Modernist Argentina - Coursework Example

In an era marked by post-revolutionary French political philosophy, positivist jurisprudence and Darwinian models of evolutionary progress, the emergence of Argentina as a South American nation in 1810 was created through a web of often contradictory social formations.i At the advent of the industrial revolution, Argentina’s status as a New World economy and national recipient to one of the largest nineteenth century influxes of European immigration fostered an environment of expansive entrepreneurialism. As in all Western nations, Modernity was at this time the core ideological tenet within the nation’s development as a unified national culture. Cultural productions of this period, such as Sarmiento’s (1868) Civilization and Barbarism were put into dialogue with international debates over the nature and place of ‘primitivism’ in a country undergoing transformation as a bourgeois and modern state.ii For Sarmiento and like minded intellectuals, progressive thought was sanctioned with moral concepts related to social intervention and ultimately, domination. Mastery of all things ‘natural’ and untamed included everything from domesticating the frontiers of the pampas; to the monitoring of an ever increasing and potentially dangerous underclass; and finally, universal management of hysterical behaviors by children, women, the infirm and insane.iii Modernity in Argentina was not, and has never been, just a narrative about the progressive enlightenment of self-disciplined ‘citizens;’ it has always depended on the coercive re-ordering and management of ‘nature.’ Women, children and indigenous people were all classified within a hierarchical arrangement in varying distances from what it meant to be a fully realized human and individual citizen. The flexibility of ‘civilization’ narratives allowed for a knitting together of otherwise incompatible models of thought. Working toward the Arcadian arrival of a progressive, pacified, and rational social order, ‘civilization’ provided a powerful rallying point for Argentines. The convergence of territory and citizenry into a utopian patriotics of ‘Argentinidad’ was a specifically Argentine amalgamation of national cultural perspectives. Integral to Argentina’s modernity was the authority of the Catholic Church.iv Perhaps the singularly most powerful institution dedicated to the inherency of colonial Argentina, the Church’s participation in the mission of modernity in the post-independence era, while not circumscribed as Modernist, certainly provided fertile cohesion to the civilization paradigm. A source stability in leadership in the contest of an otherwise tumultuous history of governmental change, the Papacy offered continuity in both European heritage and in social organization. One could easily assert that throughout the radical shifts in Argentina’s political landscape during the nineteenth and twentieth century(s), the Holy Trinity of God, Modernity and the virtues of economic liberalism have held great value in retention as the transcendental cultural currencies. In his attempt to unwrap the nature of conservatism within Argentina’s political history, Edward L. Gibson suggests that tensions have continued to exist between a landed class of Creole elites and the conservative interests of elite porteños in Buenos Aires up to the current day.v The very recent separation of church and state under the leadership of President Carlos Menem in 1991 attests to the important, albeit not entirely effective role the Church has had in bridging dissension between elite factions in support of a conservative constituency. The Catholic Church is an essential component for comprehending the specific ideological assimilations driving Argentina’s social and political 11history. As Michael Burdick (1995) argues, the power invested in Catholic authority by conservative elites in Argentina, during periods of social and economic unrest, cannot be underestimated. An ancestral precursor to modern forms of civil law and positivist political philosophy, Catholicism has had a dense and intimate historical relationship within the machinations of Argentine politics.vi This inextricable link between political institutions and the spiritual imperatives of Catholic exegesis as a foundation for ‘populist’ social movements has served to bind the histories of everyday lives and state regulatory practices in highly insidious and complicated ways. Central to the fashioning of all ‘civilization’ utopias, are the hierarchical expressions of gender specific virtues. Argentina’s historical project of nation building was no exception. Throughout the nineteenth century, notions of feminine virtue and romantic subjection performed an allegorical interchange within the guiding fictions of Argentina’s post-independence ‘civilization’ narratives. The solidified apartness of gendered virtues within the nineteenth century construction of the Social was explicitly underscored by the widespread incorporation of secularized forms of Christian theology. Since the nineteenth century, secularized Christianity has continued to have import within the everyday practices of Western socio-political orders. Magnified through the secular-humanist writings of social contract philosophy, modern distinctions within law were also served by this process; collapsing masculine (i.e. man) into rationalist strategies of regulation. Regardless of class standing, Argentine women in the nineteenth century found themselves stratified as persons and souls. An important vehicle during the era, Latin American ‘foundational fictions,’ filled with romantic submission of women implicated domesticity as powerful convention synonymous to sovereign territorial and cultural claims that became the hallmark of Argentina’s nationalist literature.vii Much like the demands placed on their European and North American counterparts, Argentine women were contracted into a society through tacit consent to inequity in participation through romantic tropes of subjectivity compatible with their status as quasi-property of men under natural law. The cumbersomeness of this negotiation proved to be the lynchpin to the maintenance of a proper bourgeois hegemony in Argentina, and one might argue, the modern nation-state in general. Like many of its New World counterparts, Argentina’s turn of the century immigration policies were informed by modern scientific ideas about race purity and eugenic intervention. Replication of political and legal philosophies of Western Europe within the Argentina’s project of nation building included self-conscious, yet positivist appropriation of Social Darwinian models of culture. Explicit legislation of white supremacy within Argentina’s immigration policies echoes the new nation’s dedicated incorporation as a virtual satellite of ‘European civilization.’viii However, early objections by the Catholic Church served to ban the most extreme regulations of negative eugenics policies such as the ones witnessed in Nazi Germany. Contrary to a strict interpretation of Northern European notions of genetic determinism, Argentina’s eugenics was positivist eugenics which was more favorable to malleable outcomes. Rooted in Lamarkian notions of environmental influence, Argentina’s eugenics allowed for a ‘whitening’ of the population.ix Argentina had a nation to build, even if the biological and cultural constitution of the citizenry fell short of Northern European ideals. As concerns for hereditary and cultural purity as civilizing forces ramified strongly throughout Europe in the first decades of the twentieth century, Argentina’s eugenicists came under increasing pressure to articulate unified Argentine campaign of national purity. Appropriating an Italian fascist strand of eugenics thought, positive eugenics found a home not only in Argentine immigration policy, but in the legislation of spiritual intervention through reproductive control.x Striving for a specifically white, yet Mediterranean or Latin civilization, Mussolini’s Italy presented an amenable solution in the form of a genealogical imaginary for solving the Argentine paradox of racial and cultural hybridity, ‘they [could] imagine this race as a timeless essence linking the ancient world of Rome with the present, and embracing and joining together all peoples of Latin descent wherever they were found. The Italians who tended to present this race in spiritual terms, liked to distinguish their ideas of race from the more reductively biological ones of the Nazis. Whatever the language, in fact, it came to much the same thing-an emphasis on unity, purity, and type as the foundation of civilization. These ideas found a ready audience in Argentina [ . . .] Argentina’s identity was going to be Latin, not Anglo Saxon.’xi Robert Young (1995) in his work on the historical construction of ‘British’ identity, Colonial Desire: Hybridity in Theory, Culture and Race, the convolution of race and class into a synonymous and always suspect category of Otherness, provided the justificatory matrix for the shape of colonial knowledge and practices. Just as in Argentina, political dissent in Britain became ‘explicable as the workings of permanent racial difference.’xii Through this alchemy of separation, class could then be realigned and convoluted with race in a hierarchical model. The clearest manifestation of this can be witnessed within the academic roots of the nineteenth century eugenics movements. For nation-states, this meant that classificatory difference within the state itself established by way of scientific race theories enabled the extraction of civility from culture. This extraction was then put into a diachronic relationship which served to re-conceptualize a stratified world through a re-constituted third category of Culture. While focused on the history of ‘British’ identity formation, Young’s argument is an important key for interpreting modern nationalism elsewhere. Identity, in the nineteenth-century Empire of ‘Britain’, as well as in the Empires of the late twentieth-century, was a tool for the management of a perceived chaos; the policing of sexual miscegenation between the Cultured Self and the Other. According to Young, ‘Culture ’in a dialectical relationship with its so-called ‘Scientific’ products has always been dependent upon the intersection between language and sex, and the conceptual differences they are able to produce; ‘hybrid, creole languages and miscegenated children.’xiii As Latin American historians have pointed out, Culture in Argentina has always implied a curious mix of creole gaucho heritage, French political and scientific philosophies, Spanish linguistics, Italian civil law traditions, shored up by British notions of civility.xiv The problem with this conceptual dynamic is as Young argues, ‘hybridity here [like Culture] becomes a third term which can never in fact be a third because, as a monstrous inversion, a miscreated perversion of its progenitors, it exhausts the differences between them.’xv The paradox of Culture is that in an attempt to maintain articulatory distance between differences, it is in fact, always calling for an amalgamation of differences into a collective bounded whole; this is the truth of ‘Argentinidad.’ Nation building in Argentina was a project of modernity. As with other cultural projects of the modern period, Argentine social organization depended on an interlocking, flexible system of Cartesian coordinates. Here, the mutually dependent discursive formations such as international/national, profane/sacred, primitive/civilized and masculine/feminine could be instantaneously rearranged through a montage of temporal and spatial orders. Barely beneath the surface of this flexible facade, however, were in ‘the complex doubling capabilities of Victorian racialized thinking.’ Eugenics served to further fashion the choreographic arrangement of cultural products during the inter-war years of the early twentieth century. As in Europe and the United States, the international futurist movement had unprecedented effects within the contemporaneous scientific movement of Argentine eugenics. Frankly speaking, eugenics was fundamentally an aesthetic movement endowed with the hybridizing technologies of civilization discourses. As Young argues, ‘hybridity as a cultural description will always carry with it an implicit politics of heterosexuality.’xvi The arrival of Argentine Culture, it was thought, could only be reached through the careful classification and selective miscegenation of the most fit (i.e. white and bourgeois) elements of society. Like other aesthetic movements, eugenics was charged with unleashing the spiritual potential of modernity within the Argentine. Here Young argues that ‘the need for organic metaphors of identity or society implies a counter-sense of fragmentation and dispersion . . . today’s comparative certainty has arisen because heterogeneity, cultural interchange and diversity have now become the self conscious identity of modern society.’xvii Eugenics, while part of earlier debates surrounding civilizing concerns of progress and order, was only effectively systematized during the inter-war years. At the forefront of this shift was the regulatory interest in the political nature of the family. Maintaining Comte’s positivist notions of gendered virtue, eugenicist calls for the spiritual growth of the nation addressed the heterosexual family unit by reiterating the spiritual responsibilities believed to be inherent to maternal virtues. In the early decades of the twentieth century, the intrusive social regulations of family focused reproductive policies; legislation of race particular immigration articles; and the battle over the legal status of prostitution; and worked in concert to form modern Argentina.xviii These three social technologies were the pivotal interventions for securing Argentina’s plans as a modern and fecund future home as the ‘Europe of the South.’ Due to the early objections by the Catholic church that the control over reproduction should be left to the power of God, sterilization, birth control and abortions were not only illegal, they were considered contrary to the moral development of Argentine civilization. According to Stephan-Leys, eugenicists sought to develop a negative eugenics of reproduction that would be ‘compatible with the very real political and other constraints’ of Argentine society. ‘Matrimonial eugenics,’ first conceptualized within the Italian bio-typology movement, provided an avenue for a ‘Christian view of eugenics.’ The family was the site of intervention where the church and the state’s reproductive policies had a common mission. In what both camps understood to be an impending threat posed to the continuity of family virtues, modern capitalism, while necessary, was also a dangerous harbinger of rapid social transformations. Developed by Pende, this type of negative eugenics enabled the church to retain a position of privilege in the concordat between the church and the fascist state. The Bio-typology Movement of the interwar years shifted eugenics from Leftist interests in reform societies, to conservative methodologies that coincided with Italian leader, Mussolini’s agendas. As the largest eugenics affiliation with Italian politico-scientific movements in Latin America, the pre-Peron, Argentine Association of Bio-typology, Eugenics and Social Medicine founded in 1932 was a fascist variant of Latin American eugenics. As an international participant in scientific policy, the association nonetheless, was ultra-nationalist in orientation. ‘The combination of exhalation of maternity and control of sexuality seemed to Argentinean eugenicists a satisfactory answer to the problem of the disintegration of the family by modernity. Eugenics was to be ‘hogaria y educacion maternologica’ (the science of the home and the mother); it was to be a rational form of sex education, directed toward subduing the sexual instinct to the eugenic will and toward the re-moralization of the family.’xix Moreover, the fact that ‘bio-typology as intertwined with Freudian, Adlerian and other psychological approaches to mental health, a connection that gave psychotherapy in general a peculiarly hereditarian and at times endocrinological orientation’ increased state access into intimate matters; thus serving to expedite an already increasing field of modern legal forms and social regulations.xx Personal histories had to not only be classified within the nation’s bio-political economy, but managed through social separation and intervention. The mandatory documentation of hereditary distinctions through the registration of bio-typological identity cards provided the state with a concrete means to implement eugenic programs of social order. Matrimonial eugenics was an extension of this regulatory intrusion by typologizing people into legal categories for appropriate marriage selection. Women were of particular interest to reproductive matters of the state. Predictably however, argues Stephan-Leys, ‘it was not the health of the individual woman that mattered but her health in relation to her child, that is, to the future germ-plasm of the nation.’xxi Moreover, a mother’s spiritual health marked by her promotion of ‘psychological wellness’ within the Christian family was equally important to Argentina’s constitution as a civilized nation. Racial classification within the constitution of Argentine society in the Modern era was furthered through the conversion narratives of the Catholic Church, and continues to be deeply embedded deeply within the imaginary of Argentinidad. Transposition of the illuminated Virgin Mary Mother of God held the promise as a clairvoyant technology of the future; one that Frederick argues enforced the promise of a ‘white power’ manifesto. Thorough ideological assimilation of this model of femininity found reinforcement in the requisition of ‘marianismo’ as an instrument for the restoration of dignity in a space marked by immigration and instability.xxii Consideration of this teleology of difference was readily mirrored within social contract interpretations of natural law, and readily supported a democracy based on a horizontal political fraternity of men. The immaculate conception then, is no longer a momentary event inside biblical history, but a dedication to ‘man;’ the core constitution of ‘the family’ as a political unit of nationalism. In Philippe Arias’ (1962) Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, he asserts that the teleological development of childhood and adolescence as distinct life phases was part of a vast regime of order-making, instituted within the beginnings of modern European social organization.xxiii Supported by a visual analysis of pre-modern paintings–where representations of childhood were traditionally narrated through the miniaturization of adult physiognomy, Arias maintains that childhood is a specifically modern construction of identity. The development of childhood as a technology of exclusion and the articulation of difference- organized through a system of class restraint, genealogical classification and educational pedagogy-has been one of the most effective tools in arbitrating power stratification within modern nation states. Children in their supposed cultural neutrality provide the enabling terrain for the future projection of hierarchical differences. During the formative years of Argentina’s independent nationhood, children occupied a crucial place in the constitution of social, spatial and legal principals of community organization.xxiv According to Francine Masiello (1992) interests in the proper location of children were not restricted to the controlling agendas of the elite, and ‘the legal status of women and their offspring became a major obsession of all social classes.’xxv Particularly where children were concerned, the contradictions of children as both citizens and property left open a space for all kinds of regulation, discipline and abuse.xxvi The rigorous concern for public regulation in the modern era developed in tandem with the industrial revolution. For example, the high incidence of child abandonment during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was circumstantially induced by the large and steadily growing migrant population of male industrial labor and female prostitution. What happened during the period set a precedence for the ways in which working class children and their parents were later monitored by the state. In Argentina as elsewhere, working class children came to be identified as the quintessential representation of the uncontrolled passions of the masses. A central point of tension within the literature on political life in contemporary Argentina is what might be called an over-determined civilization paradox: how could the nation that built an historical identification as the ‘Europe of the South’ be so recently riddled with the economic and political violence associated with ‘non-white’ nations of the ‘third world.’ Following the political geography of Cold War classifications set forth by the United States Department of State in the McCarthy Era, Argentina made its entry into North American political science discussions as a region in what became known in security discussions as the ‘Southern Cone.’ The primary foci of the Southern Cone literatures were inquiries into bureaucratic authoritarian regimes; and the more recent consolidation of democracy.xxvii Of related interest, research on human rights violence and the constitution of influence on international laws pertaining to those abuses have become increasingly important.xxviii Since the nation’s economic crisis in 2000, the shift in scholarly dialogues on the shape of Argentina’s civilizing complex have been primarily directed at its long-term market policies clarified by dedication to economic liberalism, despite oscillations in ideological and political structure. Refutation of Argentina’s parallel history as a modern and modernist nation is likely to be met with incontrovertible evidence otherwise. Despite challenges to Argentina’s place in ‘Western Civilization’ archaeological methods of digging up the past reveal little more than a ‘Europe of the South,’ indeed. Read More