Cultural Hacking, Soft Power, and New Interpretations of the State

Subliminal Culture

In the Catholic school I went to some teachers spoke with blatant ignorance and excessive authority about the subliminal messages in Japanese anime series and in songs from certain musical genres. They carried printed sheets of information taken from the nascent internet and explained the reasons why we should be careful with the flashes of light emitted in battle or with certain chords that contained within them secret orders to cause harm and recruit us into the army of evil. According to them, these cultural products contained an underground current that our developing brains couldn’t grasp. We were flippantly dismissed what they said, without suspecting that the teachers’ mystical-conspiratorial anxieties revealed an association and an understanding that some world governments utilize with refined intentionality, that is, culture as a subliminal instrument for the deployment of power.

In the same way, the government also demonizes its use for political (electoral) purposes. The problem with this perspective is that it views culture as a subsidiary element of politics, as a series of expressions used to set the stage for a specific electoral horizon. However, cultural meaning can never be reduced to a mere display of State power. Although, if we’re to be honest, this perspective does dictate part of the distribution of government resources to the cultural sector.

Scope and Examples of Soft Power

Political scientist Joseph S. NYE Jr. coined the concept of soft power in 1990 and defined it as the ability to influence others to obtain a desired result, not through coercion but instead by attraction. He highlighted the three pillars needed to exercise it, namely, culture, political values, and foreign policies. He also believed that soft power was the key to success during the Cold War. The mechanisms for implementing this type of diplomacy range from trickle-down media (books, exchanges, art) to those that produce an accelerated and more obvious impact (film, radio, news media).

Let’s look at three very different examples.

Brazil was the first country in the world to import the Japanese Digital Terrestrial Television (DTT) standard. According to author Angela S. Brandão, the use of this technology was part of a soft power strategy during Lula’s administration to influence neighboring countries and to strengthen his regional leadership through South American integration in the absence of the military might of emerging powers like China or India.

USAID, an agency recently dismantled by the Trump administration, is perhaps the most sophisticated example of this kind of geopolitical influence, injecting money into social programs in countries over which it claims significant influence.

During the Cold War, the Soviets used chess as a symbol of intellectual supremacy and, in fact, created an entire institutional framework to promote it. This sport was compulsory in all schools during the era and talented students were invited to continue their chess training in the Young Pioneers’ Palaces. They also developed robust training and coaching programs, still used today, which allowed them to dominate the world chess championship for twenty-four years (1948-1972: Botvinnik, Smyslov, Tal, Petrosian, and Spassky). That is, until Bobby Fischer defeated the last of them in the legendary world chamionship in Reykjavik in 1972. Bobby had learned Russian during his adolescence in order to access the training materials developed by the Soviets. He learned enough to read the manuals but stopped there. Reading and understanding, nothing more. (Learning a language is demanded by cultural hegemony. The possibility of hacking that hegemony by learning its language.)

Fischer achieved this feat by becoming a kind of cultural hacker, a hacker who, despite immense institutional disadvantage and instead as an icon and celebration of particular American individualism, briefly defeated a State apparatus of vast proportions. I imagine Fischer as a kind of Brazilian anthropophagus of the 1920s. Toward the end of his life, Fischer renounced his nationality and died in exile in the place where he had become a legend.

The history of soft power is a twisted and hallucinatory history, that of a flaccid power that seeks to penetrate domestic and foreign minds by any means necessary. The logic of the Cold War, however, no longer serves as a prism for understanding global reality and, in any case, these exercises in soft power are inadequate to explain the entire Latin American context. Which is why I consider it necessary to reformulate the relationship of dependence between the cultural and the political spheres.

Culture and  State

There is mutual distrust between politics (the State) and culture which stems precisely from this interpretation of culture as a display of power or as a way of thinking that is susceptible to capture by bureaucratic forces. This is so above all because we reduce politics to the realm of public funding management and understand how spending is determined by political capitalization.

According to studies, such as those of the Andrés Bello Convention or those developed by the WIPO and the General Directorate of Copyright, culture’s contribution to the GDP is somewhere between 1.8% and 3.3%, respectively. If we limit ourselves to the type of transaction that comes from budget allocations, analyses would suggest that, in a country like Colombia, culture has not received enough. In the end, this speaks about a disdain for culture as an instrument to impact society.

In nominal terms, the budget allocated to the Colombian Ministry of Culture has increased over the last seven years. However, in terms of its representation as a percentage of the nation’s overall budget, it has remained the same. According to the following table, we can see how culture is a very small percentage of the budget.

 Own elaboration

New Paradigme

The current geopolitical reorganization represents a transformation of soft power, that is, in the allocation of resources to fields such as culture and education. Perhaps this explains the popular idea of the dismantling of culture through public policy. What is seen as dismantling is actually a shift in the geopolitical paradigm, something that is not hidden but is actually the very symptom of a world in which the State is retreating.

We must, however, go beyond the scope of a purely budgetary analysis. This is where concern arises about other forms of relationships between the political (the State) and the cultural spheres, and about what other symptoms we can see in our time within this relationship. To do so, we must start from the fact that cultural conversations are quite diverse and depend on the territory where they occur, and the greater or lesser geopolitical hegemony of the State within which they develop. It also depends upon the importance of the periphery in constituting a “national” sensibility, mainly because many cultures on the periphery exist without being recognized by the State.

Bárbara Muelas, the first Indigenous woman to join the Colombian Academy of Language, mentioned in her acceptance speech the challenge of translating the term “State” into the Namtrik language when trying to translate the Colombian Constitution into this Indigenous language, as this concept does not exist there. In the end, it was translated as the “larger territory.” This is how culture operates, as a human expression not always integrated into an institutional framework. The translation exercise in which Muelas participated provides clues to the establishment of a new paradigm in the culture-State relationship, one that overcomes the retreat of the State and the bureaucratic capture of the former’s sensibility.

Bárbara Muelas (Photo credit: Comunidades Misak)

Given this approach, we must seek a new paradigm of engagement that is not exclusively transactional nor only about the projection of power, but rather expands the possibilities of meaning. In this way, it would make sense to align ourselves with García Canclini who recognizes cultural policy as a conversation. The various administrations that have presided over the Ministry of Culture during Gustavo Petro’s administration have dedicated their energy and bureaucratic apparatus to proposing different dialogues within the cultural sector. More than a dismantling, what is happening in Colombia is a restructuring, or better yet, a reconstruction and reordering of the conversation.

It is a fact that allocations for culture have been disproportionately low, although this is normal for modern states, which is why we must broaden the conversation and analyze the symptoms beyond budget allocations. In the end, States will disappear and other forms of organization will emerge. Culture, like an underground current that flows beyond us, is evidence of certain sensibilities and understandings of the universe, like a conversation that goes beyond those who are speaking.

[Featured Image: Bobby Fischer playing with children in Castelli Square in the Belgrano neighborhood of Buenos Aires. Photo credit: Harry Benson.]