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309 Pages·2015·1.48 MB·English
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Cultures of Anyone Moreno, Cultures of Anyone.indd 1 06/07/2015 12:13:01 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 Moreno, Cultures of Anyone.indd 2 06/07/2015 12:13:01 Cultures of Anyone Studies on Cultural Democratization in the Spanish Neoliberal Crisis LuiS MorEno-CABALLud Translated by Linda Grabner LIVERPOOL UNIVERSITY PRESS Moreno, Cultures of Anyone.indd 3 06/07/2015 12:13:01 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 Moreno, Cultures of Anyone.indd 4 06/07/2015 12:13:01 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 Moreno, Cultures of Anyone.indd 5 06/07/2015 12:13:01 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 Moreno, Cultures of Anyone.indd 6 06/07/2015 12:13:01 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.

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8 Joan Ramon Resina, Iberian Modalities: A Relational Approach to the. Study of Culture .. The 'cultures of anyone' create 'collective intelligence. her book Calibán y la bruja: mujeres, cuerpo y acumulación originaria (2004). In this regard, I am not trying to establish any kind of artificial
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Most books are stored in the elastic cloud where traffic is expensive. For this reason, we have a limit on daily download.