ARGENTINA TODAY: THE CULTURAL MOOD
Corradi, Juan E.
Democracy has returned to Argentina against a backdrop of profound changes in international and national life. To cite but a few: the intensification of power-bloc rivalry; revolutionary changes...
...It is difficult to gauge the exact measure of this influence, but there is little question that the Church—which in Argentina has manifested much greater complicity with reaction than in Chile or Brazil—has conquered new emplacements in key institutions...
...The next time, she came with a colorful crayon drawing of a bird...
...I'm so touched...
...Yet the image is rosier abroad than at home...
...Those factors are, in fast review: the spread of "postmodern" outlooks, the end of mobilizing prophecies, the lingering guilt about past radical commitments, the apology for their disastrous results, the sentiment that the recent past should be overcome rather than preserved, and the defensive endorsement of democracy—captured by the phrase "Never Again...
...ADDING TO THE GENERAL TONE OF CULTURAL deflation, and important for the receptivity of the general population to new cultural proposals, is the residue of de-enlightenment that stems from the military dictatorship—the joint impact of political intolerance and the new role assumed by the Church in private education, public charity, and family morals...
...They keep their ties to former colleagues in the research centers...
...Nobody is telling Argentines what to think, but they seem to be telling themselves that certain issues are best left unthought...
...The abrupt transition to democracy caught it unprepared to engage in subtle negotiations and concessions...
...Argentina needs to be rethought, since the older schemes of interpretation no longer apply...
...This is the central dilemma of a democratic culture in Argentina today...
...No pictures of people," he told her one week...
...While the PerOnist period was an era of revolutionary self-aggrandizement for intellectuals, and the period of military rule one of silence and fear, the new democratic phase is a period of selflimitation...
...Thus, local and international factors converge to create a specific intellectual atmosphere...
...Outside this restricted circle there is a mass of marginalized and underpaid intellectuals whose simmering resentment may one day become the breeding ground for new radical ideologies...
...Those who entered adolescence at the onset of the military "process" (as the dictatorship of 19761983 is called) and who resisted its onslaught in such areas of expression as rock music, today remain shy...
...For a majority of Argentine students, the collapse of local as well as imported utopias, the inertia of fear, the present stagnation of the economy, the privatism and careerism that have swept Western campuses for some time now, contribute to keeping them a diffident, quiescent, scattered generation...
...Its campaigns to block the distribution of controversial avant-garde films, such as Monty Python's Life of Brian or Godard's Je vous salue Marie, often verge on antidemocratic agitation...
...The long shadow of authoritarianism, the memories of anarchy and terror, still hover over the culture...
...Today, 25 intellectuals no longer think of themselves as revolutionary outcasts, but as specialists with a sense of public service...
...Indeed, religion has made significant inroads in what hitherto had been a secular culture...
...It is endorsed more out of hardlearned sobriety than out of passion...
...and the disappearance of a long-standing formula that equated free elections with Per6nist governments...
...Through hard-won survival, a new consensus gradually evolved in the intellectual community: the desire to apply to the field of knowledge and culture the same principles that regulate behavior in a democratic polity...
...It appears as a nation that has made a dramatic shift from dictatorship to democracy, that has moved from savage to civilized politics, from repression to free expression...
...She would prepare all week for her visit by making him a drawing for his cell wall...
...The way in which the country stumbled into democracy after the Falklands war, the tentative steps towards its consolidation under Alfonsin, and the citizens' perception of its fragility, have placed limits on the imagination, for fear that daring thoughts might be destabilizing...
...During the past decade, radicalism in both Europe and the United States has collapsed in favor of neoconservative and neoliberal proposals...
...Instead of a cultural renaissance, there is the persistence of stasis, perplexity, and malaise...
...I'll be able to put it there on the wall and it will be like a window...
...the latter purvey an aesthetics of fragmentation and various strands of cultural nihilism...
...But culture also pays a price for civic conviviality...
...The Church also exercises a considerable measure of cultural veto power—an informal but effective censorship over the media and the arts...
...Never have so many erstwhile firebrands applied themselves to offering moderate advice to the public and the authorities...
...This bent towards self-limitation is shared by many other segments of society: by new social movements that are not revolutionary but issue-specific...
...They entertain instead more modest expectations...
...But in the case of the Argentine Church, it has also been a matter of conscious policy to collaborate with the military regime...
...The difference might be this: as opposed to Spain, where there has been a long erosion of Church influence over civil society since the days of Franco, in Argentina the Church seized rapidly and efficiently a series of opportunities to increase its power during the years of military dictatorship...
...Much as these changes in the cultural map of Argentina are welcome developments in comparison with the recent past, I cannot refrain from asking: If the older contrasts are ruled out, why must the new color be gray...
...What has improved remarkably is the country's image in the world...
...Only, the prison guard served as censor and confiscated the drawings, one after another, before she could even show them to her father...
...The former speak the language of ethical liberalism...
...No pictures of houses," he told her another...
...SURELY IT IS A PLEASURE TO SEE A city like Buenos Aires no longer in the grip of silence and dissimulation...
...Uruguayan writer Eduardo Galeano, quoted in a "Talk of the Town" interview, the New Yorker, July 28, 1986 0 freeing of creative energies for the pursuit of many other projects as to a wallowing in perplexity, to the reification of new values, and to the institution of new taboos...
...It is a cosmopolitan center that has yet to recover from the bout of provincialism forced upon it by violence, ideology, and the explicitly retrograde designs of unelected governments...
...Argentine democracy today remains a prudential enterprise...
...Notably absent from the Argentine cultural landscape is the public presence of a new generation...
...by the unions, which are hard hit by austerity and suffer the depletion of their ranks...
...Yet some of the old social deadlocks have been broken just as the country embarks upon its democratization...
...They no longer ask themselves whether they should choose between Reform or Revolution, but whether they can balance expertise with ethical concern, a politics of conviction with a politics of pragmatic accommodation...
...This generation is entering a postmodern world of diversity and fragmentation without having had the benefits of a modern phase of acculturation...
...All these are rough indicators of how different Argentina is today from what it was just ten years ago...
...Be quiet, Daddy...
...But the city lags behind other Western metropolises in both invention and enthusiasm...
...The withdrawal from ideological commitment can just as well lead to the "They're Hiding" The other day, back in Montevideo, I was talking with a friend who told me of a friend of hers who had described his years in prison...
...revolutionary changes in the technology of information...
...A cursory glance at the cultural field, however, seems to belie such expectations...
...As a result, there are opportunities to redeem the catastrophes of past decades...
...A vibrant crop of new writers, filmmakers, musicians, photographers, architects, painters, theater directors, has not yet bloomed...
...Many of the new circumstances are tough...
...The next week, she arrived with a drawing of a grove of trees, and this time the guard grudgingly let it through...
...There are specific local circumstances that reinforce those trends...
...The result is an unprecedented willingness to engage in dialogue and "free communicative action," but also a paucity of vision, and a decline of the critical imagination...
...Are those lemons...
...In this area perhaps more than in others, the government has shown caution and a readiness to compromise, aware, perhaps, that in a process of incipient democratization issues of community, moral value, and religious belief are more troublesome than the toughest social and economic problems...
...Argentines spend a lot of time contemplating democracy as an object, and worrying about its future...
...his daughter interrupted him, whispering sternly...
...The Alfonsin administration has placed many intellectuals in key positions of responsibility...
...Some recent films have gained some notoriety in Europe and in the United States...
...In this respect, we must see the Church as an organization of intellectuals of a special kind, on the road to cultural and state power...
...by the government, which is acutely aware of constraints...
...by PerOnists, who lost elections and a unified leadership...
...Those are the eyes of the birds...
...The young wake up from a long night of discipline, 23 punishment, and overprotection, and find that the only authoritative figures are voices from a distant liberal past—Jorge Luis Borges, Ernesto Sabato-or echoes from distant lands...
...On the domestic front: a drastic reduction in the numerical and political strength of the working class...
...Her father held his little daughter in his lap and admired her drawing...
...And the same can be said of the works of novelists, scientists, dancers, musicians...
...In fact, the consolidation of democracy elicits fears among the clergy that they may have to surrender cultural power to unknown rivals and enemies...
...Whatever continuity exists in culture has been provided by informal networks in the liberal professions, postgraduate centers, international research teams, and foundation-sponsored research with close ties to the rest of Latin America, Europe, and the United States...
...To this, many governments responded with repression, and military governments with wholesale persecution...
...and global financial jitters...
...Many of these come from the social sciences, both as technical experts and as political strategists...
...Never has so much ink flowed on studies of democracy...
...Both then and now, a relatively small group of intellectuals that had been formerly excluded from culture and politics arrived at important positions of power and influence...
...This is beautiful," he told her, "and it means so much to me that you brought me this present...
...the realignment of world views...
...One might therefore expect a cultural renaissance: new themes, debates, and imagined futures...
...As a result, the Church jealously guards its new-won power, and is suspicious of democracy from fear of losing a monopoly over certain value areas...
...by the military, who lost a war and their self-confidence...
...The now famed Spanish cultural revival may of course not be necessarily the harbinger of deep transformations...
...They have access to the media— not as gurus, but as individuals capable of putting the basic issues of science and culture in the larger context of politics and within the grasp of ordinary people...
...The scope of intellectual influence in the government is greater today, but intellectuals show much less interest in reforming the universities and in providing ideological guidance to the wider public...
...The greater the professionalization and international character of a field, the greater its ability to withstand the onslaught of politics...
...They're hiding...
...There may be several explanations for this revival of religious influence...
...Birds are forbidden," she was gruffly told, and that drawing, too, was confiscated...
...For a long time Argentines with talent have stalked the world and accomplished much...
...high-tech militarization...
...On a superficial level, the visitor to Argentine cities finds nothing resembling the effervescence that she or he can find in Madrid...
...In any case, one should wish on the still dour Argentines a bit more gaiety and footloose divertissement...
...He had recalled how his little five-year-old daughter would come to visit...
...They lost not only liberty, life, and country, but their identities as well...
...To a considerable extent, Argentina remains a culture of the diaspora...
...There is an inertia of fear that makes life a little sad...
...Such lessons have not been lost on those who remain active today...
...After a recent sojourn of four months in Buenos Aires, I have the impression of an impending cultural ferment that has not quite been activated...
...Moreover, such consensus only holds among the intellectual elite that controls cultural power...
...Look at the wonderful trunks that you draw, and the thick branches, and the leaves, and then, here, what are these—those little circles among the leaves...
...An important cultural corollary follows...
...ARGENTINE EVENTS ECHO WIDER TRENDS IN the cultural climate of the West...
...If and as democracy helps settle some of the more engrossing issues of economic growth, order, and alternation of leadership, step by step down its crowded agenda, these energies will be released and Argentina might then become a land of cultural adventure, as it has been in brief moments in the past...
...Somehow, the frictions involving the Church seem potentially more bitter in Argentina than similar tensions in other Catholic countries, like Italy or Spain...
...But it can also be the froth of a gathering wave of cultural change...
...But theirs has traditionally been the pilgrimage of exiles rather than the advance of cultural conquistadores...
...Certainly the young have their peculiar snobbisms, their special real or symbolic territories— music, encounters, drugs—their videos and comic books, but they seem moved by a pale imitation of international media trends rather than by genuine enthusiasm and a desire to explore...
...There is a correlative decline in the input of intellectuals in oppositional politics...
...the constraints imposed by the large debt...
...Are these fruit trees...
...In the past, radical intransigence led many Argentines to a fatal impasse...
...Flatness and boredom result...
...I will only note that in times of terror and confusion, religion can become a haven of solace and structured meaning...
...The present situation bears some resemblance to the period that followed the fall of Per& after 1955...
...And this should be a pleasing prospect for those whose job is to think, to investigate, to imagine and create...
...ARGENTINA HOLDS TODAY ONLY THE RUDIMENTS of creative groups...
...They no longer fancy themselves the interlocutors of imaginary Subjects of history ("the working class," "the PerOnist masses," etc...
...And yet, beyond public discourse and conventional pieties, there is a surplus energy, a latent predisposition to participate, a demand for a meaningful life that bears no direct relation to job or self-interest, and that remains untapped...
...They prefer the carefully designed and funded research project to the political pamphlet, the corridors of power to rallies in the square...
...The image of an Argentina on the move is more a product of the Western press and international good will than of local circumstance...
...q 26...
...The habits developed under adversity persist today under democracy...
...24 On the more general issues of ideology, Argentina shares in the overall trend of disbelief in universal world-views, great historical narratives, and redemptive politics...
...To be sure, individual Argentines continue today, as they have always done, to have an impact in various fields...
...In recent months, the Church has waged a series of preemptive campaigns seeking to forestall the passage of progressive legislation in Congress, in the predictably sensitive areas of divorce, abortion, and education...
...It can easily become a culture of images, of ephemeral fads and foibles...
...There are, however, important differences...
...Sh-h-h...
...In the past, Argentine intellectuals used the public universities as bases of political mobilization, elaborating and spreading radical ideologies...
...and by ordinary citizens, who lost relatives and friends in past violence and chaos...
...These factors inhibit the full utilization of formal freedoms...
...For this ill-defined cultural ingredient, which is still missing, is the real salt of life...
...Missing, however, is a group experience centered in Buenos Aires or other Argentine cities, whence it would radiate outward...
...In sum, the participation of intellectuals in politics, their public role, and their self-image have changed in Argentina...
...The result is a marked blurring of former ideological boundaries and a softening of political stridency among intellectuals...
...There is a new stress on "realistic" issues, set against a backdrop of concern for the weakness of institutions...
Vol. 34 • January 1987 • No. 1
