Postnationalism, Globalization and the "Post-Mexican Condition" in Roger Bartra

Introduction In Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson stresses the importance of journeys, or colonial pilgrimages, in the transformation from the colonial state to the nation state (1991, 114-115). A similar process continues to this day with the transformation of what David Harvey calls the "neoliberal state" (2005). In the case of Mexico, one has to ask to what degree of relevance is the fact that 4 of the last 5 Mexican presidents did postgraduate studies in American universities known for their neoliberal credentials: Harvard, Yale, and MIT. The exception, Vicente Fox, was CEO of Coca-Cola in Mexico. This clearly suggests the possibility of class, institutional and ideological allegiances. I bring this up because it is one of the blind spots in Roger Bartra's depiction of what he calls "the post-Mexican condition. " I also bring it up to contextualize and distinguish the experiences of this neoliberal political elite and that of the cultural intellectual I discuss in this paper. Roger Bartra is a sociologist and anthropologist known for his deconstruction of Mexican identity and nationalism, and his postmodernist reading of the present conditions in Mexico. He did postdoctoral research in France during the 70s, and was a student of French poststructuralism. Furthermore, that Bartra chose France for study is significant in part because for Spanish American artists and intellectuals France has often been the alternative metropolis for those wishing to avoid Spain or the United States, especially for that generation that identified with the democratic upsurges and left wing movements of the Sixties. Bartra, however, associates his time in France with a certain disenchantment with respect to the metanarratives of the vanguard, modernity and the emancipation project of the enlightenment (1992b, vii-x, 223-234). Though he borrows the notion of postnationalism from Jurgen Habermas, Bartra distances himself from Habermas's hope in the universal spirit of the Enlightenment and modernity, leaning more toward Jean Francois Lyotard's conception of the postmodern condition. He believes that nationalism and modernity are "mortally wounded" and that we have no other recourse than to engage "the postmodernity of a fragmented western world to which we belong. " For Bartra, the task implies the construction of a postnational identity based in the pluricultural and democratic forms of civic life (1993, 97). His position is one of enthusiastic resignation with respect to postmodernism, which in my view will later reinforce his resignation with respect to neoliberalism due in large part to his failure to take sufficiently into account the negative effects of the transnational forces that have changed Mexico in the last decades. Postnational Identity and "The Post-Mexican Condition" To understand the idea of the "post-Mexican condition," one should begin with Bartra's deconstruction of homogeneity in Mexican national identity. Since the appearance in 1987 of Bartra's The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character, and in later publications such as Blood, Ink, and Culture: Miseries and Splendors of the Post-Mexican Condition, he has argued that Mexican nationalism began to suffer a crisis of legitimacy in the late 1960s, and that since the 1980s Mexico is in transition to a postnational condition. Bartra coincides with a number of prominent Latin American intellectuals regarding the demise of what he calls "revolutionary nationalism," the nationalist ideology that legitimized the government of the Institutional Revolutionary Party (or PRI) which dominated Mexican politics from the 1930s to the year 2000 when it lost those elections to the conservative National Action Party (the PAN). Nestor Garcia Canclini, writing about Latin America in general, argues that the transnationalization of economy and culture has made the notion of national identity somewhat unrealistic as a mode of legitimation: "National identity has been eroded by the economic and communicational flows, the displacement of immigrants, exiles and tourists, as well as the multinational financial exchanges and the repertoires of images and information distributed to the entire planet by newspapers and magazines, television networks. …