ARGENTINA UNDER MENEM: THE AESTHETICS OF DOMINATION
Under President Carlos Saul Menem’s reactionary cultural revolution, Argentina has become more authoritarian both by way of political changes and changes in political culture.
By Beatriz Sarlo
President Carlos Saúl Menem has propelled a true cultural revolution of a reactionary character in Argentina. Its consequences are visible not only in government policy, but in the very tone and temperature of public life. The country has become more authoritarian both by way of political changes and changes in political culture. An examination of these changes–brought about with remarkable ease–must take two factors into consideration. There are, on the one hand, the specific features of the socioeconomic conjuncture which were powerful enough to make a large part of Argentine society accept a much weakened parliament, a justice system and a Supreme Court ready to defer always to the government, and an executive branch that concentrates many of the legislative functions. On the other hand, there are more general features that have to do with how one conceives of politics. These features can be called “postmodern” or “post-political,” and are closely connected to the rise of television as a political medium.
The last two years of the Radical Civic Union government of Raúl Alfonsín–who assumed the presidency in December, 1983–were marked by two phenomena: the increasing deterioration of relations between the military and civilian authorities, and a gigantic wave of inflation that culminated in the hyperinflation of 1989. The crisis was so critical, in fact, that Alfonsín handed over power to his successor, Carlos Menem, several months ahead of time in mid-1989.
Between 1987 and 1989, conflictual relations with the military resulted in several insurrections headed by officers who had participated in the “dirty war” and in the war of the Malvinas-Falkland islands. The radical government confronted these insurrections with the support of the population, but without having at its disposal a military power that would obediently follow its orders. The trial and conviction of members of the military juntas responsible for the disappearance and death of several thousand men and women during the dictatorship (1976-83) created an open wound in the military institution. Raúl Alfonsín was not able to close this wound, even with the laws of punto final and obediencia debida. Passed after the conviction of the junta members, these laws brought to a halt the prosecution of those responsible for human rights violations. This episode of history was definitively closed only when Menem pardoned the military in the first year of his administration.
The trial and conviction of those responsible for unleashing the most ferocious repression that Argentina has ever known was a tremendously important moment in the restoration of an ideal of justice, and in the construction of a public memory of the events of the dictatorship. But the abrupt interruption of the hundreds of trials and, above all, the pardon of military officers who had been convicted and were in jail, placed the subject of human rights violations in a past that Menem wanted to put behind him. He thus initiated an operation of “forgetting” which benefited the military. On the one hand, this closure imposed by the government–which broke with any idea of justice–helped solve the problem of instability in military-state relations. But, on the other, it dulled the memory of what had occurred in the last decade. The military pardon closed a subject that is not only juridical or political, but that is decisively moral and cultural.
The hyperinflation, which had dramatically marked the final months of Alfonsín’s presidency, raged on during the first months of the Menem government. It would only be stanched with the implementation of a new economic plan, under the direction of Domingo Cavallo, Menem’s economy minister.
The recurring episodes of hyperinflation left deep imprints–not only economic but also cultural–on Argentine society. The population’s state of mind can be characterized as the obsession, constantly repeated in public and private discourse, that anything was better than a new surge of hyperinflation. Thus, a large part of the population silently agreed to hand over a blank check to the government of Carlos Menem and to his economy minister on the condition that minimal stability be guaranteed.
The cultural imprints of hyperinflation can today be seen with clarity. In the first place, the idea was imposed that all other economic or social demands must be postponed in the face of the principal objective of achieving stable prices. Everyone–including the sectors most harmed by the new economic policy–agreed that economic stabilization was the central value that had to be defended above all others. Society in its totality was ready to pay the price that the economic plan presented as necessary to prevent the return of the chaotic social and economic situation they had just passed through. Thus the discourse of Menem and Cavallo on the virtues of the free play of market forces and the negative effects of state intervention was taken as descriptive of the reality that had to be accepted. The market began to be seen not as an institution reflecting changeable social relations, but as a natural phenomenon whose objective limits had to be accepted.
In the second place, the discourse of the president and the economy minister, together with the rapid, drastic measures favored by Cavallo, tended to convince the population that it was impossible to respect all the institutional formalities if stabilization was to be rapidly achieved. President Menem and his cabinet presented Argentine society with a dilemma: to overcome inflation, it was necessary to concentrate power in the executive branch and not in the legislature; it was necessary to operate quickly and in unison; and it was necessary to avoid a debate in Congress. By contrast, to preserve the parliamentary forms of discussion of laws, the time required for the deliberation would be time miserably lost from establishing economic order. In short, the dilemma presented the institutional role of parliament in the political process as an obstacle to the common good.
In these circumstances, President Menem had recourse to two strategems. The first was–and continues to be–that of passing over parliament for approval of his measures, and using the doubtfully constitutional mode of legislation by decree. Menem’s “decree laws” have turned executive power into a legislating force, and weakened the parliamentary function. In the second place, both Menem and Cavallo transformed themselves into able mass-media communicators of governnient policy, establishing a relationship with society that is neither institutional nor based in the forms of representation. One man came off as a charismatic savior, and the other as an infallible technocrat.
We are present at a new mestizaje in which market liberalism blends with the charismatic political style that President Menem learned in the Peronist movement. In 1989 when he was elected president, people expected Menem to carry forward a populist plan with a nationalistic style. Within a few short months, however, he convinced many of his supporters of the need to take a sharp turn toward neoliberal, monetarist, anti-statist policies, which Peronisin had always considered to be the epitome of oligarchic and anti-national politics. This ideological transformation manifested itself in all the government’s actions and in its very style.
It’s illustrative to compare a public appearance of Menem as a populist leader, which took place during the 1988 presidential campaign, with another event, of strong symbolic power, that occurred a short while afterwards. Between the two events, signs of a decisive cultural make-over emerged. The first event took place in a soccer stadium in October, 1988, a year when the electoral campaign was in full swing. The other event, characteristic of the new style, was a military parade on July 9, 1990. These two examples reflect a change: from Menem the savior and hope of the dispossessed, to Menem the guarantor of the restoration of the powerful. In the first event, Menem displayed all the traits of a plebeian, mass-mediatized populism; in the second, the symbols of civilian-Armed Forces reconciliation exalted the military, crowning the operation that had begun with the pardon.
The cultural importance of this change of scene and of script is incalculable. The 1988 meeting in the soccer stadium fell back on the symbols which proliferated in the history of Peronism. Menem appeared, dressed completely in white, as the hope of righting past injustices, as the advocate for the humble, as the politician who–coming from the country’s interior and rooted in the heart of the mass movement–could interpret the desires and interests of the people. He promised redistribution, full employment, and high salaries in the near future. He used words that belonged to the ideological tradition of his audience: work, respect, dignity, well-being, justice. Turning to rhetorical forms of populism, he positioned himself in a place that had been empty since the death of Perón: a charismatic head of state; a leader who had risen outside bureaucratic structures; a man from the interior among politicians from Buenos Aires; someone respectful of the historical traditions of the Peronist movement.
With this profile, Menem shaped his candidacy and strengthened an electoral campaign that was sustained by his own physical presence exhibited as a guarantee aboard the menemóvil.[1] He offered to the political theater his body, to be seen and touched as a material incarnation of the message that he brought. In the event at the soccer stadium, he entered aboard the menemóvil followed by spotlights–like a true star of popular redemption who knows how to manage the aesthetics of pop and rock. In this event, his body became sublime. Dressed in fluorescent white and illuminated by a single ray of light, Menem moved through the stadium to take his place at the rostrum. In the processions of the presidential campaign, the body of Menem circumnavigated a scene in constant motion: people could see him arriving; they could see him passing by; they could follow him. He was there making his way through the crowd, slightly distant, but generating at the same time the illusion of proximity.
A few months later, during the military parade of July 9, 1990, the new Menem, now president, proved that this cultural citation of the Peronism of the 1950s was precisely that: a citation, a fragment of spectacle properly placed between quotation marks.
The scene of the military parade was remarkable: the Armed Forces spread out through the streets of the city; on a dais, accompanied by his full cabinet, the president, immobile, surveyed the passing column of troops. Even if the Armed Forces formally saluted the powers of the republic, those very powers, with their fixed gazes on the parade, legitimated Argentina’s most profoundly questioned institution. Menem, who knows how to organize cultural happenings, converted this parade into a statement of the refoundation of the pact between society and the anny.
Menem understood that the pardon of those who had ordered the repression of the 1970s and early 1980s was not enough, since it dealt with a law, not with cultural facts. Because of that, he made sure that the reclamation of the military would be captured in an urban set piece of great significance. The still-open conflict between society and the Armed Forces needed an allegorical resolution: the five hours of the parade, a long and tedious sequence scrolling across television screens. The visual reiteration of tanks, airplanes and marching troops had profound ideological import, because through repetition and overabundance, only one theme was heard: the phase of debate over the past dictatorship was over. At the same time, it became apparent that any discussion about a future whose shape was already decided would no longer be welcome. Menem’s reconciliation of his government with the Armed Forces presaged other alliances with both domestic economic powers and the United States. All of this could be read in the image of the gathering of military masses, members of the civilian government, and foreign ambassadors, during that parade of 1990.
In a country with a strong presidency like Argentina, the head of state plays a decisive role in setting the tone of public life. Menem’s style is perfectly mass-mediatized: he disdains ideas; he tends to shut off more complex questions; he follows recipes for a simple solution; he disdains the deliberative and discursive forms of policy-making; and he cynically rejects those values, found in the Peronist tradition, which are grounded in the ideal of a just society. This style has an important weight in the present cultural-political conjuncture.
The consequences are serious because today, only deliberative policy-making, the independence of the three branches of government, and the full functioning of political institutions can counter a presidential will perfectly aligned with the interests of the powerful. By means of mass-mediatized morals, aesthetics and culture, the baseline values of a just, equal and cooperative society have been replaced by a market Darwinism that has left profound marks in a new individualist, anti-cooperative culture.
One feature of the current clash between politics and society is the weakening of public culture. As political discussion, parliamentary representation and other forms of collective participation have become less relevant, the mass media–especially television–have come to occupy a decisive place in the construction of the public sphere.
Today it is impossible to think of politics without television. This feature, common throughout the West, has distinct manifestations and consequences in Argentina where an educational crisis and a rising rate of illiteracy converge with an audiovisual hegemony over the symbolic dimension of social life. This process is spearheaded by privately owned television channels that choose their strategies according to the laws of profit maximization.[2] A strong counterweight to private capitalism does not exist in Argentine television: the lone state channel is in the iron grip of the government, and no large public channel exists at all. Today the market completely defines the character, aesthetic and ideology of the audiovisual sphere.
Politics and political culture are formed in a televised space that responds only to the shifts and interests of the capitalist market of symbolic goods, without counterweights or balances. The public sphere has been mass-mediatized, and the political scene is increasingly an electronic one. Mass-mediatized politics pays tribute to the image of a common culture that unites actors whose symbolic and material power are very different. This may assure a minimum of cultural cohesion, but not the type of cohesion that reflects a true sense of community.
Mass-media discourse compacts society, projecting an image of a unified cultural scene, a common place where oppositions dissolve into a polyglotism of many voices which are never necessarily speaking to one another. It’s not that media are more democratic; it’s simply that they need to incorporate all the discourses in order to present a universal sphere. Politics defers to the media aesthetic. It accepts the media as representative of the universal. And it frequently adopts the formal and rhetorical limits that the media impose: speed, variety, volubility–qualities that often call to mind the emergence of a political show or a U.S.-style sound bite.
Persuaded of the importance of the media in the construction of the public sphere, politicians accept the assumption that the discussion of ideas, the great debates, complicated postulates, and the presentation of sophisticated positions are “anti-television.” They cultivate a media image based upon the reduction of the complexity of their message, and in the illusion of closeness and familiarity: “We are the same as you; we represent you at the same time as we mingle with television celebrities. We represent the people in that which the people have closest at hand: the television set in their living room or their kitchen.” The mass-mediatized operation thus concludes in a poverty of meanings, in a thinning of the growing complexity of problems, and in a visual flow where the “now” is built on top of oblivion. To exist, politicians–classic mediators between the citizenry and institutions–need television to be the Great Universal Mediator. They are captives of the mass media.
The mass-mediatization of politics is an almost irresistible phenomenon. Policy is built by the newscasters; television news sets the order of the day. Trustworthiness is taken away from political leaders; it is now administered by the heads of the mass media. The culture of discussion has been superseded by a political simulacrum which does not thrive in political institutions, and feels more at home in the realm of television. Politics in the mass media is subordinated to the laws that regulate the audiovisual flow: high impact, large quantities of undifferentiated visual information, and arbitrary and binary syntax that is better suited to a matinee melodrama than to the public arena.
President Menem is, without doubt, an expert in audiovisual communication. His style has been perfectly adapted to the style of television. He has crafted his image not in the argumentation of ideas which permits the expression of conflicts between different values and interests, but in high-impact interventions, with perfectly unified perspectives and a simple system of oppositions in which someone is either your “friend” or your “enemy.”[3]
While it’s not possible to dream of a nostalgic return to the forms of politics that existed prior to the mass-mediatized cultural revolution, it’s difficult to accept that politics is only built within the framework that the media impose. One can imagine changes in the politics of the media. Without a doubt, not all TV news is as unanimously bad as it is in Argentina; not all television correspondents have to be sensationalist agitators. There is no destiny inscribed in television from which it is impossible to escape.
The identity of politicians is not fashioned only in the media. We can hope that politicians will remain true to their calling: expressing a will broader than their own even while working to form that will. Today politics needs the properly intellectual moment as well as the mediatized one. It needs ideas as well as images. The aesthetic of audiovisual media tends to expel those discourses that have an argumentative logic of an intellectual cast. This conflict is part of a relationship that has already been deeply engrained and–what is worse–has been accepted by intellectuals and politicians alike.
With few exceptions, politicians, intellectuals and newscasters take a “descriptive” and neutral position with respect to the consequences of the mass-mediatized hegemony of the symbolic dimension of the social world.[4] Some argue that television doesn’t matter because the public recodes television messages and produces new meanings. They forget, however, that the public’s freedom to construct those hypothetical new meanings is limited because people must work with the materials that television offers them. Naturally, the intellectual defenders of this position don’t propose major changes in the use of the media, nor do they worry that the private interests of media owners are the true shapers of public opinion.
Opposite this position, which is characterized by its optimism with respect to the products of the capitalist marketplace, one can place perspectives of critique and reform. Intellectuals–especially Left intellectuals–can play a decisive role in producing new ideas about how the media can be used in a democratic, reflexive, imaginative and transparent manner. Certainly, these new ideas would confront an enormously concentrated power.[5] New ideological-cultural perspectives can, however, find a reasonable echo in the media precisely because the media are obliged to incorporate everything that has some public significance.
The last elections in Argentina, which took place this April, demonstrated that it is possible to conceive of elements of a political culture that are not inevitably prisoners of audiovisual ideology and aesthetics.[6] The center-left Frente Grande emerged as an important third national force in these elections. The party’s candidates used the media with the goal of introducing relatively more complex and non-binary discussions.[7] The Frente Grande recognized social needs that were not expressed by either Peronism or Radicalism, and they knew how to take advantage of the emergence of calls for greater transparency, honesty and capability in politics.
The situation is particularly instructive. On the one hand, these new political actors–some of whom come from the human rights movement and others from the artistic and intellectual field–recognized the power of the audiovisual media in the construction of the public sphere. At the same time, they figured out how to work with television without surrendering to all its rituals. In fact, they proposed a new kind of political discourse in the audiovisual media.
Does this recent turn of events presage a new synthesis? It’s difficult to say so today. Whatever the case, this synthesis is necessary if a new politics is to be built. This politics will have to be grounded in the recognition of two things: first, that the audiovisual sphere is an inexcludable element in the present construction of politics; and secondly, that the unconditional acceptance of the worst features of mass-mediatized culture will not permit new ideas to emerge.
One must, then, abandon all intellectual celebrations of the media. The media must be recognized as a necessary factor, but not the only one, in the construction of democratic and progressive options. One must also reaffirm the value of intellectual practice in relation to politics: a new politics must figure out how to reapportion the places and functions of knowledge and ideas as well as those of the mass media. To achieve this, the critique of mass-mediatized aesthetics and ideology is as decisive as the critique of the traditional forms of politics. In this open-ended scenario, there is, without a doubt, a place for the participation of intellectuals.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Beatriz Sario is a professor of Argentine literature at the University of Buenos Aires. Her most recent book is Jorge Luis Borges: A Writer on the Edge (Verso, 1993).
Translated from the Spanish by NACLA.
NOTES
1. The menemóvil was a truck crafted as a stage, on which Menem and his entourage moved about during his electoral campaign in 1988.
2. In February, 1994, the Education Ministry made public the results of a national survey conducted to measure educational achievement in the last year of primary school and the last year of secondary school. The survey included a sampling of several tens of thousands of students, both from public and private schools. Seventy percent of those surveyed could not answer questions posed after reading a simple text; sixty percent could not solve elementary mathematical problems.
3. Menem uses, with dangerous frequency, the words “inconciente” (thoughtless) and “forajido” (wicked) to describe those whom he considers to be mistaken.
4. The only exception that is worth mentioning is the current-events program led by Mariano Grondona, Hora Clave (Key Hour), which presents the debate of ideas in a form which suggests the possibility of building a true public arena in mass media. Grondona’s program was important in the electoral victory of Frente Grande, the center-left alliance.
5. In Argentina, legislation on the ownership of communications media lacks anti-monopoly clauses. For example, the largest-circulation daily newspaper, Clarín, owns several important radio stations as well as a television channel that transmits throughout the country.
6. In these elections, members were chosen for the Assembly which, in the course of the year, will be in charge of modifying the Argentine Constitution. The electoral stage was seen, for that reason, to be freer of the polarizations characteristic, up to now, of the elections for president or provincial governor.
7. The Frente Grande was formed from the convergence of groups that abandoned Peronism and Christian democracy, of human rights activists, and of old groupings of the Left. The Frente Grande was victorious in the city of Buenos Aires and in the province of Neuquén. It came in second in the decisive province of Buenos Aires. Nationally, it emerged in these elections as the third force, after Peronism and Radicalism, thereby breaking the traditional Argentine two-party system.
