Latin American Discourses of Modernity and the Labyrinth of the Three Minotaurs
In this contribution,in order to suggest a more flexible alter-native to these approaches,I suggest studying the dynamics of conte-mporary Latin American politics through the lens of a Venezuelan author whose work is somewhat well-known at least in northern South America,but has never been translated into English or applied in International Relations.Yet,his work speaks to the deficits discussed above in unique ways.José Manuel Briceño Guerrero,born in 1929 in the Llanos region of Venezuela,studied languages and philosophy in Caracas,Paris,Moscow,Vienna and Granada before settling down in Mérida,Venezuela,where he was active as “a philosopher,a poet,a writer,a university professor and a very remarkable citizen” until his death in 2014 (Rodríguez,2016).He also travelled widely,including to China,and was awarded the National Prize for Literature in 1996,sometimes using the pen name Jonuel Brigue .
His most relevant academic works,which were published in a number of editions during his lifetime,and which are key to the understanding of regional dynamics suggested here,are América Latina en el mundo[Latin America in the World] (Briceño,2003) and El laberinto de los tres minotauros[The Labyrinth of the Three Minotaurs] (Briceño,2014).I suggest that specifically in the latter work,there is a rich understanding of the origin,functioning and change of region-specific norms that might serve as a contribution to the study of the “norm life cycle” (Finnemore and Sikkink,1998) in a regional international society somewhat different from the OECD world contexts in which they are most often observed.At the heart of Briceño's perspective,there lies an essentially postcolonial descri-ption of how Latin America was both created in the context of and continually exposed to the intellectual hegemony of European thought,culture and norms (Briceño,2003).Such a perspective is,of course,quite common in contemporary International Relations theori-zing on the region (Rojas,2016).One important difference,however,is the abstention from the often criticized binarizations of such theorizing,which according to one critic “is in many ways surreptitiously repeating Manichean and essentialist discursive as well as epistemic patterns” (Acheraïou,2011),as well as an emphasis on the creative character of subaltern agency in Latin America.
According to Briceño (2014),the fundamental discursive orientation of Latin America towards and self-identification with the knowledge of the old continent can be expressed in terms of “pai-deia”,or of the vision of a perpetual ascent of the “second Europe”[1] towards the norms set up by its erstwhile colonizer.But in contrast to other approaches,the result here is not the reproduction of a binary between Northern and Southern thinking in the sense of “mirror knowledge”,but rather something perhaps akin to “prism know-ledge”,which “thrives on the emergence of new realities,perspectives and challenges” (Santos,2018).Rather than purely “binary conflict” and/or a submissive relation between metropolitan and colonial forms of knowledge,there is rather a creative dynamic in dealing with modernist impositions in terms of generating new “ways of proble-matizing the complexity of modern world society” (Kleinschmidt,2018),even if this creativity is clearly the result of hierarchical and exclusionary social relations.According to Briceño (2014),“three great discourses” have emerged as a result of hybridization and mesti-zajefrom the clash of different knowledge claims in the process of Latin American colonization,resistance,and dependent moderni-zation.These three discourses now govern any attempts at claiming knowledge,legitimizing social or political action in Latin America.
The first of these is the discourse of “reason”,an essentially rationalist amalgam of European enlightenment ideas and Latin American elite discussions of the 18th and 19th centuries.It relies on the optimistic language of concepts such as “modernity”,“progress” or “development”.It is typically dominant in official speech and documents,though it might also legitimize insurgency or resistance (Briceño,2014).At the same time,it should not be confused with a concrete ideological program that could be localized on a left-right axis—the discourse of reason may very well appear in astonishingly similar form in claims to the superiority of market logic or in appeals to the supreme importance of societal planning (cf. Toro,2005).It is the style of argumentation that determines the belonging of a speech act to this language game,not the actual content in terms of social ontologies.At the same time,this discourse should not be confused with contemporary northern or occidental,often quite “bounded”rationalism.It may utilize a similar language,and often pay tribute to its specific doctrines—such as liberalism or Marxism—but is,in many ways,more radical and absolute.In this sense,it has not undergone the differentiation between reasonand rationalityso characteristic of Western modernity and its social sciences (Freyberg-Inan，2016).The rationalist discourse does not pay attention to human frailty,context or critical questioning,it is absolute and imperative (Bianculli,2010).
The second grand discourse may be termed “Christian-His-panic” ,“mantuano” (Briceño,2014),or more specifically,“Hispano-Catholic” (Nahon-Serfaty,2017).In contrast to the homage that the rationalist discourse often pays to universalist modern concepts,“mantuano”[2] language tends to be quite specific to Latin American culture,often carrying with it an antiquated effect.It is inherently hierarchical in its ontology,and puts a strong emphasis on the metaphysical aspects of human existence.It emphasizes interpersonal loyalty and inherited privilege—or the lack thereof—which are defined in terms of family or race,and also places great value on the acceptance of an implicitly assumed natural cosmic order.In this cosmology,humans are neither simply actors on behalf of a greater cause nor highly agential,powerful beings—which they both tend to become in the rationalist discourse (Briceño,2014).In this sense,perhaps the closest occidental conceptual equivalent to “mantuano” discourse would be the “great chain of being” with its emphasis on hierarchical classification of all things in the philosophical thought of antiquity (Mahoney,1987).Yet,while the former was considered an explicit philosophical doctrine,“mantuano” discourse is rarely uttered in public pronouncements—preserve of the language of reason—but rather is encountered in more private or implicit communication of expectations regarding interpersonal behavior.
Finally,there is the “savage discourse”,which is the product of centuries of alienation caused by conquest,slavery,imperial dom-ination,and nowadays,dependent center-periphery relations.In the context of this discourse,both the rational and the Christian-Hispanic universes of meaning are profoundly alien,a source of “inassimilable alterity” which generates resentment in all those implicitly treated as subalterns in their language,yet still objects of their impositions (Briceño,2014).It could be understood as a reaction to the “im-possibility of nativist longing” (Mendoza,2013),which refers to the dilemma of the colonized subject to be either dismissed as irrational or to be romanticized.The savage discourse is subversive and disaggregating.It recognizes the blind spots and paradoxes of the rationalist and “mantuano” discourses,and may generate momentary revenge and satisfaction through the sabotage of their functioning (Briceño,2014).However,the social preserve of the savage discourse is the realm of the intimate and affective (Briceño,2014).Any attempt to,for example,formulate political demands in its terms will result in other discourses taking over—even decolonial approaches could be seen to generate,“in a top-down manner,an abstract and romanticised figure of the native and claims to speak on his behalf ” (Morozov and Pavlova，2018).