By RUBENS RUSSOMANNO RICCIARDI*
The genres of the culture industry are not popular art and function as a colonization fetish as an ideology of domination.
As they say, in the dictatorship of public opinion, culture is always good; its meaning is positive. But is it really? They even say that culture is inclusive – even though belonging to a demarcated identity can lead to segregation. And it is politicians who define, for example, the scope of what they understand by Brazilian culture – even though it is, invariably, a second-order idea.
More than that, the genres of the Yankee-American cultural industry are now officially Brazilian, due to the force of neoliberal colonialism: hip hop, funk, gospel and the country (the so-called university country music, which is neither country music nor university music), among others, already receive public subsidies from the Ministry of Culture. So we ask ourselves, is everything as clear as daylight or are we being seduced by the ideologies of culture? Now, if we develop truly critical thinking, could culture not be problematized in a more ingenious epistemological process?
Despite its sterility, even with public budgets, culture is established as an official policy imposed by the Union, also involving states and municipalities. We also ask, as clear as daylight – as one would expect – whether the cultural policy acts in favor of theater and dance companies, art galleries, theaters and other physical spaces suitable for art, orchestras and opera companies, art schools for children, social projects with the arts, and whether it preserves the historical and architectural heritage with dignity? Right? Wrong! – none of this is actually included in the cultural policy in Brazil.
According to neoliberal logic, this democratization of culture is reduced to mega shows pyrotechnological – and the rest can fall into ruins. There is even a National Culture System – yes, hell is paved with good intentions – as if the SUS, which is essential and of the utmost importance – deserved such a cheap and opportunistic analogy.
The secretariats and the ministry of culture – and the same logic also applies to the alienated extensions of the vice-rectorates of culture in universities – primarily promote the showbiz and still largely of Yankee-American origin. Therefore, in the cultural policy – always with socialized costs and privatized profits – there is less of a voice of its own (critical emancipation) and more colonial subordination (outsourcing of thought and, like almost all outsourcing, precarious). And all this without art or philosophy.
Let us make it clear that our criticism is against the State, which is antagonistic to the arts and imposes an official culture, but this does not mean that we are in favor of privatization or the absence of the State. Today, the State, the great promoter of the arts, through public institutions – such as universities, foundations outside the cultural sector and stable bodies – is the only one capable of providing alternatives to the neoliberal culture industry. Our issue is that the so-called cultural sector (cultural policy) is not fit to care for or manage the arts – much less is it capable of promoting critical thinking.
More precisely, the situation is embarrassing: cultural politicians – generally political cronies without intellectual merit – find themselves hierarchically above artists. In this way, lack of talent rules over talent – an inversion of values perhaps unthinkable in other areas of knowledge. In the case of cultural politicians, however, it is almost always like this: the ignorant individual, vested with authority, becomes cruel.
And speaking of cruelty, the politics of culture dates back to the Chamber of Culture of the Third Reich (Reichskulturkammer) of Adolf Hitler and the Ministry of Popular Culture (Ministry of Popular Culture) by Benito Mussolini. It was Nazi-fascism that consecrated the Enlightenment neologism of culture at its peak: culture converted into a new rationality – culture and ideological propaganda (strategy of domination) became one. Do we have a different reality today? Worse still, no.
Let us remember what everyone forgets: before the Enlightenment, there was no culture outside of agriculture. Since the Romans, culture has been all about agriculture – even in metaphor. Then came the cultivation of not only zucchini, but also minds – minds that have never been emancipated. Since then, culture has no longer been limited to planting potatoes or raising cattle: it has become, overnight, the manifestation of human intellect. With this new meaning since the 18th century – although in Brazil this meaning arrived late – the neologism culture has invaded a good part of the fields of the arts, even the most fertile ones.
Through the power of metaphor, which is always well-intentioned, it was also a matter of fertilizing minds so that they would be equally fertile. From there, cultural identities were born and grew, and their respective communication strategies were forged. We went from pig farming to the so-called high culture: from the stable to the aesthetic harvest of cultural refinement; slaughtering oxen or composing works of art – everything is culture.
But only the showbiz is a priority in the public budget for culture in Brazil. Nowadays, through increasingly loud speakers, neoliberal ideology is celebrated with massive gatherings of open-air pyrotechnology or even worse, in its version fake with Showcertain – when orchestras renounce the art of sound in time and reduce themselves to the condition (extrinsic to their nature) of cultural equipment.
In culturalism, with not infrequent cynicism, they say that everything is important and that everything is culture. But there is demagogy behind this supposed inclusion. The arts (and also philosophy), even though arbitrarily subjected to the definition of mere cultural goods, are not taken into consideration by cultural policy. Incongruously, for example, the arts are included in the definition of culture, but excluded from the budget. In fact, there is no greater violence than including the arts among cultural goods: the expectation of art as a cultural good corresponds to the expectation of a fish out of water.
Culturalists are bad at theory: they give the same conceptual scope to essentially distinct phenomena. Here, then, summarized in one sentence, is the aforementioned conceptual anything goes: in the universe of culture the center is everywhere – and so it appears in the metaphysical surroundings of the Central Clock in Campus from Butantã of USP:
(Photo: Cecília Bastos/USP Images)
This phrase, already a cliché, would not be truly cynical if it were said in this way: the ideological culture of the centers of New York and Los Angeles is everywhere. But despite its incongruity, the original phrase has been reiterated in our USP circles – regardless of the fact that it was coined by Miguel Reale, a far-right political activist and enemy of democracy.
Brazilians, by the way, cannot be so negligent about historical facts or so bad at remembering: Miguel Reale, rector of USP in two administrations (1949-1950 and 1969-1973), was the “main organic jurist” (according to Rodrigo Jurucê Mattos Gonçalves) of the totalitarian regime established by the military-bourgeois coup of 1964. Proof of this is his Seem of September 12, 1964, by which Miguel Reale ordered the dismissal of tenured public servants – a measure that brought so much misfortune to USP itself. Another irrefutable fact of his brutality is his report Revolution and Constitutional Normality, from 1966, through which Miguel Reale sought legal legitimacy for the dictatorship – despite the torture and murders.
While still rector of USP, Miguel Reale, in 1972, conceived, installed and coordinated the nefarious Special Advisory Office for Security and Information (AESI) – a repressive agency that would only be abolished in 1982. How many USP professors, students and employees were not reported to agents of the dictatorship by Miguel Reale's AESI? – an illegal infiltration of the Rectorate into USP communities with the sole purpose of political persecution. Among the victims of the dictatorship, about 10% were USP students.
Hence we ask, should we passively assimilate Miguel Reale's reactionary culturalism, agreeing with the foolish jingoism contained in the phrase from the USP Clock, that “in the universe of culture the center is everywhere” – which even justifies an alienated notion of periphery – or should we initially question whether cultural policy is in fact a universe? Isn't it rather an ideological instance?
We understand the aforementioned concept of ideology in its strong philosophical meaning, with its critical and negative sense, as a misleading abstraction of history or political distortion of knowledge, when a false authority, through a false consciousness, seeks to secure the apparatuses of power. Ideology, therefore, has to do with the political-economic and cultural hegemony of the dominant class – and not with the struggles of the dominated class for its emancipation nor with the critical-inventive languages of the arts.
With neoliberalism, not only have culture, counterculture and the culture industry become one, but the gap between them and the arts has also become increasingly widened. Cultural politics that are hostile to the arts are becoming increasingly normalized: in cultural ideologies, art is never at the center. In fact, it is nowhere to be found.
It is therefore necessary, as in the strong meaning of ideology, a critical and negative conceptualization of the concept of culture, since its meaning has long gone beyond its ancient agricultural origin. According to poíesis criticism, our new epistemology linked to the line of research of cultural criticism, the dimensions of culture are restricted to custom, habit, everyday life, norm, rule, non-critical repetition, patterns and forms of communication or rhetoric, arbitrary or manipulated, including the logic of systems.
In this strong meaning, however, we can conceive of a constructive perspective for culture. Culture would be a first nature – from which we have to free ourselves in order to experience a second nature, if we are to exist in its fullness. Human beings have this first nature (belonging): their mother tongue, social and eating habits, religion, favorite football team or sport, consumption profile, etc.
According to Heraclitus of Ephesus, however, the human mind contemplates languages and intelligences (logos) that increase themselves, hence we have the potential of a second nature (critical distancing): intellectual emancipation, the spices of language and inventive transcendence (overcoming epistemological boundaries). The natural sciences, the arts and philosophy are only possible in this second nature. Here, a critical distancing in relation to belonging is necessary, in a fruitful dialectical process.
It is therefore important to understand the arts – a question of language and not of communication – in a differentiated epistemological environment: the transcendent condition of the arts, philosophy and natural sciences (second nature) in relation to culture (first nature). We think here of the pre-Christian and Roman meaning of transcend, that is, of transformation: thought as an approximation of distance – when we weigh anchor from the safe harbor and sail on the high seas.
In this unique context of the Roman meaning, transcendence (understood here as a critical-poetic reality free from the restrictive constraints of culture) has nothing to do with the mystical, spiritual, religious or metaphysical. Transcendence (in the original Roman meaning and not in the sense of late Christianity) was forgotten along with the forgetting of poíesis or poetics of all arts: the critical-inventive process in the elaboration of the work of language. For the poíesis Criticism, however, is precisely the poetic transcendence that separates art from culture.
Also in poíesis In our criticism, we do not even work with the pathetic metaphysics of the pair high and low culture. We understand that the arts and popular arts – both extrinsic to the ideologies of culture – do not fit into these reductive and even prejudiced culturalist definitions. The arts and popular arts have never formed insurmountable monolithic blocks, because artistic freedom depends on the multifariousness of initiatives on the part of each artist or group of artists – which is not to be confused with the politics of culture or the strategy of marketing of the [culture] industry.
Also, as for the poíesis, we never consider whether it is high or low. We think, rather, of its unveiling as language and its singularity. Therefore, art founds history and inaugurates what remains. If culture (first nature) is dated and condemned to obsolescence, in turn, in a different way, only in art (second nature), in which poíesis with its fertile transformative potential, there is a fusion of horizons between the old and the new, the classical and the experimental, the regional and the cosmopolitan: the place of speech (locus dicendi) of the artist is the entire universe and the history of the arts is the history of cultural appropriations. This is also why the world of life (Living environment, a concept by Heinrich Heine) is never limited to culture.
In turn, the poíesis artistic forms relationships in the midst of the world of life, both with mimesis (symbolic-inventive representations) and critical distancing (the resistance of the arts against ideological domains), in addition to the most innovative abstractions, whose radicality – as an elaboration of language – culture, invariably resigned, will never be able to achieve. Thus, it is culture that succumbs to ideology – not great art.
Thus, if culture is ordinary and art is extraordinary, it is important to rethink the anti-artistic rigidity of culture – so well defined by Jean-Luc Godard: culture is the rule, art the exception… The rule wants the death of the exception. In a word, culture does not shelter, but suffocates art.
As Martin Heidegger would say, the freedom of To be there (human reality or presence, the human being in his existential integrity) is beyond the cultural norm, because the freedom of culture is comfortable, even lazy. When stuck in a state of culture, freedom has already been lost.
These theses are corroborated by Theodor W. Adorno, because as the consciousness of the dominant class coincides with the general trend of society, the tension between culture and thanks to . More than that, we now assert that with neoliberalism, culture and thanks to they became one. O thanks to predominates from AI to the events of the secretariats and vice-rectories of [the] culture industry; from the ideology of the pseudo-periphery propagated by identitarianism to the ideologues streamers, all synchronized with the middle-class mentality and linked to advertising for banks, cell phones, deodorants and beers fake –even though there is also propaganda from some whiskey true Scottish.
And confluent with Martin Heidegger and Theodor Adorno, we can also cite the concept of cultural invasion in Paulo Freire: the popular masses are oppressed for the conquest of the oppressor, by well-organized propaganda, whose vehicles are always the so-called means of communication with the masses (we do not criticize the means in themselves, but the use that is given to them) – as if the reiteration ad nauseam this alienating content already made it a popular art and not what it really is: an instrumentalized communication.
The triumph of culture occurs as an ideological system of communication and also of behavior (moral regulation as a mass doctrine). Each in his own time, Joseph Goebbels and Miguel Reale, both renowned in their countries as great philosophers of culture, advocated culture as politically instrumentalized communication: both knew, with precision, how to separate what should be culturally assimilated and what should be omitted or never disclosed. In both cases, behind the scenes of supposed erudition, crimes were hidden.
In our still dark neoliberal times, the same distortions prevail not only in questions of political economy, but also in the epistemology of languages. Culturalists continue to confuse art and culture, between language and communication: they prioritize the market of cultural events, in its freedom for the always the same, to the detriment of the world of artistic work, despite, in the latter case, its greater inventive potential.
Cultural ideologies now operate in Brazil through public notices that are only apparently democratic or inclusive. Such policies, sponsored with public funds, are like throwing corn to chickens: they are humiliating, so much so that they restrict creative freedom and initiative. Cultural agents are at the forefront of these projects, and artists are rarely involved. The diagnosis could not be worse: priority is given to the cultural industry, where the tragic and the ironic have been canceled – only the heroes of the arts are left behind. Marvel are in line with moral regulations and the delegation of neoliberal good customs.
Brazilian arts, since the colonial period, in turn, have remained excluded from this cultural center – despite our unique historical merits and our strong potential for new research and new artistic achievements, including the reconstruction of memory. In the 18th and 19th centuries, for example, Brazil was the country in the world with the largest number of great black and brown artists. However, a film like Black Panther matters much more to the official Brazilian culture: Lereno, Aleijadinho or Emerico, among many others, remain invisible. In fact, old or new, all art extrinsic to the culture industry has been excluded from the notices.
In conclusion, we seek to draw attention to two distortions that have been widely crystallized by the dictatorship of public opinion or even by common sense, even if it is learned. What do we propose? – contrary to what is said out there, (i) there is a critical and negative meaning of culture, just as in the aforementioned strong meaning of ideology – in fact, what we have in the case of culture, almost all the time, are ideologies of culture; (ii) cultural policy has never been a left-wing agenda – we need only remember the relations of fascists with culture, as well as, today, their neoliberal ties. Let us examine these two points in more detail below.
The pejorative sense of culture has to do, among other things, with books The malaise in culture (The Unbecoming in Culture), by Sigmund Freud – one of the pillars of cultural criticism. Freud defines culture as a source of suffering, leading to growing discomfort due to its opposition to existential impulses (thus we have the culture of believers, the militia culture, identitarianism, cultural Olavism, etc.). It is observed that culturalism harms the theory of knowledge. In the title of the first Brazilian edition, it was translated Culture by civilization – annihilating the original meaning in Freud.
Culturalists have difficulty conceiving of culture as a problem. Civilization, on the other hand, is an older concept: the ancients praised citizenship and dignity in human relations (civilitas/civilians), without excluding the diverse populations in all continents and eras – nothing that comes close to the Enlightenment neologism of culture, invariably a source of ideological distortions.
The genres of the culture industry, however, are not popular art and function as a fetish of colonization as an ideology of domination. By configuring both the economic and intellectual dimensions, the neoliberal culture industry precisely proves the theory of the classics, that the dominant ideology is that of the ruling class. In a word: the culture industry is the fetish of neoliberalism, which, in turn, is the ideology of financial capital. Culture, therefore, with its ideologies, is equivalent to domination and oppression – whether with the culturalists Joseph Goebbels and Miguel Reale, or with the neoliberal culture industry.
*Rubens Russomanno Ricciardi is a full professor at the Music Department of USP in Ribeirão Preto and conductor of the USP Philharmonic. Author of the book Against neoliberal identitarianism – an essay by Poíesis Crítica for the support of the arts (countercurrent). [https://amzn.to/4eYrz6b]
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