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ABSTRACT
Since 2002 and the election of Álvaro Uribe as president, national pride and sentiment have grown substantially in Colombia. While it is possible to understand this as a positive phenomenon, given Colombia's historical difficulties in constructing itself as a nation, this paper develops the notion of nationism (distinct from nationalism) and on that basis argues that the figure of the nation is actually central to constructing an enduring right-wing hegemony in Colombia. I focus on the Victims' Law of 2011, an important achievement for the country, crucially understood as part of the process designed to help Colombia move beyond the violence that has dominated its history since the middle of the twentieth century. The Victims' Law prioritizes memory and remembering for overcoming the divisiveness of Colombia's recent past and enabling it to enter a peaceful future. I develop a reading, however, that favours comprehending this project more fruitfully as an attempt to create memories that, in turn, will lead to the recognition of the existence of a reconciled nation, the subject of such memories: for collective memories require collective subjects (nations) to be their bearers. But the nation so-created, I then argue, is not what it purports to be: a collective subject supporting the collective aspirations of all Colombians. Rather, banefully, I contend that the figure of the nation being developed in Colombia is, more pragmatically and indeed more fundamentally, a symbolic means by which dominant social actors repudiate and repress internal dissent and dissenters, induce historical amnesia about the actual causes of Colombia's conflict and its history of violence, and thus, rather than serve as a prerequisite to usher in a future of peaceful and widespread social development, it aids and abets the prorogation of right-wing hegemony: apparently ending it theory while doing nothing to discontinue it, in fact.
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Notes
1 That this is generally recognized to be the case is evidenced by the fact Dinero, Colombia’s leading pro-capitalist glossy magazine, publishes columns like Juan Ricardo Ortega’s (Citation2019) ‘Violencia y crecmiento económico’, which matter-of-factly recounts the grip violent gangs have on Colombia’s economy.
2 For example, the once-president, now senator, Uribe, recently tweeted: ‘If authority, serene, firm and with social criteria [that is, good judgment] implicates a massacre it is because on the other side there is more violence and terror than protest’ (see: Sigue polémica Citation2019).
3 This fascination with memory is reminiscent of the way testimonio once commanded a similar fascination. Just as human memory is far from being an accurate representation of what happened in the past, so testimony, or witness recall, is notoriously inaccurate when attempting to establish what happened and who did what. The fascination with testimonio and memory seems to betray an extraordinary naivety on the part of many people otherwise concerned to make the world a better place. Perhaps such naivety is one of the reasons why their efforts, viewed from our current point in time, do not seem to have yielded much fruit: after years of emphasizing testimonio and memory, the most vulnerable of our world are no less vulnerable than they have ever been.
4 In Language and Symbolic Power (Citation1991) Pierre Bourdieu, for example, argues that changes in the critical lexicon are less driven by the demands of conceptual rigour and more subject to the demands of distinction: saying the same thing with different words makes it look as if you’re saying something different, new, distinctive, and thus earns you the profits of distinction.
5 For further examples, one might think of the aftermath of World War II in Germany. Rather than remember what had just happened, the then West Germans, under the guidance of the British, French but mostly American tutors, decided it would be best just to forget the recent past and try to build a more or less free country on the basis of a certain wilful ignorance, even if it meant including thousands of former Nazis in the process – and it did. That country is now one the world’s most successful: democratic, diverse and averse to antisemitism. And at a certain point, having managed to create a free and stable social formation, the labour of remembering was begun. See Frum Citation2019. One might also think, more recently, of Spain, which, with Franco’s death, proceeded towards a new era without ruminating too much on the past. Only in the last decade or so has the yearning for remembrance been allowed space. Contrasting these cases with ones in which the insistence has been on remembering immediately, as a necessary and fundamental part of the ushering in of a new era, it is not clear that the latter chose wisely, even if the argument can be made that they chose righteously. For an extended modern reflection contraindicating remembrance, see Rieff (Citation2011).
6 And indeed these are nationisms, in the sense outlined in this very article, not nationalisms.
7 Of course, it is still an open question as to whether what we understand as feelings or emotions actually cause actions. See Scarantino Citation2017.
8 See Billig (Citation1995) for a detailed analysis of the quotidian production of a reality that is national.
9 The rise of the nation occurs in times of uncertainty and unprecedented changes: modernity. Subjects find themselves facing questions never before formulated: who am I? What does it all mean? The answer turns out to be the nation. At first the nation seems to provide all the answers, at least in more or less successful ones. But as they enter into crisis, owing to the vicissitudes of asynchronous global (under and uneven) development, religion returns. This is certainly the case in Colombia, which is seeing, along with but not necessarily combined with the resurgence of the nation discourse, a notable increase in religious belief of all kinds (including Islam), as people seek in belief what the nation, in which many do not believe, cannot give them.
10 I note as an aside that it is common to hear academics speak of la idiosincracia colombiana, such that on one occasion I asked the speaker what was meant by this. Unfortunately – and to be clear, I was not going for this – the speaker could not provide any examples.
11 This insight does not cease to provoke reflection in popular culture. See for example Memento (Nolan et al. Citation2000), where the protagonist cannot form memories and thus cannot be sure that he exists in any meaningful sense; and much more recently Blade Runner 2049 (Kosove et al. Citation2018) in which the blade runner protagonist of the film, while understanding that his memories are artificial, having been implanted in order to help him deal with the knowledge that he is not in fact human by allowing him to indulge in the fantasy that he might be, nonetheless gullibly falls for a subterfuge which makes him think that one of his memories is in fact real, and thus that he was in fact born rather than fabricated.
12 In passing, it is probably this that truly and ultimately explains the interest in memory evident in recent years. This explains the coincident surge in nationism – in the belief in collective subjects called nations: if we want the latter to exist, there must be memories which correspond to their existence.
13 White gets tantalizingly close: ‘Does it follow that in order for there to be a narrative, there must be some equivalent of the Lord, some sacral being endowed with the authority and power of the Lord, existing in time? If so, what could such an equivalent be?’ (19). White’s rather formalistic answer is, as noted above, the social system and similar terms. But it is clear that he is talking about the notion of the nation.
14 It is important here to be clear. We have said that the nation, in its most transcendental sense, as an eternal, solidary, homogeneous community, does not exist. Similarly, we do not exist. An ‘us’ does not exist. That is, your body and my body exist, yes, but when we say we or talk about us, we are not referring to something in the world beyond language, but only (only?) to something that exists in and through and because of language. It only exists to the extent that language exists. Following Lorite’s (Citation1984) understanding of language, it is appropriate to say that when we speak in the first person plural, there is no extra-linguistic referent; we are not speaking about the world, a world which exists beyond our speaking about it. Rather, the use of the third person plural institutes or constitutes or perhaps hypostatizes the we, the us, which truly only exists in and through language, not through symbolic representation but realization. The human world (which one might say is a different world entirely from the world of homo sapiens), however, is symbolic all the way down, which means this hypostatization of a we, of an us, is sufficient, but tautologically so: if it is sufficient, then it is as if we exist qua we, but if it is not sufficient, then our efforts must be redoubled in order to make it sufficient. This is ontological field in which the Victims’ Law (and discourse in general) is seeking to fulfil its goals.
15 This same structure of memory organizes, for example, the memory of la conquista in Colombia, even among recent college students. They slip without any friction or reticence whatsoever into the tropology of indigeneity, complaining passionately of what the Spanish did to ‘us’, and quite oblivious of what they, the students, with their own full-blown unmitigatedly first-world, consumerist life-styles have done and continue to do to actual Indigenous People still resident in Colombia today.
16 Or that of a recent acolyte of Renan’s, Lewis Hyde (Citation2019), whose reflections on forgetting and the nation are also turned to the idea of universal benefit and against the continued dominance of a privileged few.
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Gregory J. Lobo
Gregory J. Lobo has taught at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, since 2002. His classes explore different areas and currents in social and cultural theory, while his research is an attempt to understand social reality, in Colombia and elsewhere, on the basis of such theory. He has been invited to share his research in China and Germany, as well as serve as Visiting Professor at Mannheim University and the Free University in the latter. In his current work he continues to elaborate the concept of nationism, as distinct from nationalism, and its usefulness for helping us understand our world; he is also engaged in working out an approach to social reality which he conceptualizes as symbolic materialism, an approach designed to capture both the real materiality of the social world, while recognizing its ultimately symbolic foundations.