The influential Peruvian socialist thinker Jose Carlos Mariategui wrote in his Reflections (from the Peru Reader) that “Myth propels man through history. Without myth, human existence has no historical meaning. Indeed, history is made by those who are possessed and illuminated by higher beliefs, by superhuman hopes; the rest are the drama’s anonymous chorus.” Mariategui believes that history is driven (i.e. social change happens) by the power of myth because mythic forces unite people around a collectively constructed purpose that inspires collective action. I certainly agree that historical social change can arise out of such myths (which are consciously reproduced through discourse and practice). However, I also think that myth can take many forms – religion, philosophy, political or moral ideology, social structures (family, ethnicity, nation), etc. – any teleology or story that can provide a purpose to the traumatic and absurd nature of history and individual experience. Examples include myths of regimented, progressive time, of absolute knowledge (accessible through the elegant, objective methodology of science), of a static and definable personal identity, of rational economic or aesthetic value, of reason, of meaning, etc. The practice of these myths is frequently unconscious in that the myth’s performer might deny that the myth exists, is imagined and/or is historically contingent. Still, these myths pervade the practice of everyday life which constitutes, in totality, through time and space, what we call history.
(on another level, the study of “history” itself can be construed as a myth – a simulacrum of sources, specificities and syntheses that struggles towards an understanding of the present).
Mariategui continues: “The bourgeoisie no longer have any myth. They have turned incredulous, skeptical, nihilist. The old liberal faith of the Renaissance has become anachronistic. The proletariat possess a myth: social revolution. They move toward that vision with a vehement and active faith. The bourgeoisie denies; the proletariat affirms…” I read in these words a classic problem with Marxist (bourgeois) intellectuals – their totalizing projections onto heterogeneous masses who, in reality, have probably never heard of social revolution, and likely remain unconscious of the various myths (in my formulation above) that inundate the rhythms of everyday existence with meaning and purpose. The real myth of the proletariat for Marxists is that the proletariat exists as a discrete, qualifiable unit that yearns for real equality and freedom (a myth that nevertheless has mobilized direct action in Peruvian and global history).
Furthermore, I partially disagree with Mariategui’s assertion that the bourgeoisie have no myth. Rather, I think the bourgeoisie have no myths of which they are conscious, but plenty of which they remain unconscious: myths of equality by formal signification, of the end of racism, sexism, and even history itself, of unambiguous scientific progress, of agency/self-creation through consumerism, of individual freedom from (rather than through) society, of a painless, planned out life that might never end, of endless expansion and acceleration without consequence, of liberalism’s ideal marriage of capitalism and democracy. None of these myths mobilize self-conscious, transformative action; nevertheless they drive many present political and social developments and thus create history.
In the above piece, Jorge Miyagui uses Mariategui’s conception of a self-conscious “mobilizing myth” in an interesting way. In an ironic syncretism of words and icons, Miyagui tags Mariategui’s image onto the belly Sesame Street puppet Elmo; the words “Elmito” (alternately meaning “little Elmo” and “the myth” in Spanish) float above. Miyagui explained the piece as a playful representation of Mariategui’s rallying cry for a popular myth to mobilize action. By employing perhaps a little too much of my scholarly license, I’d like to interpret this “infinite sign” through the framework I developed above.
For me, Elmo, Sesame Street and indeed most (inter)nationally distributed television programs function to socialize children with standardized systems of moral, communicative, and rational knowledge. In such respects Elmo can represent the bourgeois myths of achieving universality and formal equality through alienating technologies; this unconscious bourgeois idealism is mythic not merely by its imaginary substance, but also by its reproduction through the sharing of stories (via the hegemonic pathways of media and education).
It initially disturbed me that Mariategui would be pasted onto and conflated with Elmo; on further reflection, this serves as a powerful critique of the exploitation of iconography, and of utopian socialism as well as a rallying cry for a leftist counter-hegemony.
First, the critique: as we’ve seen in numerous artists work (Miyagui, Javi Vargas, Alfredo Marquez) Mariategui is a powerful figure who has inspired feelings of hope, courage, and solidarity for leftist activists; accordingly, his image (three of the most commonly circulated seen above) has become reproduced into an icon, a symbolic vessel that alludes to more than his life and ideas but more broadly to the emotional experience of activist struggle. As such, the sign has in many cases replaced its original substance - the icon, “cross-dressed” (as Vargas put it) to suit various purposes, alludes to past reproductions of the icon rather than to the person behind the image’s work. We have seen such exploited iconography in the invocations of Maria Elena Moyano, Jose Maria Arguedas and Tupac Amaru II (as well as Che Guevera and Mao Tsedong) in street art, mass media, and government and radical propaganda (both visual and language-based). Pasting Mariategui onto Elmo’s body can be interpreted as a critique of how existentially concrete, limited and dead humans can become transformed into icons, domesticated into gentle, fuzzy abstractions that, like Elmo, can be used to project any ideology, so long as it remains concealed behind an emotionally stimulating symbol.
This relates directly to the critique of utopian socialism I’m reading into Miyagui’s piece. As Mariategui explained above and I elaborated, a lot of socialist theory is powered by myths – myths of economic reductionism, clear class distinctions, dialectical materialism, universal consciousness, revolution, utopia, etc. – but what interests me even more in relation to Elmito is how socialist myths have been subsumed by hegemonic myths of tolerance and progress. As Elmo digests Mariategui (or worse, has a Mariategui tattoo), socialist discourse and dreams (wherein lies a powerful potential for radical social change) have been consumed, diluted and tokenized by a relatively “tolerant” mass society – in the totalizing language of some artists and intellectuals, in charity work justified as part of a process, in radical politics courses taught to future capitalists, in this blog post’s vague allusions and impotent reflexive paralysis – this trajectory has been described by Herbert Marcuse in One Dimensional Man as “institutionalized desublimation”. This is particularly fascinating in Peru, where a 20 year period of horror, insanity, violence, destruction and terror spurred by a Marxist insurrection (and more generally, national conflicts surrounding class, race, inequality, urbanization, imperialism, modernization/westernization/development/exploitation/liberalism/etc.) spurred a conservative reaction that has labeled leftist critics of the state as terrorists. Still, such critiques have not been driven entirely underground towards violent revolutionary action because such destruction has proven insane and futile, and there exists safer paths of expressing discontent such as art.
Now, by no means am I advocating violence as the only “true” negation of state and culture nor am I rejecting art as pointless or pathetically “safe”. Rather, I’m suggesting that Miyagui’s piece raises fascinating questions about the potentially “demobilizing” myths (of historical determinism, of already existing solidarity, of a transcendent purpose) that Marxism and art can inspire when functioning within the neoliberal logic of tolerance and commodification.
Finally, with the potentially critical aspects of Miyagui’s piece in mind, I think Elmito functions most powerfully as a rally cry towards developing a myth that might utilize the already-hegemonic discourses (progress, universality) and technologies (iconography, kids shows) suggested by Elmo in combination with the transformative potential of Mariategui. Such fusion of the hegemonic and the subversive could succeed in developing a radical counter-hegemony (once suggested by Gramsci) that might mobilize widespread consciousness and action. Indeed, this suggestion mirrors the nature of Miyagui’s work, which itself constitutes a fusion of culturally-specific symbolism that, by its syncretic nature, moves beyond the isolating specificity of its origin towards a transcultural iconography that can explain a historical purpose and demands deliberate practice. Perhaps Miyagui himself provides the answer to the questions he provokes.
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But what right do I have to project such absurd depth into an artist’s momentary playful flight of imagination? I’m not sure if I believe or even agree with everything I’ve written above – it’s occasionally callous, illogical, downright silly – I doubt Jorge will be entirely pleased with the work (not that I need him to). After all, I disagree that art is any more an infinite symbol than anything else is; original intent matters, and outsiders projections onto the meaning of powerful cultural objects that they don’t entirely understand isn’t exactly cool. This is a problem I’ve had with a lot of my academic work. Oh well, I’ll give up on this post for now and return to this later…maybe…
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