Despotic Networks: The Art of Social Control

     Last week, I examined the complicated correlation between biopower and necropower, specifically in terms of Trujillo’s dictatorship. Undoubtedly, Trujillo spearheaded policies that enforced domination over bodies through systemic terror networks. In strictly Latourian terms, a “network is defined by…. What takes any substance that had seemed at first self-contained… and transforms it into what it needs to subsist through a complex ecology of tributaries, allies, accomplices, and helpers” (Latour 5). Trujillo excelled at creating self-contained networks of control that subjugated large numbers of Dominicans and also led to a massive genocide of Haitians. Latour, however, claims that “networks are a great way to get rid of phantoms such as nature, society, or power, notions that before, were able to expand mysteriously” (8); furthermore, he argues that a network revolution is clearly political (5), but implies that the control rests in the hands of the citizenry. I would like to offer a counterpoint, in which networks can be used as tools by despots to expand seemingly fantastical power.

     Indeed, in Brief Wondrous Life, Trujillo creates an actor-network that exponentially improves his control over society and effectively eliminates resistance by means of the Trujillista. Although his network is not digital, the results (i.e. the disempowerment of individuals and the creation of a social aggregate) are the same. In fact, similar authoritarian leaders in contemporary history have controlled virtual networks to regulate a citizenry (communist China’s paranoid censorship of the internet or the banning of Facebook in Iran are salient examples). Trujillo, then, becomes “a supernatural, or perhaps alien, dictator who had installed himself on the first island of the New World and then cut it off from everything else, who could send a curse to destroy his enemies” (Diaz 246).

     Belicia Cabral’s inability to escape the symbolic “Plátano Curtain” of the DR, defined and controlled by Trujillo, is the most striking evidence of this form of network that enhances totalitarian power in society. Diaz writes:

Beli had the inchoate longings of nearly every adolescent escapist, of an entire generation, but I ask you: So fucking what? No amount of wishful thinking was changing the cold hard fact that she was a teenage girl living in the Dominican Republic of Rafael Leonidas Trujillo Molina, the Dictatingest Dictator who ever Dictated. This was a country, a society, that had been designed to be virtually escape-proof (Diaz 80).

The teenagers of Belicia’s generation in the DR, who would ultimately be the reason for the rebellion against Trujillo’s regime, feel unassailably contained and trapped by the so-called “Curtain,” a node of the network, a phantasm of power and imprisonment that overrides the traditional ideology of individuality being tied to freedom. 

     Beli, however, discovers her own power and individualism through overt sexuality and hyper-femininity. Diaz writes: “By the undeniable concreteness of her desirability which was, in its own way, Power. Like the accidental discovery of the One Ring… Belicia Cabral finally had power and a true sense of self… With great power comes great responsibility... bullshit. Our girl ran into the future that her new body represented and never ever looked back” (Diaz 94). Ironically, the manner through which she finds her own power also causes her own victimization, echoing a concrete milieu of misogyny and rape employed by Trujillo and his Secret Police. In terms of the Latourian actor-network, she uses her sexuality to exceed other females in the DR, but her identity is subsumed and superseded by the opinions of others (especially those males with characteristically Dominican machismo). “The reason is that a given individual will be defined by the list of other individuals necessary for its subsistence… Every individual is part of a matrix whose line and columns are made of the others as well” (Latour 13). Ultimately, Beli rebels against the constraints of her explicitly Dominican lifestyle, enforced by the maternal figure, La Inca. She cannot gain any true satisfaction, or become a truly self-contained individual, fighting for her place in the self-contained DR (Latour 9). She, therefore, consorts with gangsters of ill-repute, who epitomize Trujillo’s crime network, and is finally impregnated by two different men, the second of whom has Haitian ancestry, which causes her to flee the island for America. Only by removing herself physically from the DR, escaping Trujillo’s Curtain, (which still, nonetheless, brings thousands of Dominicans yearly to return home) can she escape Trujillo’s network of power.