Postmodernity in Spanish Fiction and Culture

Yaw Agawu-Kakraba

• Publisher: University of Wales Press
• Year: 2010
• ISBN:
  9781783164097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Europäische Literaturkritik

Postmodernity in Spanish Fiction and Culture is a compelling study that combines elements of cultural studies and literary studies in order to present an integrated cultural representation of the emergence of a postmodern social constitution for contemporary Spain. Marking a departure from earlier works about postmodernity and postmodernism in Spain, Postmodernity in Spanish Fiction and Culture establishes a strong connection between postmodernity understood as arising from the social and economic conditions that are the unique features of a Spain of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and postmodernism as the lifestyle experiences that manifest the new cultural and artistic practices of the 1980s and beyond.This study examines postmodernity by relating it to those exclusive social and cultural experiences that are patently Spanish (the movida, desencanto, immigration, globalization and terrorism) and concludes that by virtue of Spain's unique socio-cultural, economic and political history, the country emerges as one of the most postmodern of all European nations; moreover, the conditions that define the country's evolution from the mid 1980s to the present constitute a distinctively authentic postmodernity.

Chapter 1

The Postmodern Self and Lifestyle under Postmodernity: the Movida Phenomenon

The movida is a manifestation of postmodernity in Spain in the immediate post-Franco years. It is a term associated with the upsurge of creativity that invaded the cultural scene of Spanish cities such as Madrid, Barcelona, Vigo, Seville and Bilbao in the late 1970s through till the mid-1980s. The movida relates to Spanish youth culture construed as young people ‘on the move’. Rather than a mere superficial glitz, the movida provides evidence of the real beginnings of a postmodern current in Spain where issues of identity, particularly sexual and gender identity, emerged to challenge the homogenizing discourses of an enduring and intractable Francoism. The movida encapsulated all the trademarks of postmodernity: the destabilization of previously stable values, consumerism, accelerated speed and continuous change with an emphasis on surfaces and images, the mass media, all in the decentralized context of globalization.

Unlike British punk and other similar youth cultures such as Germany’s Neue Deutsche Welle, the movida was a response to a specifically sexual tolerance and, especially, the country’s economic prosperity. The movida movement coincided with a new phase of capitalism in Spain. It was a Spain that, once co-opted into the world of consumerism, also found itself in a frenzied accelerated development. Most importantly, it was a period in which Spaniards realized their freedom from traditional bonds and patterns of living, hallmark of previous generations. In this regard, the movida initiated the gradual transformation and dissolution of some of the traditional, social, cultural and economic foundations of a country that had endured forty years of dictatorship. In this chapter, I am contextualizing the movida within the framework of postmodernity by rendering a portrait of some of the defining traits of the social condition that appeared in Spain in the 1980s and beyond. By establishing the movida as a component of core Spanish society, I am arguing for a Spanish society of the 1980s that entered a phase that is clearly postmodern.

I must begin with a dialogue with those voices that have considered the movement to be a shallow and extravagant blip on the social radar of contemporary Spain. My contention is that the movida is part of the genesis of a robust postmodern surge in Spain that undermined some of the entrenched Francoist discourses that homogenized identity, gender, and sexuality. I am proposing – contrary to the general belief that the movida ended in the late 1980s – that a mutated form of the movement’s ethos is still prevalent and fundamental in Spain.

One critic who considers the movida a frivolous cultural phenomenon is Gérard Imbert (1986).¹ Writing in ‘El Madrid de la “movida”’, Imbert contends that once the movida became fashionable, it degraded and trivialized the avant-garde because, from its inception, the movement lacked an ideological framework. Imbert anchors his critique of the movida on the following: the movement’s apparent superficiality, its ostensible lack of political commitment, its inability to reflect the crisis of meaning and representation and its failure to engender an epistemic breakdown of grand narratives such as those that Michel Foucault articulates in his discourse on madness and the body (p. 10). He declares that because the movida was based on the ‘inconsequential’, it failed to engage in politically significant actions even as anarchism. For Imbert, the movida was reduced to banality because it was spearheaded by a marginalized minority that influenced social subgroups linked to drugs and pasotismo – apathy towards politics and official discourses of power. Imbert vilifies the media for quickly replacing social discourse and for confusing the movida with postmodernity. The movida, Imbert proposes, was neither symbolically nor mythologically postmodern because it was a ‘reversión de los valores’ (1986, p. 10) [a reversion of values]. For this critic, because of the belief that there was nothing one could do against the system, passivity and inertia became ubiquitous factors (1986, p. 10). Instead of indignation against the system, thus vindicating the little that was left of the ‘código progre’ – political existential code inherited from anti-Francoism – what surfaced, Imbert asserts, was ‘fascination’ with ‘las pequeñas maravillas del mundo’ [the little wonders of the world] that ignored deliberately grand programs and radical concepts (1986, p. 10). Although he believes that from an esthetic perspective the movida may have shared some of the sensibilities reminiscent of avant-garde movements, Imbert thinks the movida only reflected future crisis by ‘anticipating’ such crisis with ‘una estrategia de apariencias’ [a strategy of appearances] grounded in Baudrillard’s notion of the look. The ‘modern look’, Imbert explains, frees itself from all historical responsibilities and shuns all kinds of commitments— political, social, or otherwise (1986, p. 10).

Contrary to his assertions, the movida did indeed contest the grand narratives constructed during the Francoist dictatorship. By shunning grand narratives, the movida was effectively dismantling the ideological apparatuses of oppression constructed in the Francoist myth of a unified Spain. As is the case of most oppressive states, the Franco regime legitimized itself by creating a myth to integrate the society and to establish a social consensus about its policies of national development. Aside from portraying themselves as the dominant class, the Francoists propagated their ideas as though they served the interests of the entire citizenry. They were in power, and power was ‘service’. Furthermore, in an analysis of the ruling class’s legitimization of ideas and beliefs, Terry Eagleton (1990) observes that:

A dominant power may legitimate itself by promoting beliefs and values congenial to it; naturalizing and universalizing such beliefs so as to render them self-evident and apparently inevitable; denigrating ideas which might challenge it; excluding rival forms of thought, perhaps by some unspoken but systematic logic; obscuring social reality in ways convenient to itself. Such ‘mystification’, as it is commonly known, frequently takes the form of masking or suppressing social conflicts, from which arises the conception of ideology as an imaginary resolution of real contradictions. (1990, p. 5–6)

The justification for cultural uniformity that obliterated differences and emphasized a universal identity explains Franco’s government’s attempts to project Spain as ‘different’, thereby denigrating any contrary European ideas that might destabilize the regime. The ideological rhetoric embedded in Francoist discourse of purity and return to a mythical Spanish essence legitimized its grand pursuit for the Spanish people. At the same time, the Francoists’ rhetoric of a mythical Spain ensured their grip on power, validated their government, its decision-making, its laws and many other aspects of the political apparatus.

A metanarrative is evident as the regime made ethical and political prescriptions for the Spanish people by controlling decision-making and negotiating what is considered truth. With the advent of democracy and cultural movements such as the movida, some of the metanarratives that played a legitimating role for Francoist grand pursuits lost their credibility and legitimacy in the Spanish society. With the rejection of Francoist grand narratives, Spanish life had the chance to become fragmented, evoking Lyotard’s (1984) belief that absences of overarching metanarratives in societies permeated with the legitimating role of grand pursuits suffer disintegration. It is worthwhile recalling that, for Lyotard, when grand narratives such as those constructed by the Francoist government are discarded, what is left are petite narratives that offer limited contexts for explicit, if not clearly defined rules for understanding and behaviour. Lyotard insists that by fragmenting life into manifold localized functions, each with its explicit conditions for judging actions and knowledge, what validates knowledge in the postmodern condition is how well it performs, or allows a person to perform in particular roles.

The end of the Franco regime did not necessarily signal the end of its policies. Some of the entrenched social structures that supported the regime were left intact. The Catholic Church, bedrock of Francoism, rebuffed the social and cultural changes that ensued after the Caudillo’s death. Similarly, some elements that kept the Francoist institutional machinery functioning during the dictatorship maintained the status quo during the immediate years of the transition to democracy.² Some of the so-called progrés (progressives) within the public sectors simply assumed this new label in order to go along with the flow and euphoria that gripped the nation. It is into this backdrop of persistent conservative culture that one needs to insert the movida. In other words, the movida movement self-consciously and self-reflexively assumed a critical stance against the totalitarian elitist paradigms of Francoist and immediate post-Francoist Spain that sought to construct a mythical Spain based on a vision of an eternal Spanish identity. The movida’s ability to renegotiate the different possible relationships of complicity and critique between high and popular forms of culture, its capacity to undermine established cultural definitions and to resist those boundaries that constituted prior discourses represent a deligitimization of those discourses. As a principle of performativity, the movida enhanced and brought with it innovative energies in the cultural and social spheres. The movement also propelled nonconformist attitudes that subverted existing paradigms or governing structures of thought. Unlike Francoist grand narratives and their latent presence within some national institutions, the movida limited itself to local events rather than the large-scale universal concepts that were embedded in Francoist discourses. Because the petite narratives that circumscribed the movida phenomenon were situational, provisional, and contingent, they made no claim to a universal truth. The movida’s indispensable quality as an agent of postmodernity becomes apparent from Imbert’s own analysis of it. As a manifestation of postmodernity, the movida aided in the dissemination of a multiplicity of lifestyle possibilities and social identities from which madrileños, and for that matter Spaniards, could choose; it was far from intellectual bankruptcy.

Imbert’s declaration that the movida somehow trivialized the avant-garde also needs to be contested. In After the Great Divide, Andreas Huyssen points out the promises that were never fulfilled by the historical avant-garde: ‘to sever political, social and aesthetic chains, explode cultural reifications, throw off traditional forms of domination, liberate repressed energies’ (1986, p. 164). Although the movement bore some of the distinctions related to the kind of historical avant-gardism to which Huyssen refers – anti-traditionalism, undermining repressed cultural, sexual, and social energies – it was, nevertheless, paradoxically different and yet similar to the avant-garde. Unlike the iconoclastic and anti-aesthetic attitude of European avant-garde that endeavored but failed to shatter the political, social, and aesthetic domination of high culture via a synthesis with popular culture designed to incorporate art into life, the movida did not have a declared manifesto. What the movida did, however, was to play with signs that were, on the surface, superficial and frivolous. It is precisely within this superficiality that one notices the movement’s counter cultural undertones – what could be considered radicalized politics framed within a postmodernist political anarchism that assaulted ingrained traditionalism, patriarchalism, and neopoliticism.

Hans Bertens has pointed out in ‘Postmodern Cultures’ the strong affinities between postmodern culture and the modern avant-garde. Such postmodernism, Bertens believes, ‘is (often playfully) iconoclastic, embraces popular culture in its reaction against high modernism and has a feebly political programme, in that it aims at a liberation from a repressive bourgeois ideology’ (1991, p. 132). Imbert’s attempts to link the movida with avant-gardism presuppose a connection between modernism and avant-gardism, which according to Diana Crane ‘presume the existence of clear-cut distinctions between different types of aesthetic endeavors [which] are perceived today as elitist in comparison with postmodernism’ (1997, p. 123). A careful examination of the movida reveals, however, a massive proliferation of different forms of high and traditional popular cultures that infuse the movement with a postmodern current – rock and pop music, cinema, newspapers, the plastic arts, theatre arts, media forms – framed within the confines of simulation and consumption.

Writing in Sólo se vive una vez (1991), José Luis Gallero describes a plethora of media forms that became the engine of the movida’s thriving machinery. Gallero’s interview with Gonzalo García Pino reveals elements of simulation and codes quintessential to communication: ‘La movida, como palabra, surge incluso cuando el Ayuntamiento, los medios de comunicación, tratan de acuñar un término para tenerlo todo ordenado. Pero eso es una cosa, y otra negar que existió … ’ (1991, p. 363) [As a word, the movida appeared even as the city council and the media tried to coin a term that would somehow encapsulate neatly the phenomenon. But that was one thing. Another was to deny that it existed … ]. It is, however, the portrait of Madrid as a city resplendent with specific cultural signs related intimately to the movida as worthy of sale and consumption that projects clearly the movida culture as a uniquely Spanish experience. This inimitable event encompasses those conditions of life that became progressively rampant in Spain as the nation evolved into a post-totalitarian, postindustrialized and a postmodern European nation. Borja Casani and Tono Martínez underscore the following:

Madrid tiene ya algo que vender (en primer lugar su propia imagen) al resto de la península y al mundo en general. Nos enfrentamos a una ciudad que en conjunto se ha puesto en vanguardia … Todos los fenómenos han podido ser visualizados en un tiempo récord: improvisando, aprendiendo y copiando con celeridad de vertigo. Una agradable mitificación de lo moderno. Una superficialidad a prueba de bomba … Los viejos circuitos mundiales que manejan el comercio de la creación, del arte y de la estética están, a su pesar, atentos al proceso. (1984, p. 6–7)

[Madrid already has something to sell to the rest of Spain and the world in general: its own image. We are faced with a city that, as a whole, has become avant-garde. All kinds of phenomena have been consumed at a dizzying pace by improvising, learning, and copying. We witness an exhilarating mythification of the modern, an explosive superficiality … In spite of their status, world centres that normally control the creative commerce of art and aesthetics are paying attention to what is transpiring in Madrid.]

The wide-ranging signs, social images, and cultural commodities that materialized under the movida are not necessarily the aesthetically ‘superior’ culture that one traditionally identifies with the arts. All the cultural forms within the movida are a mixture of elements from different styles and different time periods that erase distinctions between high and low cultures, between dominant and minority cultures eminently postmodern. Indeed, the artifacts that appear under the movida remind one of Baudrillard’s notions of a ‘sign’ that highlights the ‘law of the code’ – the prevalence of technologies and practices connected to the exchange, promotion, distribution and manipulation of signs (1975, p. 121). The kind of representation that Madrid constructed of itself functions as a template to produce a new reality in which images become commodities. Indeed, the consumption of the movida as a sign and its aestheticization on a social level in the Spain of the 1980s echoes Zygmunt Bauman’s idea of fully-fledged social systems that invariably replace ‘the classical modern, capitalist system’ under postmodern conditions (1992, p. 52). Bauman proposes that this new type of social system promotes pleasure through the consumption of commodities and services. Self-denial and the deferral of pleasure are nonexistent (1992, p. 42).

As a reflection of postmodern culture, the movida ethos highlights the individual freedom that most Spaniards enjoyed. Nevertheless, it is a freedom that is linked intimately to consumption. Framed within the parameters of consumer freedom, this kind of individual autonomy bears the hallmark of a microscopic reproduction of the capitalist system. Instead of repression, seduction is the norm of control. Social integration is no longer despotic but creates conditions for economic viability. Imbert’s suspicions that the movida sought to have instant gratification (1986, p. 10), therefore, fail to recognize that a new social system with an entirely new ethos has supplanted prior dominant discourses and belief systems that had become the mainstay of a socially and politically oppressed nation dominated by inept ideological beliefs. The movida undermined established cultural definitions and opposed those boundaries that constituted prior discourses. As an integral social movement, the movida manifested all the nuances of a postmodernist culture. Thanks to the movida as a potent aspect of a uniquely Spanish experien...