While the Cold War ignited a global geopolitical field, the predominant role of the two superpowers also incited a simplified worldview that has become a radically effective instrument for shaping our perception of reality, structuring our language as well as social, political, cultural and artistic structures. Discourses, imaginaries, values and even emotions specific to that historical period, have filtered into and naturalised within Western critical thought, nourishing our academies and disciplines. The continuation of discursive constructions and categories, linked to the experience of this global conflict, resonates in artistic practices, theory and curating, with the survival of totalising notions that reproduce the universalist perceptions, characteristic for those years of the Iron Curtain.
In this sense, this historical chapter must be understood not simply as a context, but as an epistemological system in itself, a model for structuring thought and reality, where the circulation of cultural agents and objects as well as systems of production took shape. We are faced with a powerful system for the configuration of imaginaries that, perpetuated in current policies, is projected to the present day. Despite appearances and distances, past and present share a structural configuration without which our present cannot be understood, and in which social, political, economic and cultural formations survive and are resemanticised within the framework of neoliberal discourse.
In contrast to arguments that claim a total paradigm shift since the fall of Communism, this web project aims to understand our contemporaneity as a hybrid space in which the survival as well as continuities (and discontinuities) of Cold War times are visible in imaginaries, policies, discourses, disciplines and current rhetorical gestures (often transmuted, resemanticised or even emptied of content). We here seek to establish on the basis of different concepts a polyphonic and multifocal field of tension of terms and social imaginaries important during the Cold War, which are synthetically in their reciprocal interrelation with artistic practices and aesthetic discourses and point to their mutations up to the present day. It is a visual and interactive proposal that is connected to the editorial project Revolver el tiempo.Conceptos críticos, mutaciones históricas y estéticas entre la Guerra fría y la contrarrevolución neoliberal (Barcelona, Bellaterra, 2022), where each of these concepts is developed in further depth and at length.
This interactive website proposes a journey via 10 concepts, delving into their interconnections and proposing their most important bibliographical references, that reach from what we could call the “cradle of neoliberalism” to their current developments within itineraries that concern the socio-economic as well as the political, without forgetting to consider its coalition with the cultural practices, representations and artistic praxis that this sphere of thoughts, in conjunction with late Capitalism, has given birth to and developed.
In this way, we could say that semio-capitalism and its neo-liberal declinations are the backbone that runs through the different concepts we delineate. It contaminates them reshapes its notions, and yet, at the same time, in each concept we can anticipate the latent tools for the struggle against this very same axis that has structured the last five decades of our world-system.
Although we take in both, this website as well as in the book Revolver el tiempo, conceptual configurations as starting points, it is not our intention to produce an exhaustive glossary or a dictionary. The here-selected concepts are understood, in line with Mieke Bal, as territories of analysis and “tools of intersubjectivity…. [which] offer us miniature theories, facilitate the analysis of objects, state situations and other theories” (Bal, 2019, p. 35). Taking such prerequisites in account, the thematic approach intersects with the chronological one, in essays that shake and stir time, to develop a diachronic analysis that, methodologically, bases on the history of concepts proposed by Reinhart Koselleck (2004) as well as on the exploration of their academic resignifications and in relation to the public and popular uses of these words. In our case, this “historicising of concepts” is completed – as pointed out – with a work anchored in visual culture, seeking to analyse these concepts not only regarding their relations with a factual history of social, cultural and political transformations, as Koselleck proposes, but also regarding the agency that artistic practices and visual culture have had and still have in their configuration of the social, cultural and political imaginaries associated with them. Furthermore, our proposal is bases on the pioneering work of Raymond Williams, who at the origin of cultural studies stressed that many questions “could not be reflected upon… [and in some cases almost not even addressed] unless we are aware of words as elements of problems” and who inquired into the transformations of their meanings (Williams, 2003 [1976], p. 20). Moreover, the studies gathered here start from a transnational perspective that connects productions, platforms and agents in Western and non-Western globalised spaces, and which trace the transformations of these concepts from situated configurations (and decentred geographies, with an anti-colonial will).
With this new proposal that continues our collective reflections collected on the Decentralised Modernity(ies) platform, such as Atlántico Frío. Historias transnacionales del arte y la politica en los tiempos del telón de acero Atlantic (Barreiro, 2019), we want to go a step further and think about the interconnections and ruptures produced between the Cold War and the contemporary world. This work is in a continuation of preceding intellectual experience(s) that traces a history of mutations and meanings, of complex relations, where the processes of globalisation that mark our contemporaneity are already underway.
Delving deeper into continuities and ruptures of the here proposed concepts while at the same time showing their interpretative shortcomings, and despite all difficulties involved, is an urgent task, not only for understanding the current configuration of our present, but also for unmasking the motivations behind their survival and their strategic use, and for proposing new models of analysis. This search for alternatives corresponds to a growing social, economic, cultural and political need for change, at a time when Capitalism is as discredited as Communism at its low-point.
Bibliographic references
Bal, M., (2009 [2002]), Conceptos viajeros en las humanidades. Una guía de viaje, CENDEAC, Murcia.
Barreiro López, P. (ed.) (2019), Atlántico Frío: redes transnacionales del arte y la política en tiempos del telón de acero,Brumaria, Madrid.
Koselleck, R. (2004), «Historia de los conceptos y conceptos de historia», Ayer, No. 53.
Williams, R. (2003 [1976]), Palabras clave. Un vocabulario de la cultura y la sociedad, Nueva Visión, Buenos Aires.
