War Over Measure: Latin American Cultural Policy and the Pedagogy of Neoliberal States

Abstract:This article recovers the link between cultural and educational policy in Latin America to understand the neoliberal state's discursive institution of culture as capital. It does so by studying the form and function of Mexican and Chilean cultural bureaucracies. The calculability and accountability of culture in Chilean cultural policy and the incalculability of Mexico's culture of favor cultural policy are but two sides of one coin issued by the same neoliberal state form. Both depend on the discursive institution (from above) of culture as cultural capital and labor as human capital reflected (from below) in the formation of Latin American subjects to contemporary capitalism. On this model, culture should acculturate subjects to their status as precarious, flexible, self-managing and self-valorizing workers, whether in the form of human capital or informal labor.