Full Description
An Open Access edition of this book is available on the Liverpool University Press website and through Knowledge Unlatched.
Cultures of Anyone studies the emergence of collaborative and non-hierarchical cultures in the context of the Spanish economic crisis of 2008. It explains how peer-to-peer social networks that have arisen online and through social movements such as the Indignados have challenged a longstanding cultural tradition of intellectual elitism and capitalist technocracy in Spain. From the establishment of a technocratic and consumerist culture during the second part of the Franco dictatorship to the transition to neoliberalism that accompanied the 'transition to democracy', intellectuals and 'experts' have legitimized contemporary Spanish history as a series of unavoidable steps in a process of 'modernization'. But when unemployment skyrocketed and a growing number of people began to feel that the consequences of this Spanish 'modernization' had increasingly led to precariousness, this paradigm collapsed. In the wake of Spain's financial meltdown of 2008, new 'cultures of anyone' have emerged around the idea that the people affected by or involved in a situation should be the ones to participate in changing it. Growing through grassroots social movements, digital networks, and spaces traditionally reserved for 'high culture' and institutional politics, these cultures promote processes of empowerment and collaborative learning that allow the development of the abilities and knowledge base of 'anyone', regardless of their economic status or institutional affiliations.
Contents
Introduction
Part I. Cultural Authority and Neoliberal 'Modernization'
Chapter 1. Cultural Aspects of the Neoliberal Crisis: Genealogies of a Fractured Legitimacy
1.1. Crisis of a Hierarchical, Individualistic Cultural Model
1.2. Enlightened Gardeners, or, the Power of Knowledge
1.3. 'Transplanting People': Capitalist Modernization and Francoist Technocracy
1.4. Pedagogy of 'Normalization' and Cultural Elites
Chapter 2. 'Standardizing' from Above: Experts, Intellectuals, and Culture Bubble
2.1 Experts in Something and Experts in Everything: The Two Pillars of the Culture of the Transition
2. 2. Men Who Smoke and Men Who Drink (or, Culture, That Modern Invention)
2.3. The Engineer's Great Style: A Depoliticized Aesthetic Modernity
2.4. 'Normalization', Deactivation and Culture Bubble in the CT
Chapter 3. Arrested Modernities: The Popular Cultures that Could Have Been
3.1. Arrested Modernities I: A Culture Rooted in Tradition Faces the Transition
3.2. Words in the Kitchen: Subsistence Cultures and Productivist Cultures
3.3. Arrested Modernities II: Postwar Cultures and Creative Consumption
Part II. Cultural Democratizations
Chapter 4. Internet Cultures as Collaborative Creation of Value
4.1. Genealogies and Contradictions of Digital Cultures
4.2. Unpaid Work and Creation of Value on the Internet
4.3. The Pleasure of Doing, and Telling What One Does: Self-Representation of Internet Cultures
4.4. Two Overlapping yet Clashing Value Systems
Chapter 5. Combining the Abilities of all the Anyones: The 15M Movement and Its Mutations
5.1. Anyone's Word and the Expert's Word: An Alliance
5.2 Sustaining the Plaza and Beyond: Towards a New Cultural Power
5.3. Conflict of Authorities: Intellectuals, Mass Media and the 15M Climate
5.4. 'The Boxer and the Fly': Nomadism and Sustainability After the Plazas
Chapter 6. Towards More Democratic Cultural Institutions?
6.1. The Self-Managed Culture in Its Life Spaces
6.2. Under the Ambiguous Umbrella of the Public Sector
6.3. Between Institution and Experimentation: Why Hasn't There Been a Marea de la Cultura?
6.4. 'Making Us Be': The Question of Forms of (Self)Representation
Works Cited
Notes and References
Index
