48.1.Hoyos What is the Contemporary

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Revista de Estudios Hispnicos, Tomo XLVIII, Nmero 1, Marzo 2014,pp. 97-103 (Article)

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97Shortened Title

Revista de Estudios Hispnicos 48 (2014)

HCTOR HOYOS AND MARLIA LIBRANDI-ROCHA

Introduction

The articles in this dossier originate in an international col-loquium entitled What is the Contemporary? that took place at Stanford University on May 2122, 2012.1 We had the good fortune of having several distinguished speakers, some of them contributors here, approach this question in broad terms and with a special interest in Latin America. Our simple, yet compelling point of departure was the observation that the contemporary, as a critical category and an object of study, is often taken for granted or entirely omitted from academic discussion. Courses are taught and books are edited with the modi-fier contemporary as an organizing principleas in Contemporary Poetry from the Americas or Contemporary Brazilian Cinemabut these coinages beg the question of what exactly the contemporary is. Even at the most basic, etymological level, the idea of sharing the times leads to asking when would that shared epoch begin, who shares it and how, and so forth. Declaring by fiat that contemporary Latin American literature, for instance, begins in key historical turning points like 1898, 1945, 1989, or 2001 is easily suspect of arbitrariness. Simi-larly, equating contemporary with modern, although grammatically cor-rect, eludes an investigation about the aesthetic values associated with each of these evocative terms. Once we started to examine the matter more closely, and to ponder on the specific ramifications of the problem for Latin America, we found ourselves with a veritable field of inquiry.

It is high time to study the contemporary. Much scholarship as-sumes it is the purview of journalistic criticism, and waits for consensus to arise before considering it a viable subject of analysis. Higher learning favors the study of the past over the present, which adds institutional blindness to the inherent difficulty of considering a changing object, as the idiom goes, in real time. This is all the more pervasive in the case of Latin American culture, which does not circulate in mainstream metro-politan humanistic discourse, and is thus relegated to an always-already

98 Hctor Hoyos and Marlia Librandi-Rocha

past condition in many academic settings. Global English seems to be, for all intents and purposes, the language of the contemporary. Transla-tions from Spanish or Portuguese, the most influential languages spoken in Latin America, hardly match translations into them. At the same time, the rise of social media and other technologies has ambiguous ef-fects: on the one hand, it holds the promise of immediate relevance, of overcoming the obstacles to cultural exchange that hitherto existed; on the other, they bring about a form of presentism that disperses attention and forecloses historical depth.

Giorgio Agamben provides the articles in this collection with a common, underlying critical strategy. Glossing Nietzsches Untimely Meditations, the Italian thinker asserts that [t]hose who are truly contemporary, who truly belong to their time, are those who neither perfectly coincide with it nor adjust themselves to its demands (40). Further emphasizing disjuncture, Agamben goes on to define the true contemporary, in metaphoric terms, as someone who firmly holds his gaze on his own time so as to perceive not its light, but rather its dark-ness (44). Contributors have undertaken the task of being themselves contemporaries in the latter sense. As a result, the essays presented here not only reflect on the contemporary at a purely conceptual, abstract, or theoretical level, they also expand on the implications of this asyn-chronic outlook for the practice of literary criticism, for the configura-tion of our field, and for the study of specific cultural products that may respond to this model. The essays in this volume belong to each of these strands of reflection.

Another important referent that is at the background of several contributions is the work of Pascale Casanova. Influenced by Bourdieu, Casanova famously speaks of a Greenwich meridian of world literature, which makes it possible to estimate the relative aesthetic distance from the center of the world of letters of all those who belong to it (World Republic 88). Critics have bemoaned Casanovas alleged Eurocentrism, in our opinion confusing the descriptive and the prescriptive aspects of her argument.2 She describes how Paris, as a legacy of colonial power but also as a reflection of its rich public sphere, has been, and in many regards still is, at the center of world literature. This she considers to be a matter of fact, given the dynamics of translation, representation, and dissemination in a consolidated global literary market. Her pre-scriptive side is about empowering the disenfranchised of the literary

99Theories of the Contemporary in South America

world order, not about reifying theirour?condition. For Casanova, synchronization can be a radical force of change: it is by attaining newness that semi-peripheral authors can transform the power struc-ture. Her chief example is Rubn Daros well-known appropriation of French symbolism (Casanova, Literature 88). Here we arrive at something of an aporia. Does Daro gain prominence by assimilating Parisian culture, as Casanova claims, or does Casanova herself recon-stitute French literary capital by ventriloquizing Daro? It is tempting, following this train of thought, to estrange oneself from actual reading communities. At the colloquium, and in the full-fledged, self-standing contributions featured here, we actually engaged with French-based scholars, from Universit Paris 8, in a conversation on Latin Ameri-canism and theory. It became evident that perceiving the darkness of the contemporary, to revisit Agambens words, is not something that emanates from a center into the periphery, but the result of complex transactions across several locales.

After Alberto Moreiras, one may characterize Latin Ameri-canism as the sum total of academic discourse on Latin America whether carried out in Latin America, the United States, in Europe, or elsewhere (qtd. in Beverley 1). This compilation features practi-tioners from the three main realms Moreiras alludes to, in an effort to investigate asynchronicity across their respective discursive communi-ties. Although Spanish and English are their languages of trade, they actively involve Portuguese and French in their work, sometimes as native speakers. We find that this multilingual, multipolar approach allows direct access to theory and primary sources, without the lag of translation and transposition.

Idelber Avelar inaugurates this dossier with his essay, Con-temporary Intersections of Ecology and Culture: On Amerindian Perspectivism and the Critique of Anthropocentrism. In an effort to characterize our epoch in broad, encompassing terms, he borrows from Dipesh Chakrabartys notion of the Anthropocene, a new geological era defined by the effects of mankind on the environment. In conversation with the Brazilian anthropologist Eduardo Viveiros de Castros notion of the internalization of nature and the Argentinean philosopher Fa-bin Ludueas work on biopolitics, among other sources, Avelar shows how Latin America, and the Amazon in particular, has become a major terrain for rethinking the intersection between cultural history and


natural history. The task for a truly contemporary mode of research in the humanities would be the critique of anthropocentrisma default, long-standing basis for our efforts that has become, as of late, unten-able.

Meanwhile, Lionel Ruffel traces the trajectory of the term contemporary, punctuated by its Latin American configurations. His article, entitled What is the Contemporary? Brief Archeology of a Question, offers a cultural history of the topic. Ruffels invaluable documentation takes us from Rosario to Boston, the United Kingdom, and Santiago, among other sites where the question has been asked. The author considers several media, including the plastic arts, where the term contemporary articulates cultural capital. By interrogating the successive births of the contemporary, Ruffel delivers a compelling Foucaultian reflection on the institutionalization and naturalization of the investigation of the contemporary. In his words, he shows how the contemporary acts as a symptom of current contradictions in our disciplinary structure (139). Provocatively, he imagines an institutional configuration where contemporary studies occupy, at least in part, the space of cultural studies.

While the first two essays converse with Foucault on the bio-political and the institutional aspects of his work, respectively, Valeria de los Ros invokes the notion of cognitive map to remind us of the spatial, not just temporal, attributes of the contemporary. Through in-sightful readings of Alejandro Zambra and Pola Olaixarac, De los Ros identifies three traits of our shared times: an embodied experience that combines local and global elements; the summoning of one or more historical moments; and the presence of an audio/visual media archive. These aspects would allow us to construct the memory of a subject that often aspires to be confused with the authoras in the by now familiar case of Belano/Bolaoor that uses the first person singular to project a certain degree of intimacy or subjectivity in conflict. Such findings are particularly relevant for the study of contemporary recreations of the seventiesbeyond a politics of memory, what they mean for an individuals sense of time.

Diego Vecchio takes a different route. In a fascinating reading of Los muertos no mienten and La pregunta freudiana, published by Luis Gusmn in 2009 and 2011, respectively, Vecchio compares the birth of two parallel discourses at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth


century: psychoanalysis and spiritism. The author ponders the striking contemporaneity of these very different phenomena, particularly with regard to their different views on the unconscious. Vecchio retraces this under-examined history to illuminate the work of the Argentine writer, demonstrating how Gusmn, himself a writer and a psychoanalyst, reenacts the conflicts and the hidden affinities between the Freudian unconscious and what he refers to as inconsciente bruto, gtico, or salvaje, postulated by spiritualism. This allows Vecchio to draw implications about how literature may reveal and estrange contemporaneity itself.

In her explorative essay, La villa: poltica contempornea y esttica, Paola Corts-Rocca reexamines some of the tenets of cultural studies in light of the dossiers theme. She evaluates the contemporary vis--vis las palabras que definan el campo de lo latinoamericano in the 1990s (18485), namely transculturation, national identity, hybridity, and so forth. Corts-Rocca raises important questions, such as: Cules son [las] palabras [que definen el campo de lo latinoame-ricano] hoy? and, decisively, Cules son los conceptos que articulan hoy esttica y poltica? (185). She grounds her analysis on the narra-tive of Gabriela Cabezn Cmara and Ricardo Strafacce, in conversa-tion with the filmic work of Federico Len and Marcos Martnez. For the critic, todays political literature bears out the preeminence of performativity over representation.

In the final contribution in the dossier, Contratiempos. Li-teratura y poca, Julio Premat offers a challenging view about the contemporary as un tiempo que no es (214). For the author, the contemporary is the present converted into concept and, at the same time, the impossibility of capturing the elusive passage of time. To think through this paradox, Premat associates the contemporary with the psychoanalytical notion of the real, and the presence/absence of time with the unconscious. As an Aleph, he suggests, the time of the contemporary implies the multiplicity and the juxtaposition of different times, without contradiction. It also implies a space presently marked by global cultural mestizajes (211). The radical synchronicity of Premats position calls for a profound methodological change and a revision of our notions of time and space, thus reframing the question of how to study the contemporary in literature?

Together, these six articles chart a new terrain for the study of the contemporary in Latin Americanism. Crucially, they understand the field as a subject of theory, as opposed to an object to theorize upon. If


there is a Greenwich meridian for scholarship, and not just for fiction, then this state-of-the art compilation seeks to claim it as its own. At the same time, our goal is to open new roads for future research.

One possible route would be to extend an invitation to other spaces that construct the contemporary, such as literary festivals. Some are nonscholarly in nature, such as the various instantiations of Hay Festival in Bogot and Cartagena, while others involve local scholars alongside novelists, such as the Forum de Literatura Brasileira Con-tempornea at the Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. There is an untapped potential of combining the efforts of art practitioners and theorists, in the spirit of the workshop that Lionel Ruffel describes. Such collaborations could give heft and critical import to Latin Ameri-can locales within a world-system of literature, beyond merely promo-tional efforts to stimulate the rapid consumption of fictiona cycle that leads to unassimilated overproduction and disperse cultural capital. We must demand literature that plunges deeply into the present, and provide the critical tools and the resounding chambers to make it mat-ter. The transnational model advocated here may serve as an example. We sought to build on the asymmetric collaboration of Hispanophone and Lusophone elements, but always in the presence of a planetary discursive community. We were reminded that in his 1897 LAction restreinte, Stphane Mallarm suggested that one should not proclaim ones own contemporaneity, for the present escapes apprehension: Mal inform celui qui se crierait son propre contemporain (372). Be this as it may, our finding is that writers, thinkers and artists do proclaim their own contemporaneity, accepting to live in and to give form to its untimelinessperhaps, a way to throw the dice again and again.

When it comes to the contemporary, as this Dilogo Crtico of Revista de Estudios Hispnicos makes clear, questions matter as much as, if not more than, answers. We hope to lend a fresh pair of eyes to the study of present-day culture, elicit a reconsideration of our roles as scholars, and ultimately encourage readers of this dossier to seize the present moment and explore its perilous territory.

Stanford University


NOTES

1 The event was organized by Cultural Synchronization and Disjuncture and Tan-gible Thoughts on Luso-Brazilian Literature, both Research Unit Working Groups from the Division of Literatures, Cultures, and Languages at Stanford University. Additional support came from a Faculty Conference Grant from the Center for Latin American Studies. Other co-sponsors were the Department of Iberian and Latin American Cultures, the Department of French and Italian, the Europe Center, Mod-ern Thought and Literature, and the Humanities Center. Universit Paris 8 also made the event possible. Adam Morris, Caroline Egan, and Patricia Valderrama assisted in the preparation of the Dilogo crtico manuscript. Our acknowledgement goes to all.

2 See, for instance, Snchez Prado, Ignacio M., ed. Amrica Latina en la Literatura Mundial. Pittsburgh: Instituto Internacional de Literatura Iberoamericana, Univer-sidad de Pittsburgh, 2006. Print.

WORKS CITED

Agamben, Giorgio. What Is an Apparatus? and Other Essays. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2009: 4044. Print.

Beverley, John. Latinamericanism After 9/11. Durham: Duke UP, 2011. Print.Casanova, Pascale. Literature as a World. New Left Review 31 (2005): 7190. Print.. The World Republic of Letters. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2004. Print.Mallarm, Stphane. Ouvres Compltes. Paris: Gallimard, 1945. Print.

48.1.Hoyos What is the Contemporary

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