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Abstract
This dissertation is an analysis and critique of discourses on culture both within cultural studies and within the social sciences. It is also a historical investigation of (primarily) twentieth-century Latin American political movements, from classical populism to national liberation movements, new social movements, and beyond, and of the relations between culture and politics that they incarnate.
In place of cultural studies' emphasis on hegemony, and of the social scientific emphasis on civil society, I outline a theory of posthegemony. The constituent elements of posthegemony are affect (examined in the work of Gilles Deleuze), habit (drawn from Pierre Bourdieu's notion of habitus), and multitude (taken from Antonio Negri). This theory is both better placed to describe the ways in which, by binding culture to the state, social regimes try to reinforce the fiction of a social contract, and is a better platform for a critique of the populism and neoliberalism that cultural studies and civil society theory mimic.
The dissertation examines Peronism as the prime example of classical populism, and Fujimori's regime in Peru as a prime example of neoliberalism, bounded and mirrored by the threat of a fundamentalist Sendero Luminoso. For its elaboration of a theory of affect, the dissertation turns to the Salvadoran FMLN; to discuss habit, it takes the Chilean new social movements of the 1980s as its case studies. I return to these four examples in my final chapter, to offer a brief re-reading from the perspective of posthegemony. A preface that focuses on Columbus's first voyage of 1492, and a postface dealing with Venezuela's 2002 coup and counter-coup foreground the multitude as an optic through which to understand Latin American history.
I posit the multitude as an immanent social subject that rejects all forms of transcendence, but differentiate between “good” and “bad” multitudes on the grounds of their connectivity, or polyvalence; I end with the open question as to whether that subject (good or bad) leads to revolution, the end of history, and so social death.
