The Rise of Finance: Cultural Production and Politics in Mexico and Brazil after 1982.

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 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. The second chapter examines the same time period in Brazil and argues that the specificity of the post-82 period was not that of 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 informal city. 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. 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.