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Text published
in Zones of silence, edited by the
Rijksakademie van beeldende kunsten, Amsterdam, 2001 . One. The world can assume a variety of figures - Eden, inferno, oasis, factory, museum, network, virgin nature, urban jungle - but the most appropriate to the present historical conjuncture is that of the sphinx. In Greek tragedy, the sphinx awaited travellers at the entrance to the city in order to put an enigmatic question to them. Those who failed to provide the right answer were devoured. All cities - in themselves cultural moulds - respond to and obey a transcendental idea, a fundamental myth or its plebeian manifestations, or to financial usury, the exploitation of bodies and the technocratic foolishness of politicians and administrators. Either way, they obey. Cultural creation is the consequence of the never-ending struggle between the two exigencies of obedience. The destiny of a culture depends on the possibilities that it facilitates or obstructs for its citizens in that incessant and unsustainable tension. That struggle assumes the form of virtually insoluble questions put by the urban sphinx to its occupants, especially concerning money, the future and desire. Cities duplicate and distribute certain precincts and rituals in order to arrive at a provisional grasp of those enigmas. For example, brothel, football stadium and cinema cater for the questions raised by desire, war and fantasy, since all architecture is psychophysical rather than functional. In turn, we use the term "art" for the urban duplication that the people produced from bare necessity in order to find answers to fundamental existential questions. Death, birth, ruin, hope, joy, sorrow, the plethora of the world, horror, presence or absence of another’s face. These themes of clay are what art is made from. Every work engages in dialogue with these questions, which pressurise society and the artist’s body. Moreover, it is certain that art can be made from advertising, a urinal, or haut couture. But whether the work is made of mud or of some celestial substance, it will not last if it does not try to engage in dialogue with those urgent questions. In the past many of these questions did not exceed the boundary of the village or the language of a single nation, but today the sphinx is cosmopolitan and polyglot; she speaks every language and is situated at all the points of the compass simultaneously. Two. Words emerge in spoken language secretly and imperceptibly. Their appearance, derivation, and metamorphosis are at the mercy of the whims and wisdoms of intense shared conversation - even when the word belongs at first to a sect. But "globalisation" did not arise like this. It fell from the sky. Its inclusion - its grafting, rather - in the languages of politicians, journalists, intellectuals, technocrats and artists has been rapid, rampant and imperious. Its passage into common usage indicates that we are confronted by a curious public convergence, which often happens even to those who consider themselves to be at diametrical opposites. When that word provokes images of perfection (globe, sphere, world citizenship, intercommunication), the collective imagination tends to become fascinated by these new tacit planispheres with their attractive symbols, especially when the bridges of memory of a previous world collapse. The illusions and mirages have always assumed the idyllic form of the oasis, but the propagation of perfect images is nothing new. The first globes, in the time of Columbus, already reorientated the gaze of cultivated persons: maps of the world stopped including paradise and hell as "places", and Jerusalem no longer occupied the middle of the world. When did it start? The processes comprised in the magic concept of "globalisation", in spite of the chatter of the media about its being very recent, novel and multi-ethnic, have a history, which would take us back a few centuries and would reveal the wave of European expansion in all directions - the crest of the last wave assumed the figure of imperialism in the nineteenth century. That impulse has not stopped, even though those who only see the return of the waves, which have beaten against the limits of the world may forget that the point of impact of the rock where the flood commenced stays in the same place. The global adventure that fired the European imagination started with Magellan's voyage and culminates with the navigator who surfs the internet. A significant literary moment in this history was the publication of Jules Verne’s Around the world in eighty days, whose journey began and ended in London, the capital of the world in his day. But neither "north" nor "south" exist as physical realities, except when we consider geography from the point of view of the political compass. Neither were the systems of numeration and calculation tied to the local markets and tribal forms of classification replaced "spontaneously" by the present numerical system, which the liberal economists claim to be "perfect, democratic and universal". That required the worldwide expansion of the European economy - political, cultural, military violence. Every city extends from a foundation stone. The word "global" tends to be understood as a "humanist" and functional desideratum, the last station on a railway line connecting the point of departure with the destination. Journalists, politicians and intellectuals ring the bell of "globalisation" with an undertone of menace, of obligation, of irreversibility, of an unquestioned naturalness - an ultimatum? Globalisation not only reorganises social spaces and modifies - levels out - anthropological times, it also unfolds an image of the world within whose borders a form of life becomes capable of being formulated, but at the same time cancels out other ways of experiencing human goods. And the more that world is opened up as an image, the more the sensorial experience of the immediate habitat retreats. When the Montgolfier brothers floated a balloon above Paris in 1783, the city stretched out before their eyes like a two-dimensional picture postcard - a global image of the city that prefigured our geodesic satellites that can photograph the earth with a resolution of metres. Images of this type presuppose a disembodied logistics. One day in 1957 a satellite called Sputnik was launched into space and circumnavigated the globe at an unprecedented speed. Soon afterwards, before the eyes of Yuri Gagarin, the planet appeared like a circular film shown in slow motion, even though, curiously, the apparatus that made it possible to "measure" the earth was minuscule and accelerated. Something had been conquered and not, in the first place, space. It is just as crucial that Gagarin was unable to hear the music of the spheres. The global image had compressed the plethora of the world. These instances seem obvious, but from now on it will be necessary to remember them and to emphasise them time and again. Because there was a time when the word "global" did not mean anything. Perhaps the present state of affairs began when a US airline - Panam - adopted the shape of the globe to promote its service. Since then, "local" and "cultural diversity" have changed rhythm and sign. Three. How are we to appropriate changes in the world from a local language and experience? "Local" is an inappropriate word, because its meaning is necessarily articulated with the axis indicated and orientated by "global". Inevitably too, it is used in theory and politics in a defensive way. In Argentina, defending the "local" against the invasion of the global is a paradoxical endeavour, since the social imagination of this country was constructed using European materials. Argentina is the name of a frontier between "civilisation" and "barbary", a fundamental opposition in the ideas of the dominant groups since the mid-19th century. Moreover, the Argentine imagination has been shaped by waves of poor immigrants from Spain and Italy, the Ukraine and Germany, and by an obsessive fixation on the novelties of the European scene. Perhaps Miami and Los Angeles have now taken the place of Paris and London as reference points, but the style of orientation of the "local" gaze has not changed. Still, Argentina is both a Latin and an American zone, with the equally paradoxical effect that Buenos Aires is a singular psychological phenomenon: the struggles between the European and Latin American imaginations created a space of irresolution which unloaded anxiety and frustration onto the population, and which cultural creation has taken on - from the tango to psychoanalysis, from urban music to the latest young cinema which stresses the country’s self-destruction and the Argentineans’ self-hatred. But the local has never been anthropologically pure and free from external influences, but the effect of terrible tensions. What is ours, among ourselves, has been not quite ours, something perplexing; the foreign was inevitable. While "globalisation" was a process that had barely been set in motion and the idea of the nation continued to be a shared political obsession, cultural creation absorbed the foreign influences and steeped them in the life-giving circle of local passions. Our problem is the poverty of the Argentine languages to take account of what is entering its decline and what is springing to life in a city: the passion of all for the things we share. In the sixteenth century the silk caravans from Cathay took months to reach Samarkand. Today, it only takes a moment for the image of a product to make an impact on an audience. The populist style of the US carries myths of consumerism to the world which are as powerful as religious emblems and hagiographies were in a bygone age. It is obvious that the different European expansions (missionary, commercial, imperialist, socialist, migratory, cosmopolitan) have followed the same routes and intertwined. But present-day globalisation is unthinkable without its technological matrix. The attempt to distinguish between a good and healthy - cosmopolitan - impulse, and a bad and autocratic - economic - impulse is illusory. The question of what kind of values this implies concerns not only politics but also ethics and aesthetics. Technology - the skeleton of the process - cannot offer values, it only leads us to a different level of organisation of time and space. The problems of interpretation entailed by the use of the word "cultural" presuppose political and existential dilemmas. After 1945 many cultural certainties exploded. Popular, plebeian, classical and mass-scale changed sign as the tensions between vanguard, folklore and elitism faded, and with them some of the political forms that accompanied them. They are mere classifications. More importantly: From what source does culture spring? From the sap that makes culture germinate. Tautology? If we accept that every city is a living organism, we will understand that cultural creation is the effusion of a people, and that the museums, libraries, installations, concerts, all the products of desks and workshops, are fruits that grow because they are rooted in the elementary substances of urban life - it makes no difference whether the resulting work is conservative or provocative, boding well or ill. Culture is the seed, and if it is absent or weak, a city is no more than a decrepit house, or one that is decorated in the latest style but with limited shelf life: something unwelcoming. Art is not a sociological belt that adds colour and rhythm to globalisation, but a somatic and spiritual contact with the great enigmas contained in the questions of the sphinx. Those enigmas arise from experiences that like lost birds who find a providential nest, are welcomed by art, as other facets are embraced by religious faith or political action. Art, the mould that shapes people, welcomes enigmas and the replies - works -, even on a paltry scale, enable us to have a sense of meaning in our lives, without which the length of time given us for our stay here would be impoverished and would wither away. For the same reason, cultural creation is not "compensatory symbolic efficacy" in a pitiless global world. It is something more: the something else that cannot be reduced to the world of commodities, since "commodity" does not mean that new cultural goods are available to everybody, but that all the goods of the world are being transformed into commodities. What can an Argentine artist do in this situation? Historically, the tension between "imported" and "native" made local art a field of combat as well as transforming it into something like the digestive system, from which works displaced from their original sources were disgorged in fully-assimilated form. At the same time, the relation of local art to the modern biography of the world and to the social and existential dramas of the country made artists specialists in contraband, partisanship, the construction of escape tunnels, denial, the interpretation of barely comprehensible runes, the survival of their passions under unfavourable conditions: it individualised them in tactics resembling the crime system and the interpretation of voices without the right of defence. Every Argentine artist has had to struggle against an obfuscation inherent in the current process of globalisation: the impenetrable crust that hides a volcanic cultural foundation which is active, confused and tenebrous. To combat "camouflage", local artists have had recourse to excess and arbitrariness as well as to the amorous gesture and the astonishing, which do not imply losing one’s way, as the aseptics believe, but the risks inherent in artistic activity. Perhaps it is impossible for artists to proceed differently: before the local or global sphinx who blocks their way with riddles, they advance with the eyes of a diviner. |
Christian Ferrer es sociologist and writer. Profesor of the Faculty of Social Science of the University of Buenos Aires where he teaches “Pholiosphy of language” and “Philosophy of technique”. Has been member of editing group of the magazines Utopía, Fahrenheit 450 and La Letra A. And is at the moment for the magazines El Ojo Mocho and Artefacto. Also was chief editorof the magazines Babel and La Caja. Has published El Lenguaje Libertario. Antología del Pensamiento Anarquista Contemporáneo (Editorial Altamira) and the book Mal de Ojo. El drama de la mirada (Editorial Colihue) and also a compilation of essays on the poet and writer Néstor Perlongher under the title of Prosa Plebeya (Editorial Colihue). |
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