The Devil and Commodity Fetishism in South America - autonomous ...

Preface to the Thirtieth Anniversary Edition xiii
ity have a great power to shape reality (in good part through uncertainty),
passing along a chain of storytellers. Thus the task of the
storyteller who wishes to break the chain, as I saw it, was to step
up to the plate and come up with a new story, knowing full well
that the chain can never be stopped and that sooner or later another
story will displace yours. Such is the world of violence and memory,
bound necessarily to fiction. Recognition of this state of affairs,
however, leads not only to a sobering pessimism, but to the sliver
of a possibility that maybe, just maybe, the tension of this interval
between your displacing story and the next story that will displace
it can create a force field in which the violence can be transmuted
into healing. This I call "penultimaticity," writing as the one permanently
before the end.
Later it dawned on me that the devil contract stories I had heard
in the sugarcane fields were, similarly, stories of extremity, full of
fear and desire that Bataille had theorized as "wasting," heedless
spending, or, in the French language, depense, master of which was
our old friend the devil.
Today, as far as I can tell, the devil has disappeared or gone underground
in the cane fields owned by a handful of white families—
mostly living abroad in places such as Panama or Miami—who now
control the destiny of the Cauca Valley because sugar has found a
new and growing market as a biofuel to ensure yet more automobiles.
The plantations have inundated the valley in a chemical fog,
sucked the water out of the rivers, and displaced people through the
use of machinery as well as chemicals. What was a beautiful valley
with an enormous diversity of plant and animal life, is now a boring,
barren, rationalized, lifeless place growing sugar for cars.
The plantation towns have become pressure cookers of alienated
youth in violent gangs killing each other as well as other townspeople
and police. In turn, paramilitaries and assassins are paid by
local businessmen—with support of the townspeople—to kill the
gang members.
Peasant resistance has been largely crushed, as have the trade
unions. Yet, if anything, the appeal grows stronger every day for the
traditional peasant farm based on a magnificent tree agriculture that
goes back to the days of slavery or just after emancipation in 1851.
This is an agriculture of interplanted plantains, cacao, coffee, fruit
trees, huge shade trees, medicinal plants, and some corn, requiring
no fertilizer or herbicides.
Thus the moral economy built into the stories of the devil contract
back in the 19705 has born fruit and been validated by a now