THE POLITICAL USES OF CULTURE
"When I hear the word 'culture,' I reach for my gun," said Gestapo chief Hermann Goering, a few years before hanging himself at Nuremburg. There seems to be Something both hopeful and critical...
...It was the era when music joined politics and art...
...But not everywhere...
...More intelligent practitioners of the political arts have had a more nuanced attitude...
...it is there that we ingest the notions of what is good, bad, just, natural, desirable and possible...
...The wealthy and powerful have captured the citadels of culture...
...to inquire into the political uses of culture is to inquire into the politics of hope and desire-and of course, fear...
...Latin America's authoritarian-and neoliberal-Right can, on occasion, be similarly adept...
...Culture, its products and its media of dissemination are increasingly commodified...
...It is within the realm we call culture that we get our bearings in life...
...Chairman Mao, whether guarding or assaulting power, shared Goering's respect for the barrel of a gun, but had an entirely different attitude toward-at least some types of-artistic creation...
...the key is getting on the right side...
...Politics takes place in a cultural milieu...
...Mexico City's Superbarrio uses the cultural references of comic books and the local wrestling scene to create a media-friendly spectacle that works on behalf of the dispossessed...
...There seems to be Something both hopeful and critical about art and literature-the most visible phenomena of the realm we call 'culture'-that sends the Goerings of the world into attack mode...
...As the Chairman liked to argue, and as the experience of latter-day cultural insurgents like Robert Mapplethorpe and Salman Rushdie has since confirmed, it's tough to separate culture from politics...
...The fundamentalist Right-while disdaining the traditional apparatus called 'culture'-is adept at using powerful cultural symbols to mobilize people around its diverse reactionary agendas...
...In the 1960s and 1970s, the Latin American Left-aided by an engaged community of artists, writers and musicians-was able to effectively make use of cultural symbols to further a participatory and egalitarian agenda...
...the era of a literary intelligentsia that nurtured a utopian vision of Latin America's future...
...Artists on the left are working effectively on the margins and in the interstices of consumer culture in an attempt to escape the commodification of their work...
...The struggle continues, and-in Latin America as in the United States-a good part of it is being fought on cultural terrain...
...What we demand," said Mao in 1942, "is the unity of revolutionary political content and the highest possible perfection of artistic form...
...It is the realm of the symbolic-that amorphous web of values, beliefs, assumptions and ideals that we internalize by being members of certain groups in a certain place at a certain time...
...Subcomandante Marcos is using the still non-commercial Internet to communicate with his supporters and to circumvent government-controlled information networks...
...Culture, of course, is not always so starkly visible...
...As the powerful workings of the "free market" are presented as natural and inevitable, economists are replacing the literary intelligentsia as guardians of a very different kind of utopian flame...
...Now, in the current era of Left retrenchment, the printed word, and the literary culture which grew up around it, is being encroached upon by the commercial music industry and television...
...It was on cultural terrain that even the anti-arts-and-letters opponents of Mapplethorpe and Rushdie drew their lines in the sand...
...This was the era of the selfconscious political fiction of Garcia Mdrquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortizar and Fuentes...
...when the nueva cancidn attached itself to progressive politics, and salsa became "the soundtrack of the Latino pride movement...
Vol. 28 • September 1994 • No. 2
