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CORTES-ROCCA, PAOLA. "Positivism in Latin America." The Encyclopedia of


Postcolonial Studies. Ray, Sangeeta, Henry Schwarz, José Luis Villacañas Berlanga,
Alberto Moreiras and April Shemak (eds). Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2016.

Blackwell Reference Online. 23 February 2016 http://www.literatureencyclopedia.com/

Positivism in Latin America


Paola Cortes-Rocca, CONICET, pcortes@untref.edu.ar

Rather than the emergence of a philosophy or a new paradigm, positivism


reflects the intellectual atmosphere that defines the twentieth century epistemological
field. The name is introduced by Auguste Comte, who in his Cours de Philosophie
Positive, argues that knowledge must be based on actual experience. Not only does the
field of empiricism become an object of study, but also the agent that shapes the
universe of problems, concepts and expectations which produce knowledge. Social
disciplines, Art and Humanities should be based on statements derived from observable
facts. This is explicit in the first lesson of Comte’s work, where he distinguishes three
stages in the quest for knowledge: the theological or fictitious, the metaphysical or
abstract, and finally, the scientific or positive. Thus, the production of knowledge is
historically marked by progress, like a straight line that leads to a present in which
knowledge and factuality become equivalents. If we follow Comte's three stages, the
knowledge produced by science is not religious, theological, or fictitious. Scientific
knowledge is defined as positive and opposed to fictional discourse or theoretical
thinking which describe previous and supposedly less developed stages in the
production of knowledge. In consequence, Comte explicitly denies the rhetorical
dimension of knowledge. Words and things are separated into closed compartments;
knowledge is reduced to the level of sensory experience and words are ornaments and
thus, as non-scientific. This is the sign of a time that shows the retreat of a metaphysical
approach to the knowledge of the world.
Although in Latin America positivism coexists with ideologies such as Vitalism,
Decadentism and Spiritualism, it becomes the dominating “mental matrix” between
1880 and 1910 (Terán 1987). This dominant position is owed, on the one hand, to its
ability to function as the key narrative to national interpretation, and on the other, to its
power of articulation with specific institutions of the educational, legal, sanitary and
military areas, which makes it a real discursive practice in Foucault’s terms: an
apparatus that connects discourses, institutions, knowledge and practices. Positivism is
both a program and a description of the end of the century’s epistemological field; an
explanation of the world and a means of producing this explanation; an epistemological
change accompanying specific political and social processes, and the transformation of
the institutions which enable these processes. It aims to reduce the field of the
cognoscible to the field of the observable; to produce empirically verifiable statements,
with no connection to religious or theoretical discourses; to shorten the distance
between human and natural sciences, that is, to insert man in natural history. This is
why positivism is equated with scientific knowledge, although, it is actually a new
historical, ideological and programmatic way of thinking the relations between
knowledge, truth and discourse interwoven with the notions of progress and evolution.
It is a new way of thinking about time, based on the certainty that progress is history’s
cause and effect, origin and telos. In spite of the allegedly “moral superiority,”
characteristic, according to Comte, of the spirit of the time together with the highest
degree of scientific knowledge ever reached, that which becomes more and more
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evident is “materialism” and the “moral harm” resulting from modernization and from
an emerging consumer’s market. It is exactly this contrast that underlies the spiritualist
atmosphere of the end of the century, the popularity of Allan Kardek and Spiritism, as
“scientific religiosity” among the illustrated elites.
The introduction and expansion of positivism in Latin America also coincides
with the process of organization and centralization of the national states. After the wars
of independence and its subsequent civil conflicts, the military appropriation of the
natives’ lands, and the process of delimitation of the national state and drawing of its
internal and external borders, the young republics need the social peace that will allow
them to establish their territorial, cultural and linguistic unity, as well as to strengthen
their political organization based on the liberal model. In this context, positivism’s
double logic –its stress on sensory experience, combined with the certainty that progress
is the force that moves social history forward- legitimates the processes taking place in
Latin America at the end of the century. On the one hand, the current turmoil –internal
conflicts, post independence wars- is justified by progress as a necessary stage in the
emergence of a new political organization; on the other hand, this same progress also
explains a present firmly guided by order and stability which will help to discipline
native and Afro-American populations, or the workers organized in unions that have
just arrived with the first migratory waves. This meant an alliance between
intellectuals/scientists and the liberal governments which shaped the region by the end
of the century: Julio Roca in Argentina, Lorenzo Latorre in Uruguay, José Manuel
Balmaceda in Chile, Juan Vicente Gómez in Venezuela.
Although, a comparison between, for example, Gabino Barreda’s and José
Ingenieros’ works reveals that the allegedly homogeneity of Latin American’s
positivism can be questioned, it can still be identified as a master-narrative that
promotes regional modernization, normalizes the population/national states relation,
gives a new vocabulary for old dichotomies --such as civilization/barbarism,
city/country, elite/people--, and explains what the Uruguayan lawyer and historian
Carlos Real de Azúa (1983) has called “the Latin American evils.”

Natural Laws, Social Laws

Naturalism, which is radically transformed by Charles Darwin's On the Origin of


Species by Natural Selection, published in 1859, will both embody and shape the
positivist thought. The initial purpose of the notes taken between 1837 and 1839, during
his voyage to the Beagle was to account for living organisms' tendency to diversity and
complexity. However, after reading the Malthusian theory of population Darwin's
efforts are redirected to explain the factors that may control population growth. It is at
this point that he begins to develop his principle of natural selection. Although
evolution and progress are not equivalent terms, and biological evolution refers to a
mutation of species that does not necessarily imply progress, Darwinism becomes
central for positivism owing to the identification between evolution and progress. This
is an effect that can be seen in philosophers like Herbert Spencer and Francis Galton -to
mention the most emblematic names-, who work with Darwin's concepts and apply
them to the social field. In this way, natural selection, evolution, variation and
inheritance are all concepts that will be related to notions such as the survival of the
fittest and eugenics.
The sequence natural/social phenomena, the view that naturalist methods should
also be followed by historical, social, cultural and political theories, explain the
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predictable shift from Darwinism as a natural theory to a social narrative. This shift,
based on the epistemological transformation brought about by positivism, provided the
foundations for the emergence of criminology. Born at the turn of the twentieth century,
criminology will transform both the role of law and the ways in which its main
categories -transgression and punishment- are thought of. While for the Enlightenment,
the subject has free will to obey or break the law, criminology postulates a new kind of
subject: one whose capacity of obeying or breaking the law is previously determined.
For criminology, crime is not a result of the subject's free will, but its causes are outside
his control. They are encoded in his body and they might be determined either by
physical or psychological inheritance, or by the environment. This is a basic difference
in the conception of law's subject that might be explained by the notions of inheritance
and determinism.
In L'uomo delinquente (1876), Cesare Lombroso distinguishes the “born
criminal” from the “occasional criminal” and it is the former which best represents his
position. With the born criminal he puts the ideas of freedom, reason, and free will into
question and replaces them by a biological determinism that reclaims the evolutionist
hypotheses: the born criminal represents a reversion to a primitive stage of the human
race. He is a subhuman type with different physical features (a specific type or size of
forehead, ears, cranium, etc.) which allow his “positive” identification. Gabriel Tarde,
Alexandre Lacassagne and other French criminologists will have more confidence in the
benefits of education and put more emphasis on the weight of environmental factors and
notions such as imitation. The French School will be less influenced by ethnography
than by the changes introduced in psychiatry by Pinel and Esquirol.
With more or less emphasis on the weight of inheritance or environmental
effects, criminology is based on positivism's central notion of continuity between
biological and social phenomena. Positivism brings about the biologization of episteme:
natural sciences become a model for other sciences, disciplines, discourses, and even
aesthetic practices. The criminologist resembles the naturalist: his object is no longer
the individual, but the species; his task, to describe and classify. And it will be
medicine, rather than biology, the science which will provide a model for the
interpretation of social behavior: society is a healthy body in constant progress which
can be affected by illness, since psychological, physical or environmental conditions,
instead of free will, prevail in some of its subjects. At the end of the century,
intellectuals will not be so interested in the social body's good health, but rather, in the
detection, analysis and prevention of social illnesses, as it can be noticed in El
continente enfermo [The Sick Continent] (1899) by the Venezuelan César Zumeta or
Pueblo enfermo [Sick People](1909) by the Bolivian Alcides Arguedas. These changes
also affect the ways in which crime is punished. Since ancient times, the theories of law
have had two ways to approach punishment: Utilitarianism and Retributivism.
According to utilitarianists, such as Plato and St. Augustine, among others, punishment
is intended to educate and to discourage people from committing a crime. Retributivists
like Hegel, on the other hand, think that punishment is a way to repair the damage done.
The medical terminology applied now to crime shows a break with these traditions and
a redefinition of the concept of punishment. Since the social body is, literally, a body,
the criminologist acts like a doctor who must pay attention to social symptoms. And this
is why prevention will be as or more important than cure, social sanitation and the
removal of “cancerous elements”.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, the opposition between the civilized
and the barbarians worked as a device to read landscape and the subjects who inhabited
it: the Argentine desert and the Mexican plain were, at the time, the nation's Other -the
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city's Other-, and their civilization the state's main task. By the end of the nineteenth
century, crime and political demands by the urban immigrant proletarians make the city
a dangerous place. While, at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the desert’s native
inhabitants are the State’s main problem, at the end of it, they will be replaced by
“foreign” workers or “newcomers” to the urban centers with their hopes of social
improvement. Between these two moments, the national narrative is territorialized: what
is beyond the city becomes a sort of idealized territory, where national values and
traditions can be found, whereas the city becomes an organism from which sick parts
must be removed, in the same way as medicine removes the sick parts of the human
body. Pathological elements, antibodies, virus and bacteria, cancerous parts are all terms
with which the nation’s good health and the relation between crime and law will be
approached.
Criminology will be part of the new disciplinary area resulting from the
positivist transformation and the reorganization of older disciplines –from medicine to
psychiatry and legal theory. Its political and cultural power is seen in the development
within the state structure of departments such as hygiene, public services, crime and
medical departments; in the introduction of new subjects such as neuropathology and
legal medicine, and other forms in which the civilian population will take part such as
the medical associations. Three main shifts take place then: from the subject with free
will to act to the subject determined by biological or environmental conditions, from the
individual to the species or social body, from punishment as correction or retribution to
a social therapeutics. These changes redefine the disciplinary field. Legal theory, for
instance, will not be focused on the analysis of good and evil, or the basis of the legal
system on a social pact; but on an applied bio-socio-legality which, in the way natural
sciences do, will develop methods of observation that will help to anticipate and
eventually cure “social illnesses” or criminal behavior.
Positivism is an effect of the French post-revolutionary era, in which the divine
basis of monarchy was replaced by scientific discourse as the new power’s source of
legitimacy. Positivism in general and the resulting emergence of criminology in
particular will also work as foundation or explanation legitimating specific forms of
political and cultural intervention in each national context. It will contribute also to
account for the colonial legacy in terms of inheritance and racial progress, to justify the
long history of the elites’ contempt for the indigenous and African population, and, in
some countries, even for the Spanish cultural legacy. For one of its most outstanding
ideologists, Justo Sierra, Porfirio Díaz’s Mexico is a mestizo Mexico, the final synthesis
of the Indian and Spanish ancestry. “For the regime,” Halperín Donghi says, “it is
becoming a European Mexico, a project and fiction at the same time.” To the extent that
during the celebrations of the independence hundredth anniversary in 1910, “the people
with indigenous appearance were driven away from the main streets by the police: the
foreign visitors would get a wrong idea of the country they were in” (Halperín Donghi
1997, 317-8).
The melting pot metaphor is related to concepts such as mestizaje, which suggest
a racial improvement rather than the assimilation of cultures, in synchronicity with the
naturalist views of species evolution. In a text like Los negros brujos (1907), the Cuban
Fernando Ortiz –author of the concept of transculturation, later celebrated by
Malinowski- argues that the mixture of races will contribute to the racial configuration
of the country by improving the backwardness of the nation’s Afro Cuban elements.
Ortiz’s work is a treaty on criminal ethnology whose prologue is written by Cesare
Lombroso himself. The curious point is that he delimits a field of danger and connects it
with a racial group’s cultural practices. In other words, rather than analyzing the
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characteristics of black delinquency in Cuba, Fernando Ortiz studies and defines Afro
Cuban culture as a generator of crime. And this will be Latin America’s great
“contribution” to criminology: these features of “backwardness”, these elements that
require hybridization “offer original and precious” information that cannot be found in
Europe and that will help to scientifically define the Latin American (criminal) identity.

The Gaze and the Crowd

Criminology has been related, since its birth, to the question of vision and its
technologies. The counterpoint to the watching machine, personified by the doctor, will
be the criminal, as the embodiment of a social illness that is hard to visualize. The
paradigmatic figure will be the deceiver, who acts like a worm that hides itself -
according to José Ingenieros’s comparison in La simulación en la lucha por la vida
[The simulation in the struggle for life]. Both of them hide to defend themselves from
their enemies, since concealment as well as “camouflage is a defensive method in the
struggle for life” (Ingenieros 1955, 10). The social scientist or criminologist is derived
from the figure of the doctor or the detective: they are able to notice a deviance that the
untrained eye might not be able to detect.
The concern about the invisible is based on the distress caused by the new main
figure of the urban scene: the crowd. From Gustave Le Bon’s La psychologie des foules
(1895) to the Argentine doctor José María Ramos Mejía’s Las multitudes argentinas
(1907), the crowd has been a central issue in positivist thought, not only because of their
real presence in urban centers and in the factories emerging from the Industrial
Revolution, but also because they are the final recipients of a series of new economic,
cultural and political measures. Sanitary and educational policies, as well as large-scale
production and the new cultural and aesthetic products, which result from the
professionalization of the culture and the development of newspapers and serial
publications, are all addressed to the masses.
Positivism believes the crowd is much more than the sum of individuals: it is a
new kind of group identity characterized by the alienation of rational faculties, which
can affect everyone in modern life. In John Turner’s Barbarous Mexico (1911), for
example, the crowd is described as lazy, superstitious, ignorant, coward, and prone to
robbery and drunkenness. Crowds, even when living in the city, come from rural areas
and are made up of humble, poorly educated people who “think with their stomachs,” as
Ramos Mejía suggests. Thus, race is the category mediating between the previous topic
of “barbarism” and the modern considerations about the crowds. There is also a
“scientific” explanation that will be useful to relate these ideas and the restrictions on
political participation with the difficulties to implement a fully democratic system in the
young republics. According to the Ecuadorian Belisario Quevedo (1981, 54),
“despotism is justified by the tendencies of the race of Latin education, the apathy of the
Ecuadorian people (four-fifths of which are indigenous, incapable of action) and the
lack of preparation for democratic life.” This illiterate and lazy population, that could
gain “dangerous representation,” as Carlos Pellegrini says in 1902 during the
parliamentary debates on universal suffrage in Argentina, will be the origin of a new
relation between irrationality and politics that starts with positivism and will lead to the
following decades' totalitarianisms. It will also be the cause of debates on new forms of
government, definitions of citizenry and participation in the cultural and/or political life.
Observing, controlling what exists, and using it through the scientific gaze is the
equation that links positivism, perception and visual technologies. With unknown
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enthusiasm, a series of technologies such as the taking of fingerprints, cranial


measurements, marks and scars records and photographic portraits are all intended to
create an archive of the human body. They were combined with a number of
regulations, such as Maximilian, emperor of Mexico’s Regulations from 1865, aimed at
creating a record of the city’s prostitutes, or the introduction of prison photographers, or
the gradual systematization of criminal records according to Alphonse Bertillon’s
methods, as well as the creation of photographic records of servants, drivers, teachers
and journalists and the subsequent introduction of identity cards. Since photography
enables to fix subjectivity and offers the possibility of seeing something that remained
concealed, the photographic plate seems to be the perfect place where changes in the
legal and medical discourses meet. It could even be said that criminology does not make
use of the image, but it is a photographic act in itself. Photography provides the
criminologist with the language to perform his duty: to identify – in the double sense of
the term, to be identical to oneself and to be identifiable within a group- the suspects
hiding in the social body.
Visual technologies, crowds, camouflage and the social body seem all to find a
place in the prostitute’s body. Thus, the prostitute will be the main character in many
medical treaties and essays, but she will also be the heroine of nineteenth century novel
– from Nana (1880) and La desheredada (1881) to Santa (1903) and Nacha Regules
(1919). The prostitute’s elusive identity, which reminds of the fears caused by the
crowd, turns her body into a perfect target for social control and the camera. The
threatening face of the man in the crowd represents a danger for the criminologist, for
the same reasons the prostitute’s body does: their constant mobility and their illegible
intentions. Women as great deceivers condense the relation between criminologist and
crowd, the doctor and the “sick” elements of the social body. They also relate a series of
problems linked to identification, hygiene and governability. To put it in Ramos Mejía’s
words (1956, 12), criminology’s aim is the study and control of crowds, “susceptible
and fickle like passionate women.”
Photography contains modern age, an age characterized by turning the existent
into an image, a representation of “man” that man gives to himself and therefore, a time
in which the real is conceived as a struggle of world views. Photography is modernity's
cipher; it condenses the time --called by Heidegger the Age of the World Picture— in
which “man brings into play his unlimited power for the calculating, planning and
molding of all things” (Heidegger 135, 1977).

Positivism and Narration

The positivist genre, par excellence, is the essay. Miguel Macedo, Gabino
Barreda, Julio Guerrero and Martínez Vaca y Bergara, in Mexico; Belisario Quevedo in
Ecuador; Fernando Ortiz in Cuba; José María Ramos Mejía, Octavio Bunge and José
Ingenieros in Argentina; Octavio Beche in Costa Rica; and Clovis Bevilacqua and
Afraino Peixoto in Brazil are just some among many other essayists. However,
positivism will also be present in the novel through the naturalist aesthetics. “The
application of the evolutionist theory developed by the author of The Origin of Species
can be seen in Zola's novels,” says the Galician writer Emilia Pardo Bazán (1833, 129)
in La cuestión palpitante, a book in which she comments on and defends the new
aesthetics. Emile Zola’s project, Les Rougon-Macquart. Histoire naturelle et sociale
d’une famille sous le Second Empire, includes a series of novels about a family during
the first two decades of the second half of the nineteenth century and deals with issues
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such as inheritance, natural selection and adaptation. These are all subject matters that
can be found in Latin American novels of the time too, a corpus of very different texts
one from the other, novels that can be thought as hybrids, between romanticism,
naturalism and local aesthetics, that may comprise En la sangre (1887) by the Argentine
Eugenio Cambaceres; Mi tío el empleado (1887), by the Cuban Ramón Meza; Aves sin
nido (1889), by the Peruvian Clorinda Matto de Turner; La Bolsa (1891), by Julián
Martel; La Charca (1894) by the Puerto Rican Manuel Zeno Gandía; Santa (1903) by
the Mexican Federico Gamboa, and Los Inmorales (1910), by Carlos Loveira, among
others.
The universe of sensory experience, that is to say, the world of the body -and
passion, vice, illness and illegible sexuality-, is the field preferred by literary
representation, always interested in identifying regularities and repetitions in the social
space. And in the extreme cases, the social is better represented than in average cases:
the naturalist novel, as Emilia Pardo Bazán (1883, 131) says, “prefers the study of the
pathological rather than normal cases, which in fact, abound.” In the choice of its
objects, in its constant subject-matters, in its mimetic or specular passion, naturalism is
positivism's literary genre. It is also positivist in the use of techniques such as the
portrait. Photography, for the criminologist, rather than illustrating, presents
epistemological coincidences with renowned sciences in the nineteenth century, such as
physiognomy and phrenology, which are “discourses of the head for the head” (Sekula
1986, 12). But the links between positivism and naturalism transcend subject matters
and techniques to reveal a deeper relation based on a shared episteme. The confidence
in a secret but solid connection between the surface of bodies and the invisible depth of
psychological life is the basis of Johann Lavater, Franz Joseph Gall and George
Combe’s works. This confidence also explains the prominence of description in the
naturalist aesthetics. The notion of social type, the typical characters built to represent
the class they belong to -which has been theorized by Georg Lukács, but also by
novelists themselves- might be seen not just as literary procedures, but as a taxonomical
attempt to make social class and species coincide.
Not only the novel, but also the essay tries to give shape to social typologies
based on the use of botanical and zoological taxonomies and to incorporate the
categories of evolution, survival of the fittest, natural selection as a practice of social
Darwinism. However, the use of scientific taxonomies at a human scale is not aseptic;
these tools of analysis are applied to an already existing field of cultural and political
problems. Thus, the Argentine doctor, José María Ramos Mejía uses these categories in
Las multitudes argentinas to describe the ways in which immigrants blend in to the
national culture. “All these products of evolution that we meet everyday emerge as in a
social epigenetics,” Ramos Mejía says, “from the completely modified immigrant.”
Following the French School’s teaching, Ramos Mejía trusts the effects that
environmental conditions, that is to say, public education, will have on immigrants. Yet,
the transformation is never complete and a social typology of “intermediate”
individuals, a sort of cross or transmutation of species that adapts to the new
environment is elaborated by Ramos Mejía. With allegedly scientific accuracy, the
Argentine doctor identifies the “compadre, the canalla, the huaso and the guarango.”
“In Social Paleonthology,” he explains after mentioning Albert Gaudry, “the guarango
could represent one of those vertebrates that, in ancient times, sociologists of the future
searched for to establish the evolutionary chain of our successive types” (Ramos Mejía
1956, 132). Evolutionism or sociological futurism: the confidence in cultural blending,
which is evident in metaphors such as “melting pot” or in concepts such as
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hybridization –taken up by the Cuban Fernando Ortiz or the Mexican José Vasconcelos-
follow the logic of the cross between species.
Although the naturalist novel is the most prominent aesthetic and literary genre,
there are other texts that, even when trying other genres or other ideologies, also contain
an aftertaste or marginal elements of the positivist episteme. In the nouvelle or short
story O alienista (1882), the Brazilian writer Joachim Machado de Assis, makes a sharp
mockery of some of positivism’s main concepts, in general, and its alleged role of social
intermediary, in particular. In this story, Simón Bacamarte, a psychiatrist, after studying
in Europe, returns to his hometown, where he opens and runs a mental house. The
whole story ridicules the alienist's excessive power and an alleged scientific discourse,
which is no more than rhetorical layers of common sense. In an irrational way, he starts
to declare his fellow citizens insane and to lock them in the hospital: he locks a wealthy
man in because he is too generous with his money, a superstitious woman, a builder,
who is too proud of a mansion he has built, and even the doctor, who criticizes him and
says that the mental house is just "a private prison." A feeling of “terror” spreads, the
narrator tells us, and no one knew “who was sane and who was mad” anymore. A
feeling that causes the masses to mobilize and of which politicians -who know little
about psychiatry, but understand how to use it as a political tool- will take advantage.
The psychiatrist does not lock the insane to cure them; his aim is to study madness. But
he realizes that, by following normality and deviance criteria, there are more people
inside than outside the mental hospital, so he decides to free the prisoners, to lock the
ones that had been declared sane in, and to finally declare his own insanity.
In contrast with Machado de Assis’ burlesque, the Mexican Eduardo Urzai, writes one
of the earliest Latin American science-fiction novels, Eugenia (1919). The novel takes
place in Villautopía, in the twenty-third century. There are no more nations, but
transnational sub-confederations, which represent the highest level of cosmopolitism.
The family is no longer the basis of social unity, but there are other forms of group
association. The eugenic views defended by Galton in Hereditary Genius (1869) had
been successfully followed: he argues that the reproduction of the “best” individuals
should be encouraged, while the reproduction of the “worst” ones should be prevented.
Although he does not propose measures or regulations, he believes in “awareness” to
transform cultural and social reproductive behaviour. Thus, the the novel begins when
one of the characters receives a letter from the “Eugenics Bureau” in which he is
informed that he has been appointed the “Species Official Breeder” for the current year.
In this way, the novel explores the disengagement in the relations between sexuality,
emotion and reproduction in a world where only certain individuals reproduce
themselves as a service offered both to the species and the state, or as a form of civic
and biological participation, as positivist science indicates. With this positivist science-
fiction, literature stages what characterizes the most extreme positivism: its confidence
in science and endless progress connected to the certainty that the future is taking place
now.

SEE ALSO: Civilization; Cultural Thought; Transculturation; Mestizaje; Pueblo; Race

References

Halperín Donghi, Tulio. 1977. Historia contemporánea de América latina. Buenos


Aires: Alianza Editorial.
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Heidegger, Martin. 1977. “The Age of the World Picture” The Question Concerning
Technology and Other Essays. New York Harper & Row.
Ingenieros, José. 1955. La simulación en la lucha por la vida. Meridion: Buenos Aires.
Quevedo, Belisario. 1981. Ensayos sociológicos, políticos y morales. Quito: Banco
Central de Ecuador y Corporación Editora Nacional.
Pardo Bazán, Emilia. 1883. La cuestión palpitante. Madrid: Imprenta central.
Ramos Mejía, José María. 1956. Las multitudes argentinas. Buenos Aires: Tor.
Real de Azúa, Carlos. 1983. “Los males latinoamericanos y su clave.” Punto de Vista
18: 15-21.
Sekula, Alan. 1986. “The Body and the Archive.” October 39: 3-64.
Terán, Oscar. 1987. Positivismo y nación en la Argentina. Buenos Aires: Puntosur.

Further Readings

Kolakowski, Leszek. 1979. La filosofía positiva. Madrid: Cátedra.


Leps, Marie-Christine. 1992. Apprehending the Criminal: The production of deviance in
Nineteenth-Century Discourse. Durham: Duke UP.
Pierre Legendre et al. 1982. El discurso jurídico: Perspectiva psicoanalítica y otros
abordajes epistemológicos. Buenos Aires: Hachette.
Salessi, Jorge. 1995. Médicos maleantes y maricas. Buenos Aires: Beatriz Viterbo.
Zea, Leopoldo (comp.). 1980. El positivismo latinoamericano. 2 tomos. Caracas:
Biblioteca Ayacucho.

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