The War of Metaphors

Francisco Reyes Palma

For the purpose of this encounter, designed to constitute co-operation networks among Latin American artists, curators and cultural activists, I was requested to participate so as to contribute my reflections on the difficulties of “translation” in contexts that claim to bear similarities with each other. The mere thought of translating ourselves made wonder whether we all belong in a unified linguistic network, inserted in a community of more or less homogeneous contexts. No doubt, the proposal engineered a play between similarities and differences, a Latin American “we” composed of many others, and a set of relations between text and context.
Apart from the fact that there is a correspondence between every cultural fact and an act of translation, I regard translation as a connecting task between realms of signification that would otherwise remain isolated. Translation is a state of between-languages; an initiative seeking to find proximity among senses as well as people, making language to communicate by itself.
Starting from this attempt at translation, I shall linger a while on some of the terminology used in the document on which this encounter was based and which provided the identifying features of the intervening independent management groups. “Context”, included in the said terminology, is a decisive word in terms of the group network, since it tends to be associated to the notion of a surrounding reality, whose existence ineluctably imposes itself on us. Nobody would normally doubt that the context is present. However, it is available to us only as a construction of the mind or as act of creation, though it is as important as the text. The only existing context arouses from an intense effort of selection and forgetfulness. When we offer a definition for “group”, we tend to supplement it with something that appears familiar to us: Latin America as a reassuring context; a geography where we can gather and feel welcomed in a linguistic sense. Hence, we are faced with a problematic notion when it comes to translating Latin America with its various geopolitical and cultural characteristics, its language varieties, different historical experiences and multiple cultural projections.
Ultimately, the setting of Latin America into a union of differences is not really fruitful on the field of negotiation when it come to international exhibition circuits. And this is because we are subordinating a number of nations to a common naming, then to grant the same amount of space to whichever European country, even to the tiniest one, which disposed of its name in an independent manner. In practical, daily terms, it is supposed that this narrow scope may be set right by extending its reach to the notion of Iberian-American, i.e., by incorporating the Spanish element. Even so, these terms are to be resignified from a pragmatic perspective.
Bearing in mind one question (How do our most prominent researchers represent Latin America?), I reviewed some texts that constitute a part of cultural studies and cultural sociology in an attempt to extricate weighty, solid concepts that might aid translation. That initial moment became a language experience. To my surprise, after a tracking glance, strategic terminologies taken from diverse places came together in a meaningful bloc.
What I mean to say is that I found a level of metaphorical enunciation with a strong corporal accent, a terminology that is being commonly used, and one that, in some way, defines a living organism, characterised by discontinuity, subordination, asymmetry, hybridisation, and heterogeneity. This organism was, at the same time, marginal, distorted, disproportionate, emerging, peripheral, informal, or dependent. I am aware of the fact the persistent recurrence of these expressions has stemmed from the pressing need to explain to ourselves the features of our modernity. Still, seen as a whole, they referred me to the existence of the Latin American bloc as a unit in a hatching, incomplete state, when it is still blurred, unbalanced, broken, odd; even monstrous and inferior. An attempt at explaining these marks ends up by colonising us anew, drawing us back to the ancient imaginary of the Conquest with its savages, barbarians, and aberrations of Nature.
This part of my analysis was restricted to a crosswise reading for the sake of separating terms regardless of author, original source, or degree of academic recognition. Seen thus, it did not make any difference whether the words named collective subjects or social processes inside the immense geopolitics called Latin America. In the end, the experiment resulted in a sample of conceptual teratology brandished by our collective intellectual, whose phantom portrayal offers a clear example of the way in which we are spoken by language, and of how discourse, even if it deals with liberation, recolonises us through our own writing.
Now watchful for words, I would have liked to review dozens of texts, including my own, to interrogate them again. However, I had to return to the original purpose of this particular text and account for the notion of translating ourselves in our different realities starting from a set of projects about cultural management.

Group, nation, and history.

I find that wondering about the logic of aggregation, about the search for cohesive elements, might provide good grounds to search for shared meanings; that is to say, such common elements as enable us to translate ourselves. Frederic Jameson outlines some explanatory principles on the matter:
[...] In no way does the concept of a national allegory stand for a nostalgic repetition of the old yearning for an organic community. In fact, the issue at stake is that of a community or group, but such a group may come into existence because it shares a given situation, a set of contradictions, a long-term social crisis or a situation involving aggression or oppression. It is only on the basis of shared danger that a group can be constructed.(1)
If nations are communities bound together by shared fears, when they constitute regional blocs, as is the case with Latin America, they become enlarged communities of fear. Nowadays, regardless of language, territory, inhabitants, and the legal enforcement aimed to keep cohesion and order, the nation viewed as a factor of identification arouses profound distrust amid a fundamental portion of cultural formations. This standpoint is complemented by anti-state control thesis of globalisation, where it is imperative that planetary space be reformulated. Along these lines, each territory is defined as a boundless void deprived of autonomy, sovereignty, or national identities that might hinder the free flow of the market.(2)
This use of spatiality as one of the fictions of power tends to facilitate new forms of generalised spoliation, but the paradox here lies in the fact that the United States of America, the world power that most emphatically insists on its efforts to eradicate all discourse rooted in nationality, behaves like a huge chauvinist enterprise. In this capacity, it closes its frontiers to migration, deploys a set of protectionist barriers that favour its economy alone, and swamps its people with national symbols on the grounds of the threat imposed by external terrorism.
There does not seem to be much dialogue between cultural groups and nation in our days. Artists and curators dispense with national representation in international forums; they are content with being a part of the world’s art group. And when they do represent their country at international events, they do so outside the national rooting that was a distinctive feature in the past. There are artists who take advantage of their double nationality, or who participate in these events as members of national groups that are not theirs, under a foreign flag. Rejection of nationality becomes manifest in the works themselves. Both curators and artists have come under the flag of denationalisation. We should then wonder what aspects of threat and fear intervene in the formation of groups and group networks. While it is true the scale of these phenomena is much smaller than that operating on nations, this does not mean that they lack cohesive elements or aggregation of factors.
Mexico’s recent history seems to provide us with the counterexample for the rejection of nation, understood in the allegorical terms maintained by Jameson. A neighbour to the American aggressive power, Mexico lost over half of its territory in the 19th Century, with the resulting exacerbation of national sentiment. Later on, with “the first revolution in the 20th Century –the civil upheaval known as “the Mexican revolution”- the theme of unity returned to the limelight. Moreover, it took on marked cultural hues that still influences our history: suffice it to think of the heritage of collectives by muralists and engravers.
As was to be expected, reaction to a twofold source of threats (external attacks and the multiplication of internal factions) resulted in artists and intellectuals being absorbed by the State apparatus, though not in a unilinear fashion. Thus, Mexican art and culture became privileged instruments for the restoration of the social tissue, avoiding domestic disintegration and putting a stop to external threats. I am raising the issue because one of the key facts to understand today’s Mexican culture is still to be found in the problem of cohesion and cultural grouping as historical memory. One cannot but feel surprised at finding that the country enjoys unshakeable peace amid a chain of crises, above all, the aboriginal movement uprising that has not subsided for the last decade even though it has suffered the genocidal brutality of low-intensity warfare.
Nevertheless, Mexican rejection of the national is ever stronger, almost irrationally so. No differences are established between the strategic nature of the cohesive force necessary for survival in an environment of external and domestic commercial looting and old patriotic-holiday manipulative behaviours. There is no differentiation between cultural homogenisation mechanisms engineered by the State and the fight for autonomy carried out by national minorities. There is no effective official opposition to the violence exercised on the borders, but there is a complaisant attitude on the face of mediatic mythologies like the cult of Frida Kahlo.
Unlike nations under open military siege, the rest of the countries undergoing experimental globalisation should become aware that they are, in fact, besieged nations, at least in an economic sense. As from there, they should recognise a scenario of invisible wars as a condition that, with equal intensity, affects the survival of cultural networks. But the system possesses the quality of promoting substitute spheres; the one related to international art is a unit characterised by a frivolity stemming from its connection with typographic and interior design, fashion parades, and architectural works signed by renowned professionals.
If the only thing that remains intact, in almost everybody’s view, is the feeling that the State as an agency is on the verge of extinction, then perhaps the only threat suggested by the documents in which the groups briefly described their work is to be found in the institutions of art. I do not mean the fear of being engulfed by the large apparatus of bureaucratic inertia, but merely a slight suspicion to contract the institutional as if it were some kind of infection. Likewise, there are some misgivings about structures offering private sponsorship.
Margin and institution occupy the relevant level, the level of opposites. Both artists and promoters of culture are recognised as independent, liminal, civilian associations. They forswear the institution’s systemic and coercive structure except when it plays its project-funding role. The obvious question is whether the institution itself is a mode of management that keeps rejecting change, incapable of interstitial transformation. Still, are there any worrying issues other than assessing whether the establishment of group networks actually stands for a renovated institutional form?
Rather than go into this quandary, I would prefer to move into another dimension. Michel Foucault’s visionary perspicacity noticed that, during the Cold War era, there was a change of course from disciplinary society towards control society, a characterisation that was taken up later on by Gilles Deleuze. I will not pause too long at control society except to highlight the straggling nature of its domination, its control over marketing, its machine-based surveillance, the end of institutions, the dominance of informatics, the disappearance of frontiers and the reckoning of humans as a recording and determination factor to access.(3)
However, recent historical events like September 11 lead us to take notice of the emergence of unprecedented factors that foreshadow a new aspect of control society. By this I mean the manipulation of terror, a stage of the social field dominated by oversized arbitrariness, with markets operating under illegality or usury, migrations moving forced by a state of emergency, and wars that go against international Law.
Likewise, administration of production lies one step away from administration of death, through new experimental wars whose target is the civilian population. Their chosen weapon is terror, and their aim is to wear away both the unity of the family and the consistence of groups and inhabitants alike. Perhaps the future nature of management networks should be envisaged within this changing framework. Will communities of resistance be able to gloss over demands for defensive action when confronted with networks involving dread, or even terror?
Our efforts at translation will have to reshape the term “cohesion” together with its multiple connotations. The cultural network, just like the notion of Latin America, keeps its motherly, friendly quality, but it is clear that we are faced with such harsh situations that no alibi will open a route of escape or defence.

From tribes to networks, and on to corporate tribes

Following population growth and prestige bestowed upon artists as professionals, there has ensued a population explosion of professional ranks that contend for the pieces of what is usually known as the field of art. They first seek for local recognition and then for international acknowledgement or, conversely, they struggle for recognition abroad in order to ensure a special status in their countries of origin.
Artists, curators, and critics alike cannot set themselves free from the expectation to stand out within this excessively rarefied environment. Still, the decision to define future careers and prestige lies more within the curators’ scope, associated to the possibility of accessing visibility in exhibitions, biennials and fairs. Along these lines, the bare truth is that the skills involved in the game whose prize is to become a part of the prevailing trend may well burn out more energy than does the time devoted to the work itself. However, all in all, real assembly machinery can be deployed to achieve the effect of an actual work of art.
Networks are apt to participate in the dispute for spaces through new forms of grouping together, with a sort of marketing approach gathering the largest possible number of specialists, disciplines and sponsorships under very flexible structures (rather similar to holdings*) spread across control areas.(4) This does not differ much from what is happening to certain groups which, libertarian as their discourse may be, are bent on monopolising support, commissions, and recognition.
The electronic network model, originated from a Cold War experiment intending to maintain communication at work in case of a nuclear attack, unleashed a world-wide informatics revolution as soon as it was introduced into the civil society, bringing along its own virtual space –cyberspace- and its surveillance technologies.
Hence, speaking about the network implies assuming a relational system, a system of unstable power at play. And it is a long time since formal economies have been operating as a network, not to mention informal economies such as drug trafficking, sex tourism, or child prostitution, to cite just a few examples. It goes without saying that, in more modest ways, the industry of great art is also inserted within the same reticular system.
Having reached this point, it might be useful to appeal to some sort of clarity regarding terminology. It was not by chance that Foucault adopted a dual version of power, with its positive aspect, as a productive deployment of strategies, tactics and technologies: a lasting exercise of the act of resistance; a state of friction among individuals and among forces in a permanent state of rearrangement. Power exists only in relational terms; when resistance ceases, power is no more. Conversely, seen in its negative aspect, power was reduced to the sheer presence of the State, or to the imposition of legal codes, to an aggregation of control and repression. Power as negativity then took on the characteristics of an emanation. Our vocabulary is deeply rooted in substantialism, which transforms the said power into something liable to being snatched, attacked, hoarded, and even bequeathed.

Curatorship: an enlarged notion

The old-fangled term “curator”, which initially referred to the function of taking care of works of art, enjoys a special receptivity for new meanings. We can now speak of an aggregation of instrumental power that enables the curator to reshape the realm of creation, and even to propose views of possible and impossible worlds.
In the essay that I submitted to the Conference held under the name Del malestar de la curaduría, I concluded that, since the global art system was actually in charge of control, there was nothing but struggle so that “the curator does not become yet another piece of waste in the global society, and [that we should] consider his projection as a cultural activist, an heir to two significant traditions: the freedom to propose initiatives grounded on creative autonomy and knowledge, and the connectivity of networks, both turning him into a liaison agent among initiatives undertaken by artists’ communities and audiences; among institutions, enterprises, and new technologies. The curator should build rhizome-like rather than horizontal spaces, thus aiding to revert the patterns of a culture that is being threatened by global standardisation, war, and spoliation.(5)
I find something in common between this posit and Duplus’ assertions about how “curatorial practice may be carried out away from art environments, as an operation that creates conditions of possibility for social creativity (6)”
Almost a year after I wrote my paper, the considerations aroused by this meeting prompt me to be more precise in my remarks. Curatorship is a symptom of profound changes in the field of professional specialisation; it also points to ongoing events in the museum institution, one of the most representative mediators in the cultural field. In addition, the curator has been a mobile, connecting agent, because of his readiness to slip between networks made of various devices: the museum or the art gallery and the mass media; entertainment and the Academy; critique and fashion; the artist and audiences; knowledge and technologies; the art market and the cultural industry. To a certain extent, it is demanded that the curator be a builder of more horizontal relational spaces. However, the linearity is the same, only that it is thought of as recumbent. Perhaps the rhizome notion is more productive, as it evokes destructurisation and absence of control.
From the very beginning, the curator has been a split figure, used to connecting dissimilar spheres. He originated from the dematerialization of artistic practice and from a conceptual proposal that validates him as a new kind of creator. On the other hand, he profits from the reshaping of the museum institution in accordance with the demands posed by the arts’ avant-garde without losing the mediating power that enables him to act as an instrument of knowledge. In this capacity, he will classify, separate, arrange, divide, and distribute over time and space. For hundreds of years, these tasks have provided artists’ works with scale, value, and visibility, while the museum, for the same purpose, counted on the support of other institutions pertaining to the world of art, history, and critique.
Nevertheless, we shall have to distinguish among discourse, space, and discursiveness of spaces. In this sense, the curator has transformed the ground where cultural action occurs, and has become a crossing-point, a novel area of indistinctness directed at symbolic production. In fact, I had already noticed the “no place” characteristic in the most recent modes of the museum as a franchise. I now extend it to the curator, together with biennials and art fairs as offshoots of the museum at the point where it comes together with world fairs, thematic parks, and the market. We then reach a globalised version: the metacurator, whose arrogance is as inflated as his assumed power.
Before equating the curator with the action of self-management networks, we shall have to consider the above characterisation. We shall also have to think whether management, autonomous though it may be conceived of, does not end up by moving as a more flexible institutional variable, but still in association with formats redolent of administration and control.

Ubiquity of power

To assume that concentration of power occurs only in institutions is as narrow-minded as to locate it only in one isolated historical event. According to Foucault, we are dealing with a uniform, extensive element. In part, the translation work will consist in establishing bonds between time and space as dynamic expressions of the exercise of power.
That some countries are eternally condemned to be the past strengthens the “metropolitan” idea of their novelty and modernity (metaphors about time applied to the social). Thus, newness becomes incompatible with the notion of tradition. It is a proven fact that we in Latin America can creatively interchange modernity and tradition, even though American hegemonic discourse, out of deficiency rather than of precision, only asserts the tradition of what is new. Countries like Mexico, with its strong indigenous tradition, tend to claim ownership of an exotic utopia: an eternal “transtime”, so to speak, and this is what they exploit as a novelty at the moment of gigantic exhibitions.
Just like the museum, modernity determined its own forms of order and temporality; in some way or other, we should take it upon us to break them down. How to deal with such avant-garde elements that adhere to Saturn’s principle of devouring his own offspring (in other words, to massacre trends? And just not to overlook the other avatar of Saturn the Titan by the name of Cronus, how are we to connect with the avant-garde’s fondness for progress, evolutionary echoes included?
The choice lies in rejecting eternal return as well as the linearity of avant-garde progress. The possibility of taking the lead, of being an avant-garde –a derivation of warfare terminology- is denied to Latin America. It would seem as if we were naturally destined to backwardness, to retreat. The avant-garde is a conservation area pertaining to the modernistic model, and therefore requires a rear-guard. And this is located in the Third World, since the Second World was vacated during the Cold War, when the socialist bloc decided to leave it out of its ideological habitat, in the words used at the time.
Perhaps we feel more comfortable accessing other temporal cycles implying return and repetition, the cycles of fashion adopted by the world of art, for in these the option of “being alternative” –i.e., of becoming invested with otherness- is viewed as a valuable feature in the market of the season’s novelties.
When it is not time that drags us towards difference, then space will. This is why I would prefer to include, in this set of terminologies, particles like the prefix “sub” –I do not mean deputy * commander Marcos, by the way- preceding words like underdevelopment* or subaltern. We even tend to talk about ourselves as inhabitants of the subcontinent, even in Mexico, which, according to cartography, is a part of North America.
According to cartography as a spatialised form of domination, the notion of South appears to be debased. Do you remember the map of the world upside down? A simple little thing like a turn of the co-ordinates, and our assumptions about the size and pre-eminence of countries also takes a turn. Even the scale measurements change. The language of images is also a language pervaded by domination.
Global and glocal are metaphors about space that have already been adopted into the language of networks and groups. As for me, it is not long since I became aware of the word “glocal”, the impossibility of being global, of fully and truly belonging in the imaginary of language that permeates the whole of contemporary life. Again, “glocal” is hybrid born from the crossing of species, as one of its components is related to “local” while the other refers to “global”; when all is said and done, it is a half-caste word. When you do not have what is necessary to be one, so you are two, then you are another aspect of the barred Other, a contrasting figure with the roundness of globality, which keeps to itself the total equilibrium of shape: the perfect sphere.
We find yet another invention of power in the establishment of centrality as a reserved right. At the time of distribution, we were given the “periphery” and, suddenly, a new phenomenon occurs. Culture is driven off the centre; perhaps this decision is only a tactical measure meant to conceal control mechanisms and, perhaps, it drags along the peripheral tails. However, the idea of de-centring has turned out to be so attractive that it has inspired the geometric growth of biennials and art fairs, amid receptive communities comparable to those that travel in search of a snatch of sun and sun in the holiday season.
For time out of mind, the tropes of language have slipped into our modes of thought, and metaphorization has been the way in which patterns of dominance have become natural. This time exceeds by far the one that our thinkers and artists have invested in order to adapt to power-imposed patterns, always resulting in more widespread exclusion.

The network as heterotopy?

Overwhelmed as we feel by the construction and maintenance of our own organisations, it is not often that we are able to situate micropolitical action in long-term prospects. However, I think that resorting to heterotopy as a matrix for reflection might help us to think of the role of metaphors about space and time (always side by side in their relation to power) so as to approach their operational quality.
Originally, heterotopy was the word that anatomists used to name displaced organs. When Foucault availed himself of this notion to deal with space in a broad sense, he discarded the reference to the initial anomaly and turned the concept into the place where the whole set of cultural environments are represented, discussed, or inverted. This fictitious spatiality enjoys full existence and materiality.(7)
At times, the French thinker seems to be dealing with an issue that originated in surrealist paradoxes, and whose purpose was to foster the encounter of heterogeneous spaces; the juxtaposition of the incompatible at one and only place, like Borges did, with that peculiar atmosphere of alienation and familiarity all at once.
The very looseness of the term facilitates the connection among places that were seemingly opposed: the garden and the Turkish baths; the cinema, the brothel, but also prison as an area where control can be perfected. Our attention is drawn by a special variety of spaces –hetrochronies. This feature is shared by the typical 19th Century museum and the pantheon; the former gathers different time planes, whereas the latter establishes total detention of duration.
“Heterotopy” derives from an ancient word of Latin origin, which could be expressed as “alternate place”. The network itself acts as a threshold, the place where all places meet and dialogue about collaborative practices and cultural resistance. The alternate place offers the possibility of keeping up endless processes of movement, of enthusiastic resistance where the important thing is the fact of moving rather than the performance of each group or individual. However, there is some likelihood that the wandering silhouette of the nomadic artist will meet the new spatial device that Foucault relates to a ship. This is the point of “heterotopy par excellence”, the “place no-place”, and a space that is constantly floating and constantly adrift, yet fraught with the capacity to encourage the imaginary.(8)