization. The reappraisal of social movements also aims to recover the
richness of the social fabric as opposed to a state that has seldom taken it
into account.
—The emergence of new social movments, or grassroots organizations,
or ‘‘popular economic organizations,’’ and the enthusiasm that this pro-
liferation of initiatives awakens in some academicians and politicians dis-
enchanted with conventional approaches to development.∞Ω These new
social movements, as sociologists have taken to calling them, occupy sec-
tors of informality that develop at the community, or local, level, and they
are organized around collective strategies of survival or new forms of
channeling demands. In practice, they combine diverse functions, such as
the administration of scarcity, the mobilization of dispersed social ener-
gies, the de-hierarchization of production relations, the construction of
collective identity, the socialized provision of basic necessities, the promo-
tion of community participation, and the search for democracy in small
spaces (or democracy in daily life). It is not easy to weigh the capacity
of these movements to permeate the social fabric and to influence the tech-
nical and political leadership. Their emergence, however, posits a chal-
lenge, namely, to recuperate popular creativity and impel new ‘‘cultures’’
of development.
The postmodern debate can be fruitful in the sense that it permits, in
general, the articulation of the cultural dimension of development. Its
view of modernity allows us to interpret the crisis of styles of moderniza-
tion as a cultural crisis. With this, new light is shed on the obscurity that
presently envelops economic strategies and the policies of financial adjust-
ment or control, and the discussion of policies and strategies is provided
with a more comprehensive context from which it is possible to articulate
immediate options in the operation of national projects or concrete uto-
pias. The return to the cultural dimension of development permits the
recreation of horizons that infuse politics and policies with a mobilizing
force that convenes and commits social actors. The celebration of the new
social movements shows a concern for the constitution of collective identi-
ties, be they regional or sectorial. The preference for social movements, as

opposed to political parties, privileges new logics of social dynamism, the
search for new forms of doing politics, and an ad hoc grounding of the
exaltation of diversity. The reappraisal of democracy and pluralism points
to the consolidation of a democratic culture and not only a majority-
elected government. The reorientation of planning puts in place a change
in paradigms of the interpretation and prediction of reality, and requires a
revolution in perceptual structures, as well as in plans and programs. The
reorientation of the social sciences also implies a change in the form of
comprehending social reality, starting from the verification of the progres-
sive complexity, increasing disarticulation, and polymorphism of the so-
cial fabric. In all of these forms of ‘‘groping in the dark,’’ the tension
between instrumental and substantive reason, or between means and ends,
is once again at issue. Is this not, perhaps, one of the greatest cultural
dilemmas of modernity? As we noted at the beginning, the postmodern
debate may well be an attempt to remove the cultural base on which the
road to modernization in Latin America has been constructed, be it suc-
cessful or frustrated, open or truncated. But this does not necessarily imply
that the invention of utopias and the design of projects has to be re-
nounced, nor politics limited to laziness and the cynical administration of
crisis. Nor does it mean that neoliberalism has to be embraced. On the
contrary, it is through the thematic insistence on the cultural foundation
of modernization that we can break with the neoliberal vicious circle and
with shortsighted compulsion, often disguised as pragmatism.
Postmodernism requires that we open our perception to new contexts.
Our battery of interpretive tools cannot remain unchanged faced with
phenomena such as the acceleration of technological change, occupational
recomposition, the deregulation of the financial system, the transnational-
ization of culture that accompanies the globalization of markets, social
disarticulation, and the constriction of resources and margins of opera-
tion. Specifically, the challenge consists of enriching many of the concepts
that, for a long time, permitted us to critically relate ourselves to moder-
nity, with the aim of restoring their lost e≈cacy. The refunctioning of
such concepts in the light of new times can lend great assistance for under-
standing our context and orienting our task. I am referring to concepts,
or values, such as alienation, the satisfaction of social needs, structural
change, social participation, personal development, social subjectivity,
and emancipation from poverty and political oppression. None of these
proves to be irrelevant or arbitrary today.
In the same way, it would not be sensible to renounce the interpretive

and predictive richness of a structural focus on peripheral capitalism. This
focus has permitted, in the past, the exercise of a notable critical and
constructive capacity with respect to the styles of modernization im-
planted in Latin America and continues to encourage orientations and
alternatives in the present.≤≠ Many of its suspicions and warnings regard-
ing the models of development in force continue to be confirmed: the
regressive tendency of the terms of exchange, the dynamic insu≈ciency
of accumulation in peripheral capitalism, the di≈culties of reconciling
growth and equity, and structural heterogeneity.≤∞ Moreover, we do not
possess another interpretive focus capable of giving a specific sense of
totality and coherence to the heterogeneity characteristic of the processes
of modernization in Latin America. Nevertheless, this focus cannot be
taken as prescriptive. Its opening to the already mentioned problematic of
social complexity or progressive uncertainty necessitates a critical revision
of the mechanistic paradigm with which it usually operates.
In summary, the question we are considering here can be posed in the
following terms: How can the postmodern debate be incorporated in
order to reactivate the cultural basis of development, without it leading to
the postmodernism functionally inherent in the neoliberalist project of
political-cultural hegemony? How do we creatively confront our crisis of
paradigms and projects, without this confrontation submerging us in a
twilight ‘‘pathos’’ where the only option is the administration of entropy,
the uncritical acceptance of a status quo that is critical of itself ? How do
we reinterpret the challenges of planning, the role of the state—and the
program, or programs, of modernization—in light of this inevitable cul-
tural earthquake announced by the postmodern trumpets? How can we
integrate the critique of ethnocentrism (and along with it, the critique
of imitative models of development) without leading to fantasies, fun-
damentalisms, regionalisms, particularisms, or other forms of wishful
thinking?
The challenges and problems that are presented are very complex and
can stimulate impotence as well as creativity. The multifaceted and struc-
tural character of the crisis situates us before a moment of maximum
entropy that is, in turn, a moment of intensity. That is our weakness, but
also our strength. In the throes of this dilemma, we go from enthusiasm to
desperation, becoming postmoderns by osmosis in the midst of a still-
pending modernization.
Notes
1 In the origin of the debate, Lyotard is the postmodern enthusiast—The Postmodern
Condition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1985)—and Habermas the
critical modernist—‘‘Modernity, an Incomplete Project,’’ in The Anti-Aesthetic, ed. Hal
Foster (Port Townsend, Wash.: Bay Press, 1983), 3–15.
2 Baudrillard has been perhaps the most charismatic representative of this position.
3 ‘‘Postmodern culture does not guide or lead the process of secularization; it is its
product. Specifically, it is the expression of a hypersecularization. Perhaps we should
understand it as an ex post facto rationalization of a disenchantment.’’ Norbert Lechner,
‘‘La democratización en el contexto de una cultura postmoderna,’’ in Cultura política
y democratización, ed. Norbert Lechner. Santiago: flacso/clacso/ici, 1987, 253–
62.
4 This, of course, was the lesson of Foucault. See Carlos Pareja, Más allá del mito del
progreso (Montevideo: claeh, 1987); and Benjamin Arditi, ‘‘Una gramática postmo-
derna para pensar lo social,’’ in Lechner, Cultura política y democratización, 169–88.
5 See, on this point, Octavio Paz, ‘‘The Twilight of the Avant-Garde,’’ in Children of the
Mire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1974), 148–64.
6 See Pedro Morandé, Cultura y modernización en America Latina (Santiago: Cuadernos
del Instituto de Sociología/Pontificia Universidad Católica de Chile, 1984).
7 This negative evaluation of utopian thought was already present in the work of Karl
Popper (e.g., The Open Society and Its Enemies, 5th ed. [London: Routledge and Kegan
Paul, 1966]). In a di√erent perspective, Franz Hinkelammert also undertakes a critique
of specific forms of utopian thought in his Crítica de la razón utópica (San José, Costa
Rica: dei, 1984). See also my own ‘‘Construcción utópica y práctica política,’’ Revista
Comunidad 60 (1987): 3–11; and chapter 4 of this volume.
8 ‘‘But the dream of the abolition of state power no longer functions exclusively as part of
the socialist vision of the future. On the other hand, on the right side of the political
spectrum, there appeared a radical conceptualization of capitalism which supports
similar concepts. This union of anarchism and capitalism . . . can be made plausible
by the privatization of up to now state functions’’ (Hans Albert, quoted in Franz
Hinkelammert, ‘‘Utopía y proyecto político: La cultura de la postmodernidad,’’ Revista
Nueva Sociedad 91 [1987]: 114–28).
9 In this sense, a postmodern vision of Latin America is provided by Hernando de Soto’s
best-seller, El otro sendero (Bogota: Editorial Oveja Negra, 1987), translated into En-
glish as The Other Path (New York: Harper and Row, 1989). In this book, the Peruvian
economist analyzes the extensive informal economy of Peru and arrives at the conclu-
sion that the variety of forms it displays, which are unfolding despite state regulation,
gives evidence of the benefits of the market. In this way, de Soto transformed a prob-
lem, the informal sector, into a virtue, ignoring the vulnerability of resources and the
poverty that accompanies the vast majority of the informal sector’s population. The
book was heavily promoted in Latin America by neoliberal organizations and media,
and Ronald Reagan mentioned it with enthusiasm in a speech.
10 We find an example of this in Joaquín Lavin’s book, La revolución silenciosa (Santiago:
Ed. Zig-Zag, 1987), another recent best-seller promoted by the neoliberal media. As
in de Soto’s book, Lavin elaborates a political-cultural strategy of market hegemony,
appropriating terms that, in the past, were linked ideologically with the criticism of
capitalism (‘‘marginality,’’ ‘‘informality,’’ ‘‘revolution’’), in order to redirect them as
functional strategies for the expansion of the market.
11 ‘‘The everything goes [of postmodernism] is neither conservative, nor revolutionary,
nor progressive. . . . In reality, what has triumphed is the cultural relativism which
began its rebellion against the fossilization of class-cultures and against the ethno-
centric dominance of an exclusive, correct, and authentic culture’’ (Agnes Heller, ‘‘Los
movimientos culturales como vehículo de cambio,’’ Revista Nueva Sociedad 96 [1988]:
44). In the article previously cited, Lechner observes, ‘‘postmodern culture assumes
hypersecularization in its tendency to separate social structures from value and moti-
vational structures. That is, it accepts the liberal vision of politics as a market: an
exchange of goods. And what happens to nonexchangeable goods? I am referring to
human rights, psycho-social necessities such as social roots and collective belonging,
the necessity of transcendental referents, but also to fear and the desire for certainty. I
do not see any consideration of this in postmodern culture’’ (258). But Lechner also
shares Heller’s vision of the value of the relativizing function that postmodern dis-
course can exercise in the face of ideological and political reductionism.
12 Among them are included some figures already mentioned here (Arditi, Lechner,
Pareja, Baudrillard, and Lyotard) and others from the Anglo-Saxon world, such as
Hal Foster, Craig Owens, and Fredric Jameson.
13 On this point, see the classic essays: Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, ‘‘The
Dialectic of Enlightenment’’ and Max Horkheimer, ‘‘A Critique of Instrumental Rea-
son,’’ in their Dialectic of Enlightenment (New York: Herder and Herder, 1972).
14 On this point, see the papers from the ilpes (Instituto Latinoamericano y del Caribe
de Planificación Económica y Social), Revista de la cepal 31 (1987); and Carlos
Matus, Planificación de situaciones (Caracas: cendes).
15 No one can doubt that the same transnational corporations, in large measure linked to
the crisis of state planning (and the most enthusiastic about this crisis), plan all the
time and invest considerable sums for this purpose. The strategy for the acceleration
of technological change and for growing diversification of products responds to an
attentive job of planning by the transnationals.
16 There is much literature that points in this direction. The following examples are
noteworthy: Norbert Lechner, La conflictiva y nunca acabada construcción del orden
deseado (Santiago: Ediciones Ainavillo, flacso, 1984); Angel Flisifisch, ‘‘Consenso
democrático en el Chile autoritario,’’ in Lechner, Cultura politica y democratización, 99–
128; Norbert Lechner (comp.), Estado y política en América Latina (Mexico: Siglo
XXI, 1981), and Gino Germani et al., Los límites de la democracia (Buenos Aires:
clacso, 1985).
17 The influence of Alain Touraine is well known in this tendency in Latin America.
Touraine posits that the reorientation of sociology towards the comprehension of
social actors coincides with the political reappraisal of democracy. See his Le Retour de
l’acteur (Paris: Fayard, 1984).
18 See, for example, Elizabeth Jelin (comp.), Movimientos sociales y democracia emergente
(Buenos Aires: Centro Editor de América Latina, 1987); Alain Touraine, Nuevas
pautas de acción colectiva en América Latina (Santiago: prealc, 1984); Fernando
Calderón (comp.), Los movimientos sociales ante la crisis (Buenos Aires: clacso
1986); Fernando Calderón and Mario R. dos Santos, ‘‘Movimientos sociales y gesta-
ción de cultura política: Pautas de interogación,’’ in Lechner, Cultura política y demo-
cratización, 189–98; and Enzo Faletto, ‘‘Propuestas para el cambio: Movimientos
sociales en la democracia,’’ in Revista Nueva Sociedad 91 (1987): 141–47.
19 For example, see Tilman Evers, ‘‘Identidade: A face oculta dos novos movimentos
sociais,’’ in Novos Estudos CEBRAP (1984), 11–15; José Luis Castagnola, Participación
y movimientos sociales (Montevideo: Cuadernos de CLAEH 39, 1986); Luis Razeto,
Economía de solidaridad y mercado democrático, two vols. (Santiago: Programa de Eco-
nomía del Trabajo, 1984–1985); Luis Razeto et al., Las organizaciones económicas popu-
lares (Santiago: Programa de Economía del Trabajo, 1983); Development Dialogue,
special issue (Dec. 1986); and Martín Hopenhayn, ‘‘Nuevos enfoques sobre el sector
informal,’’ Pensamiento Iberoamericano 12 (July–Dec. 1987): 423–28.
20 For example, see the recent works of Osvaldo Sunkel, such as ‘‘Las relaciones centro-
periferia y la transnacionalización,’’ Pensamiento Iberoamericano 11 (Jan.–June 1987).
21 In the extensive bibliography of Raul Prebisch, the following texts deserve to be cited
here: ‘‘Estructura económica y crisis del sistema,’’ Revista de la CEPAL (1978): 167–
264, and the book Capitalismo períférico: Crisis y transformación (Mexico: Fondo de
Cultura Económica).
7 R The Crisis of Legitimacy of the Planning State
State Crisis as Sociocultural Crisis

For some time now the image of the Planning State in Latin America has
been weakening from various flanks. This State as Demiurge (the God of
Creation, according to Platonic and Alexandrian philosophy; the all-soul,
active world principle, according to the Gnostics), leader in moderniza-
tion, impartial referee in social conflicts and great political totalizer, is
the target of objections from all sides: it’s utopian or instrumentalist,
too eratic or too rigid, capitalist or an obstacle to capitalism, vulnerable
or hypertrophied. It is argued that its very conception was an error, illu-
sion, or failure, or that the crisis of the 1980s—the ensuing decade lost
to development and its consequences, played out in all fields—demolished
a project that was, until the 1970s, still the functional formula for the
partial modernization of mixed economies. The Planning State is attacked
from the new right and from the new left, from ideology, from econom-
ics, and from ideology funneled into economics, as well as from politics
and culture.
Crisis of Legitimacy of the Planning State 95
According to how the State is defined we can situate the crisis of the
Planning State into a range of possible perspectives. If the State is con-
ceived as the expression of the antagonism of interests between distinct social
sectors, for example, then the crisis of the Planning State need be traced to
its inability to regulate the access of distinct social sectors to socially pro-
duced resources. If the State is conceived as a bureaucratic machine, the
crisis of the Planning State can be associated with the hypertrophy of the
public apparatus, or with the tensions between the bureaucratic logic of
the State and the multiple logics of civil society (in its productive, com-
municational, consensual aspects, and so forth). If the state is designed as
a meta-actor, that is to say, as a political authority capable of bringing into
harmony and leading the whole of society along the path of moderniza-
tion and development, the crisis of the Planning State obeys the distur-
bances that global changes (industrial, financial, and commercial) gener-
ate in national economies. At the same time, that crisis corresponds to
excessive social and structural heterogeneity in societies that are meant to
be ‘‘molded’’ by the State’s integrating action.
This multifaceted fracture of the Planning State, as an image and as
utopia, has run o√ the cli√, along with the tradition of State planning that
was so promising in the region in the dawning of the 1960s. Together with
the large-scale politics of the State, large-scale social engineering has similarly
crashed. The ravine which crisis cleft has swallowed both the dream of the
State-planned utopia, as well as the dream of the utopic or universalized
planner. In the various forms of comprehending the crisis, the Planning
State is split wide, and the legitimacy of State planning gravely dimin-
ished. That crisis is conceived as a loss of collective direction, an inability
to integrate/modernize society through state action, an inability to assign
resources rationally among di√erent social sectors, or as a conflict between
the technical rationalization imposed by planning and the social claims
and defenses pushing civil society towards the State. The loss of legitimacy
is particularly di≈cult to resolve when it’s produced by the internal contra-
diction between the two sources of legitimacy, for planning and the Plan-
ning State in general. On one side, there’s the legitimacy acquired through
expertise in making decisions. On the other side is the legitimacy originat-
ing in social support or consensus. This necessity of double legitimization,
as technically competent and as socially representative of the aspirations of
the actors, is necessarily twisted, over and over. This occurs mainly when
the State’s disposable resources shrink, or when struggles over interests in
society become more acute.
Such contradiction historically falls into diverse forms or molds. One

such form or mold is the overextension of technical legitimacy, with po-
litical legitimacy consequently minimized. To this is opposed another,
equally or even more frequently occurring form: the politicization of the
technical corps, whose knowledge is appropriated by political engineering
in order to fabricate the adherence of the citizenry to a political force or
government. In this case the planner turns into a kind of organic intellec-
tual whose expertise is subordinated to the will to power, or the will to
political legitimization. State life in Latin America hasn’t been—nor is
it now—a life of reasonable equilibrium between these two sources of le-
gitimacy. The bias of the technocrats or of political clienteles are more
strained than harmonized.
Planning is not just halfway between technical legitimization and legit-
imization by consensus, between expertise and political belief. It also sees
strains between public management and private economic agents (as well
as between distinct agents within the public apparatus itself). On one side,
political leadership reproaches the planners for being biased towards tech-
nology and repeatedly calls for greater political functionality. On the other
side, the private business sector reproaches public planners in the event of
any kind of ‘‘politicizing butt-insky.’’ This conflictive situation illustrates,
in cartoon-like fashion, how in the model of the Planning State, planning
has served as a hinge, situated between the government and social actors,
technical discourse and political discourse, science and the will to power,
the public project and the private interest.
Associating planning with a determinate image of the State allows for
the recontextualization of a crisis normally dealt with solely from an eco-
nomic angle. The act of putting into relief the hinge-like nature which
planning assumes, at least in the libretto, makes it possible to conceive the
crisis of the Planning State in sociocultural terms: as a tension between
rationalities (instrumental versus political, formal versus substantive); as
the nonarticulation of actors (be they the State versus society, intrasocie-
tal, or intra-State fragmentation); as the tension of logics (bureaucratic
versus technocratic, for example); or as friction between spaces (the pub-
lic versus the private, the national versus the international, the local versus
the national).
To explain the crisis of the Planning State in terms of legitimacy also
allows for a sociocultural interpretation of the crisis, in which the phe-
nomena can be comprehended from various optics: from the power of
seduction and conviction that the image of the Planning State is capable of
exercising; from the e√ectiveness at mobilizing and bringing together the

masses, on the part of this State or its image; as the collective adherence to
an ideology of development, to an institutionalized form of political guid-
ance, and to a certain historical directionality; and as the organic connec-
tion which the State is capable of establishing between the production of
social wisdom and the use of this wisdom for the transforming interven-
tion of social reality. A sociocultural dimension of development is very
present in all of these senses.
My intention in this chapter is to probe the wounded face of the Plan-
ning State, a face that is wounded in its image and in its history. I’m
interested in singling out its problems of legitimacy, which did not begin
with, but were exacerbated by the crises of the 1980s. In so doing, I hope
to add something to the interpretations of those who persist in the strug-
gle to understand the political-cultural atmosphere in which we are im-
mersed, which leads me, in turn, to dig into some of the historical contra-
dictions by way of which blood continuously drains from the image of the
Planning State.
The Utopia of the Planning State in Latin America

There’s been much reflection on the central role that the State has played
in the modernization and development processes of the majority of coun-
tries in Latin America. The currency or pertinence of such centrality is
much questioned today. If the State is the leading agent in the develop-
ment and the directionality that it assumes, the modality as much as the
magnitude of its intervention are increasingly subject to debate. The pres-
ent restriction of financial flows, the greater e≈ciency that private enter-
prise shows in some fields, and the international economy’s increasingly
decentralized forms of insertion are all factors that cannot leave unscathed
the role of the State in the region. Yet each time that we explain the
capacities of the Planning State—as historical project and experiment—it
seems necessary to go back to the long-standing problems of articulation
between the Planning State and civil society, problems that the Plan-
ning State, with its multiple functions and elevated self-image, hinted at
solving.
The peripheral, dependent, late-development condition of countries in
Latin America led the State to acquire, from very early on, decisive func-
tions in the enterprise of modernization and development.∞ The recog-
nized necessity of transforming an agrarian and mining-based society or-
ganized as an oligarchy into an urban-industrial society with a dynamic

entrepreneurial class, and which would be less vulnerable to the economic
dynamism of the centers, brought the State to take on a leading role in
the processes of capitalist modernization. This led it to take a wide range
of functions into its own hands. Among them, the following can’t be
omitted:
—to generate a productive modern apparatus that would permit the
substitution of imports and competitively integrate itself into interna-
tional commerce;
—to integrate the national population on the basis of a structure with a
strongly urban bias, which promotes formal employment and executes an
infrastructure requiring titanic investments;
—to redistribute part of the benefits of growth for the sake of the
general welfare and greater social integration, above all through expand-
ing free education, by opening access to health services, and through the
generalized provision of basic services, as in the creation of a general
system of social security and of labor legislation;
—to reconcile the diverse interests of social actors or economic agents
that are reconstituted in the heat of modernization;
—to bring capitalist development into harmony within the distinct sec-
tors and branches of activity throughout the country’s di√erent regions.
In consequence, and as Enzo Faletto warns, ‘‘the simple verification of
the importance that the State takes on, in Latin America, leads to the pos-
tulate that the State prevails over civil society, which is to say that the State
is not just the political expression of the society and the power existing in
that society, but that it furthermore organizes the whole of the society. . . .
a brief review of the contemporary history of Latin America is su≈cient to
realize how the action of the State has been almost decisive for the make-
up of the urban-industrial system, which has resulted in a greater develop-
ment and complexity of civil society.’’≤ Adolfo Gurrieri similarly indicates
that when the problem of state intervention is posed in Latin America
(amid the crises of the 1930s and later, during World War II), the tasks
have encompassed an integration at once physical, economic, and social.
Within the region, the role of the State thus projected was more ambitious
than what was then attributed to the newborn Welfare State in the devel-
oped world. It tried to integrate the marginalized, to bring harmony to
the integrated, and, at the same time, to face the rest of the world with pro-
gressive autonomy: ‘‘The State being a decisive agent in that process, the
model reflected by the Welfare State and Keynesian forms of intervention
were manifestly insu≈cient. The role of the State in Latin America would
have to be wider and deeper than in the central countries. Although the
latter were in the middle of a grave crisis, they didn’t have to face the trans-
formation of the pattern of growth, the economic and political integration
of profoundly heterogeneous structures, or the productive absorption of
wide contingents coming from precapitalist modes of production.’’≥
The planned Latin American State was paradigmatically conceived by
cepal to face the challenges of development in the region.∂ This concep-
tion was partly the invention of an unprecedented concept of the State,
and partly the discovery of a type of State that had been insinuating itself
throughout Latin America since the 1930s. In other words, the model of the
Planning State was the consistent and unitary theoretical reconstruction of what
was already going on, in a discontinuous manner, and in day-to-day practice.
The multifunctional primacy of this paradigmatic State in Latin America
not only extended to the leading role of the State in economic undertak-
ings and activities. It turned the State, simultaneously, into a demiurge
and synthesis of civil society, into a Great Conductor and a Great Articula-
tor, into a meta-actor (who coordinates and arbitrates the di√erent social
agents in the process of development) and into a mega-actor (who concen-
trates a good part of the national economic activity). The following defini-
tion gives an idea of this totalizing vision that the State assumes when it is
adjusted to the normative model of the Planning State: ‘‘An institution
relatively independent of society and of classes, not subject to the coercion
of competition in the market or the necessity for appreciation of capital.
The State can and should present itself as the universal instance and incar-
nation of the collective interest. . . . This dynamic is unfolded and revealed
across a range of functions that the State assumes. . . . It is the producer of
legitimacy and consensus for its own power and for the system. . . . It
reinforces and readjusts its politico-administrative apparatus of domina-
tion and its functions of social coercion, its means of violence and of
control . . . it unifies and integrates the country. It is the co-producer, co-
presenter and co-disseminator of culture and ideology, of technology and
of science, and the direct manager or influential regulator for the formation
of human resources. In its relations between the country and the interna-
tional system, it mediates and arbitrates between national and foreign
groups, between national autonomy and external dependency.’’∑
In the original thought of eclac (Economic Commission for Latin
America and the Caribbean) this State, understood as mega-actor and
meta-actor, appears as endowed with a surprising diversity of strengths:
internal unity and coherency, autonomy facing other agents, political and
economic power, technical-administrative and management capacity, and
the control of external economic relations. The rank of meta-actor that the
State occupies in this maximalist model locates it over and above the social
actors or economic agents, arbitrating interclass and intersector conflicts,
assuming the most important challenges of economic investment and ac-
cumulation, and reconciling interests that are displaced and that confront
the compass of modernization guided by the State itself. In addition to
this, and owing to the emphasis on the planning character of said State,
the State impregnates society with an economic rationality (or modern
rationality, often assumed as synonymous with economic rationality), si-
multaneously turning it into the incarnation of an Enlightenment and
instrumental project. It rationalizes the conduct of all the social actors so
that they function in terms of the State’s own previously defined, sup-
posed directionality of progress.
How is planning yoked to a State with an instrumentalist and Enlight-
enment bias, to which is attributed the faculty of marking directionality
for the whole of society, based on economic rationalization? In other
words, if planning constitutes a defining characteristic of this paradig-
matic State (in as much as it is defined as the Planning State), and this
State is constituted, in its turn, as mega-actor and as meta-actor: what role
does planning fill?
The role of the planner becomes strategic in this context: as one who
articulates the political and the economic (or consensus and e√ectiveness;
the private and the public; and the di√erent instances within the public
sector that attract and invest the State’s resources). The role of the planner
is to reinforce the State’s character as both mega-actor and meta-actor. To
do so involves resorting to instrumental control, whose ultimate objective
could be defined, in the best enlightened-technical fashion, as socioeconomic
rationalization of a process of integration and development aimed at the attain-
ment of objectives previously agreed on by the political power of the State and
legitimated, in greater or lesser measure, by the consent of the citizens.
The same enlightened emphasis on directionality (in the sense of attain-
ment of ultimate objectives) appears in the following definition of plan-
ning, understood as ‘‘technical support to socially legitimated political
leadership, so that the outcome of decentralized decisions allows for the
reduction of uncertainty regarding a country’s future.’’∏ Three elements
turn out to be crucial in this conception of planning: the tension or com-
bination of technical with political reason; functionality for a socially legit-

imated power; and the tension between control and uncertainty regarding
the future. This definition is meaningful for the most mundane functions
of planning, such as regulating and limiting the patterns of accumulation
among private agents by means of customs duties, monetary and taxation
policies; for redistributing the profits from development by means of
social policies; and for privileging strategic productive sectors by means of
policies aimed at orienting and planning public undertakings.π
Evaluation, negotiation, regulation, coordination and redistribution
are tasks appropriate to planners in their roles as individuals meant to
articulate between the public and the private, and the technical and the
political. Insofar as what has been defined here as the paradigmatic State
constitutes a multifunctional apparatus that orients modernization and
development, its legitimacy depends, in great measure, on its demon-
strated capacity to closing the gap between the directionality that it pre-
scribes to the whole of society and the means that it mobilizes to accom-
plish this e√ectively. That gap is resolved, at least theoretically, by the
technical-practical arsenal of planning.
If the State assumes the status of meta-actor (harmonizer of the claims
and interests of the many actors composing the social fabric), and if it also
acquires the rank of mega-actor (through the size of its apparatus and its
weighty, influential role within the economy), it can only socially legiti-
mate this position by o√ering, to civil society, an exemplary model of
dynamism, e≈ciency, coordination and competency in its undertakings.
Planning would be called to fulfill, at least ideally, the decisive function of
providing state power with pertinent procedures for preserving that type
of legitimacy.∫
Penetrating the contradictions of the Planning State allows an explana-
tion of the crisis of that State from two angles: according to how it is
articulated within civil society (as State-Conductor) and according to its
own rationality (as State-Apparatus). State intervention has had both of
these meanings in Latin America, and it has been inherent to development
in the region ever since the changing of the guard, when, in the 1930s,
distinct versions of the populist State took over from the oligarchic State.
State intervention has been particularly strong since it took on the wide-
spread strategy of industrialization and import-substitution. The crisis of
the interventionist model, as the most enthusiastic anti-Statists diagnose
it, obeys various circumstances, among which the following stand out: the
stagnation provoked by the exaggerated statization of economic life; the

tendency to reduce spaces for private enterprise on behalf of public enter-
prise; the distortions that ‘‘State capitalism’’ generates in the internal mar-
ket, above all for the application of policies of protectionism; and the
overload of social claims assumed by the populist State in virtue of a
symbolic social pact for development.Ω Objections to the concrete forms
of State intervention also appear from a less neoliberal position, indicating
that the State in Latin America tends to cronyism, to the hypertrophy of
the public sector, to the corporatization of State enterprises, and that such
a State is more a legalistic than a legitimated entity, su√ering an endemic
crisis of representation.
For all the possible validity of the objections noted above, these do no
more than trigger an underlying contradiction that sooner or later need be
fully manifest. I refer to the contradiction between an ideal paradigm, of
the Planning State versus the historically materialized institution. Even
though this di√erence might seem an obvious point for reflection, it hasn’t
been entirely explicit in the din of public discourse. It is hard to estimate
how this confusion could contribute to the progressive discrediting of the
State. The gap produced between the model posed as utopian referent and
the real and concrete State tends to reproduce itself, between the image
that the State has projected towards (or ‘‘o√ered to’’) society, and the
State which that society has seen in action. Here, the idea I venture is that
within its own public discourse the State projected, as idea and as image of
itself, not so much its e√ective possibilities as the enlightenment utopia of
a State towering over society by the sidereal flight of reason and progress.
This reduction of the State to its ideal image also fell back onto planning,
in that in planning it sought the ability to close the gap between the
Utopian and real State. The present crisis doubtless made more acute the
problems that planning dragged along with it, beginning with its concep-
tion within the bosom of the Planning State in Latin America.∞≠
The fissures open along two flanks: widening the gap between the ideal-
ized image of the Planning State and its conflictive, historical routine,
resulting in a ‘‘retroactive’’ action in this gap, eroding the very image and
very rationality originally projected by the Planning State. The widening of
the gap as much as the deterioration and questioning of the very image
and rationality of the Planning State constitute problems with strong
sociocultural tradition. The pages that follow put the contrasts into relief,
between the paradigmatic-utopian image projected by the State and its
e√ective historical reality.
Crisis of the Planning State: The irreconcilable gap between image and reality
Reality took over, making manifest the insuperable contradictions in the
collision between the facts and the aspirations to multifunctionality. Nei-
ther the agents nor the eventual beneficiaries of the model perceived,
however, the failure of the Planning State as a utopian impossibility or as a
gap between a maximalist image and a conflictive reality. Utopia was
internalized—and disguised—from the start, as a program or as a task to be
completed. So were the ine≈ciencies of the Planning State filed away as ‘‘a
failure in the program,’’ rather than as an index of the impossibility of
molding an ideal order. It’s certain that part of the failure, if it can be called
that, corresponds to errors or shortcomings that could be avoided in
practice. But the name of ‘‘failure’’ disguises the natural distance between a
paradigmatic reference and a concrete project.
The gap between theoretical construction and real experience opened
up from three sides: as a gap between the image of an ideal State of great
internal coherence and a real State in which rationalities coexist in tension;
as a gap between the harmonic image of a State dynamically articulated
with civil society (call it social actors, economic agents, and/or classes),
and a real articulation marked by permanent conflicts; and as a gap be-
tween the utopian image of a solid State, endowed with a great capacity
for maneuvering, and a real, vulnerable State, very much exposed to the
e√ects of changing scenarios, international as much as internal. I will try,
in the following, to sketch out a descriptive map of these gaps.
The gap between internal coherency and internal fragmentation. The gap be-
tween a State with great internal coherence, as conceived from the utopia
of the Planning State, and its crystallization in a State rubbed by the
juxtaposed logics in its own apparatus, can be summarized in three types
of tension appearing within the State: tensions between technical and
political rationality; tensions between technocracy and bureaucracy, and
tensions between coercive and orienting directionality.
The tension between technification and politicization opposes the con-
ventional figure of the planner to that of the politician.∞∞ The stereotype of
the planner operates with instrumental criteria, based on the calculation of
disposable means and the optimal coordination of economic and social
policies. The logic of the politician is, instead, principally oriented to-
wards the conflict and competition of social forces, and towards creating
optimal civic adherence. The State’s political leadership has frequently
capitalized on planning in order to compete in proposing electoral pro-

grams. It isn’t easy to estimate the degree to which this aspect of planning’s
functionality for political competition is foreign to the technical rationality
of planning. Nor is it easy to indicate the measure to which the relation
between planning and government action is marked by complementarity
or by conflict. It’s not that planning would be politically aseptic, as a rule.
As has historically been the case, today it isn’t easy to collate its technical
inclination with the political functionality that governments and parties
often request of it in practice.
The tension between technocrats and bureaucrats has already been indi-
cated as a problem of the Planning State and an obstacle for the success of
the experiences of planning in the region. José Medina Echavarría’s already
classic text o√ers a substantial analysis of the conflict between bureaucratic
and technocratic utopias in planning, indicating that in both cases the
utopian resides in the claim that the power implicated in the planning
process will be concentrated within a single social support, whether bu-
reaucracy or technocracy. Bureaucratic utopia is rooted in expanding and
consolidating rational administration aimed at enabling and sustaining the
formation of the modern State and economic development. Technocratic
utopia, on its part, grants self-su≈cient value to science and to technique,
working from the supposition that society can be molded and oriented in
accordance with the plan drafted by the experts. Both utopias put two
requirements for hegemonic conquest into practice: the acceptance or
imposition of its intellectual supremacy, and political supremacy with re-
gard to other groups similarly engaged in struggling for hegemony.∞≤
The Planning State has experienced much di≈culty in making these two
logics fit together. While the power of bureaucracy is justified from within
by its suitability to institutional norms and its capacity to perpetuate them,
the power of technocracy rests on its supposed competency for sketching
technical outlines from within the State apparatus. In the case of a model of
the State to which the function of conducting the process of modernization
is attributed, the transformations generated in that very modernization
provoke collisions between the institutional and technical frameworks.
Such collisions tend to be expressed in intra-State non-coordination,
bogged down decision processes, and the non-articulation between eco-
nomic and political organizations.
The State’s lack of internal cohesion becomes more palpable when the
State’s distinct functions or definitions are associated with divergent inter-
ests. In this way, we can see the State as an actor in itself, with its own
interests and benefits and its own form of economic insertion in national
life. It can also appear as the political superstructure of private sectors that
possess greater power within the interior of civil society, sectors towards
whom the State establishes favorable mechanisms. Finally, it can appear as
a national State or social totalizer (or as a conductor of development and
national unity). In this way, privileging objectives which are of general
interest or of interest for multiple sectors of society, State Apparatus, Cap-
italist State and National State are, simultaneously, three in one. In the
decision processes there is no previous ‘‘distribution’’ of the three identi-
ties at stake, but rather a constant rivalry on the part of the concrete
subjects that compose the State, seeking to impose the interest of the
bureaucrat, the dominant groups, or the nation.
The fissures within the Planning State consequently open up, between
distinct rationalities (technical versus political, bureaucratic versus tech-
nocratic), between di√erent actors (political, planners, public function-
aries), and between the diverse interests of the bureaucrat, the capitalist,
and the nation. The State’s loss of internal consistency directly corre-
sponds to a loss of consistent directionality that the State prescribes and in
which it takes a leading role with respect to the loss of the ability to direct
the development process. With respect to, or together with society, the
State becomes less e≈cient as it becomes less articulated; its loss of legit-
imacy accelerates as the image it projects towards civil society increasingly
crumbles. In failing to reconcile the interests within its own apparatus, the
State’s internal disarticulation leads to its increased vulnerability to ex-
ogenous pressures, be they national or international.∞≥
The gap between harmonic integration and endemic conflict. The image of
harmony that the utopia of the Planning State projects with respect to the
articulation of the State and civil society contrasts with a historical reality
full of ongoing conflicts between the two spheres. Those conflicts are
continually intertwined. The following pages try to summarize each sepa-
rately, so that they may be more discernible.
A first form that the conflict assumes is between policies that privilege
economic growth alone, versus policies that prioritize the social redistri-
bution of that growth. While the Planning State proposed combining
economic growth and the redistribution of its proceeds as its central objec-
tive, modernization made society’s internal conflicts more acute. Struggles
over distribution turned into acute political confrontations. The economic
growth of the region has led to patterns of development which generate
tremendous imbalances and social inequalities, and consequently marked

degrees of conflict. The State is resultingly put in a di≈cult position: on
the one hand it has had to attend to popular demands and expectations,
but on the other hand it cannot confront groups with greater economic
power.
Capitalist modernization allowed (and required) the consolidation of a
national bourgeoisie that, in their turn, demanded that the State preserve
the rules of play functioning towards its expansion. Just as those same
bourgeoisie saw the State strengthened, as a dynamic agent of develop-
ment, they objected to the redistributive mechanisms that the State tried
to promote in order to give development a national scope. This was trans-
lated into economic and political pressures from the most robust eco-
nomic sectors, destined to block the democratization of the fruits of
growth. On the other extreme of the social spectrum, the Planning State
conducted a modernizing process that generated a spiral of requirements
and demands in the popular sectors, often accompanied by high degrees of
social and political mobilization. The crisis of governability resulting from
these counterpoised pressures progressively weakened the legitimacy of
the State and eroded its capacity to conduct development processes.
Another form of explaining the conflict is by way of the contradiction
between the transformational versus the preservative functions of the
Planning State. Structural changes could come from the will of the State,
by virtue of its integrative vocation and by way of capitalist moderniza-
tion’s inability to incorporate productive employment and the benefits of
growth throughout all social sectors. Or, structural changes could be the
result of growing social pressures within the frame of dual (or hetero-
geneous) societies with tremendous socio economic contrasts. In either
case, the conflict between the option of growing without transforming ver-
sus transforming in order to integrate puts the State at the center of an acute
confrontation. The image of the State as meta-actor—that is to say, the
authority capable of bringing harmony to the claims of diverse social
actors—contrasts, then, with the image of a State which social actors take
as a strategic instrument to be appropriated in order to impose a particu-
lar project onto society (a project that represents ‘‘non-universalizable’’
interests).
A third contradiction emerges from the former, occurring in real events:
namely, the incompatibility of a State that o√ers itself as conductor of
development with a State turned into the battle scenario for social interests
in confrontation.∞∂ In Latin America the heterogeneous configuration of
societies, halfway between the modern and the traditional, and the social
fragmentation that this implies weakens the intermediary organizations, so
that they fail to fulfill the decisive, mediatory role that they fulfill in modern
societies. Because of this, we find ourselves with societies appealing to the
State for the resolution of their conflicts from all corners, be they regional,
local, or sector- or labor-related.
This generates a paradoxical situation where very heterogeneous and
fragmented societies show themselves to be, in turn, highly politicized.
Facing this picture, in which the claims of the most diverse sectors and the
echoes of the most varied conflicts come together, the State becomes the
boxing ring that society uses for arbitrating its di√erences. It is di≈cult to
revive the image of the State-conductor, from under the ropes of the State
as boxing ring.
The problem becomes even more complex when the informal sector is
introducted into the analysis, because the informal sector has no organic
channels for pressuring the State, except for what that sector most often
manages to accomplish by its mere presence, which overflows all institu-
tionalization that the State has projected. On one hand, the State seems
inundated by the divergent interests of actors with the power to make
themselves present within the apparatus and within public space. On the
other hand, the same State appears to be excluding informal actors who are
spread out across the base of the social fabric.
A fourth tension comes from the Planning State’s claim to modernize
and bring harmony at the same time, to the whole of social sectors and
economic agents. In its quality as conductor of the process of moderniza-
tion, the State has appropriated not only the function of transforming the
productive structure, but also of guaranteeing that this process would
integrate the country from within as well as from without, so that it
revolves around the axis of industrialization. This enterprise has proven
fruitless in fact. Working from a metasocial instance such as the Planning
State attempts, the idea of rationally regulating society aimed at granting a
harmonious cohesion shatters against a global tendency towards socio-
cultural fragmentation.∞∑
That tendency towards fragmentation takes on dramatic and exacer-
bated indications in present-day Latin America. On the one side, the type
of economic growth propelled since the end of World War II has not
produced the trickle down e√ect necessary to eliminate the distortions
characteristic of so-called peripheral-dependent capitalist economies. The
extensive literature regarding the segmented distribution of earnings, ur-
ban marginality in the 1960s, and the informal sector in the 1970s and
1980s amply shows the structural obstacles to ‘‘harmonious’’ modernizing
integration. On the other side, the policies of adjustment advanced from
the 1980s have generated extremely high social costs, where the distribu-
tion of sacrifices tends to be ever more regressive. Finally, the anti-Statist
excesses of the market o√ensive have strangled redistributive functions of
the State that traditionally operated as e≈cient vehicles of social integra-
tion.
The di≈culties that the Planning State faces with regard to moderniz-
ing, integrating, and bringing harmony all at the same time are also aggra-
vated by the transnationalization of the economy and of the culture. The
recomposition of the center-periphery articulation as an e√ect of the logic
of the transnationals presents two new elements, namely: ‘‘a) a complex of
activities, social groups, and regions, that find themselves geographically
located in di√erent Nation-States, yet which make up the developed part
of the global system and that are closely interconnected, transnationally,
through a variety of concrete interests, by similar lifestyles and levels of life
and strong political and sociocultural a≈nities; and b) a national comple-
ment of activities, social groups, and subordinated regions, partially or
totally marginalized from that part of the nation which has developed
from the global system, and which has no tie to similar activities, groups,
or regions in other nations.’’∞∏
In this way, the transnational pattern consecrates a world where the
borders of Nation-States are cut o√ by the division between the transna-
tionalized and the integrated, on one hand, and the marginalized and the
dispersed, on the other hand. The integrated make up a hegemonic economy
and a hegemonic culture. For the marginalized, subculturization and eco-
nomic insertion are subordinated from within, and are inwardly hetero-
geneous: this is where the members of the informal sector, the members of
regional ethnic groups, the less-specialized wage earners and the urban
and rural marginalized live.
While the integrated share the communicative codes, consumption
habits, and sensibilities of their peers in the industrialized world, in the
world of the excluded a culture of insecurity is lived, which is resolved by
codes of violence, solidarity, or seclusion (or a combination of these). The
gap between the codes of the integrated and of the excluded cannot be
closed up by way of the common denominator of television consumption,
for the growing frustration in the expectations of the non-integrated sec-
tors regarding the benefits of modernization grows all the more when they
observe on a daily basis the contrast between their lives and the lives of
those who are surely galloping along in the chariot of material progress.
The costs of this stratification aren’t just ethical and cultural: they can also
have negative repercussions on social peace and political governability.
The high rates of economic informality and social marginality registered
in the populations of most of the countries of the region show the broadly
utopian aspect of the Planning State’s willingness to integrate. With its
wide array of survival employment, familiar life strategies, quasi-legal ac-
tivities and marginal, interstitial or communitarian forms of economic
organization, informality has little to do with the kind of modernizing in-
tegration paradigmatically designed in the project of the Planning State.∞π
This occurs, in part, because of the conditions of poverty in which the
majority of the informal sector in the region unfolds, aggravating the
socioeconomic contrasts of Latin American societies and gravely imped-
ing integration by way of equitable redistribution of the proceeds of
growth. It also occurs because those from the informal sector (or the
marginalized, according to the type of activity or settlement emphasized)
culturally and politically constitute the other, and are always indigestible for
the dialectic of progress. What remains, not subordinated to the system of
political parties, not taken up into an articulated commitment to the State,
not given to public spaces, not reliant on the classical services of the
Welfare State, muddies up social and work statistics.
The integrating vocation assumed up by the Planning State shatters as it
comes up against the irrefutable reality of the informal world and of the
poor. The harmony contained in the dream of social integration falls apart
in the harshness of a grainy insomnia. The myth of coherence is inundated
by the law of fragmentation, thus revealing its very nature, that is, its
mythic character. With crisis, that badly named ‘‘invisible world’’ becomes
intolerably visible to those who maintain the pretension of inhabiting
integrated societies. The exteriorization of the submerged, a phenomenon
that the economic crisis of the 1980s has precipitated throughout most
Latin American countries, has undermined, in a deaf and wholly system-
atic fashion, the expectations for societal synthesis deposited, once upon a
time, in the Great State.
The Planning State’s unfolding between the capitalist and the national
State obliged it to take on functions not readily reconciled: namely, to
serve, on one hand, as a instrument for the consolidation of a national
entrepreneurial class and to conduct, on the other hand, a national process
of social integration. It frequently happens that the entrepreneurs’ inter-
ests are not ‘‘universalizable’’ or capable of encompassing all social actors

in a determined moment. On one part, the Capitalist State recognizes
entrepreneurs as economic agents who operate as central conductors of
development, but at the same time, as a National State it must require
specific behaviors rarely accepted without resistance from that entrepre-
neurial sector, such as an attitude of investment rather than of consump-
tion, of austerity rather than squandering, of utilizing resources with a
sense of social responsibility rather than of individual gain. Inversely, as a
National State it must support the demands of less integrated sectors, who
have less access to goods and to services, promoting a recovery occurring
especially by way of redistribution policies, social policies, or employment
policies that can enter into open contradiction with short-term interests of
the more privileged sectors. But inasmuch the State is a capitalist one, it
must subordinate its integrating interventionism to the dynamism of the
modern capitalist sector, especially to those who have the greatest decision
making power within this sector.
The tension between classist and universalist State (or capitalist and
national State) sooner or later appears in the processes of modernization.
This especially appears with the spiraling expectations that it generates as
it aspires to integrate wider and wider sectors into the benefits of progress
(or, into hoping for the benefits of progress). The following reference is
very clear in this respect: ‘‘The State places itself in front of classes as
the guarantor and organizer of social relations that constitute classes as
such, on which account . . . it is also the guardian of the subordinated
classes. . . . First, making the pretension of being a State ‘for everyone’
seem more real . . . second, promoting living conditions for the subordi-
nated classes which are more or less compatible, in each historical instance,
with the current relations between the production and accumulation of
capital. . . . But—and this is the other term of the ambiguity— . . . the
eventual impossibility of satisfying the demands put forward . . . can put
‘excessive’ stress on the accumulation of capital.’’∞∫
In contrast to the image of continuity that it has wanted to project, the
Planning State thus appears shaken by permanent discontinuity. As a Na-
tional State, it only gradually integrates those whom development has
brushed aside and left behind if it functions according to the dynamic of
the more socially powerful capitalist sectors. If that integration runs coun-
ter to that ‘‘non universalizable’’ dynamic of the capitalist agents, however,
then it might turn back or be interrupted. The previously mentioned case
of growing global, intranational and international division of the inte-
grated versus the marginalized shows the point to which the conduct of
the most dynamic sectors, often backed up by the National States them-
selves, can run counter to social integration within a country.
The paradox in which this double function of the Planning State is
finished o√ is rooted in the fact that the State plans capitalism, that is to say,
‘‘it constructs’’ a capitalist society almost from the State itself. Central
planning in mixed economies, which has been the predominant tone in
Latin America, precisely responds to said will.∞Ω From this perspective,
and as Gurrieri warns in the article already cited, the crisis of the Planning
State occurs when a project in play has been one of ‘‘planned capitalism’’
that, among other things, counted on minimal discipline from private
enterprise, the entrepreneurs being dynamic agents privileged by planning
itself. With that the conflict mentioned in the previous point reappears—
that is, when it functions as a capitalist State, it is exposed to the sudden
and unexpected attacks of the entrepreneurial class.
A sixth tension comes given by the character of mega-actor of the State,
that is, for the considerable dimension which the State takes on as an
economic agent by way of its own entrepreneurial activity. In this case the
State/market conflicts don’t come from the State’s regulating emphasis on
the market, but from the dispute between public and private enterprise. In
this way, the centrally-Planning State, ‘‘at the same time as it presents itself
as a nation, in order to seek consensus, also organizes and implements
capitalist exploitation. On doing so, it sometimes collides with the imme-
diate interests of the local bourgeoisie and of the multinational corpora-
tions and is turned into a capitalist-producing State.’’≤≠
The idea of the Entrepreneurial State has doubtless had enormous
weight in the orthodoxy of State Planning in Latin America. Precisely the
lack of a class of private entrepreneurs capable of dynamically conducting
productive expansion and diversification led the State to assume such
challenges as its own. The planning of development, driven by the aim of
modernizing Latin American societies, lent special importance to the cre-
ation of public enterprises for certain areas of the economy whose invest-
ment costs could not be covered by the private sector. This brought with it
the natural consequence of enormous state participation in strategic areas
of the economy. Curiously, the nation’s private, entrepreneurial sector,
which later undertook sudden anti-Statist attacks, also benefited from this
intervention.
Consistent with the paradigm of the Planning State in this context,
planning had, as a meta-function, the infusion of an economic rationality
analogous to that of the entrepreneurial sector, although on a national

scale. The entrepreneurial action of the State could serve, moreover, as a
model for private agents. Within this framework the State appeared as the
rational head of modernization, and as the example of economic e≈ciency
and of optimized resources. In actuality the terms are inverted, and from
diverse political positions it is argued that the State as economic agent
ought to learn from the private sector and not vice-versa. If twenty years
ago the predominant idea was that the State was situated in the prow of
the national development process, from which it oriented private agents,
today’s prevailing image is exactly the reverse: the State, as economic
agent, seems to many in on the stern, or on the poop deck, in the modern-
ization process, where it seems hypertrophied, ine≈cient, non-actualized,
rigid, slow. Contributing to this negative judgment is the fact that the
State encountered growing di≈culties in the e≈cient management of
public enterprises, dragging along with it a mounting public debt. This
further coincides with the fact than in many of the countries of the region
dynamic and expansive entrepreneurial classes have been constituted, who
regard the size of public enterprises and the state economy as a limitation
on their actions. The privatizing wave, as much in ideas as in fact, partially
obeys this phenomenon, but it also obeys the greater articulation between
private capital within the Latin American countries with transnational
capital, which no longer count on the decisive mediation of the State. This
mediation is considered by many private agents to be more an obstacle
than a vehicle.
The gap between solidity and vulnerability. The archetypal image that the
Planning State has wanted to project is that of a solid, stable, e√ective
organism. Nevertheless, the pressures that the State has had to confront,
from civil society and from outside, have systematically corroded this
image. The gap between solidity and vulnerability wound up bending the
paradigmatic image of the State. It did so premised on the following,
additional contradictions.
The contradiction provoked interior-exterior schizophrenia. The State in
Latin America has had to unfold itself in two di√erent personalities: from
without and from within. In its role of incorporating the nation into
international agreement, politically as much as economically, the State has
had to project an image of modernity that coheres with the State in the
industrialized world, a State that guarantees internal stability, which is
institutionally consolidated and e≈cient in its actions. But in the internal
scope, the State confronts a civil society in a situation of partial or trun-

cated modernization, heterogeneous in its productive structures and in its
sociocultural characteristics, towards which it must operate in very dis-
tinct languages.
This tendency becomes acute in the present conditions of crisis and
external indebtedness. Here, when it looks abroad, the State must tailor
itself to the requirements of the regulating financial organisms. When it
looks within, it must face a host of social claims which that very same con-
ditioning postponed. The acrobatics of being simultaneously a State that
negotiates and guarantees abroad, and a populist State towards within,
winds up toppling the acrobatics. A vicious circle is produced in which we
currently observe that many of the countries of the region see themselves
submerged in the sterile administration of their internal crises and their
external pressures. They must deal with the question of how much should
the State pledge itself to international financial capitalism as a modern,
solvent, and responsible State even as the ‘‘recessive’’ civil society to which
it must respond, on the internal front, becomes more heterogeneous,
conflictive, and fragmentary. In short, it conducts itself as a State whose
external survival requires it to attack the austerity policies that condition
the flow of credit towards the country. Yet the more it attacks those poli-
cies, the less it can prevent the social fragmentation that the State itself
tries to integrate and bring into harmony.
The contradiction provoked by the paradox of the large but weak State
characterizes the Planning State as it has taken shape in many of countries
of the region. In the economic area, the phenomenon of transnationaliza-
tion makes the regulatory engineering of the State seem increasingly be-
yond control, given the e√ects of changes in the global order (in com-
merce, finance, and production) on internal economies, as well as the
increasingly independent power of the national entrepreneurial class in
articulation with transnational capital. In politics, the image and claim of
the Nation-State, sovereign and autonomous, nevertheless continues to
reign. This makes the political image projected by the State seem some-
how caricatured by its lack of control over the economic arena.
This tension becomes all the more critical on taking into account the
Latin American State’s having assumed the historical role of leading actor
and agent for modernization. It has been precisely this role, as mega-actor
in development, which led to its dynamic of growing absorption in the
national budget. This progressive spiral could be maintained while the
State suctioned o√ resources coming from the exportation of raw mate-
rials—even up to a couple of decades ago—or international banking dur-

ing the decade of the 70s, with the multiplied flow of currency coming
from the North. But, at present, the situation is exactly the reverse. Not
only have the traditional sources of resources for the State been cut o√ or
much reduced, but the State must apportion an important percentage of
its liquid capital to servicing the debt. The paradox of a State which is
fragile in its capacity to lead, yet broad and dense in its apparatus, dis-
figures the original image of the Planning State and exacerbates its legit-
imacy crisis with respect to civil society.
Recapitulating
The preceding reflections enable the visualization of a State in the process
of delegitimation. In very divergent lines, neoliberals, communitarians on
the left and on the right, and pragmatic politicians have given up on the
model of the Planning State. They propose measures, programs, or uto-
pias that rearticulate the itinerary of development from other ‘‘centralities’’
(or ‘‘decentralities’’). The fact that such diverse political, academic and
intellectual postures coincide in seriously questioning the currency and
present relevance of the Planning State reveals a certain sociocultural spirit
of hostility with respect to the proposal of development that said State
took as its leading, managing, and articulating axis.
The variety of flanks from which the image of the Planning State is
blurred, as mega-actor and meta-actor, allows for the understanding, in its
fullest extension, of the crisis of governability so frequently alluded to
today, which is often attributed to the processes behind the growing com-
plexity of the social fabric. What’s certain is that social complexity and
fragmentation have been perceived and assumed with considerable delay.
In e√ect, only their becoming more acute and widely known abroad,
through the crisis of the 1980s (and the subsequent adjustment policies,
and the greater proliferation of variety in productive processes), forced its
consecration as a problematic reality in the sociology of development. But
that complexity belongs to the very character of the peripheral and depen-
dent societies which live discontinuous and heterogeneous processes of
modernization. If the crisis of governability is explained by the growing
complexity of the social fabric, then ungovernability in Latin America
unfolds from the historical development model—with its specific mode of
articulation between the State and society—throughout most of the coun-
tries of the region. The alternatingly authoritarian and democratic govern-
ments, like the recurring ruptures of social pacts or interclass agreements

promoted by the meta-actor State, show the structural precariousness of
the project of the Planning State in past decades: its incapacity for integrat-
ing, harmonizing, and conducting without ‘‘disrupting functions.’’
The crisis of the 1980s, like the national economies’ growing vulnerabil-
ity to the financial, productive, and commercial strategies of transnational
capital, winds up swamping a boat run aground. The contradictions indi-
cated here are the already constructed bottom, upon which the new sce-
narios will have their impact. The lack of the State’s internal cohesion, like
the ambivalence between the national and capitalist State, large and weak,
arbitrator and boxing ring, transformer and preserver, are some of the
structural aspects from which the crisis of governability can be explained.
What is paradoxical and dramatic in this context is that the State loses
legitimacy precisely when it requires the greatest assistance in order to face
a crisis of unforeseen proportions. On the one hand its weakening pro-
duces a deterioration of image with respect to society. On the other hand,
that same deterioration exacerbates its weakness. This vicious circle of the
delegitimation of the State (which Habermas perceived a decade before,
in the case of the Welfare State in Europe in the 1970s) is particularly
critical in the case of the Latin American State in the 1980s. This does not
imply, of course, that the forces ought to devote themselves to the restora-
tion of lost legitimacy. It’s much more important to ask how and for whom
the State should be legitimated today, in Latin America. It’s certain that
growing external vulnerability provoked by the inexorable openings of
national economies, added to the state budget crises, rapid productive
transformations, and the growing sociocultural fragmentation of societies
are conditions that require a strong State, one that is able to convene, to
harmonize very heterogeneous social actors, and to rationalize the endow-
ment and use of scarce resources. The State model that could turn out to
be more functional in the middle and long range, for dodging the quag-
mire of underdevelopment, is still unclear.
What enters into play—and into consideration—isn’t only a pattern of
growth or an economic strategy but, much more than this, a culture of
development associated with a specific form of articulating the State with
civil society. That culture of development, itself induced and disseminated
by the Planning State, expresses its fissures in distinct ways: through
the crisis of consensus, through the permeability of social sensitivity on the
part of the privatizing euphoria and the market o√ensive, through the
sporadic re-sprouting of antidemocratic values in the social fabric and in
public institutions, or through the hermetic and atomized withdrawal of

distinct social actors.
If the crisis of the model of the Planning State is seen as a sociocultural
crisis we cannot expect it to resolve itself through technical packaging or
the workings of the political will. This doesn’t mean that the resolution of
the crisis doesn’t pose challenges for the government and for planning. On
the contrary, what it requires of them is opening up to the sociocultural
problem so that they can give the best of themselves. Only through the
interrogation of a social project or projects that could turn out to be
collectively desirable is it possible to find ways out of the present quag-
mires. Otherwise, politics runs the risk of turning into bleary-eyed crisis
management.
Notes
1 In late capitalism, with the passage from the liberal State to the intervening State, the
latter takes on the character of a very powerful economic agent.
2 Enzo Faletto, Especificidad Estado en America Latina (Santiago de Chile, División de
Desarrollo Social de la cepal, 1988), 18.
3 Adolfo Gurrieri, ‘‘Vigencia del Estado Planificador en la crisis actual,’’ Revista de la
CEPAL 31 (Santiago de Chile: 1987), 205.
4 cepal-eclac had a preponderant role during the 1950s and 1960s in explaining the
large-scale strategies of economic development in the region, in giving advice to coun-
tries for settling their national plans for development, and in proposing the bases of
State planning in Latin America.
5 Marcos Kaplan, ‘‘Estado, cultura y ciencia en América Latina,’’ in Cultura y creación
intelectual en América Latina (México: Siglo XXI, 1984), 103–5.
6 Alfredo Costa-Filho, Los nuevos retos de la planificación (Santiago de Chile: ilpes,
1988), 18.
7 José Medina Echevarría’s classical text defines the following economic functions of
planning: to stimulate the economy (privileging certain productive sectors, regulating
the consumption and division of labor, etc.); to distribute revenue, resources, or poten-
tialities of economic action (regulating credit and taxes); and to integrate, ordering or
unifying the field of economic activities, bringing harmony to sectors or imposing
norms of coherency on the economic system (Medina Echavarría, ‘‘Discurso sobre
política y planeación,’’ in La obra de José Medina Echavarría (Madrid: Ediciones Cultura
Hispánica, 1980), 306–307). These wide faculties attributed to planning give an idea
of the capacity and weight of planning in the model of the Planning State in Latin
America.
8 In present visions planning also covers this function of legitimating power with respect
to civil society. Among the functions attributed to it are: providing information to the
government and to society about the most probable future scenarios in which one
might be called to live; articulating the whole of public decisions; and providing
technical backing to social dialogue between social agents with the aim of strengthen-
ing the design and execution of social policies (See the ilpes [Instituto Latino-
americano y del Caribe de Planificación Económica y Social] article, ‘‘Planificación
para una nueva dinámica económica y social,’’ Revista de la CEPAL 31 [Santiago de
Chile: 1987]).
9 This last item is the classical criticism of the Welfare State, which argues that the
inflation of expectations that the Welfare State provokes in society brings with it a
sustained rise in public expenditure, in turn provoking a growing budget deficit,
which negatively impacts monetary stability.
10 ‘‘Global planning has always been, perhaps, a somewhat utopian concept in a mixed
economy. . . . the conditions of the crisis make it even more di≈cult to carry out the
technical aspects of global planning than in more stable epochs. On that account, the
application of global planning would intimate delusions of grandeur, although the
models of planning might have a heuristic value’’ (Brian Van Arkadie, ‘‘Notas sobre
nueve directrices en materia de planificacion,’’ Revista de la CEPAL 31 [1987], 36).
And in the same key: ‘‘Planning is useless, even in market economies; it has an
inalienable role to fill within the process of development, but it will continue to be
ine≈cient as long as it is considered a hegemonic task of the State, that decidedly
idealized actor, to whom are attributed in a scarcely real fashion, virtues (that it lacks)
or irremovable defects (when there is no reason to have them)’’ (Alfredo Costa-Filho,
Los nuevos retos de la planificación, 7).
11 Medina Echavarría perceives this tension in a distinct manner. For Medina Echavar-
ría, planning politicizes development in so far as it accentuates the decision making
process within its character and in as much as it refers to the rational ordering and total
transformation of society, aimed at expanding and sustaining freedom. With this,
Medina Echavarría associates planning with Comte and Mannheim respectively,
breaking with the more habitual vision of the planner as a technician, and conceding a
more political profile to the planner (see José Medina Echavarría, ‘‘La planeación en
las formas de la racionalidad,’’ in La obra de José Medina Echavarría, 377–448).
12 Medina Echavarría, ‘‘La planeación en las formas de la racionalidad,’’ 393–403.
13 It’s not that the State should be a homogenous block, uniform and molar, where
neither internal di√erences or conflicts are reflected. But the utopia of the Planning
State explains the requirement of a highly articulated apparatus which, through being
at the height of utopia and utopian goals, should be indivisible and incorruptible.
14 ‘‘Class conflicts and those that derive from the process of change not only cross the
State but very often it is within the compass of its own apparatus that the political
arena is constituted, in which the interests, orientations, and options of the distinct
social actors express themselves and compete with one another’’ (Enzo Faletto, Es-
pecificidad Estado en America Latina, 26).
15 Useful in this respect is the provocative thought of Agnes Heller: ‘‘If cultures are
being pluralized until arriving at the degree of absolute particularization, the question
to be posed is whether a meaningful and rational decision making process is still
possible. . . . it still isn’t clear if pluralization and cultural relativization carry rational
politics to extinction, or if they will be the prelude to a more democratic form or forms
of political action . . . ’’ (Agnes Heller, ‘‘Los movimientos sociales como vehículo de
cambio,’’ Revista Nueva Sociedad 96 (Caracas: Jul.–Aug. 1988), 44 and 47–48).
16 Osvaldo Sunkel, ‘‘Las relaciones centro-periferia y la transnacionalización,’’ Pensa-
miento Iberoamericano 11, (Madrid: Jan.–Feb. 1987), 36–37.
17 Regarding the already paradigmatic case of Peru, two analyses with divergent ideolog-
ical premises made graphic the ine√ectiveness of the State in facing the informal
world: José Matos Mar, Desborde popular y crisis del Estado: el nuevo rostro del Perú en la
década de 1980, Serie Perú Problema 21 (Lima: Instituto de Estudios Peruanos, 1984),
and The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World, Hernando de Soto in
collaboration with the Instituto Liberatad y Democracia, foreword by Mario Vargas
Llosa (New York: Harper and Row, 1989).
18 Guillermo O’Donnell, ‘‘Apuntes para una teoría del Estado,’’ Revista Mexicana de
Sociología Año XL, Vol. XL No. 4 (Oct.–Dec. 1978), 1195–96.
19 ‘‘In the case of Latin America . . . in certain measure it’s possible to postulate that the
function of ‘stimulating capitalism’ has corresponded to the State. . . . the proposal of
a capitalist society on the part of the State signified that the latter should be formulated
for the whole of society, which in fact required that a development plan be explicit.
This consequently has to do with a capitalist society that nonetheless incorporated the
idea of a Planning State . . .’’ (Enzo Faletto, Especificidad Estato en America Latina 11).
20 Fernando Henrique Cardoso, ‘‘El desarrollo en capilla,’’ in Planificación social en Amér-
ica Latina y el Caribe, (Santiago de Chile: ilpes / unicef, 1981), 38–39.
8 R Is the Social Thinkable without Metanarratives?
Crisis of Intelligibility and Crisis of Organicity

Since the middle of the 1970s the Latin American social scientist has been
su√ering a crisis of intelligibility and a crisis of organicity. The crisis of
intelligibility denotes social scientists’ progressive di≈culty in grasping the
growing complexity of social reality by way of previously consecrated
cognitive tools. This is evident in the crisis of paradigms in the social
sciences, involving the loss of explicative and orienting validity of the three
most significant paradigms that governed the practice of the social scien-
tist from the 1950s until the middle of the 1970s: ‘‘cepalism’’ (the matrix
of development discourse), Marxism, and the paradigm of so-called ‘‘de-
pendency theorists.’’ The elements that can explain the crisis of these para-
digms are multiple, and frequently cited, but the following, very tight
synthesis, is worth noting: ‘‘The presence of many ‘anomalies’ that theo-
retically should not have appeared, or even the emergence of new phe-
nomena that they could not explain (like the paradigm crisis in the natural
sciences); the exhaustion of the model of development ‘towards within’;
the crisis of the populist State (and even more, of the Latin American
model of the Planning State); the emergence of authoritarian regimes and
their permanence, the processes of growing social division, the growth of
the informal sector and of new modalities of marginality, the diversifica-
tion and deepening of structural heterogeneity, the problems of the pro-
cesses of democratization.’’∞ As Heinz Sonntag and Norbert Lechner sim-
ilarly indicate, from the mid-1970s modernization generated complex
processes that the then-available categories could not apprehend. Re-
definition and growing di√erentiation in social structures made for the
unfeasibility of a glance that, lacking a globalizing, totalizing rationality,
proved incapable of retaining the specificity of these new complexities.≤
Crisis of organicity refers to the break in the tie between knowledge
production and intervention on the real (that is, social change). The
political and cultural defeat of the left, and the political and technical
defeat of development discourse and its national variants, dismantled the
other founding aspect of the architecture of the social sciences in Latin
America, namely the organic (or supposedly organic) articulation be-
tween the production of knowledge and the radical transformation of
society’s structures. It’s been stated, ad nauseum, that social scientists in
Latin America have, almost from the beginning, centered their concerns
on the question of social change and of how they, as producers of knowl-
edge, might contribute to the orientation of said change. This social
change always had, in the dominant paradigms of production in the social
sciences, the sense of modernization of the political, productive, social and
cultural structures of the countries of Latin America, although di√ering in
the styles of development, that is, in the contents that modernization
should embody with respect to the distribution of political power, eco-
nomic resources, and social relations. But beginning with the authoritar-
ian o√ensive and subsequently with the more hegemonic o√ensive of the
neoliberal model, and even more yet with the Welfare State’s loss of pres-
tige and still later, with the loud collapse of the socialist models, the Latin
American social sciences fell into a conundrum. In postmodern terms,
they were left, choked by their metanarratives, caught up in a pitiful self-
image, in which the social scientist appears as a mistake of history, or
presently impotent.
The present lack of articulation between the intelligibility of the social and
intervention on the social corresponds to increased di≈culty in creating a
bridge between the re-interpretation of societal processes generated by the
new scenarios, and the design of actions organized towards structural
The Social without Metanarratives? 121
change. But in this di≈culty, not only do new scenarios intervene, be they
international or national, political or cultural. Also evident is a change of
the social scientists’ perception and stance with regard to Latin American
reality. Twenty years ago the sociological exercise was substantially slanted
by the conception of a militant science, which made social theory identify
with one or another model of political alternative (whether the develop-
ment model or the socialist one, the two models dearest to development
sociology in its times of greatest influence). This was a double-edged
sword. On the one hand it made for a tighter and more dynamic relation
between theory and practice, between social reflection and political action,
between ideological debate and acts of power. On the other hand, how-
ever, social reflection was skewed to the extent that the perception of the
real often became a subjective construction of reality. At present, the field
of the social sciences has slipped into greater academic and political humil-
ity. But this replacement of global change projects with the cautious obser-
vations of intrasocietal articulations is double-edged as well, serving, on
the one side, as an antidote to simplifications that can have lamentable
consequences when policies and strategies are derived from them. On the
other side, however, it deprives politics of a source of integrating energy
which a theoretical production charged with projects for societal transfor-
mation previously supplied.
On the other hand, the atomization of knowledge, its multiplication
and growing functionality for strictly productive processes, increasingly
marginalizes or problematizes ‘‘macrosocietal’’ knowledge or the genera-
tion of integrated macrovisions. The tendency of knowledge towards the
diversification and acceleration of productive processes pushes in the op-
posite direction, towards fragmentation, discontinuity, and speed. If so-
ciocultural dispersion and the loss of a oft-noted national cultural identity
are added to this, along with the explosion of ‘‘microsocietal’’ logics, the
expectation of a totalizing orientation for society can survive only with
great di≈culty in the discourse of the social scientist.
It is not entirely necessary to allude to the postmodern debate in order
to refer to this crisis of intelligibility and of organicity in the field of Latin
American social sciences. The theoretical shortcomings and di≈culties in
insertion currently su√ered by the social scientist occur absolutely inde-
pendent of the texts of Lyotard, Baudrillard or Vattimo. It isn’t overly
necessary to resort to notions of ‘‘multiplicity’’ in order to maintain a
concern with structural heterogeneity. Nor is there much need to resort to
‘‘discontinuity’’ in order to understand truncated modernization, or to
‘‘the crisis of metanarratives’’ in order to feel ourselves lost in facing the

lack of large-scale proposals capable of freeing us from underdevelopment
and poverty.
There’s no need to take an anti-Enlightened stance, to understand the
exaggeration with which the Western Enlightenment model of the pro-
ducer of knowledge was embodied in the model of the Latin American
social scientist since the end of World War II. That modern inhabitant of
progress, gifted with an almost mythical capacity for deciphering the na-
ture of reason, was then to identify the movement of reason in history, and
finally to recognize in that movement, thanks to reason itself, the best
direction for the future. And of course, there’s no need to resort to the
dystopian discourse of disenchantment in order to feel the psychological
and even spiritual costs that the pulverization of the image of a possible
revolution provoked—a revolution that we were locating in some uncer-
tain future, but towards which the roads were all inevitably leading; a
revolution that as an image was definitively losing its force for mobilizing
the masses, and as a discourse was being left without verisimilitude.
What’s important here is to show how a mutation of rationalities can
impact the means by which a social knowledge has become related to
social reality. In this sense, postmodern discourse o√ers to increase our
awareness of this crisis of rationalities of modernity, with the goal of
referring a situation of crisis of intelligibility and organicity of a social knowl-
edge to a more extensive crisis of rationality.
Planning, Revolution, and the Crisis of Rationalities

In the following pages we will consider certain links between the two most
extreme images that strongly influenced Latin American social scientists
during the decades of the 1960s and the 1970s. Those images are dis-
covered to be in deep crisis today: the image of state planning and of social
revolution. Our analysis will try to refer the crisis of these images and the
oft-mentioned crisis of rationalities to Latin American modernity. This spec-
ulative sequence should not be interpreted as yet another recourse of pro-
market ideology in its pretensions towards theoretical and political hege-
mony. In no way would this be my intention. Quite the opposite: I would
like to explore prospective veins in order to reactivate the passions that
once upon a time awakened critical thought and the will to utopia. I hope
to o√er, in this perspective, a distinct comprehension of the connection
between the crisis of paradigms and the crisis of organicity in the social
sciences, obviating the rhetoric of postmodernity but welcoming the post-

modern call to relativize the rationalities that brought legitimacy to the
practice of the social scientist.
Planning and revolution constituted the paradigmatic model of the
decade’s ‘‘development from within,’’ which amounted to industrializing
modernization and political and social transformation. These were max-
imalist notions through which one could most eloquently embody the
deliberate intervention of technical and teleological reason in history.
It dealt not just with the notions, but with the extreme images for the
organicity of social knowledge in the projects of structural change in Latin
American societies.
On the side of planning, this could come to be considered the privileged
instrument of the large-actor-driver-of-change, which was the Planning
State.≥ Within that actor, planning came to constitute an idealized link for
the articulation of technical reason with political reason, in order to relate
social knowledge with technical intervention from power so that, para-
phrasing Hegel, the rational might be more real and the real, more ra-
tional. Planning constituted, in this extreme connotation of the term, a
palpable example of this organicity of social knowledge in social change.
In the extreme image of planning, the social scientist went far back in time,
moving from rationalist metaphysical speculation to budgetary and policy
programming. As a privileged instrument of modernization and of the dy-
namic articulation between the distinct agents of modernization, the plan-
ner became a kind of implicit vanguard within the social-constructivist
State. Silent, but with much energy, planning was consecrated as a kind of
science for the control and orientation of the future. Isn’t this, precisely,
Enlightenment thinking brought to an extreme?
On the side of the revolution the pretensions were greater, since what
was undertaken wasn’t to program but to radically subvert an order that
constituted a rein on the rationality of history (productive rationality, but
above all, social). The revolution symbolized the fusion of the social scien-
tist in the struggle for a new order, the definitive embrace of a definitive
future. The image of the revolution constituted a motive for the produc-
tion of social knowledge. A good part of the literature of development and
of sociological and philosophical production, and of production relative
to political theory during the 1960s and the beginning of the 1970s, had
the revolution as its propelling motif.
Technological rationality, unlike planning, didn’t try, in a minute man-
ner, to construct the future using the present as a point of departure, but
rather to interpret the present, in a thick manner, using the future as a point
of departure.
Situated on opposite poles, both technological rationality and planning
fixed the furthest limits within which, in an infinity of combinations and
mediations, social scientists ‘‘breathed their own air’’ for unforgettable
decades. Both planning and revolution were images weighted down with
modern reason: both were permeated with utopianism and enlighten-
ment thinking.∂
With respect to the crisis of rationalities, this constitutes part of an
ongoing discussion in which ‘‘critical humanists,’’ on the one hand, and
‘‘pragmatic positivists’’ on the other, have invested much e√ort: the for-
mer in the critique of formal-instrumental rationality, and the latter in the
critique of substantive-normative rationality. But despite a lucidity experi-
enced in the critique of these rationalities, the reflection of the modern
social sciences was much delayed in considering, in depth, a critique of
another two rationalities that were also very much a part of modernity.
We’ll call them Enlightenment rationality and utopianizing rationality. The
critique of Enlightenment and of utopianism, in its most decided version,
arrived all wrapped up in the discourse of postmodernity.
There are three rationalities that I’d want to consider in this context.
They all coexist in the cultural architecture of modernity and of modern-
ization: instrumental rationality, Enlightenment rationality, and utopianiz-
ing rationality. The crisis of these rationalities implies, in the first place,
that their political legitimacy is in question, whether because these ra-
tionalities show themselves to be less e≈cacious, or less democratic in the
reality of what their apologists initially proclaimed. Secondly, such ra-
tionalities lost their rootedness in common sense and in the interpreta-
tions that the culture forges with respect to reality and to the changes of
reality. Finally, this crisis is also produced because the conflicts between
these rationalities (between instrumental reason and utopianizing reason,
between Enlightenment reason and instrumental reason, between means
and ends) wind up relativizing and even reciprocally neutralizing the mo-
bilizing capacity that those paradigms exercise over collective action.
The practice of the planning and discourse of revolution embodied
the adduced rationalities with special force. In the basic structure of the
mentality of the planner and the revolutionary, instrumentalism, enlight-
enment thinking, and utopianism coexist, often without the planner or
revolutionary ever perceiving themselves to be situated at the intersec-
tion of these three rationalities. Thus my interest in further developing

these connections.
Instrumental Reason, Planning, and Revolution

Instrumental rationality is at the basis of the technical development that
characterizes the processes of modernization. It is founded in the criteria
of e√ectiveness and productivity. In the economic realm it is associated
with the maximalization of utilities. In the political realm, it is associated
with the rationalization of power and the ‘added’ conduct of social actors.
Planning is crossed by instrumental rationality from its very basis. In the
case of Latin American societies, the apogee of planning, above all from
the beginnings of the 1960s, follows from the conviction that it’s possible
to rationalize the economic management of society with the goal of op-
timizing the use of resources, to increase productivity and to transform the
productive sphere with an eye to maximalizing results. At the same time,
conventional planning exhibits a markedly economic bias, which implies
that its ends are nothing but means: increasing profit, multiplying produc-
tivity, and diversifying production.
From the side of revolutionary discourse, the presence of instrumental
reason is more ambiguous. On the one hand, there’s no doubt that the
exercise of power in the real experiences of socialist States reveals an ex-
haustive and functional rationalization of political relations. Instrumen-
tality has been undeniable there, expressed in the bureacratization of the
mediations between State and society, and in the subjection of state action
to a logic of political e√ectiveness. The presence of an instrumental logic is
also clear in the Leninist discourse that many revolutionary leftist parties
engage from their very origins, and that go on to characterize the vertical
relations between their leadership and base members. This modality of
‘‘organic’’ militancy that characterized the parties of the left over a long
period of time in Latin America, and into which many progressive intellec-
tuals also entered, was permeated by instrumental rationality.
But revolutionary discourse was, on the other hand, also interwoven
with elements that cannot be considered subordinate to a technical ra-
tionality. Revolutionary mysticism, the sacrificial dimension in the ex-
treme image of the militant of the revolution, the epic connotations in the
rhetoric of radical change, the unreality of many of the strategies and
proposals impelled from the supposedly educated, well-read leftists of our
countries: all these are elements that doubtless exceed any kind of instru-
mental rationality.
The critique of instrumental reason derives from various theoretical and
ideological sources. One could trace those sources, in the Weberian radi-
ography of modern, formal rationality and in the critique of instrumental
reason undertaken by T. A. Adorno and Max Horkheimer, from the
Frankfurt School. Later, these critics have been refitted and reformulated
from political theory as well as from the sociology of development.
Within this framework, normative planning has been questioned for its
tendency to dissolve ‘‘the great policy’’ in social engineering, and by the
consequent omission of the question for the meaning of modernization
directed from the State. The orthodox discourse of the socialist revolution
has also been questioned in its instrumental dimension, especially by the
tendency to assume, acritically, an instrumental logic in the struggle for
power.
The literature of development already shows in this field an important
stockpile in a divergent sense. The contributions made in order to con-
ceive alternative styles of development—centered on quality of life, the
democratization of social relations, the communitarian ethic or environ-
ment equilibrium—all reveal an e√ort to overcome the technicological
bias in the culture of development. The diverse contributions have in
common the questioning of modern formal-instrumental reason, a ques-
tioning which functions in them as a kind of initial e√ort, and which
subsequently turns to query the ends, ruling values, and orienting utopias
of development. It moves on to query, as well, the consistency of pro-
cedures with ends, and of felt necessities with the planning of necessities.
The emphasis with which said reflections support other logics woven
through the social fabric—the logics of solidarity, sacrifice, communica-
tion, redistribution—is born from this return to ends and values in discus-
sions of development.
But the critique of the instrumental bias of planning, of the ‘‘Leninist’’
discourse of the revolution or of the agenda for the construction of econo-
mies of centralized planning, not only derives from this new reading of
development where the disenchanted come together from the militant
left, from development discourse, and from progressive humanism in
order to recycle their hopes and their proposals. There is also a sharp
critique from liberalism, much more widely disseminated by the academic
sphere, the most influential political circles, and by the mass media. The
emphasis of liberal critique of instrumental reason promoted by the Plan-

ning State, be it the Welfare State or the Socialist State, is, nevertheless,
symmetrically opposed: it does not object to the surplus engineering in
the rationalization imposed by state planning. Quite the contrary: the lib-
eral critique objects to ine√ectiveness, in a line whereby neoliberals a≈rm
that planning should occur ‘‘spontaneously’’ from the market, rather than
from the State, and that processes of economic rationalization should be
articulated from the market, rather than the State, if instrumental reason is
to operate with greater e√ectiveness. In other words, would-be private
economic agents, rather than the agents of the state apparatus, would
allow for the dissemination of this rationality in distinct spheres of activity.
Hayek has formulated the most widely known argument in this sense,
and his argument has been exhaustively repeated by the apostles of mon-
etarism in Latin America. According to Hayek, the quantity of informa-
tion and of variables to consider in economic management is of such
magnitude that one cannot expect a reduced group of persons to appropri-
ate the faculty of conducting the economy of a country and to claim to do
so while optimizing the yield of the factors and the coordination of the
activities. In consequence, and given that said information is found dis-
seminated between the dispersed mass of private economic agents, only
the signals of the market have a regulatory e√ectiveness capable of ra-
tionalizing the system as a whole. In this way, the neoliberal critique
questions not a kind of instrumental rationality but rather, the place—or
agent—from which said rationality is formulated and promoted. With
this, the critique attacks both planning and socialism, arguing that both
resort to a kind of rationalization of productive factors that deny the very
e√ectiveness that they claim to impel.
The neoliberal critique holds that there is a basic contradiction in the
combination of economic rationalization with redistributive policies (a
combination that is at the very marrow of the planner’s discourse and of
socialism in general). According to this argument, social redistribution
muddies the rules of the game of the market and in so doing enters into the
deployment of rational economic behaviors, restricting entrepreneurial
freedom and producing grave distortions in the signals of the economy. So
the redistribution of social wealth would attack the principle of e≈cient
rationality, and could only be consistent with economic rationality in spe-
cial circumstances in which it would be necessary to reactivate the econ-
omy by way of energetic stimulation of consumption. But it’s an obstacle
to said rationality when it limits the power of gain on the part of private
agents or when it unleashes inflationary processes in which investment
becomes risky and much more uncertain.
Between the critique of the instrumental rationality of state planning,
and the orthodoxy of the left formulated by the paladins of alternative
development, and the critique that the neoliberals propose, there exist
coincidences and important di√erences. Both coincide in indicating that
the Planning State, be it capitalist or socialist, cannot attempt to rationalize
from the above social behaviors in a uniform, homogenous manner. Both
coincide in emphasizing the relative autonomy that civil society should
enjoy, with regard to the State. They both coincide, finally, in the need to
stimulate creativity and individual as well as group initiatives, and suggest
that such potentialities not see themselves neutralized or coopted by state
centrality. But while neoliberalism and the present expansive tendency of
the market economies do not renounce, but rather redouble their enthusi-
asm for the instrumental rationality of economic agents and social rela-
tions, the ‘‘alternativist’’ position is especially critical in this respect. While
neoliberalism is reluctant to engage redistributive policies, alternativism
proposes that all desirable development proceeds from processes of ex-
haustive redistribution of socially produced resources. While neoliberal-
ism supports the autonomy of civil society by way of the market, alter-
nativism ties together autonomy and communitarian participation, local
development and/or the ties of solidarity within spaces on the micro-scale.
These di√erences become di≈cult to reconcile upon passing from the cri-
tique of instrumentality to proposals for alternative forms of development.
Enlightened Reason, Planning, and Revolution

The critique of enlightened reason has also been formulated from various
ideological stances. Postmodernists on the right and on the left have
strongly questioned it, concentrating its critical arsenal on objecting to the
metaphysics of progress, the mystification of the leading vanguard, and
the euphoria of integrating modernization.∑
With regard to the critique of the notion of progress—an idea at the
core of Enlightenment modernity—it is argued that history does not
march forward and upwards, and that its discontinuous and multidirec-
tional character redounds with considerable margins of uncertainty re-
garding the future. Since history does not appear to be regulated by an
internal, unmistakable kind of rationality, its unfolding is unforeseen as
being provisional at best. From this perspective, to think of knowing the

internal reason of history—assuming that there is one—and from there to
scientifically regulate society, economy, and culture, appears as a mega-
lomaniac delusion, with totalitarian consequences.
This bears on the demystification of the avant-gardes. If history has no
rational direction, this shows the lack of legitimacy for the aspiration of a
group that adjudicates in itself the objective interpretation of history, and
with this as a base, arrogates to itself the right, globally, to formulate
norms. Neither the educational elite, nor science, nor the State can, in
consequence, aspire to establish totalizing orientations. With the erosion
of the image of progress and of certainty regarding an underlying reason in
history, the avant-garde assumes the face of the despot.
The conventional image of revolution as much as the dominant style of
planning are thus seen as substantially deligitimated. In its theoretical
conception as in its historical reality, planning has been a meeting point
between science and the State. It supposes rational historicity at the same
time as it supposes the capacity to craft said rationality from a plan de-
signed and brought about by a group in which expertise and power are
condensed. If one does not socially recognize a clear and positive historical
directionality, and if one does not admit the capacity of a restricted group
‘‘to read’’ the present scientifically and to orient it e√ectively towards the
future, then it would be di≈cult to appropriate legitimacy to the norma-
tive planning that underlies the Planning State. What appears as illusory in
this new ‘‘politico-cultural temper’’ is the hypostatic conception of the
State, understood as a kind of ‘‘Hegelian synthesis’’ which, independent
of the vicissitudes of contingency, always constitutes the highest moment
of the rationality of history and the most suitable management of society.
At these heights it’s di≈cult to think of the present Latin American State
as the harmonic totalizer of social interests.
The image of socialist revolution has also received quite a beating in its
Enlightenment matrix for being evidenced in the history of the reversibility
of socialism. Of course, in Latin America, from the beginnings of the
1960s, the overthrow of progressive governments by right wing military
coups already made problematic, from the perspective of the struggle for
power, the supposed historical inevitability of the revolution. Further-
more, from the middle of the 1970s, the social sciences had to seriously
propose up to what point that limiting image of a socialist revolution,
with the characteristics attributed to it from the Cuban Revolution, could
operate as an intellectual superego (as much in terms of the possible as
well as of the desirable). But it was with the abrupt fall of the socialist
systems in the East, at the end of the 1980s, that the narcissist image of a
revolution from the west received its bloodiest blow. From this historical
inflection it became unlikely, in practice, to associate that revolution with
progress, with the freeing of human potentials, or with the optimal de-
velopment of productive forces. The failures were so patently revealed that
it was no longer possible to attribute the regressive image of socialism to
the capitalist press. The revolution remained without the support of rea-
son in history.
The myth of integrating modernization also collapsed under its own
weight, for that myth is understood as deriving from the modern myth of
progress. Confidence in rationality and historical continuity could not be
more marked than in the vision of integrating modernization that ema-
nates from the Planning State, which that State proposes to society as a
natural itinerary. What is in doubt here is the idea that following the
compass of the times necessarily requires carrying out occupations of grow-
ing productivity, promoting progressive grades of formal education and
massively incorporating a ‘‘literate’’ sensibility to the population. The
educational-industrialist utopia that forms the symbolic substratum of the
Planning State defines the ultimate objectives of development as based on
an ideal, homogenous society with growing productivity. Within this
framework, the task that the Planning State assumes with regard to its
own historical project does not substantially di√er from the Enlighten-
ment project that underlies modernity: under an articulated direction, to
integrate the process of accumulating knowledge, the development of
productive forces, and the socio-political order.∏
In this way, the crisis of Enlightenment reason flows into the question-
ing of the theoretical-ideological models that were so very influential dur-
ing the 1960s in the region. Despite expressing opposing political engage-
ments at the time, capitalist development discourse, like state-centered
socialism, referred back to a model of normative planning, whether for
mixed economies or for state economies, where the plan represented the
highest possible degree of rationalization of historical directionality. Curi-
ously, it has been a certain kind of postmodern liberalism that has induced
a retrospective reading of our history, which disenchanted leftists to some
degree share, and in which the development discourse as well as the social-
ism of the 1960s are siblings on the same branch of the family tree. This
shows us where the Planning State gravitates when the political past of our
countries is reconstructed. Because what can 1960s-style development dis-
course and socialism unequivocally share, if not the axiomatic approval of

the Planning State? Would it not be in the use of central planning, as a
means for ‘‘molding’’ society according to the intentions of reason, where
development discourse and socialism can be considered part of the same
world-vision, and not as irreconcilable opponents? Do they not both re-
produce the Enlightenment task of social emancipation, which develop-
ment discourse defines as modernization and emancipation with respect
to the ‘‘traditional’’ or ‘‘primitive’’ forms of social reproduction, and which
socialism defines as emancipation with respect to international capital—
imperialism—or with respect to the oppressive relations of production?
And wouldn’t the role of the Planning State be crucial in whichever of the
two images of social emancipation—whether to overcome technical delay,
or to overcome domination—to the point that in both positions this
historical reason only becomes real from the moment that it is embodied
in the Planning State’s power to regulate society?
The critique of development discourse and of socialism that this post-
modern liberalism infers from its critique of Enlightenment reason is
nonetheless closely bound up with pro-market ideology, which has been
increasingly on the o√ensive in all latitudes over the course of the last
decade. This mixture of anti-Enlightenment and anti-State thinking can be
summarized as a critique of the transformational function of politics (ex-
cept when aimed at privatization and economic deregulation), and as a
critique of state intervention in regulating economic relations.
But another qualification that the image of socialist revolution or the
practice of State planning both face, which also derives from the anti-
Enlightenment critique, is the one formulated from the culturalist per-
spective and from currents of democratic political theory presently in
vogue. In the first case—the culturalist perspective—the referents of plan-
ning and revolution are reproached for their ethnocentric bias. It is argued
that these referents do one of the following: they may look to the indus-
trial world, in a development style and set of expectations that they seek to
impose on developing countries, in a model ‘‘from above onto below.’’ Or,
they may take as a model an emancipatory ideal belonging to European
modernity, a model incapable of taking up the cultural identity of Latin
American peoples. In this way, the critique of Enlightenment reason is
translated into the critique of the reductionist imposition of the exoge-
nously induced pattern of development or redemption of history. In the
second instance—the perspective of a revalorization of democracy—the
exhaustive reach of the Planning State, or of the eventual socialist State, is
questioned, in turn valorizing the relative autonomy of civil society and a

sociopolitical order based in a wide social agreement. In this agreed upon
order, much noted ‘‘historical directionality’’ would not turn out to be
monopolistically concocted from the central power constituted by the
planners and political agents of the revolution. Rather, that ‘‘historical
directionality’’ would result from the processes of negotiation and con-
sensus among multiple social actors.
From this optic, the utopia of the socialist revolution or of the Planning
State (as the axis and driver of the model of modernization) seems incom-
patible with a social democracy that encourages the proliferation and ex-
pression of diverse logics expressed in the social fabric, which have been
called the logics of social movements. Likewise, the invocation of social
creativity and diversity do not aim to strengthen the market against the
State, but to call attention to social complexity, to the variety of actors and
sociocultural costs that the enterprise of homogenizing modernization
drags after it.
In synthesis, the archetypal images underlying planning and revolution
lead into the mystification of progress, of the rational avant-garde, and of
integrating modernization to such a point that if we were to subtract any
one of these three foundations for the organicity of social knowledge, that
knowledge would tend to disappear from the epistemological horizon.
These foundations are as much normative as they are epistemological.
They are normative in that the idea or image of revolution or planning
challenges obligates the social scientist to produce knowledge that can
foment and make viable the practice of planning or of a possible revolu-
tion. These foundations are epistemological in that an ideal construction
(such as the former ideals of the revolution or of planning) o√ers posi-
tionality and meaning to the social scientist’s research.
Utopianizing Reason, Planning, and Revolution

The outbreak of economic crisis at the beginning of the 1980s, and the
collapse of socialism facing the alternative of the market at the end of the
1980s, put an inflexible ceiling on development and social change as these
had been conceived, both historically and from the optic of theories of
social change, in Latin America. An inevitable consequence of this objec-
tive and exogenous limit imposed by the crises has been the withdrawal of
utopianizing reason,π since such reason requires, for its own deployment,
an open horizon. But here too the economic crisis and the defeat of so-
cialism do no more than make explicit a utopian image that was born
condemned by its own excess. Because these two paradigmatic images
combine two ideals that are not easily harmonized: a technical idea of
maximum development of the productive forces and a sociopolitical ideal
of construction of civil society by the State.
What constitutes this juxtaposition between technical and sociopolitical
ideals, between instrumentalism and utopianism? In the model of the
Planning State, technical reason presupposes that utopia is only worth think-
ing about if it’s plannable—that is, if one can sketch out a technically viable
itinerary for conducting the present towards that utopian construction. In
this way, in the model of development ruled by the Planning State, the
planning of utopia combines or mingles with the utopia of planning—
that is, with the conviction that planning is more apt to be attained if it can
be universalized. So that in the practice of normative planning, what’s
lacking is the exhaustibility of the instrumental handling of development:
the desirable is the full correspondence between the plan—its objectives,
its duration—and its e√ective crystallization. Utopia is the reality regu-
lated by the judgment of productive reason, by the horizon of economic
modernization, by intersectorial balances and the improvement reflected
in combined economic indicators.∫
The critique of utopian reason also has two divergent ideological-
theoretic strains. On the one hand, there is an objection to the coercive
strength that the utopian construction can exercise over reality. In this
argument, the utopian referent operates creating norms and directing the
present, closing o√ perspectives and subjecting it to the straightjacket
of utopia. On the other hand, the critique of utopian reason is wielded
from resurrected realism or political pragmatism, indicating that utopian
thought distorts and simplifies the conflicts that really exist, that it side-
steps the relation of real forces and agents, and winds up confusing desires
with facts. We shall see, further on and with greater detail, these two flanks
of attack on utopian rationality that can be applied as much to the idea of
revolution as to the discourse of the normative planner.
The critique of utopian determinism has been formulated by neoliberal
thinkers, originally inspired in Karl Popper’s critique of Plato, Hegel, and
socialism in general. This line of reasoning argues that a normatively pro-
posed model, that therefore aspires to regulate from an ends defined as
valid for everyone by the global historical directionality, is incompatible
with the image of an ‘‘open’’ society—understanding, with this term, a
society free to choose and rectify its own destiny, or to permit as many
destinies as there are people composing it. This critique of the utopian
construct tends to be joined with a critique of statism. It’s not surprising
that Popper has chosen to attack the statist utopias of Plato and Hegelian-
ism of the Left.
This attack on utopia is easily extended to planning and to the idea of
revolution, and it’s no accident that in neoliberal discourse the two enjoy
so little favor. Planning and revolution are seen as forms of ‘‘exercising
power over the future,’’ which is exactly how Popper and his intellectual
heirs look at the utopian construct. Consequently, the image of the Plan-
ning State or of revolutionary power would produce such reactions in the
utopian-aversive neoliberal sensibility, reactions that likewise are notori-
ously extended into the discursive field of postmodernism. Development
driven from the top down, by a group, like development driven by the
Planning State or by the revolutionary program, would be, from its very
formulation, a menace to the open society. The rational utopia that un-
derlies the similar image of the State, according to which the latter em-
bodies an optimizing rationality, would be inexorable as well, and would
then constitute the first step towards the coming of a totalitarian order
hyper-regulated by a power that, in its turn, indefinitely perpetuates its
regulation.
This warning could have paranoid connotations and could serve as an
argument for liberal crusades which in themselves sometimes acquire
totalitarian streaks. But there’s no reason, on this account, to engage
in denial or make light of the matter. What neoliberal fears posit for
democratic thought in general and above all in countries of peripheral-
dependence capitalism, is the challenge of rethinking the image—or the
model—of the State as Conductor so that it opens its utopian horizon to
multiple rationalities, instead of or preceding rationalities in communica-
tions, eudaemonics, solidarities, fraternity, and/or participation. Only by
relativizing utopian reason (as a form of utopianizing reductionism, be it
formalist or finalist) is it possible to undermine the foundations of the
fears of neoliberals and postmoderns. This requires a profound revision of
the culture of modernization, for this very culture has served as symbolic
substratum making up the image of the Planning State.
The second critique of utopian reason does not question the utopian
exercise as such. Rather, it seeks to specify its political and epistemological
functions. What this critique objects to are the utopia’s pretensions to
feasibility and the distortions that said pretensions generate in the percep-
tion of the existing order. Such an objection does not necessarily have a
defined political character. It has been formulated by intellectuals situated

in very diverse points of the ideological spectrum, in distinct ways and
with diverse emphases.
In the political aspect, the critique in question is tied to the recent
resurgence of political realism. From this position, the maximalist ten-
dency is questioned with every intention of practicing politics departing
from utopia. Similar maximalism is liable to flow into a kind of political
lack of realism that winds up frustrating e√ective attempts towards struc-
tural change in society. Under this perspective, utopianism is associated
with an excessive ideologization su√ered by the left in past decades, where
the maximalist positions or the symbolic referent of the revolution will
have underestimated the objective weight of the social forces that have
been opposed—and are opposed—to the proposals for radical change.
The epistemological critique questions the confusion that utopian rea-
son generates when it wants to perceive present reality as only a necessary
moment in the road towards the realization of utopia. Reality then moves
on to be ‘‘read’’ as a pending ideal, which tends to slant many aspects and
actors that compose the real system and that don’t necessarily march in
line towards the utopian city. Utopianism reissues, in a mundane version,
the old concept of Providence that lived on until the rationalist mega-
lomania of Hegel. From this illusion, once again, all of the real seems
rational and all of the rational seems capable of being realized.
Facing this distortion of utopian reason, epistemological criticism holds
that the utopian construction ought, as a purpose, to serve as a reference of
intelligibility, that is, to contrast objective limitations and restrained po-
tentialities with a utopian ideal of limitations overcome and of freed po-
tentialities. Utopia would then be a contrasting reference for compre-
hending a specified reality, and a horizon of reference allowing for the
orientation of actions in a directionality that the utopia itself would indi-
cate as desirable. But it is crucial to delimit this methodological function of
utopia and not to fall into a type of idealization in which the di√erences
between ideal construction and real world are erased. Said confusion at-
tributes to utopia an ontological quality that it does not possess.
This political and epistemological crisis is as applicable to the discourse
of the revolution as to the discourse underlying planning. One could
think, for example, that the multiple functions adjudicated to the Planning
State, as meta-actor and as mega-actor, and as great societal conductor and
articulator, derive from the assumption of a flexible social reality, capable
of being harmonized from above, and of a progressive flow of resources
towards the State.Ω The idea that one could conjugate economic develop-
ment with profound transformations of the social structures, and all of this
with a degree of conflict su≈ciently tenuous so that the State would be
able to arbitrate without substantial mishaps, does not seem consistent
with a realistic analysis of Latin American societies. This utopian maximal-
ism that would animate the enterprise of the Planning State also worked,
with very di√erent contents and programs, in the other enterprises that
awakened such adhesion among many intellectuals and politicians in the
1960s: the socialist revolution.
With respect to the confused ontological status of utopia, it su≈ces to
remember that the socialist revolution and normative planning were never
perceived as utopian constructs (at least, not during the height of the idea
and its application). Rather, they were seen as programs designed in ac-
cordance with the reason of history. Such programs were, in both cases, an
itinerary of rationalization of the society by the State, with a more techni-
cal slant in the case of planning, and a more teleological one in the case of
the revolution. In both cases, political power was the trustee.
But also, in both cases, the transit of the ideal construct to action oc-
curred with minimal mediation on the part of reality. The limits between
the ideal construct and perception of reality became vague and ambig-
uous. With the apogee of planning unleashed in 1961 under the Alliance
for Progress, national plans for development not only appeared as the
bridge between the possible and the desirable. From its scrupulous instru-
mental rationality, it also depicted a reality to be sculpted by the planner’s
utopia. Time, along with the interests of some and the power of others,
showed that reality was neither so docile or so lineal.
In the field of image production of the revolution, the appeal to the
political will was much more explicit than in that of planning. At the same
time, however, the image of the revolution was swathed in an epic cloth-
ing that wound up, in many cases, avoiding the real correlation of political
forces. That the bloody military coups had taken the intellectuals and left
wing parties by surprise reveals this lack of political realism for which the
left wing was so often blamed afterwards. The epic character assigned to
the revolutionary process, and the mythification of the agent (be it the
militant, the people, the worker, or the guerilla of the revolution) were the
elements of utopianization in apologists for radical social change.
How much did the social sciences contribute to these errors of percep-
tion and to these biases in intelligibility? In what measure did the produc-
tion of social knowledge construct, and in what measure did it interpret,

those enlightened and utopianizing myths with which normative plan-
ning and the theorists of the revolution operated? To what point did this
maximalism of the normative planner (to control exhaustively the process
of development) and of the revolutionary intellectual (to transform ex-
haustively the relations between the actors of development) form part of
the social scientist’s imagination during decades that were most constitu-
tive of Latin American social science? In what measure, finally, did these
ideal types serve as motives and horizons of reference for the practice of
research, reflection, and teaching in the field of the Latin American social
scientist until the middle of the 1970s? And if all this had to find a positive
response, at least in a considerable proportion: how much of this remains
at present, how much is dragged against the current of disenchantment
and of self-criticism, how much is transformed into new utopias and new
models of ‘‘negotiation’’ between science and power? In the heat of such
disenchantments and reformulations, it isn’t easy to have any kind of
clarity on these points.
New Sensibilities Facing the Crisis of Rationalities

A cartography of these rationalities in crisis should contribute to a dif-
ferent perception of the crisis in which the social sciences have had to
endure for more than a decade in Latin America. If the images that would
sustain a fully self-justified identity for the social scientist have been sys-
tematically knocked down prior to constructing new images, it would be
best to ask in what measure they might have a chance of proposing, as a
source of legitimation for the Latin American social scientist, alternative
images that might well be born from the same trunk of rationalities. Per-
haps it’s best, today, to hope, to observe, to maintain a low profile in the
respective fields of activity, and to let the discourse of history go on a
bit, in order to see if a pendular movement returns the social sciences
to the urgent necessity of consecrating great rationalities and historical
directionalities.
The current options seem to point towards new mediations between the
social scientist and his or her object, or between knowledge and reality. A
bit of Enlightenment and utopianism might ward o√ the tendency to-
wards excessive functionalism and pragmatism that threatens to co-opt
the production of the social scientists. A bit of Enlightenment or utopian-
ism might limit the a-critical apologies made in defense of the functions of
the market. It might be possible to widen the concept of rationality to the
scope of the cultural self-production of society, to new life strategies, to
the irreducible mestizo that underlies and survives in Latin America. It
could be possible speak in the plural, in perspectives, in simulacra, or
in alternative scenarios, and to be more humble in the transmission of
knowledges, but more adventurous in experimenting with knowledges.
To carry the value of pluralism from the political to the epistemological
option, to be pluralist as social scientists. To modify the form as much as
the contents, personal attitude as much as the object. To become, for a
while, the very object of research, to become fully aware of one’s own
disenchantment and perplexity, and that of peers and neighbors. To dis-
card nothing as irrational or irrelevant. To examine from close up the
cultural shades and profiles, the qualities of sensitivity and of personality,
in ways that a planner or scientist of the revolution never imagined doing.
The social sciences can’t revive a corpse. If a cultural death exists in
society and it’s impossible, then, in a given moment, to produce fresh and
renewed images of itself, one can’t expect the social sciences to ward o√ the
dominant note of indi√erence towards the future or the tendency to re-
nounce large-scale, collective projects. Social scientists have always been
creative as interpreters of the real movement of the society, or of the
multiple movements of social reality. For the raw material of what they
would work out, however, they require the cultural energies that society
itself is capable of generating. If today those energies remain opaque or
refracted, the social scientist would have to develop a new clinical eye, to
practice with his or her own disenchanted or desolated body, and from
there to incite the social imagination towards the hope of a new swing of
the pendulum. To be alert, to avoid that typical discursive obesity of those
who have little to really propose, to empathize with what’s coming in
order to be able to become fully aware of new rationalities. To maintain a
certain vitalism and, at the same time, this critical and revealing gaze in
which the best of modern humanism survives.
With all this, I don’t want to fall into the recipe of easy ways out of the
postmodern discourse. I am not talking, here, about celebrating disen-
chantment, or about proclaiming that finally the social sciences have been
freed from the chains of Reason, Logos, and from the commitment both
to history and to the end of history. Nor do I want to reduce ethical
problems to an ambiguous aesthetic glance, or practical problems to ut-
terly individual options. I do not want to soften the social and structural
heterogeneity under the gallant epithet of ‘‘plasticity.’’
Nor do I believe that the critique of historical directionality, and above
all of present history, should prevail towards the negation of all direc-
tionality capable of conferring meaning and direction to society as a
whole. What should indeed be relativized, in this weakening of large-scale,
future projects, with regard to the challenge of modernization, is the
prevailing style of development, as a style that takes the present condition
of the metropolis, or of industrialized societies, as its norm for the future.
But if the social sciences want to go beyond the ritual of exegesis within
the cloistered walls of the university, if they want to break with the atom-
ized and taxonimized mold of the practice of knowledge in the research
centers, if they want to transcend the casuistry towards some link where
casuistry no longer has that amorphically descriptive mold in which it
finds itself encapsulated, if they want to go a little bit beyond the technical
assessments for ministers and cabinet members, a bit beyond political
publicity and opinion polls, a bit beyond elegant marketing and the tech-
nocrat’s life in international organizations, if they want to go a bit beyond
all these substitutional or chancy forms of articulation between science
and social life, social science will have to let itself be a little contaminated
by the new sensitivities proclaimed in postmodern discourse. Without this
having to lead into a cool look at the problems that, like all the big social
problems in Latin America, are really boiling.
Maybe this contamination will sharpen the spirit of the social scientist
and allow for a rediscovery of new incipient tendencies in which there are
new rationalities and utopias in the process of gestation. These might be
utopias attributed to the new social movements, with their respect for
diversity, their will to local autonomy, their vocation for solidarity. These
might be the utopias that privilege the cultural specificity of Latin America
and from there seek to think about more authentic ways of living together.
It might be the more institutionalist utopia that potentially dwells in the
new democracies, understood as the promise of greater political participa-
tion, wider citizen action, wider citizenship. They might be new forms
coming from the field of art, intellectual production or survival strategies.
And planning or revolution would no longer be the extremes within
which the legitimated self-image of the social scientist would be sketched.
Others will come, just as they have come, over recent years: community
organizer, arts critic, telluric metaphysician, or market socialist.
It’s worth it, for now, this odd combination of prudence and adventur-
ousness, this opening up of perspectives, this experimentation in know-
ing, this heterodoxy in the expectation of new signs.
Notes
1 Jorge Vergara, ‘‘Crisis y transformaciones de las ciencias sociales latinoamericanas,’’ a
paper presented to the IX Seminar of the Commission for Epistemology and Politics in
clacso (Santiago de Chile, November 28–29, 1991), 5. Parentheses added.
2 ‘‘The celebrated ‘paradigm crisis’ sprung from the recognition of its inability to deci-
pher and explain in a global form a reality turned extraordinarily complex’’ (Heinz
Sonntag, El estado de arte en las ciencias sociales latinoamericanos, [Caracas, 1991], 11).
See also Norbert Lechner, Los desafíos de las ciencias sociales en América Latina (Santiago
de Chile: flacso, 1988), which similarly stresses the dissolving impact of increasing
social complexity in the ‘‘historical’’ paradigms of the Latin American social sciences.
3 Understood as the maximalist extension with which it was incorporated into the politi-
cal imagination, up to the middle of the 1960s: as Demiurge State, meta-actor, conduc-
tor of industrializing modernization, impartial arbiter of social conflicts and great
political totalizer.
4 But it’s also certain that the revolution, as the hope and image of a distinct future, was
also clothed in many images that weren’t modern, or even less ‘‘rational’’: messianism,
fundamentalism, providentialism, and salvationism were always present in the dis-
courses and revolutionary sentiments in Latin America.
5 In this respect, a more detailed analysis can be consulted in this book’s chapter on the
postmodern debate.
6 The modernization that since the end of World War II assumes a defined profile in
Latin America ‘‘is inferred from those economic and social transformations that took
place in some countries of Latin America as a consequence of the processes of depen-
dent industrialization after the Second World War. This is the sense in which we should
understand modernization as a series of changes that, beyond the purely economic,
encompassed the cultural realm and were ideologically expressed in the conviction that
the ‘history’ of the countries of the continent advanced in a progressive direction
towards ‘higher stages.’ This modernizing vision branched outward in turn, in two
strains: one that we here will call developmentalist and another that we’ll call, provision-
ally, revolutionary ’’ (Fernando Mires, ‘‘Continuidad y ruptura en el discurso político,’’
Revista Nueva Sociedad 91 [Caracas: Sept./Oct. 1987], 129).
7 ‘‘Utopianizing reason,’’ not ‘‘Utopian reason,’’ since the latter indicates that reason itself
is a utopia, and not a producer of utopias. The term ‘‘utopianizing reason,’’ in turn,
denotes this productive character of reason, which in this case turns out to be very
pertinent to explicate.
8 The pretension that normative planning, conceived as instrumentalist utopia, could be
considered as a form of subsuming political conflicts in formal structures. Within this

framework, planning found itself with the problem that arises as a ‘‘strategic’’ attri-
bute of a State in the process of historical formalization (a process never completely
achieved). As a consequence, it’s impossible to separate the crisis of legitimacy in
planning from the crisis of the State, especially from the crisis of the State as an ideal
construction.
9 For a more exhaustive analysis of the utopia of the Planning State, see the chapter titled
‘‘Crisis of Legitimacy in the Planning State,’’ included in this book.
9 R Utopia against Crisis, or How
to Awake from a Long Insomnia
Crisis and Utopian Thought

Today as never before, the nations of Latin America coincide in institu-
tionalizing and promoting democratic politics. For the first time in the
republican era, all the countries of the region are reckoning on popularly
elected governments. This consecration of democracy takes place, symp-
tomatically, at the same historical period when great utopias have lost
legitimacy, utopias that in preceding decades fed the Latin American polit-
ical imagination. At the same time as institutions are being democratized,
the politicians are reducing their ambitions. Paradoxically, the gain in
stability is matched by a loss of mobilizing force.
This loss of utopic force runs the risk of reducing politics to its institu-
tional, bureaucratic, and technocratic dimensions. It becomes urgent,
then, to seek out and question new mobilizing utopias, so that political
practice can propose substantive projects. These new utopias, in distinc-
tion to the preceding ones, should be formulated in order to recreate the
future, rather than to nail it down. The following questions arise, then:
Utopia against Crisis 143
how to plan for open utopias, which for all their openness will not be
indeterminate? How to articulate utopic construction with political prac-
tice so that the latter comes to be inscribed in the universe of collective
signs without its becoming, on this account, something that overdeter-
mines its horizon of possibilities?
The integrating visions of modernity have exploded into multiple, low
profile strategies in which the dream of the transformed and redeemed
community no longer counts. The global economic recomposition and
total demystification of real socialisms have left modernity bereft of mass
dreams. The masses are less and less thought of as e√ervescent, mobilized,
challenging. The tendency towards collective resignation, together with
the administrative and pragmatic biases of politics, have created a situa-
tion that could be defined as a crisis of utopian thinking.
The positive image of the postwar period depended on the fact that each
country would find plenty of meaning in the elaboration of collective
projects or development styles founded in clear rules and goals. There now
appears, by way of contrast, the image of governments forced to adminis-
ter a crisis that they have not chosen and that determines them from the
very onset. We become, progressively, ‘‘sleepwalking administrators of a
crisis that we intuit as impossible to resolve by our own means. This
somnambulant state, in which the crisis of utopia flows out into us, is
manifest in many faces: defeatism, demobilization, lack of will power,
exacerbated individualism, fear, anguish, cynicism.’’∞ The market econ-
omy’s aspirations to assert hegemony over reflection on the future of
development have sought to strip legitimacy from the utopias that, during
the preceding decades, animated politics and planning in our countries.
The only ones to resist this, with their customary viscosity, were some
closed-o√ utopic tales that were entrenched in local spaces, in raving mille-
nalianism or in hermetic cultural identities.
Utopic thought doesn’t have the strength to push back the crisis. It
nonetheless has the mobilizing e√ect of shaking up the gregarious skepti-
cism that has spread out under the eaves of the crisis. If utopia possesses,
by definition, a certain impossible character, its contrasting e√ect allows
one to unmask the irrationality of the situation from which one imagines
utopias. To conceptualize utopias can be none other than to express collec-
tive desires for collective unrealities. Yet its very expression is, under re-
gressive circumstances, a critical event.
In the pages that follow, we will return to fathom the folds of utopia and
its architecture of origin, with the intention of recuperating speculative
elements that are negated today by the anti-utopian ebb and tide. With
this battery charged we will return, in the concluding pages of this chapter,
to the sense and meaning of utopic thinking in Latin America.
Utopia and Critical Function

Etymologically speaking, utopia is nowhere. Ontologically speaking, it’s a
real impossibility, an absent presence, the unlocatable that makes our loca-
tion easier. It’s the eye that watches from the imagination, the desire that
lies in wait, the hope that defends.
A look at the most widely known classical utopias, from Plato to Francis
Bacon, shows that the relation between utopic construction and reality
tends to follow a common pattern—that is, that utopia always supposes a
critique and questioning of the existing order. Thomas More’s Utopia,
published for the first time in around 1516, embodies the tension between
political-instrumental reason and the incipient development of commer-
cial capitalism in the Old World on the one hand, and, on the other,
expectations regarding the New World as a communitarian paradise.
Thomas More devotes the first part of his Utopia to expounding the disas-
trous consequences of that exalted modernization: the enclosure of the
common lands with the consequent expulsion of great masses of peasants
and the economic polarization brought about by commercial capitalism in
the Renaissance. Utopia is the critique and negation of private property
and of the demoralized face of politics: ‘‘ ‘Till property is taken away there
can be no equitable or just distribution of things, nor can the world be
happily governed,’’ writes More, ‘‘ . . . nor [will] the body politic be
brought again to a good habit, as long as property remains.’’≤
Campanella does with 17th century Naples what More did with 16th
century England. The workers’ democracy of Campanella’s ‘‘City of the
Sun’’ contrasts with the Neapolitan life where, according to the author
himself, only 20 percent of the population was working, and doing so
under conditions of exhaustion. His utopia, like More’s, homologizes
ethics with social and economic justice, the non-existence of servility, and
an order where the State’s action coincides with the will of civil society:
‘‘In the City of the Sun . . . it only falls to each one to work for about
four hours every day,’’ writes Campanella. ‘‘It is not the custom to keep
slaves. . . . But with us, alas! it is not so.’’≥
But the utopia of the Renaissance is more than an objection to moder-
nity. It positively values scientific progress and knowledge. In it, the Re-
naissance utopians navigate by their epoch’s compass. The ‘‘City of the

Sun’’ is culturalist from the very bases of its architecture: it is composed of
concentric circles, and within its walled fortress are engraved all scientific
knowledge, all the discoveries and all the technical achievements available
at that time. Bacon’s utopia shares with Campanella’s and More’s the
Renaissance exaltation of knowledge, brought to the extreme of covering
the whole map of his ideal city. There, the idea that utopia is, after all, the
maximum threshold of culture and that it contains all the cognitive mem-
ory of history. The words of one of the inhabitants of his New Atlantis are
eloquent in this respect: ‘‘We maintain a trade, not for gold, silver, or
jewels, nor for silks, nor for spices, nor for any other commodity of matter,
but only for God’s first creature, which was light; to have light, I say, of the
growth of all the parts of the world.’’∂
Utopia not only emphasizes the absent but also the repressed. Cam-
panella speaks of the possibilities of freeing man from enslaving labor.
Rousseau is only opposed to science when it is translated into techniques
of domination. The gap between imaginary construction and existing
order is but one moment in utopia. The other moment is the gap between
a present moment marked by repressed possibilities, and potential future
of freed possibilities. The critical function of utopic construction is there-
fore given in order to remake the repressed under the sign of the new.
Descriptive Force, Normative Force

Utopia is a bounded concept and a useful tool: it is at once immanent and
transcendental regarding the era in which it is conceived. If it describes
that which doesn’t exist and cannot exist, by way of its extreme con-
struction it facilitates the comprehension of that which does exist, and it
deduces orientations for change based on this comprehension. Franz
Hinkelammert has shown the transcendental character of the utopic con-
struction and the dangers implied in forgetting that utopia is only this: an
impossibility that orients and permits apprehension of the possible. ‘‘The
framework of the possible is uncovered anew, through the imagination
and through the conceptualization of the impossible. One who doesn’t
dare conceive the impossible will never discover the possible. The possible
can be visualized only by submitting the impossible to the criteria of
feasibility.’’∑ But while a political order or an ideology ‘‘doesn’t manage to
discern abundance as a possibility towards which one never advances in
terms of an empirical progress in time, such abundance is simultaneously
blinding and illuminating. It’s impossible to be pragmatic without our

realizing the transcendental character of such conceptualized abundance,
and without our falling into the illusion of wanting to carry them out.’’∏ In
this sense, utopia ‘‘is less a compensation for, than a complement to,
existing reality,’’ part of the social imagination that all societal reality ac-
quires for its institution.π
That the idea of the republic is confused with the ideal republic shows us
that in Plato the utopic construct already contains descriptive and norma-
tive force. Its force is descriptive, in the measure that in the ideal republic it
is the ‘‘essence’’ of the republic as such, and on that account it allows for
the passing of judgment on what is good and what is bad, what is desirable
and what is undesirable.
On the ethical plane, utopia is normative, presenting or imagining the
best that can be conceived and the most desirable. On the plane of knowl-
edge, it is a limit, or a boundary, for the concept: it delimits the conditions
of possibility for apprehending the existing social reality. From the pla-
tonic horizon, to think of the ideal republic is, then, to establish a paradig-
matic referential frame on the basis of which the existing political reality
becomes both intelligible to us and capable of giving us a sense of direc-
tion. Utopia, understood as an ideal order, turns into the real that is
unrealizable, and into an impossibility that’s more true than the possible.
Utopic speculation is justified by its operating as a contrast: the ideal
that it proposes makes evident what at present stands as unrealized or
repressed.
Utopia as Mimesis, or, How the Square Root of

X Squared is Not Equal to X
The utopic construction is reduction and potency. Both operations con-
stitute complementary moments of a single construction.
Reduction underlines an aspect or potential within reality, which is only
partially given in its deeds. The utopic construction thus turns over the
real in order to rescue that which it considers more desirable and more
promissory of reality, isolating it from all exogenous factors or elements
that could distort, sully, or neutralize its potency. This implies that each
utopia privileges a determinate aspect of reality: the neoliberal utopia
privileges the market, and in order to do so isolates it from all ‘‘contami-
nating’’ elements. The developmentalist utopia does the same thing with
the Planning State, the communitarian utopia with people’s vocation for
solidarity, the socialist utopia with socialized production, and the futurist
utopia with the substitution of human labor by machine labor.
‘‘Potency,’’ in the sense of making something happen, and to raise expo-
nentially, and to universalize, magnifies what was previously recovered in
reduction: potency reconstructs a social universe di√erent from the pres-
ent one, where the element that the reduction has privileged grows and
multiplies. In this way, in the neoliberal utopia, the market is rampant: it’s
transparent everywhere, and in all cases the paradigm of perfect equi-
librium is fulfilled. In the developmentalist utopia, for example, the Plan-
ning State assumes with e≈ciency all the functions liable to be assigned to
it: to modernize the productive apparatus, to integrate all social sectors
into the benefits of industrialization, to harmonize conflicts without any
mishaps, to redistribute and create growth at the same time. In the com-
munitarian utopia, the experience of self-managed community activists,
which in reality yield dispersed and interstitial results, appear multiplied
and consolidated to such a point that they permeate the entire social fabric
with humanist, fraternal values, instead of values of solidarity. The futurist
utopia, finally, universalizes the technological component that has pre-
viously isolated all social or political components. It doesn’t thematize the
organization of production or the assignment of resources, but only the
productive potential of the machines that would redeem social struggles
by way of an inexorable march towards the paradise of leisure.
This process of reduction-potency shows the form that utopia has for
feeding on and creating fissures in reality. Obviously, the type of reduc-
tion—what is privileged in it—reflects determinate and often exclusion-
ary options. The paradox rests on utopia’s trying to reconcile the exclu-
sionary, but the reduction that operates in the utopic construction tends,
intrinsically, to exclude by way of privileging one or another element of
reality.
If one takes the utopic construction as a narrative with the double
operation of reduction and potency, the functions of utopia show its fun-
damental ambiguity. As an instrument of intelligibility with regard to the
real, utopia permits us a more penetrating but also more arbitrary vision of
reality. It puts into relief potentialities that are contained or latent in
reality, but channeled in a directionality that outlines it with a specific
prism. As the horizon of normativity, utopia serves as a directional reference
while departing from a perception that is, at the same time, a wager. The
perception that serves as its base privileges certain elements to the detri-
ment of others, and from there establishes an orientation that blocks o√ or
sidesteps other possible orientations. In this way, utopia simultaneously

opens a horizon of meaning for action, and limits that same horizon in a
specific sense.
The Times of Utopia

For the Renaissance Utopians, utopia’s time is simultaneously the present
and its reverse. The gap is then given by space: it is in a remote place,
habitually an unlocatable island where the narrator arrives by chance or
error, where the scenario of an ideal society is mounted. In More’s ac-
count, the testimony arrives by way of Raphael Hythlodaeus, an imagi-
nary person who accompanies Amerigo Vespuccio in his sea voyages
throughout the New World. In Campanella’s utopia, the geographical
place is uncertain, but the recourse of the testimony of an invented person,
known as ‘‘the admiral,’’ reappears. The New Atlantis, by Francis Bacon, is a
similar case. To this spatial indetermination is added the fact that these
utopias appear to us as timeless societies that have resisted and are un-
scathed by the battering of time. An unmistakable (and unmistakably
platonic) feature of these utopias is their incorruptibility: history doesn’t
diminish these ideal societies. The ideal is united with what preexists and
endures.
This image proposes that the challenge of utopia isn’t only its plau-
sibility, but also its sustainability. This is the problem that in the past
century, the experience of the Paris Commune left open and unresolved,
just as a multitude of ephemeral, small-scale experiences also did. Thus the
importance of the dimension of temporality in the utopic invention. The
problem of the utopic is, then, as much the unsustainable as the unrealiz-
able. Plato already introduced the problem with the requirement of incor-
ruptibility for the ideal republic.
The Desirable and the Unchangeable

Utopia is, then, the image of a desirable, durable order. But this poses a
dilemma di≈cult to resolve: the durable becomes utopia in a static order;
and between the static, the inalterable and the closed-o√, the borders are
di√use. It’s not accident, then, that the hell that Huxley depicts in his
Brave New World would have a certain resonance with Campanella’s City of
the Sun. Each presents a compact universe in which individual happiness
rests in everyone’s having been programmed for their desires to coincide

with what society and the State expect from them. No movement is possi-
ble there.
In this regard, it turns out to be symptomatic that the accounts of More
and Campanella would be unfinished, apparently wanting to recuperate in
their form the openness that their contents deny. This is because the prob-
lem of utopias is that the finished description of an ideal order is turned
into the ideal description of a finished order. For a utopia to endure, there
should be nothing lacking, and no detail can be allowed to escape from the
description. But the resistance, in More as in Campanella, to closing the
account can be interpreted as the resistance to constructing a closed uto-
pia. This resistance isn’t present in the less democratically inspired Plato.
On the contrary, if in More utopia is fundamentally a democracy that per-
sists and is incorruptible, in Plato democracy is a type of corruptible gov-
ernment, par excellence. Incorruptibility in the Greek philosopher therefore
doesn’t come up against the practical di≈culties of pluralism and the will
of the people.
This doesn’t mean that the Renaissance utopias are distinguished by
respect for individual autonomy or by a vocation for the liberty of citizens.
Far from it. They all show, to a greater or lesser degree, the force of a Law
that constrains the bodies of the citizens: it restricts spatial displacement,
organizes the work of each one, and regulates sexuality. The same incor-
ruptibility that they award to the utopia that they invent obliges them to
insert into it an inflexible normativity. The durability of a model of society
across time would require the direct coercion of all that menaces stability.
It might well require totalitarian conditioning so that the will of the ma-
jority would be made to coincide with that of the status quo, just as
individual desires would be made to coincide with public institutions, and
subjective necessities with their objective satisfaction.
Utopia and Openness

The expectation of a definitive conciliation of individual aspirations, social
organizations, and political decisions doubtless pierces utopic thinking as
an extreme image. But this compulsion for conciliation is confused with
the eschatological, and culminates in imaginary hermetic constructions
such as Bacon’s and Campanella’s, or in ideal systems where cohesion is
achieved by way of rigorous disciplinary conditioning, as with Plato. Even
in the passionate utopias such as the phalansteries of Fourier, the regimen-

tation of life is quite scrupulous and controls the body of each individual
within the community.
The objection of neoliberal positivism to the utopic element of political
doings is born from this normative force (or ‘‘constructivism’’) that uto-
pia exercises and that is susceptible to being transformed in the coercion of
individuals. This only happens, nevertheless, when the utopic construc-
tion becomes a dogma, and when its impossible quality is forgotten and
actions are oriented as if the realization of a utopia were part of a strategic
program. Curiously, it’s precisely the neoliberals who deserve this re-
proach. Franz Hinkelammert has shown how the concept of perfect equi-
librium, in neoclassical theories and in neoliberal ideology, is a ‘‘bounded’’
concept or a utopic construction; he also shows how the very defenders of
neoliberalism confuse the transcendental function of utopia with its prac-
tical function, and fall into a kind of normativity that to them seems
morally inadmissible.∫ This is one of the deepest contradictions in the
neoliberal attack in Latin America: if on the one hand it denounces the
totalitarian potential of the statist or Leftist Utopias, on the other hand its
own crusade-like character is evidenced in the fact that it has resorted to
violent military dictatorships in order to impose itself, and to conquer the
physical and ideological resistence of sectors opposed to the utopia of the
market.
The idea that utopia operates restrictively on reality, exerting a coercive
force on individual will and limiting the recreation of alternatives, is an
objection that deserves to be considered, not in order to disqualify utopic
thinking, but in order to widen it, opening it up. The necessity of an open
utopia exists, a utopia capable of continually reformulating itself, but
which would not on that account be diluted into e≈ciency or impotence.
How to open the discourse of development to those open utopias with-
out ceasing to recognize, in turn, social necessities that require collective
attention? How to make utopia a normative horizon capable of e√ecting
practice in a transformational direction, but which instead of becoming a
force of coercion constitutes a force of liberation? These questions become
more pertinent the more a participatory democracy, creative and capable
of transforming itself, is revalued as a desirable order. In Latin America, an
intercultural utopia can operate as a liberating referent, in contrast with
the coercive character of past utopias that have reproduced, under various
forms, the compulsion to negate the other—this other who is Native
American, mixed-blood, Black, a peasant, marginalized in the city, part of

the informal economic sector, a woman, born out of wedlock, a domestic
worker. This very intercultural utopia can simultaneously combine, on the
basis of a criteria of openness and heterodoxy that suggests mestizaje/
racial mixture (in the best sense), an ideal of participatory democracy, of
solidarity extended in the overcoming of poverty and socioeconomic ex-
clusion, and a utopia of communication that provides widespread access
to symbolic interchange by way of the culture industry.
By Way of Corollary: Determined But Not Closed

Utopia is a factual impossibility, absolutely desirable, that serves as an
orienting horizon to frame the intelligibility of the real and to make patent
the potentially repressed. As an imaginary construction, it’s the expression
of a desire, not just any desire, but a collective desire for a collective order.
Just as it bestows meaning, it sets limits on what is desired. If on one side it
grants contents, on the other side it marks the terrain of possible contents.
This ambiguity is intrinsic to utopia.
Facing the anticonstructivist argument, which emphasizes the coercive
or narrowing e√ect of utopias, one possible response is to renounce the
utopic construction. But this renunciation is also the renunciation of a
societal identity and intelligibility. Because in utopia, society ‘‘encounters
as an initial investiture of the world and of society itself with a ‘final sense’
of life, by way of which people recognize and a≈rm themselves as a collec-
tive entity. This self-creation of society as collective life is, in a matter of
speaking, the ‘function’ of utopia.’’Ω Utopia is the other face of the founda-
tional myth: a social image that motivates reciprocal recognition between
citizens of the same social body.
Another possible response involves renouncing utopias with contents.
Utopia, then, is a formal referent that doesn’t specify ends. It determines
less what to do than how to do it. In this way it maintains an open as well
as indeterminate character. Such is the case with the utopia of consensus, the
utopia of transparency, and the utopia of the perfectly representative.
Here we confront the challenge of devising utopias which are open but
not indeterminate. Social imaginary, normative horizon, transcendental
referent, mystifying-demystifying: in any case, utopic production is cur-
rently passing through the ambiguous situation of being simultaneously
indispensable and indefensible. Indispensable, because the magnitude of
the crisis and the lack of shared projects makes even more urgent a horizon
that, although utopic, restores personal experience to hope; because the
litany of social theory, the death of the truth and the multiplication of
interpretative methods and models require referents that are capable of
orienting the projects of knowledge with meaning and new values. Indis-
pensable because the social image or self-perception pierces such uncer-
tainty that collective identity and intelligibility are threatened from vari-
ous flanks, and utopic invention provides dreams to share, fantasies on
which to ground intersubjectivity, ideals capable of restoring the terrain of
dialogue.
That utopic plenitude would make sense doesn’t imply that it operates
reductively on the real. Such a reduction is only necessary in utopias that
are millenialist, fundamentalist, closed-o√, or exclusive. To conceive uto-
pia as the order where necessities are definitively met is also to conceive
dystopia. Necessities are never met. Rather, they are ceaselessly set in
motion. The ‘‘meta-necessities’’ of utopia would be Campanella’s City of
the Sun becoming the Brave New World of Aldous Huxley: a very e≈cient
program for immobility, and for forgetting that there are necessities that
demand realization, potentialities that deserve to be actualized. The ab-
sence of needs is the absence of movement, and life requires movement.
An open utopia requires a change of rationality, and its e≈ciency for
promoting it is what makes a political practice out of utopic speculation.
The utopic construct should rescue as means and ends attributes such as
solidarity and participation, social identity and freedom, belonging and
work, communication and a√ection, collective creativity and cultural di-
versity: these possess value in themselves and radiate e√ects which are
desirable beyond themselves. The continual realization of necessities and
the progressive actualization of potentialities is, simultaneously, a road
and a utopia. Today, to actualize this integrating rationality is a crucial
challenge, because it implies breaking with the industrialist supposition to
which capitalisms as well as real socialisms have been heir: namely, that
only a highly industrialized society can begin by freeing human potentials.
Crisis closes o√ the future from the unfeasibility of the present. Vul-
nerability, precariousness, and the high degree of conflict in our peripheral
societies corrode the will towards utopian constructs. Utopias that until
the recent past ruled social projects of modernization have lost credit and
popular legitimacy. Integrating modernization showed, for exogenous
reasons and endogenous causes, little capacity for integration. The crisis
swept away the last dreams of homogenous and constant progress.
What remains, as meaning and contents of utopia, for the Latin Ameri-
can periphery?
The answer could well be posed as the reverse of the question: what
remains to our precarious and tense realities if we cannot make them stand
out, in a horizon of meaning capable of transcending that same pre-
cariousness and tension? Our region is stocked with myths, dispersed
elements, the fragments of encounters, partial overflowings, informal in-
terstices through which fragments of fantasy that are born or survive
thread their way. One vein, not new but very much our own, would be to
assume a mestizaje capable of negating the negation of the other, and to open
the repressed abundance of intercultural riches inscribed in our history.
Between literature, landscape, culture, the partial rationalization of life,
and the certain dream of democratic coalitions, utopia can and must be
produced. Utopia in order to reread crisis and utopia to split it open.
Utopia, in order to restock with meaning what administrative rationality
(imposed in the adjustment, in Mephistophelian deals regarding external
credits, in the worthless composure of the utterly hopeless) has previously
despoiled. Utopia that would not necessarily be universal, rational, west-
ern. But neither would it be reduced to a bucolic purism that in a short
period of time would reflect the heterogeneity of our continent. Utopia
that reduces, that mixes, that hybridizes, that combines and recombines
anew the scarcity of the present in order to suggest the plenitude of the
future.
Utopia that is both a factual impossibility and a cultural necessity, a
political challenge and threat, dreams to trick both integration and the
apocalypse.
Notes
1 Cepaur, Desarollo a Escala Humana: Una opción para el futuro. Development Dialogue,
special number (Dag Hammarskjöld Foundation, 1986), 9.
2 Sir Thomas More, Part 1, Utopia. Trans. Ralph Robynson [1551, 1901]. NY: The Colo-
nial Press, 1901. 11 May 2001 »http://www.dholliday.com/tmore/utopia001.htm…
3 Tommaso Campanella, City of the Sun. Trans. T. W. Halliday [1885]. NY: The Colonial
Press, 1901. 11 May 2001 »http://eserver.org/fiction/city-of-the-sun.txt….
4 Sir Francis Bacon, The New Atlantis [1627]. 11 May 2001. »http://www.sirbacon.org/
links/newatlantis.htm…
5 Franz Hinkelammert, El realismo en política como arte de lo posible (Santiago de Chile:
flasco, 1984), 11.
6 Hinkelammert, El realismo, 13–14.
7 Norbert Lechner, El consenso como estrategia y como utopía (Santiago de Chile: flasco,
1983), 21.
8 In this respect see Franz Hinkelammert, Crítica de la razón utópica (San José de Costa
Rica: Colección Economía-Teología, 1984).
9 Norbert Lechner, El consenso como estrategia y como utopía (Santiago: flacso, 1983), 18.
Index
Adorno, T. A., 57, 59, 60, 61, 63, 65, 73, Capitalism, xiv, 15, 17, 18, 25, 27, 38, 83,
74, 75 nn.1, 14, 92 n.13, 126. See also 94, 113, 134, 144, 152; capitalist mod-
Critical theory; Frankfurt School ernization, 98; financial, 35 n.5, 38, 113;
Alienation, xii, xiii, 15, 39, 44–45, 63, 64, peripheral-dependent, 144
65; capitalist, 2; notion of, 74; of work, cepal, xiii, xiv, 84; cepalism, xvi, xix
62, 82 n.1, 119; eclac, 99, 116 n.4
Apocalypse, 34, 37; and apocalyptic Citizenship, 38, 52, 67, 69, 139; and cit-
thought, 30, 36, 44. See also izens, 47, 151. See also Democracy
Disenchantment Civil society, 67, 68, 87, 95, 97, 98, 99, 101,
Authoritarianism, ix, 48, 62; Authoritarian 103, 105, 112, 113, 114, 115, 144
State, 61 Coercion, 56, 64, 71, 82, 87, 150. See also
Autonomy, 45, 60, 63, 68, 83, 85, 98, 149; Repression
ideals of, ix; local, 139. See also Communication, 38, 77, 79, 126, 152;
Emancipation globalization, 21; revolution, 38; hori-
zontal, 69; social, 33. See also Mass
Bacon, F., 145, 148. See also Utopian communication
thought Complexity, 79, 87, 89, 90, 98, 114
Conflict, 67, 103–107, 111, 136, 147,
Campanella, T., 144, 145, 148, 149. See also 152
Utopian thought Consensus, 95, 96, 99, 100, 115, 151
156 Index
Consumption, 22, 23, 30, 40, 62, 84, 108; negation, 57, 58; dialectical thought,
habits, 110 57, 58
Crisis, xi–xviii, 86–90, 120, 124, 132, 135, Directionality, 132, 133, 135, 137, 139,
137, 142, 143, 152, 153; of governability, 147; historical, 129, 130
106, 114, 115; of intelligibility, xvi, 65, Discourse, viii, 19, 24, 25, 34, 36, 37, 44,
119, 121, 122, 136, 147, 151, 152; of or- 53, 65, 69, 126, 137; public, 102; of rev-
ganicity, xvii, 119, 120, 122; of para- olution, 135; of the social scientist, 121,
digms, 122, of the Planning State, 103– 122
114; of the State, 94–116, 136, 147, 151, Disenchantment, vii, ix, xvii, xviii, 1, 28,
152 31, 34, 45, 66, 69, 137, 138; culture of, 3,
Critical theory, 55–58, 60, 61, 63, 68, 70, 11; discourse of, 122; disenchanted, 14,
71, 73–75. See also Critical thought 15, 36, 38, 81. See also Apocalypse
Critical thought, 57–59, 62, 67, 69; Crit- Disintegration, 26, 37–38, 65. See also
icism, 36, 56–61, 64–67, 69, 70, 71, 74, Fragmentation
77, 82, 84, 135; Critique, 62, 64, 71, 73, Diversity, viii, xiii, xv, 6, 9, 10, 31, 32, 33,
81. See also Critical theory 80, 82, 83, 84, 85, 89; diversification, 22,
Culture, 14, 17, 26, 27, 32, 33, 34, 42, 49, 23, 79, 111, 120, 121; cultural, 21, 31,
50, 57, 69, 70, 71, 87–89, 92 n.11; cul- 152
tural change, 7, 49; cultural consump- Domination, 49, 50, 56, 58, 63, 64, 71, 74,
tion, 17, 23, 31, 34; of death, 27–30, and 99, 145; dominant culture, 57, 70; domi-
fundamentalism, 26; cultural hegemony, nant rationalities, 43, 70, 74, 85
48, 81–83; cultural industry, xiii, xv, xvi,
4, 17, 20, 30, 38, 44, 63, 70, 99, 151; sub- Education, 19, 72, 80, 82, 98, 130
cultures, 28, 29, 30; of survival 31. See Emancipation, viii, 2, 15, 16, 17, 30, 35
also Diversity; Identity n.4, 58, 60, 64, 68, 74, 78, 79, 89; collec-
tive emancipation, 8, 63; mass, 26, 63,
Decentralization, 18, 32, 67, 85, 87 64; redemption, xii, 2, 10, 15, 64. See also
Democracy, xiii, xv, 1, 14, 23, 26, 30, 32, Autonomy; Liberation; Revolution
67, 69, 84, 85, 87–89, 131, 132, 144, 150, Enlightenment, xvii, xviii, 60, 62, 69, 80,
151; democratic culture, 32, 89; demo- 100, 122, 123, 124, 137; reason, 128–
cratic order, 68, 71; democratization, 132; rationality, 124; utopia, 102. See also
viii, xv, 32, 69, 106, 120, 126. See also Critical theory
Citizenship Equity, xv, 90; equitable distribution, 87;
Development, ix, 5–7, 22, 23, 25, 26, 28, social, xiv, 32, 84. See also Redistribution
31, 32, 35 n.1, 36, 38, 41, 56, 62, 64, 65, Ethnocentrism, 81, 83, 84, 90; and ethnic
67, 70, 72, 78, 86, 97, 104–106, 123, 125, groups, 108; and ethnic minorities, 12
130, 133, 134, 137, 139; alternative, xv, n.2, 72
128; another, 71–74; changing style of, Everyday life, 5–9, 15, 18, 68, 74
82–88; crisis of, 94–96; discourse, xi– Exclusion, xi, xii, 20, 23, 26, 28, 64;
xviii, 11 n.2, 23, 35 n.1, 63, 66, 119, 120, excluded, 6, 7, 8, 12 n.2, 20–22, 28, 29,
130–134; model, xvi, 72, 90, 121; en- 32, 33, 108; social and socioeconomic,
dogenous, 39; and homogenization, 80; 26, 151
individual, 19, 20; new sensibilities of,
136; planning of, 110–114; styles of, 4, Fragmentation, 1, 17, 23, 30, 32, 38, 96,
9, 120 103–109, 113, 114, 121; social and
Dialectic, 50, 51, 58, 60, 65; dialectical socio-cultural, xv, 3, 4, 9, 25, 107, 115;
Index 157
and structural heterogeneity, 82, 83, 90, 61–63, 66, 68, 75 n.14, 125–128, 144;
95, 120, 139. See also Disintegration critique of, 71–74. See also Instrumental
Frankfurt School, 55, 56, 58–63, 65, 69, rationality
71, 73, 74, 75 n.16, 85, 126. See also Crit- Integration, xiii, 2, 3, 5, 6, 9, 10, 11, 12 n.2,
ical theory; Adorno, T. A.; Horkheimer, 23, 24, 37, 38, 65, 66, 79, 80, 82, 98, 99,
M.; Marcuse, H. 100, 108, 109; integratd, 20, 21, 29, 33,
Freedom, x, 57, 58, 59, 63, 64, 65, 78 36, 41, 46; social integration, xiv, 17, 21,
Fundamentalism, 24–27, 33, 34, 90 24, 28, 29, 32, 33, 37, 38, 84, 98, 108,
109, 111
Globalization, 4, 10, 22, 24, 27, 36, 70, 89; Intellectuals, xi, xii, xvi, 15, 27, 55, 62, 63,
global communication, 17, 83; global 65, 66, 125, 135; and reality, xviii; and
order, 113; global system, 108 revolution, 135–137; roles of, xvii
Government, 96, 104, 114, 116, 142, 143,
149 Lechner, N., 92 n.11, 120
Governability, 109 Left, 11 n.1, 120, 125, 126, 128, 134, 135;
Grassroots, 68, 71; communities, viii; leftist intellectuals, xii
organizations, ix, 88 Legitimacy, 95, 96, 97, 99, 105, 106, 114,
115, 152; crisis of, 94, 95; legitimated
Habermas, J., 68 power, 101; political, 96, 124; social, 85,
Hegemony, 27, 43, 73, 90, 104, 122, 143; 87; of state planning, 95
and culture, 108; hegemonic order, 74 Liberalism, 27, 78, 81. See also Market(s)
Heller, A., 76 n.21, 92 n.11, 117–118 n.15 Liberation, xii, xiii, 5, 15, 16, 59, 60, 64;
Hinkelammert, F., 145, 150 mass, 5. See also Emancipation,
History, ix, 37, 39, 42, 60, 66, 79, 80, 97, Revolution
129, 139, 145; direction of, 64, 78; dis- Lyotard, J. F., 78. See also Postmodernism
course of, 137; reason of, 136
Horkheimer, M., 57, 59, 60, 61. See also Manipulation, 50, 58, 69, 70–72
Critical theory, Frankfurt School Marcuse, H., 56, 58–61. See also Frankfurt
School
Identity, x, 4, 5, 39, 40, 71, 72, 79, 137, Market(s), xviii, 10, 14, 15, 18, 27, 29, 33,
151, 152; collective, xviii, 68, 88, 152; 38, 42–44, 48, 67, 68, 87, 89, 99, 102,
cultural, 5, 70, 84, 121, 131; and identi- 127, 128, 132, 143, 146, 147, 150; cul-
fication, 32, 33, 42, 56, 57; social, 23. See tural, 8, 34; globalization of, 4, 36; hege-
also Culture mony, 92 n.10; ideology, 17, 82, 83, 84,
Ideology, xiv, xviii, 18, 27, 49, 50, 56, 58, 85, 122; rationalization of, xii; and social
59, 66, 70, 94, 97, 145; hegemonic, xv, fragmentation, 30–32
79–82; of progress, xii; pro-market, 131 Marxism, xvi, 48, 62, 69, 78, 82, 119
Individualism, 8, 9, 20, 27, 80, 82, 83, 143 Masses, xvii, 14, 16, 23, 30, 32, 38, 66, 80,
Informal sector, xiv, 5, 37, 39, 91 n.9, 107, 97, 122, 143, 144; mass society, 37
108, 109, 120 Mass communication, 26, 63; mass media,
Instrumental rationality, 18–21, 27, 29, 30, 19, 25, 126; means of, 31. See also
31, 84; capitalist, 27; instrumentaliza- Communication
tion, 19–21, 71; planning, revolution, Medina Echavarría, J. 104, 116 n.7, 117
and, 124–128. See also Instrumental n.11
reason Mega-actor, 99, 100, 101, 111, 113, 114,
Instrumental reason, 19–21, 30, 32, 33, 135
158 Index
Meta-actor, 99, 100, 101, 106, 114, 115, revolution, 129–137. See also Planning
135 State
Metanarratives, 60, 65, 70, 78, 79, 119, Planning State, 1, 94–116, 117 n.13, 120,
120; crisis of, 122; and narratives, viii, 11 123, 127, 146, 147; and revolution, 128–
n.1, 44, 45, 49, 53, 69, 147. See also 132; as utopia, 132–136. See also
Modernity, Modernization, Progress Planning
Modernity, xi, 25, 32, 39, 40, 41, 45, 60, 70, Planners, 69, 70, 95, 96, 100, 101, 103, 123,
75 n.14, 83, 85, 88, 89, 122, 124, 143, 124, 133, 137, 138. See also Planning,
144; crisis of, 77; critique of, 77–81, Planning State
128–132 Plato, 133, 134, 144, 146, 148, 149; Plato-
Modernization, x, xi, xiv, 4, 11 n.2, 14, 16, nism, 57
17, 20, 25, 27, 40, 41, 78, 80, 84, 86, 89, Pluralism, xviii, 69, 89, 138, 149
90, 94, 95, 97, 98, 100, 101, 131, 132, Politics, viii, 14, 24, 27, 32, 45, 47, 48, 49,
133, 134, 139, 140 n.6, 144, 152; alterna- 51, 52, 66, 68, 71, 74, 77, 80, 82, 86, 88,
tives forms of, 67–71; crisis of, 104–114, 89, 131, 135, 142–144; political culture,
120–128; paradigm, 84 11 n.1; political discourse, xii, 15, 19, 26,
More, T., 144, 148, 149. See also Utopian 96; political parties, 87–89, 109; political
thought power, 100, 120, 136; political system,
xiii, xv, 37, 68
Negative thought, 36, 55–71, 75; nega- Poor, 22–24
tion, 58–65, 72, 73; negativity, 58, 59, Popper, K., 133, 134
72. See also Critical thought Postmodernism, 77–90, 92 n.11, 134; post-
Neoliberalism, xvi, 15, 48, 77, 78, 81, 84, modern culture, 92 n.11; postmodern
89, 128, 150; neoliberals, 81, 84, 92 n.10, debate, 88, 89, 90, 121; postmodern dis-
114, 127, 128, 134, 150; neoliberal ideol- course, 79, 81, 82, 122, 138, 139; and
ogy, 15, 150; neoliberal utopia, 146, 147; postmodernists, 78, 79, 128; postmod-
postmodern, 83. See also Privatization ern narrative, 81, 83; and postmoderns,
5, 65, 80, 90, 134; postmodern tribes,
Paradigms, xvii, 67, 77–80, 83, 84, 102, 140 46. See also Postmodernity
n.2, 147; change in, 89–90; crisis of, 77– Postmodernity, 30, 65, 80, 86, 123. See also
80, 119, 120, 124; of the Planning State, Postmodernism
111 Poverty, xii, 15, 20, 23, 33, 89, 109, 122
Paradox, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 43–45, 49 Power, 48, 50, 51, 62, 63, 70, 73, 74, 80, 83,
Participation, viii, ix, xv, 12 n.2, 31, 32, 85, 100, 104, 105, 107, 123, 125, 136, 137,
111, 128, 134, 152; collective, 30, 68; 143; rationalization of, 125; struggle for,
community, 33, 88; political, 23, 32, 126. See also State
139; social, 67, 84, 87, 89 Privatization, viii, xi, 14, 18, 21–24, 82,
Periphery, 43, 44, 63, 83, 153; peripheral 131; privatizing secularization, 24. See
capitalism, 90; peripheral societies, also Neoliberalism
152 Progress, ix, x, 4, 5, 11 n.2, 23, 59, 70, 78,
Personal development, xiii, xv, 33, 44, 45 79, 80, 100, 102, 109, 128, 129, 132;
Planning, 8, 37, 66, 83, 85–87, 89, 90, 92 directionality of, 100; of freedom, 57;
n.15, 116 n.7, n.8, 117 n.10, n.11, 122, and modernity, 78, 79, 80; rationality of,
137, 139, 140 n.8, 143; crisis of, 95–97, 70. See also Modernity, Metanarrative,
123–126; and instrumental reason, 125– Modernization
128; paradigm of, 100–102, 111; and Projects, ix, 5, 8, 11 n.1, 41, 50; collective
Index 159
projects, viii, 3, 4, 65, 138, 143; projects tion, 73, 123; structural change, 6, 10,
of modernization, xvii 106, 120, 123, 135
Public, 29, 54; public space, 68, 69, 107, Social fabric, 31, 72, 87–89, 101, 107, 114,
109 115, 126, 132, 147. See also Social actors,
Social movements
Quality of life, 40–41, 44, 45, 126 Socialism, 25, 36, 127–133, 143, 152;
socialist criticism, 76 n.21. See also
Radical change, 4, 11 n.1, 47, 49, 51, 55, Revolution
125, 135. See also Revolution Social knowledge, 122, 123, 132, 137;
Rationality, 74, 79, 80, 85, 105, 130; com- social reflection, 63, 121; social research,
municational, 67, 68; crisis of, 122, 124, 74; social researchers, 73. See also Social
137; of development, 39; dominant, 43, science
71; formal, 60; of history, 80, 123; Social mobility, 12 n.2, 22, 23, 28, 38
instrumental, 19, 24, 30, 31, 126, 127, Social movements, ix, xv, 10, 47, 68, 69,
128; of modernity, 122, 123; technical, 87–89, 132; new, xv, 68, 69, 72, 88, 139.
24, 104, 133; technological, 25, 123, 124; See also Social actors, Social fabric
totalizing, 120; utopian, 133. See also Social science, 78, 87, 89; crisis of, ix, xi,
Rationalization xvi–xviii, 66, 77, 78, 119–124; new para-
Rationalization, xii, 44, 60, 62, 63, 73, 125, digms of, 137–139. See also Social scien-
127, 130, 153; systemic, 63, 68, 70. See tist, Social theory
also Rationality Social scientist, 67, 68, 119, 120–124, 132,
Redistribution, 82, 101, 105, 109, 126; pol- 137–139. See also Social science, Social
icies, 110; redistributive struggle, 32; theory
regressive, 37; social, 105, 127. See also Social theory, 56, 64, 65, 66, 121, 152. See
Equity also Social Science, Social scientist
Reification, 58, 59, 60, 62, 71. See also Solidarity, 16, 19, 22, 32, 33, 43, 108, 126,
Alienation 128, 134, 139, 147, 151, 152
Repression, 49, 50, 59, 63. See also State, xiv, 80, 82, 83, 85, 87, 88, 90, 125,
Coercion 140 n.3, 143; delegitimation of, ix, 94–
Resistance, 43, 68, 73, 74 115; populist, 102, 113, 120; postmod-
Revolt, 47–54 ern critique of, 71; planning, x, xiv, xv,
Revolution, xii, xvii, xviii, 1, 11, 43, 48, 64, 82, 111, 122, 127–131; Statist narrative,
65, 86, 122, 123, 138, 140 n.4; death of, 2– 52. See also Power, Planning State
6, 15, 16; market, 92 n.10; revolutionary Subjectivity, x, 11, 48, 60, 69, 70, 89; Sub-
discourse, 125; social, xiii, 17, 122; social- ject, ix, 2, 79, 81
ist, xii, 15, 16, 122–37. See also Emancipa-
tion; Liberation; Radical change Technological change, 78, 85, 89
Touraine, A., 93 n.17
Secularization, viii, 14, 16, 17, 18, 19, 25, Transnationalization, 5, 42, 108, 113
27, 32, 33, 65. See also Modernity
Social actors, 69, 82, 87, 100, 106, 110, Underdevelopment, 39, 115, 122; under-
115, 116, 132; and social sectors, 95, developed countries, 43
106, 107. See also Social fabric, Social Unmasking, 50, 51, 56, 63, 64, 70; unveil-
movements ing, 58
Social change, xi, xii, xvi, xvii, 15, 16, 69, Utopia, xiii, 10, 15, 17, 26, 27, 28, 47, 50,
120, 123, 132, 136; social transforma- 52, 79, 85, 95, 114, 122, 126, 130–137,
160 Index
140 n.8, 142–153; capitalist, 18; com- 142–144; utopian reason, 133–135, 140
munitarian, 146, 147; and critical func- n.7; utopianism, xi, xviii, 124, 135, 137;
tion, 144–146; critique of, 82; death of, utopianizing rationality, 124; utopic
1, 3, 9, 24; developmentalist, 146, 147; construction, 145–147, 150, 151; utopic
end of, 11 n.1; open, 149, 150–52; of thinking, 144, 150. See also Utopia
Planning State, 97–103; socialist, xi,
147; technocratic, 104; times of, 148. See Violence, viii, x, 3, 6, 8, 25, 28–30, 32, 34,
also Utopian thought 42, 48, 99, 108; social, 33
Utopian thought, 91 n.7, 142; crisis and, Vulnerability, 44, 105, 112–115
Martín Hopenhayn is a consultant for the United Nations Economic
Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (cepal).
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Hopenhayn, Martín.
[Ni apocalípticos, ni integrados. English]
No apocalypse, no integration : modernism and postmodernism in
Latin America / Martín Hopenhayn; translated by Elizabeth Rosa
Horan and Cynthia Margarita Tompkins.
p. cm. – (Post-contemporary interventions) (Latin America in
translation/en traducción/em tradução)
Includes index.
isbn 0-8223-2760-0 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn 0-8223-2769-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Latin America—Civilization—1948–. 2. Latin America—Social
conditions—1982–. 3. Latin America—Economic conditions—
1982–. I. Title. II. Series. III. Series: Latin America in translation/en
traducción/em tradução.
f1414.2.h62 2001 980.03%3—dc21 2001040630

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No Apocalypse, No Integration

Series Editors: Stanley Fish and

A Book in the Series

Latin America in Translation

Sponsored by the Duke-

University of North Carolina

Program in Latin American Studies

Modernism and Postmodernism in Latin America

Translated by Cynthia Margarita Tompkins

and Elizabeth Rosa Horan

Duke University Press Durham and London 2001

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper $

Typeset in Galliard by Keystone Typesetting, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear

on the last printed page of this book.

Preface to the Spanish Edition vii

A thread, tough and slender, runs through the following pages.

If some myths of emancipation or development seem to have shattered

institutional requisite for actualizing old emancipatory ideals there is a

The essays constituting this book are variations on a pair of questions.

The Crisis of Utopias Promising Social Change

The Crisis of State Modernization and Development Discourse

terized our countries even in times of shared enthusiasm with respect to

most direct and democratic alternative for processing demands. Attrib-

Crisis among Intellectuals and Social Scientists

planations of reality were overtaken by scenarios requiring new, more

tion lead to much higher stakes of heterodoxy in the means of grasping

We are, without doubt, crossed by interwoven uncertainties. These uncer-

be said to constitute the raw material for meaningful emancipation, for

single out the ones that most contribute to a culture of disenchantment

articulative impact of new technologies and the ﬂourishing cultural indus-

nally, the preeminence of a kind of exclusionary transnationalization that

The Smouldering Ashes of the Everyday

experiment and a ludic passage between fashions, languages, and expres-

and diversiﬁed exchange with diverse peers. So is everyday life networked,

which accumulation rests less in the continuity of a business than in a

Life’s Cool Joy

life’s joy in this discontinuous, uncertain, fragmented, shifting scenario?

to ends, this subordination is not evident in the culture of disenchant-

nomena include: progressive participation in the economically active population, in

politics in South America share a common characteristic: from indigenous

From the Side of the Disenchanted: Where Are

tion metamorphose into reasons for a theology of liberation. Aren’t these

hints at contradictory de-secularizing pressures moving underneath the

exclusionist secularization consecrated as status quo, whether for the pres-

On the Side of the Triumphant: Booming Culture at the

The culture of instrumentalization

ment. In other words, the most recent e√ects of communicational global-

The culture of privatization

towards intensiﬁed integration on the symbolic-cultural level (which is an

Playing with Prospects

Privatizing secularization, clothed in transnational, technologizing

modernization. Instead, it proposes to constitute an alternative, replacing

networks, its power in the means of mass communication, its ﬁnancial

Lacking utopias of popular emancipation, lacking stable channels

bility. The same lack of prospects for social integration or occupational

Diversiﬁcation with fragmentation (of spheres of competency,