Triple coraje

Dr. Simi (and his competitors) clearly know how to multiply in the commer- cial sense. But González Torres/Dr. Simi is unique in the degree to which he also makes multiplicities in the political sense. The reverberations – from the chemo-pharmaceutical to the commercial, to the political, and back again – are not subtle, though characterizing their relationship remains the method- ological challenge. Dr. Simi has, since the early 2000s, made a name for himself by simultaneously copying drugs and copying ‘the state’ in order to a pose himself as a viable substitute thereto. Pursuing these combined ends, González Torres (who identifies himself with, or as, Dr. Simi) has, from the outset, tapped into an almost cartoonishly recognizable inventory of popular- political aesthetics, tropes and tactics. This inventory has included a (failed) bid to stand as a presidential candidate in 2006, alongside the adoption of a corporate flag, a corporate hymn, and a mural in corporate headquarters mimicking Diego Rivera’s famed depiction of Mexico’s glorious past and future in the National Palace.8_{He has engaged in relentless attacks against the}

state’s social security medical system, aired through a well-financed, constant presence on talk radio shows, TV programmes and newspapers. As I have outlined in greater detail elsewhere, González Torres has echoed the populist gestures of both the right and the left in Mexico’s constantly re-congealing multi-party democratic field, essentially establishing (the appearance of) an enterprising SimiState, with real effects in the world (Hayden, 2007). His many-tentacled, often lucrative, social-political apparatus works on many fronts. Alongside the franchised, low-cost popular health care infrastructure anchored by Farmacias Similares are González Torres’ philanthropic associ - ations, constituent organizations (he has made sure to call into being his own ‘civil society’), and a visible presence as a source of social and material aid to the poor, the elderly, and the underfunded organizations that serve barrios populares (popular and working-class neighbourhoods).

What kind of a politics is this, and what kind of aggregates are in formation? Political and social theory provide us with a few recognizable points of orientation, which may help us make our chemical turn. On the one hand, 176 Cori Hayden

similarity and substitutability are not new idioms of politics, or of imagining, intervening in, naming, and even knowing ‘a mass of men’. Before Foucault described population as a biological multiplicity, Gabriel Tarde and late nineteenth-century crowd theorists had much to say about how nongenealogical reproductions and multiplications – imitation, repetition and replication – literally constitute sociality (Tarde, 1993).9 _{The point has been particularly}

relevant to theorizations of popular politics in Latin America, especially in the work of Ernesto Laclau (2005).10_{It was Tarde, Laclau reminds us, who freed}

imitation and repetition from their disreputable association with the unruly crowd, arguing instead that even proper, ‘rational’ publics are generated by imitative processes across multiple scales. That is, sociality at a collective level is only produced, Tarde argues, through minute acts of repetition and imitation. Taking this argument a turn further, Laclau insists on extracting from Tarde’s imitation an account of populism as something that produces – indeed that works through – homogeneity and equivalence.11_{But such a seamless confla -}

tion of ‘imitation’ with ‘equivalence’ deprives us of a way to engage with some of the most generative aspects of populism itself, which, like the chemical, seems to fundamentally trouble unexamined notions of ‘the same’, the homo - geneous or the equivalent. SimiPolitics, as pharmaceutical politics, demands that we rethink such taken-for-granted terms, attending in fact to how they have ‘not the same’ at their core.

The chemical-political formula ‘the same and not the same’ in fact matters very much to how we think about populist politics in Mexico (and elsewhere in Latin America). In conversations about this project, my Latin Americanist colleagues frequently mention the inescapable resonance between the notion of the generic (and the substitute, and interchangeability) with twentieth-century idioms of citizenship and efforts to incorporate the popular masses into ‘the state’. This resonance emerges out of the history of twentieth-century Latin American populism, which was largely configured around the political and economic strategy of Import Substitution Industrialization (ISI). ISI provided a state-led language for Latin American nationalist politics of production, consumption and identity well into the 1960s and 1970s. The project of substituting domestic - ally made products for foreign commodities, under the mantle of an explicit protection ism (the very thing to which recent free trade agreements have so deter - minedly put an end), was meant to produce, among other things, employment for the working classes, a sense of identification through the consumption of lo nuestro (‘ours’) and a promise of undifferentiated inclusion for the ‘masses’ – la ronda de seres inter cambiables12_{– in state projects of modernization and}

development (García Canclini, 1995; Lomnitz, 2001; Yúdice, 2001).13

Given this history, invocations of ‘generic substitution’, it seems, cannot help but evoke the making of political multiplicities. And indeed, González Torres/Dr. Simi vividly taps into this storied history of ‘the national-popular’ configured around the domestic substitute, as in his early quasi-nationalist advertising campaigns (‘defend your economy!’) and the loud echoes he gen - erates of a corporatist SimiState that will take care of the popular classes.

Population 177

But! Simi’s interruption also draws our attention directly to the other side(s) of this national-popular story: the strong association of the domestic copy and the ‘popular masses’ with the specter of uncertain authenticity (the same but . . .?), national identities marked by an ambivalently ‘imitative’ relation to the metropole, and the uncanny powers accruing to the proliferative copy. It also, of course, draws our attention to race, ethnicity, and indigeneity as the modes through which the tensions between sameness and difference within these ‘national’ projects have long been mediated. It is my contention here that, entangled with the well-documented biopolitical managements of race, sex, gender and reproduction that have defined twentieth-century national-state projects (Leys Stepan, 1996; Nelson, 1999; Appelbaum et al., 2003), Latin American political histories have simultaneously been riven with anxieties about, and the management of, ‘fissiparous’ reproductions; that is, proliferative, nongenealogical acts of replication or imitation, which have long troubled elites’ sense of the sites and sources of political power.14_{(Consider Eva Perón}

and the multiple copies of her corpse that circulated long after her death (Eloy Martínez, 1996).)

Political and social theory’s attention to populism in a broad sense may thus help remind us of the long-standing centrality of the non-genealogical copy to the making of multiplicities. If SimiPolitics brings this legacy into view, it also draws our attention to the possibility that the compound phrase, pharmaceutical politics, might have a very particular traction. To reframe the question baldly, why is SimiPolitics organized around the pharmaceutical at all? Why not organize a SimiPolitics around washing machines, or cars, as in the era of ISI? What does it mean to make the pharmaceutical-ness of this enterprise matter to the operations of a biochemical multiplicity? With Dr. Simi in view, me propose an empirically animated, speculative schema with which to address these questions.