“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 about art and literature–the most visible phenomena of the realm we call 'culture'–that sends the Goerings of the world into attack mode. More intelligent practitioners of the political arts have had a more nuanced attitude. 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.
"What we demand," said Mao in 1942, "is the unity of revolutionary political content and the highest possible perfection of artistic form." 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 key is getting on the right side. It was on cultural terrain that even the anti-arts-and-letters opponents of Mapplethorpe and Rushdie drew their lines in the sand. 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. Latin America's authoritarian–and neoliberal–Right can, on occasion, be similarly adept.
Culture, of course, is not always so starkly visible. 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. It is within the realm we call culture that we get our bearings in life; it is there that we ingest the notions of what is good, bad, just, natural, desirable and possible. Politics takes place in a cultural milieu; to inquire into the political uses of culture is to inquire into the politics of hope and desire–and of course, fear.
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. This was the era of the selfconscious political fiction of García Márquez, Vargas Llosa, Cortázar and Fuentes; the era of a literary intelligentsia that nurtured a utopian vision of Latin America's future. It was the era when music joined politics and art; when the nueva canción attached itself to progressive politics, and salsa became "the soundtrack of the Latino pride movement."
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. 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. Culture, its products and its media of dissemination are increasingly commodified. The wealthy and powerful have captured the citadels of culture.
But not everywhere. Subcomandante Marcos is using the still non-commercial Internet to communicate with his supporters and to circumvent government-controlled information networks. 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. 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.
