Cultural Agents Reloaded: The Legacy of Antanas Mockus ed. by Carlo Tognato (review)

Once upon a time, not so long ago, we talked in Colombia as did most others elsewhere, about structures, las estructuras. We could then imagine tearing down these edifices, like the bourgeoisie, the market. This felt good. Once we had done so, but not before, it would become possible, even inevitable, we felt, for the ways in which people lived and thought—for their cultures—to change as well. There was then a politics against the structures, a human warmth in street protests: “El pueblo unido jamás será vencido.”

A politics against our cultures we could not then quite imagine. Cultures, our daily behavior so close at hand, seemed far-distant, constant, unchanging. We did not know how to tear at them. They were us. We may have heard the feminist challenge from the United States in the turmoil of the Sixties, that the personal is political, but we could hardly fathom what that meant.

Who would ever have thought that just some decades later, a few ideas about altering our daily behavior as individuals in public places, emanating from the mind of one person, the twice- elected mayor of Bogotá (1995–97 and 2001–03) Antanas Mockus, and a small group of imaginative people around him, would captivate us? Who would have thought that a few practices, some simple tearings (rasgaduras; not a term Antanas would use), would produce so much noise, such commotion and innovation, and affect the daily ways of tens of thousands of people? Few Bogotanos or others from far away to this day remember las mimas y zebras, the young mimes who spread out through the streets encouraging citizens to use the crosswalks. They made us feel good. Together with a politics of protest, we now had a culture of participation. Their streets were one and the same.

And who would have thought that these cultural experiences would lead to a rich text like this one, the work of 25 scholars and activists with the financial and organizational backing of Harvard University and the Universidad Nacional de Colombia, as well as a host of other international institutions? The market price of this esthetically designed book— and not merely for its visual essay with hundreds of photographs composed by José Luis Falconi and presented to us on 177 laminated pages—must be far below the costs of production. As were Mockus’s imaginative cultural practices, these texts are a labor of love.

This book brings us two stories: one about its protagonist Antanas Mockus, and the other, gaining space though its long generative process (2008–17), the story of the making of the book itself. Both are concerned with art and the humanities in the making of social change. Both are based on the seemingly shocking notion—one that seems almost like a conceptual trick—that culture is change, that culture can change structures. This idea is at the heart of Doris Sommers’s Harvard Cultural Agents project, which spawned this text and led to the creation of a Cultural Agents initiative in Colombia, to complement the making of this book.

The story of the first of Mockus’s various Cultura Ciudadana initiatives is vibrantly told. It is the story that explicitly brought all these scholars and activists together. It works particularly well, visually and verbally, from the variety of essay writers, the interviews with scholars in the United States. and especially activists in Colombia who worked daily with Mockus, together with pithy commentaries by some who witnessed the mayor’s initiatives, and culminating with the revealing reflections of Antanas Mockus himself. As the historian Malcolm Deas states on the back cover, “Often the chapters depart as interestingly from conventional political analysis as Mockus’s methods departed from conventional politics.” Here is Antanas’s legacy, sympathetically told, and critically too.

The second story, in the background, is that of the many authors themselves, of the everoptimistic editor, Carlo Tognato, who...