Cultures of Anyone: Studies on Cultural Democratization in The Spanish Neoliberal Crisis by Luis Moreno-Caballud (review)

Cultures of Anyone does not want to be a book. It would rather be a “conversation,” a “meeting space,” a “tool of composing with many others”, “full of holes, edges and unfinished pieces” (283, 280, 276). If a book at all, it imagines the possibility to be (to have been) one “with a less traditional authorial voice. . . . a voice that does not pretend to be explaining reality from a position of traditional intellectual authority . . . but rather proposing tools for the democratic development of a common story” (275), a collaborative endeavor, a “network experience.” And yet, when we open the hard cover of the book, when we look at the list of contents, with those strictly numbered chapters and subheadings, the disciplinary traps of the academic machine are nothing but obvious. This is, definitely, a book, an academic book. As Moreno-Caballud states, one of those that gives you tenure and institutional access to the world of “experts”: a meticulously documented work with a clear set of hypotheses; an original study that will be an indispensable reference for scholars in contemporary Iberian cultural studies, the history of social movements or the cultural effects of the 2008 economic crisis for years to come. But this is academic orthodoxy with a bad conscience, a monologue of dislocation coexisting, not always harmonically, with a horizontal conversation of multiple voices; an exercise of academic legitimation that attempts a radical critique of that very process and its implications.

There is, after all, an author (an authority) who, like many before him (particularly those following the steps of the Cultural Studies Birmingham group), inhabits an old paradox: the apology of dis-appropriation confronts the threat of becoming an institutional tool of re-appropriation. One cannot avoid the suspicion that the beautiful, strange, and melancholic photograph on the cover has been chosen as a sort of cryptic emblem of the book itself: Sol, the emblematic square in Madrid that served as the main stage in the 15-M protests appears at the height of the occupation, full of the bright-colored tents that constituted an ideal alternative city. In the background, some of the most famous mottos and banners of the protest can be seen. And yet, there is nobody in the square. The only presence is the equestrian statue of Charles III, reflected in the quiet water of a silent fountain, as if self-absorbed in his own image. This is an uninhabited space, an empty stage. The protest is asleep, in pause. The space of anyone is, just for a moment, the space of no one, the calm before the protest. It is a space of potentiality and promise or, conversely, one of mourning or, maybe, just fatigue.

From the very beginning, Moreno-Caballud states his goal very clearly: his work is not only an analysis and study of the processes of cultural democratization (“cultures of anyone”) opened by the Spanish economic crisis in 2008; it is also a contribution and a participant in those very processes, giving voice to a “collective intelligence” that takes the place of strong traditional authority revealing its “fictionality” (8). But his book also tells a parallel story, perhaps subdued compared to the enthusiasm of the activist, but still there: the multiple means of re-appropriation of that “collective intelligence” by “cultural authority,” a field of experts engaged (even against their own political and intellectual will) in the constant transformation necessary for maintaining their institutional and intellectual privileges. Moreno-Caballud is also, unavoidably, a participant in that parallel story. It is the performance of that fracture, between utopia and realism, between critique and complicity, that makes Cultures of Anyone a fascinating reading and, precisely because of the visibility of its essential and constitutive paradoxes, an extraordinary book written by an expert against the figure of the expert.

The first two chapters of the book serve as a rich and meticulous genealogy of that “culture of experts” as...