Beatriz Sarlo and Cultural Criticism in Argentina

By David William Foster

The importance of the critical discourse of Beatriz Sarlo lies in the success
she has had in positioning herself in terms of the debates occurring in
Argentina with respect to cultural production. This has meant not only
engaging in strategic expansions of the realm of literary and cultural
studies, but the willingness to enter, in a fashion that is characterized by
the dynamism and the aggressiveness of intellectual debate in Argentina,
in issues relating to the politics of culture.

Sarlo was trained in a narrow focus on literary studies of the sort that has
traditionally dominated the Argentine academy. Although the Argentine
university has often hosted highly trained and original scholars, the
combined pressure of intellectual traditionalism and the circumscriptions
of authoritarian rule, punctuated in turn by neofascist tyranny, has often
made it difficult to move programs in newer, innovative, and risk-taking
directions (for example, gender studies have only recently become possible
in some disciplinary sectors, and queer studies still remain pretty much of
a remote possibility). Thus, the quest for a space in which to expand
definitions of the literary and to conjugate it with larger parameters of
cultural production in which the literary beings to lose its privileged place,
has been a difficult undertaking: in many Latin American societies,
literature continues to be considered the high point of all Culture.
Correlating it with other modes of cultural production or suggesting a
geometry of cultural production in which literature is only one plane among
many others meets with considerable resistance.

Sarlo's critical writing, however, with the encouragement of the possibility

for developing a sociology of literature that dominated in some sectors in
Argentine during the heyday of leftist sociopolitical movements in the
1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, began to move away from a concept of literary
elitism with her first work to attract an enthusiastic critical reception, El
imperio de los sentimientos: narraciones de circulación periódica en la
Argentina, 1917-1927 (1985). In her examination of romance-novel writing
appearing in periodical literature at a high point of Argentine modernism,
Sarlo brought to the critical forum one of the first rigorously principled
examples of cultural criticism to be published in Argentina.
Sarlo's subsequent work has interacted with at least three dominant
sociopolitical discourses in Argentina. First, the discourse of the neofascist
tyranny which, although Argentina returned to constitutional democracy in
1983, still dominates many institutional and social sectors of the country,
less in terms of a call to return to military dictatorship than an abiding
endorsement of the principles that provided some measure of endorsement
and legitimacy for de facto government. Specifically, Sarlo has written and
taught extensively on the cultural production of resistance during the time
of the tyranny and on the cultural response to the transition to
constitutional democracy. In focusing on writers whose works, like the
highly praised novels of Ricardo Piglia, considered by many to be the most
important novelist to emerge in this period of transition, Sarlo has
underscored the way in which literature provides an interpretation of the
sociohistorical process. This is less of a sociology of literature in the
manner of her early writings on the role of literature in the social arena
than it is a scrutiny of the strategies available to literature and that
literature privileges for interpreting the sociohistorical in an act of cultural
semiosis.

Secondly, Sarlo has intervened in persuasive ways on the relationship of

Buenos Aires to the cultural projects of modernity and the degree to which
one can speak of a postmodernity in Argentina is a sequel to modernity, as
in a continuum with modernity, and as a critical stance toward modernity.
Una modernidad periférica, Buenos Aires 1920-1930 (1988) returns to her
earlier interest in the period of the vacas gordas in Argentina, but this time
with an interest in the relationship between cultural production as a whole
and the circumstances of its relationship to larger social and historical
processes at work in the country. Several recent works continue Sarlo's
perceptive and incisive thoughts on the subject: La imaginación técnica:
sueños modernos de la cultura argentina (1992).

Thirdly, Sarlo has continued to expand the horizons of her work on the
spheres of cultural production, and the attention to that production that is
often considered both peripheral to and antagonistic vis-à-vis traditional
literary culture has provoked much debate among intellectual circles in
Argentina and considerable antagonism toward Sarlo's intellectual project.
This work is available in Escenas de la vida posmoderna: intelectuales,
arte y videocultura en la Argentina (1994) and Instantáneas: medios,
ciudad y costumbres en el fin de siglo (1996). In Instantáneas, Sarlo makes
it clear that the whole range of cultural production must be submitted to a
theoretically grounded ideological analysis, that appeals to "high culture
values" are meaningless as a response to ever-changing examples of
cultural production, and that intellectuals, while at the same time
grounding their work in carefully elaborated theoretical models, must be
able to forge a public discourse that makes cultural commentary a vital
part of a vigorous national debate about culture on all social levels.