Coming to Our Senses: Affect and an Order of Things for Global Culture

2. Any mention of “hegemony” in Hispanist circles will immediately evoke Jon Beasley-Murray’s claim that “there is no hegemony and never has been” (ix) with which he begins his 2010 Posthegemony, a text that has become a disciplinary standard. Beasley-Murray uses the term posthegemony to denote a postideological cultural landscape in which the withering of social teleologies only reveals a status that is, essentially, the opposite of Althusser’s “always already”—for Beasley-Murray, the appropriate descriptor would be, perhaps, “never actually.” “Nobody is very much persuaded by ideologies that once seemed fundamental to securing social order…. Social order was never in fact secured through ideology” (ix); “the myth of the social contract is over” (284).

My persistent use of the term hegemony, however, does not run as counter to Beasley-Murray’s position as might appear. Beasley-Murray defines posthegemony as a function of “affect, habit, and an immanent multitude,” averring that “politics is biopolitics”; “at stake is life itself” (284). I coincide thoroughly with Beasley-Murray in this definition; I view ours as largely a terminological difference. Where Beasley-Murray delineates the end of one epoch and the beginning of another as the transit from hegemony to posthegemony, I trace that same transit as the end of rational colonial politics and the beginning of affective free-market politics in which free-market democracy, as a model, is the new cultural hegemon on a global scale.

3. I would like to note an affinity of what we might call intertemporal structure and intertextual play between my study and Graff Zivin’s Figurative Inquisitions (2014). Graff Zivin traces what she terms “Inquisitional logic” (xii) from its origins in imperial Spain to its appearance in “practices of interrogation, torture, and confession” (xi) in the post-9/11 cultural world. Thus making a sweeping historical arc connecting the fifteenth century to the twenty-first, Graff Zivin also considers the place of Inquisitional logic on a cross-sectional plane of contemporary global culture, moving easily in and out of regions and across genres, from the U.S. to Latin America and the Iberian Peninsula, from journalism and cultural theory to film and literature. In this regard, I appreciate Graff Zivin’s book as an important precursor to my own, establishing, as she does, new terms of regional, temporal, and textual engagement for the field of Hispanist cultural criticism.

I would be remiss if I did not also recognize the extent to which the late María Rosa Menocal’s Shards of Love (1994) serves as a precursor to us both, insofar as it posits a fundamental historical affinity between the turbulent multiculturalism of 1492 and Menocal’s present, the postmodern globalization of the early 1990s, within which the analysis moves between regions, time periods, and genres, from the mozarabic jarcha to Dante and Petrarch to Eric Clapton. Shards of Love remains a model of scholarly creativity and even audacity in privileging a free play of concept over the conventional disciplinary constraints of regional and temporal specialization.

4. My endeavor to trace the evolution of affect in the conceptual dimension through time and place, essentially a archaeological diagnostics, or the historiography of an episteme, coincides with Joshua Lund’s efforts in compiling a cultural history of the concept of hybridity, which he describes as a “metacritical study,” an exercise in “tracking the ways in which the idea of hybridity has been thought, specifically in Latin American writing” (ix), with the ultimate stakes of thereby creating a tool for analyzing and assessing “how the coloniality of power continues to operate on the site of the nation, which of its operations is transgressed, which maintained, which reinforced, and which might be stopped” (188). My own attempts to trace the epistemological dimension of affect in contemporary cultural discourse has the analogous objective of offering itself up as a tool for the measuring and comprehension of contemporary biopolitics that turn on affective interventions and manipulations. The conceptual fabric of my politics may not be readily intelligible or legible within a field traditionally concerned with Marxism and its legacy, deconstruction, subalternity, and politics of cultural difference—I think here, for example, of Román de la Campa’s Latin Americanism (1999) and Alberto Moreiras’s The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Difference (2001)—but my study of affect approaches these same questions of ethics, sovereignty, and power from an angle that might at first glance seem oblique, but simply approaches them through the filter of the epistemological. In this sense, I feel a solidarity of intention—if not entirely of method—with the group of Latin Americanists described by John Beverley in Latin Americanism After 9/11 as generating a critical production on the strength of deconstruction that is “both a critique but also a new form of Latin Americanism” (43). I also feel an intellectual solidarity with Abraham Acosta insofar as he attempts to challenge, loosen, unravel the knots of reified disciplinary assumptions about resistance in Thresholds of Illiteracy (2014). Acosta’s thematics of analysis revolve around a more traditional Latin American subalternity than mine do—indigenista narrative, testimonio, the EZLN, and border politics—but I nevertheless consider myself to be making an analogous push for the reconsideration and expansion of the standing theoretical limits of Latin Americanist thought.

5. I see a strong resonance with this mode of conceptualizing the relationship between Latin America and the United States in the relationship envisioned by Mariano Siskind in Cosmopolitan Desires between the Latin America desirous of joining the “global order of modernism” and the metropolis thus envisioned as world literature: “My point throughout the book,” explains Siskind, “is that marginal literatures (however we define the subaltern materiality of their marginalities) expose the hegemonic making of modernist global mappings” (18). The Latin American deseo de mundo (“desire for the world,” 3) thus reveals the mechanisms of the world it seeks to join, participating in the same currents of knowledge, imagination, and representation from a marginal position, however defined. Siskind’s tracing of the Latin American deseo de mundo in many ways echoes Carlos J. Alonso’s mapping of the quest for modernity in The Burden of Modernity: The Rhetoric of Cultural Discourse in Spanish America (1998), where Alonso’s vision of the relationship between literary center and periphery is analogous to Siskind’s. My perspective on the relationship between Latin America and the United States is in many ways a fusion between Siskind’s deseo de mundo and Alonso’s burden of modernity, on the one hand, and, on the other, Ericka Beckman’s notion of capital fictions in which a desire for capital—the “promise of bananas” (191)—becomes a “foundational myth of Latin American societies” (197). Beckman helps us to consider the extent to which capital relations between Latin America and the economic metropolis—neocolonialism, in a word—are textually inscribed in Latin American cultural production. I depart from precisely this same premise in my analyses of the perspectival differential between Latin American and U.S. cultural production, understanding Latin American cultural production to be self-conscious of its literary and economic marginalization vis-à-vis the developed world, especially the United States, while simultaneously participating in the literary and economic paradigmatic network that embraces both regions—and extends to global proportions.

1. In this same vein, within the field of Hispanism, Aníbal González argues in Love and Politics in the Contemporary Spanish American Novel that a “new sentimental novel” (144) has arisen in Latin American letters during roughly the same time period, which González dates from 1969 to the present (as listed in his appendix of relevant titles, 147–48). González suggests that this “new sentimental modality” (viii) is a reaction to the end of revolutionary politics and their commercially successful literary counterpart, the so-called Boom of Latin American literature in the 1960s, although he ultimately leaves the question of how this new modality originates open-ended (ix). This periodization is entirely consonant with my contention that affect begins to be visible in the wake of the cold war and the “universal triumph” of liberal democracy.

2. Another deeply personal study in cultural theory whose format and epistemological construction might be productively analyzed alongside Stewart’s Ordinary Affects is Beatriz Preciado’s Testo Junkie (2013), in which the consideration of the history of pharmaceuticals and pornography since the mid twentieth century, and the impact of this history on sexual identity and erotic desire, is intertwined with autobiographical meditations on the effects of testosterone on the author’s body and psyche.

3. Stewart’s waxing lyrical as denotative of the discursive terrain of affect calls to mind a contribution to Patricia Ticineto Clough’s and Jean Halley’s The Affective Turn in which author Hosu Kim analyzes the experience of a young Korean immigrant’s learning of English as a second language. Kim’s hybrid poem-essay is among the most explicitly poetic of recent contributions to affective scholarship, but it serves to underscore a tendency toward the poetic that is recurrent in the scholarly treatment of affect, as though evincing a tacit consensus that poetry were the expressive vehicle most closely related to affective communication—that poetry constitutes the linguistic form best suited to the expression of affective content. Collectively, scholars of affect seem to be giving themselves certain poetic license in the use of poetry in order to access—in a mimetic way—the experiential and conceptual field that they are seeking to describe in scholarly terms.

4. It is worth noting that, as historical contemporaries, Deleuze and Guattari and Williams both stage a struggle of sorts between affect and reason. In Williams this relationship is dialectical; in Deleuze and Guattari it is adversarial. But in both there is a question of whether affect will submit to the dominion of reason. Since Williams posits a dialectic in which affect precedes reason as an inevitable eventuality: affective preinstitutionality will, sooner or later, give way to rational institutionalization. In this regard, in Williams, reason is posed as dominant in an eternally repressive sort of way of affect, which is styled, in contrast, as unruly, spontaneous, and effervescent. These characterological traits—which also heavily populate the mid-century discourse of revolution—are indeed accorded dissident status in Deleuze and Guattari, where the body without organs that manifests them in its antiteleological and free-spirited self-pleasuring is capable of countering the capitalist machine associated with rationalized productivity tantamount to organic colonization.

Along with Williams and Deleuze and Guattari, Roland Barthes’s Le Plaisir du texte (The Pleasure of the Text, 1973) comes readily to mind, for example, as vertebrally positing an opposition of reason and affect in two different models of reading: the first, a placid and unremarkable pleasure associated with the cultural bourgeoisie and its forms of rational order; the second, a jouissance riding the border between pleasure and pain cast as a desirable epistemological mechanism for the interruption of organized convention. (Barthes’s opposition between two different models of reading is also suggestive as a precursor and analog for Stewart’s two different models of writing.)

The recurrent motif of a structural and systemic contest between reason and affect in poststructuralist discourse (Williams, Deleuze and Guattari, Barthes) could be connected to psychoanalytic discourse, which sets up the same contest but with the reverse outcome. For Freud, the pleasure principle is an unbridled libidinous stage in early development that must be overcome by the rational overlay of heterocentric logic. The early “polymorphous perversion”—whose negative connotations could not be more pronounced—is inferior, base, undisciplined, and dangerous if unchecked. Heterocentric redirection and mastery of the libido, in contrast, represents the proper functioning of the ego and constitutes a functional passage toward rational order that underwrites the phenomenon of civilization itself.

It is not only mid-century poststructuralist thought that restages this contest between reason and affect, but inverting its outcome so that a triumphal affect destabilizes the rational social order, now associated with civilization in Freud, now associated with capitalism (as a synecdoche for Western civilization) in Deleuze and Guattari. The artistic vanguards of the early twentieth century write this opposition into their discursive program for cultural freedom embodied in such operations as surrealist automatic thought, which privileged the expression of the nonrational unconscious—a highly affective unconscious, to be sure—as a way of countering reified patterns of thought associated with rational cultural convention. In this regard we might position poststructuralist thought, and its championing of affect as nonrational and contestatory, as the cultural inheritance of the political aesthetics of the vanguard and an evolving critique of the psychoanalytic dominion of reason over pleasure.

5. Stewart’s politicized treatment of affect resonates with that of two anthologies, The Affective Turn (2007) and The Affect Theory Reader (2010), in which respective editors Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley (2007) and Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (2010) present collections of essays that work loosely—and intentionally so—toward the theoretical definition of affect in cultural discourse. These interventions construct a politics of affect that effectively posits itself with a certain ideological charge as against a sometime, and negatively connoted, politics of rational discourse. These two anthologies frame affect in a way that connotes an a priori resistance to conservative politics and discourse. Indeed, in both texts’ introductions, which serve as a definitional aegis for the otherwise heterogeneous set of essays that follow, there is a marked and insistent ascription to affect of such qualities as rupture, multiplicity, fluidity, and resistance to definitive conclusions and analysis, with the result of inscribing affect studies and affect theory within a philosophical tradition of anticapitalism and antirationalism most heavily associated with Deleuzean thought (e.g., the bodies without organs of the Anti-Oedipus, the rhizome of A Thousand Plateaus, the notion of intensity in the cinematic theory of Deleuze focused on sensory perception and affective engagement between film and spectator). Affect can “do things” (to quote the speech-act phrasing of Peninsular Hispanist Jo Labanyi’s 2010 “Doing Things: Emotion, Affect, and Materiality” on the interpretive use-value of affect), and it can do them without engaging the traditionally Cartesian apparatus—e.g., exclusively mental thought, critical evaluation, rigorous synthesis.

1. The conventional manner of conceiving of homeostasis is simply as a set of autonomic functions (e.g., the circulation of blood and respiration). Damasio refines this definition significantly by expanding the definition of the nonrational and automatic functions of the body to include a sequential chain of affective processes that is ascending in its complexity. First the senses apprehend external (or remembered) stimuli, which provokes a corresponding emotional state (understanding emotion as a generalized but preconscious somatic circumstance). This in turn produces a consciousness of emotion in the brain that Damasio calls feeling (understanding this feeling-as-consciousness as a product of the brain, yet prerational in that it has been produced without the engagement of the rational cognitive apparatus whose engagement Damasio characterizes as a second-order operation that happens once feeling has been established).

2. In addition to Damasio’s evocation of Spinoza (in opposition to Descartes) in exploring the “feeling brain,” Hardt and Negri look to Spinoza for their definition of affect (108, 374n9). Spinoza is also to be found in the concept of immanence by way of Deleuze, who develops the term while championing Spinoza. The journal Polygraph dedicated its 2004 issue, for example, to the question of immanence versus transcendence, in which a cadre of prominent philosophers (Jean-Luc Nancy, Alain Badiou, Žižek) and Hispanists (Alberto Moreiras, Bruno Bosteels), among others, engage in what we might consider a Spinoza-Descartes debate routed through Deleuze’s intellectual debt to Spinoza (Salván and Rodríguez).

3. Obama’s “hope” campaign also recalls Bill Clinton’s signature use of the 1977 Fleetwood Mac song “Don’t Stop (thinking about tomorrow)” in his 1992 presidential campaign.

4. Clough and Halley’s The Affective Turn joins a growing list of titles in a de facto affect series published during the last fifteen years by Duke University Press that have become landmarks in the emergent field of affect studies within the humanities and the social sciences, including, among others: Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (as well as her seminal anthology coedited with Adam Frank, Shame and Its Sisters), Kathleen Stewart’s Ordinary Affects, Sara Ahmed’s The Promise of Happiness, Jane Bennett’s Vibrant Matter: A Political Ecology of Things, and Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth’s The Affect Theory Reader. In the natural sciences, Oxford University Press has twenty-nine titles to date in its Series in Affective Science, also established in the mid-1990s, with the bulk of its titles published in the 2000s (see Oxford University Press’s online catalog, “Series in Affective Science”).

5. The late Teresa Brennan works toward an ontological definition of affect in an even broader context than media culture, aiming to “stan[d] neo-Darwinism on its head” with the contention that “what is at stake with the notion of the transmission of affect is precisely the opposite of the sociobiological claim that the biological determines the social. What is at stake is rather the means by which social interaction shapes biology” (74).

6. Foucault’s definition of the episteme in this 1977 interview is “retrospective” because it glosses his original use of the term in The Order of Things (published in the original French in 1966). This retrospective gloss circles back to recuperate the term after his own rejection of it in favor of “discursive formation” in the subsequent Archaeology of Knowledge (1969). This latter terminological substitution (of “discursive formation” for “episteme”) was intended to lay charges of structuralism to rest, since the intervening events of May 1968 (the failed student protests and worker strikes that announced the demise of modernist leftism) had ushered in poststructuralism as a new theoretical position critical of a structuralist school now perceived as part and parcel of the repressive state. Foucault responded to these ideologically unflattering charges by underscoring, through the terminological shift to “discursive formation,” that, as an intellectual category, the episteme was to be understood as a product of social-scientific discourse contingent upon its material historical circumstance, not as a product of some abstract ordering principle of knowledge. But I submit that this definitional precision should not—as the fact of his “retrospective” definition demonstrates—be interpreted to mean that Foucault abandoned the central idea of the episteme as an ordering principle of social thought operative on an epochal scale and extending from the scientific to the cultural.

7. The full title of Fox’s treatise is The line of righteousness and justice stretched forth over all merchants, &c. and an exhortation unto all friends and people whatsoever, who are merchants, tradesmen, husbandmen, or sea-men, who deal in merchandize, trade in buying and selling by sea or land, or deal in husbandry, that ye all do that which is just, equal and righteous in the sight of God and man one to another, and to all men; And that ye use just weights and just measures, and speak and do that which is true, just and right in all things.

8. Peter Brooks’s The Melodramatic Imagination might be productively considered as an important counterpart to Eustace’s study of the role of emotion in underwriting the American Revolution, insofar as Brooks argues that melodrama—a social narrative of emotionality—emerges to codify bourgeois society in the era of the French Revolution. Likewise, Matthew Bush’s Pragmatic Passions: Melodrama and Latin American Social Narrative, citing Brooks as a key influence, contends that melodrama is,. likewise, a central narrative modality in Latin American letters from the early nineteenth-century independence era forward. “For this reason,” Bush boldly asserts, it is necessary to begin to consider melodrama not as the exception, but as the rule of Latin American literature…. [and] the dominant narrative made when Latin American literature speaks about politics and social development (22).

9. In the documentary film The Corporation, Charles Kernaghan, executive director for the Institute for Global Labour and Human Rights, gives anecdotal insight into corporate production practices: “One day [in the Dominican Republic] we found a big pile of Nike’s internal pricing documents. Nike assigns a timeframe to each operation. They don’t talk about minutes. They break the timeframe into ten thousandths of a second. You get to the bottom of all twenty-two operations: they give the workers 6.6 minutes to make the shirt. It’s $0.70 an hour in the Dominican Republic. That’s 6.6 minutes; equals $0.08. These are Nike’s documents. That means the wages come to three tenths of one percent of the retail price. This is the reality. It’s the science of exploitation.”

10. A brief consideration of the history of the World Wide Web reveals, in its most skeletal version, a strong correlation with post–World War II U.S.-led global capitalist hegemony. The earliest conceptual blueprints and avatars of the Internet emerged in the late 1950s in connection with the communicative needs of the emergent U.S. military-industrial complex. The Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA, which would later become DARPA, the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), created in 1957 to lead space exploration, would over the next fifteen years turn its attention to computing and develop ARPANET as the practical realization of ARPA director Joseph C. R. Licklider’s humoristically coined 1963 vision of an “intergalactic computer network.” This first network linking the computer mainframes of large corporations, government agencies, and universities went public in 1972, spawning other such corporate-government-academic networks across the United States and Europe. In 1982, when Reagan-Thatcher neoliberalism was firmly taking root, ARPANET adopted the transmission control protocol/internet protocol (TCP/IP) that would allow these networks to communicate with one another: the Internet was born. Meanwhile, the concept of personal computing was in development; Macintosh released its first personal computer in 1984. Finally, in 1989, World Wide Web was developed as a global hypertext system connecting a network of sites, thus creating a virtual topography for the Internet, by Tim Berners-Lee at CERN (the Geneva-based European Organization for Nuclear Research) and released to the fledgling computing public in 1991, just as the fall of the Soviet Union was giving way to Fukuyama’s “end of history”: the global triumph of capitalist liberal democracy. For a history of the Web, see—among other myriad sources—Richard T. Griffiths’s online “History of the Internet,” Robert H. Zakon’s “Hobbes’ Internet Timeline 10.1,” and Noah Wardrip-Fruin and Nick Montfort’s New Media Reader, especially the final part, “Revolution, Resistance, and the Launch of the Web” (587–798), which concludes with an essay coauthored by World Wide Web architect Tim Berners-Lee (791–98).

11. A growing body of scholarship also attests to what we might label the “neocolonial” power of new media, in keeping with growth- and profit-oriented capitalist practice and discourse. Edward S. Herman and Robert Waterman McChesney’s The Global Media: The Missionaries of Corporate Capitalism emphasizes the concentration of the global media in “three or four dozen large transnational corporations” and warns that “such a concentration of media power in organizations dependent on advertiser support and responsible primarily to shareholders is a clear and present danger to citizens’ participation in public affairs, understanding of public issues, and thus to the effective working of democracy” (1). Robin Mansell and Michele Javary develop a similar line of argumentation in “New Media and the Forces of Capitalism.”

12. In an analysis of the political iconography of democracy, Susan Buck-Morss meditates on the persistence of sovereign exception as an epistemological contradiction with respect to democracy’s foundational revolutionary spirit:

13. Both the United Nations Declaration of Human Rights (1948) and the Declaration of Alma-Ata (1978) calling for the worldwide protection and promotion of health resonate with the notion of a feeling soma and the primordial claim that its structure supposes to the homeostatic patrimony of well-being. Both declarations invoke all of humanity as their purview and explicitly politicize well-being, in political and physiological terms, as the “right” of every human being in the global body politic.

14. In regard to the epistemological potential of affect, Ruth Leys takes a certain cluster of “new affect theorists” (Damasio, Massumi, and others) to task for what she views as overdetermining the separation between reason and affect with a resultant exclusion of intentionality and cognition from affective processes. I do not pretend to assess the merits of how affect and reason are characterized in the empirical and ontological dimensions; I can only read Leys’s intervention as indicative that a debate is underway in order to identify with greater precision the physiological distinctions—or hybridities—between rational and affective processes, and that this debate ultimately reflects the perception of an epistemological contest between their respective possibilities (or limits) of signification. But insofar as I infer Leys’s central concern to be that affect’s possibilities of signification not be atrophied by a scientific approach of definition that shortchanges and structurally stunts its epistemological power, I consider her argument to be analogous to mine—hers in a scientific context, mine in the context of cultural representation. That is, where Leys seeks to prevent affect from being dismissed as an epistemological force on physiological grounds of justification, I seek to foreground the epistemological power of affect as a cultural construct and to enable cultural critics to identify and interpret its markers with an awareness of their potency of signification.

15. Frederick Luis Aldama makes an equally damning assessment of Babel, calling it a “failure” on the grounds that director Alejandro González Iñárritu “ignored connections between neurological emotion and reason systems” (139), a charge that goes unexplained, yet whose terms of analysis echo those of A. O. Scott’s negative evaluation. Aldama also argues that the “interrelations among [Babel’s] stories are artificial and do not depict or illuminate in any way the forces that unify our planet, namely, the capitalist system, which dominates through oppression and exploitation” (105).

I would argue that González Iñárritu’s representation of emotion is itself constitutive of his geopolitical analysis of the capitalist system. Babel has three story lines that involve four countries: the United States, Morocco, Mexico, and Japan. As the film progresses, a Global North-South pattern becomes clear: as regions, the United States and Japan are characterized by death (suicide, infant mortality) and persistent depression (emotional isolation, marital estrangement) and are also the source of guns. When those guns travel south—and this is a key connector of the story lines—they bring death and pain along with them to regions that are otherwise characterized by unconditional family love and togetherness. The arrival of the guns in the Global South sets in motion events of misguided aggression (a shooting contest between brothers, a drunken flouting of customs and border officials) that, like a boomerang of intensification, only bring that aggression back to roost on the Global South (ominous disappearance, definitive deportation, death in a shoot-out with police). The emotional patterns of the film reflect the patterns of power, money, and authority on a global level: the Global South is thoroughly abused, wounded, and left to deal with its humiliation, grief, and pain of loss by the Global North; the Global North, as a function of this painful resolution of events, experiences a certain catharsis toward the recuperation of positive affect, particularly in the area of family togetherness. The film concludes with the rekindling of the U.S. couple’s marital love and the reaffirmation of the Japanese father’s emotional availability for his daughter. In this sense the film stages a classic tale of North-South economic dependency theory in emotional terms. But viewers must be willing to accept emotional patterns as intellectual currency in order to appreciate the critique they mount.

16. In a relevant study, Laura Podalsky’s The Politics of Affect and Emotion in Contemporary Latin American Cinema (2011) surveys the extent to which emotion pervades contemporary cinematic representation in Latin America.

17. “15-M” refers to May 15, 2011 (in Spanish, “15 de mayo”—hence the sequence of the acronym), the date of the opening protest in Madrid’s Puerta del Sol.

1. The title of the autobloggreen blog post making the 2011 announcement “Whole Lotta Prius Love” (Loveday) also reiterates the association between love and consumption that has become both standard practice in the advertising industry and a recurrent motif of sustainability discourse.

2. Antonin Artaud, the French writer best known for his theorization of a “theater of cruelty,” lived with the Tarahumara in the mid 1930s. Like McDougall, Artaud also had a revelatory experience in their company, but for him it centered on peyote rituals rather than running, which he chronicled in D’un Voyage au pays des Tarahumaras (Voyage to the Land of the Tarahumara; The Peyote Dance), published a decade later in 1945. Also, like McDougall, Artaud saw in the Tarahumara a naturalistic antidote for what he considered the decadence of Western civilization.

3. Although a cottage industry has sprung up around the denunciation of the ills of U.S. industrialized food—and its permeation of the rest of the globe—two authors have particularly focused on the sugar-salt-fat triumvirate and its role in the success of processed food. David A. Kessler, former head of the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, has written precisely such an exposé explaining how the sugar-fat-salt combination physiologically overrides the homeostatic capacity to moderate food intake by activating the reward system: The End of Overeating: Taking Charge of the Insatiable American Appetite (2009; adapted as a “teen” book: Your Food Is Fooling You: How Your Brain Is Hijacked by Sugar, Fat, and Salt [2012]). Pulitzer Prize winning New York Times journalist Michael Moss echoes Kessler in Salt, Sugar, Fat: How the Food Giants Hooked Us (2013), in which he recapitulates Kessler’s information about the brain’s reward system and its endlessly deferred “bliss point” and gives a history of the development of the processed food industry in the United States that ultimately turns on the questions of profit and competition. I will discuss the sugar-fat-salt triumvirate further in chapter 3.

4. Interestingly, anthropologist Dean Snow suggests that European cave handprints may be preponderantly female (Messer). While this research does not come explicitly to bear on the question of other representational images such as hunting or running, it does throw into relief the masculinist bent of McDougall’s imaginative fabrication of the “Running Man” as humanity’s first cultural protagonist. Further, that this archetypical narrative of humanity’s first cultural protagonist—founder of the “first fine art” of running, object, as such, of the first artistic representation—should also include a heterocentric boy-meets-girl coupling completes a portrait of the social in which cultural and sexual reproduction are, once again, conceptually intertwined.

5. A filmic adaptation of the eponymous 1992 P. D. James novel.

6. Cuarón is a vanguard director of what has been hailed as a renovation of the national Mexican cinema that has languished since its “Golden Age” of the 1940s and 1950s (when it was the “Hollywood of the South”). But, as is evidenced by his list of Oscar nominations that have broken out of the “foreign film” category, as well as his U.S. directorial credits (chief among them the third Harry Potter film in 2003), and the cosmopolitan scope of his filmic narratives, Cuarón’s filmmaking does not cleave to the mold of the national Mexican cinema of old. Like fellow directorial compatriots Guillermo del Toro and Alejandro González Iñárritu—who, along with Cuarón, have been dubbed the “Three Amigos” in Hollywood circles—Cuarón has become a global figure in film direction and production. On the subject of Mexicanness and its borders, González Iñarritu concisely articulates the shared ethos of the Three Amigos: “Cinema is universal, beyond flags and borders and passports” (Rohter). In this regard, Cuarón forms part of a broader tendency toward the redefinition of the Latin American cultural agent in universal terms.

Deborah Shaw’s The Three Amigos foregrounds this postnational character of their films in the book’s subtitle, The Transnational Filmmaking of Guillermo del Toro, Alejandro González Iñárritu, and Alfonso Cuarón; Celestino Deleyto and María del Mar Azcona also consider these three filmmakers to have an appeal that is both local and international, thus redefining mexicanidad (6).

7. Sayantani DasGupta proposes a race-based interpretation of the film in which Kee is the “subaltern surrogate” (198) to the “white heterosexual family unit” (197), “carr[ying] her pregnancy for the First World protagonists” in a “motherhood not born of autonomy but of a personal and ideological colonization” (198). This hermeneutic model reads Kee alongside the other “dumb beasts” “tame[d]” by Theo—dogs who don’t bark, a kitten climbing his leg, his lone sighting of a deer—and views her as being discursively likened to the cows that surround her as she reveals her pregnancy to him: “Kee is all fertility, ‘savage’ simplicity, bestiality, and childlike trust” (188). While this interpretation certainly has merit, my analysis reads the representation of posthumanist animality as part of the conceptual paradigm that holds the morality of the natural world in higher regard than that of a humanity mired in materialistic (read: capitalist) resource hoarding and infighting. As DasGupta’s terminology suggests, the film adopts a scale of social critique for this infighting that is geocultural, evocative of the emerging geopolitical division of the world into a Global North and South: the first world of old and the third world, respectively, with the old second world having tellingly disappeared in this new bipartite nomenclature predicated, above all, on respective generalized levels of economic development. It may well be true that this representation of a higher morality coded in positive affective terms begs interpretation for its racialization—the browner Global South, in this vision morally superior for its nobility of character in the face of its adversity through chronic victimization, saves humanity through its intimacy with nature, whereas the whiter Global North, morally inferior for the violence of its hierarchical power and resource-mongering, rots in the decadence of abundant yet sterile capital—yet, if that is so, then I would argue that such a reading works to affirm, rather than undermine, the film’s message of geocultural critique.

1. Eltit has posited a continuity between the economic and cultural politics of military dictatorship and democracy—whether left-leaning or conservative—in Emergencias (2000), an anthology of journalistic pieces most centrally reflecting on the dictatorship and its aftermath. This postulate was also vertebral for the theoretical orientation of the Revista de Crítica Cultural (Journal of Cultural Criticism) directed from 1990–2008 by compatriot Nelly Richard—founded, precisely, in the juncture of the transition to democracy following the 1989 plebiscite that put an end to the Pinochet regime—in which Eltit was also involved as a key contributor to the journal’s pages and conceptual architecture.

2. Crude has a near mirror-image antecedent in Trinkets and Beads, a 1996 documentary film celebrated on the independent film circuit and in the academic sector with an award from the Latin American Studies Association for its chronicling of the David-and-Goliath struggle of the Ecuadoran indigenous Huaorani people against exploitation for oil and the Christian missionaries who have historically facilitated the penetration of Huaorani territory by a succession of international oil companies. The title refers to a quip made by an American present at a ceremony in which the daughter of the Ecuadoran president gives her gold earrings in exchange for tribal consent to drill on Huaorani land; when the president’s daughter, acting as a de facto proxy for the Dallas-based oil company Maxus (acquired in 1995 by Argentina’s Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales), remarks that she got the better end of the deal, the American jokes that Manhattan was obtained in much the same way, “with trinkets and beads.”

3. Shortly after the October 2014 Brazilian presidential elections, an already months-old investigation into Petrobras corruption by the Brazilian Federal Police exploded into public view. “Operação Lava Jato” (Operation Car Wash), as it has been dubbed, denominates an allegedly “vast kickback scheme,” as the Economist has described it (“Scandal in Brazil”), in which the Wall Street Journal reports over ten billion reales are involved in “atypical financial operations” (Connors, Trevisani, and Kiernan). Dozens of executives at Petrobras and related companies have been arrested; scores of politicians have also been implicated, including, possibly, the newly reelected president Dilma Roussef (along with former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, who had faced an analogous scandal involving Petrobras corruption in 2005); a protest on the scale of some ten thousand people on November 15, 2014, called for Roussef’s impeachment (Phillips). Meanwhile, Roussef herself claims that this investigation “may change the country forever … by ending impunity” (“Petrobras Scandal”).

As I read the Washington Post’s online coverage of the Petrobras scandal, I cannot help but notice the irony of the overhead banner advertisement for Chevron’s Human Energy project, featuring the face of a middle-aged smiling woman of indiscernible ethnicity under the transparent dome of a greenhouse, surrounded by green plant tops, a visual accompanied by the following caption: “We treat the land like we live here. Because we do.” This juxtaposition of, on the one hand, a report of corporate malfeasance, which invites interpretation as a lack of responsibility and care, with, on the other hand, a slogan of corporate responsibility, care, and even co-citizenship, paints a Janus-faced portrait of big oil, one of the world’s most powerful industries. Chevron asserts its social and environmental stewardship in a display of the “double” bottom line phenomenon that I am trying to underscore; in the Petrobras story the Washington Post tracks down the missing component of the economic in the form of many billions of missing dollars that may never be recovered, much less enjoyed by society or environment.

4. In citing dependency theory as an amalgam, I am thinking in the aggregate of several interventions in the domain of economic theory from the 1950s to the 1970s that were particularly central to Latin American economic discourse: Raúl Prebisch’s The Economic Development of Latin America and Its Principal Problems (1950) advanced the argument that exporters of commodities (underdeveloped countries) would face deteriorating terms of trade over time in the same measure that exporters of manufactured goods (industrialized countries) would accrue more favorable terms of trade (known as the “Prebisch-Singer thesis” because of Hans Singer’s publication in the same year of an independent study drawing similar conclusions). André Gunder Frank’s Capitalism and Underdevelopment in Latin America: Historical Studies of Chile and Brazil (1967) developed the idea that Latin America had been part of a capitalist center-periphery relationship since the sixteenth century and that, after independence, this same relationship continued with Britain, which appropriated Latin America’s economic surplus and thereby stymied continental economic sovereignty. Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto’s Dependencia y desarrollo en América Latina (1969) argued, in a far more positive light, that the center-periphery relationship did not foreclose the possibility of “dependent development,” since a hybrid economic state would result in the periphery by virtue of investment by the center. Eduardo Galeano’s Las venas abiertas de América Latina (1971) recapitulated the thesis of a five-century extractive oppression of the continent, now identifying the United States as Latin America’s newest economic exploiter. Here I am not concerned with a comparative parsing of the particular angles of each dependency theorist’s argument, but rather with their conceptual distillation: what they share is a vision of global power as asymmetrical, unevenly distributed between center and periphery, and fundamentally economic in nature.

1. Along with Octavio Getino, codirector of their cinematic call to guerrilla arms La hora de los hornos (1968), Solanas authored “Hacia un Tercer Cine: apuntes y experiencias para el desarrollo de un cine de liberación en el Tercer Mundo” (“Toward a Third Cinema: Notes and Experiences for the Development of a Cinema of Liberation in the Third World”) in 1969, one of the most enduringly influential manifestos from the markedly leftist Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano (New Latin American Cinema) of the 1960s. In it Solanas and Getino analyze the politicized Latin American film production of the era as a “Third Cinema” in contrast to the “First” and “Second” cinemas, respectively, of Hollywood and the auteur cinema best exemplified in the French New Wave. Third Cinema, in contrast to the other cinemas, rejects the capitalist logic of story, structure, and production technology, instead placing all these in the service of a revolutionary agenda.

2. Goodlad, Kaganovsky, and Rushing cite Egner’s “Seeing History in ‘Mad Men.’”

3. The anthology Mad Men, Women, and Children is, to my mind, particularly emblematic of this scholarly approach to the show, exploring, among other themes, the working/career girl of the 1960s, the archetypal opposition between Jackie Kennedy and Marilyn Monroe, the traditional American family, African American domestic help and marginalization, civil rights, motherhood and domesticity, and children’s perspectives on the Baby Boomer years.

4. In this sense, it is no small irony—yet telling of the consumer culture it diagnoses—that Mad Men has inspired feverish retro consumerism, from period business attire to midcentury modern furniture and decor to collectible Barbie dolls of four Mad Men characters (see Stoddart’s detailed inventory of Mad Men franchising and consumer inspiration, 4–8).

Mad Men has also inspired a bevy of critical scholarship, largely in the form of edited volumes. One of the most interesting in regard to Mad Men’s consumer appeal is Mad Men and Philosophy (ed. Carveth and South), in which the list of contributors, subtitled “Some Real Mad Men and Women” (247–51), substitutes biographical quips on the theme of love for Mad Men in place of traditional scholarly credentials, e.g., “An avid music lover, [George A. Dunn] hopes to be reincarnated as Joan Holloway’s accordion” (248); “Landon W. Schurtz … does occasionally enjoy vodka martinis” and is “[a] lifelong lover of bowling, cars with fins, and Formica-and-chrome furniture” (250); “If the academic job market does not improve in the near future, Tyler [Whitney] would consider working with Harry Crane in the television department at Sterling Cooper Draper Pryce” (251). Another contributor, George Teschner, jokes that “he had the choice of advertising and teaching philosophy and has come to believe there is little difference between the two” (251); this comment sums up the spirit of the volume, and, more broadly, of the intellectual commodification that Mad Men has unleashed, somewhere between pleasurably guilty and unapologetic.

5. Lair and Strasser also cite this opening sequence as a key component of what they call Mad Men’s “masculinity-in-crisis narrative” (179), alongside Don Draper’s pitch of the Kodak slide projector wheel as a nostalgia device, which Lair and Strasser view as definitional of that crisis as an emotional wound bound up with a yearning for love (178). Where, on the strength of this foundational interpretation, Lair and Strasser move forward to analyze Mad Men’s crisis of masculinity as the product of the feminist and civil rights movements on the social horizon, I argue that this crisis is more deeply embedded within the fabric of midcentury postwar U.S. consumerist cultural hegemony itself. To my mind, Mad Men’s genius lies in creating a cultural mise-en-scène whose subterranean wounds give the lie to its opulent aesthetic, showing how social destabilization in the form of countercultural movements could be understood as having arisen from that very contradiction. Edgerton concurs, considering one of Mad Men’s most “distinguishing and innovative aspects” to be the dedication of its first three seasons to the “seemingly calm cultural period before the storm” of the early 1960s pre-Kennedy assassination years, a time that Edgerton views as one in which the “seismic developments” of the countercultural Sixties “simmered … beneath the placid exterior of post-war America before finally boiling over with a pent-up fury that took many people in the country by surprise” (xxviii).

6. Hernandez and Holmberg view Draper’s character as a composite between “Adam in his new Eden” and a U.S. “frontier hero,” both of which ultimately remit to the overarching notion of a “regeneration narrative” (16) that “call[s] into question … America’s amnesiac romance with itself” (17). In this same vein, I thank Priscilla Wald for bringing to my attention the extent to which Draper is the mid-century analogue of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s WWI veteran and self-made bootlegging millionaire Jay Gatsby, whose true name is Jimmy Gatz, hailing from rural farming country (The Great Gatsby, 1925). Michael Bérubé also makes this comparison in passing (353). Draper and Gatsby both seek to commit to oblivion their original names and agrarian pasts, redefining themselves in postwar prosperity and thus serving as synecdoches for the respective refashionings of twentieth-century America as a function of world war and shifting geopolitics that increasingly favor the United States as an emergent superpower. While Edenic and frontier narratives may have their place in the analysis of Don Draper’s character, I believe that Mad Men reads most compellingly as an archaeology of contemporary consumerism and the global cultural might of the U.S. derived from that market power.

7. The foundational role of the Lucky Strike account and the surrounding context of the anxiety stemming from the Surgeon General’s report, in turn spurring the use of publicity to influence public opinion, establish a historical arc between Mad Men and a seminal campaign credited as giving birth to the field of public relations itself. This one-time event with international media dissemination was the 1929 “Torch of Liberty” campaign staged by Edward Bernays—nephew of Sigmund Freud—in which female models marched with lit cigarettes in the New York City Easter parade, wearing banners that proclaimed the cigarettes—which, furthering the Mad Men connection, were Lucky Strikes—“torches of liberty.” See Ewen’s PR! (1996) and Tye’s The Father of Spin (1998), the latter of which features an early twentieth-century inset photo of a woman raising a lit cigarette to her lips. Investigative reporters Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber (2000) cite Bernays’s “Torch of Liberty” campaign as a seminal moment in the development of public relations as an industry that would cultivate the manipulative distortion of evidence in order to override health concerns in the promotion of toxic products. In this sense, Brandt’s The Cigarette Century (2007) offers up an academic version of the proposition set forth by Mad Men, namely, that cigarettes are at the center of the publicity-driven consumerism—of unhealthy consumption—that defined the United States of the twentieth century.

8. Best known for his film Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002), a narrative film chronicling the rise of organized crime in the eponymous slum of Rio de Janeiro between the 1960s and the 1980s, Fernando Meirelles has received some dozen nominations for Academy Awards, Golden Globes, and prizes at Cannes.

9. In this way, Blindness makes use of a central metaphorical contrast between blindness and sight as a sensorial disposition toward capitalism or its antithesis, respectively, that is analogous to the opposition between superficial sight (the English “I see you”) and true vision (the N’avi “I see all of you”) in Avatar as explicated in an impromptu language lesson. As in Blindness, these two contrasting terms in Avatar encapsulate the cultural politics of each race—the exploitative neocolonial capitalism of humans versus the harmonious equitable sharing of the N’avi. In each case, the sense of sight—and therefore the sensing, perceiving body—is used as a vehicle to represent possibilities on the scale of the social. Indeed, extensive attention could be devoted exclusively to the study of the use of the senses to represent sociopolitical schema.

10. Likewise, in Children of Men (2006), what appears to be a morning glass of water contains the self-euthanizing product “Quietus”; in both La Ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) and Y tu mamá también (2001), water associated with the normative bourgeois culture of capitalist exploitation is dirty, contaminated, and unpotable.

11. Venegas offers an analysis of how The Motorcycle Diaries, in the context of Gael García Bernal’s playing the role of the young Ernesto Guevara, constitutes a “process of re-articulation through iconicity combined with stardom” (141); this fusion of the “guerrillero and the star,” Venegas argues, “brings together insurrection and historical reconstruction as a weak form of politics in global film culture” (145) that “re-purpose[s] cultural and political memory into a politically correct, capitalist enterprise … reinforces the notion of memory and place as repositories of sentiment, and redefines revolution as pleasurable within the arena of consumption” (161). Implicit in this characterization of market politics as “weak” is the estimation of comparatively strong Cuban revolutionary politics. It is true that revolutionary Cuba eschewed market forces in its early years—it could certainly be argued that this revolution, which, in its origins, was neither socialist nor Soviet, was essentially a struggle against U.S.-led free-market capitalism and its politico-military complex. This is less true in the post-Soviet “Período Especial en Tiempo de Paz” (Special Period in Times of Peace), a time when dire economic crisis and extreme austerity led the regime to act as a “gatekeeper” for a controlled capitalist economy in Cuba (see Corrales).

But I would like to nuance the opposition between revolutionary politics and market politics by adding an epistemological filter to our comparative lens before judging the relative strength and weakness of the politics on each side. In what might be a contentious estimation, I would nevertheless assert that revolutionary politics participate in the imperialist logic of rational epistemicity, with its framework of teleological drive and conquest, albeit through the via negativa of anti-imperialist struggle. Consider, for example, Santiago Colás’s masterful 1995 analysis of Cuban revolutionary discourse as desirous of colonial structures past or Antonio José Ponte’s short story collection Cuentos de todas partes del Imperio (2000), whose imperialist referent is clarified in its English translation as Tales from the Cuban Empire (2002). The market politics characterized by Venegas as turning on “sentiment” and “pleasurable … consumption” may well undercut the power of revolutionary politics proper, but I would argue that they are no less powerful; they are simply germane to a different epistemological paradigm. It is precisely the participation of The Motorcycle Diaries in affective epistemicity on a narrative level that I wish to explore in my reading of the film. The Motorcycle Diaries certainly commodifies insurrection and historical reconstruction in a package of sentiment and pleasure; included within that package, as we will see, however, is also a critique of injustice as pain and disease. I caution against the wholesale glorification of imperialist politics of rationality past and the condemnation of free-market politics of affectivity present and instead urge the sober contemplation of both periods as two very different, yet both powerful, politico-economic paradigms functioning in obeisance to broader self-legitimizing epistemological currents. This is the way to begin thinking through what Venegas references in her title, but leaves entirely unarticulated in the body of her essay, as a “New Revolutionary Imagination” of capitalist market forces.

12. In his study of the intersection between theology and Third Cinema, which includes a reading of The Motorcycle Diaries, Antonio D. Sison echoes this interpretation, characterizing these indigenous tableaux vivants as embodiments of a “praxical imperative that haunts the memory of Ernesto … and representations of the call for social change” (80).

13. Ching, Buckley, and Lozano-Alonso also view Ernesto’s crossing of the river as significant in the filmic representation of his revolutionary future: “The analogy to Che’s eventual life as a revolutionary leader in this scene is obvious. He throws aside concern for his own well-being out of an inherent embrace of the masses and their suffering. They, in turn, are drawn to him and become the malleable force that he will lead to a better future through revolution and mass activism” (249). Ching, Buckley, and Lozano-Alonso’s interpretation of Ernesto as “ignor[ing] his asthma” (248) and “throwing aside concern for his own well-being” construes his character as adopting a mind-over-matter posture; this classically hierarchical mind-body dualism finds analogy in the relationship that Ching, Buckley, and Lozano-Alonso envision between Ernesto as a Pygmalion-like leader and the “malleable” masses that will follow him, in an interpretation that collapses the filmic Ernesto and the historical Che, whose writings did in fact evince the belief that a revolutionary vanguard elite was necessary to guide the masses toward their own liberation and betterment. Guevara’s canonical 1965 letter known as “El socialismo y el hombre en Cuba” (Socialism and the New Man in Cuba), for example, asserts that a revolutionary vanguardia in the form of a leadership of guerrilla fighters is required to awaken the pueblo that he describes as a masa todavía dormida—an “as yet sleeping multitude,” though masa also means “dough” in Spanish, a polysemanticity that resonates with the adjectival description by Ching, Buckley, and Lozano-Alonso of the “malleable” character of the masses that the filmic Ernesto will mobilize as he becomes el Che.

Yet I would argue that The Motorcycle Diaries does not in fact participate in this epistemically rational verticality of mind-body dualism and thinking-head leaders vis-à-vis subordinate masses. On the contrary, in the first regard, it stages Ernesto’s potentially fatal river swim more as a leap of faith toward well-being than as an act of stoic negation thereof. It also insists on Ernesto’s systematic efforts at achieving indistinction from the lepers-as-masses. The filmic Ernesto rejects every form of hierarchy, from symbolic white gloves in treating lepers to birthday celebrations that exclude them; if he “leads” the lepers—or the doctors and nuns, for that matter—it is through horizontal inspiration and affect-driven example rather than by vertical imposition. Both the river crossing scene and the film as a whole register a shift away from the vertical dynamics of top-down vanguard militancy to which the real-life Guevara subscribed. This twenty-first-century filmic reconstruction of revolutionary politics on an epistemological axis of free-market affectivity is what is of central interest for the present study.

14. Although I have structured this analytic cluster to show how a hemispheric cultural pattern emerges in the form of a divide between U.S. film as diagnosing capitalist ill-being and Latin American film as proposing an alternative well-being, there are certainly exceptions to this pattern. David Fincher’s Fight Club (1999) which stages a national guerrilla revolution against U.S. capitalist consumerism that culminates in the destruction of the edifice of credit debt, as the central romantic protagonists look on holding hands in a tender high-school-sweethearts kind of embrace (although they may or may not be dead—but that would be the subject of a longer analysis), is but one example of U.S. cultural production that takes its narrative beyond denunciation and into corrective contestatory action to restore the well-being perceived to have been lost to a stranglehold of consumerist ill-being.

1. Over the past twenty years, there has been a groundswell of scholarship in business studies on emotional advertising. A small sampling of the now established subfield includes the following titles: Agres, Edell, and Dubitsky, Emotion in Advertising (1990); Feig, Marketing Straight to the Heart (1997); Robinette et al., Emotion Marketing (2000); Travis, Emotional Branding (2000); Gobé and Zyman, Emotional Branding (2001); O’Shaughnessy and O’Shaughnessy, The Marketing Power of Emotion (2002); Feig, Hot Button Marketing (2006); Hansen, Christensen, and Lundsteen, Emotion, Advertising, and Consumer Choice (2007); Du Plessis, The Advertised Mind (2008); Hill and Simon, Emotionomics (2009); Hill, About Face (2010).

This marketing interest in emotion should properly be understood as an interdisciplinary field in the sense that its lessons are drawn from the explosion in neuroscientific research on emotion during the same post-Soviet time period. Neuromarketing and emotionomics are thus roughly commensurate business neologisms, with the following titles attesting specifically to the central role of neuroscience in maximizing the emotional exploitation of advertising: Zurawicki, Neuromarketing (2010); Du Plessis, The Branded Mind (2011); Dooley, Brainfluence (2011).

2. The use of the term posthuman is generalized to several different fields and phenomena: some use it to denote a roboticized cybernetic body “evolved” through artificial intelligence, e.g., Fukuyama’s Our Posthuman Future (2000); others use it to denote a vision of monstruous human alterity, such as zombies as a representation of afterlife, e.g., Christie and Lauro’s edited volume Better Off Dead (2011), and others use it to denote a vision of the planetary animal kingdom in which humanity’s place and role are redefined as being alongside those of other species and/or as imbricated within the natural ecosystem, e.g., Wolfe’s What Is Posthumanism? (2009). The discussion in this chapter will explore that last meaning ascribed to posthumanism, but it bears noting that emotion plays a role as a pivotal analytic in each of these cases: the robotics of emotion are considered the final frontier of artificial intelligence; the question of empathy is key in the analysis of radical human alterity; and, as I will consider at some length here, emotion is what links humanity to animals and planet—in a word, to other life—in the understanding of the posthuman as what I will call a democratization of the animal kingdom and, indeed, all of sentient life. I would therefore hazard the hypothesis that what links the multiple definitions of the posthuman is an interest in the status of humanity itself and that an interrogation of emotion as a connective (i.e., relationship-, group-, and community-building) agent—whether to animals, cyberhumans, or radical Others (the undead, aliens, etc)—is what links these otherwise heterogeneous optics on humanity.

3. Dawkins’s The Selfish Gene (2006 [1976]) revolutionized the field of evolutionary biology with the argument that the gene is “selfish” in that it is always seeking to maximize its chances of survival; even selflessness in the form of altruism is, in this light, essentially selfish. Yet Dawkins devotes the entire introduction of his thirtieth-anniversary edition to an apology for its title and asks his readers to “mentally delete” the “rogue sentence” where he had earlier urged, “Let us try to teach generosity and altruism because we are born selfish” (ix). Without disavowing any of its original content, Dawkins nevertheless tries to frame his book differently, asserting that, “if anything, [it] devotes more attention to altruism” (viii) and might just as well have been called “The Cooperative Gene” (ix). The updated discursive through line of Dawkins’s book makes it fully concordant with de Waal’s efforts at “putting the altruism back into altruism” (The Age of Empathy) and affirms the hypothesis that the cultural exigencies of discourse have shifted away from selfishness and toward selflessness.

4. A full study of the shifting relationship between reason and affect would provide a diachronic account of their discursive relationship. Although it is spare and perhaps reductively skeletal, I have signaled at least some key topoi in what would be the early twentieth-century installment of this discursive historiography in my abbreviated discussion of the relationship between psychoanalysis and poststructuralism (see “Prelude,” note 4).

5. See the “Avatar” entry in Box Office Mojo for detailed statistics on the film’s lifetime gross and rank.

6. Of all political figureheads of the Latin American leftism unexpectedly renewed during the first decade of the twenty-first century, Hugo Chávez (1999–) has been the most radical, with his populist politics and the nationalization of petroleum, and the most openly antagonistic toward the United States government and economic system, particularly during the presidency of George W. Bush (2000–2008). Although at no time has the U.S. government issued any formal threat of military intervention, a video game released by Pandemic Studios in 2008, Mercenaries 2: World in Flames, does simulate—in mercenary form—the U.S. invasion of Venezuela. The video game begins with a coup d’état, followed by the game’s central and sustained objective of battling China to gain control over the country’s oil supply. The Chávez government interpreted this game as “preparation work for a real invasion” (“Venezuelan Anger at Computer Game”), especially in light of the fact that in 2003 Pandemic Studios had created the army training simulation Full Spectrum Warrior as a CIA contractor. In 2009 Venezuela enacted legislation banning violent video games with a fine and multiyear prison sentence for violators.

7. In a review of Avatar, Sara Palmer argues that disability studies theorist Robert McRuer’s concept of “compulsory able-bodiedness” is “central to the narrative logic of Jake Sully’s character”—that is, a compulsion to prefer able-bodiedness over disability as the result of a normative social desire. See McRuer’s “Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence.”

8. In addition to emphasizing the motif of legs, we might also track the motif of obesity, comparing WALL-E on this basis, for example, to Pablo Trapero’s Mundo grúa (Crane World, 1999), in which “Rulo” (“Curly,” Luis Margani), a middle-aged blue-collar worker, is denied employment operating a construction crane in Buenos Aires because of a medical report defining him as obese and therefore a hazard the insurance company will not permit. At stake in this film is the question of Rulo’s free will, posited in analogy—albeit with greater subtlety—to the central thematics of WALL-E: is Rulo’s obesity in fact a syndrome of the lifestyle imposed by capitalist culture—in other words, an expression of capitalist ill-being? The film presents Rulo as being boxed into his way of life: he works—or looks for work—during the day, comes home to a loveless existence in which the television is his only company, eats in large quantities while watching mindless programs, and falls asleep on the sofa. The physician who diagnoses him with “Pickwick” syndrome, a cardiopulmonary complication of obesity that manifests itself as sleep apnea, guesses that this is Rulo’s routine, making its predictability suggestive of a larger cultural pattern in which Rulo is not the exception but the norm. The backdrop that defines this ill-being is what the film’s title announces: a capitalist machine of progress—a culture of “more”—symbolized by the crane, which towers over a panoramic view of the city in an opening shot, as though it were king of the urban expanse. Rulo accepts this symbolism and speaks to his son of his aspiration to work the crane as the ultimate expression of personal freedom (“Voy a estar solo, voy a poder leer, escuchar la radio, si quiero tirar un pedo me tiro un pedo” [“I’ll be alone, I can read, listen to the radio, if I want to fart, I fart”), yet the film shows that it is precisely the logic of the “crane world” that dicatates Rulo’s subservience to a lifestyle that systematically submerges him into increasing depths of unfreedom, progressively depriving him of his health, his livelihood, his love interest and friends, even his most meager income, and, finally, of his most cherished memory and greatest source of solace, when, in the closing moments of the film, he confesses to having lost the pleasure of recounting his brief glory as a member of a two-hit-wonder rock band. Rulo’s band, Séptimo Regimiento (Seventh Regiment), is modeled on the real-life Séptima Brigada (Seventh Brigade); the latter’s two successes, “Paco Camorra” (1969) and “Juan Camelo” (1970) are fictionally credited to Rulo in the film. This historical detail forms part of a larger neorealist aesthetic: the almost exclusive use of nonprofessional actors, their use of their given names (Rulo’s full diegetical name is Luis Margani, the real-life name of the actor who plays him), the gritty and slow-paced hand-held camerawork shot in black and white. Just as Italian neorealism sought to denounce the social ills of postwar fascism, so does Mundo grúa seek to denounce a contemporary set of social ills: those arising from the capitalist model of progress that not only fails to provide well-being but generates its opposite in the form of systemic and ineluctable ill-being for the masses.

9. Rescue consumption becomes the mantra of the multibillion international online auction company eBay in its “ReLove” Earth Day 2013 campaign that seeks to rebrand “used” items as “pre-loved” items whose purchase is tantamount to “giving pre-loved items new life,” which, eBay argues, is “good for the planet, too” through a “virtuous cycle [of] using our shared resources wisely.” “Here’s to falling in ReLove, again and again,” eBay concludes, urging an affect-driven “green” consumption that demonstrates the increasing cultural hegemony of the notion of love as consumption. That is, the idea of a loving rescue consumption is no longer simply the purview of a contestatory discourse but characteristic of the rhetoric of corporate consumerism itself.

10. Brown’s “Wounded Attachments,” originally published in 1993 as journal article in Political Theory, also appears as a chapter in her subsequent 1995 Princeton University Press book States of Injury.

11. The commercial was still viewable on the Nike website some three years after the 2008 Olympics for which it was made. I would speculate that its subsequent removal had as much to do with obsolescence as with the public scandals that erupted around at least two of the athletes featured therein: Lance Armstrong was convicted in 2012 of doping for sports performance enhancement, stripped of all his Tour de France racing titles, and banned from competitive cycling; in 2013 Oscar Pistorius shot and killed his girlfriend, South African model Reeva Steenkamp, and in 2014 was sentenced to five years in prison for homicide. Nike had intended for these athletes to symbolize courage and love; their scandals certainly undercut these associations.

12. As a cultural text, this film is by far the least mainstream of any I analyze in this study. Yet it has made its way onscreen at a significant list of film festivals: Fifth-Seventh Berlin International Film Festival (“Berlinale,” 2007); Festival de Cine Centroamericano Ícaro (winner, Best Production 2007); NewFilmmakers Film Festival (New York City, 2007); Pioneer Theater’s “SAVNY Lovely Surveillance—Students from the Savannah College of Art and Design” (New York City, 2007); Del Corazón (HeART) Film Festival (El Paso, Texas) (2007); Twenty-Second Latin American Film Festival (North Carolina, 2008), including a visit to Duke University; Iberoamerikanische Filmtage, IV Festival de Cine Iberoamericano (Künstlerhaus k/haus Kino, Vienna, 2008); Third Latin American Film Festival (Oaxaca, 2009); Vancouver Latin American Film Festival (2009); and Jaman online archive of international cinema (ongoing).

13. Escobar Galindo offers a retrospective account of the relationship between his and Dalton’s poems in the context of the Salvadoran violence of the 1970s in “El duelo por el ‘Duelo …’” (“The Mourning of ‘Mourning … ,’” 2006). In a case of tragic irony that remains judicially unresolved, Dalton is said to have been assassinated by members of his own political party (see Campos’s “El asesinato de Roque Dalton” for a detailed discussion of the circumstances surrounding Dalton’s death).

14. Ever Amado’s denouement of familial imagery in the sky is virtually identical to that of Sean Penn’s Into the Wild (2007), a narrative film about the real-life story of Christopher McCandless, a young Emory graduate from a family of means who renounces Western materialism and what he considers its fundamental violences in order to live alone in the Alaskan wilderness. As part of his renunciation, McCandless leaves behind his given name (becoming “Alexander Supertramp”) and his family as well as his money and material possessions. The film makes the question of the family—as a synecdoche for loving relationships in general—the pivotal through line of McCandless’s story. Penn interprets McCandless’s philosophical journey as one that leads him back to the social sphere that he has squarely renounced, giving heavy emphasis to a marginalia notation in Leo Tolstoy’s Family Happiness (1859) that seems to be one of the last that McCandless made before his death in isolation: “Happiness is not real unless shared.” On the strength of this analysis, Penn casts McCandless’s death as a return to his family: as he is in his final moments, gazing at the light from the sun, the sky seems to open up, and in that space a smiling Chris rushes into his parents’ waiting arms in a final embrace. Whereas Penn’s film ends on this note of the de facto reintegration of the double bottom line of the environmental and the social, concluding with a series of images of the people whose lives McCandless touched engaging each other with feeling as the implicit legacy of his communication of well-being, Ever Amado has no such happy ending, coming to rest only on genocidal violence and the perversion of nature in an effective eulogy for the double bottom line.

15. Although Michael Hardt does not give love a leftist ontology—that is, claim it as an essentially leftist phenomenon—he does gesture toward the identification of a variant of love with use-value for the political left (2007, 2009).

16. Writing about Mexican and Spanish cinema at the end of the twentieth century, Claudia Schaefer argues that its “dissonance and indigestion” (172) have the salutary effect of unsettling the middle class from the boredom of the status quo and may even contain the “possibility of emancipation from our dream state” (172) “These films,” Schaefer continues, “should haunt Western society for some time to come since they bring the unexpected into view without creating an aura of fascination and wonder to surround the brutality of the images” (172). Though she is writing about films that somewhat antecede Reygadas’s production, and at a period in time when one might argue that the “unexpected” was just around the corner in the form of global economic crisis, these descriptors are nevertheless equally apt for Reygadas’s filmography.

17. Excerpt from Bello’s “Silva a la agricultura de la zona tórrida” (“Ode to the Agriculture of the Torrid Zone,” 1826):

Mas ¡oh! ¡si cual no cede

el tuyo, fértil zona, a suelo alguno,

y como de natura esmero ha sido,

de tu indolente habitador lo fuera!

¡Oh! ¡si al falaz rüido,

la dicha al fin supiese verdadera

anteponer, que del umbral le llama

del labrador sencillo,

lejos del necio y vano

fasto, el mentido brillo,

1. In the afterword of the Darwin edition (“Universality of Emotional Expression? A Personal History of the Dispute”), Paul Ekman argues that the categorical rejection of a universal character of culture in favor of its malleability was a “one-sided view [that] developed in part as a backlash against Social Darwinism, eugenics and the threat of Nazism” (368). Immensely influential anthropologists such as Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson were steadfast in their resistance to the idea of what Mead called “inborn differences” because of the potential for political misuse and abuse of such ideas. Ekman explains how these political misgivings impeded the study of human universals, namely the emotions: “[Mead’s] concern that racists would misuse evidence of biology based individual differences led her to attack any claim for the biological basis of social behavior, even when biology is responsible for what unites us as a species, as in the case of universal expressions of emotions” (369).

2. Research that has gathered momentum from the mid-1990s forward on mirror neurons—brain cells that fire both in the viewing of another’s actions and in their subsequent enactment by the viewer—approaches this question of emotional mirroring from a neurophysiological point of view (see, e.g., Sandra Blakeslee’s New York Times Science section summary of mirror neurons “Cells that Read Minds”). Some researchers also explore the extent to which mirror neurons are linked to empathy and behaviors of togetherness (e.g., neuroscientist Marco Iacoboni’s Mirroring People [2008], which underwent a subtle but significant change of subtitle in its paperback release indicative of its principal argumentation and presumed readerly interest alike: The Science of Empathy and How We Connect with Others [2009]).

3. The documentary film The Corporation, for example, explores this question of the privatization of the globe. Interviewee Maude Barlow, Canadian political and environmental activist, says, “There are those who intend that one day everything will be owned by somebody, and we’re not just talking goods here. We’re talking human rights, human services, essential services for life. Education, public health, social assistance, pensions, housing. We’re also talking about the survival of the planet. The[re are] areas that we believe must be maintained in the commons or under common control or we will collectively die. Water and air.” In an interview that follows Barlow’s commentary, the interviewer then explicitly follows up on this point with free-market advocate Michael Walker, asking, “It sounds like you’re advocating private ownership of every square inch of the planet. Every cubic foot of air, water.” “Absolutely,” Walker responds.

4. Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 Appetite for Destruction is ranked number 4 on Rolling Stone’s top one hundred debut albums of all time. It came out too late to be included in The Decline of Western Civilization Part II: The Metal Years (1988), but this second volume of the three-part documentary that chronicles the punk-rock music scene in the context of cultural decay resonates heavily with the content of the Guns N’ Roses album, which characterizes daily life as a “jungle” where one “bleeds” and submits to self-destructive or decadent vice—drugs and sex, at turns—hoping all the while for a providential “paradise city” to counter this sadomasochistic jungle.

5. In A Brief History of Neoliberalism, David Harvey asks whether asymmetrical inequalities presumed to be outliers of a system presumed to be fair and egalitarian are not in truth better understood as structural; in The Shock Doctrine, Naomi Klein argues that capitalism has achieved its global spread on the strength of a vulturelike preying upon crises that are either natural or engineered. In this same vein, Jean Franco’s Cruel Modernity (2013) attests to the extent to which Latin American modernity has been constructed on a foundation of torture and violence, whether in dictatorships or the drug war. Though Franco’s analysis is more trained on culture than economics, the idea of “modernity” in Latin American scholarship is inextricably linked to the question of the continent’s relationship to global capital. Though the relationship between Latin American dictatorships and the development of neoliberal economies has been long established—the Milton Friedman–trained “Chicago Boys” who became Augusto Pinochet’s advisers in Chile being the most infamous referent of this phenomenon—Franco’s omission of any regional identifier in her title allows her to “gradually buil[d] a theory of the cruelty of modernity as such” (Bosteels, Review of Cruel Modernity, 221).