A sota, la primera (i esperem que no l’última) de les ressenyes de El malestar a revistes acadèmiques internacionals. Sens dubte, la millor de totes les publicades fins ara. No és d’estranyar que l’hagi escrit una persona d’un calibre intel·lectual tan important com Helena Buffery (fins no fa gaire, professora de la Universitat de Birmingham, i ara a la Universitat de Cork, a Irlanda). La ressenya va sortir al Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 87 (2010).
El malestar en la cultura catalana
Of the numerous recent studies which attempt to diagnose and address the state of contemporary Catalan culture, El malestar en la cultura catalana is undoubtedly both the most searching in scope and the most rigorous in its use and recognition of the implications of contemporary cultural theory. Focusing on the period between 1976 and 1999, and thus overlapping with another key recent text, Kathryn Crameri’s Catalonia: National Identity and Cultural Policy 1980-2003 (Cardiff: Univ. of Wales Press, 2008), Josep-Anton Fernàndez covers some of the same ground, in identifying both the importance of language and culture to contemporary projections of Catalan identity and pinpointing the centrality of a project of normalization to post-dictatorship cultural policy. However, Fernàndez is far more conscious of the necessity to explain these phenomena in terms of the continuing subordination of Catalonia within the Spanish state, whilst attending in detail to the concurrent pressures of globalization. Thus, the considerable malaise the author reveals in the Catalan cultural field, as manifested in often acrimonious debate over literary value, the relationship between language and culture, and the marketability of Catalan cultural products, is identified as a symptom of a crisis caused both by Catalonia’s recent -and continuing- history of political and cultural subordination, and by the wider global crisis associated with postmodernity.
In order to do full justice to the complexity of the Catalan cultural problematic, Fernàndez organizes his study into two main parts. The first contextualizes and diagnoses the cultural crisis, through analysis of critical discourse on Catalan culture in the 1980s and 1990s, carefully outlining the epistemological frame for his approach and situating his response as one that is committed to an emancipatory agenda. For him, ‘un tal posicionament [. . .] comporta, també, una actitud de resistència contra la normalització, és a dir, contra l’estandardització de les pràctiques socials i culturals, i contra la invisibilització o naturalització dels processos de dominació’ (23). Chapter 1 focuses on the normalization process, tracing its roots in the ‘Projecte inacabat de la modernitat catalana’ and revealing its underlying ambivalence, as a project that seeks to naturalize Catalan identity as the unmarked norm but was born of resistance to the subordination of Catalan culture. Chapter 2 classifies and critiques current crisis discourses, showing that their discomfort with the contemporary Catalan cultural field stems either from political dissatisfaction with the naturalization of Catalan identity, or from culturalist criticism of the limited achievements of normalization. In Chapter 3 he places these discourses and processes within the wider context of a postmodern crisis in cultural models, diagnosing the ‘Triple condició postmoderna de la cultura catalana’. All three chapters point to a crisis in the production and legitimation of cultural value, whose impact at a symbolic level has brought about a crisis in identification, at the level of identity discourses and representation.
The second half of the volume goes on to explore the wider cultural manifestations of this triple crisis in terms of discourse, project and process. In Chapter 4, ‘El producte Catalunya: la crisi dels discursos de legitimació’ the author proposes that the erosion of legitimating discourses about Catalan culture is in part due to the particular problems of creating a Catalan culture market, but also to Catalonia’s dependent status, and its government’s feeble capacity for cultural legitimation. In Chapter 5, he explores the crisis in production of value through the overarching metaphor of ‘Terror a la delicatessen’. For him it is the very process of normalization that has provoked this crisis, rather than the shift to mass cultural products identified by other cultural critics, because of its inability to generate belief in the value of Catalan cultural products. Finally, Chapter 6 explores the effects of the struggles for hegemony in and on the symbolic field, through close analysis of a wide range of cultural texts. Arguing that the crisis in the production and legitimation of cultural value has led to a crisis in representation, by which Catalan discourses, practices, images and symbols have become invisible in mass culture, losing their capacity to represent their surrounding society, Fernàndez goes on to show how this problem has been addressed in relation to different levels and scales of identity discourses.
The study is impressive in its combination of a rigorous theoretical grounding with expert attention to sociocultural context and detailed and sensitive analysis of cultural texts. Whilst the conclusions are controversial in tone, due to his employment of metaphors of monstrosity and more playful recourse to queer theory, his insights are searching and deserve fuller consideration. His diagnosis of the underlying conditions of Catalan culture is wide-ranging and compelling, and we should not complain -as many others have- that the solutions he proposes in his conclusion appear disappointingly simplistic in comparison. Whilst he here reveals his own position to be fundamentally Queer, and thus committed to the interrogation of normative discourses, it would be unfair to expect him to come up with solutions that suit everyone. Fernàndez certainly convinces of the need to stop pretending to be normal and face up to the subordination of Catalan culture, if anything is to be done to address the current crisis.
