Toxic Criminalities in Francoist Spain the Making of a European Dictatorship
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Toxic Criminalities in Francoist Spain The Making of a European Dictatorship Ibai Atutxa Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy! in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY 2018 2018! Ibai Atutxa CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 ABSTRACT Toxic Criminalities in Francoist Spain: The Making of a European Dictatorship Ibai Atutxa This dissertation investigates the transformation undergone by the Francoist dictatorship (1939-1978) in Spain in the 1950s and 1960s, which occurred under conditions of neoliberal rationalities and petroleum toxicity –petrotoxicty. It addresses the transformation at three levels: the dictatorship’s criminalized bodies; the Francoist national political project; and early transnational attempts for European unification. By exploring an archive of laws, mass media, and intellectual dialogues, the dissertation contends that there was a shift in regimes of criminality that allowed the dictatorship in the south and Europe in the north to establish the initial form of their coalition. The dissertation addresses processes of recognition of criminality by establishing a critical framework that examines the transition from a dominant paradigm of disease toxicity to one of petrotoxicity. In proposing that this transition took place together with the development of neoliberalism, the dissertation argues that the neoliberal regime operated during its period of consolidation by generalizing, at national and transnational scales, forms of exclusion and inclusion that were characteristic of what the text presents as the “petrotoxic regime of criminality.” By conducting the analysis through the lens of the petrotoxic regime of criminality, the dissertation offers a fresh perspective to the debate within Spanish Peninsular Cultural Studies about the seemingly contradictory nature that the Francoist dictatorship acquired during this period; both anti-modern and modern; both Catholic fundamentalist and neoliberal capitalist. It allows us to shed light on a process of revaluation of the regime’s toxic nature that resulted in a Catholic Fundamentalist Capitalist dictatorship. TABLE OF CONTENTS Francoist Residues ………………………………………………… 1 The Paradigm of Petrotoxicity ……………………………………………… 10 In a Specific Time and Place ………………………………………………… 19 Criminal Archives ………………………………………………… 38 The Law ………………………………………………… 39 The Mass Media ………………………………………………… 43 Intellectual Discourses ………………………………………………… 50 Structure and Chapter Layout ……………………………………………… 55 PART ONE Disease Toxicity Chapter One. Contagious Vagrancy ………………………………………………… 61 Vagrants Refigured ………………………………………………… 64 A New Immunitary Paradigm ………………………………………………… 67 Disease Toxicity and Regimes of Power ……………………………………... 74 Chapter Two. After Inoculation ………………………………………………… 79 Nationalist Bodies as Antibodies ……………………………………………... 81 The Married Childbearing Woman ..……………………………………… 82 The Indebted Man ………………………………………………… 84 Cinema and Censorship as Viral Encoding ………………………………… 90 Homeowner ………………………………………………… 91 Noir Dissidence ………………………………………………… 94 i Productive Censorship of Maricones ..……………………………………… 98 Cinderella Women ………………………………………………… 100 Chapter Three. Intellectual Immunizations ………………………………………. 106 Three Intellectuals on the Spanish Condition ….……………………………. 109 European Catholic Spirit and the Vagrant South ….………………………... 113 The Francoist Inimicus ………………………………………………… 116 The Neoliberal Cure ………………………………………………… 119 TRANSIT Chapter Four. Petrotoxic Transition to Petromodernity ………………………... 123 A Paradigm of Oil Spills and Dangerous Substances ………………………. 124 Slick Resistance ………………………………………………… 131 PART TWO Petrotoxicty Chapter Five. Residual Threats ………………………………………………… 136 The Modernity of Social Danger …………………………………………… 138 Petrotoxic Residues ………………………………………………… 143 Molecular Risks ………………………………………………… 144 Revalue or Dispose ………………………………………………… 146 Exposing the Toxic ………………………………………………… 150 Petro-Dependent ………………………………………………… 152 Petrotoxic Terrorism ………………………………………………… 153 ii Chapter Six. Petrotoxic Iterations of the Nation ………………………………… 156 The Regime on a Petrotoxic Blind Spot …………………………………….. 159 The Exceptional Married Woman ……………………………………….. 161 A Stakeholder in the Nation ……………………………………………... 165 On the Petrol Screen ………………………………………………… 166 Sexual Deviancy ………………………………………………… 167 Economized Women ………………………………………………… 182 Chapter Seven. Slick Intellectuals ………………………………………………… 190 Three Intellectuals on the Residual South …………………………………... 192 Revaluation of Colonized Residual Europeans ……………………………... 197 A Catholic Capitalist Response ……………………………………………… 199 Enmity and the Plastic Partisan ……………………………………………... 203 Petrotoxic Enemies in European Dialogues ………………………………… 205 Revaluing the Spirit of Catholic Fundamentalist Capitalism ………………. 208 CONCLUSION Re-valuing Residues for the Formation of Europe ……………………………….. 210 Bibliography …………………………………………………. 214 iii Acknowledgments I would like to extend thanks to the people without whom this dissertation would not be possible. My adviser, Alberto Medina’s work of extensive close readings and thorough feedback of every single piece of writing and acts of rewriting has led to this final form that the dissertation has acquired. I could not have wished for a more committed work of direction. The members of the committee, in alphabetical order, Ana Fernandez Cebrián, Bernard Harcourt, Seth Kimmel, and Jo Labanyi for reading with care exams, the prospectus and drafts of chapters, and for being a positive and creative source of comments, thoughts and networks at every stage. I would also like to thank the members of my department, the department of Latin American and Iberian Culture, as well as of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, the Institute for Research on Women, Gender and Sexuality, and the Politics Department of the University of the Basque Country (who welcomed me as a Visiting Scholar) for broadening my perspective and for teaching me where and how to look for questions and answers. Finally, thank you Sejal Shah and Daniel da Silva. You have been the shelter for survival, for caring creative thinking, productive critical debates, endless corrections, editions and readings, and mainly, love. iv To Sej v Francoist Residues After World War II, a different logic to identify people and collectives as criminals reproduced the paradigm of the petroleum-based toxicity, which itself linked inextricably the final optimization of the violence of the Francoist dictatorship in Spain (1939-1978) with the first scaffoldings of the coming European Union. This is, in a nutshell, the main argument of the present dissertation. Furthermore, I propose that this petrotoxicity1 informs the logic of recognition of threats and calculation of risks that sustain the contemporary neoliberal rationality. Unlike before, it established an economy of revalorization and disposal of dangerous subjects; of recycling, reusing or reducing dagerous individuals. I approach the paradigm of petrotoxicity as an economy of recognition of criminals that sustained the consolidation of neoliberalism. Petroleum toxicity, as the other side of the coin of petromodernity, established a distinct paradigm that made sense of the threats to life within the early neoliberal formations of the Spanish dictatorship and of Europe. More than just tropes and metaphors, petrotoxicity became an interpretive category that provides of an economy of recognition of criminal threats. 1 I borrow the concept “petrotoxic” from the sparse critical work that has started to make use of this term to refer in a single word to the toxicity of petroleum and the elements that derive from it. For example Donna Haraway’s book Staying with the Trouble refers briefly to “the great new petrotoxic lakes of North America” (184), in order to talk about the unconventional oil deposits known as tar sands, which can be found in the Canadian region of Alberta. We find another example in Adam Romero’s 2017 talk “Manufacturing Petrotoxicity” in which he explored “the rationalization of oil as an economic poison across California and US agriculture.” Finally Lucas Bessire and David Bond refer to the term petrotoxic when they explain how tracing “thresholds of petrotoxicity in factories, cities, nations, and now the planet, shows how hydrocarbon problems have been instrumental in making the conditions of life visible, factual, and politically operable” (447). 1 I introduce four coordinates that delimit petrotoxicity as an interpretive category of criminality. Petrotoxicity does not refer to threats that come from the outside but to ones that were already there before exposing their toxicity. It describes economic entities, which following the rules of market economy, need to be either revalued or disposed of. It calculates the risk posed by threats at the molecular level of the dangerous agents. Finally, petrotoxicity refers to threats that are at the same time indispensable and poisonous for economic progress. This petrotoxic economy of recognition of threats posed to life emerged hand in hand with the development of the neoliberal governing rationalities of the time. Understanding the entanglement of the dissemination of petrotoxicity and the consolidation of neoliberal rationalities requires a situated and detailed analysis of a change of paradigms. I situate the juncture for the emergence of the petrotoxic paradigm in the 1950s, within the transformation of the south-north relationship of Europe that occurred with the recognition