The pivotal and most potentially productive point in Alberto Moreiras’s critique of my essay strikes me as his call for “some basic kind of oldfashioned Marxism.” This, he suggests, would be the appropriate approach to my example of the Peruvian peasant women who migrated to Lima and organized themselves in so successful a fashion. This alludes to the most challenging of contemporary issues, one that ultimately underlies both Moreiras’s work and my own: engaging the informal actors that are fast becoming the dominant sectors of metropolitan centers in politically formal ways. Moreiras appeals to Marxism here as an alternative to the culturalist orientation inherent to the concept of transculturation. Though I am not certain what an “old-fashioned Marxism” means in the context of the activity that characterizes postnational economic and social informality (many old-fashioned Marxisms — whether theoretical or pragmatic — were as tied to the nation-state paradigm as Rama’s elaboration of transculturation), I do certainly appreciate the spirit, if not the letter, of the comment. Whether we are talking about History with a capital H, a good dose of empiricism, political parties, political mobilization, or state apparatuses, we all, I think, agree that it is time to switch gears. I know that a few years back, I found the book After Theory — Terry Eagleton’s humorous examination of our theoretical excesses that at the same time does not underestimate the significance of theory — very timely indeed. Moreiras’s all too resonant call for something specifically political rather than cultural, however, seems oddly incongruent in an essay that develops its definition of subjectivity from a science fiction film. One might argue that I am taking the “replicant” theory of colonized subjectivities all too literally, but the way that the poetic register in Moreiras’s essay bleeds into a semblance of the political warrants or makes obligatory such a reading. Along these lines, his call for “some basic old-fashioned kind of Marxism” — at least in the context of his essay, where one can’t begin to imagine what this would mean (nor is encouraged to) — is sheer metaphor.
