A Companion to Modern and Contemporary Latin American and Latina/o Art. Группа авторов
by a reactionary will toward reactionary ends. The countryside loves tradition too much. It is conservative and superstitious. Its mind is too easily conquered by antipathy and resistance to the heretical and iconoclastic spirit of progress. German nationalism, like Italian fascism, does its recruiting in the provinces, in the countryside.
(1959b, p. 46; 1994, Vol. I, p. 509)
The city, he concludes, prepares “man for collectivism, [whereas] the countryside excites his individualism” and his desire to own land (1959b, p. 47; 1994, Vol. I, p. 510). A further indication of Mariátegui's sound pragmatism is that his own defense of the autonomy of art, regardless of its optimistic tones, is not blind to the fact that art is both an economic activity and an institutional practice. There exists, he says, an essential connection between art centers and power centers:
Art, of course, cannot escape the influence of these historical forces. In medieval society, artists thrived and flourished around powerful courts; in bourgeois society, they feel fatally attracted to the great capitalist and industrial centers. A flourishing artistic scene is, in many respects, a matter of clientele, environment, wealth. Rome, a mediocre art market [when compared to Milan], cannot, therefore, be but a mediocre center of artistic creation.
(1959b, p. 81; 1994, Vol. I, p. 526)
This most unusual combination of mysticism and materialism, of romanticism and pragmatism, leads one to wonder how Mariátegui's thought would have evolved in the years following his untimely death.
The writings that we have discussed thus far provide us with some ground for speculation. First of all, it seems likely that Mariátegui would have adopted, sooner than later, a critical stance with regard to the Soviet regime, especially after the latter abandoned the project of world revolution. We might also suspect that he would have seen a reflection of his own ideas in Antonio Gramsci's meditations on the national‐popular as well as in the messianism of Walter Benjamin. Insofar as they elevate the ideal of the new to the rank of moral imperative, the philosophies of Ernst Bloch and Cornelius Castoriadis might have similarly drawn his attention.
With respect to art, an issue that would have surely preoccupied Mariátegui is the crisis of the ideal of originality, the result of both the emergence of culture industries and the impact of technology on the production and consumption of art. How would he have reacted to the increasing reproduction of art on a massive scale and the resulting death of the artwork as a unique and unrepeatable object? Would he have welcomed these phenomena, as Benjamin did, because of their democratizing potential? Or would he have declared art obsolete in agreement with Theodor Adorno's pessimistic account?
We cannot know precisely what solutions he would have offered, but by way of conclusion, we might speculate that Mariátegui would likely have been puzzled by the narrow chauvinism that underlies much “postcolonial” thinking today. Cultural difference, he believed, was not a matter of metaphysical essences or self‐enclosed identities, but of styles and individualities. His own indigenism, as we have seen, was not grounded on racial or ethnic utopias, but rather on a sense of historical justice that, anticipating Benjamin, demanded that we read history against the grain and take the side of the victims. The notion that cultures are fixed signs of identity, that they set insurmountable boundaries between that which is one's own and that which is foreign, would have made little sense to him. Although he considered himself an Indian (which he was not), he felt Gothic art to be his own. What is ours, he believed, is that which we find intelligible and valuable (1959b, pp. 73–78; 1994, Vol. I, pp. 523–525). As if it were a matter of inverting that old, worn‐out cliché according to which one can only attain universality by adhering to the particular, he was convinced that the particular could only be reached by way of the universal – that only “the universal, ecumenical roads we have chosen to travel, and for which we are reproached, take us ever closer to ourselves” (1959a, p. 305; 1971, p. 287; 1994, Vol. I, p. 157).
Notes
1 1 For the sake of clarity, I expound this book as if it were a treatise, even though Mariátegui does not sustain any single argument throughout its pages and each essay can be read on its own. It should be noted as well that, before the publication of Mariátegui total (1994), the essays composing The Morning Soul had already appeared in three separate volumes of the standard pocket edition of his Complete Works: El alma matinal y otras estaciones del hombre de hoy (1959b [1950]), El artista y la época (1959c), and Signos y obras (1959d). In what follows, I use the title The Morning Soul as referring to the overall content of those three volumes, thus adhering to Mariátegui's original intention. All translations are mine unless otherwise noted. Whenever existing translations in English are used, the original sources are also listed for reference.
2 2 See Schutte (1988) and Nugent (1991), pp. 16–29.
3 3 It is perfectly possible to argue, as Flores Galindo (1980) has done, that Mariátegui's thought possesses a “utopian dimension” if “utopia” is roughly taken to mean the desire to create a different society, beyond the barriers imposed by common sense and politics as usual. But this conceptualization, rather vague and general, misses a key aspect of utopian thinking, namely the opposition between reality and reason – between chaos and perfection – that marks it off from other approaches to social change. All utopian projects aim to revolutionize the social order, but not all revolutions are committed to the ideal of the perfect society.
4 4 It is worth noting that this condemnation of “educational solutions” was not motivated by a rejection of the cultural assimilation of the Indians (i.e. the fear that they would lose their cultural identity), but by a hostility to liberal reformism. It would therefore be a mistake to turn Mariátegui into something of a precursor of US‐style identity politics.
5 5 Mariátegui wrote about only two other Latin American visual artists: Emilio Pettoruti (1959c, pp. 86–90; 1994, Vol. I, pp. 581–583) and Julia Codesido (1959c, pp. 97–98; 1994, Vol. I, pp. 586–587). In both cases he provided personal impressions rather than critical analyses.
6 6 The version originally written by Breton, as he would admit with some embarrassment (1995, p. 45), contained a clause that Trotsky unhesitatingly crossed out: “Complete freedom for art, except against the proletarian revolution.”
References
1 Aragon, L. (1952). Parenthèse sur les prix Stalin. Les Lettres Françaises 409 (10 April): 10.
2 Brecht, B. (1962). To posterity. In: Modern German Poetry. 1910–1960 (ed. M. Hamburger and C. Middleton), 231. New York: Grove Press.
3 Breton, A. (1995). Free Rein [La Clé des champs] (trans. M. Parmentier and J. d'Amboise). Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press.
4 Flores Galindo, A. (1980). La agonía de Mariátegui. La polémica con la Komintern. Lima: Desco.
5 Löwy, M. (1998). Marxism and romanticism in the work of José Carlos Mariátegui. Latin American Perspectives 25 (4): 76–88.
6 Mariátegui, J.C. (1959a [1926]). 7 ensayos de interpretación de la realidad peruana. Lima: Biblioteca Amauta.
7 Mariátegui, J.C. (1959b [1950]). El alma matinal y otras estaciones del hombre de hoy. Lima: Biblioteca Amauta.
8 Mariátegui, J.C. (1959c). El artista y la época. Lima: Biblioteca Amauta.
9 Mariátegui, J.C. (1959d). Signos y obras. Lima: Biblioteca Amauta.
10 Mariátegui, J.C. (1959e). Peruanicemos al Perú. Lima: Biblioteca Amauta.
11 Mariátegui, J.C. (1959f). Temas de nuestra América. Lima: Biblioteca Amauta.
12 Mariátegui,