Culture Is to the Social Materialization of Democracy as the Critical Subject Is to Democratic Citizenship

Abstract

By analyzing transitional government documents and political campaign material from the 1979 municipal elections in Barcelona, this chapter explores the process by which their language and images with reference to culture moved from being a conceptualization of the citizen as a critical, creative, and transformative subject, one modeled on the grassroots activist of the late-Francoist period, to another where residents were invited to celebrate a city where political agency had become redundant, and consensus the norm. The main argument here is that cultural policies and culture in general served the purpose of managing the local population, and contained its political activism by means of making culture and politics discursively indistinguishable. This is possible because culture in this time incarnated democracy more than the economic or even political realms, as it took the role of demonstrating that the institutions were making democratic life, democratic everydayness, possible, and with it, they were providing the means for the full humanity of citizens to emerge. I argue that it is in culture, so understood, that the freedom-seeking impulse of the anti-Francoist movement was channeled by government, and in culture where it was adapted to the needs of celebration and forgetting conflict.