Exchange: Monge vs. Cárdenas
From January to February of this year, Mexican writer Emiliano Monge and Colombian writer Juan Sebastián Cárdenas exchanged emails. In the middle of moving and travels, they spoke humorously and earnestly about pop culture, different kinds of Latin American writers, Junot Díaz, and, of course, Ricardo Arjona.
Read their correspondence here.
Translated by Jessica Sequeira
From: Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 11:02 AM
Blood brother,
Were our messenger pigeons shot down in Honduras? Those fucking Honduran assassins don't get tired of firing at our birds.
Giant hugs...
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 11:18 AM
Friend,
Sorry for the silence, it wasn't the Honduran artillery that was responsible for interrupting communications. These days I've had a rough time. I'm in Quito, battling with several tasks assigned to me from Bogotá and Madrid, a real mess. If that weren't enough, we've been moving to an apartment two steps from the FLACSO, the university where Luciana is carrying out her research. So you can imagine: buying stupid little things for the new house, cups, toilet brushes, detergent, getting to know the brands of toilet paper... The gist is that for a few months I'm going to be coming and going between Bogotá and Quito, working here and there, here-there. And taking the opportunity to finish a new novel.
Where are you? What are you up to? And your dog?
Big fat hugs (man, I'm getting fat with Ecuadorian food, a lot of cooked maize).
From: Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 1:27 PM
Carnitas,
How happy I am to know that the Hondurans (the spell check on this piece of junk isn't a sure thing like us, and each time I write “Hondurans”, it changes it to “cartridges“) had nothing to do with your silence. Silence that on the other hand I understand immediately: I'm getting in too, and am also up to my neck in the motherfucking chaos that a move involves. Just today I got a house (I was with my mother for nearly a week, which is like committing yourself to an asylum) and the scramble of the search for real estate is now turning into the scramble of the search for my furniture, everything I distributed and entrusted with my colleagues and left to a friend that has storage space in her home: bed, armchair, bookcases, writing desk, table… Only then will I throw myself into that scramble you're telling me about: cups, toilet brushes, washcloths, silverware, plates, glasses, bla bla bla. So honestly, although Quito and Bogotá are both really great, I wouldn't like to be having to go from one to the other constantly. I'm not going to move again for a long time, unless it's for a vacation. A vacation which, on the other hand, I won't have money for (after the moves and packing up of the house) until about 2025.
What is indeed fantastic news is that you're finishing a novel, how happy I am to think that soon I'll get to read you again, asshole. If it's not too much trouble telling me, what's the bitch about? On my end, I'm also on the home stretch of a novel, but I'm starting to believe that I still have a lot more to go than I'd thought. Suddenly I want to change a whole bunch of things. So that, and jobs here, there, and here-there, is what I'm up to. That and missing Petra, who after some really hard and difficult talks, stayed in Barcelona to live in with Paula. The good part is that, my unconsciousness being a real son of a bitch, at night it gives me the pleasure of letting me dream of her. The bad part is that my consciousness isn't as pleasant, and I wake up feeling crushed. Fucking hell.
Big strong hugs for you, and kisses to Luciana,
Emiliano.
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 9:47 AM
Mongélico,
It's so good to know that I'm not the only fool who's packed his bags to return to these valleys of narcotears and mental silicone... For the moment, as I told you, I've sought temporal refuge for a few months here in Quito, where things are a little more pleasant. The city is just the right size, there's not much traffic, and in general things are simpler than in Bogotá, where precious weeks of life are lost in useless paperwork and procedural stupidities. Colombian bureaucracy is a symptom of our political frustrations, of the historical maliciousness of the elites, of the aesthetic of simulation and pretense that the narco culture inherited from the idiosyncrasy of the colonial castes, just look at what's happening with Mayor [Gustavo] Petro... In comparison with the juridical hell of Colombia, Ecuador feels like an open space, healthier, a terrain of political discussion where at least the opposition isn't assassinated.
The only bad thing is that these Ecuadorian sons of bitches don't have a single decent bookstore, not a single decent art gallery, not a single decent museum, except for those of colonial art, obviously. And in general Ecuadorian cultural production is very poor. Yesterday, to go back no further, I had a meeting with a museum director. She was a young woman, thirty-something, windswept curls, Andean energy. She assured me very firmly that here in Quito they rejected the neoliberal model of commercial contemporary art, that their proposals were centered more on the community, on the social aspect, that the museum received many visits each day and that people felt it was their own. She was lying, obviously. I've visited the museum several times over the last few years and have never seen it full; the exhibitions are often very mediocre, with slapdash installations, and I've always had the impression that the magnificent building (really lovely) wasn't being taken advantage of. Sadly, the alternative to the "neoliberal model of contemporary art" this woman was talking about is the good vibe culture of the Madrid squat house, with little sewing workshops and hip-hop courses for teenagers in some neighborhood or another. These things are very good and should of course be done, I'm not saying they shouldn't. But a center of contemporary art with a hall full of diagrams and photos and videos of those workshops as planned by Oxfam Intermón is a frankly depressing sight. Especially if in the space next to it there's an individual exhibition by a young Ecuadorian artist who wants to be up-to-date with the latest trends, and is presenting work at the level of a mediocre graduate from the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá.
Culture is the great Achilles' heel of leftist governments. And Ecuador doesn't seem to be the exception, despite the true feats that [President Rafael] Correa has achieved in education. Anyway, I trust that within a few years Ecuador will become a reference at the regional level. The educational transformation is incredible.
This very minute I'm writing to you from the FLACSO library, where I come every day to work on the novel. Here around me, at the tables nearby, there are tons of people of scarce resources, indigenous boys from the country studying masters and doctorates. A few years ago this was unthinkable. And I think that the results will be seen not too long from now. Ecuador is on its way up. And it's nice to be here to see it.
Tomorrow I'm going to Cali, where I'll be for a few days giving a talk and visiting my father the baboon. I'll tell you about it.
Changing the subject, a couple of weeks ago one of the few decent channels in this country, Señal Colombia, showed this marvelous film, Karla against the Jaguars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcQhY026nrY
One more demonstration that when Mexicans and Colombians get together to fuck things up not even God can beat us.
Big hugs, animal,
J.
From: Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 12:35 PM
Cardenaleishon,
We continue suffering from the same evils: Latin American bureaucracies are the worst thing the Bourbons left us. Well, after their genetics (it's lucky that the world's scientists didn't try to complete the map of the species with the king's cells because they'd still be looking for missing chromosomes). I've only been in Mexico nine days and have already had to confront about thirty different counters, at all of which, of course, I've been flagrantly defeated. Here some paper or another is always missing, and one's nails are always two centimeters too long.
But the worst is the soundtrack: for some reason, in all the Mexican offices, in addition to the portrait of the employee of the month, duly crowned with little colored stars like in the kindergartens, [Ricardo] Arjona plays in the background. It's incredible: one even gets used to having an employee send you to hell while humming to this Guatemalan animal, for whom my country shows a pathetic devotion: one is forced to hear him in buses, libraries, university cafés, and even the street, where the repulsive sidewalk troubadours don't seem to know any other singer. Obviously, if the great educator of the country is Televisa, in whose hands the Mexican government left the formation of the masses a long time ago, our identity couldn't be any other way: our identity, which our disgusted elites won't even approach to shit on, is made up of purple thongs, T-shirts with giant yellow hearts, comely and mocking servants, vacations taken en masse, lottery tickets and convertibles. Of the people of the thousand and one masks, only one mask now remains: that of El Santo.
So what you're telling me about Quito fills me with envy and eats away at me, despite its museums of bread paste dolls and tin soldiers. And it reminds me of the Zapatista districts, perhaps the only places in this immense, nearly shut-down country where something similar to the Ecuadorian experience is occurring. But, of course, this experience (of efficient self-government, quality education, and cultural development) remains hidden from the bulk of the people. Here the guilty party isn't the government or the TV or the elites. It is the voluntary self-blindfolding of the masses. “What are we going to learn from those damned Indians?”, the national mestizo asks himself, while he begs Korean scientists to discover how the hell to extirpate the genes of color he carries in his skin. For him it is a thousand times better to have only Bourbons in the veins: since they still haven’t seen the last specimen of that race drooling! It's incredible how racist Mexico is with Mexico. I tell you: the last mask that remains here is that of El Santo, a mask of silver, that is to say: of white when it shines.
I hope that your days in Cali are not hell and that you return soon to that FLACSO stronghold you're telling me about. But if they are, and if you don't want to return so quickly to Quito, you already know that you're always welcome here. What's more, I already found an apartment. Well: I almost already found an apartment.
I say almost, because here I am hoping that the papers don't get held up at some point in the process, and the process, of course, is bureaucratic: some person even now listening to Arjona is simultaneously checking to see that my account balance, personal documents, and the signatures they've asked of me aren't false.
Very much in seriousness, I say: come visit for a few days soon. Here in this problematic city (governed by the PRD [Partido de la Revolución Democrática] for nearly twenty years now) you will be able to confirm what you say once again: if the Achilles' heel of leftist governments is culture, imagine what happens when the Achilles' heel of leftist governments is the left. Culture here is an international tamale fair and a campaign for the sterilization of pets.
Strong hugs!
Emiliano.
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 12:49 PM
Mong,
Arjona is a genuine mystery. Here in Ecuador he's the fucking boss too, and in Bolivia and in the night taxis of Bogotá and in the ipods of the secretaries of all the damned offices of the continent... I assure you that I detest the Adornian skepticism that only sees garbage in the culture of the masses, but this Arjona mania threatens to shatter the world as we know it to pieces. The other day I read that in Iran the death penalty is given to those caught listening to Arjona, who is considered there to be a son of Satan. We should start to make fake recordings of Arjona singing with Peña Nieto, with Uribe, with Piñera, to see if the ayatollahs declare sharia law against all these sons of bitches. Arjona is the evil twin of Marco Antonio Solís (whom I consider a genius), and my theory is that the songs of this Guatemalan are palpable proof that the aesthetic of nineties neoliberalism remains strong among us, no matter how much Lula da Silva and Chávez and Cristina we've had in the last few years. Titans of the tacky the level of Ricardo Montaner have succumbed to the political upheaval. Only Arjona, pillar of the free market, remains unscathed, thanks to his capacity to continue touching dark heartstrings. I wish that Aira would write a novel with Arjona as protagonist: Arjona discovers that he is the son of Satan and opens a church in the neighborhood of Flores. I wish that in his next novel Piglia would make Adolf Hitler run into Arjona in a café in Zurich in 1918. I wish that Monge would write one of those twilight westerns with Arjona in the role of the Grand Torturer, the Muchhated, the Blunt, the Notenjoy.
The only way to deactivate his macabre power would be to bring him to the terrain of the avant garde.
The avant guarde is the path. Or the precipice. But it’s all good, if we know how to fly.
Yours forever,
Marco Antonio.
PD. As you can see, I had to postpone the trip to Cali. I'm leaving tomorrow. I'll write you from there.
From: Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 4:05 PM
Traveler,
I don't know if you are in Ecuador, Colombia, or Spain, back in Madrid this time forever. Ecuador or Colombia is the same to me, but I don't want the last option for you: given the difficulty in leaving the kingdom of anesthesia, returning would be an unforgettable defeat. So I assume you're in your place in the South American mountains.
Currently I am in a town near DF, where I shut myself away to trim the novel I'm buried in. Without realizing it, I wrote a number of obscene pages, and now I am a hairdresser once again, trimming loose ends and taking off an ear every so often. Speaking of ears, I have an unbearable ear inflammation that I'm almost sure the music of Arjona produced in me, and that not even you, dear Marco Antonio, could get rid of. I wake up every morning with my inner ear converted into a hand grenade, and with my cheek dripping bloody pus.
But let's leave my ailments, because if I start in on them I'll never finish: beyond the momentary deafness, I have a bitch of a cough that won't leave me despite syrups and teas and tablets. And, of course, having a cough and a pain in the ear is an indescribable hell: How can you sleep if the only thing you hear is the internal crunch of your bronchi?
But let's leave my ailments, seriously, because the fucking cough is nothing compared to the hyperthyroidism I carry and that I don't think of speaking to you here. Better for us to speak of Marco Antonio, which is fine as long as we don't compare him to the true Marcos Antonios: how would this one fare next to José Alfredo? At most, ask him if he doesn't want a little glass of water. José Alfredo is the highest peak of the best mass culture. Watch and listen (if you can) to this jewel of jewels:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NpiopIkVNY
And since we're talking about the masses: another of my annoying ailments is my cholesterol. 273 points out of the blue, out of nowhere, is what my doctor told me I had in my blood! And though he assured me it was due to fried foods, excessive dairy products, and a sedentary lifestyle, I'm sure that it's due to the worst of my idiocies: quitting smoking cigarettes for three years. Why didn't anyone tell me that nicotine did me so much good that it maintained my triglycerides in shape? Luckily, I've decided to get hooked on tobacco again, and am convinced that my triglyceride levels will decrease very quickly. Not like my asthma, which has come back from the dead. But to be honest, between an evil that is cured by eating less, and another that is cured with a little bottle of Salbutamol, who the fuck is going to choose to go on a diet.
And since we're talking about diets and triglycerides: it's true we have to order Peña Nieto, Uribe, and Piñera killed, but before that, we have to order the assassination of the ex-governor of the Bank of Mexico: he could never do anything about improving hunger statistics in my country, but he might if we sliced him up. Look at this photo: www.acentoveintiuno.com/IMG/jpg/pf-3502120215_bm_2_gc-1-c.jpg. And I'm sure it was taken after he sucked in his stomach.
Strong hugs, once again,
Illmonge.
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:19 AM
José Alfredo,
I write to you from Cali, after a few never-ending days starting in the early morning last Monday, when I left my department in Quito.
My friend Daniel Silvo commissioned an exhibition here, and as I had written the text of the exhibit, he invited me to participate in the related activities. Curiously, the expo took place in a space that I used as a model when writing the gallery part of Los estratos: it's a place called “Lugar a dudas” [“Room for Doubts”], and is one of my favorite art spaces in Colombia. So going to work there had a strange air of intrusion, profanation, that in this case was double because I always feel like that when I participate in art-related things, like a kind of thief, like I'm someone external to the discipline, gate-crashing with a screwdriver and a hammer (in literature I camouflage myself a little better because, ultimately, I make books, but even there in the depths of my soul I know that I am there too as a small-timer, like Chómpiras.
Anyway, we worked hard on the installation, but there were also meetings with the resident artists in the space and visits to museums and galleries, and we took advantage of the time to see many portfolios of Cali artists (really good, seriously). The day of the inauguration, on Dani's suggestion, we had a dialogue about what the art of the future would be like. The theme was really sci-fi, as you can imagine: Óscar Campo, a local filmmaker, showed a horrific short film made with documentary snapshots of the city (pure poverty porn), Dani screened a dystopic film filled with jokes about the art-system, and I spoke about Antonioni's The Red Desert, a film for which I feel special devotion. Have you seen it? I spoke about that film precisely because it was made during the Cold War years, under the permanent threat of catastrophe, but what's most impressive is that Antonioni seems to be saying that with or without nuclear disaster, the worst has already happened. Desire is broken. What breaks with the idea of an end in history —that the nuclear threat makes patent— is desire. Desire is the true machine propelling history. And we have arrived at the point where our desire has suffered an astonishing transformation since at least the '50s, and we still don't know what it will end up turning into.
Anyway, sometimes I'm given to thinking like this, you already know the idiot I can be. One has to go out and dance salsa in Cali to rechannel that desire. What would become of us Colombians without dance? We would be even worse than we already are, incredible as it seems. The people here begin dancing and something miraculous starts to work. It's like seeing a cat jump, or when you find yourself in the street with a rat and the rat is startled and scurries away. There is something miraculous in it. Something animal, in any case. There are no muscles anymore, just rhythm passing through the clothing and deforming it subtly, as the dancer smiles with complete happiness. It's like seeing a rat scurrying away in slow motion.
And since you unleashed the heavy artillery of classics, I have no choice but to pull out the true H bomb. Because look, we can make a thousand lists of the Genuine Badasses of the continent, but I have no doubt that any of them would have to include, and in one of the top positions, this puny human with the voice of an inebriated dog, the biggest punk that's emerged in all the Caribbean.
Here you go, so that you suffer through it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpmwQcc1h2g
Good luck and strength,
El Jéctor.
PD. Tomorrow, in the early morning, I leave for Quito.
From: Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 11:06 AM
Carneishon on my lapel,
Like the great song by Lavoe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAlATS5ioAg), this email is yesterday's news. It's arriving late because I was going crazy with work and moving, and though I wanted to tell you that today I would be buying a bookcase, searching among the fucking drawers of my furniture for the tragedies of Euripides (I promised to loan them) and finishing a prologue that I was assigned on the Stateless Prose of the master [Julio Ramón] Ribeyro (do you like him?), by the time I got around to it, I'd already bought the bookcase, found the tragedies, loaned them, and finished the annoying prologue.
The only thing missing, then, is your response about the Peruvian author, which as I know it will be affirmative, isn't necessary, and so nothing is missing. Everything has arrived late. Even your fondness for Ribeyro. Who, by the way, and speaking of taste, writing and those pretty boys we have to put up with at the literary congresses, meetings, and book fairs where I also feel like a Chómpiras of letters, wrote these great lines: "The literary ostentation of many Latin American writers. Their complex of proceeding from peripheral or underdeveloped areas of the world, and their fear that they'll be taken as uncultured. The demonstrative will of their works, social climbing to the max. To prove that they too can encompass all culture —What culture? As if there only existed one culture!— and express it in an encyclopedic work that summarizes twenty centuries of history. New and rich aspects of their works: eclectic, monstrous, and ornate mansions like the attire that the African immigrant or the Parisian slumdweller wears on Sundays to stroll down the boulevards. His own shine discredits him."
Does any name occur to you after reading the Stateless Prose #142 of the master? It's too easy: choose any author published by Alfaguara.
I read of your experience in Cali and envy it with teeth clenched. I would have loved to have been there, in the gallery which inspired the space in Los estratos, at the exhibition installation, and above all, at the discussions you told me about, even more so if these approached the subject of desire, which has obsessed me for so very long (my thesis was on the master-slave dialectic in Hegel and, therefore, on desire). You're completely right: The Red Desert is a masterpiece, and our desire (or our object of desire, because desire is always the same, as the inspirational Don Karlitos Marx would say) has been transformed in a radical way over the last few years. In large part, perhaps, because we have arrived at a point at which for some, everything desirable is achievable, while for others (the immense majority) the object of desire remains forbidden even before desiring it. The only thing that remains, then, is to desire without the principle of sense.
On that note, this Thursday a very good friend, José Jiménez Ortiz (https://www.jmnz.mx/jmnz/index.php?p=539.0) inaugurates his new exhibition, in which he presents several pieces having to do with the subject of desire and longing. I would love it if you could look at them and comment on them, above all on a piece he made with the traces people leave on the computers of internet cafés. You tell me if you find something on his page of what I'm talking about, obviously, if you have time.
And so as not to forget merely trivial subjects of no importance, I'll tell you that just as you're moving to your place, my pains are moving through my body: now I have asthma and am unable to move, because this morning while running (gambling my bronchi in the smog of this sewer in which I live, I know) I tripped on a crack and simultaneously fucked up my left ankle and right knee.
Big hugs,
Thedoublecripple.
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 9:10 AM
Meister Monguiliano,
The stateless Peruvian buzzard is one of our zen masters, obviously. I've always felt devotion to his writing, but also to the elegance with which he constructed his self-exile. And of course many, many names occur to me that would fit in your description of the ostentatious Latin American writer. I, for example, am a pure middle-class snob, a cheap quote machine, and what's more I identify myself with the Subsaharan individual that puts on his suit on Sundays to stroll down the boulevards. The stateless buzzard had an aristocratic notion of taste that I, in large part, share. I believe in a certain idea of classicism (a mix of wisdom and lightness, knowledge made malleable, sensual). And I believe, like him, that erudition is something very different from culture, that "the member of a primitive tribe that possesses the world in ten basic notions is more cultured than the specialist in sacred Byzantine art who doesn't know how to fry a couple of eggs". But I also believe that there is a politics in the Sunday suit of the Subsaharan individual that Ribeyro was possibly incapable of appreciating. There is in it an affirmation that goes behind the idea of the lumpen and alienated leisure of the Saturday Night Fever type, that idea of leisure that the situationists despised but which seems to me potentially revolutionary. I believe that in the forms of leisure of the workers, of the popular classes, very strong imaginary conceptions are produced which point to a utopic conception of life in the best sense. As I said to you in another message, I distrust the Adornian distrust of the culture of the masses. I distrust those who only see fascism in football, in reality shows, in programs of teletrash. Rather I believe, like Benjamin, that every document of barbarianism is at the same time a document of civilization. And vice versa. One of the most common errors of the critical tradition consists in unilaterally reifying cultural products, creating a determinist context for objects, a genealogical prison that impedes its resignification, its reuse.
These days I've been thinking a lot about these things. Above all after the experience in Cali. For example, in the last few years a style of dance called salsa choke has become popular there. It's a way of dancing I'd never seen, with some very strange and subtle movements that put the music’s beat out of joint, attacking it against the rhythm; the dancers combine very smooth swaying and small spasms. There is a flow, elements that are stretched, and at the same time contractions, very defined marks in space (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7Ldrymh950), parries, cuts. Lately even the players on the national team celebrate goals with steps from choke. The thing has gone on growing and growing, and surely within a time it will become a product of well-packed shit for the deceitful cultural industry. But, at least at the moment, the thing still hasn't lost its affirmative power. One must take into account the context of extreme violence where this dance has been produced, between Buenaventura and Cali, in black shanty towns where people get together to dance on the sidewalks and on the roofs of houses. Favelas where even now, at this moment I write to you, an atrocious war is being unleashed for the control of those territories, because that is the main corridor through which most drugs leave the country. In those neighborhoods there are places known as "picaderos". They're shacks where people are dismembered alive and the screams and cries are heard for kilometers around. The people have to live with that every day. And that is precisely where salsa choke was born, as a radical positioning of the body, as if the body said: destroy this if you want, bastard. Dismember this if you can, sonofabitch. You shoot me here and I'll escape there. Salsa choke is the culture of the masses and it is resistance. For that reason I distrust that idiotic critical thought which only sees trash and underdevelopment in these things. The people often respond to pain with imagination and beauty. And in Colombia the people throw their body into it, literally.
Well, blood brother, let's continue. I leave you with a video of young geniuses of choke:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hUNNowoz4U&feature;=youtu.be
Big hug,
The hillbilly.
PS. The work of your friend José Jiménez Ortiz seems really fantastic. I'll look into it in more depth.
From: Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 12:19 PM
Choke dancer of my heart,
It's exciting to confirm that the very clear mirror of my friend's house works just as well in "seeing beyond the obvious" as the Sword of Omens of the immense Lion-O.
However, of middle class snobbery, you and I have very little. Even if we are a couple of cheap quote resellers and have our own notion of classicism (which you point to and which Ribeyro summarizes so well), for all our best efforts, we can't bring ourselves to be tacky. And we can't bring ourselves to do so, in the sense the Buzzard describes, because we aren't willing to (and this is what the Peruvian criticized) sell Latin America like someone selling smoke. In truth we aren't like those authors that "translate" their reality in order to charm foreigners. You said well that the base of all culture is popular culture. But the tragedy of popular culture is that it ceases being an object for itself and becomes a saleable commodity for another, because then it stops being popular culture and is converted into spectacle. What's bad about it, then, is not the suit of the Subsaharan individual, it is the suit of the Subsaharan individual in which the colors were dyed fluorescent in Chinese laboratories (they know very well what colors most dazzle Europeans thinking of Africa) and the fabrics were sewn by Turkish children (who were taught how to sew the Austrian knot and Bavarian stich perfectly). What's bad about the suit that Ribeyro talks about isn't even the suit: it's wearing it with Parisian shoes, Italian wallet, and Venetian hat. What's bad about the Subsaharan suit, then, is not the pride with which it is worn, but the hang-ups with which it is worn.
Because every hang-up accepts domination, because without pride there is no revolutionary content in our acts. Rebellion (and before that, even: resistance, as Ranajit Guha and the rest of the historians of the school of subaltern studies have explained so well) takes off not only from feeling ourselves completely confident and in harmony with our discourse and our acts, but also with renouncing the desire for our discourse and our acts to be understood and shared by dominant society. Not only is it not necessary to translate popular culture for dominant society: it is not even necessary to aim for them to understand it! Because the rebellion will develop in a circle to which we must not give them entrance, and because it must explode in their face. And explode not only like a dance or a mask or a carnival, but with the hidden content with which these dances, masks, and carnivals threaten. As you say, when they dance these guys are in reality saying: dismember this, sonofabitch, if you can, even if the dominant class only sees the latest fashionable dance. This is my fear with massification: that it loses the: dismember this, sonofabitch. So that only the dance remains.
(And speaking of dances and subterranean discourses, help me find the hidden discourse, the dismember this, sonofabitch, in this latest and most absurd document of barbarism and culture that my country has produced. I honestly declare myself incapable of watching it. It's about the latest dance from the north, danced by more people each day, all bearers of their own emblem: pointy boots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veQkt4tS0Tc —forget the mongoloid journalist—).
Now, returning to our situation and extrapolating (and also exaggerating) to nearly absurd levels the theme which Ribeyro denounced, and which we haven't discussed so much: Junot Díaz, let's not be taken for fools, is in the end nothing more than just an English-Spanish dictionary. And writers like Vallejo are an enigma and an endless series of questions for even those people that use a dictionary. It's worth the effort to read the extraordinary article by Binyavanga Wainaina on Granta's selection of African authors (this article is also fairly illuminating with respect to our other subject, popular culture): https://www.granta.com/Archive/92/How-to-Write-about-Africa/Page-1
Sending an enormous hug,
Monki Paiton.
PS. We are so far from the elegance and tenacity of Don Ribeyro building his self-exile!
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 9:54 PM
Herr Mvnk,
I'd already been introduced to the mysterious world of pointy boots, and the truth is that frankly it is charming (in fact, it reminds me of some visions I had a few years ago during the consumption of San Pedro, Andean peyote: monstrous protuberances that emerged from things, plants, words, so just seeing it already makes me laugh uncontrollably). But I wouldn't know how to read beyond the superficial and purely phenomenal impressions that it produces in me. There is something in the creole culture of indigenous roots that borders on a macabre and very strange humor. It happens in the Andean world with the penchant for the miniature, with the concept of reducing everything to a minuscule size: the tiny becomes tender, amusing, and on occasion, sinister. In Bolivia, as perhaps you know, there's a big fair of the miniature every January. It's like a celebration of abundance, but at a small size. I suppose there is something analogous in allowing the points of the boots to grow to absurd lengths (beyond the obvious connections with the phallic and the narco-girlymacho culture and so on). What I like about the peasant culture of indigenous roots is the confidence with which it delivers itself to the ridiculous, to excess, nearly a Gombrowiczian movement of the grotesque.
Of course, as you say well, all manifestations of popular culture are anchored and even determined by neoliberal logic (which is precisely what is behind the identity fallacy that Binyavanga Wainaina condemns; multiculturalism is obviously a branch of the market economy).
But we live in a world where everything is shot through with the aesthetic (and by aesthetic I understand conditions of sensibility) of capitalistic ideology. There is no possible refuge. Neither in high culture, nor in the aristocracy of our admired Buzzard, nor in popular culture, nor in folklore, nor in the avant garde. In this respect, Žižek says something that seems very relevant to me, and it is that ideology is never more present than when one intends to avoid it, "if there is an ideological experience in its most pure expression, in its zero level, it is produced at the moment at which we adopt an attitude of ironic distancing, laughing at the mad ideas in which we are disposed to believe. That moment of deliberate, hearty laughter, when we look at the absurdity of our faith, is when we become pure subjects of ideology, when ideology exercises its greatest control over us." This, of course, attacks the waterline of a certain notion of irony which is presented as an attitude prior to any naive understanding of the real. I defend the second type of irony: that of Cervantes when he tells us about the nasty luck that befalls poor Sancho and Don Quijote. The first type of irony is associated with cynicism (nothing other than a perfection of fear, of terror of the real, of the unpredictable, of chance) and is one of the most typical attitudes of the capitalistic subject: the cosmopolitan know-it-all attitude, instructed (trained, rather), well-traveled, that turns the cheek with paternal disdain when it doesn’t understand something. In summary: the ostentatious writer that the Buzzard talked about.
Although I would add a new form of Latin American ostentation, and it is that of those guys who boast about the poverty of their origins, of the home without books in which they had to do what they could to cultivate their genius, and who claim that when they were children nobody talked to them about "culture" (which I suppose should bring us to immediately applaud them, unconditionally admire them, and forgive their flagrant frivolity). I speak, obviously, of types like Junot Díaz, a type that has the nerve to call us South American writers "white guys" when his ecological niche and institutional megaphonism wouldn't have been possible without the multicultural ideology of the gringo right. It is not an exaggeration to say that there would be no Junot Díaz without Ronald Reagan. I am not going to call him cynical, because I'm sure that he himself believes his position of subalternity is authentic. The worst and best business that many "Latino" writers living in the United States have engaged in is to have given in to the discourse of their owners, a discourse that understands race as the grand epistemic framework. And so, their affirmation of ethnic difference gives them publicity, but at the cost of reinforcing segregation at a deeper level. For that reason Junot only sees "white guys" when he is invited to congresses in Latin America, and his whole goddamn life he will never truly understand the creole Borges, the caboclo Guimaraes Rosa, the Greek-Chilean Alfonso Reyes, the mulato Machado de Assis, the Robinsonian Elizondo, the Polish Pitol, or the Buzzard.
Because the gringos have put racial glasses on him with which to see the world, poor guy. If only somebody would take them off him!
Ariós amigou,
J.
PD. And if Junot believes that everything pale is white, I challenge him to a dance competition to see who is more black.
Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 12:54 PM
Dear Mr. Carnes,
How right you are with respect to that humorous and macabre character of a certain creole culture of indigenous roots. In fact, it is really interesting to see how, in many of its manifestations, the excess is precisely what supplies the desire. Everything that is or can be has to be more: start and end of the peasant culture. One not only has to obtain what one longs for, but go a little beyond. As if limits didn't exist. In these types of manifestations, you are also right, there is a lot of abandon, and nearly a celebration of the grotesque. However, what interests me most is where there isn't abandon in excess.
Because if excess is a voluntary consequence, it comes off as obviously funny, and so yes, it is a Gombrowiczian banner of the grotesque. But what happens if excess is only the result of an incapacity to locate limits? What happens if we are not even capable of marking off that which we desire, if we are not conscious of excess? The Mexican narco from the north imitating the cowboy aesthetic is not the same as the narco from the north carrying that same aesthetic to the level of pointy boots. You say that one should renounce discussing the macho and the phallic from the start, but I believe it is the unconscious excess, the excess without limits of the pointy boots, which itself already gave up this issue even before an analysis could be made of it. Because evidently in the narco aesthetic there is an unquestionable macho and phallic content, but is it in the pointy boots? Or did they go so far already that they are something else? It seems to me that the incapacity to locate the limit, which is what gives rise to the unconscious excess, transforms, in this case, the footwear of the brave, aggressive, and virile Marlboro man into the footwear of the court jesters. And the boots that call forth the fight become an excuse for the fight. There is a reconversion of the white into black.
And here, it seems to me, we are before the line that divides the popular culture we defend, that of conscious excess, from that which does nothing and does so much damage, that of unconscious excess. Which is the same, by the way, as what Žižek says when he talks about returning or not to being subjects of the ideology that controls us: laughing consciously or unconsciously, with or without ironic distance. But, as I already said, I still don't have this all clear.
What I do have very clear, in contrast, is the disgust this class of writers also generates in me, who claim the poverty of their origins and boast of the effort it took to get out of the Latin American sewers... to then convert themselves into those lavish worldly men shining out from behind their display window Armani suits. It's pathetic to see them surrendering to their readers, or even worse, to the critics and directors of cultural supplements with their shitty little discourse that at its root only seeks to avoid literary treatment of the literary. But worst of all is that this discourse works for them. Because the articles about Latin American writers, in the yankee and European press, always speak about the origin and personal struggle of the author. I already know that colonialist prejudice is difficult to overcome, but it is even more so if our peers encourage it, using it as currency to exchange. Do you remember that chat we had in Madrid, in Jose's house, about the pathos and condescension of the immense majority of Spanish reviewers when talking about books by South American writers? And here we are, so many months afterward, realizing that we owe this pathos and this condescension, in addition to colonialism (which judges itself to be the only bearer of the natural and the universal, and continues seeing us as curious manifestations of the local) to the Junot Díazes of the world, who prefer to begin their conferences saying: "where I come from" than to talk about literature!
Every time I hear or read one of these writers, it makes me think of one of Artaud's greatest lines: "Ceaselessly, a few dogs roam the steppes in search of wolves, seeking to convert them into dogs".
Strong hugs,
Monge.
PS. In addition to the dance-off, I say we add a mezcal challenge.
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 11:55 AM
Prezado doutor Monch,
Your theory of desire applied to the aesthetic of excess in popular culture seems to me very suggestive.
The idea that we end up being disproportionate because we fail to make the object of desire concrete is a characteristic Gutiérrez-Alea already pointed to in Memories of Underdevelopment. Do you remember the grotesque melodrama that took place in court with the family of the girl the protagonist sleeps with? The girl stages all that drama because ultimately she herself doesn't know what she wants. It is very possible that the relationship with desire has to do with the legacy that, for better or worse, the Baroque culture has left us Latin Americans. And I say for better or worse because I see potential in precisely that which you called "unconscious excess". Put in another way, it is in the symptom, the manifestation of the sickness, where the possibilities of art are suggested. It is only necessary to take the step from "unconscious excess" to "conscious excess" for form to appear. Art, we could say, is the result of beginning to read the deformed as form, the monstrous as a morphology of the possible. We could also say that the displacement of reading is a constitutive part of our literature. A displacement that is analogous to the act of eating: cannibalism. From the Inca Garcilaso to Borges.
Unconscious excess is the terrain of the immature, of the unfinished. That's why the tension that Gombrowicz posed between immaturity and form continues to be so relevant. Maturity is incapable of giving us forms. Maturity is sterile in the sense that TS Eliot gave to that word (waste), that is to say, a museum or a supermarket that we can order or disorder at our whim, as Lyotard would have it. The mature is a wasteland.
The immature, in contrast, is the space of the potential something, despite it being always on the verge of failing in the rigor of the climate of the unconscious. The artist accepts that challenge: he submerges himself in the immature in search of form.
And therefore, the step from unconscious excess to conscious excess is mediated by a didactic action, by a lesson, understood as a redirection of attention. To teach is to point out.
I know that "pedagogy" is very much stigmatized by high culture, I know the idea of teaching is frequently presented as cheap populism or paternalism. But let's return to Žižek. Isn't one more immersed in cheap populism or paternalism precisely when one intends to hide from it? Isn't denying didacticism a twisted way of concealing the ways in which it "instructs" perception and consciousness? Perhaps one must begin from the starting point that every perception and every construction of the conscious is previously mediated, that nothing exists exterior to mediation, that there is no pure position from which to judge objectively.
It's not strange to find people who criticize the exhibitions of the Museo Reina Sofía because they are full of text, of "explanations". Often I've had to hear things like: "they don't let the works breathe, the works need silence around them, so that nothing interferes with their reading, so that they don't asphyxiate the pure perception of the object, they're intending to impose on me their vision of the world and of art". Frankly I find these commentaries laughable. There are no ideal conditions for the perception of a work. Even in laboratory conditions we are always confronted by the work in the midst of noise, in the seat of a bus full of sweaty people, with Arjona playing at full volume on the speakers. The perception is always directed, dictated, always. The Reina Sofía makes that condition explicit in its installations; there they never hide from you their line of reading, they never stop marking it out so that all the material becomes an object of debate. That is called democracy. But high culture is not democratic. High culture constantly struggles so that the ideology that allows its existence and its privileges remains hidden. High culture is what sends dogs to domesticate wolves, to preach the gospel of false emancipation, the gospel that asks us to jump into absolute liberty while in reality making us pass through a hoop.
No doubt, we are going to have to settle these questions over a few mezcals. But without "junots", please.
A storm of hugs.
Previous entries:
[Ignacio Echeverría vs. Damián Tabarovksy]
[Mario Bellatín vs. Edmundo Paz Soldán]
[Patricio Pron vs. Rafael Gumucio]
[Lina Meruane vs. Cristina Rivera Garza]
Read their correspondence here.
Translated by Jessica Sequeira
From: Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 11:02 AM
Blood brother,
Were our messenger pigeons shot down in Honduras? Those fucking Honduran assassins don't get tired of firing at our birds.
Giant hugs...
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Wed, Jan 22, 2014 at 11:18 AM
Friend,
Sorry for the silence, it wasn't the Honduran artillery that was responsible for interrupting communications. These days I've had a rough time. I'm in Quito, battling with several tasks assigned to me from Bogotá and Madrid, a real mess. If that weren't enough, we've been moving to an apartment two steps from the FLACSO, the university where Luciana is carrying out her research. So you can imagine: buying stupid little things for the new house, cups, toilet brushes, detergent, getting to know the brands of toilet paper... The gist is that for a few months I'm going to be coming and going between Bogotá and Quito, working here and there, here-there. And taking the opportunity to finish a new novel.
Where are you? What are you up to? And your dog?
Big fat hugs (man, I'm getting fat with Ecuadorian food, a lot of cooked maize).
From: Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Thu, Jan 23, 2014 at 1:27 PM
Carnitas,
How happy I am to know that the Hondurans (the spell check on this piece of junk isn't a sure thing like us, and each time I write “Hondurans”, it changes it to “cartridges“) had nothing to do with your silence. Silence that on the other hand I understand immediately: I'm getting in too, and am also up to my neck in the motherfucking chaos that a move involves. Just today I got a house (I was with my mother for nearly a week, which is like committing yourself to an asylum) and the scramble of the search for real estate is now turning into the scramble of the search for my furniture, everything I distributed and entrusted with my colleagues and left to a friend that has storage space in her home: bed, armchair, bookcases, writing desk, table… Only then will I throw myself into that scramble you're telling me about: cups, toilet brushes, washcloths, silverware, plates, glasses, bla bla bla. So honestly, although Quito and Bogotá are both really great, I wouldn't like to be having to go from one to the other constantly. I'm not going to move again for a long time, unless it's for a vacation. A vacation which, on the other hand, I won't have money for (after the moves and packing up of the house) until about 2025.
What is indeed fantastic news is that you're finishing a novel, how happy I am to think that soon I'll get to read you again, asshole. If it's not too much trouble telling me, what's the bitch about? On my end, I'm also on the home stretch of a novel, but I'm starting to believe that I still have a lot more to go than I'd thought. Suddenly I want to change a whole bunch of things. So that, and jobs here, there, and here-there, is what I'm up to. That and missing Petra, who after some really hard and difficult talks, stayed in Barcelona to live in with Paula. The good part is that, my unconsciousness being a real son of a bitch, at night it gives me the pleasure of letting me dream of her. The bad part is that my consciousness isn't as pleasant, and I wake up feeling crushed. Fucking hell.
Big strong hugs for you, and kisses to Luciana,
Emiliano.
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Fri, Jan 24, 2014 at 9:47 AM
Mongélico,
It's so good to know that I'm not the only fool who's packed his bags to return to these valleys of narcotears and mental silicone... For the moment, as I told you, I've sought temporal refuge for a few months here in Quito, where things are a little more pleasant. The city is just the right size, there's not much traffic, and in general things are simpler than in Bogotá, where precious weeks of life are lost in useless paperwork and procedural stupidities. Colombian bureaucracy is a symptom of our political frustrations, of the historical maliciousness of the elites, of the aesthetic of simulation and pretense that the narco culture inherited from the idiosyncrasy of the colonial castes, just look at what's happening with Mayor [Gustavo] Petro... In comparison with the juridical hell of Colombia, Ecuador feels like an open space, healthier, a terrain of political discussion where at least the opposition isn't assassinated.
The only bad thing is that these Ecuadorian sons of bitches don't have a single decent bookstore, not a single decent art gallery, not a single decent museum, except for those of colonial art, obviously. And in general Ecuadorian cultural production is very poor. Yesterday, to go back no further, I had a meeting with a museum director. She was a young woman, thirty-something, windswept curls, Andean energy. She assured me very firmly that here in Quito they rejected the neoliberal model of commercial contemporary art, that their proposals were centered more on the community, on the social aspect, that the museum received many visits each day and that people felt it was their own. She was lying, obviously. I've visited the museum several times over the last few years and have never seen it full; the exhibitions are often very mediocre, with slapdash installations, and I've always had the impression that the magnificent building (really lovely) wasn't being taken advantage of. Sadly, the alternative to the "neoliberal model of contemporary art" this woman was talking about is the good vibe culture of the Madrid squat house, with little sewing workshops and hip-hop courses for teenagers in some neighborhood or another. These things are very good and should of course be done, I'm not saying they shouldn't. But a center of contemporary art with a hall full of diagrams and photos and videos of those workshops as planned by Oxfam Intermón is a frankly depressing sight. Especially if in the space next to it there's an individual exhibition by a young Ecuadorian artist who wants to be up-to-date with the latest trends, and is presenting work at the level of a mediocre graduate from the Universidad de Los Andes in Bogotá.
Culture is the great Achilles' heel of leftist governments. And Ecuador doesn't seem to be the exception, despite the true feats that [President Rafael] Correa has achieved in education. Anyway, I trust that within a few years Ecuador will become a reference at the regional level. The educational transformation is incredible.
This very minute I'm writing to you from the FLACSO library, where I come every day to work on the novel. Here around me, at the tables nearby, there are tons of people of scarce resources, indigenous boys from the country studying masters and doctorates. A few years ago this was unthinkable. And I think that the results will be seen not too long from now. Ecuador is on its way up. And it's nice to be here to see it.
Tomorrow I'm going to Cali, where I'll be for a few days giving a talk and visiting my father the baboon. I'll tell you about it.
Changing the subject, a couple of weeks ago one of the few decent channels in this country, Señal Colombia, showed this marvelous film, Karla against the Jaguars:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gcQhY026nrY
One more demonstration that when Mexicans and Colombians get together to fuck things up not even God can beat us.
Big hugs, animal,
J.
From: Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Sat, Jan 25, 2014 at 12:35 PM
Cardenaleishon,
We continue suffering from the same evils: Latin American bureaucracies are the worst thing the Bourbons left us. Well, after their genetics (it's lucky that the world's scientists didn't try to complete the map of the species with the king's cells because they'd still be looking for missing chromosomes). I've only been in Mexico nine days and have already had to confront about thirty different counters, at all of which, of course, I've been flagrantly defeated. Here some paper or another is always missing, and one's nails are always two centimeters too long.
But the worst is the soundtrack: for some reason, in all the Mexican offices, in addition to the portrait of the employee of the month, duly crowned with little colored stars like in the kindergartens, [Ricardo] Arjona plays in the background. It's incredible: one even gets used to having an employee send you to hell while humming to this Guatemalan animal, for whom my country shows a pathetic devotion: one is forced to hear him in buses, libraries, university cafés, and even the street, where the repulsive sidewalk troubadours don't seem to know any other singer. Obviously, if the great educator of the country is Televisa, in whose hands the Mexican government left the formation of the masses a long time ago, our identity couldn't be any other way: our identity, which our disgusted elites won't even approach to shit on, is made up of purple thongs, T-shirts with giant yellow hearts, comely and mocking servants, vacations taken en masse, lottery tickets and convertibles. Of the people of the thousand and one masks, only one mask now remains: that of El Santo.
So what you're telling me about Quito fills me with envy and eats away at me, despite its museums of bread paste dolls and tin soldiers. And it reminds me of the Zapatista districts, perhaps the only places in this immense, nearly shut-down country where something similar to the Ecuadorian experience is occurring. But, of course, this experience (of efficient self-government, quality education, and cultural development) remains hidden from the bulk of the people. Here the guilty party isn't the government or the TV or the elites. It is the voluntary self-blindfolding of the masses. “What are we going to learn from those damned Indians?”, the national mestizo asks himself, while he begs Korean scientists to discover how the hell to extirpate the genes of color he carries in his skin. For him it is a thousand times better to have only Bourbons in the veins: since they still haven’t seen the last specimen of that race drooling! It's incredible how racist Mexico is with Mexico. I tell you: the last mask that remains here is that of El Santo, a mask of silver, that is to say: of white when it shines.
I hope that your days in Cali are not hell and that you return soon to that FLACSO stronghold you're telling me about. But if they are, and if you don't want to return so quickly to Quito, you already know that you're always welcome here. What's more, I already found an apartment. Well: I almost already found an apartment.
I say almost, because here I am hoping that the papers don't get held up at some point in the process, and the process, of course, is bureaucratic: some person even now listening to Arjona is simultaneously checking to see that my account balance, personal documents, and the signatures they've asked of me aren't false.
Very much in seriousness, I say: come visit for a few days soon. Here in this problematic city (governed by the PRD [Partido de la Revolución Democrática] for nearly twenty years now) you will be able to confirm what you say once again: if the Achilles' heel of leftist governments is culture, imagine what happens when the Achilles' heel of leftist governments is the left. Culture here is an international tamale fair and a campaign for the sterilization of pets.
Strong hugs!
Emiliano.
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Sun, Jan 26, 2014 at 12:49 PM
Mong,
Arjona is a genuine mystery. Here in Ecuador he's the fucking boss too, and in Bolivia and in the night taxis of Bogotá and in the ipods of the secretaries of all the damned offices of the continent... I assure you that I detest the Adornian skepticism that only sees garbage in the culture of the masses, but this Arjona mania threatens to shatter the world as we know it to pieces. The other day I read that in Iran the death penalty is given to those caught listening to Arjona, who is considered there to be a son of Satan. We should start to make fake recordings of Arjona singing with Peña Nieto, with Uribe, with Piñera, to see if the ayatollahs declare sharia law against all these sons of bitches. Arjona is the evil twin of Marco Antonio Solís (whom I consider a genius), and my theory is that the songs of this Guatemalan are palpable proof that the aesthetic of nineties neoliberalism remains strong among us, no matter how much Lula da Silva and Chávez and Cristina we've had in the last few years. Titans of the tacky the level of Ricardo Montaner have succumbed to the political upheaval. Only Arjona, pillar of the free market, remains unscathed, thanks to his capacity to continue touching dark heartstrings. I wish that Aira would write a novel with Arjona as protagonist: Arjona discovers that he is the son of Satan and opens a church in the neighborhood of Flores. I wish that in his next novel Piglia would make Adolf Hitler run into Arjona in a café in Zurich in 1918. I wish that Monge would write one of those twilight westerns with Arjona in the role of the Grand Torturer, the Muchhated, the Blunt, the Notenjoy.
The only way to deactivate his macabre power would be to bring him to the terrain of the avant garde.
The avant guarde is the path. Or the precipice. But it’s all good, if we know how to fly.
Yours forever,
Marco Antonio.
PD. As you can see, I had to postpone the trip to Cali. I'm leaving tomorrow. I'll write you from there.
From: Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Wed, Jan 29, 2014 at 4:05 PM
Traveler,
I don't know if you are in Ecuador, Colombia, or Spain, back in Madrid this time forever. Ecuador or Colombia is the same to me, but I don't want the last option for you: given the difficulty in leaving the kingdom of anesthesia, returning would be an unforgettable defeat. So I assume you're in your place in the South American mountains.
Currently I am in a town near DF, where I shut myself away to trim the novel I'm buried in. Without realizing it, I wrote a number of obscene pages, and now I am a hairdresser once again, trimming loose ends and taking off an ear every so often. Speaking of ears, I have an unbearable ear inflammation that I'm almost sure the music of Arjona produced in me, and that not even you, dear Marco Antonio, could get rid of. I wake up every morning with my inner ear converted into a hand grenade, and with my cheek dripping bloody pus.
But let's leave my ailments, because if I start in on them I'll never finish: beyond the momentary deafness, I have a bitch of a cough that won't leave me despite syrups and teas and tablets. And, of course, having a cough and a pain in the ear is an indescribable hell: How can you sleep if the only thing you hear is the internal crunch of your bronchi?
But let's leave my ailments, seriously, because the fucking cough is nothing compared to the hyperthyroidism I carry and that I don't think of speaking to you here. Better for us to speak of Marco Antonio, which is fine as long as we don't compare him to the true Marcos Antonios: how would this one fare next to José Alfredo? At most, ask him if he doesn't want a little glass of water. José Alfredo is the highest peak of the best mass culture. Watch and listen (if you can) to this jewel of jewels:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-NpiopIkVNY
And since we're talking about the masses: another of my annoying ailments is my cholesterol. 273 points out of the blue, out of nowhere, is what my doctor told me I had in my blood! And though he assured me it was due to fried foods, excessive dairy products, and a sedentary lifestyle, I'm sure that it's due to the worst of my idiocies: quitting smoking cigarettes for three years. Why didn't anyone tell me that nicotine did me so much good that it maintained my triglycerides in shape? Luckily, I've decided to get hooked on tobacco again, and am convinced that my triglyceride levels will decrease very quickly. Not like my asthma, which has come back from the dead. But to be honest, between an evil that is cured by eating less, and another that is cured with a little bottle of Salbutamol, who the fuck is going to choose to go on a diet.
And since we're talking about diets and triglycerides: it's true we have to order Peña Nieto, Uribe, and Piñera killed, but before that, we have to order the assassination of the ex-governor of the Bank of Mexico: he could never do anything about improving hunger statistics in my country, but he might if we sliced him up. Look at this photo: www.acentoveintiuno.com/IMG/jpg/pf-3502120215_bm_2_gc-1-c.jpg. And I'm sure it was taken after he sucked in his stomach.
Strong hugs, once again,
Illmonge.
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Mon, Feb 3, 2014 at 12:19 AM
José Alfredo,
I write to you from Cali, after a few never-ending days starting in the early morning last Monday, when I left my department in Quito.
My friend Daniel Silvo commissioned an exhibition here, and as I had written the text of the exhibit, he invited me to participate in the related activities. Curiously, the expo took place in a space that I used as a model when writing the gallery part of Los estratos: it's a place called “Lugar a dudas” [“Room for Doubts”], and is one of my favorite art spaces in Colombia. So going to work there had a strange air of intrusion, profanation, that in this case was double because I always feel like that when I participate in art-related things, like a kind of thief, like I'm someone external to the discipline, gate-crashing with a screwdriver and a hammer (in literature I camouflage myself a little better because, ultimately, I make books, but even there in the depths of my soul I know that I am there too as a small-timer, like Chómpiras.
Anyway, we worked hard on the installation, but there were also meetings with the resident artists in the space and visits to museums and galleries, and we took advantage of the time to see many portfolios of Cali artists (really good, seriously). The day of the inauguration, on Dani's suggestion, we had a dialogue about what the art of the future would be like. The theme was really sci-fi, as you can imagine: Óscar Campo, a local filmmaker, showed a horrific short film made with documentary snapshots of the city (pure poverty porn), Dani screened a dystopic film filled with jokes about the art-system, and I spoke about Antonioni's The Red Desert, a film for which I feel special devotion. Have you seen it? I spoke about that film precisely because it was made during the Cold War years, under the permanent threat of catastrophe, but what's most impressive is that Antonioni seems to be saying that with or without nuclear disaster, the worst has already happened. Desire is broken. What breaks with the idea of an end in history —that the nuclear threat makes patent— is desire. Desire is the true machine propelling history. And we have arrived at the point where our desire has suffered an astonishing transformation since at least the '50s, and we still don't know what it will end up turning into.
Anyway, sometimes I'm given to thinking like this, you already know the idiot I can be. One has to go out and dance salsa in Cali to rechannel that desire. What would become of us Colombians without dance? We would be even worse than we already are, incredible as it seems. The people here begin dancing and something miraculous starts to work. It's like seeing a cat jump, or when you find yourself in the street with a rat and the rat is startled and scurries away. There is something miraculous in it. Something animal, in any case. There are no muscles anymore, just rhythm passing through the clothing and deforming it subtly, as the dancer smiles with complete happiness. It's like seeing a rat scurrying away in slow motion.
And since you unleashed the heavy artillery of classics, I have no choice but to pull out the true H bomb. Because look, we can make a thousand lists of the Genuine Badasses of the continent, but I have no doubt that any of them would have to include, and in one of the top positions, this puny human with the voice of an inebriated dog, the biggest punk that's emerged in all the Caribbean.
Here you go, so that you suffer through it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PpmwQcc1h2g
Good luck and strength,
El Jéctor.
PD. Tomorrow, in the early morning, I leave for Quito.
From: Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Wed, Feb 5, 2014 at 11:06 AM
Carneishon on my lapel,
Like the great song by Lavoe (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gAlATS5ioAg), this email is yesterday's news. It's arriving late because I was going crazy with work and moving, and though I wanted to tell you that today I would be buying a bookcase, searching among the fucking drawers of my furniture for the tragedies of Euripides (I promised to loan them) and finishing a prologue that I was assigned on the Stateless Prose of the master [Julio Ramón] Ribeyro (do you like him?), by the time I got around to it, I'd already bought the bookcase, found the tragedies, loaned them, and finished the annoying prologue.
The only thing missing, then, is your response about the Peruvian author, which as I know it will be affirmative, isn't necessary, and so nothing is missing. Everything has arrived late. Even your fondness for Ribeyro. Who, by the way, and speaking of taste, writing and those pretty boys we have to put up with at the literary congresses, meetings, and book fairs where I also feel like a Chómpiras of letters, wrote these great lines: "The literary ostentation of many Latin American writers. Their complex of proceeding from peripheral or underdeveloped areas of the world, and their fear that they'll be taken as uncultured. The demonstrative will of their works, social climbing to the max. To prove that they too can encompass all culture —What culture? As if there only existed one culture!— and express it in an encyclopedic work that summarizes twenty centuries of history. New and rich aspects of their works: eclectic, monstrous, and ornate mansions like the attire that the African immigrant or the Parisian slumdweller wears on Sundays to stroll down the boulevards. His own shine discredits him."
Does any name occur to you after reading the Stateless Prose #142 of the master? It's too easy: choose any author published by Alfaguara.
I read of your experience in Cali and envy it with teeth clenched. I would have loved to have been there, in the gallery which inspired the space in Los estratos, at the exhibition installation, and above all, at the discussions you told me about, even more so if these approached the subject of desire, which has obsessed me for so very long (my thesis was on the master-slave dialectic in Hegel and, therefore, on desire). You're completely right: The Red Desert is a masterpiece, and our desire (or our object of desire, because desire is always the same, as the inspirational Don Karlitos Marx would say) has been transformed in a radical way over the last few years. In large part, perhaps, because we have arrived at a point at which for some, everything desirable is achievable, while for others (the immense majority) the object of desire remains forbidden even before desiring it. The only thing that remains, then, is to desire without the principle of sense.
On that note, this Thursday a very good friend, José Jiménez Ortiz (https://www.jmnz.mx/jmnz/index.php?p=539.0) inaugurates his new exhibition, in which he presents several pieces having to do with the subject of desire and longing. I would love it if you could look at them and comment on them, above all on a piece he made with the traces people leave on the computers of internet cafés. You tell me if you find something on his page of what I'm talking about, obviously, if you have time.
And so as not to forget merely trivial subjects of no importance, I'll tell you that just as you're moving to your place, my pains are moving through my body: now I have asthma and am unable to move, because this morning while running (gambling my bronchi in the smog of this sewer in which I live, I know) I tripped on a crack and simultaneously fucked up my left ankle and right knee.
Big hugs,
Thedoublecripple.
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Thu, Feb 6, 2014 at 9:10 AM
Meister Monguiliano,
The stateless Peruvian buzzard is one of our zen masters, obviously. I've always felt devotion to his writing, but also to the elegance with which he constructed his self-exile. And of course many, many names occur to me that would fit in your description of the ostentatious Latin American writer. I, for example, am a pure middle-class snob, a cheap quote machine, and what's more I identify myself with the Subsaharan individual that puts on his suit on Sundays to stroll down the boulevards. The stateless buzzard had an aristocratic notion of taste that I, in large part, share. I believe in a certain idea of classicism (a mix of wisdom and lightness, knowledge made malleable, sensual). And I believe, like him, that erudition is something very different from culture, that "the member of a primitive tribe that possesses the world in ten basic notions is more cultured than the specialist in sacred Byzantine art who doesn't know how to fry a couple of eggs". But I also believe that there is a politics in the Sunday suit of the Subsaharan individual that Ribeyro was possibly incapable of appreciating. There is in it an affirmation that goes behind the idea of the lumpen and alienated leisure of the Saturday Night Fever type, that idea of leisure that the situationists despised but which seems to me potentially revolutionary. I believe that in the forms of leisure of the workers, of the popular classes, very strong imaginary conceptions are produced which point to a utopic conception of life in the best sense. As I said to you in another message, I distrust the Adornian distrust of the culture of the masses. I distrust those who only see fascism in football, in reality shows, in programs of teletrash. Rather I believe, like Benjamin, that every document of barbarianism is at the same time a document of civilization. And vice versa. One of the most common errors of the critical tradition consists in unilaterally reifying cultural products, creating a determinist context for objects, a genealogical prison that impedes its resignification, its reuse.
These days I've been thinking a lot about these things. Above all after the experience in Cali. For example, in the last few years a style of dance called salsa choke has become popular there. It's a way of dancing I'd never seen, with some very strange and subtle movements that put the music’s beat out of joint, attacking it against the rhythm; the dancers combine very smooth swaying and small spasms. There is a flow, elements that are stretched, and at the same time contractions, very defined marks in space (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B7Ldrymh950), parries, cuts. Lately even the players on the national team celebrate goals with steps from choke. The thing has gone on growing and growing, and surely within a time it will become a product of well-packed shit for the deceitful cultural industry. But, at least at the moment, the thing still hasn't lost its affirmative power. One must take into account the context of extreme violence where this dance has been produced, between Buenaventura and Cali, in black shanty towns where people get together to dance on the sidewalks and on the roofs of houses. Favelas where even now, at this moment I write to you, an atrocious war is being unleashed for the control of those territories, because that is the main corridor through which most drugs leave the country. In those neighborhoods there are places known as "picaderos". They're shacks where people are dismembered alive and the screams and cries are heard for kilometers around. The people have to live with that every day. And that is precisely where salsa choke was born, as a radical positioning of the body, as if the body said: destroy this if you want, bastard. Dismember this if you can, sonofabitch. You shoot me here and I'll escape there. Salsa choke is the culture of the masses and it is resistance. For that reason I distrust that idiotic critical thought which only sees trash and underdevelopment in these things. The people often respond to pain with imagination and beauty. And in Colombia the people throw their body into it, literally.
Well, blood brother, let's continue. I leave you with a video of young geniuses of choke:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3hUNNowoz4U&feature;=youtu.be
Big hug,
The hillbilly.
PS. The work of your friend José Jiménez Ortiz seems really fantastic. I'll look into it in more depth.
From: Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 12:19 PM
Choke dancer of my heart,
It's exciting to confirm that the very clear mirror of my friend's house works just as well in "seeing beyond the obvious" as the Sword of Omens of the immense Lion-O.
However, of middle class snobbery, you and I have very little. Even if we are a couple of cheap quote resellers and have our own notion of classicism (which you point to and which Ribeyro summarizes so well), for all our best efforts, we can't bring ourselves to be tacky. And we can't bring ourselves to do so, in the sense the Buzzard describes, because we aren't willing to (and this is what the Peruvian criticized) sell Latin America like someone selling smoke. In truth we aren't like those authors that "translate" their reality in order to charm foreigners. You said well that the base of all culture is popular culture. But the tragedy of popular culture is that it ceases being an object for itself and becomes a saleable commodity for another, because then it stops being popular culture and is converted into spectacle. What's bad about it, then, is not the suit of the Subsaharan individual, it is the suit of the Subsaharan individual in which the colors were dyed fluorescent in Chinese laboratories (they know very well what colors most dazzle Europeans thinking of Africa) and the fabrics were sewn by Turkish children (who were taught how to sew the Austrian knot and Bavarian stich perfectly). What's bad about the suit that Ribeyro talks about isn't even the suit: it's wearing it with Parisian shoes, Italian wallet, and Venetian hat. What's bad about the Subsaharan suit, then, is not the pride with which it is worn, but the hang-ups with which it is worn.
Because every hang-up accepts domination, because without pride there is no revolutionary content in our acts. Rebellion (and before that, even: resistance, as Ranajit Guha and the rest of the historians of the school of subaltern studies have explained so well) takes off not only from feeling ourselves completely confident and in harmony with our discourse and our acts, but also with renouncing the desire for our discourse and our acts to be understood and shared by dominant society. Not only is it not necessary to translate popular culture for dominant society: it is not even necessary to aim for them to understand it! Because the rebellion will develop in a circle to which we must not give them entrance, and because it must explode in their face. And explode not only like a dance or a mask or a carnival, but with the hidden content with which these dances, masks, and carnivals threaten. As you say, when they dance these guys are in reality saying: dismember this, sonofabitch, if you can, even if the dominant class only sees the latest fashionable dance. This is my fear with massification: that it loses the: dismember this, sonofabitch. So that only the dance remains.
(And speaking of dances and subterranean discourses, help me find the hidden discourse, the dismember this, sonofabitch, in this latest and most absurd document of barbarism and culture that my country has produced. I honestly declare myself incapable of watching it. It's about the latest dance from the north, danced by more people each day, all bearers of their own emblem: pointy boots: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=veQkt4tS0Tc —forget the mongoloid journalist—).
Now, returning to our situation and extrapolating (and also exaggerating) to nearly absurd levels the theme which Ribeyro denounced, and which we haven't discussed so much: Junot Díaz, let's not be taken for fools, is in the end nothing more than just an English-Spanish dictionary. And writers like Vallejo are an enigma and an endless series of questions for even those people that use a dictionary. It's worth the effort to read the extraordinary article by Binyavanga Wainaina on Granta's selection of African authors (this article is also fairly illuminating with respect to our other subject, popular culture): https://www.granta.com/Archive/92/How-to-Write-about-Africa/Page-1
Sending an enormous hug,
Monki Paiton.
PS. We are so far from the elegance and tenacity of Don Ribeyro building his self-exile!
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Fri, Feb 7, 2014 at 9:54 PM
Herr Mvnk,
I'd already been introduced to the mysterious world of pointy boots, and the truth is that frankly it is charming (in fact, it reminds me of some visions I had a few years ago during the consumption of San Pedro, Andean peyote: monstrous protuberances that emerged from things, plants, words, so just seeing it already makes me laugh uncontrollably). But I wouldn't know how to read beyond the superficial and purely phenomenal impressions that it produces in me. There is something in the creole culture of indigenous roots that borders on a macabre and very strange humor. It happens in the Andean world with the penchant for the miniature, with the concept of reducing everything to a minuscule size: the tiny becomes tender, amusing, and on occasion, sinister. In Bolivia, as perhaps you know, there's a big fair of the miniature every January. It's like a celebration of abundance, but at a small size. I suppose there is something analogous in allowing the points of the boots to grow to absurd lengths (beyond the obvious connections with the phallic and the narco-girlymacho culture and so on). What I like about the peasant culture of indigenous roots is the confidence with which it delivers itself to the ridiculous, to excess, nearly a Gombrowiczian movement of the grotesque.
Of course, as you say well, all manifestations of popular culture are anchored and even determined by neoliberal logic (which is precisely what is behind the identity fallacy that Binyavanga Wainaina condemns; multiculturalism is obviously a branch of the market economy).
But we live in a world where everything is shot through with the aesthetic (and by aesthetic I understand conditions of sensibility) of capitalistic ideology. There is no possible refuge. Neither in high culture, nor in the aristocracy of our admired Buzzard, nor in popular culture, nor in folklore, nor in the avant garde. In this respect, Žižek says something that seems very relevant to me, and it is that ideology is never more present than when one intends to avoid it, "if there is an ideological experience in its most pure expression, in its zero level, it is produced at the moment at which we adopt an attitude of ironic distancing, laughing at the mad ideas in which we are disposed to believe. That moment of deliberate, hearty laughter, when we look at the absurdity of our faith, is when we become pure subjects of ideology, when ideology exercises its greatest control over us." This, of course, attacks the waterline of a certain notion of irony which is presented as an attitude prior to any naive understanding of the real. I defend the second type of irony: that of Cervantes when he tells us about the nasty luck that befalls poor Sancho and Don Quijote. The first type of irony is associated with cynicism (nothing other than a perfection of fear, of terror of the real, of the unpredictable, of chance) and is one of the most typical attitudes of the capitalistic subject: the cosmopolitan know-it-all attitude, instructed (trained, rather), well-traveled, that turns the cheek with paternal disdain when it doesn’t understand something. In summary: the ostentatious writer that the Buzzard talked about.
Although I would add a new form of Latin American ostentation, and it is that of those guys who boast about the poverty of their origins, of the home without books in which they had to do what they could to cultivate their genius, and who claim that when they were children nobody talked to them about "culture" (which I suppose should bring us to immediately applaud them, unconditionally admire them, and forgive their flagrant frivolity). I speak, obviously, of types like Junot Díaz, a type that has the nerve to call us South American writers "white guys" when his ecological niche and institutional megaphonism wouldn't have been possible without the multicultural ideology of the gringo right. It is not an exaggeration to say that there would be no Junot Díaz without Ronald Reagan. I am not going to call him cynical, because I'm sure that he himself believes his position of subalternity is authentic. The worst and best business that many "Latino" writers living in the United States have engaged in is to have given in to the discourse of their owners, a discourse that understands race as the grand epistemic framework. And so, their affirmation of ethnic difference gives them publicity, but at the cost of reinforcing segregation at a deeper level. For that reason Junot only sees "white guys" when he is invited to congresses in Latin America, and his whole goddamn life he will never truly understand the creole Borges, the caboclo Guimaraes Rosa, the Greek-Chilean Alfonso Reyes, the mulato Machado de Assis, the Robinsonian Elizondo, the Polish Pitol, or the Buzzard.
Because the gringos have put racial glasses on him with which to see the world, poor guy. If only somebody would take them off him!
Ariós amigou,
J.
PD. And if Junot believes that everything pale is white, I challenge him to a dance competition to see who is more black.
Emiliano Monge
To: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
Sat, Feb 8, 2014 at 12:54 PM
Dear Mr. Carnes,
How right you are with respect to that humorous and macabre character of a certain creole culture of indigenous roots. In fact, it is really interesting to see how, in many of its manifestations, the excess is precisely what supplies the desire. Everything that is or can be has to be more: start and end of the peasant culture. One not only has to obtain what one longs for, but go a little beyond. As if limits didn't exist. In these types of manifestations, you are also right, there is a lot of abandon, and nearly a celebration of the grotesque. However, what interests me most is where there isn't abandon in excess.
Because if excess is a voluntary consequence, it comes off as obviously funny, and so yes, it is a Gombrowiczian banner of the grotesque. But what happens if excess is only the result of an incapacity to locate limits? What happens if we are not even capable of marking off that which we desire, if we are not conscious of excess? The Mexican narco from the north imitating the cowboy aesthetic is not the same as the narco from the north carrying that same aesthetic to the level of pointy boots. You say that one should renounce discussing the macho and the phallic from the start, but I believe it is the unconscious excess, the excess without limits of the pointy boots, which itself already gave up this issue even before an analysis could be made of it. Because evidently in the narco aesthetic there is an unquestionable macho and phallic content, but is it in the pointy boots? Or did they go so far already that they are something else? It seems to me that the incapacity to locate the limit, which is what gives rise to the unconscious excess, transforms, in this case, the footwear of the brave, aggressive, and virile Marlboro man into the footwear of the court jesters. And the boots that call forth the fight become an excuse for the fight. There is a reconversion of the white into black.
And here, it seems to me, we are before the line that divides the popular culture we defend, that of conscious excess, from that which does nothing and does so much damage, that of unconscious excess. Which is the same, by the way, as what Žižek says when he talks about returning or not to being subjects of the ideology that controls us: laughing consciously or unconsciously, with or without ironic distance. But, as I already said, I still don't have this all clear.
What I do have very clear, in contrast, is the disgust this class of writers also generates in me, who claim the poverty of their origins and boast of the effort it took to get out of the Latin American sewers... to then convert themselves into those lavish worldly men shining out from behind their display window Armani suits. It's pathetic to see them surrendering to their readers, or even worse, to the critics and directors of cultural supplements with their shitty little discourse that at its root only seeks to avoid literary treatment of the literary. But worst of all is that this discourse works for them. Because the articles about Latin American writers, in the yankee and European press, always speak about the origin and personal struggle of the author. I already know that colonialist prejudice is difficult to overcome, but it is even more so if our peers encourage it, using it as currency to exchange. Do you remember that chat we had in Madrid, in Jose's house, about the pathos and condescension of the immense majority of Spanish reviewers when talking about books by South American writers? And here we are, so many months afterward, realizing that we owe this pathos and this condescension, in addition to colonialism (which judges itself to be the only bearer of the natural and the universal, and continues seeing us as curious manifestations of the local) to the Junot Díazes of the world, who prefer to begin their conferences saying: "where I come from" than to talk about literature!
Every time I hear or read one of these writers, it makes me think of one of Artaud's greatest lines: "Ceaselessly, a few dogs roam the steppes in search of wolves, seeking to convert them into dogs".
Strong hugs,
Monge.
PS. In addition to the dance-off, I say we add a mezcal challenge.
From: Juan Sebastián Cárdenas
To: Emiliano Monge
Mon, Feb 10, 2014 at 11:55 AM
Prezado doutor Monch,
Your theory of desire applied to the aesthetic of excess in popular culture seems to me very suggestive.
The idea that we end up being disproportionate because we fail to make the object of desire concrete is a characteristic Gutiérrez-Alea already pointed to in Memories of Underdevelopment. Do you remember the grotesque melodrama that took place in court with the family of the girl the protagonist sleeps with? The girl stages all that drama because ultimately she herself doesn't know what she wants. It is very possible that the relationship with desire has to do with the legacy that, for better or worse, the Baroque culture has left us Latin Americans. And I say for better or worse because I see potential in precisely that which you called "unconscious excess". Put in another way, it is in the symptom, the manifestation of the sickness, where the possibilities of art are suggested. It is only necessary to take the step from "unconscious excess" to "conscious excess" for form to appear. Art, we could say, is the result of beginning to read the deformed as form, the monstrous as a morphology of the possible. We could also say that the displacement of reading is a constitutive part of our literature. A displacement that is analogous to the act of eating: cannibalism. From the Inca Garcilaso to Borges.
Unconscious excess is the terrain of the immature, of the unfinished. That's why the tension that Gombrowicz posed between immaturity and form continues to be so relevant. Maturity is incapable of giving us forms. Maturity is sterile in the sense that TS Eliot gave to that word (waste), that is to say, a museum or a supermarket that we can order or disorder at our whim, as Lyotard would have it. The mature is a wasteland.
The immature, in contrast, is the space of the potential something, despite it being always on the verge of failing in the rigor of the climate of the unconscious. The artist accepts that challenge: he submerges himself in the immature in search of form.
And therefore, the step from unconscious excess to conscious excess is mediated by a didactic action, by a lesson, understood as a redirection of attention. To teach is to point out.
I know that "pedagogy" is very much stigmatized by high culture, I know the idea of teaching is frequently presented as cheap populism or paternalism. But let's return to Žižek. Isn't one more immersed in cheap populism or paternalism precisely when one intends to hide from it? Isn't denying didacticism a twisted way of concealing the ways in which it "instructs" perception and consciousness? Perhaps one must begin from the starting point that every perception and every construction of the conscious is previously mediated, that nothing exists exterior to mediation, that there is no pure position from which to judge objectively.
It's not strange to find people who criticize the exhibitions of the Museo Reina Sofía because they are full of text, of "explanations". Often I've had to hear things like: "they don't let the works breathe, the works need silence around them, so that nothing interferes with their reading, so that they don't asphyxiate the pure perception of the object, they're intending to impose on me their vision of the world and of art". Frankly I find these commentaries laughable. There are no ideal conditions for the perception of a work. Even in laboratory conditions we are always confronted by the work in the midst of noise, in the seat of a bus full of sweaty people, with Arjona playing at full volume on the speakers. The perception is always directed, dictated, always. The Reina Sofía makes that condition explicit in its installations; there they never hide from you their line of reading, they never stop marking it out so that all the material becomes an object of debate. That is called democracy. But high culture is not democratic. High culture constantly struggles so that the ideology that allows its existence and its privileges remains hidden. High culture is what sends dogs to domesticate wolves, to preach the gospel of false emancipation, the gospel that asks us to jump into absolute liberty while in reality making us pass through a hoop.
No doubt, we are going to have to settle these questions over a few mezcals. But without "junots", please.
A storm of hugs.
Previous entries:
[Ignacio Echeverría vs. Damián Tabarovksy]
[Mario Bellatín vs. Edmundo Paz Soldán]
[Patricio Pron vs. Rafael Gumucio]
[Lina Meruane vs. Cristina Rivera Garza]
