Opinion
On knowledge, criticism, and design.

Alfredo GuevaraBy: Alfredo Guevara
e-mail: digital@jrebelde.cip.cu
February 4, 2009 - 00:09:12 GMT

I.- On knowledge and the road to freedom

It was at the Moncada garrison, amid all the pain, hope and bloodshed, where the «cultural policy» of a Revolution inspired by Martí and headed by Fidel became sacred at last. Launched right after V-day, the plan was to step up our people’s general education and foster unity –as well as the exchange of vital experiences– between city workers and peasants, first through a heroic literacy campaign that strengthened their practical and moral bonds and then with the race for ninth grade, in a relentless and progressive search for knowledge. The exercise of freedom would be nothing but make-believe without all the lessons we received then, day after day and hour after hour, from teachers eager to share with us their endless wealth of knowledge. It was the beginning of a cultural program that bore the most wonderful fruit: a country of over 12 million citizens who have gone way beyond elementary school and of whom a whole million have a university degree and other hundreds of thousands are on the way to get one.

Such has been and still is, I repeat, the Revolution’s cultural policy. We must move on then, and develop our potential to aim for more elaborate cultural levels and goals yet to be reached. In other words, make a beeline for our purest, truest and most fundamental and, I dare say, basic aspiration of a Martí-based Revolution by impregnating with knowledge the very nature of society and its citizenry.

That is why I stated at the VII Congress of our National Union of Writers and Artists (UNEAC) that we had better remember and honor Marx’s assertion that «...for thousands of years culture and society have been, strictly speaking, two looks upon a single subject of reflection. Known since the dawn of man, society is the one that assumes associations and common values found in past memories, which are our history; while history is what we take from our experiences, which progressively purify our knowledge. This is culture, an underlying, ever-present design that determines our society, its features and mechanisms, whether visible or invisible, sophisticated or primary; in other words, its potential».

As I see it, the jump from being ignorant to becoming learned is paramount if you want to exercise freedom. Therefore, I refer over and over again to what it means to have a million university graduates and many more ready to be citizens.

It is not by chance that I use the word «person», for the person, as an autonomous being, is what matters. Such accomplishment is a symbol of the Revolution, and what makes me radically different from everything that is accidental, small or big, serious or unimportant in every personal or historic process. To understand our society you must stop to cherish its essence and erect something on top. Only then will you be able to learn its history, find out what lies within and discern its bright and dark spots, traps and lessons in order to make your choice, and forever retain what it is putting across to the future, that is, its brightest and diaphanous values. Only like this can we approach the postulate demanded by the question of what it is like for a citizen to be revolutionary: to be always in the vanguard, found it if need be, play a leading role in it and make it ethically and aesthetically richer.

What I know for sure is that our intelligence, knowledge and method are critical sources of lucidity and we will have to find the necessary solutions, however unprecedented, for every epoch and situation. I also know that there will be no future without everybody’s active and creative participation, or if the written word fails to become the eternal action we know as life.

To quote Karl Marx again, «we must know reality before we can change it».

II.- On criticism as an approach to the truth in history

Words, that marvelous refuge of concepts, are usually accurate, albeit constantly changing and taking endless nuances, depending on their meaning and the degree to which they are misused, overused and even purposely distorted or made monotonous. I’d like to dwell on the word «criticism» and the meaning I lend to it for my own purposes.

By criticism I mean analysis and search for information, the use of whatever experience we have gained through reflection to grasp our real history in its true context. Simply said, the use of every available instrument we can get to understand a situation, epoch, period or group of actions better and in more detail. I think about José Martí, [Alejo] Carpentier, Cintio Vitier, Valery, Caillois (whom Alejo made me appreciate), Pasolini and Víctor Sklovski, but in order to voice my own disquieting worries –as I cannot stand voluntary blindness– I think most of all about Karl Marx.

Those who read his work sincerely, without trying to work things to their own advantage, will find that he left not a single word to chance, that his writings were always preceded by hard study, facts, verification, the exchange of views with other people and comparisons with other texts and sources, as he was a first-class encyclopedist and an ever-learning wise man. This allowed him to fathom not only the origins and progress of capital and its real behavior in history, something he managed to figure out and foresee, but also the way merchandise becomes an idol and the market a trap deprived of any ethics or purpose slightly related to the betterment of man and society.

None of Marx’s texts, reflections, articles or letters, no matter how complex their subject, lacks the backing of thorough studies or his omnipresent ethical inspiration. Noticeable therein is his well-founded, irrefutable, compelling intellectual and practical struggle for people’s liberation, humanization and the right to develop all their potential, long choked by the exploitation, either open or disguised, of their productive and, one way or another, creative energies. To me, Karl Marx is above all else the foremost and most integral thinker who fought for people’s true liberty, dignity and independence. To be so he must have been, and I’m sure he was, not only a brilliant intellectual, but also a tireless student.

Similar devotion to thinking, studying and researching with a view to verifying and supporting everything, is or should be at the root of our critical awareness and the moral and social responsibility that evaluating a given epoch, situation or period entails. I will never let myself get carried away by routines or impositions that sometimes surpass what is otherwise fair. Sometimes what is fair (say, an apology), should by no means lead to what is unfair or, for that matter, to uncritical generalizations. Those usually stem from disregard for or insensitivity to another word-concept, the nuance, which is at times too subtle to be easily perceived. However, it cannot go unheeded when we exercise criticism of our own free will, lest we end up confused and inefficient.

III.- On design as an instrument to express intellectual and ethical dedication

If we start from the two-fold premise that, on one hand, you can tell a society by its culture and see it as an outcome of the historical and cultural process along which it formed and took shape, and –of course– find in culture the mark left by the entire human activity of yesterday, today and tomorrow, and on the other, that a short period of time cannot be relied to provide the right idea about consequential events or major projects, then we must expect that if one or more policies laid down by a party, social organization, guild or institution or even by a renowned, influential individual are a part or even an essential element in society’s development either in one second or after a long time, we will see that those are not the only elements and also that the interference of many other factors cannot be avoided, including pure chance with its unpredictable social, climatological and other surprises.

It is like the three hurricanes that succeeded each other and destroyed priceless assets in several provinces, robbed us of our time and energy, and shattered some hopes that it seemed we would have soon been able to bring to fulfillment.

Can a society, its government or the leaders of one of its sectors, services, schools or economic branches in charge of providing to its citizens afford to take a decision in a trice about the intellectual-practical process we know as design, relying solely on its talent and experience and without jeopardizing its mission, detracting from its responsibility or taking a minute to organize things if it were deemed necessary or convenient?

It is the ruler and decision-maker, a full-fledged, if fragile, man, who faces the greatest risk, as he must decide on behalf of others –alone or as part of a team– the fate of all members of society, which is in turn that of every one of them and, sometimes, that of just one individual who is isolated and different but, in the final analysis, no less a person.

How to approach, then, the topic I suggest herein without getting lost in doctrinal twists and turns or the twisting alleys of interpretation? Thus I get at what I care for the most: to define, once the use –as opposed to the abuse– of the term «criticism» is specified, the values of another, no less underestimated and impoverished term, one we should take into account and use to a greater extent, used for many things and mainly in plastic arts, but one which I will apply in its broadest sense: design.

Speaking on the basis of one’s personal professional experience, who in their right mind would think of starting to invest in and make a film and consider it done without a feasibility study about its cost in terms of deadlines, casting, qualified technicians who can work together, settings, supplies, catering, transportation, etc., or without weather reports and a forecast of nature’s possible effects on the process? What filmmaker would come up with an inflexible timetable with no regard to eventualities or without the skilled staff capable of modifying any lines that an actor might find unpronounceable or a dialogue that proves laughable or inadequate when it comes to the crunch? Every detail must be foreseen, calculated and carefully weighed up long before take one, and to that effect something is accounted for in the plan, known in other fields as road map, which schedules with great precision the most expensive and difficult-to-reconcile elements.

As a working method, design is as common in cinema as it is indispensable, a kind of art that demands no chronological order from the shooting and production process. Yet, as an organizational principle and a benchmark of both the feasibility of and the preparations for filmmaking, it is quite valuable in all respects. It is from this standpoint that we believe no such basic ignorance must exist in any field. However, for the sake of caution, we will confine our views to artistic, literary and, in general, humanistic expressions, for instance, the schools, and especially the universities, including the Higher School of Arts. The reason is that the most thorough, rigorous design would have to come before any work program, policy guideline or change thereof. Lack of foresight, breakneck decision-making, indulgence, personal inspiration, even judgments reached without a confrontational dialogue. They must all be banished from such a sensitive field where the knowledge and discernment typical of the great teaching profession would also have to play a key role and rely on scholars from other disciplines.

Therefore, I wonder –permanently obsessed with the idea of a design that comes before any action, the moment when the wheel meets the road and the first step is taken toward the realm of what will be– whether it is advisable and feasible to train decision-makers from every level of management in these principles.

I have never done any course in a military school, but I am sure that design stands as a basic principle in their curriculum. I have addressed this topic here on the basis of cinematic experience and Bauhaus teachings. A design is not a guarantee of success, nor does it bring magical results, but it sure helps to avoid absurd failures. Our managers attend courses on military readiness at regular intervals, their drills almost certainly conducted by army officers. Wouldn’t it be convenient to train them as well in the use of a preparatory, preventive exercise like «design», or whatever they call it in military science, that provides so many options and guarantees? It would be a further contribution to our defense, in this case from nonsense.

IV.- Declaration


This is my reflection about an issue that always preys my mind and one that, in my opinion, we never address as much as we should in our assessments and debates. As a socialist revolutionary and someone who dreams about utopia, I feel co-responsible for the Revolution in its entirety and perceive my country as a huge crystal-clear lake covering 111,000 square kilometers. It's a vast sea teeming with unthinkable currents of turbulent waters and strong, uncontrollable waves, but always dominated by a central, never-shifting stream of pristine transparency.

That is the current that leads me to commit myself to these sunsets from which hope is born out of the horizon like a many-colored burst that brings a whole different day every morning. That is the current that makes me, first and foremost, set my sights on and fight for the future.

http://www.juventudrebelde.cu/opinion/2009-02-04/del-saber-la-critica-y-el-diseno/
http://www.juventudrebelde.cu/UserFiles/File/impreso/icuba-2009-02-04.pdf

   
   
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Opinión

Del saber, la crítica y el diseño

Alfredo Guevara
Por: Alfredo Guevara
Correo:
digital@jrebelde.cip.cu
04 de febrero de 2009 00:09:12 GMT

I.- Sobre el saber en el camino de la libertad