Cultural Capital: Reflections from a Latin Americanist

Abstract

John Guillory's Cultural Capital (1993) is a peculiar and instructive reading for a scholar of Mexican and Latin American literature in the US academy. A fellow Bourdieusian, I have always admired Guillory's account of power and economic differentials in the material work of literature in education. The book continues to be bold and timely thanks to its way of raising the question of the literary canon in academia critically but without conceding to the pieties of neoliberal multiculturalism. Guillory's work establishes a framework to address the canon as a matter of capital and power rather than of representation. In this, Cultural Capital predicted the limits and aporias of how the academic humanities in the United States, and cultural institutions and universities at large, have thoroughly normalized a neoliberal idea of cultural justice. Our cultural debates continue to render accurate his critique of both “the right-wing design of purging noncanonical works from the curriculum” (Guillory 1993: 46) and left multiculturalism's inclination “to cede to the right the definition of cultural capital” (47). This is why university discourse today can square the inclusion of diverse voices with the preservation of vertical and hierarchical structures of prestige, reconciling the space for critical dissent that scholars correctly claim and defend with an increasingly unequal division of labor and status. If anything, neoliberalism's transformation of multiculturalism into an institutionalized and often toothless discourse of diversity and inclusion is a direct consequence of believing that representation within unchallenged structures of cultural power is preferable to the democratization of knowledge. This is foreseen in Cultural Capital: “In the present regime of capital distribution, the school will remain both the agency for the reproduction of unequal social relations and a necessary site for the critique of that system” (55).Guillory corrects the belated and equivocal reception of Bourdieu's work in the Anglosphere, challenging the mistaken view that his sociology of literature does not allow for aesthetic judgment as such. Bourdieu is concerned with the disavowal not so much of aesthetics writ large but rather of the structures of distinction that deploy taste and its performance (what he calls habitus) as a mechanism of reproduction of power. This is why Bourdieu (2000: 73–77) spends a significant amount of time criticizing not only the correlation between aesthetic value and educational attainment but also the patronizing ways in which elites define the category of popular culture. Yet, as Tony Bennett (2005: 142) discusses, Bourdieu's critique of cultural institutions sought to “make it possible to recognize the universal value that inhered in particular works as a result of their emergence from historical processes of a particular kind.” This is particularly the case in the last pages of The Rules of Art, where Bourdieu (1996: 348) calls artists to embrace this idea and join a “collective fight” against corporativism and the exclusion of intellectuals from public debates under neoliberalism “by involving themselves in their own times, to assert the values associated with their autonomy.” Guillory (1993: 340) lucidly identifies the same difference between institutional critique and relativism asserted by Bourdieu, arguing that the critique of aesthetic judgment misunderstands the questions of power related to the canon: “Insofar as the debate on the canon has tended to discredit aesthetic judgment, or to express a certain embarrassment with its metaphysical pretensions and its political biases, it has quite missed the point. The point is not to make judgment disappear but to reform the conditions of its practice.”I particularly appreciate this insight because Bourdieu is far more influential and extensively engaged in Latin America than he is in the United States. I belong to a cohort of scholars who have worked in Bourdieusian studies of the literary fields of the region and are often frustrated by the simplistic ways in which concepts of cultural capital and autonomy are rendered in Anglophone scholarship.1 As Mabel Moraña (2014: 19–20) notes, in Latin America Bourdieu's work served, above all, to tend to the important redefinitions of the intellectual in the heart of dominant culture, to rethink the long trajectory that begins with the colonial letrado and leads to the public intellectual of the twentieth century, moving through republican and liberating messianism, the figure of the organic intellectual, all the way to the modalities of technocratic-intellectual consultancy and even alternative forms of intellectual work registered in originary non-Western cultures in Latin America.2Coming from this intellectual tradition, I believe Guillory's main contribution is to show that one can square Bourdieu's critique of the practices of distinction that foreground literary reading and criticism in a class-structured society with the material possibility of an aestheticism rooted in the democratization and redistribution of cultural capital. Just as Bourdieu argued that “we must . . . work to universalize in reality the conditions of access to what the present offers us that is most universal” (Bourdieu and Wacquant 1982: 84–85), Guillory (1993: 340) closes the book by arguing that “socializing the means of production and consumption would be the condition of an aestheticism unbound, not its overcoming.”Yet Cultural Capital, in its targeting of the material conditions of Guillory's own field at the time of its writing, misses significant debates regarding the question of literature and cultural capital in the US academy. I work in a field that represents the second language and the largest demographic minority in the US, as well as the literature of twenty countries of the hemisphere. But we are seldom named, much less engaged, in the books about “literary criticism” or the “literary field” in the United States. You could be challenged to find any book speaking of those matters that is not squarely about English departments, with courtesy cameos by scholars of French, German, and comparative literature, particularly insofar as these departments were essential to the theoretical turn in the discipline that has now been appropriated in English programs (Saussy 2006: 4). Because of that, as a Latin Americanist, the only possible approach I have to Cultural Capital is to provincialize it: to understand it as a book that only partially concerns my tradition. Latin American literature, its criticism, and its teaching represents the majority of the hemisphere and has deep roots and a substantive footprint in the United States. Spanish departments and programs constitute the second largest field of literary studies in the United States after English. We are attentive to the work and contributions from our English department colleagues and neighbors regardless of their lack of reciprocity. And yet writing on “literary studies” often fails to even acknowledge our existence.From my field, a significant chunk of Cultural Capital reads as the chronicle of a distant land. My estrangement derives in part from the fact that the New Critics, central to the narrative of this book, are generally irrelevant to Latin Americans, who were far more involved with structuralism, German philology, and Marxism than with the provincial kingdom of close reading. A careful approach to Cultural Capital cannot disavow any perception that, in its account, literary criticism and education in the United States belongs to the field of English literary studies. It is remarkable that a book committed to Bourdieusian reflexivity, with an open critique of the notion that Western culture is a lineage to US exceptionalism (Guillory 1993: 38–42), does not engage the simple fact that English departments are the dominant but not the only field of literary and cultural criticism in the university. Or, for that matter, the fact that Anglocentrism is a form of cultural capital bound to both an isolationist and xenophobic idea of the national school (as English-only policies have demonstrated in states like Arizona) and the marginalization of literary studies outside English (and maybe French and German) programs.3 Some of the book's critical investments make it feel both anachronistic and deeply regional. As someone who has never found Paul de Man particularly interesting or fruitful, the painstaking discussion of his role in the institutionalization of theory reeks of outdatedness. The rise of theoretical approaches tied to race and gender, as well as the discussions related to questions of the Anthropocene, have gradually pushed deconstruction away from its role as a barometer of the question of theory. To be fair to Guillory, this is a factor of his project. A presentist book always runs the risk of missing the forest for the trees. It is clear to me that in 1993 the book represented a powerful critique of the state of his discipline at the time. Cultural Capital's true legacy, the reason why we are gathered to discuss it, is not its concrete content but the timeliness and relevance of its structure, its questions, and its critique.I came to reread the book now many years after I found it during the research of my undergraduate thesis (and first book) on Harold Bloom and the canon (Sánchez Prado 2002). Bloom triggered a whole debate on canonicity that my younger self sought to record in that book and that I have recently revisited in a different piece (Sánchez Prado 2021). I found myself recognizing that the value that we found in Bloom's narrow orthodoxy to speak about Latin America's right to universality has become exhausted, and that we need to envision forms of literary criticism that aspire to a cosmopolitanism closer to the aspirations of Latin American humanists than to the parochial Anglocentric claims of a Yale professor. In rereading Guillory once again in the wake of reading Bloom, I began to harbor the fantasy of a hypothetical version of Cultural Capital that truly engaged the questions that Guillory's English-centric account sidesteps. As far as my own subfield goes, such a book would deal with matters such as the complexities of writing and teaching in Spanish versus English (a matter that not only affects universities but also K–12 education), the North–South differential in the cultural capital of literary disciplines, the dominant role of Spanish vis-á-vis Indigenous languages, Portuguese or Spanglish, the tensions between Iberian, Latin American, and US Latinx literatures, the cosmopolitanism of peripheral scholars, and the provincialism of metropolitan academics. I do not intend to take Guillory to task for not embarking on such a wide-ranging project. His book continues to be an impressive feat of cultural sociology and criticism. Rather, my wish for such a book recognizes the fact that his conceptual and methodological contributions can continue to engage complex matters of the multifield study of literature in the United States when it is freed from the axiomatic and unreflexive conflation of English with the larger field of literary studies. The highest praise I have for Guillory is my renewed belief that every field and subfield of the literary humanities should have its Cultural Capital.In this spirit, a discussion of Cultural Capital coming from a Latin Americanist should balance two questions. First, given the role of Bourdieu as an influence and interlocutor of the field of Latin American literary and cultural studies, the enduring power of Guillory's reading of the concept of “cultural capital” can be deployed as a compass to engage the present and future of literary subfields like mine. Second, there is a valuable lesson in creating a chronology of Latin Americanist debates on the canon and the idea of literary language that runs parallel to various moments in Cultural Capital. These debates can complement and further illuminate Guillory's understanding of common questions that account for the baroque and transcultural tradition at the core of Latin American literary criticism. I will dedicate the rest of this essay to rehearsing the second option, bringing to the fore a debate on the concept of literary language in Latin America that may speak back to Cultural Capital.The question of the canon in Latin American literary studies has a double dimension: the criteria of representation for the continent's culture, and the historical struggle of a cosmopolitan (semi)peripheral region to assert its universal cultural citizenship. In the early years of the twentieth century, the very idea of Latin America as a site of production for literature was very much in question in both Spain and the United States. It was only in the late nineteenth century, as Alejandro Mejías-López (2009: 4) discusses, that “modernismo created a continental Spanish American literature, actively engaged the international cultural and political arena, and became the only postcolonial literature to wrest cultural authority from its former European metropolis.” Furthermore, “Spanish American modernismo radically altered Spain's literary field, transformed and modernized literary expression in Spanish, and stripped Spain of linguistic authority, the very core of its (imperial) identity” (4). In other words, Latin America in the late nineteenth century was able to take control of the literary field in Spanish and counter the notion, sustained by critics on both sides of the Atlantic, of Spain's linguistic supremacy over its former colonies. The cultural capital and perceived inherent superiority of Spain's literary language have been challenged ever since by Latin American writers committed to both the universalism and the specificity of our continental culture.In this period, then, we see the confluence of three phenomena that would set up the discussion of the idea of the literary in the twentieth century. First, intellectuals like José Enrique Rodó begin positing the idea of a “Latin race [that] is defined as the result of a cultural tradition, an accumulation of historical achievements” (Mejías-López 2009: 147). Second, as Julio Ramos (2001: 42) discusses extensively in his classic work Divergent Modernities, the literary field in Latin America develops in this period both a defense of tradition and a critique of modernity—both cultural features also advanced by literary work—and the creation of literary autonomy vis-á-vis the overarching cultura letrada that had defined the region since the colonial period. Finally, as Mariano Siskind (2014: 103–82) studies, the turn of the century brings the rise of “Latin American world literary discourses” enacted by cosmopolitan inclinations that nevertheless continued to have a significant stake in the differentiated cultural identity of the region. As the formation of pedagogical imaginaries and canons, to use Guillory's terms, emerged with the massification of public and higher education from the Mexican Revolution onward, the balance between the differentiated characteristics of the region and the claim to universalist value and recognition became the fundamental terms defining the cultural capital of Latin American literature.As the academic study of literature rose in the United States, the struggle for recognition of Latin American literary production was tied to imperial ambition. It is quite instructive to think this history alongside the English-centric accounts by Guillory and other scholars. The first history of Latin American literature of the twentieth century was written in 1916 by a scholar from the United States, Alfred Coester. A “teacher-spy from Brooklyn,” as Fernando Degiovanni (2018: 50) describes him, Coester believed that “literary education should become part of the academic knowledge needed for the development of a rapidly growing national economy with limited opportunities for domestic reinvestment.” Coester ([1916] 1928: vii) departs by praising former US president William Howard Taft and the building of the Panama Canal and noting that “reading the books written by Spanish Americans” is a way to know the culture. Of course, this approach is closer to the courses on “civilization” that would fill university curricula in the twentieth century than to the praxis of distinction between “literary language” and “ordinary language” that Guillory (1993: 133) places at the center of conversations on the canon—which is why Coester ([1916] 1928: 17) felt obliged to ask, “But shall we call Spanish-American writings literature?” His answer was yes, but insofar as “literature is often meaningless without an understanding of contemporary politics” and “the language of Spanish America is not only permeated with terms and expressions taken from daily life.” Ultimately, Coester ([1916] 1928: viii–ix) concludes, “The originality of Spanish-American literature . . . lies chiefly in its subject-matter, in its pictures of natural scenery and social life.”The academic study of Latin American literature in the United States accrues cultural capital not in relation to the uniqueness and autonomy of literary language but rather through a discourse of specificity valued for its connection to ordinary speech and to the sociological understanding of a region necessary to form the emerging class of imperial administrators. As seen in John T. Reid's (1942) eulogy, Coester would have a long, rich career as a founder the Spanish department at Stanford University, a charter member of the American Association of Teachers of Spanish, and a longtime editor of the association's flagship journal Hispania. Coester's view of the teaching of Latin American literature as subservient to what would be called years later “area studies” is perhaps the reason the field is absent in the work of Guillory and other histories of literary study in the United States. Coester is altogether absent from Gerald Graff's ([1987] 2007) classic Professing Literature, where the conflation between literary study and English is a pure matter of fact. Nevertheless, Coester's The Literary History of Spanish America appears at the very end of what Graff ([1987] 2007: 118) terms “The Early Professional Era” (1875–1915) and the emergence of a tension, as the 1912 MLA presidential address put it, between the “breadth of culture” and “a more or less narrow professionalism.” By setting such a civilizational mission, Latin Americanists like Coester were in fact sidestepping this debate by professionalizing Latin American studies as a discipline of knowledge tied to the political role of the literary canon both within the region and in hemispheric affairs. It was bound, as Richard Cándida Smith (2017) has exhaustively shown, with the imagination of what he calls an “improvised continent” that exists in the long history of Pan-American engagement. The historical continuity is remarkable as one can see it move historically from the imperialist enthusiasm of people and Coester, through the Cold War and the Congress of Cultural Freedom (Cohn 2012), all the way to the present.Tellingly, the word Spanish is mentioned in Professing Literature three times and is completely absent from Cultural Capital, according to the Google Books search I conducted out of curiosity. The geopolitical nature of Latin American literary studies sets the stage of the general sidetracking of Hispanophone literature and criticism from the imaginaries of the literary canon and the discipline of literary study in the Anglosphere.4 As Mary Louise Pratt put it acidly in reference to Latin American literature's absence in postcolonial studies, “In less charitable moments, one suspects that the main barrier has been the need to learn so unprestigious a language as Spanish” (Robbins et al. 1994: 4). And yet Latin American literary studies persisted and thrived across the hemisphere. The conversation on exactly what constitutes literary language throughout the twentieth century shows how Guillory's method in Cultural Capital can help illuminate the field of Latin American literary studies, notwithstanding its blind spots. One of those blind spots is the question as to which languages are allowed to be literary in the first place.Guillory devotes one of the most luminous sections of Cultural Capital to the tracing of the question of literary language from Russian formalism to the book's present. His discussion departs from the debate between Russian formalists who sought to displace “the agency of change (genius, originality) to the ‘literary system,’ conceived as a specific and irreducible linguistic system with its own inherent laws of evolution” and the Bakhtinian circle that posed “the question of literary language as the question not of an essentially different kind of language (literariness) but of linguistic differentiation as a social fact” (Guillory 1993: 64). Following Bakhtin's remarks in “Discourse in the Novel,” Guillory observes that “‘literary language’ does indeed ride the crest of a historical wave, but not as the defamiliarized or the new. On the contrary, it forms at the interface between the language of preserved literary texts and the context-bound speech that continually escapes total regulation and hence changes” (67). This discussion leads Guillory to understand, alongside Bakhtin and sociolinguists like Charles Ferguson, the idea of literary language as a practice that has a distinct temporality: Literary language also changes, if at a slower pace than extraliterary language, or heteroglossia, and this is the crucial point. Canonical texts, institutionally preserved and disseminated, constitute the paradigmatic basis of literary language, the guarantor at the lower educational levels of simple grammatical speech, the exemplar, at higher levels, of more expansive as well as more elite standards of linguistic use (stylistic or rhetorical rather than simply grammatical norms), even the licensed abuses that are now virtually identified with the language of high canonical literature. Hence canonical texts cannot be reduced wholly to exemplars of the literary language or the grammatical speech abstracted from them, and that difference is as consequential as the perpetual difference of the heteroglossic. (68)This distinction of temporalities embedded in forms of criticism related to the linguistic turn (the Russian schools, for sure, but one can also add critics like Roman Jakobson, Roland Barthes, and Lucien Goldmann in successive years) leads Guillory to the possible theorization of “the history of social relations of writing” (70–71).It is worth remembering that the Russian scene after the revolution was the place in which literary theory as understood in the twentieth century finds its foundational space. Galin Tihanov (2019: 3–4) claims as much in defining literary theory as the contemplation of literary autonomy “not through the figure of the writer per se, but through language” and suggesting that “until the 1940s, when global awareness of Russian Formalism began to spread, literary theory remained almost exclusively a Russian and Eastern European invention.” I will sidestep the discussion of this controversial but very plausible claim. I bring Tihanov to the table in part because his work decenters the Anglocentric account, present in Guillory's (1993: 176) work, of “the emergence of theory in the 1960s,” related to a discourse based on the “suspension of the category of the literary,” which he particularly identifies with deconstruction. It would be interesting to pit Tihanov's account of theory with Guillory's, but this is not my primary objective here.More to my purposes, Tihanov (2019: 20) argues that the “intimate link between Romanticism and the inception of modern literary theory is once again suggestive of the dialectic between national and cosmopolitan tendencies in Eastern and Central Europe.” This is also the constitutive dynamic of the idea of literary language in Latin America and in many other parts of the world. What Anglocentrism misses is that the struggles to define literary language in the early part of the twentieth century on a more global scale were certainly related to the problem of the school and the canon but also to the extent to which a language of lesser cultural prestige in the international division of intellectual labor should balance the universal with the national. In Russian and Spanish, which Alexander Beecroft (2015: 267) usefully describes as “regional world languages,” there is a deeper identification between the language of aesthetics and the language of the polis, as well as a weightier tension between the local as specific and the cosmopolitan as universal.In the 1920s, the question of literary language was quite distinct in Latin America from Russian or English. One of the essential works of criticism from the period, Pedro Henríquez Ureña's 1928 Seis ensayos en busca de nuestra expresión, argued that independent nations need literature (and other arts) that embody their own particular expression. However, Henríquez Ureña ([1928] 2013: 146) notes, music and the visual arts could mix the various heritages of the region (European, African, Indigenous) in symbolic and material forms, but writers have a different problem: “We have not renounced writing in Spanish, and the problem of an original expression of our own begins there. Each language is a crystallization of modes of thinking and feeling, and everything written in it is bathed in the color of its crystal. Our expression will need redoubled vigor to impose its tones over the red and the golden yellow [the colors of Spain's flag].” This quest for a literary aesthetics that properly embodies Latin America while writing in a language not born out of it would emerge when “the spiritual axis of the Spanish world has passed to these shores of the Atlantic” (154).The distinction between the Latin American idea of “our expression” and the idea of Western Culture in US literature as discussed by Guillory (1993: 39) resides precisely in that the US canon is founded on “an image of the American nation as the telos of Western cultural evolution.” Latin Americans did not renounce their Western lineage but built their system on an idea of universal culture that was not as teleological. The two-volume textbook Lecturas clásicas para niños, created by the Mexican Department of Education (1924) in the wake of the revolution, offered an anthology that covered “Oriental” literature, the Greeks, and the Bible, as well as a selection of European and Latin American texts. These books have no claim whatsoever to presenting Latin American texts as the inheritors of the classics. They are classics of their own and part of a canon intended to elevate the quality of reading in schools. The point of including Latin American classics was not so much to create lineage but to equalize. Pre-Columbian stories are equal to Greek myths, and Simón Bolívar and Vicente Riva Palacio are as worth reading as Tolstoy or Goethe. While a modernizing impulse underlies this reading of the canon—the idea of a legible tradition to instill into the education of Latin Americans—the fundamental gesture is universalization. Much like Bourdieu rejects the distinction between the aesthetic and the popular as a reproduction of structures of power, Latin American critics and intellectuals began, from modernismo forward, to consider the difference between the European and the Latin American tradition as a reinforcement of Eurocentrism rather than as a factual aesthetic hierarchy.The lack of self-exceptionalism and the identification of literary language with the social history of the region also accounts for why Latin American literature struggles to be read as literature in the United States. Guillory (1993: 41) notes, “If works by Afro-American, Latin-American [by which Guillory appears to mean Latinxs in the United States, although it is equivocal] or postcolonial writers are read now in formal programs of university study, this fact may be the immediate result of a political project of inclusion, or the affirmation of cultural diversity.” Guillory continues in a way that carries a different meaning after reading Henríquez Ureña: “The current project of affirming cultures themselves through the legitimation of cultural works in university curricula is enabled by the very conflation between the senses of culture to which I have drawn attention” (41). Guillory correctly points out that Western culture leads to the formation of an American consciousness in the pedagogical model of the Great Books, while “the formal study of Latin-American novels in the university does not really transmit or reproduce Latino culture,” and “it follows that the relation of even Latino students to these artifacts will not be entirely unlike the relation of ‘American’ students to the works of ‘Western’ (American or European) culture” (41). There is a distinction into which culture or identity can be reproduced within the canon-making structures, and a culture that is defined as a minority or as located in a periphery inherently lacks, within the US system, the cultural capital to ensure its pedagogical effect in the core of the curriculum. The fact that Guillory appears unaware of, or unable to express, the difference between Latin American culture and what we now term Latinx culture from the United States—fields that are distinct from each other and located in different positions of the university structure—is to me evidence of the general invisibility of my field to someone that was writing the most authoritative history of the discipline at the time.Latin Americans can also be experts in US literature. No Latin American scholar would ignore the scholarship of those working on our literature in the United States or Europe. In fact, the work of European and US L