The return of identity and the exhaustion of storytelling

Breaking with the sterile cycle that leads from the affirmation of identity as an immutable essence to its negation in the supposed inevitability of homogenization, contemporary thought proposes identity as a construction which emerges through narration. This new way of thinking about identity aims to account both for the changes which traverse mono-identities and the emergence of multiculturalities which exceed ethnic, racial and national categories.

In this chapter I address the meaning and representativity of the term ‘Cuban popular culture’ through two rather different test-cases, the first of which is the film Aventuras de Juan Quinquín (1967) by the Cuban film director Julio García-Espinosa (b. 1926), and the second the religious social phenomenon of santería. In each case I ask the question of the extent to which the energy of popular culture is co-opted into a new (revolutionary) value-system or whether, ultimately, it escapes that hermeneutic net. It is legitimate to argue that García-Espinosa's films as much as santería as we nowadays understand the phenomenon came into being as a result of the Cuban Revolution. The experience of a revolution in Cuba in 1959 was as decisive for its generation as the French Revolution had been for European intellectuals in the 1790s. As Hobsbawm puts it: ‘It was now known that social revolution was possible; that nationals existed as something independent of states, peoples as something independent of their rulers, and even that the poor existed as something independent of the ruling classes’ (1962: 91). Hobsbawm's last point about the ‘poor’ existing ‘as something independent of the ruling classes’ is particularly relevant to the Cuban context. Hugh Thomas provides a sense of Fidel Castro's particular personal impact among the popular sectors of Cuban society soon after the Revolution:

‘Popular culture’ has always represented a fulcrum within social, cultural and anthropological discourses in Latin America. It has often been imagined as inhabiting interstitial and heterogeneous spaces that have represented a challenge to the dominant cultural paradigms of the ‘lettered city’ since at least Colonial times, and has repeatedly been mapped on to political, economic and even libidinal boundaries – between the country and the city, between the folk and the street, between the ‘masses’ and elite national/political structures. Yet since at least the turn of the millennium, concepts of the ‘folk’, the ‘mass', the ‘people’ and the ‘multitude’ have exploded in the face of new cultural and informational technologies, with cinematic, televisual, narrative, musical and cybernetic manifestations of popular culture at the forefront of social processes which mediate between the national and the global in a see-sawing climate of technocratic neoliberal economic ideology, financial crises marked by new and intensified social problems, boom and bust cycles in commodities and resource-extraction, and the rise of demagogic, mediatic neo-populisms.

In this chapter I would like to reflect on the ways in which the Magdalena river has figured both in the imaginary production of a Colombian national-popular body, and in its dissolution, and at key moments in Colombian history from the mid-nineteenth century to the beginning of the twenty-first. I do so not to reclaim the river and its landscape, in a Romantic vein, as the wellspring of some authentic national ‘spirit’. Instead I am more interested in how instances of the articulation of such a thing occur in both real and imagined spaces where the nation's integrity is most questionable and the porosity of its borders most conspicuous.

As the principal route for the traffic of people, ideas and capital between colonial times and the early twentieth century, the Magdalena was for a long time central to the construction of the nation. Even today, as flows of global capital and information have displaced the organic motif of the river as an index of historical time and of the nation's temporal unfolding (see Appadurai 1996; Castells 2000), the Magdalena retains an affectively loaded presence in works of Colombian art and literature. Thus, in texts such as Fernando Vallejo's El río del tiempo (1998), where nature's collapse mirrors the entropy of Colombian public life, or films such as Bolívar soy yo (Jorge Alí Triana 2002), where history dissolves into the two dimensionality of the spectacle, the Magdalena continues to perform a labour of figuration, albeit of the nation's destiny as pipedream or curse.

This chapter discusses the work of internationally acclaimed, influential mixed-and multimedia artists who may be situated between the introduction in the 1990s in Cuba of the policy that granted artists the right to receive payment in convertible currency as well as to promote their work abroad freely, the introduction of a parallel currency for foreign visitors and investors (peso cubano convertible) and the ironic taking stock of the effects that such liberalization and commerce had on visual art practice referenced by the exhibition Cubanos convertibles in 2008. Its reflections play on the slippage between ‘convertible’ currency and convertible vehicles in relation to the value assigned to convertibility in aesthetic and cultural paradigms. These artists' deconstructivist strategies have sought to critique globalization while dismantling the complicitous ‘impurities’ and incongruities of their own productivity, seen through the distorting mirror of frustrated consumerism at home and the voracity of the free market paragons abroad that promote and consume their wares. The twisted skein of the analysis aims to discuss an interestingly impersonal (although archival) reflexive trend in contemporary art that, fibred by notions of social responsibility, participatory spectatorship and dissent, has explored the notion of ‘recycling’ as broadly inclusive of material disjecta with attendant ideas of ingestion and reconversion. Pieces have been predicated on the shift of emphasis from the phenomenology of ‘beholding’ to the involvement of the public as recipient, correspondent, interlocutor or user, with attention focused on the body of the observer and on experience.

At the beginning of his seminal social history of the Revolution, Alan Knight describes Mexico on the eve of the outbreak of the civil war:

The formation of national sentiments has become a key theme in the burgeoning critical literature devoted to the politics of popular culture in the post-revolutionary period. Commentators have analysed how, in the aftermath of the profound upheavals of a war in which peasants, workers and the middle classes made, albeit uneasy, common cause, they came to unite under the rubric of shared symbols, icons and discourses experienced as national (Vaughan and Lewis 2006). Culture, particularly those forms and practices designated as popular –folk artisanship and music, and mass media forms, such as the radio and cinema – participated in the transformation of Mexico from ‘a regionally, culturally fragmented country into a modern nation-state with an inclusive and compelling national identity’ (López 2010: 2). Far from being a top-down process, the cultural-political construct that emerged in this period ‘was shaped, resisted, and ultimately negotiated by a multitude of actors and interests, and lo mexicano came to serve counterhegemonic impulses as well as regime projects’ (Joseph et al. 2001: 8).

In recent years there has been a veritable explosion in Internet use in Latin America; according to recent statistics, in South America alone there are over 143 million Internet users, or 36.5 per cent of the population, representing an increase of over 900 per cent between 2000 and 2009.1 Alongside this growth in Internet use there has been a concomitant growth in literary, socio-cultural and artistic works which make use of the new medium, including blogs, hypertext novels, hypermedia fiction, net.art, online performance art, hacktivism and tactical media, among many others. From the first forays of the Zapatistas into the uses of new media technologies for oppositional purposes, giving rise to the term ‘digital Zapatismo’ (Domínguez c.1998), to the complex negotiations of on- and offline activism of the self-styled Chicano ‘cyberpunk media artist’ Fran Ilich, through to the multiple uses of digital technologies in by the now large and growing community of net.artists in Latin America, new media technologies in Latin America have been put to use in innovative and challenging ways by local practitioners, and frequently involve a consideration for the socio-political consequences of such technologies and their potentially resistant reworking.

While the wide range of tactical media projects, net.art, game art, hacktivism and other genres within Latin American digital culture cannot be subsumed into one universal model, one striking feature that is common to many of them is the way in which they involve a critical engagement with the on/offline interface, and the resistant reuse of (globalized) digital technologies, two notions which will be explored in more depth below.

The philosopher Bernard Stiegler argues that the ever-increasing technologization of memory is complicit with the shift in the nature of power towards a ‘society of control’. Stiegler borrows this term from Gilles Deleuze who, in his essay of 1990 entitled ‘Postscript on a Society of Control’, himself borrowed the term from William Burroughs to describe a nightmarish extension of the logic of Foucauldian discipline that parallels a shift towards a social logic governed by the flexibility and mobility afforded by digital technologies. Rather than rely on Deleuze's definition of the term (which emphasizes the crisis of the spaces of disciplinary enclosure described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and their replacement by a flexible logic of ‘control’ or ‘modulation’) Stiegler argues that the society of control is characterized by the total automation of consumption. Rather than just the means of production, in the control society consumption and the network of desires and affective intensities that drive consumption have become automated.

Stiegler argues that the fundamental interdependence of memory and technology is the crucial battleground on which the transition towards the nightmarish vision of the control society is negotiated and contested. He starts from the premise that the externalization of memory in technological tools is constitutive of humanity. As Stiegler explains in his essay ‘Memory’, which introduces ideas explored in greater detail in his three-volume Technics and Time, he uses the term ‘hypomnesis’ to describe the technical exteriorization of memory, which he opposes to the act of embodied memory ‘anamnesis’.

In the last ten years there has been a surge in films about Brazilian favelas for domestic and international markets, led by Kátia Lund's and Fernando Meirelles's blockbuster Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002). Most of those films focus on the violence generated by drug trafficking: this is most famously the case with Cidade de Deus, but it also true of José Padilha's Tropa de Elite (Elite Squad, 2007) and Tropa de Elite 2 (Elite Squad 2, 2010), which offer an implicit response to Cidade de Deus by showing the drug war from the point of view of the police; and M.V. Bill's and Celso Athayde's documentary Falcão: Meninos do Tráfico (Falcão: Traffic Boys, 2006), which also responds to Cidade de Deus by presenting a view from within the favela. Other works, such as Matt Mochary's and Jeff Zimbalist's documentary Favela Rising (2005), concentrate on youth music and social initiatives that are presented as alternatives to drug trafficking – that is, they are films that, without focusing on drug violence per se, have it as the motivation for the artistic endeavours they document. An exception to this violence-centred cinematic view of favelas is Tata Amaral's Antônia (2006), where the violence caused by the traffic of drugs and illegal weapons is simply not present. Yet the favela where the action of Antônia takes place, Vila Brasilândia on the north side of São Paulo, is, like Cidade de Deus in Rio, notorious for being a violent, drug-ridden place that has seen many prolonged shoot-outs between the PCC and the police.

Preliminary considerations

¿Y el pueblo dónde está? [‘And where are the people?’]. According to chroniclers, such was the question Julián de Leyva, procurator of the Buenos Aires Council, posed to Cornelio Saavedra on 25 May 1810, when American patriots called for the creation of an autonomous popular junta (Mitre 1859: 2530). The same accounts stress that ‘the people’ had been out on the streets all day but by night had already retired home. The popular mobilization was inscribed by nationalistic historiography as the birth of the nation and Leyva's question interpreted as engaging in delaying tactics against the revolution. This piece of historical cunning seems to have passed into popular folklore, as contemporary protests in Argentina often chant Si éste no es el pueblo ¿el pueblo dónde está? [‘If this is not the people, where are the people?’] (fig. 1.1).

In between these two appeals to the people, almost two hundred years apart, the popular emerged as the standard account for contemporary political modernity. However, some philosophers warn us that ‘the people’ has lost its conceptual impetus, both politically (to the pervasive effects of neoliberalism and, more generally, to that network of ruling powers that Negri and Hardt have called Empire [2000: xiv–xv]) and theoretically (to competing ideas of the multitude, post-hegemony, etc.).

Garbage art

Adopting city surfaces as their open canvas, Brazilian street artists inscribe São Paulo's built environment with a chaotic flow of colourful imagery and typographic scripts. Their cumulative input to the urban visual sphere constructs an alternative mediation of the cityscape based in mediatic excess, which disorients (or rather, reorients) the experience and expectations of urban conditions negotiated by city inhabitants on a daily basis. While paulistano street art practitioners frequently envision their creative endeavours as an ‘arte pro povo’ – a ‘popular’ public art located between the margins and the masses – because of their nonconformist (often unauthorized) use of public space, these amendments to urban content are routinely positioned as an excessive and disorderly social text which disrupts the appearance of prescribed visual order, seemingly beyond the control of the city authorities. Threatening formalized efforts (particularly by the state) to enforce orderly city planning or to maintain intended architectural aesthetics, such street art transgressions can subsequently become maligned as a contaminating presence, a ‘visual pollution’ which mars the cityscape.

Playing on this sense of pollution – at once evoking ecological, societal and aesthetic connotations – multiple street artists visually articulate their concern for the conditions of São Paulo's physical and social environments by engaging a ‘garbage’ framework within their art. Specifically, these eco-ethical discourses are achieved through the incorporation of waste management mechanisms (especially recycling and cleaning) into the construction of their artistic productions in order to highlight polluting behaviours habitually performed within the urban environment and social body.

Unannounced transitions, ellipses, openings in medias res, truncated dénouements: examples from Lucrecia Martel's films would fill a textbook on the subject of the disruption of narrative linearity. Their apparent rejection of the codes of storytelling creates an uncertainty and an ambiguity that confound conventional modes of critical interpretation. This has certainly been the experience of many of Martel's critics, who have found her films – in particular, La ciénaga (The Swamp, 2001) and La niña santa (The Holy Girl, 2004) – stubbornly resistant to attempts to tease out deeper meanings or to place them within their socio-political context (see, for example, Aguilar 2006: 24; Varas and Dash 2007: 198; Gundermann 2005: 241; Page 2009: 182–94). To add to the confusion, at different times Martel has variously sanctioned or rejected allegorical readings of her films. She has been more consistent in describing La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman, 2008) as an allegory of society's complicity in Argentina's most recent military regime (Enriquez 2008); however, as I will argue below, this reading may occlude a more radical understanding of the film's politics.

Martel's films steer us unequivocally away from transcendental modes of criticism which would seek an ideological or political ‘meaning’ for the text, and towards the immanent approaches advocated and practised by Deleuze, which refer us always to relations rather than essences, construction rather than interpretation, and to the text as assemblage rather than a set of signifying codes to be cracked.