Modernidad/Capitalismo a

traves de sus Fundamentos

Coloniales:
Genealogias y Estructuras de
Poder, Saber & Ser.
COLONIZATION AND DECOLONIZATION AS WELL AS COLONIALITY AND DECOLONIALITY ARE INCREASINGLY
BECOMING KEY TERMS FOR MOVEMENTS THAT CHALLENGE THE PREDOMINANT RACIAL, SEXIST, HOMO- AND
TRANS-PHOBIC CONSERVATIVE, LIBERAL, AND NEOLIBERAL POLITICS OF TODAY.
 Analitica de la Modernidad en
Perspectiva Pos/Descolonial

 Modernidad/Colonialidad como Matriz de Poder/Saber: 1. Hegemonia Mundial: Geo-Politica, Imperios Trans-territoriales , Orden Interestatal; 2. Patrones de
Acumulacion de Capital-Desarrollo Desigual y Combinado; 3. Episteme: Invencion de Continentes & Surgimiento de Europa, Narrativa Hegemonica de Tiempo/Espacio, Yo,
Verdad, Arqueologia del Conocimiento, Proyecto Etico-Politico, Racial, Regimenes de Subjectiviidad, Regimenes Esteticos y Visuales; 4. Dominios Entrelazadados de
Dominacion: Capitalismo/Clase, Racismo/Etnico-Racial, Imperialismo/Diferencia Colonial, Patriarcado/Genero & Sexualidad.
 Modernidad, Modernizacion, and Modernismo. Como se relacionan estas tres categorias claves? (Peter Taylor) Como se distinguen y cuales son sus significados
diferenciados para una analitica de la modernidad/colonialidad?
 Dussel: la idea de una linea singular de desarrollo Grecia-Roma-Europa es un product conceptual de imaginario eurocoentrico VS Black Athena (Martin Bernal), Before European
Hegemony (Janet Abu-Lughod), In an Antique Land (Amitav Ghosh) & todavia no una historia mundial en el sentido empirico. Solo habia historias locales articuladas a imperios y
universos historicos como el Mediterraneo de Braudel Vs Conciencia Planetaria (Pratts) & Sistema-Mundo Moderno/Colonial Capitalista (Wallerstein).
 Dos Conceptos de Modernidad: Eurocentrico/Occidentalista VS Planetario/Transmoderno. Otredades de la Modernidad: Contra Antiquedad, Traditcon, Estancamiento,
Esclavitud/Servidumbre; Politica (Maquiavelo, Kant)), Razon/Historia (Hegel, Weber, & Habermas), Economia (Smith to Marx), Sujeto (Nietzche, Freud) VS Modernidad como
conciencia and gerencia de la centralidad (politica, economica, filosofica, epistemica, estetica) del sistema-mundo desde 1492. Modernidad Europea—una largo proceso de cinco
siglos— como el desenvolvimiento de nuevas posibilidades derivadas de su hegemonia en el mundo moderno y la construccion historica del resto del globo como sus
perisferias… La modernidad como un nuevo paradigma de vida que envolvio la emergencia de del sistema Atlantico en el largo Siglo XVI que implico la colonizacion del
imaginario (memoria, geografia, subjetividades) con sus nuevas jerarquias geo-politicas, economicas, epistemicas, culturales,esteticas, y espirituales Mito de la Modernidad:
Modernidad puede interpretarse como una justificacion de una practica irracional de violenciia… en este sentido el Mito de la Modernidad como bienestar envuelve un Sacrificio
de Violencia para la Modernizacion/Mision Civilizadora & Falacia Desarrollista y Linea de Progreso Transmodernidad & Metodo Analectico: “transmodernidad-proyecto
mundial etico-politico de Liberacion donde la alteridad, que es fundamento de la modernidad, representa las fuerzas vivas del cambio radical… Transmodernidad es un proyecto
de liberacion de dimensiones multiples: politico, economico, ecologiol, erotico, pedagogico, religioso.
 Quijano: todo un periodo historico… comenando con America, un nuevo espacio/tiempo fue constituido de materialidad e inter-subjectividad: esto es lo que nombra la categoria
modernidad & Dos ejes principales de este patron de poder son la clasificacion social de la cuerpos, pueblos y teritorios del mundo a partir de la idea de raza & la constitucion de
una nueva estructura de explotacion del trabajo sus productps y recursos, comola subyugacion al capital de todas las formas de trabajo historico, esclavitud, servidumbres,
pequena produccion de mercancias y reciprocidad, para vender en el mercado mundial y obtener ganancias. Patron Global de Poder: the current model of global power is the
first effectively global one in world history… the modern world-system that began to form with the colonization of America, has in common three central elements that affect the
quotidian life of the totality of the global population: the coloniality of power, capitalism, and Eurocentrism
 Reidentificacion e Intersubjetividad: Las relaciones sociales fundamentadas en la explotacion y dominacion (racial y patriarchal) produjeron nuevas identidades sociales
historicas en las Americas—Indios, Negros, Mestizos— redefinieron otras…estas identidades constituyeron las jerarquias, lugares, & roles sociales, y por ende el modelo de
dominacion colonial que se impuso... Lo racial se convirtio en criterio fundamental de distribution de riqueza, poder, reconocimiento y representacion en el mundo.
 Que es el Capitalismo?

 Co-Production of Modernity as Global European Modernity in Dialectical relation with non-European alterity that is its
ultimate content, Multipe-Trotsky´s Combined & Uneven Development. Vs Expansion/Dissemination Myth.
 Genealogies of the Modern. 1492 Birth Myth of Modernity & Encubrimiento/Eclipse-concealment, misrecognition of the
Other contra Todorov. From so-called Iberian Reconquest to Conquest/Colonization of the New World. Latin America as First
Periphery that created Europe & Caribbean where Modernity was Invented!
 Inventions: Center/Periphery & Modernity as the conception and management of centrality in the modern/colonial capitalist
world-system. Continents (O´Gorman, Mudimbe, Pagden), Civilizations, Races, Ethnicities, Nations.
 Quijano: Coloniality of labor control determined the geographic distribution of each one of the integrated forms of labor
control in global capitalism. In other words, it determined the social geography of capitalism: capital, as a social formation for
control of wage labor, was the axis around which all remaining forms of labor control, resources, and products were
articulated.
 Debate con Marxismos Occidentalistas. De los Masxismos del Tercer Mundo-Negros, Latinoamericanos, Africanos, Caribenos,
Arabes & el Ultimo Marx.
 Immanuel Wallerstein & Giovanni Arrighi: Capitalismo Historico como Forma de Civilizacion-racionalidad de vida que incluye
una forma propia de urbanizacion.
 Wynter: it was this initial, large-scale, one-sided accumulation of lands, wealth, power, and unpaid labor by the West that was
to provide the basis for today’s 20/80 wealth and power ratio between the world’s peoples Order of Power, Order of Being,
Order of Knowledge.
Who’s the Modern Subject? Who’s the
Subaltern? Who’s the Post/Decolonial
Subject?

 Sujeto Moderno Varon, Blanco, Europeo o Eurodescendiente, Letrado, Propietario, Burgues,

Heterosexual, Citadino.
 Hegel´s Universal History from East to West & Kant´s Adultcentrism (Jorge D Vazquez) The Color of
Reason (Eze) vs Rationalities- Changing the Geography of Reason. People of Western Europe have
Absolute Right as Bearers of the Spirit hence Eurocentrism & Sacralization of Imperial Power of Homo
Europeus (Stoler). Will to Know/Dominate.
 Wynter: Man as Ethnoclass since Long 16th C & as the Political Subject of the State hence Coloniality of
Power. All other modes of being human… as the lack of the West’s ontologically absolute self- description.
Man as a universally applicable “descriptive statement” of the human & principle would be embodied in
the new line that W. E. B. Dubois was to identify as the Color Line. & ethnoclass Man—of its genre of being,
of truth, of freedom—as all three are articulated in the disciplines of our present epistemological order…
shifts in epistemes… and in the “politics of being”; that is, as a politics that is everywhere fought over
what is to be the descriptive statement, the governing sociogenic principle, instituting of each genre of the
human… about whose master code of symbolic life and death each human order organizes itself.
 Coloniality of Being/ Power/Truth/Freedom: Racism/Ethnicism Complex, Colonial Difference Idea of
Race as “the most efficient instrument of social domination invented in the last 500 years.” Racial Duree
(Winant) & Race as the Rule of Colonial Difference (Partha Chatterjee) Miranda as a Woman… at midpoint
between rational/irrational nature.
What is Eurocentrism, Colonialism,
Coloniality & Colonial Difference?

 Quijano: Eurocentric version is based on two principal founding myths: first, the idea of the history of
human civilization as a trajectory that departed from a state of nature and culminated in Europe; second,
a view of the differences between Europe and non-Europe as natural (racial) differences and not
consequences of a history of power. Both myths can be unequivocally recognized in the foundations of
evolutionism and dualism, two of the nuclear elements of Eurocentrism.
 Mitchell- These more global pictures make possible a less Eurocentric account of the formation of the
European modern. If modernity had its origins in reticulations of exchange and production encircling the
world, then it was a creation not of the West but of an interaction between West and non-West. VS
Colonial Labs of Modernity: The principle of self-monitoring embodied in Bentham's Panopticon was
designed by his brother Samuel while assisting Russia's colonization of Ottoman territory, while monitorial
schooling was invented in early nineteenth century Bengal. The emergence of "the population" as the
primary object of governmental power, as Partha Chatterjee notes in his essay in this volume, and
certainly the invention of "culture" as the features embodying the identity of a population group,
probably first occurred in the colonization of non-European regions.
 Lao-Montes: Coloniality as a central component of Modern Regimes of Power/Knowledge & in Fanon a
Colonialism as a System and the Colonial as a Social Relation (a la Marx).
 Mignolo: Coloniality/Colonial Difference is to Decolonial Critique what Surplus Value is to Marxism and
the Unconscious to Freud.
Beyond Occidentalism: Toward
Nonimperial Geo-historical
Categories Fernando Coronil
 By Occidentalism, I refer to the emsemble of representational practices that participate in the production
of conceptions of the world which, 1) separate the world´s components into bounded units; 2) disaggregate
their relations histories;3) turn difference into hierarchy; 4) naturalize these representations, and thus; 5)
intervene, however unwittingly, in the reproduction of actually existing assymetrical power relations.
 Imperial Maps & Question of Representation Time/Space, History & Geography hence Geo-Historical
Categories: Occident/Orient, North/South, Center/Periphery Self/Other as Mental Maps become Second
Nature.
 Representational Practices West and Rest as Critique/Critique of Critique. How Western representations
of Others constitute its definitions of Self? Dissolution, Incorporation, Disruption.
 Occidentalism & Eurocentrism part/parcel system/regime of global power-relation of Western
representations of Cultural Difference.
 City/West/Empire/Center vs Country/non-West/Colony/Periphery & Binary Equivalences in contrast to
categories & methods as Relations/Processes.
 Decentered Transcultural Anthropology & Contrapuntal Logics-Methods. Imagine & Construct Geo-
Historical Categories for a Non-Imperial World.
Critique of Occidentalist Categories,
Cartographies & Narratives

 Decolonization of Memory-The silencing of the past inheres not only in what is said but also in how it is said &
assess the terms of the dominant narratives of world history—the words used, the concepts deployed, the setting of
the plots and subplots. (Trouillot, Young, Guha et al)
 We should hold under suspicion any word that describes a chunk of the story while claiming universal relevance.
Words such as progress, development, modernity, nation-state, and globalization… Hybris del Punto Cero (Castro
Gomez) & Said´s Disembodied Imperial observer.
 North Atlantic Universals: We should hold under suspicion any word that describes a chunk of the story while
claiming universal relevance. Words such as progress, development, modernity, nation-state, and globalization &
words that project the North Atlantic experience on a universal scale that they themselves helped to create. North
Atlantic universals are particulars that have gained a degree of universality, chunks of human history that have
become historical standards. They do not describe the world; they offer visions of the world... since they are projected
as universals, they deny their localization, the sensibilities and the history from which they spring.
 By North Atlantic universals, I mean words that project the North Atlantic experience on a universal scale that they
themselves helped to create. North Atlantic universals are particulars that have gained a degree of universality,
chunks of human history that have become historical standards. They do not describe the world; they offer visions of
the world. They appear to refer to things as they exist, but because they are rooted in a particular history, they evoke
multiple layers of sensibilities, persuasions, cultural assumptions, and ideological choices tied to that localized history
.
 Cuestiones de Método:
Doble Critica & Analectica

 La doble crítica significa la articulación de dos formas del quehacer crítico; por un lado la crítica inmanente que deconstruye
e implosiona las contradicciones internas y aporías de procesos y categorías, dentro de un universo particular; mientras la
crítica externa o transcendente se efectúa desde lugares de enunciación que corresponden a historias y culturas con sus
propios conocimientos, lógicas y categorías que son negadas y subalternizadas en los registros hegemónicos de poder y
saber. En lenguaje dusseliano, la doble crítica se traduce como conjugación de analéctica y dialéctica, en ana/dia-léctica.”
 “La filosofía y política de la liberación se fundamentan en lógicas de liberación sustentadas en un método ana/dia-léctico
afín a las metodologías contrapuntales utilizadas en todo este volumen. La ana/dia-léctica constituye una lógica de
liberación que entrelaza discursos críticos de diversa índole, saberes académicos radicales con conocimientos ancestrales de
otredades subalternizadas, marxismo negro con feminismo descolonial, el pachakutik indígena con la revolución
comunitaria. En fin la ana/dia-léctica, promueve un modo de construcción de conocimiento crítico, a contrapunto de los
métodos y discursos hegemónicos que reproducen el entramado de opresiones que conceptualizamos como cadenas de
colonialidad. En esta clave, es un método descolonial de carácter contrapuntal.”
 “El método que se ha bautizado como doble critica, surge a contrapunto de la crítica occidentalista de corte eurocéntrico y
falo-logo céntrica. Esto se hace a contrapunto y en relación a la crítica transcendente que implica cuestionar y si es
necesario reemplazar los conceptos convencionales con categorías, lógicas, valores, instituciones, y proyectos, a
contracorriente de la racionalidad occidental. Dos ejemplos son, nociones vernáculas de comunidad política y gobierno
siguiendo el principio Zapatista de mandar obedeciendo, y racionalidades de vida ecológicas como se expresan en los
conceptos de “buen vivir” como traducción de Suma Kawsay en Kichua y Ubuntu en Zulú.”
Coloniality of Being, Power, Truth,
Freedom. After Man, Toward the Human!

 Rigorous Intersectionality. The correlated hypothesis here is that all our present struggles with respect to race, class, gender,
sexual orientation, ethnicity, struggles over the environment, global warming, severe climate change, the sharply unequal
distribution of the earth resources… these are all differing facets of the central ethnoclass Man vs. Human struggle.
 Gruzinski´s Colonization of the Imaginary-Cognitive Mappings of Self, Memory & Space hence Occidentalist Discourses of
History, Geography, & Identity.
 Modern/Colonial Episteme from First Modernity. Sepulveda vs Las Casas-a dispute, then, between the theocentric
conception of the human, Christian, and the new humanist and ratiocentric conception of the human, Man (i.e., as homo politicus,
or the political subject of the state). & mode of sociogeny of medieval Latin-Christian Europe & Episteme-Beyond Two Cultures.
 Man from Theopolitics to Egopolitics. This theological condemnation of the “natural man” of the laity had become even more
intensified by medieval Scholasticism’s reconception of the human in Aristotelian Unmoved/Mover terms… enacting of the
ontogeny/sociogeny, nature-culture mode of being human & The large-scale accumulation of unpaid land, unpaid labor, and overall
wealth expropriated by Western Europe from non- European peoples, which was to lay the basis of its global expansion from the
fifteenth century onwards, was carried out within the order of truth and the self-evident order of consciousness, of a creed-specific
conception of what it was to be human—which, because a monotheistic conception, could not conceive of an Other to what it
experienced as being human, and therefore an Other to its truth, its notion of freedom.
 Narcisism Occidentalist Modernity & Failure Recognize Location. The West would therefore remain unable, from then on, to
conceive of an Other to what it calls human… All other modes of being human would instead have to be seen not as the
alternative modes of being human that they are “out there,” but adaptively, as the lack of the West’s ontologically absolute self-
description
After Modernity/Coloniality?
Which Politics/Projects?

 Quijano: Neo-Colonial Indendences & Structural Dependency/Coloniality of Power. That democratization would have implied,
and should imply before anything else, the process of decolonizing social, political, and cultural relations that maintain and
reproduce racial social classification. The structure of power was and even continues to be organized on and around the
colonial axis.
 Maldonado-Torres: various crisis, of a civilization system that has coloniality as its basis… reflected in contemporary
“development” policies, nation-state building practices, widespread forms of policing, surveillance, and profiling, various
forms of extractivism, the increasing concentration of resources in the hands of the few, the rampant expression of hate and
social phobias, and liberal initiatives of inclusion, among other forms of social, economic, and political control
 If coloniality refers to a logic, metaphysics, ontology, and a matrix of power that can continue existing after formal
independence and desegregation… nexus of knowledge, power, and being that sustains an endless war on specific bodies,
cultures, knowledges, nature, and peoples, decoloniality refers to efforts at rehumanizing the world, to breaking hierarchies
of difference that dehumanize subjects and communities and that destroy nature, and to the production of counter-
discourses, counter-knowledges, counter-creative acts, and counter-practices that seek to dismantle coloniality and to open
up multiple other forms of being in the world
 Lao-Montes: Decolonization as long-term uneven and complex process and revolution as deep decolonization which entails
combating multiple chains of coloniality by building rainbows of solidarity for liberation against diverse and entangles forms
of oppression (capitalist/class, racism/ethnic-racial, patriarchal/gender, sexuality, imperial/geo-political) and types of
injustice (epistemc, ecological, economic, social, political, cultural, aesthetic, spiritual). This is what I call a politics of
decolonization and liberation. !MOVIMIENTOS ANTISISTEMICOS A LA WALLETSTEIN!!!
 “Giro Decolonial”:
Historias y Debates
 Perpectiva Descolonial como un terreno disputado. Variedad y Diferencias tanto en los Marxismos, como en los
argumentos pos/descoloniales, y los analisis de sistema-mundo (Arrighi vs Wallerstein).
 Anibal Quijano: Colonialidad del Poder, Modernidad (dominacion-explotacion vs liberacion), Crisis Raigal-Utopia-
Movimientos Societales. Afin a Colonialidad del Saber (Lander) pero no a Colonialidad del Ser por preocupacion perdida
de especificidad y eficiencia politico-epistemica de la categoria. Con Hugo Zemelman contra construir formulas y
escuelas. Critico de Walter Mignolo.
 Enrique Dussel: El sistema-mundo como problema filosofico. La dependencia como categoria filosofica. QuinceTesis
sobre Economia-Politica. Vente Tesis sobre Politica. Cinco Volumenes sobre Marx. Relacion con Bolivar Echeverria? &
Debate con Carlos Aguirre Beltran.
 Se puede hablar de un Giro Decolonial similar a los llamados Giro Linguistico (Sausurre), Giro Pragmatico (Habermas),
Giro Cultural (Jameson)?
 Centralidad del Feminismo Descolonial: Maria Lugones, Ochy Curiel, Yuderkis Espinosa? Que implica esto para los
contenidos sustantivos de la categoria Colonialidad y las Politicas de Descolonialidad? Colonialidad como el entrelace de
cuatro regimenes modernos de dominacion y expplotacion: Capitalismo, Imperialismo, Racismo, Patriarcado (lao-Montes)
 Cuestiones Claves: Totalidad (Dussel vs Quijano), Metodo, Proyecto Politico-Agencia, Estado, Camino y Horizonte,
Cuestion Epistemica-dialogo teoria critica occidental, teoria critica desde el Sur, y conocimiento vernaculo?.
Desafios y Debates dentro de
Perspectiva Descolonial!!!

 Centralidad y Definicion del Capitalismo, vigencia de la critica del capitalismo y la economia politica
marxista.
 Articulaciones entre capitalismo, racism, patriarcado, imperialism. Y entre dimensiones geo-politicas,
politico-economicas, epistemicas, esteticas de la colonialidad del poder-saber.
 Significados del Giro Decolonial. Relacion con la Teoria Critica Occidental. Cuales son las genealogias
politico-epistemicas: historias, movimientos, corrientes? Quienes son las figuras, lecturas y argumentos
claves.
 Cuestiones Claves: Totalidad, Metodo, Agencia, Proyecto Politico, Horizontes de Futuro.
 Criticas Externas: Macronarrativa de caracter esencialista (Moreira et al) con necesidad de fundamentacion
historica, empirica, politica. Esencializacion
 Criticas Internas: 1)Castro-Gomez-El Tonto y los Canallas. 2) Zemelman-Pensar Epistemicos y Pensamiento
Categorial vs Pensar Teorico y Pensamiento Parametral e intent de montar escuela decolonial. 3) Silvia
Rivera-contra modas academicas e importancia fundamentarse en practicas anti-coloniales. 4) Feminismo
Descolonial-critica feminista anti-racista e interseccionalidad en rigor.
 Carencias: Cuestion Urbana, Economia-Politica, Teoria Politica.