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The Rise of Finance: Cultural Production and Politics in Mexico and Brazil after 1982 by Brian Whitener A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy (Romance Languages and Literatures: Spanish) in the University of Michigan 2016 Doctoral Committee: Professor Gareth Williams, Chair Associate Professor Katharine M. Jenckes Assistant Professor Jaime Rodriguez-Matos Professor Elizabeth R. Wingrove © Brian Whitener, 2016 Acknowledgements Thanks to my friends, comrades, and families (biological and otherwise) for their companionship throughout the process of writing this document and for reading many parts of it and offering their feedback. Thanks, as well, to my dissertation committee for their support during my time in graduate school and for their engagement with this project and the ideas contained therein. Thanks are due to the following kind souls who answered emails queries, offered bibliographical help, or dialogued with respect to this project: Paul Amar, Joshua Clover, Annie McClanahan, and Alberto Toscano. ii Table of Contents Acknowledgements……………………………………………………………………………….ii Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………...iv Introduction………………………………………………………………………………………..1 Chapter 1: Crisis, Ontology, and the Saltos of Finance in Jorge Volpe‘s En Busca de Klingsor.38 Chapter 2: The Failures of Finance: Urban Peripheries, Hyperinflation, and Real Abstraction...88 Chapter 3: Subject of Credit: Credit Democracy, Projection, and State Violence in Financialized Brazil……………………………………………………………………………………………146 Chapter 4: Cultures of Circulation in Contemporary Mexico: Beyond Interiority and Voided Collectivities……………………………………………………………………………………200 Conclusion: Towards a Politics Neither of Nor at a Distance from the State…………………..250 iii Abstract The Rise of Finance: Cultural Production and Politics in Mexico and Brazil after 1982 examines the impact of the rise of finance, or the turn from production-based forms of accumulation to financial ones, on cultural production, social life, and subjectivity in Mexico and Brazil in the period from the 1982 debt crisis to the present. The first two chapters of this dissertation examine how cultural production reacts in the aftermath of the 1982 debt crisis and to the process of state and capital restructuring which follows. In the opening chapter, I trace how Jorge Volpi‘s En busca de Klingsor, in the face of financial indeterminacy, reconstitutes the racialized imaginary of the national popular, turning away from defining race via biology or culture, by specifying an ―ontological‖ or moral division between good or bad subjects, which prefigures the emergence of the category of delincuente (a category not marked explicitly by biology or culture but which nonetheless does the work of race of distributing resources and selecting certain populations for premature death). The second chapter examines the same time period in Brazil and argues that the specificity of the post-82 period was not that of generalized crisis (as in the Mexican case) but one of hyperinflation. As a result, the recomposition of the national popular form of social control which cultural production participates in takes a different form: again, as a turn away from race thought as biology or culture, but which is replaced in the Brazilian case by a spatial division between the formal and iv informal city (a division, I discuss, by drawing on contemporary heterodox Marxist cultural theory, as a form of ―real abstraction‖). The chapters in part 2 of the dissertation argue that the post-2001 moment is marked by, in Brazil, what I term, ―failed forms of financial corporativism,‖ or the attempted use of finance in the form of personal credit to bind subjects to the nation, and, in Mexico, a turn of the economy not to personal credit, but rather to ―circulation‖ more generally (i.e., a turn away from the sphere of production into drug logistics, finance, and remittances) in which the state is unable to produce either processes of subjectivization or meaningful collectivities. Chapter 3 examines three transformations wrought by the massive entry of finance into Brazil after 2003: a form of (failed) financial corporativism, a projective structure of feeling, and on the level of the subject. In chapter 4, I track how, during the turn to circulation in Mexico, the corporativist structures of the developmental state have been replaced by a military-policing apparatus, which is no longer concerned with producing subjects and collectivities, and I examine how cultural objects from this period repeatedly return to the question of how to produce, in the absence of state-generated forms of collectivity, new forms of relation between the individual and the collective which could serve as a stay or defense to the predations of state and capital. Finally, in the conclusion, I examine what the twin conditions of increasing surplus capital and surplus population mean for our thinking of politics in Latin America. v Introduction The early and mid-2000s witnessed a spate of books celebrating the seizure of political power across Latin America by a new set of social movements, the marea rosada. By the close of the decade, however, it was abundantly clear that the majority of these new ―Left‖ governments were not only developmentalism in a new financialized and extractivist guise, but, more importantly, they were even less successful than their national populist forebears in addressing the contradictions of capitalist development. In Bolivia, the very miners and indigenous groups who brought Evo Morales to power have rioted. In Venezuela, after the death of Chavez, the most intensive discussions have been around how to undo the bureaucratization into the state of the ―revolution from below.‖ In Brazil, millions have marched in the streets. And in countries, like Mexico, where there was never a Left turn, we have unparalleled death. What each country shares is that they have been unable to address in a substantial way, first, the changes that occurred in the new insertion of Latin American economies into the world economy after 1973 (the year of the first oil crisis and the United States‘ exit from the Bretton Woods agreement) and, second, the specifically capitalist contradictions that have arisen from their new developmental strategies. That is, in each case, and throughout Latin America as a whole, the Left turn has doubled down on capitalist development and (failed) finance-led accumulation (i.e, expansion of stock markets, derivatives, and personal credit). The inability to propose, indeed to even think, something beyond the developmentalist program first conceived in the 1930s and 1940s and the need to be able to do so form the horizon of this project. While this dissertation is 1 focused on the linkages between political economy, culture, and social theory, it is the tepid return of state-led, partially ameliorative, fully financialized responses to the long downturn of capitalism since the end of the 1960s and early 1970s that has provided the background, framing, and motivation for it. Indeed, the last forty years in Latin America, since the beginning of the end of the post- war boom, have been nothing if not a history of crisis. Starting with the Mexican currency devaluation in 1976, the landmarks of the subsequent decades bare the names crisis and crack (i.e., the Spanish term for stock market crash) and the restructurings of this period are often both preceded and followed by crashes, crises, or failures of attempted finance-led accumulation. This dissertation, then, is an attempt to take this history of crisis seriously and to think finance as a central category of Latin American cultural and political economy of the last forty years—with the aim of setting the stage for a potential rethinking of political forms of intervention into this on-going crisis. I affect this centering of finance by focusing on two countries, Mexico and Brazil, which I have chosen for the rich set of comparative possibilities they offer. Both countries, one with and one without a (formal) dictatorship, take on massive amounts of debt in the 1970s. Both pass through the 1982 financial crisis, but with different paths: Mexico is ground zero of the crisis, while Brazil is almost able to keep its creditors at bay (before they finally agree to a credit bailout in 1983 [Oliveri 120]). Similarly, both have major crises in the 1990s, but their shape and temporality are distinct. While in the post-2001 period, their paths diverge, with Brazil massively expanding consumer credit as a form of financial corporativism and Mexico making a turn to circulation that brings along with it mass destruction and death. This project, thus, does not claim to say everything that is possible about finance in Latin America, nor even in these two 2 countries, rather my primary aim is to make finance perceptible as a social force and to trace a few of what feel like its most important inflections. A Brief History of Finance in Mexico and Brazil The historical argument that frames this project is that the rise of finance is the centerpiece, in Latin America, of a response to failing capital accumulation, the end of the post- war cycle of expansion, and the beginning of the long downturn that occurs in the late 1960s and early 1970s. The uneven rise of finance from the 1970s to the present is a process that occurs, roughly, in three stages that created a new financial integration of Latin American countries into international capital circuits and a new financial architecture for processing, receiving, and mitigating flows of finance capital and redirecting them internally. To center finance as a social force, it is necessary to have some sense of these processes, the new architectures, and finance‘s history in the region. Thus, in the following, I trace three stages of finance—dwelling mostly on the most recent period—and develop a comparative framework for Mexico and Brazil, placing them into the context of a longer historical frame of Latin American capitalism.

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