14 - Aesthetics

Kate Jenckes and Patrick Dove. In Dictionary of Latin American Cultural Studies, eds.
Robert McKee Irwin and Mnica Szurmuk. Under preliminary contract with University of
Florida Press.

Aesthetics comes from the Greek word aisthanumai, which refers to sense
perception. The term was recuperated in the eighteenth century by German philosophers to
designate a theory of perception that related especially to the beautiful and the frightening;
subsequently, the term came to be associated with artistic experience (perception, intuition
and representation). One of the most influential texts on aesthetic theory is Friedrich
Schillers 1794 On the Aesthetic Education of Man, which proposes an ideal connection
between the individual and the state mediated through aesthetic experience. For Schiller,
aesthetic experience is capable of uniting the spheres of the sensible and the rational, and
the particular and the universal, in such a way as to resist the growing fragmentation of the
human condition in the modern era. Schillers ideas about aesthetic education were
appropriated by nineteenth-century Liberalism by influential Spanish American
intellectuals such as Esteban Echeverra, and had strong repercussions in several instances
in the twentieth century in which art and culture were considered pillars of the nation-state
In Latin America, aesthetic questions lay at the heart of educated Creoles search for
a national or regional identity that would not be a mere imitation of European culture.
Efforts to found an autochthonous artistic culture increased at the end of the nineteenth
century and in the first decades of the twentieth century with movements such as
modernismo and vanguardismo, which in spite of their strong European influences,
represented attempts to establish an artistic style that would be properly Latin American.
The desire to identify new origins of Latin American culture is also evident in the cultural
populism developed after the Mexican revolution by figures such as Jos Vasconcelos and
Diego Rivera, among others. The flurry of narratives produced in the middle of the
twentieth century (during a period known as the Boom) could be said to constitute a kind
of synthesis of these different movements, by weaving together original and unique
representations of some of the varied currents of Latin American culture and history.
While proponents of such literary and artistic movements endeavored to create forms of
expression that would be specifically Latin American, their critics argued that they ended

152
up ignoring, excluding, or appropriating the heterogeneous experiences of the continent in
order to create cultural objects whose intended audience was Europe or the Eurocentric
metropolitan centers of the Americas.
This is an explicit tendency in one of the foundational texts of modern Latin
American aesthetics, Ariel [1900], by the Uruguayan Jos Enrique Rod. In this essay, the
author exhorts the youth of America to embark on a new stage of Latin American history,
starting from an aesthetic education that would establish the basis of social and political
values in relation to a notion of art as ideal representation. This ideal is rooted in elements
of German philosophy that attribute to art the qualities of being universal, reasonable,
disinterested, and spiritual. Rod contrasts this ideal, embodied by the character Ariel in
Shakespeares The Tempest, with the materialism, personal interest, and irrationality of the
character Caliban. Rod employs this opposition to justify an anti-democratic hierarchy in
which the social and cultural elites of Latin America would have hegemony over the poor
and illiterate inhabitants of the continent; furthermore, he advocates the spiritual superiority
of Latin Americans over North Americans, who, according to him, lack cultural and artistic
sensibility.
Such an opposition between culture and materialism turned out not to be sustainable
in twentieth-century Latin America, where heterogeneous social and historical forces
tended to interrupt attempts to establish universal notions of culture. Ariel represents an
extreme view that was mostly left behind by the main literary and artistic movements of the
twentieth century, which readily incorporated any number of material elements that Rod
would have found distasteful: for example, representations of technology, mass culture,
ruptured language, emphasis on sonority, and mixes of cultures and discourses.
Nevertheless, many works that attempted to represent the heterogeneous forces of the
continent ended up by appropriating them and neutralizing their difference with respect to
hegemonic structures.
The second half of the twentieth century witnessed renewed attempts to define Latin
American culture beyond the purely artistic endeavors of the preceding years. A
paradigmatic expression of this redefinition appears in the essay Caliban [1971] by the
Cuban writer Roberto Fernndez Retamar, in which the author explicitly rejects the
hierarchy posited by Rod and suggests that the symbol that best corresponds to the

153
experience of Latin America is not Ariel but Caliban. In The Tempest, Caliban is a slave
who chooses not to follow the masters commandsas does Arielbut who instead rebels,
using the language the master has taught him in order to curse him. Fernndez Retamar
suggests that this portrait represents the true cultural heritage of the continent, and he lists
political and cultural figures from Rubn Daro to Che Guevara who contributed to a
cultural politics of rebellion, hewn from the tools of the European and North American
masters. The figure of Caliban evokes a material reality that dominant powers cannot
idealize or eliminate.
If hopes of creating forms of culture and politics that would reflect material realities
and lived experiences of Latin America strengthened after the 1950s, the following decades
saw brutal suppressions of such possibilities. As a result of the civil wars in Central
America, the repression of popular protests in Mexico, and the rise of brutal military
regimes in many South American countries, artists, writers, and intellectuals throughout
Latin America were forced to question their roles and their place in the world. These
intellectuals felt compelled to seek new forms of representation and new spaces of thought
and creation, given that traditional structures were being eliminated or appropriated by
official discourse. These new forms included mass media, such as cinema and popular
music, as well as media more traditionally associated with art and literature. Film, it was
felt, promised to change perceptions and expand consciousness to places beyond the reach
of metropolitan intellectuals. Popular music, both folkloric and rock, combined political
denunciation with poetic lyrics and rhythm and melody. Visual art was radicalized, leaving
the protected enclaves of the museum or gallery, and bursting into public spaces with
sculptures made from the detritus of modern life, or in performance pieces that were
designed to shock and confuse the norms and distinctions that ordered national imaginaries.
Elena Poniatowska, Carlos Monsivis, Nelly Richard, and Beatriz Sarlo are some of
the most prominent figures to produce texts that function as both analytical and cultural
interventions during these years. Their works effectively changed the direction of aesthetic
thought and production in Latin America by integrating elements from a variety of genres,
including chronicles, journalism, fiction, sociology, political activism, and visual arts.
Furthermore, they have played important roles in the formation of public opinion on
cultural production, socio-political events in their own countries and in Latin America as a

154
whole, and made significant contributions the field of cultural criticism on an international
level.
The chronicle is a genre that challenges traditional forms of representation, in spite
of the fact that its history in Latin America can be traced back to the first encounters
between European conquistadores and native inhabitants of the continent. Elena
Poniatowska and Carlos Monsivis recuperated this genre as a means of denouncing the
simultaneous repression of popular sectors and the privatization of the state in Mexico
following the turbulence of 1968. La noche de Tlatelolco: testimonios de historia oral
[1971] represents the first use of such a use of this form. The book is comprised of a
montage that incorporates different materials and media, including interviews with
participants of the student movements who were repressed by the Mexican army, as well as
with government officials responsible for organizing the repression. The chronicle includes
cuttings taken from newspapers of the time, photographs that attempt to document a
massacre whose very existence was denied or ignored by official channels, and comments
penned by Poniatowska hereself. La noche de Tlatelolco constitutes a collective
testimonial work that lays bare the mediations and compromises that form part of its very
construction and raison dtre.
Carlos Monsivis also tends to employ the structure of montage to denounce
corruption and incompetence of the Mexican state in relation to natural disasters and the
forces of late capitalism, and as a way of revindicating minor triumphs of the oppressed. A
noteworthy example is Entrada libre: crnicas de una sociedad que se organiza [1987], a
collection of essayistic chronicles that address a series of social ruptures characterized by a
State that had abandoned its role of reconciling social conflicts: the Pemex (Petrleos
Mexicanos) explosion in 1984, and the earthquake in Mexico City in 1985. In addition to
their objective of political denunciation, the chronicles are reminders of what Monsivis
calls a community effort of self-organization and solidarity, a space independent from the
[national] government, in effect, a zone of antagonism. They aim to mark the emergence
of new conjunctures within the temporalities of late capitalism, but they are not necessarily
reducible to that. Monsiviss essays represent approaches to social and cultural
phenomena that are difficult to summarize. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify recurrent
narrative strategies: as John Kraniauskas affirms, Monsivis, rather than telling us,

155
shows us, and in so doing he moves back and forth between the diverse experiences and
ideological positions that make up the cultural field he is attempting to explore. His essay-
chronicles are polycentric and performative, setting in motion ideological conflicto and
celebrating small victories wherever they are to be found. Such features are difficult to
reconcile with conventional definitions of the essay and the chronicle.
In Chile the 1973 coup detat produced what has been described as a crisis of
meaning for writers, intellectuals, and artists. Under severe censorship from the military
regime, and in the face of the disappearance and torture of thousands of Allende supporters,
those intellectuals who were not imprisoned or exiled felt the need to question old models
of political commitment in art and thought. Nelly Richard, in her book Mrgenes e
institucin: arte en Chile desde 1973, describes how the artistic and literary communities
pushed the category of art to its extremes as a way of increasing its strength against the
governments repression and control of all forms of public expression. The artists in what
is known as the Escena de avanzada (Vanguard Scene) rejected any direct or instrumental
relationship between art and politics, aiming rather to generate a form of art that would
function as a disruptive force in the rigid society created by the military. This artistic
movement was characterized by an interest in collective artistic production and an attempt
to erase the limits between the auratic space of art and the people, and a thematic focus on
the undisciplined materiality of bodies and desire. Richard, who was not a member of the
movement, saw in its productions an alterative to the political and academic discourses of
the left, which not only were threatened by the regime but also tended to reproduce the
hierarchies and totalizing schemes associated with the official discourse. Influenced by
Michel Foucault, Roland Barthes and the Argentine journals Contorno and Punto de vista,
among other sources, Richard conceived a form of essayistic writing that combined
observations about art, society, popular culture, urban space and gender, and which focused
on micropolitics and fragments alongside major political and social events. In 1990, at the
beginning of the transition to democracy, Richard founded the Revista de Crtica Cultural,
creating a space for the public development of this form of cultural criticism. Although it
has been the object of numerous controversies, especially for its importation of foreign
ideas and a perceived elitism, the journal has become an important force for the redefinition

156
of political and cultural discourse in Chile, and has had a considerable influence on other
Latin American countries as well.
During the Argentine dictatorship a group of leftist intellectuals founded the journal
Punto de vista as a space for political, cultural, and social reflection. The journals critical
project sought to join dynamic and open concepts of art and politics, with the goals of
interrogating the relation between the two and destroying any conception of cultural
autonomy as well as the instrumentality of art presumed by political commitment.
Influenced by English cultural materialism and French sociology, the journal aimed to
probe the historical and material bases of Argentine cultural production, and to de-mythify
a homogeneous notion of culture, combining critical analyses of literature, cinema, rock
music, art and popular culture together with psychoanalysis, sociology, and cultural theory.
Beatriz Sarlo, one of the journals founders and still its chief editor today, is a paradigmatic
figure of the type of cultural criticism promoted by the journal. In her first book, El
imperio de los sentimientos [1985], she analyzes popular womens magazines to reveal a
historical perspective that differs significantly from masculine and elite versions of history.
In her second book, Una modernidad perifrica [1988], she elaborated a theory of
Argentine modernity based on a peripheral consciousness that can be identified in some of
the most sacred texts of Argentine literature, which she places in dialogue with the social
and historical margins of urban life in the 1920s and 1930s. In the 1990s, Sarlo
experimented with a looser essayistic form of cultural criticism in her books Escenas de la
vida postmoderna: intelectuales, arte y videocultura [1994] and Instantneas: medios,
ciudad y costumbres en el fin del siglo [1996], where she collects fragmentary observations
of life in Buenos Aires during late capitalism, combining descriptions of postmodern art
with analyses of the hygienic space of shopping malls and the temporal interruption of the
television remote control.
In spite of the fact that the critical forms advanced by Richard and Sarlo have a
great deal in common with cultural studies, both writers have expressed their differences
with cultural studies as they were practiced in North American academic circles during the
1990s. Richard acknowledges the importance of the Latin American cultural studies
movement in its attempt to decentralize the notion of culture from its monumental and
hegemonic form, by way of increasing the visibility of the multiple manifestations of

157
culture in a given society, and by underscoring underlying tensions between culture and
ideology, history, aesthetics, economics, politics, and social inscription. Nevertheless, she
has criticized the enthusiasm with which North American academics adopted cultural
studies as a way of understanding Latin America. She warns that such analyses run the risk
of characterizing Latin American culture as a brute force or a mute object incapable of
understanding itself, and as a periphery that is condemned to remain in the margins of the
world system. She urges critics to focus on the singular aspects of culture and experience
in Latin America, concentrating on the form or style of those singularities, which are
capable of resisting capture by the normative and totalizing discourse characteristic of
academic investigations. Sarlo shares Richards suspicions vis--vis the implicit
marginalization of Latin America in metropolitan cultural studies, but the solution she
proposes is different. Basing herself on a particular interpretation of the Frankfurt School,
Sarlo rejects mass media as revealing texts about culture and society, and demands a return
to a critical discourse based on aesthetic value and national literary traditions, in spite of the
apparent normativity and conservatism that such a gesture would seem to provoke.
The ideas expressed by Richard and Sarlo about cultural studies point to a
significant tension between cultural production and criticism and the category of the
aesthetic, a tension that has been largely forgotten in the turn to cultural studies over the
past few decades. The change of focus in the study of culture from traditional institutions
of art and literature to popular or mass culture does not guarantee that the new focus will be
able to maintain critical distance from aesthetic and culturalist ideologies that served as the
basis of older forms of criticism. To the extent that cultural studies reproduces a concept of
culture as plenitude or as depository of social values, it will continue to be either too
aesthetic, or not aesthetic enough. The future of cultural studies depends on how it
responds to an interior tension that has marked and divided it since its inception: on one
hand, a desire to distance itself from aesthetic ideology seen as complicit with structures of
domination and normativity; and on the other, a search to affirm the traces of materiality
beneath modern idealizations of culture, a materiality that attests to the factical history of
human stuggles and labors.

158
 Select Bibliography

Franco, Jean. The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City: Latin America in the Cold War,
Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2002.
Gonzlez Stephan, Beatriz, ed. Cultura y tercer mundo. Caracas: Nueva sociedad, 1996.
Herlinghaus, Hermann y Monika Walters, eds. Posmodernidad en la periferia: enfoques
latinoamericanos de la nueva teora cultural. Berlin: Langer-Verlag, 1994.
Kraniauskas, John. John Kraniauskas. Carlos Monsivis : proximidad crtica.: Fractal 2:2
(octubre-diciembre 1997): 111-129.
Ramrez, Mari Carmen. Inverted utopias: Avant-garde in Latin America. New Haven:
Yale University Press, 2004.
Richard, Nelly, ed. La crtica: revistas literarias, acadmicas y culturales, Special Issue
of Revista de Crtica Cultural 31 (2005).
Sarlo, Beatriz. El relativismo absoluto o cmo el mercado y la sociologa reflexionan
sobre la esttica. Punto de Vista 48 (1994): 27-31.

159