Autor/es
Descripción
ver mas
Colaborador
Gilman, Claudia
Materias
Spatial Coverage
Temporal Coverage
1979-1981
Idioma
spa
Extent
203 p.
Derechos
info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess
Atribución-NoComercial-SinDerivadas 2.0 Genérica (CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)
Formato
application/pdf
Identificador
Cobertura
ARG
1979-1981
Abstract
This thesis analizes the magazine Controversia para el examen de la realidad argentina /Controversies for the examination of Argentinian reality/ (1979-1981), published in Mexico by a group of Argentinian exiles. In line with the reflection on political violence, it offers early information about how theories and political expectations were being reformulated, and about how the role of the armed struggles were being thought afresh.
Our hypothesis is that, if we set as reference the long sixties (1959 – 1976), the Controversia magazine generated specific changes and continuities in the relation opened up between politics and culture, leaving long-lasting marks through their debates and relaunching into the public sphere the figure of the editors who carried it out. The magazine will allow for vanguard changes in that on its pages there were topics which up to the time had been dealt with only in rare opportunities, and cause the subjective side of the editors to emerge, which until then had been erased from public interventions by a universalist language.
We start from the idea that in the move from the 1970 to the 1980 decade a series of political and cultural changes took place, which the Contoversia magazine took charge of. We refer to the progressive relinquishing of the revolutionary ideals and the incorporation of theories and debates which contributed to a new democratic set of principles, in which the editorial group took over a decisive role for the case of Argentina. Alongside with this, we maintain that the aforementioned magazine was one of the pioneering expressions of that period in providing debates referred to human rights and in carrying out a harsh selfcriticism about the armed struggle. As can be appreciated, our analysis stands in line with Gilman’s (2003), who poses that cultural magazines had an important political place as a power alternative to that of the parties and the State itself, and contributed to set a specific emphasis upon the social changes occurring in Latin America at the time.
Within a context of military regimes which took over the governments of the regions, it became necessary to break the censorship and keep active the cultural fields which could encourage debate and thinking. In that direction, Controversia appears as one more mode of expression of the communities of exiled Latin Americans.
Our work fits into the frame of Sociology of Culture. It starts from some of Bourdieu’s premises (1971, 1979, 1984, 1993) to understand how, in the change of decade we here work on, there was a hierarchy of objects of analysis set out from the magazine, and strategies of intellectual and political prestige which were in tune with the social orders in dispute. In line with this we stopped at some of the magazine`s formal elements and interviewed the editors of Controversia, to establish counterpoints with our readings of the articles and the interpretations of the above mentioned publication of the Mexican exile. The interpretative perspective with which we addressed the texts resumes some of the tools of hermeneutics (Gadamer, 1975) so as to reconstruct the horizon of meaning in which these were integrated and figure out the substantial questionings.
For the exiled Argentinians Mexico was a prominent place, in that their State encouraged those resistance practices and made possible the emergence of publications like Controversia. This has been considered a hinge magazine (Gago, 2012) in that it was halfway between two ideologies in conflict, the revolutionary and the democratic one. The wager to construct a democratic society was precisely one of the central issues on debate in the magazine and which called for an abandonment of the vocabulary belonging to the socialist revolution. This was not a simple path, in that it called for a strong self-criticism and required to push reflection to limits seldom reached before.
Regarding the continuities it made evident, a series of political practices which surrounded Controversia stand out, as in groups of intellectual debate, round tables and talks, participation in other publications and performance in the orbit of the Mexican State. Actually, the launching of the magazine meant a political fact which required the explanations we have unraveled through the chapters of this thesis.
The Controversia magazine was a unique experience in its type, in that beyond the emphasis of the editors themselves, who place it as a space of theoretical and political reflection found in only very few expressions of exile, what can be read in its pages is the expression of changes in the structure of feeling (Williams, 1988), which involves thinking as it is experienced and felt; the addressing of certain taboo subjects of the time; the dialogue between socialists and peronists that converge in the magazine to practice a space of frontal and plural debate.
Furthermore, the editor group of the magazine –integrated by: José Aricó, Juan Carlos Portantiero, Nicolás Casullo, Sergio Caletti, Héctor Schmucler, Oscar Terán, Jorge Tula, Sergio Bufano, Ricardo Nudelman y Carlos Ábalo– constituted an intellectual and political elite with influence in the academic and editorial field as well as in that of the armed organizations; at the same time it owned political capital to exert influence also on democratic governments, and symbolical capital to influence on universities and on a wide cultural field. In Controversia there is a gesture which leads us to think of defeat, and at the same time we find a bet of the editor group to carry on being part of the intellectual and political vanguard in Argentina.
Our hypothesis is that, if we set as reference the long sixties (1959 – 1976), the Controversia magazine generated specific changes and continuities in the relation opened up between politics and culture, leaving long-lasting marks through their debates and relaunching into the public sphere the figure of the editors who carried it out. The magazine will allow for vanguard changes in that on its pages there were topics which up to the time had been dealt with only in rare opportunities, and cause the subjective side of the editors to emerge, which until then had been erased from public interventions by a universalist language.
We start from the idea that in the move from the 1970 to the 1980 decade a series of political and cultural changes took place, which the Contoversia magazine took charge of. We refer to the progressive relinquishing of the revolutionary ideals and the incorporation of theories and debates which contributed to a new democratic set of principles, in which the editorial group took over a decisive role for the case of Argentina. Alongside with this, we maintain that the aforementioned magazine was one of the pioneering expressions of that period in providing debates referred to human rights and in carrying out a harsh selfcriticism about the armed struggle. As can be appreciated, our analysis stands in line with Gilman’s (2003), who poses that cultural magazines had an important political place as a power alternative to that of the parties and the State itself, and contributed to set a specific emphasis upon the social changes occurring in Latin America at the time.
Within a context of military regimes which took over the governments of the regions, it became necessary to break the censorship and keep active the cultural fields which could encourage debate and thinking. In that direction, Controversia appears as one more mode of expression of the communities of exiled Latin Americans.
Our work fits into the frame of Sociology of Culture. It starts from some of Bourdieu’s premises (1971, 1979, 1984, 1993) to understand how, in the change of decade we here work on, there was a hierarchy of objects of analysis set out from the magazine, and strategies of intellectual and political prestige which were in tune with the social orders in dispute. In line with this we stopped at some of the magazine`s formal elements and interviewed the editors of Controversia, to establish counterpoints with our readings of the articles and the interpretations of the above mentioned publication of the Mexican exile. The interpretative perspective with which we addressed the texts resumes some of the tools of hermeneutics (Gadamer, 1975) so as to reconstruct the horizon of meaning in which these were integrated and figure out the substantial questionings.
For the exiled Argentinians Mexico was a prominent place, in that their State encouraged those resistance practices and made possible the emergence of publications like Controversia. This has been considered a hinge magazine (Gago, 2012) in that it was halfway between two ideologies in conflict, the revolutionary and the democratic one. The wager to construct a democratic society was precisely one of the central issues on debate in the magazine and which called for an abandonment of the vocabulary belonging to the socialist revolution. This was not a simple path, in that it called for a strong self-criticism and required to push reflection to limits seldom reached before.
Regarding the continuities it made evident, a series of political practices which surrounded Controversia stand out, as in groups of intellectual debate, round tables and talks, participation in other publications and performance in the orbit of the Mexican State. Actually, the launching of the magazine meant a political fact which required the explanations we have unraveled through the chapters of this thesis.
The Controversia magazine was a unique experience in its type, in that beyond the emphasis of the editors themselves, who place it as a space of theoretical and political reflection found in only very few expressions of exile, what can be read in its pages is the expression of changes in the structure of feeling (Williams, 1988), which involves thinking as it is experienced and felt; the addressing of certain taboo subjects of the time; the dialogue between socialists and peronists that converge in the magazine to practice a space of frontal and plural debate.
Furthermore, the editor group of the magazine –integrated by: José Aricó, Juan Carlos Portantiero, Nicolás Casullo, Sergio Caletti, Héctor Schmucler, Oscar Terán, Jorge Tula, Sergio Bufano, Ricardo Nudelman y Carlos Ábalo– constituted an intellectual and political elite with influence in the academic and editorial field as well as in that of the armed organizations; at the same time it owned political capital to exert influence also on democratic governments, and symbolical capital to influence on universities and on a wide cultural field. In Controversia there is a gesture which leads us to think of defeat, and at the same time we find a bet of the editor group to carry on being part of the intellectual and political vanguard in Argentina.
Título obtenido
Doctor de la Universidad de Buenos Aires en Ciencias Sociales
Institución otorgante
Universidad de Buenos Aires. Facultad de Ciencias Sociales