State dependence of Mexican intellectuals

State dependence of Mexican intellectuals is Oscar Amalfitano’s account of how state employment shapes not only writers’ livelihoods but also the limits of their cultural work. The state, he argues, can sustain intellectuals and quietly keep watch over them even when they defend or criticize it; in return, it puts their writing to use. His image of shadowless performers translating the unintelligible sounds of a hidden mine turns this political arrangement into a parable of compromised perception, constrained language, and a shrinking literary public.

Identity and Material Conditions

Amalfitano presents state employment as an old relationship between Mexican intellectuals and power, while cautioning that this is not a claim that all writers are alike. Some are more interested in writing, and those who accept state work need not do so in bad faith or surrender themselves completely. For many, he suggests, it is simply a job. His distinction matters: dependence is a condition of intellectual life, not proof that every individual has the same motives or political convictions.

He contrasts Mexico with Europe, where writers may rely on publishing houses, newspapers, spouses, family allowances, or other work, even criminal livelihoods. In Mexico—and, he qualifies, perhaps across Latin America except Argentina—intellectuals work for the state. The political administration may change, but he expects the pattern to continue under either the Institutional Revolutionary Party or the National Action Party. The writer’s declared position toward the state does not undo the economic relation: a passionate defender and a critic alike can be sustained by the same institution.

Patronage and Cultural Use

The state’s support is neither described as an explicit command nor as a simple exchange of public employment for obedience. It feeds writers and watches over them in silence, then puts a large cohort of writers to work in the cultural sphere. Amalfitano characterizes that work as an attempt to exorcise demons and alter, or at least influence, the national climate. His image of lime being laid over a pit whose existence is uncertain makes the state’s cultural labor equivocal: intellectual production may cover a danger, act upon it, or help make it legible, without anyone knowing exactly what lies beneath.

The arrangement can reach writers even when they work elsewhere. Amalfitano allows that intellectuals may hold university posts, or take positions at American universities, whose literature departments he regards as no better. Yet a late-night call in the state’s name may offer better work and pay—something writers believe they deserve. The possibility of such intervention extends patronage beyond a writer’s formal job and makes aspiration part of the mechanism. Amalfitano says that the system crops writers’ ears and drives them insane, describing its damage as a deformation of intellectual life rather than merely a change of employer.

The Shadowless Stage

Amalfitano’s metaphor shifts from institutions to a theater. Mexican literature becomes a nursery school, playground, or children’s club beneath sunny skies: writers sit in parks with books by Valéry, visit one another, and talk, until they discover that their shadows have quietly disappeared. He offers possible explanations—sunlight, alcohol, pain, fear, illness, wounded vanity—but none restores what has been lost. The shadow’s disappearance marks a failure of perception that the writers themselves notice and then try to forget.

Without their shadows, intellectuals take the stage and translate, reinterpret, or sing reality. Behind the proscenium is a cave or mine shaft, from which come sounds that might be rage, seduction, or only murmurs and moans. The mine’s true opening is concealed by scenery, light, and time. Only spectators nearest the orchestra pit can glimpse the shape of something behind the camouflage, and even they cannot see its real form; those farther away see nothing, or prefer not to. The intellectual performers face their audience and hear the noises from behind them, but cannot look directly into their source.

Their failure is linguistic as well as political. Where they sense a hurricane, they supply rhetoric; where they hear unleashed fury, they try for eloquence; where there is deafening silence, they preserve meter. Their imitations—animal sounds such as cheeping, barking, and meowing—cannot imagine either a colossal creature or its absence. The stage remains attractive and carefully designed, but steadily grows smaller, as does the hall, while its audience dwindles. Amalfitano’s theatrical image makes cultural dependence inseparable from a narrowing capacity to represent what lies beyond the visible performance.

Media, Public Language, and the Lost Shadow

Other stages offer a revealing contrast. Painting has an enormous stage and a tiny, elegant audience; film and television have vast capacity, full halls, and prosceniums that expand year by year. Intellectuals from the literary stage sometimes appear on television, where the mine’s opening remains the same although the perspective changes and its camouflage may become denser. The larger platform does not resolve the underlying problem: the roars continue, and the intellectuals continue to misinterpret them. Their public reach can grow even as their access to the source of what they describe remains obstructed.

Amalfitano adds a further reversal: writers who are supposedly masters of language cannot enrich it on their own. Their best words are borrowings heard from spectators in the front row, whom he calls flagellants. These spectators are sick; at times they invent hideous words, and their mortality rises. The image binds public language to suffering and suggests that writers’ expressive resources come from those closest to the violence, not from the institutional stage itself. When the theaters close, steel sheets cover the mine openings, and the intellectuals retire for the night.

The account ends with a recurring return of the shadow. An intellectual sometimes wanders into a bar, drinks mezcal, and sings; occasionally he believes he has seen a legendary German writer. What he has actually seen is a shadow—perhaps his own, which comes home each night so that he will not burst or hang himself. Yet he swears he saw the German writer, and his happiness and sense of order rest on that conviction. In the morning, with his shadow again at his heels, he can read Valéry in the park, and the cycle begins again. The metaphor offers neither a clean escape nor a final diagnosis: the shadow returns, but the stage, its noises, and the writer’s dependence remain.