Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies

ISSN: 1463-6204 (Print) 1469-9818 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjsc20

Cultures of anyone: studies on cultural

democratization in the Spanish neoliberal crisis

Bécquer Seguín

To cite this article: Bécquer Seguín (2019): Cultures of anyone: studies on cultural
democratization in the Spanish neoliberal crisis, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies, DOI:
10.1080/14636204.2019.1609251

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2019.1609251

Published online: 02 May 2019.

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JOURNAL OF SPANISH CULTURAL STUDIES

BOOK REVIEW

Cultures of anyone: studies on cultural democratization in the Spanish neoliberal

crisis, by Luis Moreno-Caballud, translated by Linda Grabner, Liverpool, Liverpool
University Press, 2015, 305 pp., £26 (hardback), ISBN13 978-1781381939 / £19.99
(paperback), ISBN13 978-1786941848

In many respects, the economic crisis that began in Spain in 2008 – also known as, simply, la
crisis – is still not over. Despite the mild recovery of the Spanish economy and a dip in unem-
ployment numbers, many Spaniards today still have temporary employment contracts called
contratos Kleenex, cannot pay off their homeownership debt and are being evicted from
their homes. This still dire situation, fortunately, hasn’t prevented scholars in Spain and the
Anglophone world from taking stock of the cultural responses to the economic crisis, which
are numerous, variegated and ongoing. Luis Moreno-Caballud’s Cultures of Anyone: Studies
on Cultural Democratization in the Spanish Neoliberal Crisis is, if not the first, one of the first sub-
stantial scholarly monographs to provide a wide-ranging analysis of the crisis. And we are all
fortunate that this is so, for not only does Moreno-Caballud’s book provide an exhaustive
account of the cultural practices that have blossomed since the 15M protests in 2011 but it,
moreover, makes a significant contribution to the field in its capacious and dexterous under-
standing of what counts as “culture”.
Part of that contribution is to open up the field of Spanish cultural studies to an analysis of
political and social movements, work that, until now, has mostly been left to political scientists
and sociologists. For Moreno-Caballud, “culture” includes the copyleft movement, which advo-
cates for the right to freely distribute materials that would otherwise be copyrighted, just as
much as the novels of Juan Marsé; the cultural think tank Fundación de los Comunes just as
much as the Euraca Seminar on contemporary poetry; a manifesto in defense of internet
rights just as much as essays by Manuel Vázquez Montalbán. Defining “cultures of anyone”,
the primary term he uses throughout the book, Moreno-Caballud writes, “These ‘cultures of
anyone’ have arisen mostly around grassroots social movements and in collaborative spaces
fostered by digital technology, but they are spreading to many other social milieus, including
those traditionally reserved for institutional ‘culture’ and ‘politics’” (4). Moreno-Caballud’s
account of culture treats social and political movements not only as valuable objects of cultural
study, but also as objects that dialogue with, challenge and ultimately shape traditional cultural
objects, from literature to photography to pop music. What he calls “cultural democratization”
in the subtitle and throughout the book, then, has as much to do with who has access to culture
as it does with who can produce it. These objects of culture are collaborative and horizontal at
both the point of reception and the point of production.
Organized into six chapters, Cultures of Anyone proceeds more or less chronologically, cover-
ing the entire period from the Transition to the present. The first part of the book, which con-
sists of the first three chapters, provides an account of the intellectuals who came to create
what Moreno-Caballud calls the “culture of experts” (77). He identifies the origins of this
culture of experts in the shift from autarky to technocracy in the Franco regime, when engi-
neers, sociologists and other intellectuals executed a so-called colonization of Spain’s rural
areas as part of a broader plan to liberalize the economy. The importation of economic liberal-
ism and individualism, according to Moreno-Caballud, is what ultimately marginalized collec-
tive cultural practices and consolidated the “middle-class” vision of society that carried
through into the democratic period. The third chapter provides a hinge between the first
2 BOOK REVIEW

and second parts of the book. It tells the story of what might have been in Spain had “an intel-
lectual counter-figure” (105) emerged to challenge the elite intellectual that ushered in neoli-
beralism through the back door of the Franco dictatorship. Moreno-Caballud excavates
“counterfactual reflections” (105) that lead us through the writings of Luis Mateo Díez,
Marsé, Montalbán and others. In a wonderfully unconventional book, this chapter will be the
most familiar to scholars of literature – but, in its uncovering of an alternative future to the
one people in Spain have lived through over the past two decades, it also may be the most
powerful.
The book’s remaining chapters bring us up to the present. They examine the collective cul-
tural practices that have emerged since 2008, delving into the past, when appropriate, in order
to trace their prehistories as well as their critiques of what Guillem Martínez has termed “the
culture of the Transition”. Moreno-Caballud shows how the proliferation of collective practices
online, which have created everything from internet manifestos to subtitles for TV shows and
movies, have developed “because of the desire that there be a common space where intelli-
gences can freely develop their abilities in collaboration” (176). He demonstrates why such
apparently counterproductive formal constraints as, for example, the sequence, time limits
and ordering of speeches at Puerta del Sol during the 15M occupations were, in fact, an ega-
litarian and useful way to counter “the illegitimate hoarding of cultural authority” (226) by intel-
lectuals and the media. But for all his appreciation of how 15M transformed cultural practices in
Spain, Moreno-Caballud understands the limits of scholarly inquiry and remains keenly aware
of how his work might come across to the unsuspecting reader – “I am not trying to fetishize
the event or the climate of the 15M movement” (204), he reiterates.
In the book’s epilogue, Moreno-Caballud strikes perhaps the most self-reflexive tone in a
book already very mindful of the limits of its own existence and written framework. “I
imagine now”, he writes, “a book with a less traditional authorial voice” (275). The book
Moreno-Caballud has in mind is one suffused with memoir, critical theory, ethnography,
essay and manifesto. That book, like this one, would indeed be another welcome contribution
to what we might broadly call the cultural public sphere in Spain. But formal constraints are
nonetheless useful. The book’s mostly chronological organization, its logical sequence of
experiences and analyses, its threading together of the latter with the words of theorists
and writers – all of these make Moreno-Caballud’s book not only an academic monograph
but an intellectual repository for those who wish to turn their attention to such collective prac-
tices in Spanish history. We all imagine one day fulfilling Walter Benjamin’s desire to compile a
book of quotations with no context or explanatory notes. But let not our modernist impulses
cheapen the labor of scholarship. Moreno-Caballud’s Cultures of Anyone is a tremendous
piece of labor. It reaches a deep and insightful understanding of its subjects that would be
the envy of any monograph – scholarly, narrative, collective. And it will indeed be read, both
in and outside the academy, for many years to come.

Bécquer Seguín
Johns Hopkins University
becquer@jhu.edu
© 2019 Bécquer Seguín
https://doi.org/10.1080/14636204.2019.1609251