In The Globalisation of Crime: Understanding Transnational Relationships in Context (1999), which “charts th[e] evolution” of “crime and its traditional boundaries […] into predictable and active features of globalisation,” the criminologist Mark Findlay argues that “[c]rime operates amongst the other market solvents in globalisation, and as such may now be analysed against features of ‘commodification’ which are presently expanding and penetrating every corner of the planet” (1). At the same time, as Findlay immediately informs us, “the process of time-space compression, which is globalisation, has enhanced material crime relationships to an extent where they require analysis in a similar fashion to any other crucial market force” (ibid.). In effect, crime and globalization con-form a Möbius strip in Findlay’s formulation since crime, which is variously described as a “lubricant” (8) and an “agent of flux” (1, n.3) of globalization, is itself raised to the level of a “feature of the emergent globalised culture” (2) and is “unburdened of conventional legal and moral determination” (1) by globalization itself. That is to say, that crime is itself globalized in the process of “lubricating” globalization processes. Through globalization, crime comes to constitute an element of an emerging “universal [i.e. global] culture” (2). The effect of Findlay’s analysis is to render timid the apparently blunt affirmation with which he opens The Globalisation of Crime: namely, that “[c]rime has been a silent partner in modernisation” (1). In light of what follows this somewhat belated pronouncement, this “partnership” appears to be closer to an essential symbiosis than to a convenient—and therefore dissoluble—pact.
In the aptly-titled “Anillo de Moebius” (Möbius ring or strip), which originally appeared in the collection of short stories Queremos Tanto a Glenda published in 1980, the Argentine Julio Cortázar allegorically dramatizes modernization and crime’s symbiotic or Möbius-like relationship, anticipating my own critical radicalization of Findlay’s formulation by nearly three decades. Moreover, and perhaps alluding to the fact that in the Americas said partnership extends at least back to Latin America’s post-independence period, as this study postulates, if not to their putative inception during the Conquista (as the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [EZLN] points out in their communiqués), Cortázar’s tale extends the Möbius foundations of the partnership into the “pre-modern” past. After all, the story, which narrates the rape of a travelling English woman (Janet) by an unemployed, nomadic French rustic (Robert), takes place “bosque adentro” [inwards from the edge or beginning of the forest] “en algun lugar de Dordoña” [somewhere in the province of Dordogne] (149) in the French countryside. Even as the narrative takes place in the country that famously gave birth to Latin American modernismo, it also takes place in the exposed heart of that country’s “non” or “pre” modern landscape.
We should note at this point that Janet functions in the allegory as a representative and/or heir of British modernity, the other major (cultural) locus of modernization in the Americas. Reminiscent of British colonialists, she is a travel writer, keeping a “diario de viaje” [travel diary] into which she often scribbled “inicios de poemas y pensamientos no siempre felices que el lápiz escribía y después tachaba con pudor, con trabajo” [openings of poems and thoughts not always happy which the pencil would write and later scratch out with vehemence, with some work] (151, emphasis added). Reinforcing this general association to British modernism and/or modernization, the narrative includes an epi-graph from the Brazilian modernist Clarice Lispector’s first novel, Perto do coração salvagem [Near to the Wild Heart] (1995), the title of which is literally taken from a line in James Joyce’s epiphanic Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In Cortázar’s telling, despite the fact that the narrative unfolds “bosque adentro,” the “wild heart” of modernism/modernization is to be found not in some romantic connection to Nature (in Portrait, the line occurs in an episode in which Stephen comes to realize his artistic calling that takes place near the sea), but rather in its Möbius-like, and immemorial, relationship to crime.
In “Anillo de Moebius,” such relationship is represented both at the level of content as well as structurally. As I have already mentioned, what brings together our two embodiments of modernism, our two protagonists, is a violent, and criminally punishable act, rape, for which Robert is sentenced to death (158). Unsurprisingly, though provocatively, victim and perpetrator are thus, and thus forward, inextricably connected to one another in the story. For this reason, in the latter sections of the brief narrative, it becomes more and more impossible, down to the level of language, to distinguish between Janet and Robert, even when we are evidently in Janet’s head, and even when Robert has been carefully and watchfully secluded in his cell—thus securely separating him physically from Janet. Despite this factual separation, however, or precisely because of it, Janet and Robert come to constitute indiscernibly a continuum, a singularity that is “in the end” an objectivity: “[…] allí seguramente alguna vez al término del tibio balanceo en olas cristales una mano alcanzaría la mano de Janet, sería al fin la mano de Robert” [surely there sometime at the end of the warm balancing in crystal waves a hand would reach Janet’s hand, it would be at last (or in the end) Robert’s hand] (166, emphasis mine). Structurally, however, this “in the end” singularity is present from the very beginning since “Anillo” inter-collates the two narratives all throughout, moving back and forth (emulating a Möbius ring) between Janet’s and Robert’s synchronous points of view, which are advanced in both cases through indirect free style. Through this structure, which both supplements and anticipates the narrative content, Cortázar’s fable dramatizes the irremediable inextricability of modernization and crime, their mutual and symbiotic being-in (or even being-of) the other.
Nearly two decades later, in El cuerpo del delito: Un manual (1999), the literary and cultural critic Josefina Ludmer would give theoretical and historical consistency to Cortázar’s allegorically-crafted critique. Ludmer literally fleshes out the “body” (what I have been calling the objective singularity) of crime’s relationship to modernity. As she states from the outset, “Mi tema es ‘el delito’ y este libro es un Manual sobre su cuerpo” [11; My theme is ‘crime’ and this book is a Manual on its body]. In her manual, Ludmer shows how crime, which she calls “[un] instrumento divisor y articulador [de culturas]” (159; an instrument for dividing and articulating cultures), functioned as a motor in Argentina’s modernization from the end of the nineteenth century and the birth of the liberal state to the present—“[en] un país latinoamericano en el momento de su entrada en el mercado mundial” (143; [in] a Latin American country at the moment of its entrance into the world market). In this context, as Ludmer demonstrates:
El delito traza un límite cultural que muestra otro lado, un ‘más allá’, algo nuevo (‘lo nuevo’). Y entonces se abren las lógicas de la diferenciación: otras direcciones, territories y cuentos. Las fronteras ‘en delito’ (fronteras móviles: mutaciones culturales) funcionan como pasajes que nos permiten viajar por el tiempo y por la cultura. Separan (y unen) culturas, fundan culturas, y también separan (y unen) líneas en el interior de una cultura (144).
[Crime traces a cultural limit that reveals an other side, a “beyond,” something new (“the new”). And thus are opened the logics of differentiation: other directions, territories and stories. The frontiers “in crime” (mobile frontiers: cultural mutations) function as passages that allow us to travel through time and through culture. They delimit (and bring together) cultures, they found cultures, and they also delimit (and bring together) demarcations in the interior of a culture].
Crime—or, as Ludmer would insist, “crime”—not only fashions (or even creates) the “other directions, territories and stories” of modernization, its “outsides”—thus helping to define modernization’s “interiority”—but also because by organizing the “passages” between modernization and those same, if created, “outsides” crime in fact unblocks, so to speak, the arteries (“líneas en el interior”) that both give shape modernization’s corporeality and that permit its (now global) mobility. For this reason, crime is in fact a, if not the, body of modernization.
Agreeing with both Findlay and me, Ludmer, citing Karl Marx, avers that “Hoy, el delito es una rama de la producción capitalista y el criminal un productor […]” (11; Today, crime is a branch of capitalist production and the criminal a producer […]). However, unlike Findlay, who tries to “work outside the charmed or demonic circles of Western cultural representations” (56)—and thus to dissociate “crime” from its fictions—Ludmer, who admits that “mi campo es la ficción” (11; my field is fiction), affirms their inextricability:
El “delito” […] no sólo nos puede servir para diferenciar, separar y excluir, sino también para relacionar el estado, la política, la sociedad, los sujetos, la cultura y la literatura. Como bien lo sabían Marx y Freud, es un instrumento crítico ideal porque es histórico, cultural, político, económico, jurídico, social y literario a la vez: es una de esas nociones articuladoras que estan en o entre todos los campos (14, emphases in original).
[“Crime” […] not only helps us to differentiate, separate and exclude, but also to relate the state, politics, society, subjects, culture and literature. As Marx and Freud well knew, it is an ideal critical instrument because it is historical, cultural, political, economic, juridical, social and literary at the same time: it is one of those articulating notions that are in or between all fields/disciplines].
Like the French historian Michel Foucault before her—vid. esp. Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (1973)—, Ludmer thus shows that the “corpus delicti” of modernization, literally its “criminal body,” is animated not only by material and/or contextual “relationships” (Findlay) of power, but also by representations that are in fact inseparable from its (historical) becoming. For this reason, “[l]a constelación del ‘delito’ en literatura no sólo nos sirve para marcar líneas y tiempos, sino que nos lleva a leer en las ficciones la correlación tensa y contradictoria de los sujetos, las creencias, la cultura, y el estado” (15, emphasis added; Our constellation of ‘crime’ in literature not only serves to trace [cultural] lines and times, but it also leads us to read in the fictions the tense and contradictory correlation between subjects, beliefs, culture, and the State).
Another way of saying this is that criminal representations—or representations “in crime,” to follow Ludmer’s play—provide an avenue for reshaping modernization by reshaping its “corpus delicti.” Such representations in fact arise from and re-enter the Möbius loop of modernization’s criminal “body,” thus opening, however briefly, a rearticulatory space within the criminal foundations of Western modernity. Yet another way of saying this is that by reshaping the frontiers of modern culture—and crime is one of those frontiers—representations “in crime” redraw the territories not only of modernization’s historical development but also those of its being.
For this reason, criminal representations, whether they be in the political, the cultural, the juridical, or the popular spheres, can be interpreted as struggles over modernity, not only over its futures, but also over its resources, that is to say, over those elements that buttress its materiality and that thus guarantee its futures. In light of this, representations in crime, that is to say, representations of the omnipresent foundationality or corporeal motoricity of crime within Western modernization, take on added importance as potential vehicles through which to deflect the devastating hegemonic effects of representations of crime and their ideological-effects. This is because by giving us a way to inhabit it, they may yet offer us ways to reconfiguring modernization’s criminal body into more equitable social arrangements and political modalities. The emerging criminal literature and film will play a significant role in this struggle. For it is by embodying and denuding the “corpus delicti” of modernization that new avenues may materialize for rerouting, even perhaps for reversing, the overpowering momentum of modernization’s now global symbiosis with crime.
Bibliography
Cortázar, Julio. “Anillo de Moebius.” Queremos tanto a Glenda. 2nd ed. Mexico City:
Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1981. 149-66.
Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. “7 piezas sueltas del rompecabezas mundial
(El neoliberalismo como rompecabezas: la inútil unidad mundial que fragmenta y
destruye naciones).” 1 Mar. 2003
199708xx.es.htm>.
Findlay, Mark. The Globalisation of Crime: Understanding Transitional Relationships
in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan.
New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Ludmer, Josefina. El cuerpo del delito: Un manual. Buenos Aires: Libros Perfil, 1999.
—–. “The Corpus Delicti.” Trans. Donally Suzanne Kennedy and Georgina Dopico-
Black. The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America. Ed.
Doris Sommer. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. 11-20.
William Castro: Notes on Modernization as Crime
Notes on Modernization as Crime
William Castro
In The Globalisation of Crime: Understanding Transnational Relationships in Context (1999), which “charts th[e] evolution” of “crime and its traditional boundaries […] into predictable and active features of globalisation,” the criminologist Mark Findlay argues that “[c]rime operates amongst the other market solvents in globalisation, and as such may now be analysed against features of ‘commodification’ which are presently expanding and penetrating every corner of the planet” (1). At the same time, as Findlay immediately informs us, “the process of time-space compression, which is globalisation, has enhanced material crime relationships to an extent where they require analysis in a similar fashion to any other crucial market force” (ibid.). In effect, crime and globalization con-form a Möbius strip in Findlay’s formulation since crime, which is variously described as a “lubricant” (8) and an “agent of flux” (1, n.3) of globalization, is itself raised to the level of a “feature of the emergent globalised culture” (2) and is “unburdened of conventional legal and moral determination” (1) by globalization itself. That is to say, that crime is itself globalized in the process of “lubricating” globalization processes. Through globalization, crime comes to constitute an element of an emerging “universal [i.e. global] culture” (2). The effect of Findlay’s analysis is to render timid the apparently blunt affirmation with which he opens The Globalisation of Crime: namely, that “[c]rime has been a silent partner in modernisation” (1). In light of what follows this somewhat belated pronouncement, this “partnership” appears to be closer to an essential symbiosis than to a convenient—and therefore dissoluble—pact.
In the aptly-titled “Anillo de Moebius” (Möbius ring or strip), which originally appeared in the collection of short stories Queremos Tanto a Glenda published in 1980, the Argentine Julio Cortázar allegorically dramatizes modernization and crime’s symbiotic or Möbius-like relationship, anticipating my own critical radicalization of Findlay’s formulation by nearly three decades. Moreover, and perhaps alluding to the fact that in the Americas said partnership extends at least back to Latin America’s post-independence period, as this study postulates, if not to their putative inception during the Conquista (as the Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional [EZLN] points out in their communiqués), Cortázar’s tale extends the Möbius foundations of the partnership into the “pre-modern” past. After all, the story, which narrates the rape of a travelling English woman (Janet) by an unemployed, nomadic French rustic (Robert), takes place “bosque adentro” [inwards from the edge or beginning of the forest] “en algun lugar de Dordoña” [somewhere in the province of Dordogne] (149) in the French countryside. Even as the narrative takes place in the country that famously gave birth to Latin American modernismo, it also takes place in the exposed heart of that country’s “non” or “pre” modern landscape.
We should note at this point that Janet functions in the allegory as a representative and/or heir of British modernity, the other major (cultural) locus of modernization in the Americas. Reminiscent of British colonialists, she is a travel writer, keeping a “diario de viaje” [travel diary] into which she often scribbled “inicios de poemas y pensamientos no siempre felices que el lápiz escribía y después tachaba con pudor, con trabajo” [openings of poems and thoughts not always happy which the pencil would write and later scratch out with vehemence, with some work] (151, emphasis added). Reinforcing this general association to British modernism and/or modernization, the narrative includes an epi-graph from the Brazilian modernist Clarice Lispector’s first novel, Perto do coração salvagem [Near to the Wild Heart] (1995), the title of which is literally taken from a line in James Joyce’s epiphanic Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916). In Cortázar’s telling, despite the fact that the narrative unfolds “bosque adentro,” the “wild heart” of modernism/modernization is to be found not in some romantic connection to Nature (in Portrait, the line occurs in an episode in which Stephen comes to realize his artistic calling that takes place near the sea), but rather in its Möbius-like, and immemorial, relationship to crime.
In “Anillo de Moebius,” such relationship is represented both at the level of content as well as structurally. As I have already mentioned, what brings together our two embodiments of modernism, our two protagonists, is a violent, and criminally punishable act, rape, for which Robert is sentenced to death (158). Unsurprisingly, though provocatively, victim and perpetrator are thus, and thus forward, inextricably connected to one another in the story. For this reason, in the latter sections of the brief narrative, it becomes more and more impossible, down to the level of language, to distinguish between Janet and Robert, even when we are evidently in Janet’s head, and even when Robert has been carefully and watchfully secluded in his cell—thus securely separating him physically from Janet. Despite this factual separation, however, or precisely because of it, Janet and Robert come to constitute indiscernibly a continuum, a singularity that is “in the end” an objectivity: “[…] allí seguramente alguna vez al término del tibio balanceo en olas cristales una mano alcanzaría la mano de Janet, sería al fin la mano de Robert” [surely there sometime at the end of the warm balancing in crystal waves a hand would reach Janet’s hand, it would be at last (or in the end) Robert’s hand] (166, emphasis mine). Structurally, however, this “in the end” singularity is present from the very beginning since “Anillo” inter-collates the two narratives all throughout, moving back and forth (emulating a Möbius ring) between Janet’s and Robert’s synchronous points of view, which are advanced in both cases through indirect free style. Through this structure, which both supplements and anticipates the narrative content, Cortázar’s fable dramatizes the irremediable inextricability of modernization and crime, their mutual and symbiotic being-in (or even being-of) the other.
Nearly two decades later, in El cuerpo del delito: Un manual (1999), the literary and cultural critic Josefina Ludmer would give theoretical and historical consistency to Cortázar’s allegorically-crafted critique. Ludmer literally fleshes out the “body” (what I have been calling the objective singularity) of crime’s relationship to modernity. As she states from the outset, “Mi tema es ‘el delito’ y este libro es un Manual sobre su cuerpo” [11; My theme is ‘crime’ and this book is a Manual on its body]. In her manual, Ludmer shows how crime, which she calls “[un] instrumento divisor y articulador [de culturas]” (159; an instrument for dividing and articulating cultures), functioned as a motor in Argentina’s modernization from the end of the nineteenth century and the birth of the liberal state to the present—“[en] un país latinoamericano en el momento de su entrada en el mercado mundial” (143; [in] a Latin American country at the moment of its entrance into the world market). In this context, as Ludmer demonstrates:
El delito traza un límite cultural que muestra otro lado, un ‘más allá’, algo nuevo (‘lo nuevo’). Y entonces se abren las lógicas de la diferenciación: otras direcciones, territories y cuentos. Las fronteras ‘en delito’ (fronteras móviles: mutaciones culturales) funcionan como pasajes que nos permiten viajar por el tiempo y por la cultura. Separan (y unen) culturas, fundan culturas, y también separan (y unen) líneas en el interior de una cultura (144).
[Crime traces a cultural limit that reveals an other side, a “beyond,” something new (“the new”). And thus are opened the logics of differentiation: other directions, territories and stories. The frontiers “in crime” (mobile frontiers: cultural mutations) function as passages that allow us to travel through time and through culture. They delimit (and bring together) cultures, they found cultures, and they also delimit (and bring together) demarcations in the interior of a culture].
Crime—or, as Ludmer would insist, “crime”—not only fashions (or even creates) the “other directions, territories and stories” of modernization, its “outsides”—thus helping to define modernization’s “interiority”—but also because by organizing the “passages” between modernization and those same, if created, “outsides” crime in fact unblocks, so to speak, the arteries (“líneas en el interior”) that both give shape modernization’s corporeality and that permit its (now global) mobility. For this reason, crime is in fact a, if not the, body of modernization.
Agreeing with both Findlay and me, Ludmer, citing Karl Marx, avers that “Hoy, el delito es una rama de la producción capitalista y el criminal un productor […]” (11; Today, crime is a branch of capitalist production and the criminal a producer […]). However, unlike Findlay, who tries to “work outside the charmed or demonic circles of Western cultural representations” (56)—and thus to dissociate “crime” from its fictions—Ludmer, who admits that “mi campo es la ficción” (11; my field is fiction), affirms their inextricability:
El “delito” […] no sólo nos puede servir para diferenciar, separar y excluir, sino también para relacionar el estado, la política, la sociedad, los sujetos, la cultura y la literatura. Como bien lo sabían Marx y Freud, es un instrumento crítico ideal porque es histórico, cultural, político, económico, jurídico, social y literario a la vez: es una de esas nociones articuladoras que estan en o entre todos los campos (14, emphases in original).
[“Crime” […] not only helps us to differentiate, separate and exclude, but also to relate the state, politics, society, subjects, culture and literature. As Marx and Freud well knew, it is an ideal critical instrument because it is historical, cultural, political, economic, juridical, social and literary at the same time: it is one of those articulating notions that are in or between all fields/disciplines].
Like the French historian Michel Foucault before her—vid. esp. Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (1973)—, Ludmer thus shows that the “corpus delicti” of modernization, literally its “criminal body,” is animated not only by material and/or contextual “relationships” (Findlay) of power, but also by representations that are in fact inseparable from its (historical) becoming. For this reason, “[l]a constelación del ‘delito’ en literatura no sólo nos sirve para marcar líneas y tiempos, sino que nos lleva a leer en las ficciones la correlación tensa y contradictoria de los sujetos, las creencias, la cultura, y el estado” (15, emphasis added; Our constellation of ‘crime’ in literature not only serves to trace [cultural] lines and times, but it also leads us to read in the fictions the tense and contradictory correlation between subjects, beliefs, culture, and the State).
Another way of saying this is that criminal representations—or representations “in crime,” to follow Ludmer’s play—provide an avenue for reshaping modernization by reshaping its “corpus delicti.” Such representations in fact arise from and re-enter the Möbius loop of modernization’s criminal “body,” thus opening, however briefly, a rearticulatory space within the criminal foundations of Western modernity. Yet another way of saying this is that by reshaping the frontiers of modern culture—and crime is one of those frontiers—representations “in crime” redraw the territories not only of modernization’s historical development but also those of its being.
For this reason, criminal representations, whether they be in the political, the cultural, the juridical, or the popular spheres, can be interpreted as struggles over modernity, not only over its futures, but also over its resources, that is to say, over those elements that buttress its materiality and that thus guarantee its futures. In light of this, representations in crime, that is to say, representations of the omnipresent foundationality or corporeal motoricity of crime within Western modernization, take on added importance as potential vehicles through which to deflect the devastating hegemonic effects of representations of crime and their ideological-effects. This is because by giving us a way to inhabit it, they may yet offer us ways to reconfiguring modernization’s criminal body into more equitable social arrangements and political modalities. The emerging criminal literature and film will play a significant role in this struggle. For it is by embodying and denuding the “corpus delicti” of modernization that new avenues may materialize for rerouting, even perhaps for reversing, the overpowering momentum of modernization’s now global symbiosis with crime.
Bibliography
Cortázar, Julio. “Anillo de Moebius.” Queremos tanto a Glenda. 2nd ed. Mexico City:
Editorial Nueva Imagen, 1981. 149-66.
Ejercito Zapatista de Liberación Nacional. “7 piezas sueltas del rompecabezas mundial
(El neoliberalismo como rompecabezas: la inútil unidad mundial que fragmenta y
destruye naciones).” 1 Mar. 2003
199708xx.es.htm>.
Findlay, Mark. The Globalisation of Crime: Understanding Transitional Relationships
in Context. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1999.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan.
New York: Vintage Books, 1979.
Ludmer, Josefina. El cuerpo del delito: Un manual. Buenos Aires: Libros Perfil, 1999.
—–. “The Corpus Delicti.” Trans. Donally Suzanne Kennedy and Georgina Dopico-
Black. The Places of History: Regionalism Revisited in Latin America. Ed.
Doris Sommer. Durham: Duke UP, 1999. 11-20.