From beneficiaries of a cultural policy to political subjectivities: Political use of rights and political experimentation in the "Community Culture" of Argentina

Abstract

In this article we analyze the identities and processes of subjectivation of cultural collectives in Córdoba, Argentina. We propose to articulate the contributions of a previous investigation with the sense of identity proposed by Hall and the developments around the political subjectivation of Rancière's tradition. We argue that there is a precarious and contingent process of political subjectivation that confronts normative regulations and the instituted political order, beyond the process of subjective interpellation that gives collective subjects a specific place (as beneficiaries of public policy). We conclude that some collectives stage the exclusions and inequalities that certain official cultural policies generate. In fact, when they relate with the instituted social and governmental order, they give rise to experimentation on other ways of being-in-common. Based on the analyzed experience, we focus on three relevant dimensions for the staging of the disagreement: the relation with the State (disputing what is considered as community culture and culture), the confrontation with the traditional ways of understanding political participation and territorial activism, and the visibility of the inequalities produced by geographic centralization processes.