Cultures of Anyone

309 Pages·2015·1.48 MB·English

Cultures of Anyone
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Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures
Series Editor
L. Elena Delgado, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Niamh Thornton, University of Liverpool
Series Editorial Board
Jo Labanyi, New York University
Chris Perriam, University of Manchester
Paul Julian Smith, CUNY Graduate Center
This series aims to provide a forum for new research on modern and contemporary
hispanic and lusophone cultures and writing. The volumes published in
Contemporary Hispanic and Lusophone Cultures reflect a wide variety of critical
practices and theoretical approaches, in harmony with the intellectual, cultural
and social developments that have taken place over the past few decades. All
manifestations of contemporary hispanic and lusophone culture and expression are
considered, including literature, cinema, popular culture, theory. The volumes in the
series will participate in the wider debate on key aspects of contemporary culture.
1 Jonathan Mayhew, The Twilight of the Avant-Garde:
Contemporary Spanish Poetry 1980–2000
2 Mary S. Gossy, Empire on the Verge of a Nervous Breakdown
3 Paul Julian Smith, Spanish Screen Fiction: Between Cinema and Television
4 David Vilaseca, Queer Events: Post-Deconstructive Subjectivities
in Spanish Writing and Film, 1960s to 1990s
5 Kirsty Hooper, Writing Galicia into the World: New Cartographies, New Poetics
6 Ann Davies, Spanish Spaces: Landscape, Space and Place in
Contemporary Spanish Culture
7 Edgar Illas, Thinking Barcelona: Ideologies of a Global City
8 Joan Ramon Resina, Iberian Modalities: A Relational Approach to the
Study of Culture in the Iberian Peninsula
9 Bruno Carvalho, Porous City: A Cultural History of Rio de Janeiro
(from the 1810s Onward)
10 Javier Krauel, Imperial Emotions: Cultural Responses to Myths of Empire
in Fin-de-Siècle Spain
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Cultures of Anyone
Studies on Cultural Democratization
in the Spanish Neoliberal Crisis
LuiS MorEno-CABALLud
Translated by Linda Grabner
LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS
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First published 2015 by
Liverpool University Press
4 Cambridge Street
Liverpool
L69 7ZU
Copyright © Luis Moreno-Caballud 2015
The right of Luis Moreno-Caballud to be identified as the author of this book
has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs
and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced,
stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior written permission of the publisher.
British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication data
A British Library CIP record is available
ISBN 978-1-78138-193-9 cased
Typeset in Borges by
Carnegie Book Production, Lancaster
Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon CR0 4YY
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Contents
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction 1
Part i. Cultural Authority and neoliberal ‘Modernization’
Chapter 1. Cultural Aspects of the Neoliberal Crisis: Genealogies of a
Fractured Legitimacy 17
1.1. Crisis of a Hierarchical, Individualistic Cultural Model 17
1.2. Enlightened Gardeners, or, the Power of Knowledge 33
1.3. ‘Transplanting People’: Capitalist Modernization and
Francoist Technocracy 41
1.4. Pedagogy of ‘Normalization’ and Cultural Elites 53
Chapter 2. ‘Standardizing’ from Above: Experts, Intellectuals, and
Culture Bubble 64
2.1. Experts in Something and Experts in Everything: The Two
Pillars of the Culture of the Transition 64
2.2. Men Who Smoke and Men Who Drink (or, Culture, that
Modern Invention) 73
2.3. The Engineer’s Great Style: A Depoliticized Aesthetic
Modernity 82
2.4. ‘Normalization,’ Deactivation, and Culture Bubble in the CT 89
Chapter 3. Arrested Modernities: The Popular Cultures that Could
Have Been 105
3.1. Arrested Modernities I: A Culture Rooted in Tradition
Faces the Transition 105
3.2. Words in the Kitchen: Subsistence Cultures and
Productivist Cultures 113
3.3. Arrested Modernities II: Postwar Cultures and Creative
Consumption 121
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vi Cultures of Anyone
Part ii. Cultural democratizations
Chapter 4. Internet Cultures as Collaborative Creation of Value 137
4.1. Genealogies and Contradictions of Digital Cultures 137
4.2. Unpaid Work and Creation of Value on the Internet 146
4.3. The Pleasure of Doing, and Telling What One Does:
Self-Representation of Internet Cultures 156
4.4. Two Overlapping yet Clashing Value Systems 166
Chapter 5. Combining the Abilities of all the Anyones: The 15M
Movement and its Mutations 178
5.1. Anyone’s Word and the Expert’s Word: An Alliance 178
5.2. Sustaining the Plaza and Beyond: Towards a New Cultural
Power 192
5.3. Conflict of Authorities: Intellectuals, Mass Media, and the
15M Climate 205
5.4. ‘The Boxer and the Fly’: Nomadism and Sustainability
after the Plazas 219
Chapter 6. Towards More Democratic Cultural Institutions? 232
6.1. The Self-Managed Culture in its Life Spaces 232
6.2. Under the Ambiguous Umbrella of the Public Sector 242
6.3. Between Institution and Experimentation:
Why Hasn’t There Been a Marea de la Cultura? 254
6.4. ‘Making Us Be’: The Question of Forms of
(Self-)Representation 263
Epilogue. Cultures of Anyone: A Proposal for Encounters 275
Works Cited 285
Index 301
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Acknowledgments
Acknowledgments
This book has been possible thanks to the direct or indirect contribution of
a great variety of people who desire and experiment with collaborative and
egalitarian—and, sometimes, non-capitalist and non-patriarchal—ways of
life. You will find many of them quoted in the following pages. But a lot
of them don’t usually write or at least don’t publish articles or books. I
want to express my gratitude to them. I hope that they may find this book
interesting, despite all its shortcomings, and that they find it a good tool
to resist the excess of cultural authority that is usually granted on those
of us who do write. I would like to thank particularly the people from the
political collectives in which I have worked and learned in the last years:
Democracia Real Ya NY, the General Assembly of NYC, Occupy Wall Street’s
Empowerment and Education working group, Making Worlds, 16 Beaver,
Marea Granate NY, Círculo Podemos EEUU, and the NYC to Spain delegation.
I thank my friends and colleagues in the universities where I studied and
worked. I thank my dear friends and ‘compas’ in Madrid, New York and
everywhere else. I could have never survived without your love. And I deeply
and lovingly thank my sister, Ana Moreno, my parents, Merche Caballud
and Ramiro Moreno, my partner Begonia Santa-Cecilia, and our son, Max
Santa-Cecilia.
introduction
Introduction
The Spanish state, 2008–May 2015: unemployment rates approach 25%,
and 50% among young people. Eight million living in poverty, according
to official figures. The second highest rate of childhood malnutrition in
Europe. The highest rise in economic inequality of all states in the OECD.
Some 3 million empty homes and about 184 families evicted from their homes
every day.
Despite changes in the governing party, the public policies that have
attempted to address this situation have not changed since the beginning of
what has come to be called the ‘economic crisis:’ obedience to the ‘experts’ of
the Troika (the International Monetary Fund, the European Commission, the
European Central Bank), bailouts of financial entities, prioritizing payment
of the public debt over social spending, and cuts to basic public services like
health, education, and disability benefits.
Regardless of whether or not these policies work, what my research
seeks to emphasize is that such measures are not only executed by political
authorities, but are also normalized by a certain form of cultural authority: the
authority of the ‘experts.’ This authority is based on a long, complex tradition
in every society that tends to establish a group of people ‘in the know,’ and
another group ‘in the dark.’ In its most flexible manifestation, this tradition
allows for those ‘in the dark’ to be able to move up to the group ‘in the know,’
if they fulfill an entire series of pedagogical prerequisites supervised by the
latter group. But in any case, the decisions about important things, like the
social organization of housing, work, food, health, and education, will be
made made on the basis of the specialized technical opinion of those ‘in the
know’ at any given moment.
Given this cultural tradition, those who implement political measures
enabling situations as difficult for the majority of a population as those
currently experienced in Spain can justify their policies based on the
technical knowledge of the ‘experts’ who recommend them. There are also,
of course, others who oppose them by putting forward the authority of
2 Cultures of Anyone
their own ‘experts,’ who—based on their respective technical knowledge—
recommend very different policies. In the midst of this confrontation between
differing groups of ‘those in the know,’ those who are supposedly ‘in the
dark’ are sometimes called upon to offer an opinion—primarily through
the election of political parties every four years. But again, according to this
cultural tradition, the opinion of ‘just anyone’—of someone who does not
belong to the group of ‘those in the know’—can never be equal to that of
those who bear the titles of established knowledge. In the capitalist version
of this tradition, those ‘in the know’ guarantee a way of life for everyone else
which, in addition to voting, they can use money as a measure of all social
value and channel their individual desires by consuming and competing
among themselves.1
1 The cultural authority of those ‘in the know’ is never isolated; on the contrary,
it is part of wider ‘ways of life,’ which reproduce complex structures of domination
operating at different levels. Thus, in its capitalist version, the segregation between
those ‘in the know’ and those ‘in the dark’ works together with, among other factors,
the crucial function of money as a measure of all social value, which reinforces
and reproduces social inequality (see Harvey 1989). In this sense, when I say that
public policies responding to the ‘crisis’ are naturalized by this system of cultural
authority, I don’t exactly mean that many people really believe they are adequate
because a series of ‘experts’ say so. Moreover, and as I hope the following pages
will make clear, I mean that these policies are supported by a whole ‘way of life’
through which we tend to internalize hierarchical and competitive divisions of value
that exclude many of us from the position of ‘having a say’ about the value of said
policies. In the words of French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, this internalization is
a key aspect of domination, which consists in the limitation of the ‘possibilities of
thought and action in the oppressed’ (Bourdieu 2001, 41). Fortunately, we—people
of the twenty-first century—have inherited many tools to understand domination
and its ‘cultural’ aspect. In a world swamped by publicity, propaganda, spectacle,
and therapy, it seems increasingly clear that, as writer Ricardo Piglia (2000) likes to
say, quoting from Valery, ‘physical repression alone is not enough to impose order;
fictional forces are required as well.’ There have, of course, been very important
contributions to this understanding from intellectual and activist traditions.
Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony (1999) was instrumental in bringing to the
fore the power of education, religion, intellectuals, and the media in constructing
a worldview for the dominated to accept their condition. After Gramsci, there have
been many ways of qualifying the nature of this ‘acceptance,’ displacing simplistic
ideas of ‘rational consensus.’ To quote just some of them, we could remember the
aforementioned Bourdieu’s work on the internalization of domination, Laclau and
Mouffe’s Lacanian re-reading of Gramscian hegemony (2004), Beasley-Murray’s
concept of ‘posthegemony’ (2010), Rancière’s notion of the ‘distribution of the
sensible’ (2004), and Deleuze and Guattari’s concepts of segmentation and molarity,
as well as their whole method of ‘schizoanalysis’ or ‘cartography of desire’ (1987).
In this book, the two last theoretical frames (Rancière’s and Deleuze and Guattari’s)
Introduction 3
In recent years, however, something important has happened in the
Spanish state. The economic disaster has generated such a huge drop in
the credibility of political institutions that it has begun to affect this
hierarchical cultural system, thus compromising the very authority of those
‘in the know.’ This has driven many people ‘in the dark’ to trust in their
own abilities to collaboratively construct the knowledge they need in any
given situation and to generate effective answers to the problems that
confront them. In the process, they avoid having to weigh down their ways
of knowing with the monopolistic, exclusive, hierarchical ambitions that
accompany the tradition of the ‘experts.’
This book studies some signs that seem to point towards a crisis of that
tradition, along with others that announce the emergence of something I call
‘cultures of anyone.’ These cultures do not suggest a rejection of specialized
fields of knowledge, but rather a rejection of the uses of such knowledge to
monopolize cultural authority. They avoid creating divisions between those
‘in the know’ and those ‘in the dark,’ asserting that we all know something,
nobody knows everything, and our abilities are developed better when we
learn together than when we live in hierarchical relationships.2
are preferred for understanding domination (although not quoted extensively). This
is because they seem more apt to investigating cultural processes that, instead of
following Bourdieu’s interest in the restriction of the ‘possibilities of action and
thought of the dominated,’ strive to flee the hegemonic division of people into
‘those who know and can’ and those who ‘don’t know and can’t,’ by betting on the
empowerment of the intelligence and abilities of anyone. This bet certainly has its
risks, but as I will try to show, it cannot be considered simple wishful thinking, or
a blind negation of the harsh and complex realities of domination.
2 This, of course, will always run the risk of not paying enough attention to the
deep determinations that all sorts of hierarchical relationships have imprinted upon
our lives. By opening a space for the ‘anyone,’ these cultures certainly are in danger
of encouraging superficial understandings of such determinations, which would be
doomed to return in conflictive ways. On the other side of the argument, however,
there is always the risk of placing so much emphasis on those social determinations
that one ends up reinforcing them. For instance: by victimizing and patronizing
those who are ‘suffering the most,’ or by assigning them stereotypes that deprive
them of the possibility of self-representation and value creation. Beyond categorical
and universal judgments about the outcomes of ‘cultures of anyone,’ I propose
to study certain concrete cultural processes that in the context of the neoliberal
crisis in Spain have preferred to run the first of those two risks. I believe this is an
important task not only because of the increasing social relevance of this type of
process (which, as a cultural historian, I think I should investigate), but also because
tactically—being aware of the ethical and political dimensions of all research
work—I would like my own study to also be a contribution to the empowerment of
the abilities of anyone attempted by these processes.