Book Fair: hot debate

The parties met outside early in the morning. There was a group of people, pilots and umbrellas, gathered to enter together through Plaza Italia. On the way back, some girls with backpacks and pins were agitatedly consulting the location of the Victoria Ocampo Room. There were almost two hours left until the closing debate, “Culture at the center of the scene”, the novelty of the 2024 Book Fair. “An invitation to critical thinking,” was announced last Sunday, and will serve as the closing balance starting with this edition. And the conclusion of the Book Fair, which gathered almost ten percent less than last year, had more of the meaning of “spicy,” a word that the organizers anticipated, than of “thought.” But it also makes up polarization and party. As in the old Creole politics, the factional politics that mass democracy and consensus sought to leave behind, the Rural hall was the atrium of a battlefield. With the Culture, hurt, confused and outside.

Many were waiting for Beatriz Sarlo sitting in the middle of Martín Kohan, Alejandra Laurencich, Hernán Lombardi and Lucas Llach. There were sighs and knowing smiles when her disaffection for “personal reasons” was announced. So there was no other option, for those who went by the word intellectual, than to settle in a packed room, and a ready venue, to jump at the slightest cyclical detail. Something that began early in the memory of Victoria Ocampo, the intellectual who “burned” fortunes for Argentine culture, explained the presenter Gabriela Saidón, while denouncing that the national government drastically reduces the Southern Project for the translation of national literature. Thus she gave way to María O’Donnell, who she could barely moderate, and barely limited herself, overwhelmed with the debaters’ retorts, as the temperature rose, uncomfortable and nervous in her role.

In a text read, the narrator and editor Alejandra Laurencich started the debate by clarifying that “I would like to raise the need for us to no longer use words like battle, domination, combat in culture. Words that only serve those who seek to unleash a war. Let’s stop talking about battle and talk about cultural encounter, cultural promotion. Today the value of Culture is attacked. And a good like Culture is not fought, it is supported and protected.” And he expanded his position by understanding the difficult economic situation but that it cannot be resolved by “defunding education or the arts.” He took over from national representative Hernán Lombardi and began by quoting from memory John Stuart Mill, “who said that the opinions of others are what enrich one.” The same Englishman, by the way, who in another paragraph of “On Freedom” stated “The worst offense (to freedom) that can be committed consists of stigmatizing those who hold the opposite opinion as bad and immoral men.”

Lombardi later highlighted the climate of debate at other Book Fairs, several editions in which he participated in important municipal and national executive positions, and a “point that we should not touch: Culture as a factor of coexistence and as construction of identity. Culture like exploring other paths and respect for others. I believe that Culture is an essential element of the foundations of tomorrow,” he stated. although it was not completely clear because he turned his head over and over again. And she did it throughout the debate.

Freedom and fuck

And that’s where Lombardi started with candombe, since “I don’t want to avoid any controversy.” And he publicly provided a trigger for the speakers, which the organizers had circulated only among them, “the unbridled protagonism of freedom. No. Welcome the prominence of freedom.” From the bottom up the “aha” voices were increasing and became histrionic with the “I’m sorry that the president didn’t come to the Book Fair.” We had to wait until the end of the activity for Natalia Zito, one of the organizers along with Gabriela Saidón, to explain that the “unlawful” was justified by a president who signs every twitter with “Long live Liberty, damn it.” According to the Royal Spanish Academy, which the same former minister cited to disambiguate the term desaforar, that is, break privileges, hell refers to the virile member. The caveat of the woman writer and teacher Zito was little heard.

Economists take power

The one who had listened attentively, taking notes, perhaps the only one who had meticulously noted, was the writer and university professor Martín Kohan. And as he spun his sentences, the color of his face turned red. “If a cultural battle, or cultural dispute, opens around cinema, we would be talking about cinema and what type of cinema we want to promote in Argentina. That is a discussion that we could call a cultural battle. Exploding the Incaa is not a cultural battle. It is bursting the Incaa,” said the literary critic., and outlined the state areas contested in this “attack against Culture” and closed with “Culture, Get Out!”, which received a standing ovation from a section of the back, and the grimaces of the guests in front. One of them took the opportunity for a selfie, with the set panelists, when Lucas Llach remembered his days as a CBC student at the UBA and some “Germans who gathered more than 160 definitions of the word culture.” And like a good economist, “now that we even have an economist president,” he boasted, he got tangled in the usefulness of words. But culture, or the cultural battle, seems to exceed accounting or utility, and “has to do with issues such as ethnic cleansing, and not with the relative value of a speech or a soap opera,” Terry Eagleton would clarify in the distant nineties. , inspired by cultural studies that changed so many lenses of what to understand and how to understand the civil, identity and commercial value of Culture.

Cultural Studies that pointed out that the fire, or the blessed “polarization” or “cultural battle”, did not start in Argentina, which comes from the distant times of the Welfare State and the neoliberal reaction, and the unresolved conflict between equality and freedom. This floated in Llach’s words every time he compared high-screen sentences and discussed the role of the state in financing public universities or cultural policies, which he said were attended and enjoyed by “mostly, I’m not saying only, middle sectors.” -highs”, in a country where “the children of Jujuy were hungry”. Then the organization’s supposed conceptual discussions, in addition to the critical thinking shibboleth, languished in the heat of an afternoon of dogs outside. And inside, there were those who assured that Mario Vargas Llosa was the first South American Nobel Prize winner to attend the Fair, that Bukele is a success in security “although he is violating some rights, I don’t know”, that the books were for “rich people, so why they are deducted from VAT”, or that universities should celebrate because there was only a 25% budget reduction, less than ten percent more than the rest of society. Hallelujah.

The Great Absent

We are not talking about Juan Bautista Alberdi, upheld by the neoliberal marble, and of whom it is not known whether the one who thought that plowing the alphabet was better for the Argentines is praised, or the one who defended civilized Paraguay from the tyrants Solano López, in the War of the Triple Barbarian Alliance. Alberdi was the same man who lived for a large part outside of Argentina, dazzled by the Parisian salons since his romantic youth. No, the Great Absentee was Javier Milei in most of the participants’ reflections, except for Martín Kohan who repeatedly highlighted the president’s violent rhetoric and imprint. “I don’t know how they manage not to think about him!” Kohan exclaimed. On a different agenda, Lucas Llach mentioned it surreptitiously, highlighting that it is the “economy, the relevant issue in Argentina,” and that the right, of which he was an official in past radical and Macrista administrations, someone who defined himself as liberal- social democrat, “It is the one that is proposing changes and the progressive army is the one that resists. It has been a long time since I heard a reformist proposal from progressivism. That was left for Milei, which is only property, and less Family and Tradition”, curious reformulation of the economist, who was Ernesto Sanz’s partner in the 2015 PASO.

And it is more curious that the president is not mentioned because it was Milei himself who questioned, and not in the best way, the continuity of national cultural and educational entities. In another absence at the critical thinking table, it was rather Yrigoyen’s diary – which did not exist, let’s say in passing – of each panelist, to the question of the second part, “Does the State have to finance Culture?”, a fairly previous one was missing, “Which State would be building citizenship?” The question arises about this possibility that emerges from a society, from a Culture, with individuals who agree on a minimum common objective, and which is based more than on Gramscian ideas of cultural battles, fulfilling the agonistic and revealing societies of Carl Schmitt. The other Great Absence to understand the state of things in the contemporary world. “Enough noise and sides,” Alejandra Laurencich longed nostalgically, reliving the days of World Cup goals, and five million in the streets, without any incident.

failed debate

For the second part of the meeting there was a discussion where neither party dressed as the “best version of the adversary.” All the panelists agreed on the “public financing of Culture” although they increased the playlist of numbers and statistics, some defending a “successful model of the City of Buenos Aires where money goes where it needs to go”, and the others, hammering with the state questioning of “finance Culture, with a president who defends cultural practices. And that logic of violence, grievance and denigration of Milei has been transferred to society. That is the serious problem we have and that many like and replicate. All Culture is called a job and public education is called indoctrination”, a prior and “unavoidable” drawback to any “chance to improve the functioning of cultural organizations,” stressed Martín Kohan. Antonio Gramsci, who is quoted and those who speak of a cultural battle very badly, was thinking about a fascist prison in Bari in 1931, “Understanding and realistically assessing the positions and reasons of the adversary means precisely having freed oneself from the prison of ideologies.” -in the sense of ideological fanaticism-, that is, placing oneself in a critical point of view, which is the only fruitful one.” Almost a hundred years later, in a Palermo that was not Italian, names from past administrations flew in front and in the background, Jaimes, Máximos, Cristinas and Mauricios, and the discussion that the peninsular Marxist with a affinity for critical thinking dreamed of did not arise.

Towards the end everyone wanted to make the final push. And that “enriching everyone from the debate”, an hour and a half earlier, that the president of the El Libro Foundation, Alejandro Vaccaro, promised, failed in the noise. Kohan was still microphone in hand, asking “send food” to the poor children of Jujuy or Formosa and the “extortion of facing a plate of food or a movie ticket”; and Llach, winning smile, pulling the rope, “then give money to everyone.” Outside Victoria Ocampo, the dispute over the revealed truth continued between each other’s acolytes, throwing trains and biblical plagues at each other. Climbing on the escalator, some frenetically posted phrases in 140 characters, leaning towards the device. And the people, many who had arrived early for the debate, came and went without books, that is, without freedom.