Archivo Bolívar Echeverría Discurso crítico y filosofía de la cultura

Multiple modernity*
Bolívar Echeverría

Before getting into the core of this presentation, I would like to tell
you something about the perspective through which modernity has become a
central theme of my work at the University of Mexico. It arises from my
research in cultural history and, more specifically, into the history of
Latin American culture during the Seventeenth century, the century of the
Baroque. This is a prolonged and seminal period of Latin American history,
which happens to be a very neglected chapter in the academic books and
studies of the continent’s history.
In Latin America, the theoretical approach to modernity has to do
with a current discussion on the nature of political thought: the
discussion about democracy, its possibilities at present and its economic
and social promises for the future.
It is well known –and there is no need to insist on it- the situation
of permanent economic and political disaster, in which the historical
development of Latin America has been trapped and seemingly appears unable
of breaking. The catastrophic exploitation of natural resources, to which
we can add a similar catastrophic overexploitation of labor, provides a
volatile wealth that a small minority of the population consumes with
scandalous rapidity. This leaves almost nothing to contribute to an
objective, public infrastructure, and condemns the majority of the people
to misery and frustration. The succession of all sorts of authoritarian
regimes, interrupted by periods of weak and merely formal “democratic”
governments, confirms time and again that the oligarchy remains the
untouched species of political life in Latin America.
In the last ten years, as the “socialist perspective” seems to have
lost relevance, and radical revolution is no longer seen as a realistic
alternative, the current political and sociotheoretical thought sets the
clock back almost exactly one hundred years. What Latin American societies
*
Presentation at a Colloquium on XVIIth Century in Mexico, organized by Josefa
Salmon, Loyola University, New Orleans, 2001.

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must do in order to get out of this destructive and self-destructive

destiny should be, once more, to accomplish a historical transition from
pre-modern social organization to a real modern one.
The history of Latin American nations beginning with the wars of
Independence against Spain in the early Nineteenth century has been a
history that repeats a peculiar and never-ending circular pattern of
behavior; a vicious circle that can be called “the circle of democracy and
development”.
«Democracy first», is the leading statement; only by applying it, the
conditions of injustice prevailing in these republics can be really
changed. On the other hand, it is impossible for democracy to become an
essential part of political life without a minimum of fair economic play
and a minimun of justice in social life. Thus, democracy appears as a pre-
condition of economic and social development but also as a result of them.
And the same occurs with development, it appears also as a pre-condition
and as a result of democracy.
How can this vicious circle be broken? How can democracy and
development be reached simultaneously?
Leftist intellectuals and social reformers used to have an answer to
this question. But now, at the exact place where the left used to put the
idea of revolution, the current generation of leading politicians and
academics revives another method of reaching it, the old method of
modernization; restores the idea of the healing effects of a modernization
shock.
The shock of modernization (another name for “neoliberal” policy) is
nothing more than the combined shock of total liberalization in the field
of economics and a complete institutionalization of representative
democracy in political life.
What does “modernization” mean in the case of Latin America?
The modernization of a social and historical reality characterized as pre-
modern, implies or brings with it -both again as a condition and as a
result- a radical change, a change of its essential features, a change of
identity.

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And what can this change of identity possibly mean? It could mean
either change as a complete substitution of the traditional identity or
change as a renewed reconstitution of that identity.
The first definition of radical change, as substitution of identity,
has been tried by the official praxis for almost two centuries by
successive waves of “progressive politics” in the Latin American
republics.
The administration of Porfirio Díaz in Mexico a hundred years ago,
could be mentioned as a salient example of this.
French, English, but most of all, American identity can be pointed out as
the identities that Latin American societies were induced to copy and
reproduce as their own.
Beginning with the attempt of the Bourbonian Despotisme Illustré
during the Eighteenth century, substitution of identity is a way of
modernization that has failed time and again in the history of Latin
America. The repeated failure of these attempts has had its byproducts: a
long list of monstrous phenomena on the economic and political scene,
which are usually seen as almost picturesque features of social life in
Latin America. For instance, corruption, a fact that begins with the
unfair subsidy of the national capitalists by the state (to make them
better able to compete on the world market) and continues to trickle down
to the whole economy and the entire social body.
For instance in politics: the excesses of militarism, “caudillismo”,
populism, oligarchic “democratism,” etc. The best example of this is
perhaps “caciquismo”, a peculiar adaptive configuration of “natural”,
almost tribal exercise of local power played out at the national political
level, right in the middle of modern institutional life. This is a form of
domination that pervades economic, social, political and high cultural
life in Latin America. This phenomenon can only be understood as the
result of a process of hybridization; it is a conflictive mixture of the
new imported identity and its “modern” political culture with the old
identity and the traditional political culture; a mixture where the new

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and modern appears too weak to become exclusive, and where the old one
proves to be too strong to be eliminated.
As you can see, the theme of modernity appears in Latin America as a
question of cultural and historical anthropology.
Emancipation and affluence, or if you want democracy and development
are two goals inextricably linked together, and they become possible only
in modern civilization; even more, they characterize modernity as such.
But -and this is the question- is this established, this so-called
“Western” image of this pairing (democracy and development) its only
possible actualization? In fact, can modernity only exist as what we know
traditionally as “Western” modernity?
Alexis de Tocqueville observed that the spread of democracy, of
“American democracy”, as he understood it, could only exist in the
presence of an “egalitarian trend” in civilized life. That is why he meant
that only certain countries should try to be democratic and certain
others, like Russia or South America, should not. A hundred years later,
Max Weber spoke of capitalism and the main feature of modernity, as an
economic fact sustained by a “spirit”, by a pattern of behavior that
matches at best with a community of Calvinistic-protestant ethics. Many
other observations and studies similar to those of de Tocqueville and
Weber determined what can be called the cultural determination of
“Western” modernity. ” A trend towards egalitarian behavior” in social
life; social internalization of an “ethic of productivistic self-
repression”, becomes the feature of an economic and a political culture.
These are the features of communal identity that lead us to study “Western
modernity” -that is, Western democracy/Western development- as a huge and
a very complex figure in cultural history.
At this point, Karl Marx’s critical approach to the capitalist
reproduction of social wealth becomes crucial. This is so, because
cultural forms, as George Bataille says, always come up as condensations
of strategies for surmounting a contradiction between the renewed needs of
the social body and the new limits put to them by nature, strategies to
reach a compromise between drives and constrains. The specific

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contradiction of social life in modern civilization -a contradiction that

can be found at the core of what Fernand Braudel calls “la civilisation
materielle”- seems to be, as Marx formulates it, the “contradiction
between the concrete, ‘natural’ or non-mercantile mode of reproduction of
social life, on the one side, and an abstract, artificial or capitalistic-
mercantile mode of performing that same reproduction, on the other. This
is the contradiction that appears in the objective world under the the
form of a contradiction between the “use-value” of things, on the one
hand, and the “exchange value” of the same on the other.
Thus, cultural forms in modern “Western” civilization should be seen
as emerging under the gravitation of a dominant necessity, the necessity
to surmount the “capitalist contradiction” prevailing in modern everyday
life. This contradiction dominates not only the modern process of
circulation of social wealth as a huge world of commodities but each and
every act of production and consumption of concrete goods and services.
According to Marx, all perception of the world of life and its components
must come in modern “Western” civilization through a determining
experience, the experience of this capitalistic contradiction. Modern
people must live in a world that pays obedience to two legalities at the
same time; a world that follows simultaneously two incompatible organizing
principles and has therefore two divergent dynamics. The first one, the
reproduction dynamic of the concrete qualitative dimension of social body
and social wealth can be seen as the “natural” dynamic of production and
consumption of “values in use”, as a process of work and enjoyment. The
second one, a reproductions dynamic of the abstract, only quantitatively
growing dimension of the social world can be seen as the dynamic of
production and consumption of pure economic value, as a process of
exploitation of surplus value and accumulation of capital. Modern people
must live in a world where the first of these two dynamics, the concrete
one, is permanently dominated and subordinated -subsumiert, says Marx- by
the second, the abstract one; a world, in sum, where the qualitative
dimension of life is constantly sacrificed to the economic-quantitative
part of itself.

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Identities, that is, cultural forms in modern times can then come up
as condensations of very different strategies to surmount countless sorts
of conflictive situations, but they cannot hide the fact that the most
radical and acute contradiction with which they have to deal is the
contradiction between -on the one hand- the “natural” mode of social life,
the life that produces and consumes values in use as such, that cares
about the concrete consistency of the world, and, on the other hand, the
capitalistic-mercantile mode of it. The life that produces and consumes
abstract economic values, amounts to a sort of currency that is a meant
for nothing but its own reproduction, a life that cares only about the
growth or the progress of the piece of capital (riches) that it presumes
to posses.
Max Weber studies Protestant ethics as the most pure or adequate
response to the “call” or the “spirit of capitalism”, that is, to the
behavior pattern that capitalism requires of modern human beings so they
can lead a prosperous life. His book on this matter may be seen as one of
the best theoretical approaches to the basic cultural form in modern
“Western” civilization. Max Weber’s assumption is that all other possible
“calls” or all other possible “spirits” that may still be active in modern
society are condemned to disappear, that they are tendentially non
existent. For him, modern history is not only a history of the dominance
of the “spirit of capitalism” but a history of its exclusivity. Now, if we
observe modern society before its hypothetical total conversion to the
“spirit of capitalism”, we can see a society that lives under capitalism
but has developed many impure or not quite adequate responses to the
“call” or the “spirit of capitalism”, responses that are being reproduced
together and parallel to Protestant ethics.
The question in modern society seems to be not about how to obey the
“spirit of capitalism” and identify one self with it, but, less
conspicuously, about the strategy required in every day life to surmount
the capitalistic contradiction, to neutralize it and to make habitable or
livable a world that otherwise would be unbearable because of its inner
contradiction. If we consider this fact, if we do not think of modern

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ethics only in terms of contributing or supporting capitalism but in terms

of enduring or bearing capitalism, then the question arises unavoidably is
if the cultural form that comes from the Protestant ethics the only or
exclusive basic cultural form in modern Western civilization? Or can we
think of other basic cultural forms that come from other strategies and
patterns of behavior under the gravitation of capitalist contradiction?
As you can see, this question is crucial if we have to deal with such
problems of identity as the problems that I mentioned before in the case
of the Latin American societies. Because if we can assert that
“Protestant” basic form of modern culture is not the only one but just one
of several other possible versions of this basic cultural form, then that
change of identity that is considered indispensable for the modernization
of the Latin American societies could not be necessarily a substitution of
identity, not an assumption of the cultural forms based on “Protestant”
ethics, but an internal change to another possible modern identity, a
radical re-constitution of cultural forms based on another sort of modern
“ethics”.
If we contest the claim by the now dominant, so called “Western”
model of modern emancipation and affluence, as being the only possible
one, then we can answer in the affirmative to the crucial question about
whether or not there are there other alternative figures of modern
democracy and modern development to the established one, that could be
considered now as valid and possible?
If we look at people’s everyday behavior in the capitalist mode of
modern life, in its contradictory determination, we can detect not one but
several spontaneous ways of composing a strategy to convert it into a
normal, a “natural” reality in what otherwise could be considered a
hostile, unlivable reality. If we take as the main criterion for
classifying these many strategies the specific attitude towards the
capitalist contradiction that we can find in each of them, we distinguish
four different types. Borrowing the terminology of the main stylistic
trends in the history of art since the Renaissance, we can call them: the

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realistic ethos, the classical ethos, the romantic ethos and the baroque
ethos.
Let’s consider very briefly the main features of these four figures
of modern ethos.
The strategy of behavior that we call realistic corresponds in many
ways to the “Protestant ethics” described by Weber. It has a particular
but very effective way of neutralizing the capitalistic contradiction: it
uses the recourse of simply denying it. Concrete qualitative needs are
perfectly convertible to quantitative abstract-mercantile needs; whatever
is good for the accumulation of capital is also good for the improvement
of values in use. Accumulation and satisfaction are for this ethos
essentially the same; they are practically not discernable from each
other. There is no place for a contradiction; the “natural” form of the
dynamics of social reproduction is for him perfectly well represented by
its mercantile-capitalistic dynamics. The conflicts that may appear
between them are due to exceptional, accidental episodes of malfunction
that the march of progress will soon eliminate. This realistic ethos, that
teaches to take life under capitalism exactly as it is, without any
utopian weakness or deviation, is of course the most functional cultural
basic form that comes up in the capitalistic modernity. It favors
capitalist development, in the same measure in which capitalist
development confirms it.
The second modern strategy for living under capitalism, the “romantic
ethos”, shares with the former the same attitude of denial facing the
capitalist contradiction in economic life. Far from being incompatible,
for both of these strategies, reproduction of capital and realization of
values in use coincide. But, opposite to realism, for the romantic ethos
this happens not because the concrete or “natural form” of human life is
reducible to the capitalist form, but on the contrary because this
capitalist form is a special historical configuration, a peculiar way of
accomplishment of that concrete or “natural form”. Accumulation becomes
transfigured (verklërt); it is not just an economic compulsion but it has
a concrete spiritual dignity; it is a realization of the spirit, the

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“spirit of enterprise”. Individuals are not just a mass of working forces

under the command of capital but real sovereign subjects, members of a
concrete community, a macro-subject that is the national state, a subject
that has the command over his national accumulation of capital.
The third modern ethos, the “classical ethos”, takes another way to
neutralize the capitalist contradiction of modern life. It does not imply,
as the earlier two do, an identification of the human subject with the
subordination or subsuming of “natural” life under the “life” of capital.
It realizes the experience of sacrifice that this subordination implies
and keeps its distance from the capitalist destiny. The “classical”
strategy to live under capitalism constructs a positive attitude towards
it but only inasmuch as capitalism appears as an unavoidable condition of
the new possibilities that technical progress opens to human life. The
philosophes of the Enlightenment period of French history would be perhaps
the best exponents of this modern ethos.
But preparing oneself to live within capitalism, by means of
neutralizing its contradiction, does not always imply an internalizing or
an affirmative attitude towards the subordination of concrete reproduction
of life under the reproduction of capital. A negative, dysfunctional
behavior is also able to neutralize that contradiction in everyday life.
That is the case of the baroque version of modern ethos. Aware of the
subordination and the sacrifice that it implies, the Baroque strategy
-completely opposite to the realistic and the romantic and clearly
different from the classical— it does not internalize that capitalist fate
and is also reluctant to accept the sacrifice of the “natural” dynamics of
social reproduction to the dynamics of the “self-valuing economic value”
(sichselbst verwertende wert, says Marx). This Baroque behavior turns the
sacrifice of the real qualitative consistence of the world into a
construction of an imagined second qualitative consistence for it. «Man
can endure in the real, unbearable conditions of life during the
capitalist modernity, but only if he simultaneously re-tells himself his
experience in another way, an imagined, a “transreal” way. This could be
the motto of the baroque ethos. Of course, the baroque basic cultural form

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can -as well as the classic or the romantic can in their own way- be seen
as an obstacle in the pure and orthodox development of capitalism, but in
itself it also implies a deep conformity with it, an acceptance of
capitalist destiny.
“Decorazione assoluta”, so refers Th. W. Adorno to Baroque art. What
he means is that the specific feature of a Baroque work have to be found
in the ambiguity of the dialectics of central and peripheral elements, of
essential and accessory levels. In a Baroque painting, for instance,
certain of its elements or levels that should be secondary, only
ornamental in a traditional renaissance painting, become at that point
protagonistic that they are able to propose their own “forming principle”,
a second degree principle, for the picture as a whole, yet without
abandoning its dependent, subordinated function. Take, as an example, the
famous trompe-l’oeil in the Meninas-painting by Velázquez. In a Baroque
image, the image contains a duplication of itself within itself, a
duplication that over-determines it and makes it mean uncertainly more
than it would mean as a classical image. This uneasiness with the very
fact of representation that prevails in the Baroque representation of the
world -an uneasiness that leads the work of art to be always transcending
itself, always telling that it says more and always doing so but in a
fleeting, enigmatical way- is similar to the uneasiness of modern everyday
life as it appears to the “B” ethos when it creates a second qualitative
consistence, an imagined consistence, for that world of values in use that
is being sacrificed to the accumulation of capital. This similarity is the
reason for the name “Baroque” for the fourth of the basic cultural forms
that we try to describe in the Western capitalist modernity.
I would like to insist on this issue of Baroque modernity because -as
I already told you- the concept of a baroque ethos can give us an
important key for the comprehension of the Latin American societies, their
culture and their history.
Cervantes, in his ambivalent -condemning and praising- approach to
the Hispanic world at the beginning of the so called “Baroque century”,
has shown the first historical results of typical baroque behavior in the

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satiric, exaggerated or caricaturized figure of Don Quixote. In his

misunderstandings with the real world, Don Quixote has arrived to the
point where only the translation of it into a tale can make it acceptable
for him. Only “aesthetized,” “literaturized” (made part of a roman of
chivalry) can reality be bearable for this allegory of decadent Spain that
is Don Quixote.
If we look now with archaeological eyes to the present forms of Latin
American everyday culture, we find that most of them refer us undoubtedly
to the seventeenth century, to the baroque culture that Cervantes’ Don
Quixote satirizes in its beginnings.
Much research coincides in confirming a main hypothesis of economic
history that says that an “economie-monde”, as Braudel calls it, was in
process of formation during the seventeenth century: An “économie-monde”
that was mostly “informal” or “de contrabando”, that didn’t develop as a
result of a economic policy of the Spanish Crown but against it, in the
margins of it or beneath it, was strong enough as to organize with its
underground legality most of the economic life of Mexico and Peru,
unifying it around the commercial activity of the Caribbean “Mediterranean
Sea”, as Carpentier used to call it.
The formation process of this Latin American economie monde -an
interrupted process- takes place during the historical period of a “large
XVII century” that begins with the defeat of the Spanish Gran Armada at
the end of the XVI century and ends with the expulsion of the Compañía de
Jesús in the second half of the XVIII century.
The nuclear form of the characteristic features of Latin America
culture was built spontaneously in this “large XVII century.” But not only
was there a strong organizing action that came from the urban centers
dominated by the “criollos”, an action in which the Compañía de Jesús took
a very important part. The broad and persistent utopian activity of the
Jesuits, that spread from California to Paraguay -an activity that was
focused on rebuilding the Catholic world according to the project of a
specific “Catholic” modernity- gave to the development of Latin American
culture some of its baroque orientations. We should not forget that the

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reason that Carlos III gave for the expulsion of the Jesuits was that they
-in a very Baroque way- had constructed an “informal” state, an “state
within the state” that could not be allowed to continue.
I won’t try now to approach this reflected, conscious and organized
origin of the Baroque forms of Latin American culture. I will say instead
a few words on the spontaneous origin of them.
The Baroque appears originally as a spontaneous behavior by the
remaining Indian population in the urban centers of México and Perú. It
appears as a survival-strategy in a situation of general decay of
civilized life in American Spain during the first decade of the XVII
century. In fact, not only had the ancient civilization of American
Indians had been completely destroyed together with 90 per cent of its
people, but also the incrustations of European civilization, that only a
few years earlier had been strong and flourishing, were exhausted and in
danger of regression or disappearance.
The recivilizing reaction to this desperate situation came as a
compelling reactualization of what has always been the “method” of
historical change in the history of human culture: the “method” of
“mestizaje” or “cultural crossing.” Culture can be defined as the process
in which a community cultivates its identity, its concrete, singular way
of being human. Each community behaves, as well in its praxis as in its
discourse, not only according to the specific human codification that
shapes that human codification into a very peculiar form. Culture is the
process of material and symbolic reproduction of this sub-codification in
every day life; a process that goes together with the material production
and consumption of meanings.
But reproduction of identity does not mean preservation of protection
of identity. Each subcodification of the human behavior implies not only
the construction of a closed world but also the recognition of its own
limitation; it implies not only the exclusion of all other alternative
subcodifications but also a need for them, an openness to other
possibilities of being human. Only when a community yields to this need of
the Other and loosens the stiffness of its subcodification can really

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cultivate its own being. The life of culture is only possible when an
identity is ready to be devoured by other identities and is capable of
devouring them. Culture, cultivation of identity, implies this process of
mutual devouring, this process of cultural “mestizaje”.
That part of the Indian population of Mexico and Peru at the
beginning of the 17th century that was not expelled from the “civilized”
centers, and had to survive in them, reinvented for the modern times this
old “method” of cultural historical change. Their behavior was typically
baroque. They accepted that they had been defeated, that their ancient
world had been annihilated and could not be revived anymore; they adapted
the new world of the conquerors and let their identity be devoured by the
Western European identity of the Spaniards. They did this, but they did
something else too, or something more; they took in their hands the task
of reconstructing a Western civilization that was not able to reproduce
itself properly in
America anymore. They worked in their own way in the Western cultural
structure and transformed it from within. The Indian-mestizo population
invented a way –a baroque way—to live the decline of Western-European or
Spanish civilization as a peculiar manner of civilized life, as a new,
properly American type of Western civilization.
This is the spontaneous historical process which created the original
cultural forms that we can find until now characterizing the Latin
American societies; those forms that the “criollo” society adopted and
developed in its reflective, political activity during that “long 17th
century.” It is a historical process that follows a baroque strategy, the
same strategy that was described as a distinctive feature of the fourth
ethos in capitalist modernity.
Modernity is multiple. There are at least four basic types of
modernity, and one of them, the baroque modernity, can be found as that
that determines the forms of civilized life still prevailing in societies
like those of Latin America. It is a very ineffective and subordinated
version of modernity because it doesn’t organize the world in order to
improve the capitalistic mode of economic reproduction but only in order

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to reconstruct the possibilities of human life that are being sacrificed

by that mode of reproduction.
I gather that there is a lesson to be learned from the actual
existence of such failed or not successful forms of modern life, like the
baroque modernity of Latin America. In times like ours, in which current
modern life seems to lead civilized life to a self-murderous future, a
historical account showing the plural tradition of modernity can let us
hope that not every possible civilized life will be lost with the end of
capitalist modernity; that, after all, an alternative modernity could
still be a real perspective.

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