Traditional and Critical Theories of Culture

Santiago Castro-Gomez, Adriana Johnson

Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 1, Issue 3, 2000, pp. 503-518 (Article)
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Traditional and Critical
Theories of Culture
Santiago Castro-Gmez
In his renowned 1937 programmatic
article Traditionelle and Kritische Theorie [Traditional and critical the-
ory], Max Horkheimer (1974 [1937], 223-71) established a distinction be-
tween two conceptions of theory. The rst of them refers to a series of
propositions whose validity lies in its correspondence with an object already
constituted prior to the act of representation. This radical separation be-
tween subject and object of knowledge converts theory into a pure activity
of thought, and the theorist into a disinterested spectator who is limited to
describing the world as it is. Such an idea of theory, which considers the
object of study to be a series of facticities and the subject to be the passive
element of an act of knowing, is identied by Horkheimer as traditional.
In opposition to this theory, he describes a second model that he designates
critical theory. In contrast to traditional theory, critical theory considers
that both science and the reality it studies are the product of a social praxis,
which means that the subject and object of knowledge nd themselves so-
cially performed. The object is not simply there, deposited before us and
waiting to be apprehended, nor is the subject merely the notary of reality.
Both subject and object are the result of complex social processes. The fun-
damental task of critical theory is therefore to reect upon the structures
from which both social reality as well as the theories that seek to account
for it are constructedincluding, of course, critical theory itself.
Even when Horkheimers project was conceived as a tool in the
struggle against the positivism of his time, it could, it seems to me, be very
useful for drawing up a map of modern theories on culture. I will argue
that such theories can be divided into two basic groups: Those that perceive
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culture as natural facticity, that is, that approach their object as if it were
rooted in human nature; and those that, on the contrary, consider culture
to be a realm structured by praxis, that is, a social construction of which
theoretical practice itself is a part. FollowingHorkheimer, I will call the rst
group the traditional theory of culture and the second the critical theory
of culture. In what follows, I will identify some characteristic elements of
traditional theory and then contrast these with the concept of geoculture
developed by postcolonial theories. With this I propose to present postcolo-
nialismas a critical theory of culture in times of globalization or, parodying
Fredric Jamesons phrase, as a cultural critique of late capitalism.
The Metaphysics of the Subject and the Traditional
Concept of Culture
Any consideration of the traditional theory of culture should begin with the
following epistemological reection: Culture becomes the object of knowl-
edge only whenmanconstitutes himself as a subject of history. The concepts
of culture, history, subject, and man refer to the same genealogi-
cal root, which, chronologically speaking, emerged and consolidated itself
between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries. Before this era, something
like culture was not thinkable, simply because the episteme that made
the concepts formation possible had not yet been congured. If we limit
ourselves solely to the types of theories arisen in the West, we will see that
neither in Greece nor Rome, nor in the Christian Middle Ages, was a the-
ory of culture possible in its traditional, much less critical, sense. This was
due to the fact that morals, politics, and knowledge were viewed as simple
prolongations of cosmological laws, that is, as a set of natural institutions
ordered around the consummation of a cosmologically predetermined end
(telos).
For Aristotle, truth, goodness, and justice are impossible without
considering the basic principles which govern the cosmos, because the
purpose of science, legislation, and morals is to manifest being insofar as
being, that is, the natural order such as it and not as it ,,.. For Aris-
totle, the reection on the social life of men does not pertain to theoretical
sciences, whichaddress only the basic principles of things, but to a type of
minor and less dignied knowledge designated practical sciences. First
philosophy, or metaphysics, occupies the pinnacle of the entire gamut of
knowledges, as its task is to establish the most universal notions. The object
of metaphysics is the immutable laws that rule the cosmos, and it is for
this reason the most abstract, the most exact, and the most general of all
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sciences. In contrast, sciences like politics and economy derive their general
concepts frommetaphysics because their object of study, human life, has no
autonomy whatsoever inrelationto the laws of the cosmos. The same is true
for the elds of morality and legislation. Since the laws of social life have
a cosmological foundation, independent of human will, the wisdom of the
good ruler consists precisely in recognizing this foundation and ensuring
that the laws of the polis are organized around the fulllment of mans
natural dispositions.
The crux of all this is the following: in an epistemological order in
which morals, politics, and knowledge are thought to be dependent on the
laws that rule the cosmos, the emergence of an object of knowledge called
culture is impossible. It is only when human life in its totality is perceived
as a dynamic process governed by laws created by man himself, and which
are, therefore, not simple corollaries of natural laws, that it is possible to
speak of culture in both the traditional and critical senses of the concept.
The modern idea of man, understood as a being that produces himself
in history and creates cultural values, can emerge only in the vacuum left
behind with the disappearance of classical cosmology.
It is, then, only during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries
that the idea of culture as a space of ,.//, / values, contrasted to
nature, began to consolidate itself.
1
Under this idea, culture constituted
that sphere of moral, religious, political, philosophical, and technological
values that permittedmantohumanize himself, that is, escape the tyranny
of the state of nature. If, as mentioned above, the metaphysics of the
cosmos turned social life into a purely derivative element whose dynamics
reected the general laws of the universe, now man saw himself as the
producer of his own forms of political and social organization. That is,
nature ceased to be the site to which man reverted in order to extract moral
lessons or contemplate divine glory and came to be seen instead as an object
to be put at the service of human interests. The metaphysics of the cosmos
was substituted by the metaphysics of the human. The world that modern
thinkers such as Bacon, Descartes, and Kant referred to was not the Greco-
Roman-Medieval cosmos, in which social life was a simple reection of
predetermined laws, but a world created by man in his image and likeness.
But if the world is a human construction and not an inexorable
reection of the /. .., then social life assumes an as yet unthought
dimension: temporality. Neither Plato, nor Aristotle, nor Thomas Aquinas
contemplated time as an axis from which human action derived cosmo-
logically predetermined meaning. Since man was not responsible for the
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creation of something new, time was nothing but the actualization of
potentialities established beforehand and forever. But when man was per-
ceived to be the sole architect of his own destiny, then it could be said that
humanity lay in the capacity to humanize, that is, in mans ability to con-
stitute himself in time through the creation of his own world: culture. The
rst characteristic of the traditional concept of culture is then the idea that
the gradual humanization of the species is a process that occurs in time,
in history, and is not already determined from an outside by cosmological
laws.
If through culture man slowly liberates himself from the chains
imposed by nature, then cultural forms acquire ever increasing degrees
of perfection to the extent that they permit the unfolding of the spirit,
that is, the exercise of human freedom. For Hegel, the cultural forms that
most closely resemble nature possess less dignity than those that are more
abstract. This is because nature belongs to the sphere of necessity, while
spirit is the proper site of freedom. Thus, for example, the religions that
practice in naturalist cults are inferior to Christianity, which possesses a
more abstract concept of divinity (God is spirit). The same is true of artistic
manifestations: those which imitate nature or revolve around the purely
gurative are inferior to those which privilege pure form, since these latter
have managed to escape the tyranny of material contents, which do not
bet the free expression of spirit. From Hegels hand we nd thus a second
characteristic of the traditional concept of culture: the privilege of so-called
high culture over and above popular culture. The lettered, or, as Weber
would say, rationalized forms of culture (musical codication, secular-
ized art, literature, philosophy, historiography) are the most elevated, since
through them man can reect upon himself and recognize his own spiri-
tual vocation. The human groups that have not been able to accede to the
reexivity of high culture remain rooted in youth and nd themselves
in need of the illumination radiating from lettered peoples, particularly
philosophers. The lettered and the philosophers are those people who can
elevate themselves above cultural contingencies and apprehend their object
from the outside, with the same gaze of a . / that condescends
to contemplate the world.
But if the evolutionof culture is the outcome of a historical process,
then freedom can also be objectied, particularly in the sphere of political
life. A nation that has reached maturity has not only developed a high,
that is lettered, culture, but has been able to constitute itself politically as a
nation-state. For Hegel, the state is the true bearer of culture, of a peoples
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national spirit. Only in the state does freedom become objective, because
it is there that all individuals are reconciled with the ethical substance of
the collectivity. Individuals must, therefore, subordinate themselves to the
state, since it is only throughits mediationthat they canlearnto be conscious
of who they are, what they want, and what their destiny is as members of
a single nation. Johann Gottfried von Herder, Rousseau, Montesquieu,
and Johann Gottlieb Fichte also considered the state to be the bearer of a
peoples national identity. Incontrast to the contractualists, they thought the
state should be established on the basis of geographical conditions, customs,
language, and the ways of thinking of the people over which it rules. This
brings us to the third characteristic of the traditional concept of culture: the
identity between people, nation, and culture. The fullest objectication of
culture, understood as freedom from imperatives coming from an exterior,
is the historical construction of the national-popular state. Individuals can
experience true freedom only as members of a state that juridically reects
what Montesquieu called the general spirit, Hegel the Volksgeist, and
Rousseau the general will.
Postcolonialism as a Critical Theory of Culture
Transferring the distinction introduced by Horkheimer to the present sub-
ject, it can be said that the difference between the traditional and critical
theories of culture is the recognition, by the latter, that its object of study
is not a natural facticity but a social construction. Culture is discerned not
as the site of freedom, that which protects us from the tyranny of nature,
but as the network of relations of power that produces values, beliefs, and
forms of knowledge. Theory is, in turn, taken not for a set of analytical
propositions uncontaminated by praxis, but as an integral part of this net of
inclusions and exclusions called social power. The theorist is not a passive
subject who assumes an attitude of scientic objectivity and neutrality, but
an active subject who nds himself or herself traversed by the same social
contradictions of the object under scrutiny. Subject and object form part
of the same lattice of powers and counterpowers from which neither can
escape.
One of the fundamental tools of critical theory, one whichdistances
it substantially from traditional theory, is the notion of totality. This con-
cept implies that society is a sui generis entity whose workings are relatively
independent of the activity of individuals composing it.
2
The social group
is something more than the total sum of its members and constitutes a sys-
tem of relations whose properties are different from those of the particular
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elements that enter into relation with each other. Societys plus compared
with its individuals lies, then, in the set of relations that individuals estab-
lish among themselves, so that what counts for critical theory is the kind of
transaction or negotiation that takes place between subject and structure.
The life of the structure cannot do without the subjects, as Emile Durkheim
and Niklas Luhmann proposed, nor can the life of the subjects do without
the structure, as the communitarians would have it.
This concept of totality certainly breaks with the metaphysics of
the cosmos, because the laws that structure the lives of men are not seen
as simple reections of a divine or cosmological normativity; but it also
breaks with the metaphysics of the subject, because social life is no longer
considered a transparent extension of human consciousness and will. This
means that social life does not free man fromthe tyranny of nature, guiding
him via culture to a gradual humanization, but subjects him instead to a
new kind of heteronomy, this time under the form of systems that are not
entirely under his control. Such systems are second nature in the sense
that they exert an external coercion on individuals and become, as Giddens
demonstrates, the conditions of possibility for human action. But the action
of individuals reverts, in turn, to the workings of the systems, impelling
their historical transformations.
In contrast to the traditional concept of culture, a critical theory
of culture posits, then, that social life is not the reign of freedom but that
of contradiction; that, because social life does not depend entirely on the
intentionality of consciousness but rather on the dialectic between subject
and structure, it generally has perverse consequences, that is, outcomes that
escape all rational planning. It can even be the case, as Beck, Giddens, and
Bauman show, that these perverse results do not emerge from a lack of
rationality, but rather as a consequence of it, as the crisis of the so-called
project of modernity teaches us (Beck 1986). Organized social relations,
whichfor traditional theory appear to be the way out of the state of nature
and an entry into the spiritual or civil site of culture, are perceived by
critical theory as a space of struggle and confronting interests.
In the eld of postcolonial theories,
3
the idea of totality is ex-
pressed in a categorythe world-system that was coined by the North
American social philosopher Immanuel Wallerstein (1994), but has been
widely used by such different theoreticians as Walter Mignolo, Enrique
Dussel, Anibal Quijano, and Gayatri Spivak. From a hermeneutical point
of view, the interest of this category lies in its reference to a structure of
/// dimensions, broadening thus the interpretative horizon of the tex
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national society that had functioned as the classical referent of social sci-
ences since the nineteenth century. The world-system is a sui generis set of
social relations congured in the sixteenth century as a consequence of the
European expansion over the Atlantic.
4
The world-system is a network of interdependencies that covers
a single space of social action. Sociologically speaking, this means that,
from the sixteenth century onward, the lives of an ever greater number
of people began to be linked by a planetary division of labor, coordinated
by smaller systemic units denominated nation-states. The differences be-
tween groups and societies that constitute the world-system do not depend
on their level of industrial development or degree of cultural evolution,
but on the // position they occupy within the system. The differ-
ences are thus not temporal but structural. Some of the systems social
zones occupy the function of centers, meaning that they monopolize the
hegemony, while others occupy a peripheral function because they are
relegated to the margins of the structures of power.
5
For one sector of contemporary traditional theory, this is an un-
comfortable perspective because it casts doubt upon the idea that the cog-
nitive, moral, and expressive development of different societies obeys the
unfolding of specic competencies of the human race. Even while accept-
ing the idea that the world-system functions as an a priori mechanism that
quasi-transcendentally organizes the social experience of the three spheres
described by Jrgen Habermas (1973), we do not nd ourselves before a
transcendental structure invested with anthropological status. It is rather a
historical structure, witha genesis inthe longsixteenthcentury, a maximum
systemic equilibrium between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that
currently nds itself in a moment of instability and disarticulation. From
this point of view, the true, the good, and the beautiful, that is, the set of his-
toric objectications of human activity we call culture, are not rooted in
the species transcendental abilities, but rather in relations of power that are
socially construed and which have acquired a global character. Culture
is indicative then not of a level of aesthetic, moral, or cognitive develop-
ment of anindividual, a group, or a society, but rather, as Wallerstein(1994)
afrms, signies the world-systems eld of ideological battles.
We arrive thus at the second of the characteristics of the modern
world-system: the colonial logic that since the sixteenth century has con-
ditionedits workings. Ineffect, the historical formationof the world-system
was fueled for a long time by the incorporation or military annexation of
new geographic zones by states that achieved a hegemonic position within
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the system. But this process of colonization was something constitutive and
not merely additive to its logic of operation, since the basic imperative of
the world-systemhas been, and continues to be, the incessant accumulation
of capital.
6
To accomplish this, it was necessary that the hegemonic states
of the world-system (Spain and Portugal rst, then Holland, France, and
England, and later the United States) open up new sources of supply for
their internal markets, with the goal of increasing the margin of benets.
The power relations congured by the world-systemthus acquired a colo-
nial character, which affected not only the old European colonies but also
a great number of peoples within the colonizing countries themselves. The
Peruvian sociologist Anibal Quijano (1999, 99100) has coined the concept
of coloniality of power to indicate this very situation.
But what has all of this to do with culture? A great deal, if we
keep in mind the fact that the social division of labor between central and
peripheral zones, both at the general level of the world-system, as well as
in the interior of its basic units, the nation-states, needed to be legitimized
ideologically by hegemonic groups or contested, also ideologically, by sub-
altern groups. While traditional theory naturalizes culture, projecting it
into an ideal space in which order and harmony (aesthetics of the beautiful)
reign, critical theory emphasizes the political and social, that is the con-
ictive, nature of culture. In other words, culture is seen as the battleeld
for the control of meaning. This means that critical theory does not isolate
culture from the process of its social production and from its structural
function inside the world-system and its subsystems, but rather advances
toward the question of the geopolitical economy of culture.
7
Postcolonial
theories radicalize this question by suspecting that the cultural logic of
the world-system is traversed by the social grammar of colonization.
Seen from this perspective, culture has been the space wherein the
coloniality of power has been legitimized or impugned from diverse social
perspectives. For reasons of space, I will consider only the ways in which the
coloniality of power was legitimized in ideological terms since the sixteenth
century, and not occupy myself here with the type of contestation to which
it has been submitted by what Wallerstein (1994) has named anti-systemic
movements. As I will argue, the colonial annexation of new zones of the
world-system was accompanied by the birth of two ideologies that served
as cultural pillars of the modern world-system: racism and universalism.
8
Although social hierarchies have always been justied on the basis
of the presumed inferiority or superiority of some peoples over others, the
concept of race is a theoretical construction characteristic of the modern
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Traditional and Critical Theories of Culture
world-system. It arises in the heat of the debates that took place in Spain
concerning the necessity to submit the American Indians to colonial domi-
nation, and it takes form in institutions like the .. and ..
The idea of race served as a criterion for social differentiation between the
white colonizers and the mulatto or mestizo colonized, seen as infe-
rior for their color and social origins.
9
In the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries, once the hegemony of the world-systemhadmigratedfromSpain
toward France and Holland, the concept of race was incorporated into the
theoretical register philosophy of history. Here, the hierarchical differ-
ences between peoplesand, concomitantly, their corresponding place
in the social division of laborare justied according to their level of de-
velopment, measured on a temporal-evolutionary scale. In consequence,
the peoples that appear more advanced on this scale could legitimately
occupy the territory of the more backward peoples and bestow the bene-
ts of civilization upon them with no troubling pangs of conscience. In the
nineteenth century, coinciding with the consolidation of British hegemony,
the concept of race was nally unhitched from the philosophy of history
and scienticized, incorporated into the methodology of positive sciences
and the nascent social sciences.
10
The superiority of some races over others
was seen as the inevitable result of the evolution of the species; it was an
inexorable law of nature, capable of being empirically veried.
What interests me here is the intrinsic relationship between the
colonial idea of race and the / concept of culture. If the maximiza-
tion of benets was the systemic imperative that impelled the territorial
annexation of colonies, then it was necessary to justify why their inhabi-
tants needed to be used as inexpensive labor for the benet of the coloniz-
ers: Indians, blacks, and mulattos could and should be enslaved because
they shared a series of values, beliefs, and forms of knowledge that im-
peded them from attaining the fruits of civilization on their own. There
was something in their culture, and perhaps in their very biology, that set
them at odds with the universalistic values shared by the white man. There
was no point of contact possible between the culture of the colonizers and
colonized, because either they possessed two different natures, as Juan
Gins de Seplveda posited (1987 [1892], 2728), or they possessed a sin-
gle nature but in different phases of historical evolution. In either case,
we nd ourselves before a naturalist or ideological concept of culture that
legitimizes the social and political inequalities of the world-system.
11
The intrinsically colonial character of the world-system also tra-
verses the second ideology considered in this essay: universalism. If racism
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serves to legitimize the inferiority of the colonized or subaltern groups
in the colonies, universalism sanctions the superiority of the colonizers or
hegemonic groups at the national level. As an heir of what I have in this
essay called the metaphysics of the cosmos, modern universalismis, above
all, an epistemological posture. It proclaims the possibility of acceding to
objectively valid knowledges concerning the physical and social world once
the adequate method is found. It afrms that the validity of this method
is guaranteed by its neutrality in terms of value, since it transcends the moti-
vations historically conditioned by culture. Its ground is not thus history,
and its traditions, but a faculty shared by all men, independently of race,
gender, age, or social condition: reason.
Viewed from the perspective of the world-system, universalism is
fully integrated into the logic that Weber called rationalization. It is not
now the inscrutable will of God that decides the happenings of individual
and social life, but man himself who, using reason, is able to decipher the
inherent laws of nature in order to place them at his service. This rehabili-
tation of man goes hand in hand with the idea of a domination over nature
through science and technology, whose true prophet was Francis Bacon. In
fact, nature is presented by Bacon as mans great adversary, the enemy
to be overcome in order for the contingencies of life to be domesticated
and the . / established over the earth (Bacon 1984 [1620]). The
value-free character of sciences andtechnologies was convertedthus intothe
ideological guarantee of the modernization promoted by the hegemonic
states of the world-systemand, concretely, by the bourgeoisie of these states.
The political institutionalization of the . / dreamt by Bacon
and Descartes becomes thus a problem of technical character, addressed by
economists, social scientists, educators, administrators, and experts of all
kinds. The founding imperative was to eliminate the cultural barriers
that obstructed the expansion of capital and the maximization of prots.
On an internal level, universalism served as the instrument of ju-
ridical and social control within nation-states. Insofar as it was an integral
part of the modern world-system, the structural function of the state was
to adjust the body and mind of all individuals belonging to a specic
territoriality to the global imperative of production. All state politics and
institutions (school, constitutions, law, hospitals, prisons, etc.) were canal-
ized toward the disciplining of the passions through work. The purpose
was to link all citizens to the global process of production through the sub-
jection of their time and bodies to a series of norms that were dened and
sanctioned by scientic-technical knowledge. In order for this to work, the
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Traditional and Critical Theories of Culture
state needed to be able to guarantee an impartial juridical framework
within which the people under its jurisdiction could be contemplated as
subjects of law. The juridical-political function of constitutions was pre-
cisely to invent citizenship, that is, create a formal eld of legibility which
would, on a microphysical level, render the macrostructural imperative of
the accumulation of capital viable.
At this point it is necessary toclarify that althoughpostcolonial the-
ories take up the microphysics of power analyzed by Michel Foucault, they
complement his perspective by working with what lurked in the French
theorists blindspot: relations of power are markedbymacrophysical imper-
atives of a colonial character.
12
Thus, for example, citizenship was not only
restricted to men who were married, literate, heterosexual, and proprietors,
but also, andespecially, to menwho were white. Inturn, the individuals that
fell outside the space of citizenship were not only the homosexuals, prison-
ers, mental patients, and political dissidents Foucault had in mind, but also
blacks, Indians, mestizos, gypsies, Jews, and now, in times of globalization,
ethnic minorities, immigrants, and /. (foreigners). In this way,
the genealogy of the microstructures of power is broadened by postcolonial
theories into a genealogy of the macrostructures of long duration. It can
be said, then, that postcolonial theories take the programof the ontology of
the present, masterfully begun by Foucault, to its ultimate consequences.
I want to conclude by pointing out two things. The rst is that,
at least until the rst half of the twentieth century, racism and univer-
salism congured the dominant geoculture of the modern world-system.
Racism is a legacy of what Dussel calls the rst modernity, the Hispanic-
Catholic one, while universalism is a legacy of the second modernity,
the eighteenth-century Enlightenment and its extension into nineteenth-
century positivism. Both ideologies created a representational sitea
culturethat legitimatedtheunprecedentedmobilizationof thelabor force
and nancial resources, of military campaigns and scientic discoveries, of
educational programs and juridical reforms; in short, of this whole set of
Faustian politics of social control, never before seen in history, which we
know as the project of modernity. Of courseand this is the other side
of the storythe unequal distribution of riches also generated antisystemic
movements that were successful to the extent that they could negotiate
with the hegemonies created by the system.
13
The second point is of a diagnostic nature. If one of the character-
istics of globalization is to have mined the capacity of the nation-states to
organize all of social life, thenwe ndourselves before a profoundstructural
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crisis of the modern world-system. This, as has been noted, was organized
onthe basis of smaller units, nation-states, whichguaranteedthe fulllment
of the imperative that assured the internal equilibrium of the system: the
endless accumulation of capital through the annexation of new territories.
But at the outset of the twenty-rst century, we nd ourselves in a situation
in which there are no longer any territories to annex and in which social
life is organized by supranational instances. The slightly ambiguous cate-
gory of postcoloniality points toward this situation. The end of territorial
colonialism, propelled by hegemonic nation-states, runs parallel to the ex-
haustionof the project of modernity, that is, withthe endof the institutional
capacity of these states to exert control over the social lives of peoples.
14
But
this does not necessarily mean that the world-system is mortally wounded,
nor that its structural geoculture has ceasedto be operational. Rather, we are
in a historical moment in which there are no colonizing countries, but only
countries colonized by a capital that has become invisible, that has assumed
a spectral character.
Faced with this new situation, the critical theory of society faces
the challenge of recuperating the horizon of totality that contemporary
cultural critique seems to have lost in the name of the postmodern attack on
metanarratives and runs the risk of converting itself into a new traditional
theory. A cultural analysis that limits itself to thematizing the exclusions of
gender, race, ethnicity, or knowledge, that homogenizes differences, is not
sufcient to articulate a criticism of capitalism. It is necessary to think the
world-systemthat structured social subjects and to askwhy this historical
project of social control (modernity) has exhausted itself, yielding to new
forms of global (re)structuration. In other words, it is necessary to think the
historical transformations suffered by the geoculture of the modern world-
systemin its present moment of crisis. This is, to my mind, the main agenda
for a social theory that understands itself as a critical theory of culture.
Translated by
Adriana Johnson
Notes
1. I do not want to emphasize here any progress of thought or any historical teleology.
Critical theory did not substitute for traditional theory after the eighteenth
century. What I want to underscore is that at this time the material conditions
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Traditional and Critical Theories of Culture
were created for the emergence of a type of theorization that was previously
impossible.
2. Here, relatively independent means that the social totality is not an entity that
is ontologically prior to the individual elements that constitute it, and in
which these simply assume predetermined roles, as is proposed by classic
structuralism, but rather that the reproduction of social life takes place as a
process of negotiation between the whole and its parts. Giddens (1994 [1979])
has shown that this process implies a certain structuration of subjects but
also and at the same time a subjectivization of structures.
3. By postcolonial theory I mean a model of theorization that () interrogates the ma-
terial conditions of possibility of the production of knowledge in modernity
and (/) specically points to the colonial experience as one of these condi-
tions. Although considerations like those of Walter Mignolo (1998)and his
distinction between the different critical theories loci of enunciationare
suggestive, they are not relevant for my argument here.
4. Both Dussel and Wallerstein have pointed outconfronting other Marxist theorists
like Erik Wolf and Andr Gunder Frankthat in contrast to previous social
systems, which revolved around a kind of centralized political unity, we live
today in a system that gathers different political units around a single world
economy: capitalism. Furthermore, the modern world-system is the only
historical structure in which the incessant accumulation of interests is taken
as a value in and of itself. In all other social structures, the accumulation of
riches was perceivedas a means for obtainingsomething, andnot as anendper
se. The maximization of surplus value converts itself thus into individual or
collective virtue, rewarded or punished by an institution called the market.
See Dussel 1992 and Wallerstein 1994.
5. I emphasize the idea of social zone to avoid confusing it with the concept of geo-
graphical zone. By social zone I mean a hegemonic set of social relations
(what Marx called class) that is primarily congured under the political
auspices of the national state, but whose structural function transcends in
some cases the political limits set down by the state. Thus, for example, the
hegemonic social zones in the European countries in the nineteenth century
certainly functioned as centers of the interior of their own societies, but their
economic and cultural hegemony also extended itself to all the peripheral
social zones of the world-system. In addition, the appropriation of surplus
value, generated by labor in the colonies, was concentrated in these peripheral
zones. In this sense, as we shall see, the hegemony of power assumes a colonial
character.
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6. Inorder toreproduce itself, the world-systemhas developedinstitutional mechanisms
(established initially in nation-states and now in the global logic of consump-
tion) to materially reward and punish individuals according to whether or
not they adjust themselves to the imperative of the maximization of benets.
Horkheimer and Adorno (1994) spoke in this sense of the universalization
of instrumental reason, even if they erroneously extrapolated this concept
until it accounted for the totality of human history.
7. Formulated in this way, the problem we are posing eludes any determinism of the
base on the economic superstructure of society. The critical theory of
society proposes a dialectic between subject and structure, in which neither
element can be thought independently of the other, since both mutually con-
dition each other. In other texts I have dealt with this idea more extensively
(Castro-Gmez 1997, 1998).
8. Racism and universalism are ideological knowledges congured in the sixteenth
century that serve to legitimize and give meaning to Spains economic and po-
litical dominion over her colonies. After the seventeenth century, when Spain
began to cede the hegemony of the world-system to other European powers
(France and England), these ideological knowledges began to permeate the
scientic practices that lie at the origin of what we know today as the social
sciences. From this point of view, social sciences, as they were institutional-
ized in the nineteenth century and after, did not succeed in establishing an
epistemological rupture with ideological knowledges such as racism and
universalism. Concepts elaborated by the social sciences, such as modernity,
society, and progress, are founded upon ideological knowledges cong-
ured in the sixteenth century. A genealogy of social sciences and humanities
should begin thus in Spain, and not in France or England.
9. In this sense, Magnus Mrner speaks of a racial pigmentocracy based upon the
concept of racial purity (Mrner 1969, 6077). This is an ethnicization of
the labor force.
10. In fact, as Edward Said (1995) has demonstrated, social sciences, especially anthro-
pology, ethnology, and orientalism, generate their languages on the basis of
the colonial experience and as a consequence of the occupation of overseas
colonies by France and England.
11. It should be remembered that when I refer to center and periphery I am not
speaking only of the relationship between metropolis and colonies, but also of
the relationship between hegemonic and subaltern groups within European
national states.
12. Foucaults renunciation of methodological holism impedes him from tracing a ge-
nealogy of structures of long duration. For the critique Foucault will level
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Castro-Gmez
.
Traditional and Critical Theories of Culture
at the category of totality, see the discussion proposed by Martin Jay (1984:
51037).
13. This is the case, for example, of the labor movements in Europe and the United
States, or of third world national liberation movements.
14. I have developed this idea of the end of modernity as a project of political-social
control in Castro-Gmez 1998, 78102.
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