Happy new academic year! May it brings plenty of positive energy for teachers and students, and the thorough defeat of patriarchal darkness in all fronts and nations. I’ll begin my fifteenth year as a blogger (yes, time passes!!), with a reminder that the all the yearly volumes can be found here, including the Spanish-language volumes of the translated version that I started publishing in 2021. I have considered taking a break, but finally decided against it for fear that this would end the habit of writing a weekly post for good, so here I am!
This post is inspired by Sergio Fanjul’s controversial article for El País, published two days ago, “Ser cultureta cada vez mola menos: las alucinantes metamorfosis del capital cultural” [“Being a hipster is becoming less and less cool: the mind-boggling metamorphoses of cultural capital”]. As you can see, the colloquial ‘cultureta’ does not translate well into English, requiring something as clumsy as ‘culture nerd’ (or hipster…). Perhaps it is typically Spanish to diminish ‘being cultured’ to ‘ser cultureta’. Fanjul’s main argument is that whereas in the past (a time between the 1980s and 2014…) the persons who saw themselves as intellectually attractive flaunted their credentials, name-dropping like crazy from Faulkner to Kaurismäki, today nobody conceals their ignorance or their preference for products that lack cultural prestige (um… reggaeton).
Fanjul’s main argument, based on Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of cultural capital, is that today subcultural capital, based on popular culture and social media, dominates. Nothing new, then, but still something relevant, worth reconsidering. As social anthropologist Carles Feixa explains in the article, young people, feeling excluded, discredit official culture, mistrusting education and all the cultural institutions. Class distinctions have been, besides, erased long ago with the upper classes consumption of both high and low culture, though indeed the same product can be consumed differently depending on class.
Fanjul’s interviewees also comment on the lost figure of the intellectual and the media’s general disinterest in culture. Fanjul cites Víctor Lenore’s essay Indies, hipsters y gafapastas, crónica de una dominación cultural (Capitán Swing, 2014), as a referent to understand when the need to be ‘moderno’ started waning. Cultured persons who enjoy minority tastes have always been seen as snobs (since the 18th century, when the word was first used), but at some point ten years ago the prestige they used to enjoy collapsed under the weight of the more democratic impulses unleashed by the social media (Instagram, for instance, was launched in 2012). As music sociologist Fernán del Val explains in Fanjul’s article, there is far less room for the underground: every artist wants to be mainstream and audiences want to participate in that aspiration, which explains Rosalía’s quick transition to worldwide fame and Taylor Swift’s dominance.
Fanjul’s article, of course, is designed to provoke. Hipólito Ledesma rushed to publish the following day in Jot Down “La cultura según Fanjul: esnobismo reciclado para las masas modernas,” a piece in which he criticizes the author for too easily dismissing the creativity of current high culture, overlooking the many compartments of youth subcultures and reducing cultural snobbery to recent times. This seems spot on. You might also want to take a look at the 100 comments by readers of Fanjul. I’ll quote some. Alejandro González writes that “Confundir consumir cultura con ser culto, como hace el autor del artículo, demuestra su nivel cultural” [“Mistaking consuming culture with being cultured, as the article’s author does, only shows his cultural level”]. Jesús Lobato replies that “La cultura es la ausencia de ignorancia, sí, pero con el añadido de desarrollar un espíritu crítico” [“Culture is the absence of ignorance, yes, with the addition of developing a critical spirit”]. Possibly the best observation belongs to Jose C: “La cultura, la de verdad, no es ostentación. En realidad, ni siquiera es conocimiento (ése es sólo el camino): es sabiduría, madurez y hondura espiritual. Lo otro está bien para quien quiere eso, lucirse, ante quien se deje. Pero, la frase es muy vieja, dime de lo que presumes, y te diré de lo que careces” [“Culture, the real one, is not ostentation. In reality, it is not even knowledge (that is only the way): it is wisdom, maturity and spiritual depth. The other thing is fine for those who want that, to show off, to whoever they want. But, the phrase is very old, tell me what you boast about, and I’ll tell you what you lack”].
My impression is that to judge more accurately the situation we need more personal testimonials from persons in all classes and of all ages. More cultural memoirs, so to speak. Tara Westover’s Educated (2018) is a good example of the story of declassing that today many are narrating. I have just read Berta Collado Cabrera’s autofiction Yeguas exhaustas (Pepitas de calabaza, 2023) and was left with a need for more texts closer to our own Spanish reality. Collado narrates how she (or her main character) progresses from her working-class rural environment to a university career (in Spanish Literature) only to be expelled and end up teaching in secondary school. There is absolutely nothing wrong with being a secondary school teacher, part of a collective that is key in guaranteeing that culture survives and upward social mobility is maintained. Yet, the protagonist is frustrated in her aspirations. I don’t know what happened to the real Berta, but the academic career of the fictional character is stopped by her abusive partner, a snobbish, misogynistic associate teacher in the same university who represents all the faults of the Spanish academic system. That is not, however, the main point I want to rise but the protagonist’s realization that despite her PhD she has not managed to belong to the same social group whose culture she is sharing and studying.
This leads me to an idea I should further develop, perhaps in a memoir of my own: culture, as we understand it today, is a dream that some of us in the uneducated working classes once had but failed to fulfil. I am going to enormously simplify what I mean, but I think that authors as different as Matthew Arnold and José Ortega y Gasset describe in Culture and Anarchy (1869) and La rebelión de las masas (1922) miss the constant social exclusion of those who want to be persons of culture starting from an uneducated position. Collado includes in her book an anecdote that perhaps explains everything. Her protagonist, then an undergrad, lends a male classmate she fancies (who, unlike her, has been educated in an exclusive private school) her class notes. He returns them and she is mortified to see that he has corrected her ‘Fuco’ to ‘Foucault’. Their relationship does not progress. I think this is an example of what has failed spectacularly in the expansion of education, and hence of high culture, to the middle and the working classes. Many of us, unlike what Collado narrates, are part of the official cultural system (as academics, authors, artists, managers of cultural institutions) but we have not been integrated into the social classes from which the culture we spread and study originates.
Part of our unease translated back in the 1990s into a staunch defense of popular culture (or subculture, a word I hate), aided by the work of intellectuals such as Raymond Willaims or Stuart Hall, and the establishment of Cultural Studies. Culture, Williams explained, is the sum total of all cultural manifestations in a society, and we should not distinguish between high and low because everything is valuable. I had in that sense an epiphanic moment visiting the Museo del Encaje of Camariñas, in A Coruña, when I saw that the working women who had woven all that marvellous lace where great artists, equal if not superior, to the painters and sculptors canonised by high culture.
The problem is that the academic legitimisation of popular culture did not take into account this social rejection I have mentioned. The dictum that all cultural manifestations are valuable intended to expand the idea of culture so that, complementing the Enlightenment’s belief in education, all individuals would learn to appreciate all types of culture. Ideally, education would enable all persons to appreciate value in all manifestations, but this has not happened. Actually, the upper classes have benefited, for they have become more omnivorous culturally. In contrast, feeling excluded by the false promise that learning higher culture was a path to a higher social standing, many working-class people or middle-class people of working-class origins have retrenched, defending their own cultural manifestations as signs of identity. I am not speaking here, of course, of the beautiful lace displayed in Camariñas, but of other cultural manifestation such as, yes, reggaeton.
Reggaeton, like jazz or rock in the past, occupies a liminal position in that it is not yet officially ‘culture’ but might soon be. It is the cultural manifestation most often mentioned by the readers of Fanjul’s article as an example of a subculture whose defence outs any person as uncultured. This is complicated. I don’t want to discuss the age factor but, logically, the younger a person is the more likely they are to defend a cultural manifestation they see as their own. And the other way round: an older person with a wider cultural experience is less likely to defend new cultural manifestations, as they can compare them to others. If you have seen 3000 films in your 50 years of life, for instance, most of them art-house, you are less likely to be charmed by superhero films.
What worries me in all this conversation around culture, then, is the inexistent conversation among persons of different cultural experiences and the lack of openness, particularly among the uneducated. I was once uneducated, gave myself an education, decided this was too narrow, widened it to include popular culture and here I am, a little bit wiser and far more critical for all my efforts. I am also capable of enjoying many more cultural manifestations, from ballet to comic books. I still don’t like reggaeton (or, for that matter, classical music), but this is to a great extend because I see it as a culture that excludes me as a woman and an older person.
In any case, as this is an issue Fanjul does not raise, I am worried above all by the increasing lack of culture of the culture creators, manifested, for instance, in the low quality of the film scripts written by persons who don’t know about past cinema. Or, the complaint of that creative writing student who does not want to read other persons’ books but wants everyone to read her books. A young reader who comments on Fanjul’s article protests that if the young are less cultured, this is the fault of the older generation. I myself stopped reading El País’s cultural supplement, Babelia, tired of the insistence on fame and success and the constant urge to find the ‘next best thing’, so maybe this young reader has a point. Culture cannot be something based on constant novelty, but a far more reposed combination of the old and the new, otherwise we’re just speaking of consumption. And that demeans all of us.
I’ll stop here… more next week.