Roger Bartra is Senior Research Fellow at the Instituto de Investigaciones Sociales, Universidad Nacional AutÓnoma de MÉxico. An anthropologist, sociologist, and respected public intellectual, he has served as editor of the Mexican literary weekly La Jornada Semanal and is a regular contributor to literary and political journals in Mexico, Spain, Japan, England, and the United States. He is also the author of numerous books in Spanish; those available in English include Wild Men in the Looking Glass: The Mythic Origins of European Otherness and The Cage of Melancholy: Identity and Metamorphosis in the Mexican Character.

Mark Alan Healey is Assistant Professor of History and International Studies at the University of Mississippi.

Blood, Ink, and Culture-CL

By Roger Bartra

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2002 Roger Bartra
All right reserved.
ISBN: 9780822329084

Chapter One

The Mexican Office: Miseries and Splendors of Culture

To hide its nakedness in times of want, Mexican “official culture” has sent its jewels and treasures to New York, the metropolis of the north. It dreams of flaunting the splendors of its art before the stunned eyes of savage millionaires, to warm the cold industrial heart of the United States. And as ever, it aims to affirm its identity by confronting Anglo-American culture, attempting to shore up the waning legitimacy of the Mexican political system.

Mexican “official culture” is showing the world thirty centuries of splendor. I would like to take this opportunity to reflect on how “official culture” is generated. The concept can be understood from two angles. First, as an ethnographer, I can confirm that there is a culture that emanates from the offices of government and saturates the exercise of authority. This is an ensemble of habits and values that mark the behavior of the Mexican political and bureaucratic class: this swarm of licenciados and leaders share customs and folklore worthy of being carefully cataloged to be stored away in museum vaults. Painters have already begun this task: in his celebrated painting The Bone, Covarrubias portrayed the typical Mexican functionary with extraordinary irony.

Second, we find that those very same government offices issue a seal of approval for artistic and literary production, in order to restructure it according to established canons. This peculiar reconstruction also makes up part of what I call “official culture,” but it should be clearly understood that this does not mean that the writers and artists themselves are the official spokespeople of government culture (although that is the case for a few). Nonetheless there is a close relationship between the folkways of government offices and the form the official reconstruction of Mexican culture takes: together they can be seen as the practice of a Mexican Office.

Just as there is a Divine Office that marks off the hours of the canonical day with prayers, psalms, and hymns, so there is a Mexican Office that marks off the days of the nation according to officially established canons. There is a Mexican Office that sings and tells of the national splendors. That Mexican Office is the “official culture” that stamps its nihil obstat on the works of time. That Mexican Office is what decrees that Mexico has been resplendent for Thirty Centuries.

Matins

At the dawn of history, the Olmecs raise their strange and enormous heads to look upon us. In the tradition of the old counterpoint Roger Fry noted at the beginning of this century, those first Mexicans are there to remind us that modernity is born stained with primitiveness. Those faces of primeval art are there so that we, modern Mexicans, can recognize ourselves in them and see reflected in their otherness the buried and hidden part of our national being. This is an old and well-known theme in art history, but in Mexico it was made useful again by the frantic search for “Mexicanness” that accompanied the postwar modernizing boom.

So the origins of contemporary Mexican art should be found on the coast of the Gulf of Mexico, not in the Mediterranean or the Middle East. Contrary to appearances, it has been decreed that our roots lie more in the figures of pre-Columbian codices than in the verses of the Old Testament. This is a cultural decision that fully makes sense only if we read history against the flow of time: it is from our here and now-from the perspective of the present-day Mexican state-that the Thirty Centuries of Mexican art have a unified meaning. Reasons of state, when applied to culture, become naturalized. Nature is the first element that gives unity and continuity to cultural history. Geography is turned into an immense living frame for history. The earth becomes a fertile mother in whose body the deep roots of national culture grow. According to this idea of nature, volcanoes, forests, valleys, lakes, flora, and fauna are no longer part of geography but have metamorphosed to become the anatomy of the living body of culture. That is why Jose Maria Velasco and Doctor Atl are considered indispensable elements of Mexican art: they are at the same time witnesses and creators of the palpitating landscape that defines the outline of the nation-state.

I do not mean to say that the awareness of a certain origin and a landscape is simply an ideological formation created by the Mexican state to trick a dominated population. Cultural processes have a legitimating, homogenizing, and unifying effect, but not because they are mere “instruments” of the ruling classes. Even “official culture”-which does have an instrumental character-cannot be explained except as a function of the complex process that feeds it, and that process is the creation of an articulated ensemble of myths about Mexican identity.

Despite Weber’s claims, modern society has not ceased to generate myths. One of those myths is precisely the myth of national character. In Mexico that myth has crystallized into what I have playfully called the axolotl canon. That canon orders and classifies the features of Mexican character according to a basic duality: Mexicans are amphibious beings who shift between the rural savagery of melancholy Indians and the artificial and playful aggressiveness of urban pelados. In my book The Cage of Melancholy, I carry out an anatomical dissection of that mythical amphibious creature, Mexican national identity. The results of the operation may surprise many sociologists, because it shows that the rationality inherent to the unification of the modern state requires a mythological structure to give it legitimacy. There is no such thing as a purely rational legitimacy produced by capitalist economic structures and modern bureaucracy. The legitimacy of modern political systems generates a mythology capable of creating the “subject” of the capitalist state. That mythology is developed around the notion of national culture and, more specifically, around the conception of a national character.

Lauds

We can praise the first twenty-five centuries of Mexican splendor that represent the solitary primeval otherness without which national culture apparently could not exist. But our praise cannot create a continuity that was broken by conquest and colonization; ancient artistic traditions were annihilated within a few years. Still, some insist on speaking of a cultural continuity that would span a bridge over the abyss opened by the conquest, between pre-Hispanic Mesoamerica and colonial and independent Mexico.

We can recognize an intense search by twentieth-century Mexican artists for formal or spiritual values in pre-Hispanic cultures. What they found undoubtedly enriched their creations, but it is doubtful that it contributed to filling the immense void left by the destruction of ancient societies. “Official culture” has also taken a great leap across the centuries to search for the foundations of the modern state in ancient Mesoamerica.

Many consider it useless to look to history for the formal or stylistic continuation of pre-Columbian art into colonial or modern Mexico. The only real continuity is not usually accepted anywhere but in ethnographic museums: the millions of marginalized indigenous peoples are the only battered bridge left. They are a symbolic referent to the past, but they are usually rejected as an active presence. In his introductory essay to the exposition catalog, Mexico: Splendors of Thirty Centuries, Octavio Paz indicates how the continuity problem has been resolved: all across an incredible variety of forms, we find the persistence of a single will, the will to survive in and through form. An attentive and loving look can perceive a continuity that is not manifest in either style or ideas, but in something deeper, in a sensibility. This will for form is nothing more than the transposition of reasons of state onto the Mesoamerican past, an artistic past where the figure, the form, reveals the metamorphoses of a single will.

This game of transformations, of transfigurations, perfectly exemplifies an intellectual process that has been used frequently by modern nationalism and in theology is called figural interpretation. Elsewhere, I have already pointed out this curious phenomenon, which goes beyond the imaginative metaphorical relationships artists establish between distant epochs and distinct cultural spheres. We are facing a delicate and complex process that manages to establish in collective consciousness a structural relationship between two unrelated cultural dimensions. This structural link operates on two planes simultaneously: as mimesis on one, and as catharsis on the other. Mimesis finds a similarity between ancient cultural features, for instance of the Mexica or the Maya, and colonial or modern history. I am not going to go into depth on this issue, but I would like to mention some of the themes in which this metahistorical link is usually found: sacrifice, guilt, cyclical events, baroque exuberance, dualism, the worship of the Virgin, et cetera. We find a transposition of current themes and conflicts onto a more or less imaginary past, where a prefiguration of the modern scene is to be found. This transposition onto an imagined past is similar to the one that takes place in modern mythology’s reconstruction of the Homo mexicanus, an android whose anatomy must be examined because it will give us the keys to what I call the institutionalization of the national soul. A line reaches from the stooping Indian to the mestizo pelado, passing through the major points of articulation of the Mexican soul: melancholy-idleness-fatalism-inferiority / violence-sentimentalism-resentment-escapism. This line marks the voyage the Mexican must undertake to find himself, from the original Eden of nature to the industrial apocalypse.

Prime

The spectacle of this cultural simulacrum allows us to indicate the importance of the other plane, that of catharsis, in the link between real and imaginary dimensions. The stage set of national culture is a space where the feelings of the people can be released. That is where nationalism can achieve its greatest effectiveness, by managing to identify politics with culture.

Nationalism is the transfiguration of the supposed characteristics of national identity onto the terrain of ideology. Nationalism is a political tendency that establishes a structural relationship between the nature of culture and the peculiarities of the state. In our country the official expressions of nationalism tell us: If you are Mexican, you must vote for the institutionalized revolution. Those who do not either are traitors to their deepest essence or are not Mexican. Nationalism is, then, an ideology that disguises itself with culture to hide its intimate means of domination. But for this identification of politics with culture to be successful, a process of sedimentation must have taken place already, separating elements socially held to be national from those that are not specifically held to be so. This is a complex process that cannot be produced artificially. That is to say, neither the state nor the ruling class can direct this process from above. This is a global process shaped by the interplay of several factors, including the very formation of the national state. On the basis of this process, the ruling class may be able to establish its cultural hegemony by using a nationalist ideology. But this is not the only way in which a social class can gain hegemony. I would say that the nationalist path is one of the most dangerous ways for achieving it and can lead-as it has in Mexico-to the institutionalization of a pernicious authoritarian system. And this system is all the more pernicious when nationalism produces a collective catharsis, through which it legitimates one way of doing politics as the only way of being Mexican.

Terce

We live in the age of the collapse of great ideological blocs, and because of that, cultural critique becomes more important every day. There are different ways of conceiving of cultural critique. In Mexico it has been common to offer a critique from the perspective of nineteenth-century rationalism, that is, from the perspective of modernity, which says that it is crucial to “modernize” Mexican culture to adapt it to the needs of industrialization and mass society. This approach quickly leads to a dilemma: should we remake national culture along the lines of “true” popular culture, or should we accept the transnationalizing invasion of the new mass culture? But this dilemma is soon revealed to be a false one. It is false because our present-day national culture is precisely the amalgam of these two options, which are therefore complementary. With this I mean to say that the modernization of Mexican culture has already taken place. What I call the exercise of the Mexican Office is precisely the result of the modernization of national culture, and not some archaic and premodern leftover that must be redirected, or even destroyed, to open the way to modern culture.

What I am critiquing is precisely the modernity of national culture. It is its modernity that oppresses us, since that is where the authoritarianism that characterizes the Mexican system came from. Our choice at present is therefore not between a populist option or a transnational proposal: we need only turn on Mexican television to realize that hegemonic culture has already managed to overcome that contradiction, by imposing on us a deeply jingoistic culture that is aggressively aligned with U.S.-produced mass culture. By approaching these problems from the perspective of postmodernity, I am suggesting that the dividing lines have shifted and the contradictions have been displaced onto new terrain. We can no longer critique Mexican culture in the name of modernity, of a liberal-inspired modernity that raises up the banner of “progress.” We have to critique modernity from the standpoint I call dismodernity, or better yet-taking a cue from desmadre, Mexican slang for disorder-dismothernity.

Sext

These observations lead us to conclude that we should distinguish between three phenomena: national identity, political culture, and official cultural policy. In examining the relationship between these three, we see that this is a matter of the ties between the formation of a myth (identity), its insertion into institutional life (political culture), and the ideology that attempts to explain and direct the process (official culture).

The myth of national identity is not a merely ideological phenomenon manipulated by the ruling class or the government. For the myth to be incorporated into political culture in what we might call a “natural” and lasting way, several conditions are necessary, which it would be excessive to explain fully here. Suffice it to say that this is a matter of the accumulation of a series of historical moments through which various elements are transfigured and transposed until political culture becomes relatively homogeneous and coherent. For its part, government cultural policy is an ideological practice that, in addition to many other tasks, uses cultural expression to legitimate the system. An example: the circulation of Mexican culture defines the officially national space, yet official cultural policy only slightly modifies the constitution of Mexican political culture. Fotonovelas, commercial television, comics, commercial music, detective novels, popular best-sellers, and romance or pornographic novels continue to exercise enormous influence. No matter how much they are denounced as “foreign,” they still form an integral part of Mexican political culture. On the other hand, the myth of the “Mexican soul” has managed not only to successfully survive the avalanche of “foreign” influences but to stake out a lasting place in political culture.

The “Mexican soul” has held a stable place in political culture precisely because it appears as something non-Western. The myth of Mexican being has contributed to the legitimation of the political system, but it has taken on a mythical form hardly consistent with the Western capitalist development typical of the twentieth century’s end. Of course, if one wishes to see it this way, the myth did correspond to the peculiarities of a backward, corrupt, and dependent capitalism. Hence the contradictions contemporary Mexican culture is living through: the myth of national identity is becoming dysfunctional. But this dysfunctionality comes in great measure from its “popular” and “anticapitalist” origins. The myth stores up a good dose of protest, bitterness, revolt, and resistance: this circumstance explains the popularity of the stereotype of the Mexican.

Continues…
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