Professional Documents
Culture Documents
izek says that we have reached a new stage of capitalism in which production is
greatly de-materialized and in which we are obliged to consume not merely cultural
products but lifestyles. In this sense, the emergence of a New Age trend must be
understood as a ideological process that appeals to a supposed return to a natural state
since human ties have been systematically commodied.
In cultural capitalism, the relation between an object and its symbol has been
inverted: the images no longer represent the product, but rather the product
represents an image. We buy a product say an organic apple because it
represents the image of a healthy lifestyle . . . . What we are seeing today, the
denitive trait of postmodern capitalism, is the direct commodication of
experience itself: in the market, products (material objects which are possessed)
are being purchased less while life experiences like sex, food, communication,
cultural consumption, and participation in a particular lifestyle are being purchased
more. Material objects serve only to support this experience, which is increasingly
offered for free in order to seduce us into buying the actual experiential
commodities. (Z
izek, 1992).
I think that the best way to explain this situation can be found in characterizing
the state of contemporary culture based on its strongly cynical component
(Sloterdijk, Z
izek, Ubilluz). This does not mean only that we nd ourselves before a
system of global organization that has commodied everything and, by divorcing itself
from history, has opted for a postcard image. Rather, this means showing that
cynicism understood as institutionalized rationality is the cultural nucleus of
capitalist globalization. And thus it is the main producer of discourses that force the
subject to believe and enjoy a fantasy that is emptied of all historical antagonisms
and that sells all to the highest bidder. The past is useful only when it is protable and
pliable.
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Understood as that knowledge that is hidden or that which is known but denied,
cynicism is a central component of the contemporary neoliberal culture. Cynicism is
the discourse of denial through which Peru has become subject to the demand for the
exotic imposed by the global market. Life is held hostage by the image, reality by
ideology, and history by the market. Peruvians know that what The Royal Tour shows
is false, that the indigenous people do not live in that way, that Peru is not like that, but
this does not matter as business justies all. Today, what matters is responding passively
to the commands of the outside (Be exotic so that we can come and see you!) and in this way
we continue to be trapped in a clearly colonial relationship. Under the singular
imperative of doing business, we end up counterfeiting ourselves, and convinced of the
cynical conclusion that we have no other hand left to play.
Addendum
During the military dictatorship of Odria, one phrase characterized his regime: one
cannot eat democracy. With this phrase, the military chief tried to justify a political
system that also failed to give Peruvians something to eat and that became one of the
darkest and most despicable regimes in Peruvian history. In the same way, one could
nish reading this article and reach a claim formulated with similar terms: one cannot
eat theory and if tourism brings some income then it is ne that it continues operating
in this fashion.
Indeed, we nd ourselves before a difcult dilemma. When do we use our history
to attract resources without betraying ourselves? In other words, how do we use the
intercultural potential of diverse Peruvian identities without falling into the trap of
eroticizing ourselves to satisfy the desire of the more powerful? Is it possible that
tourism could articulate a better and more interesting narrative based on the reality of
the country? Is it imaginable that tourism could become a space of reection in which
visitors could be more conscious of the antagonisms and possibilities of the present?
One thing seems certain: the extreme pragmatism that is being imposed upon
us (which could well be summarized by the phrase act without thinking, just do it) is
unacceptable. We should imagine and propose other more creative mechanisms with
which to narrate our history (and our identities) in order to introduce them politically
on the global stage. Spivak (1996) speaks of strategic essentialism, that is, a way in
which supposedly xed and stable identities can be manipulated to gain greater rights.
What I would like to suggest is that performance can be as much a weapon of liberation
as an iron cage. Tourism should be a space that articulates state promotion and private
initiatives with the participation of local populations. Tourism can no longer be the
ventriloquists story of a demand for exoticism that serves to silence and make
invisible. This is a question of options, of cultural politics, of cultural agents and actors
who are committed to not resigning themselves to a cynicism that is all too widespread.
Notes
1 So far, four programmes of this type have been completed: Jordan (2002), New Zealand
(2002), Peru (2005) and Jamaica (2005).
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2 As one might suspect, the script was written in Lima by Peruvian ofcials but always
taking into account the ofcial instructions of the producers. Direct testimonies
conrm that the negotiations between the various actors were constant but that at the
moment of recording the programme, it was clear that President Toledo wished to
please the North American producers, going against the advice of many of his own press
advisers. This is hardly of marginal importance as many of the images analysed here will
demonstrate.
3 For example, the assassination of the former mayor of Ilave in Puno took place around
this time. A chronology of the government can be found in Grompone (2005).
4 I noted this phrase during a good conversation that we had in the Instituto de Estudios
Peruanos on the morning of 22 July 2005.
References
Canepa, Gisella. 2004. Los antropologos y los sucesos de Ilave. Quehacer 148 (Mayojunio):
2631.
Grompone, Romeo. 2005. La escision inevitable. Partidos y movimientos en el Peru actual. Lima:
IEP.
Harvey, David. 1998. La condicion posmoderna. Investigaciones sobre los or genes del cambio
cultural. Buenos Aires: Amorrortu.
Mignolo, Walter. 1999. Diferencia colonial y razon post-occidental. In La reconstruccion de
las ciencias sociales, edited by Santiago Castro-Gomez. Bogota: Instituto Pensar.
Reguillo, Rossana. 2005. Horizontes fragmentados. Comunicacion, cultura, pospol tica. El desorden
global y sus guras. Guadalajara: ITESO.
Spivak, Gaytri. 1996. Subaltern talk. In The Spivak Reader, edited by Donna Landry, and
Gerald Maclean. New York: Routledge.
Vich, Cynthia. 2003. 29 de julio de 2001: Toledo en el Cusco o Pachacutec en el mercado
global. In Batallas por la memoria: antagonismos de la promesa peruana, edited by Marita
Hamman, Santiago Lopez Maguina, Gonzalo Portocarrero, and V ctor Vich. Lima:
Red para el desarrollo de las Ciencias Sociales en el Peru.
Z
izek, Slavoj. 1992. El sublime objeto de la ideolog a. Mexico DF: Siglo XXI.
Z
izek, Slavoj. 2003. A proposito de Lenin: pol tica y subjetividad en el capitalismo tard o. Buenos
Aires: Atuel.
Victor Vich has a PhD in Latin American Literature from Georgetown University, USA.
He is currently Associate Professor at Ponticia Universidad Catolica del Peru and
researcher at Instituto de Estudios Peruanos (IEP). He has published several articles in
different journals and three books: El discurso de la calle: los comicos ambulantes y las
tensiones de la modernidad en el Peru (Lima, 2001), El Canibal es el otro: violencia y cultura
en el Peru contemporaneo (Lima, 2002) y Oralidad y poder (Bogota, 2004).
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