"Aesthetic Politics"

That phrase occurs in the subtitle of Javier Sanjinés's 2004 book Mestizaje Upside Down, a book about Bolivian cultural politics.* Cultural nationalism is a literary, aestheticized discourse. From the title of this book I also got the idea of "flipping" exceptionalism. I had already come up with the reversibility of the inferiority and superiority complex, and of progressive and reactionary versions of cultural exceptionalism.

Walter Benjamin famously said that Fascism aestheticized politics, and Marxism politicized art. Something like that, I believe in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." That's true enough. So chiasmus is another master trope for cultural exceptionalism. Unamuno loved that trope, so he said instead of Europeanizing Spain, we should Hispanize Europe (for example). Now I'm remembering an essay by Thomas Mermall on Unamuno and chiasmus, in PMLA I think. Too late at night to look it up.

UPDATE

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*I found this book first from a reference on Profacero's blog. It is a very good book and it is very good for me to read something so outside of my normal Peninsular expertise.

Atavistic

Exceptionalism is atavistic. People who should know better, sophisticated postmodern intellectuals, love it.

It is also atavistic in its direct appeal to the ancestors.

It is not that I am particularly immune to this rhetoric. I just think it is advantageous to step outside it. I am not interested in developing my own version or refining the best existing version of it even further.

***

I propose another test: you might describe an exceptionalism without identifying it, pseudonymously. Then evaluate it. Only then, "lift the veil" to see what you have. In other words, you would have to evaluate it without knowing whether it is a progressive or Fascist form of cultural nationalism.

La increíble hazaña de ser mexicano (2010)

I read this book (whose title is equivalent to "the incredible feat of being Mexican) because I have always enjoyed Heriberto Yépez's writing. We've never met in person but have had friendly conversations on the internet. This book shows his habitual brilliance and is a classic example of exceptionalist / anti-exceptionalist thinking. In other words, the rejection of old versions of identity in favor of the "New Mexican" who will take inspiration from Vasconelos (raza cósmica). It has some psychoanalysis, psychohistory. Some acute cultural analysis. It does repeat the commonplaces from other writers on Mexican identity, in an effort at going beyond them.

His point about humor as repressive mechanism is very good. According to him, humor (like laughing at corrupt politicians) is not transgressive, but pretty much leaves things in their place.

I don't know enough to take issue with anything he writes here, not being a Mexicanist or even close. I don't even know enough to agree with him! Some points are more convincing than others, prima facie, but I will let people who know better sort that out.

I will use the book, though, as a classic example of many of the points I am making in "13 Ways of Looking at the Poetics of Cultural Exceptionalism." Especially my axiom that says: "exceptionalism draws strength from weakness." The devastating dissection of the classic Mexican character has, as its aim, the triumphant emergence of a new subject.

Flipping exceptionalism

Citizens of Exceptionstan believe they have achieved a coherent identity, but what they really need to do is realize their country is decadent: to achieve true excepcionistanidad,they need to recover their indigenous roots.

That is the argument of a book I'm reading. By someone whom I admire and have corresponded with quite a bit. I had thought the title of his book was ironic, but no, he is putting forth earnest arguments. I'll blog a bit more and not be so coy about the title when I'm in a position to say more.

I'm interested in all these metaphors of flipping, reversibility, turning upside down, deriving strength from weakness, leverage. We know how cultural nationalism derives strength from grievances, from the exploitation of psychic wounds.

Introduction -- almost free of signposting

Cultural Exceptionalism involves the claim that a particular people, nation, or region of the world possesses an especially distinctive cultural identity or unique historical destiny. In the most trivial sense, all cultures are different from one another, and from this perspective exceptionalism might be merely a default position. The idea of culture itself, in fact, might be exceptionalist in this broader sense. The same might be said of the idea of the nation, but not all nationalism finds expression in this characteristically literary discourse. The Spanish poet and critic Dámaso Alonso, for example, speaks of Spain’s “necesidad dramática de una expresión diferenciada, nacional” (758; dramatic necessity for a differentiated, national expression). His contention is not just that Spain is unique among nations, but that its difference necessitates a dramatically differentiated cultural expression.

Any appeal to the exceptional, distinctive, differentiated, distinctive, particular, or unique, associated with a nation or people, is likely to be exceptionalist. Such appeals are often essentialist, even when they appear to be based on history rather than on nature. (Other varieties of identity politics, based on gender, sexual identity, or other differential factors apart from ethnicity and nationality, follow a similar logic.) The rhetorical structure of any particular set of such claims—whether made on behalf of Spain, Ireland, Cuba, Mexico, Brazil, the United States, or Japan—will fall into predictable patterns. These patterns comprise a poetics, or a system of tropes that gives structure to a particular discourse. This term, of course, also refers to the theory of poetry itself, and modern poets from Yeats and Williams to Cavafy, Lorca, Lezama Lima, and Paz have often linked their own poetics to cultural nationalism.

A comparative approach encourages a skeptical view of exceptionalism generally: the mere existence of more than one cultural nationalism of this type casts doubt on all of them. The assumption that cultures (and the claims made on their behalf) are inherently incommensurable prevents meaningful comparisons and hence reinforces the logic of this discourse. There is a danger, then, in debating exceptionalist claims one by one or in getting mired down in an overly nuanced analysis of any given version. Too much detail or nuance—while desirable in other contexts—might detract from the overarching goal of defining the characteristics shared by exceptionalist narratives as a general category. This refusal of nuance seems counterintuitive, given the immense value accorded to the distinctive and the unique in humanistic research. Nevertheless, there is also value in seeing how claims for uniqueness follow predictable patterns.

The thirteen axioms that follow outline a general theory of exceptionalism. These axioms take the form of “prophecy after the event” in that they make predictions based on the shape that this discourse has already taken. Cultural projects that deviate too sharply from these predictions will probably not be classified as exceptionalist in any significant sense. The first four axioms concern the literariness of exceptionalist rhetoric. The next three have to do with its ideological causes and effects. The remainder explore the curiously paradoxical nature of the beast, including its reversals of negative and positive poles of value, its tensions with univeralism or the ideology of “normality,” and its peculiar status within discourses of modernity.

Since this essay had its origin as part of a book-chapter on a lecture by Federico García Lorca, Juego y teoría del duende, it is grounded in the study of Spanish exceptionalism, and in the specific example of Lorca himself. A general theory of the poetics of cultural exceptionalism can be grounded in Lorca’s lecture because it is a typical example a kind of discourse found elsewhere in Spanish literature and intellectual history, and in other formulations of this variety of poetics found elsewhere. (A close reading of Lorca’s essay in terms of his own poetics is a complementary task. ) The aim here, then, is to predict what Lorca’s duende might look like from the point of view of a “comparative exceptionalism.” American cultural and literary exceptionalism, both in the United States and in Latin America, forms part of this comparative framework. Needless to say, other projects of cultural exceptionalism on the Iberian peninsular itself (Basque, Catalan, Galician, Portuguese, etc...), also bear a direct relation to similar discourses in Spain and Latin America. Cultural exceptionalism is also strong on the periphery of Europe: Greece, Ireland... Taken together, these varieties of cultural nationalism might describe the way that exceptionalism would look like in the fictional nation of Exceptionstan or Exceptionlandia.

New York School

I have been heavily invested in the New York School. Here is a blog devoted to these poets and painters. I have a collection of several dozen books by Ashbery, Schuyler, Koch, Guest, and O'Hara, plus second generation poets like David Shapiro and Ted Berrigan. I own books by Berrigan's sons too.

This is strange to me, now. To be so heavily invested in a world that is not mine, that has nothing to do with me. At some point I could have said, I know enough about it, and moved on. It's kind of like a fantasy life.

Our PhDs

Here are some KU graduates with PhDs from the time I've been here:

Megan Thortnon

Erin Finzer

Laura Kanost

Antonio Moreno

Camilla Stevens

María García Otero

Maryanne Leone

Paola Hernández