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The Dictator: Theories and Representations of Agency in Neoliberal Argentina, 2001-2010

Jessica Cullen Dzaman

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2015

© 2015 Jessica Cullen Dzaman All rights reserved

ABSTRACT

The Consumer Dictator: Theories and Representations of Agency in Neoliberal Argentina, 2001-2010

Jessica Cullen Dzaman

This dissertation examines the co-evolution of and production as competing models of agency in Argentine in the era of global consumer .

Tracing the influence of several key political and intellectual developments in Latin America, the

US, and Europe on the symbolic language of regional politics, I map out how participation in the global consumer market came to be understood as an expression of power and authority in the context of Argentina's disastrous experiment with in the last three decades of the 20th century. Then, using films and literary texts including works by Lisandro Alonso,

Adrián Caetano, and Aníbal Jarkowski together with critical projects by George Yúdice and

Josefina Ludmer, I examine how a model of subjectivity that exaggerates the economic, social, and cultural agency of has managed to persist in Argentina's cultural imagination despite growing disillusionment with the neoliberal model and the disenfranchisement of the nation's consumers. Through close readings that reveal work as the site of a restored order that is ultimately incomplete, fantastical, and contradictory, I show how the myth of the consumer dictator perpetuates itself through a system of intellectual values, including abstract, absolutist visions freedom and tolerance, that isolate the subject and divert communication, inscribing an extreme version of consumer agency even upon production itself. Together, these instances of interrupted reform suggest that a model of agency suited to the era of global

must understand production and consumption not as alternative options, but as distinct, integral modes of creativity.

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………….. ii

Introduction……………………………………………..…………………………………………… 1

1. Utopias of Production and Consumption in Latin American Politics and Culture……….. 28

2. Global Citizenship and the Cultural of Labor in Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad and

Adrián Caetano’s Bolivia……………………………………………………………... 68

3. Consumer power and social responsibility in Fabián Bielinsky’s Nueve reinas and Aníbal

Jarkowski’s El trabajo.………………………………………………………………… 128

4. The critic as consumer: George Yúdice and Josefina Ludmer………………………..……. 163

Conclusion………………..……………………….…………………………………………………. 206

Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………………... 214

i Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my dissertation advisor, Carlos J. Alonso, for generously contributing his insight and experience at each step in the development of this project. Thank you also to Professor Graciela Montaldo for directing my first qualifying exam, and for her helpful bibliographic suggestions. I am very grateful to her and to Professors Orlando

Bentacor, Ronald Briggs, and Karen Benezra for serving on my committee.

I also owe thanks to the many professors, instructors, and informal advisors who offered encouragement, guidance, and inspiration over the course of my studies: Marta Peixoto, José

Antonio Castellanos-Pazos, Alessandra Russo, Patricia Grieve, Marc Hertzman, Maite Conde, and of course the original and sin par Antonio Carreño.

A heartfelt thank you as well to Professor Christia Mercer, for extending me the opportunity to teach in the Core, and for leading me through the first year with wise, kind, and frank advice. Taking part in "Lit Hum" was a singularly rich experience that helped me to develop the ideas about literary criticism explored in this thesis--and to recognize the value of voicing my own perspective.

In that regard, too, I am grateful to Sheryl Kaskowitz for reading parts of this manuscript and contributing thoughtful suggestions that improved both the text and the sanity of its writer.

Thanks to my New York family: BB, JL, DI, and GS. To Duane, for sustaining me and challenging me always. It's more fun than I thought possible. And finally, to my first family, especially Mom, Dad, Matthew, Lindsay, and Grandma. Thank you for all the ways in which you have shown your support, including but not limited to generously lending your faith, apartments, counsel, shoulders, ears, tech support, and even on one occasion shoes, so that I could see this project through. I love you.

ii Introduction

The rise of a monolithic global capitalism since the 1980s has made consumption an increasingly important and influential part of the cultural and political landscape. The technocratic political culture of global capitalism relocates politics from the public sphere of debate to the private realm of the subject’s innermost desires, introducing a new kind of utopia founded on the premise of the moral and intellectual inadequacy of the human subject. The new consumer utopia reimagines reason, discourse, tradition, and culture not as the building blocks of progress, but rather as obstacles to the realization of a natural social order.

Eschewing inherently flawed collective endeavors, the subject of that utopia—the consumer dictator—rules with uncontested authority over his own unique system of social and cultural values. His power over his own jurisdiction is absolute, but beyond that, he cannot be sure of his impact on the social order. His duty is to himself alone; in pursuing his own interests, he rests assured that he is doing his part to contribute indirectly to the rightful order of things, inputting his own truths into the neutral aggregator of the market, which will eventually transform his individual desires into social outcomes that are right, natural, and fair—but whose logic eludes comprehension. The truth contained within his desires is a latent one; a coded, irreplaceable and authentic message that can only be “read” and translated into meaningful social outcomes by the market itself.

In other words, there is always hope that what looks like an impending disaster might not be. This hope was the only kind left in Argentina in December of 2001 as the nation’s depressed economy careened toward total collapse. Over the past three years, the country’s productivity had slowed to a halt as foreign withdrew from the region and the national

1 rate crept toward 25 percent. It was with the last remaining scrap of unlikely, experience-denying hope that the government, under threat of imminent default, made a final effort to stabilize the shaky financial system by preventing citizens from withdrawing large sums of from their personal accounts. While Argentina’s public default—the largest in world history—did not come until shortly after the banking freeze, the “corralito” itself served as the symbolic breaking point, marking the economy’s descent into full-scale collapse. It provoked an outpouring of public anger that threatened the political order as well, stoking ongoing demonstrations against wage cuts for public employees into an explosion of mass protests across the country. In the , protestors began to clash with police outside the seat of government, demanding the resignation of President Fernando de la Rúa until the disgraced leader escaped the outraged crowds with a sensational exit by helicopter.

These dramatic events announced a crisis to the world—but a longer view reveals a more complicated truth. As the excitement faded, analytical accounts of the “crisis” emphasized continuity rather than rupture.1 The signs that increased participation in the global was a “bad deal” for Argentina were all around, in plain sight, carved into the changing cityscape of Buenos Aires. (In the city center, new luxury developments catering to the tastes of an international elite competed for space with improvised shantytowns known as villas miserias; in the surrounding suburbs, those lucky enough to have jobs passed abandoned factories on their commute to the international district downtown.) Still, with the slow, painful unraveling of the Soviet Union finally complete and the information revolution in full swing, integration into the global free market seemed to be the only way forward. Authorities in the international economic community held that the inequality and austerity Latin America was suffering were merely growing pains—a kind of a temporary penance for years of protectionist policies that would pass as soon as the region fully embraced the true path of the free market.

2 In testament to this neoliberal theodicy was ’s “Miracle of Chile,” right next door.

Thus, despite the demonstrations of outrage that captured the attention of the world media, most Argentines experienced the crisis less as a shock than as the culmination of frustrations that had been building up for years. The dominant trope that emerged in popular and journalistic narratives was that of “waking up” to reality.2 There was some wisdom to this common-sense view; besides reshuffling power at the top and inspiring a brief flurry of grassroots efforts,3 the crisis did not bring about significant, lasting economic or political reforms. Rather, as a political event, the crisis was largely received as a confirmation of people’s growing disillusionment with the promises of neoliberalism and the new democratic order implemented in the 1980s. The general mood of cynicism with regard to national politics only reinforced the basic premise that the current flawed institutional models were the only ones feasible in the contemporary world order. In spite of the varied experience of local economies in Latin America and elsewhere with neoliberalism, an apparent consensus among global authorities on economic policy continued to endorse the idea that the dual system of political and economic , structured around twin ideals of political and , was as inevitable and indivisible as it was imperfect.

In this way, the response to the events of 2001 in Argentina reflected a general climate of chastened humility throughout the developed world with regard to the possibility of progressive social change. The economic crisis in Argentina coincided, roughly speaking, with what Andreas Huyssen calls “the crisis of the ideology of progress” throughout the cultural universe of global capitalism. Compared to the explosion of utopian—or even dystopian— predictions about the future that had accompanied other fin-de-siècle periods in modern history, he argues, the arrival of the 21st century was notably devoid of such imagining. With the wounds of the spectacular failures of 20th-century idealism still fresh, the advent of a new

3 era was an occasion for caution and sobriety. Newly sensitized to the dangers of ambition, progressive voices across the developed world were tempered with apologies: “I’m not an economist, but…”; “They did a study…”. Such qualifiers became the norm not out of pessimism or fatalism, exactly, but rather out of a kind of tentatively optimistic pragmatism. At least by admitting to our own self-interest and shortsightedness, humanity could hope to live a reality located a little closer to the truth.

A version of this resignation could be perceived just below the surface of popular outrage over the corralito, feeding contradictory expressions of guilt, disgust, and frustration that coexisted in the reactions of many citizens.4 After all, even if the neoliberal policies of recent administrations had been definitively exposed as disastrous, the bad behavior of de la

Rúa and his predecessor, Carlos Menem (1989-1999)—corruption, greed, laziness, and short- sightedness—5 also worked on some level to confirm the bleak view of human nature that was central to philosophical justifications for the neoliberal approach.

The of what Giovanni Arrighi termed the “long 20th century” arose in concert with an Enlightenment conception of the rational, self-interested individual subject as the irreducible unit of the social order. Extrapolating from that understanding of the subject, early theorists of capitalism portrayed the of the market as the most efficient and fair mechanism for organizing individuals into a social division of labor that would, under a given set of political circumstances (most importantly, protections for private , reliable financial institutions, and free and open access to information), provide the best outcome (the maximum utility) for society as a whole. However, thanks to the influence of prominent free- market economists (most notably the enthusiastic popularizer Milton Friedman) and the political success of “Reaganomics” and “” in the world’s leading economies, the

1980s and 1990s saw the rise of a particular expression of liberalism that downplayed “man- made” political factors (for example, the active role of governments in shaping and maintaining

4 institutions) and portrayed the existing world market as a system that could “naturally” sort the inconceivable chaos of human societies into an efficient, productive order.6

In this way, the acceleration of cultural and economic processes of throughout the 1990s provided the perfect backdrop for this understanding of the market as a kind of superhuman force rather than as a human-designed and produced system to become entrenched. Despite evidence of the failures of neoliberalism, what option was there besides faith in the market-gods and their economist-priests?

In Argentina, the novelist César Aira captured this sentiment in a 2001 essay echoing

Huyssen’s diagnosis of a post-utopian moment. In the piece, Aira relates the country’s mood of resignation and helplessness to the realization that revolution itself was a flawed concept; a kind of naive delusion finally overcome by maturity and experience. But Aira takes a broader view of the causes of this contemporary culture of skepticism, assimilating into the discourse of the end of history even the apparently antithetical explosion of technological progress upon which the new global order was founded. Paradoxically, the same technological and social changes which have afforded humanity unprecedented opportunities to participate in cultural and economic activities with worldwide reach also fill the experience of daily life with reminders of our own smallness as individual subjects of a vast global order.

La complicación de la economía, los desplazamientos poblacionales, los flujos de

información trazando caprichosas volutas en un mundo de estadísticas encontradas,

han terminado produciendo una resignada ceguera cuya única moraleja es que nadie

sabe “qué puede pasar”; nadie acierta con los pronósticos, o acierta por casualidad. (4)

This is certainly one unanticipated consequence of the most recent technological revolution: our access to unprecedented amounts of decontextualized information and the ever-increasing specialization of knowledge under the global capitalist division of labor conspire to make us experience life more like our pre-modern ancestors did, a little more at the

5 mercy of everyday mysteries. In short, at the same time as technology affords humanity more and more god-like superpowers, “Dios avanza” (4).

This is why, at the same time as the public indignation reached dramatic, even violent, heights, its expression was accompanied by a persistent uncertainty that marked the outcry with a faint hint of the performative. Already, as crowds of protesters gathered in the Plaza de

Mayo, their anger was inflected with the characteristic ambivalence surrounding questions of agency and responsibility in the era of global capitalism. The comprehensiveness of the scathing condemnation of the entire political system—“¡Que se vayan todos!”—also served to conceal a persistent uncertainty surrounding the problem of accountability. The intensity of the anger was almost too great to direct at any specific target. (Even years after the tensions of

2001-2 subsided, a somewhat tongue-in-cheek popular superstition against speaking the name of former president Menem aloud endured in some circles.) Naming a culprit would mean opening the door for a possible defense. There were too many plausible excuses, and deep down everyone knew that the prosecution’s case was shaky at best.

One obvious problem was that there was no single party responsible for producing the disaster; the seeds of the collapse had been sown by layers of actors whose roles were hard to disentangle. There were the supposedly neutral international authorities at the IMF, in turn heavily influenced by the Americans with their own thinly-veiled interests; then there was the national leadership who had allowed the country to become vulnerable, not to mention their political opponents, who made efforts behind the scenes to maneuver the situation to their own advantage.

In this way, the financial crisis was emblematic of a new kind of catastrophe unique to the contemporary global order. As sociologist Ulrich Beck argues, modern-day calamities from financial crises to terrorist attacks to environmental disasters are outgrowths of the distorted incentives of a “global risk society” that separates decision-makers from the consequences of

6 their actions, which may be felt more on the other side of the globe than in their own communities. As exemplified by the accident at the Fukushima nuclear power plant in 2011, contemporary catastrophes are “on the one hand, man-made, but on the other hand, geographically, socially, and in the time dimension, unlimited.” “Modernity,” he explains, “ […] produces more and more uncontrollable consequences. And we have a system of organized irresponsibility: Nobody is really responsible for those consequences.”7

This account of contemporary crisis helps to explain how a tenuous distinction between the corralito—a deliberate decision by the administration—and not the default itself, became the symbolic trigger for the outpouring of much more general frustrations with the economic situation. The anger could only be sustained as long as a degree of vagueness in defining the guilty parties helped to postpone acknowledging explicitly what many already accepted on some level: that the crisis had built itself.

These circumstances make it difficult to sustain moral outrage in the era of global capitalism; a taboo sympathy for even the most despicable actors threatens to creep in when we lack a full picture of the choices others face. (We wonder: “Would I have taken the same risk?”) Worse yet, when we lack a full picture of our own choices, every accusation introduces the terrifying possibility of discovering that we, too, are implicated in the crimes we denounce.

Bruce Robbins observes that this kind of confusion has become a common side effect of consumption in the global economy. Contemporary global trade networks now carry the consequences of even the smallest, most unthinking actions of consumers in the developed world to distant communities we may know nothing about;8 These circumstances make it possible for interactions with even the most rudimentary of consumer goods to provoke the disorienting, even paralyzing, experience Robbins calls “the sublime.” The phrase refers to the trope of contemporary culture in which an otherwise innocuous and mundane act of consumption suddenly envelops the consumer in a startling moment of self-awareness as

7 he imagines his own place in an invisible and enormous global economy. A sip of tea or a glimpse of a tag might pluck any one of us out of our daily routine and into a whirlwind of imagined power, impotence, pleasure, and pain reminiscent of Kant’s description of the sublime (in this case, as a kind of satisfying confusion prompted by contemplation of the limits of one’s own mind).

To put it somewhat less grandly, consuming what someone else has produced requires accepting a little bit of ignorance. To consume is to trust, to defer to another’s authority and judgment. The greater the distance between consumer and producer, the greater the leap of faith required. Thus, as consumer goods from around the world become an increasingly important part of daily existence in the developed world, consumers must adapt to the realities of life among increasingly visible uncertainties.

For Aira, too, the ever-expanding presence of consumer goods in our lives is an important factor in our diminished sense of our own intellectual capacities. (As the world becomes more complex, the arc of our understanding narrows.) He traces the decline of the self-possession and confidence of the modern subject—“la vieja inteligencia,” or the sense, however illusory, of being able to understand and control our surroundings—to the moment when ordinary people bought into the new fantasyland of consumer technology. The hidden cost of unlocking superhuman memory, speed, vision, and the other capabilities afforded by consumer gadgets turned out to be the sacrifice of our mastery over those tools, accompanied by the obligation to endure an unpleasant feeling of impotence in the face of the occasional malfunction. As Aira sees it, most of today’s techies are expert users, a far cry from the leisure- time engineers he remembers from his own childhood—automobile enthusiasts who prided themselves of being able to take apart the entire vehicle, “hasta la última tuerca”—and put it back together again. But no one can achieve this intimacy with each individual machine in the clutter of gadgets that have become our constant companions. As a result, he writes, “Hoy

8 vivimos en un mundo de cajas negras. A nadie le escandaliza ignorar lo que sucede dentro del más simple de los aparatos de los que nos servimos para vivir. Sólo importa que funcione, como un pequeño milagro doméstico” (4).

If, as Aira suggests, god is gaining ground, then global consumption seems to be one of

His greatest messengers. Indeed, despite the aura of newness that has clung to the for well over a century now, there is something decidedly Old Testament about the lessons in humility that the global market teaches consumers. The Lord of a contemporary Job: And where were you, when your sneakers were being sewn? Just as the

Job of antiquity finds his faith strengthened by the image of his own smallness that he gleans from his encounter with the Lord, so too, the global consumer subject sees her own insignificance disappear into a market order that sustains her and makes the choice to end her quest for understanding and relax into the comfort of authority. The lesson reveals nothing about the Lord’s truth, and everything about the evils of theological . The moral?

Close your eyes, and open your heart to the sublime, mystical experience of being a consumer.

It is a self-contradictory and unsettling fable, this theological indictment of theology. The kaleidoscopic intersection of logic and faith is always shifting. The thorn in the side of the global consumer is not her impotence or her ignorance, per se, but rather her always-fleeting awareness of them. Even when, like Aira, we try to console ourselves by remembering that our perceived loss of virility and self-sufficiency is only the loss of an illusion—“Después de todo, los bricoleurs domésticos, cuando volvían a armar el auto obtenían el mismo auto del que habían partido, no un avión”—we still recall and long for that virility.

And so we try to get that feeling back. If our sense of impotence is tied up in the perception that we have been reduced to “users” of a preexisting order—consumers choosing among options rather than producers of our own destinies—then one way to restore a sense of agency is to focus on the ways in which consumers do have power. Long viewed as a passive

9 process—at best, the successful completion of an impersonal cycle of mass production, and at worst, a zombifying addiction—the consumption of manufactured goods and cultural products has, since the end of the 20th century, begun to be understood as an active process, even a form of power.

To be sure, the post-Fordist production model offers consumers a kind of agency that was unthinkable just a few years ago.9 For instance, new methods of data collection have allowed producers to become much more sensitive to the preferences of customers, giving customers unprecedented control over the production process. Daniel Miller explains that changes in the structure of production and retail in the 1990s helped to encourage this new relationship between consumers and international , as producers and designers invented “new (e.g., low-fat, or conspicuously more safety-conscious, or less gendered)

[versions] of a familiar commodity” (4). These relationships soon took on an explicitly political nature, too. Eric J. Arnould describes how politics became an important part of global branding in the early 2000s as it became a common understanding that “global brands and global wield extraordinary influence, both positive and negative, on society’s wellbeing.”

Given consumer expectations that firms “address social problems linked to what they sell,” it became advisable for firms not only to associate themselves with particular myths and values, but also to “invest in initiatives that clearly benefit stake-holder communities” in order to improve their image. Moreover, as the growing concentration of power and resources in multinational corporations enables the latter to compete with national governments for influence on the international stage, the nation-state cedes more and more of its exclusive rights to the role of intermediary between the individual and the rest of the world. The result is that consumption becomes an increasingly plausible arena for civic action and personal expression. As Néstor García Canclini argues in Consumidores y ciudadanos (1995):

10 […M]uchas de las preguntas propias de los ciudadanos — a dónde pertenezco y qué

derechos me da, cómo puedo informarme, quién representa mis intereses—se

contestan más en el consumo privado de bienes y de los medios masivos que en las

reglas abstractas de la democracia o en la participación colectiva en espacios públicos

(13).

Thus, through what we might call a “civics of consumption,” consumers gain the opportunity to enact personal and political views on the global stage, without the mediation of the state. The apparent immediacy and directness of this arrangement was heralded by many social theorists as the potential beginning of a new era of freedom and democracy rooted in the emergent agency of individual acts of consumption. Daniel Miller’s enthusiasm for the democratic possibilities opened up by -led consumer capitalism sums up the spirit of these new conceptions of consumer agency when he speculates whether the consumer might not “have displaced the top-hat capitalist as the aggregate ‘global dictator’ (8).

While a neo-Keynesian view of consumption as a motor of economic growth gained acceptance among many economists and gradually became a commonplace of political discourse and popular wisdom, the rise of structuralism and then post-structuralism in Europe and the Americas prompted critical theorists to reexamine the assumption that cultural meaning had to be either actively produced or passively consumed. For example, Michel de

Certeau argued in The Practice of Everyday Life (1984) that “consumers” or “users” of cultural products were responsible for actively producing meaning as they engaged in unique, creative processes of interpretation.10 Working against the backdrop of a in which a markedly nationalistic tradition was beginning to reckon with the legacy of colonialism, de

Certeau emphasized the way active and creative modes of reception opened up spaces for resistance and alterity to thrive within otherwise hegemonic cultural spaces. But the range of

11 creative expressions theoretically afforded by an “active” cultural consumption expanded exponentially with the acceleration of cultural and economic globalization.

For anthropologist Arjun Appadurai, the multidirectional “flows” of an emerging global cultural imaginary allow the subject to access “a synchronic warehouse of cultural scenarios, a kind of temporal central casting, to which recourse can be taken as appropriate, depending on the movie to be made, the scene to be enacted, the hostages to be rescued” (30). The implications of this “central casting” model also entailed a qualitative shift in the understanding of hegemony itself. To consume culture produced on a global scale is not necessarily to be a victim of :

No longer mere fantasy (opium for the masses whose real work is elsewhere), no longer

simple escape (from a world defined principally by more concrete purposes and

structures), no longer elite pastime (thus not relevant to the lives of ordinary people),

and no longer mere contemplation (irrelevant for new forms of desire and subjectivity),

the imagination has become an organized field of social practices, and a form of

negotiation between sites of agency (individuals) and globally defined fields of

possibility (31).

If globalization promised to be “the unleashing of the imagination” from the shackles of the monolithic, restrictive national cultural-political systems of modernity, then access to the global consumer market promised not just an enhanced quality of life in the (former?) periphery, but also the opportunity for new forms of cultural expression and political liberation that would scramble modern hierarchies in ways previously inconceivable. Thus, for some, the boom in the global economy in the late 1980s and 1990s fueled dreams of a new kind of utopianism, one that relocated visions of progress from the imagined spaces of nation and empire to a newly direct encounter between the individual and an ever-expanding horizon of possible products, interpretations, and values.

12 We have already seen how this story ends, though. As the market failures and downturns of the late 1990s and 2000s made it increasingly difficult to keep faith in consumer agency as the ultimate deliverance from oppression, the global consumer utopia sketched out above quickly gave way to a different image of the future of consumer capitalism—the world of black boxes and the end of progress. But shift was not just a simple reversal. The pendulum that had so recently swung toward capitalism and across Latin America could not find an easy path back toward a state-managed economy as it had many times before. In Argentina, the legendary Latin American curse of premature postmodernity resurfaced in the form of a precocious crisis: the crisis devastated the local economy in the late 1990s, but its impact would not begin to be felt by the global political and ideological infrastructure that had administered the transition to neoliberalism for at least another decade.

The resulting political upheaval produced a kind of inverted or negative utopianism—a commonsense understanding of cause and effect that looked almost exactly the same as it had before the crisis, but anticipated far bleaker outcomes from the same realities. How could the same model of consumer agency that seemed to announce the culmination of the modern project of democratic emancipation also be implicated in the fog of despair and resignation that settled over the site of the crisis? Yet, rather than challenge the idea that consumption had become a key locus of agency, the Argentine economic crisis seemed only to further complicate and obscure the mysterious and sacred link between individual consumers and the social order produced by their participation in the global market.

In his account of the sweatshop sublime, Robbins traces the confusion induced by the encounter with global consumer goods to an imbalance between the respective ranges of the individual subject’s knowledge, power, and control. On the one hand, he writes, “Your sudden, heady access to the global scale is not access to a commensurate power of action on the global scale” (85). Yet, at the same time, the global consumer suffers from having too much

13 power; more power than he or she can control. He explains: “[…We] sense that we possess transcendent powers,” but those powers are “exercised on our behalf and… without our active will” (85). In other words, the sweatshop sublime is what happens when the global consumer subject reckons with the contradictory and ambivalent nature of his own power—a power that paradoxically seems to flout the constraints of his own agency. As Daniel Miller points out, the empowerment of the global consumer through her purchasing power requires a Foucauldian notion of power as more than just a resource: “It is when we understand that power is today located above all in consumers, such as the housewife, that we realize that we need a much more sophisticated concept of power: a power that can be repressive as well as enabling to those who wield it…” (9).

The global consumer subject’s ambivalent experience of his own empowerment further complicated the search for political justice in the wake of the crisis as well. We have already considered the ways in which the uncertainty surrounding the temporality and the location of consumer agency prevented those hurt by the government’s poor handling of the national economy from identifying the individual architects of the crisis and holding them accountable; the officials responsible for the default exercised their power under the watch of larger, global institutions (e.g., the IMF)—so the culprits on the local stage were themselves victims in a sense. Moreover, like the citizens they served, they were “consumers” of the crisis, “guilty” of multiple and overlapping layers of deceit (being deceived, deceiving themselves, and deceiving others).

The parallel structure of the guilt of the leaders and the led points in the direction of yet another dimension of the underlying ambivalence of reactions to the crisis. The problem is this: if the prevalence of known unknowns in the black box world of the consumer subject makes it impossible to pinpoint responsibility with absolute certainty, then what is to prevent us from all being a little responsible for everything? The potentially infinite, private power of the consumer

14 subject comes with an unadvertised, but similarly vast burden of virtual responsibilities which the consumer, tethered as he is to his locally bounded perspective, is ill-equipped to shoulder.

Mike Featherstone observes that the late 1990s and early 2000s brought about a more complicated view of consumer citizenship, with increased attention to the responsibilities, risks, and costs of consumption. Consumption, he writes, “can no longer be seen as an innocent act” but rather “part of a web connecting us to others around the world” (xviii). The high price of consumer agency is living with the constant risk of discovering after the fact one’s own complicity in unexpected or even unimagined evils.

For this reason, the crisis, signaling the end of faith in the neoliberal miracle, pitilessly twists the consumer subject’s boundless capacity to “author” meaning (i.e., by appropriating the products at his disposal) and turns it against him, transforming his happy exploration of the global warehouse-workshop into a lonely and dangerous odyssey through an always-unfamiliar culture. Thanks to the heightened significance of “imagination,” basic principles of reason, justice, and even time and space appear unreliable. And yet, when the consumer’s utopian dream begins to turn into a nightmare, that only makes him cling with more determination to his dreamed-up powers, trying to defend himself with strategies born of an outlandish dream logic. Because of his heightened and distorted sense of his own possible power as a consumer, the worse things get, the more he wants to believe. Faced with the prospect of discovering that he has become an accessory after the fact, confusion becomes more tolerable than the possibility of learning the truth. Rather than take on the slightest risk of finding out we went wrong in such a horrifying way, we willingly defer power. This is hardly rational; in reality, the most likely possibility is that we are wrong. However, our share of the responsibility is tiny.

Beck’s global risk society allows us the luxury of looking away from those comparative probabilities, dismissing them both because they are not certainties.

15 Troubling and misleading as it can be, the idea that the power of the individual has become divorced from his conscious and self-aware agency—seems to capture something essential to the experience of the consumers and political subjects of 21st century global capitalism. And yet, the gap between the reach of an individual’s actions, imagined or real, and his or her actual knowledge and control is by no means unique to the culture of global consumer capitalism. As the protective buffer of the nation as a cultural and economic community wears increasingly thin, the individual finds himself left to his own devices as he sorts through the conflicting messages bombarding him from all directions. It is the vast scale of the global informational economy that inflates the perennial dilemma of imperfect knowledge into an insurmountable obstacle, making it all too easy to blame the consumer of information for his or her own ignorance. As the information revolution brings remote corners of the globe increasingly within reach, it offers infinite access and imposes infinite responsibility, with little by way of guidance. In the sprawling, erratic, and constant conversation made possible by new media, there is no longer any guarantee of a consistent frame of reference.

The vagueness of a generalized consumer guilt becomes an effective smoke screen for criminal intent when international justice must compete for attention with personal appetites and desires. In this way, the ambivalence of responses to the crisis suggest that the most sinister implications of the disorienting experience of the ‘sweatshop sublime’ arise from its capacity to strike at any given moment and surreptitiously change the parameters of any conversation. Seeing ourselves as agents acting through consumption makes us willing to defer to others’ assessments of value—and makes us willing to accept responsibility for things that happen after our actions, in worlds far away.

For better or for worse, by the time the crisis of neoliberalism hit Argentina, consumption had become an unlikely but indispensable site for the production of the social order. Reactions to the crisis reflected this shift; at a symbolic level and on the ground, the

16 expression of popular will could not be contained in the public square. Crowds formed spontaneously both at the seat of the government and in supermarkets and other around the capital. The looting that took place in the latter settings may have been extraneous opportunism, and is true that the destruction and theft of property lacked the unimpeachable purity of more traditional forms of civil disobedience. However, the looting was not without its own symbolism. At the very least, the violation of property that accompanied the cacerolazos and the demonstrations in the city center reinforced the role of spaces of private consumption as de facto stage for political action—even if only illegitimate action.

At best, looting is a compromised, messy way to assert demands. Still, in some ways, that very messiness made it an apt vehicle for ambivalent and contradictory frustrations that could not be expressed within the representational and rational logics of traditional democratic forums. After all, the power of the consumer is rife with contradictions—-at least as individual subject experiences it—but it is in part those apparent contradictions that make the notion of consumer agency so resonant for citizens of a global capitalist order. The actions and decisions of individuals have become a battleground upon which conflicting interests struggle to define the values and priorities of the community and shape the direction and meaning of progress. If modern democracy made the individual the fundamental, indivisible unit of sovereign will upon which the nation was founded, then the global consumer democracy of the

21st century has apparently discovered a way to split the individual and divide him against himself. In the light of the achievements and failures of modernity, we now see the truth obscured by the Enlightenment’s cult to reason: what we experience as the rational, sovereign individual subject is itself the summation of so many smaller units of agency: conscious-less, matter-less impulses; flashes of desire, doubt, and need. The imperceptible and unpredictable movements of these new and ever-shrinking particles of agency become legible and

17 accountable to the laws of reason only when, aggregated by the invisible hand of the market, they reveal the unfathomable face of the global order.

Aira’s self-conscious romanticizing of the “bricoleur doméstico” as the representative figure of the self-possessed ingenuity of the modern subject encapsulates poignantly the distinct flavor of the nostalgia of a stubbornly “post-nostalgic” and “post-utopian” moment. As an embodiment of la vieja inteligencia,’ or the lost (and ever-illusory) ideal of mastery, the old automobile owner understands the entirety of how something works, so that he can not only anticipate its needs and fix it when something goes wrong, but disassemble the whole thing just for the sake of assembling it again. For this recreational mechanic, ownership is the practice of a special kind of “working knowledge.” His singlehanded reenactment of the ritual of his vehicle’s production gives him the complete agency of a producer.

Of course, he is reproducing, not producing. (Thus, the essay’s wistful “lesson” holds; our tinkerer-hero never made an airplane, only the same old car.) He may be an owner rather than a user, but he is still a consumer. Aira presents this story as a parable about the bittersweet realization that we cannot will a new order into existence. However, it is really a parable about an unnoticed slippage into a reality where the ability to consume is indistinguishable from the ability to produce. The contradictions inscribed within the essay’s nostalgia are markers of a desire for a sort of productive agency that cannot be voiced within the ideological parameters of the current global capitalist order.

* * *

This dissertation analyzes cultural representations of work in recent Argentine culture in order to explain the cultural significance of production and consumption as competing representations of agency in contemporary Argentina. The first chapter provides context for this discussion by mapping out the emergence of consumption as a site of agency in relation

18 to the rise of global consumer capitalism. It highlights key changes in the political, cultural, and intellectual landscape of Latin America, Europe, and the United States that contributed to the gradual displacement of work as a conceptual model of the exercise of power over the last 150 years. After a brief overview of the significance of metaphors of production and consumption in the context of Latin American politics in the colonial and nationalist periods, I trace the expansion of the cultural and economic significance of consumption from the modernization projects of the late 19th century through the advent of the era of mass-produced consumer goods in the early 20th century and the rapid growth of the consumer economy in the last half of that century. I treat these changes in as a backdrop that illuminates the evolving cultural and political status of consumption in the last decades of the previous century, as the international conflict between capitalist and communist ideologies cemented the ideological link between political and economic liberalism, while, at the same, time, developments in the social sciences and critical theory were challenging traditional models of democratic representation. The primary aim of the chapter is to show how together all of these changes contributed to the rise of a new justification for capitalism, which purported to improve upon fallible human leadership by situating the rational capitalist market at the center of a new post-representational, post-national democracy populated by consumer-citizens. The chapter concludes by situating these developments in the particular context of Argentina, where circumstances have conspired to make the emptying-out of producer agency and the rise of consumer agency a uniquely intense and deeply ambivalent experience.

Chapters two and three examine the persistence of the myth of the consumer dictator as manifested in fictional portrayals of work that emerged during and after Argentina’s “Great

Depression” of 1998-2002. Set against a backdrop of unemployment and unmet needs, these fictions of the crisis look to the restoration of the productivity of workers of all types (manual laborers, service workers, writers, artists, and even thieves) as an obvious solution to the social

19 ills inflicted by global consumer capitalism. Accordingly, they afford work—or at least its trappings and effects—a central role as a site of potential reform, from self-improvement to social redemption. Yet, their depictions of the production of reform are inevitably partial, interrupted, or contradictory; production remains shrouded in mystery and uncertainty because the subjects of the works continue to exercise agency primarily as consumers. The impossibility of rendering a complete cycle of economic, cultural, or even biological production in these works gives rise to a a hyperational, dystopian image of society in which the struggle to accumulate more buying power appears as an undesirable but inevitable natural order.

However, in identifying the obstacles that stand in the way of production in each of these texts, it becomes possible to sketch out the dangerous effects of an intransigent myth that exaggerates the powers of the consumer dictator—and to expose, at least in negative, the flawed assumptions and oversights that perpetuate his reign.

The second chapter considers the relationship between the “freedom”—or isolation—of the consumer dictator and the ethos of imposed by the “free” market. It analyzes two films in which competition and the exploitation of inequalities, rather than labor, are portrayed as the true source of value in the capitalist system. Adrián Caetano’s Bolivia (2001) follows the fate of an undocumented Bolivian migrant worker as he tries to piece together a living as a short-order cook in a working-class neighborhood bar in Buenos Aires. Though the meager wage he earns for his long hours of labor is not even enough to cover his expenses— let alone support the family he left behind—Freddy sees his hard work as a contribution to the dream of a Pan-American nation. In Freddy’s vision of a globalization, dignity, brotherhood, and collaborative work are the basis of a new, post-national citizenship. Yet neither Freddy’s boss, nor the racist and xenophobic locals who frequent the bar, share this view. Each character defines for himself—and in his own interests—the boundaries of the community to which he belongs, so that the bar itself remains a “disintegrated” space, lacking

20 in the shared perceptions of time and space that help to make up the imagined community of the nation. The only one not troubled by the tensions and conflicts that result from these contradictory post-national images of community is the bar’s owner, who has the resources, and thus the authority, to impose his view on others through sheer force. This is a world where power begets power—where the possibility of justice vanishes as the democratic process is replaced by an all-encompassing power that is both real and symbolic. In the film’s rendering, the consumer utopia of neoliberal globalization is in fact a dystopia—but the critique does not suggest that it is any less inevitable because it is unappealing.

Like Bolivia, Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad (2001) makes physical labor the site of a fantasy of restored agency in the era of a global consumer capitalism in crisis. Alonso’s semi- documentary feature presents a day in the life of another migrant worker, this time a young woodcutter operating in a rural province outside the capital. Though Misael’s earnings are also barely enough to cover his expenses, La libertad depicts his work as an expression of pure, autonomous control over his environment. Thus, despite its trappings of production, Misael’s labor functions as a realization of the consumer dictator’s fantasy of power as control. Misael’s sense of his own independence and “freedom” depends on his internalization of the limitations of his situation. He imbues whatever he has with value and treats whatever he lacks as insignificant. Together, the films construe the social realities of global consumer capitalism as an oppressive, yet “natural” order in which members of a disenfranchised producer class are destined to suffer. Their poverty and social isolation can only be mitigated through self- delusion.

The third chapter reconsiders this fatalistic diagnosis through two texts that examine the causes of the dystopian order inflicted by the recession. In both, the attempt sort out who is to blame is complicated by pervasive moral confusion and the constant risk of self-implication.

Fabián Bielinsky’s film Nueve reinas (2000) at first appears to return the spectator to the world

21 of Bolivia, depicting a globalized Buenos Aires as the site of a naked power struggle, this time of wit against wit. However, a surprise twist reveals that the apparently amoral universe portrayed in the film is in fact an illusion: the careful contrivance of an elaborate con perpetrated against the protagonist and the viewer alike. The result is a moral fable that denounces the inattention and negligence of those who let themselves be duped. It places hopes for the restoration of social justice in a 20th-century style utopia rooted in teamwork, planning, patience, and skill. Yet that image of collaborative work is in an important sense just a stand-in signaling the desire for yet another political “miracle”—a justice of consensus in which the costs of compromise still cannot be acknowledged.

In Aníbal Jarkowski’s novel El trabajo (2007), too, conflict is suppressed under the sign of a nominal consensus. But in this case the wishful thinking and irresponsible, sloppy readings that allow that empty sense of consensus to persist end up perpetuating the violence they attempt to forget. The novel tells the story of one artist’s ill-fated attempt to restore a sense of collective responsibility to her community—yet the real focus of Jarkowski’s critique of the consumer subjectivity is the misguided effort of the artist’s writer friend to help the cause even at the expense of the truth. The writer’s wishful thinking, born of his desperate desire to shield his friend from the pain of confronting the possible failure of her project, becomes a dangerous attachment to his own ignorance that threatens everything he loves. The novel insists that it is a moral imperative to confront truths even when they cannot be known with certainty. By implication, it tasks public intellectuals with producing better strategies for dealing with risk and comparing probabilities, asserting that it is the responsibility of citizens of the global capitalist order to dispel the myths of purity and certainty that accompany utopianism in any form.

The final chapter endeavors to take up El trabajo’s challenge. Turning to the realm of nonfiction writing about culture, it aims to explain more precisely why it is so difficult to have a

22 meaningful public discussion of shared values in the era of the consumer dictator. The chapter examines the ways in which the rise of the consumer dictator as an important figure in cultural theory disrupts the modern tradition of cultural criticism, contributing to the recurring diagnosis of an ongoing “crisis” in the study of literature and culture. Even setting aside the possibility of any kind of “failure” in the market of cultural meanings, the increased visibility of the cultural consumer’s agency displaces the critic from her role as intermediary between the meaning contained within a cultural product and a general public assumed to lack the specialized knowledge required to unlock that meaning.

The idea that meaning is actively constructed at the site of consumption or reception of a text ultimately empties the critic’s aesthetic judgment of its significance, but it also imbues other cultural processes with new potential significance. The chapter compares two recent efforts from opposite corners of the field of Latin American studies to reimagine the social function of cultural criticism in contemporary consumer culture in order to construct a framework for thinking about how those new sites of meaning can be recognized within cultural scholarship. In The Expediency of Culture (2003), George Yúdice deals with the displacement of aesthetic judgments from cultural criticism by directing his analysis at the act of consumption. Building on the premise implicit in Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of the cultural field that cultural meaning is constructed through strategic position-taking, Yúdice performs a kind of market analysis of local “sites” of consumption that stabilizes the meaning of culture, framing meaning as the result of a negotiation between competing interests and perspectives within a fixed “site” of consumption. This approach yields nuanced readings of cultural exchanges, but its claim to authority, which is staked on the “objectivity” of his assessments, becomes cumbersome, allowing Yúdice to communicate his most important ideas only indirectly.

23 In Aquí América latina: Una especulación (2010), Josefina Ludmer takes the opposite approach, making the consumer dictator’s model of relative and dependent assessments of cultural value an occasion for a bold and unapologetic expression of the personal. Her

“speculative” criticism works through the market, rather than as the market, “making public” her own private consumption of culture. In effect, Ludmer’s creative solution is to speak to the consumer as an advertiser would, anticipating his resistance and his inclination to appropriate rather than assimilate content. While Aquí América latina offers a compelling portrait of the obstacles to direct communication in the era of consumer culture, once again the extreme tactics the text employs to avoid dismissal in a that does not tolerate visible disagreement sometimes veer into the territory of self-censorship, impeding the communication between writer and reader by making the author’s own intentions opaque.

Although the two authors approach the task of expanding the relevance and visibility of public debates in (and about) consumer culture from essentially opposite directions, examined side by side these works offer a similar, surprising lesson: the real obstacle to open communication is not a problem with the way consumers read (i.e., asserting their freedom by disregarding the intent of the writer), but rather with the way they write, anxiously anticipating the future consumption of their words.

Just as the myth of the consumer dictator exaggerates the economic and social agency of the consumer, it also overstates his cultural agency. It is the consumer’s tendency to overvalue the absolute; internal coherence gives the illusion of rationality and certainty. As a result, the most difficult-to-avoid problems caused by the hypervisibility of consumption as a cultural process are, once again, self-inflicted injuries which perpetuate an internalized model even within explicit efforts expose its false claims to inevitability.

Critical and theoretical discussion of consumer culture has itself suffered from this extremism. Models of consumer culture continue to position themselves in relation to a

24 tradition that imagines consumer society as either a dystopia or an utopia. Despite plenty of historical evidence to the contrary,11 we still tend to think about consumer culture as part of the future. The temporality of anticipation that belongs to the experience of consumption itself bleeds into our understanding of the process. Even in academic circles, the subject of consumption still seems to invite reactionary responses, with trends in its popularity influenced as much by the economic climate as by new findings. Accordingly, the boom of the global economy in the 1990s produced a number of studies that advanced the discussion of consumer culture, building on the lessons of theory, anthropology, sociology, and history, to find points of continuity between past and present functions of consumption in all realms.12

However, echoing the famous adage about hemlines that fall with stock prices, studies that investigate consumption as a significant social process become less fashionable in tougher times. The recent global recession has not been an exception to this rule; as this dissertation documents, attention turned to production in both cultural production and criticism in the 2000s. Of course, consumption does not cease to have cultural significance because it becomes gauche to talk about it. This study tries to counteract this hot-and-cold pattern.

Focusing on consumption in the context of an economic downturn, it considers consumption and production together, as interlaced and mutually constitutive processes; a dialectic model of agency.

This is important because the choice between homo faber and homo consumens is a false one—a vestige of 20th-century geopolitics that no longer reflects the ways in which individuals interact with society. Nor does it accurately represent the conflicts between individual interests and the common good. It is now clear that making and taking are not mutually exclusive processes—but it would be going to far to say that they are the same. The following chapters bring together a series of efforts to understand, represent, and articulate the complex relationship between these activities in the culture of global consumer capitalism. One

25 of the lessons they have to teach is that it is still not possible to listen and speak at once. But there is no alternative to trying.

Notes

1 Andrés Malamud argues that views of the crisis as rupture with the past overlook the ways in which the crisis was consistent with a local political culture, including the strategic efforts of regional, Peronist leaders to make use of, and even amplify, popular protests against the national government for the sake of furthering their own political interests.

2 Sarah Muir documents the prevalence of this trope in the course of her anthropological study of discourses on the crisis. This quote from one of her interviews is a typical example of how the image was used to characterize the Argentine public as “a people who have finally woken up to the reality of neoliberalism” (7).

3 E.g., attempts to circumvent the monolithic system of global capitalism through bartering networks or alternative currencies. I describe these popular responses in more detail and address their cultural significance in Chapter 3.

4 Muir argues that the middle class, in particular, came to be understood as “an ambivalent collective subject” responsible for the country’s fate. She writes: “The middle class emerged as the collective subject uniquely capable of integrating the nation or of provoking its disintegration: In one formulation, the protests that brought the government to its knees were, as one protester described them to me, ‘the spontaneous expression’ of a middle class that had suddenly ‘woken up to the injustices of neoliberalism’ and ‘wanted to change things for the better.’ On the other hand, the very same participant explained, they were also the ‘spontaneous expression of a middle class capable of protagonism only when its pocketbook is threatened and only to defend its own short-term and poorly understood interests” (9). 5 Short-term solutions and a lack of political accountability (emblematized by the plasticity of Peronism as a political model that has managed to assimilates a vast range of policies from socialist redistribution to neoliberalism) have been consistent features of Argentina’s political institutions for the last hundred years. These problems led international economists and locals alike to blame Argentina’s government for the collapse. See “The tragedy of Argentina.” However, Joseph Stiglitz argues that the crisis was inevitable given the budget cuts demanded by the IMF (“Argentina Shortchanged”).

6 See, for example: Cameron & Palan 2004; Acemoglu & Robinson 2012.

7 The quote is taken from Hirohito Ohno’s 2011 interview with Beck. My use of the concept of “organized irresponsibility” is also informed by Beck’s elaboration of this concept elsewhere, including the 2006 lecture “Living in the world risk society,” where he argues that the globalization of the economy introduces more and more risks whose consequences are incurred not by the decision-makers who evaluate risk, but by innocent bystanders. Such moral hazards makes risk and uncertainty ambivalent, if not outright desirable, features of the power structure.

8 Robbins explains that imagining the secret and infinite strings tied to each transaction in the global economy tends to have a paralyzing effect on the would-be activist: “…to glimpse even for a moment the unimaginable face of society as a whole is to go through a near-death experience in which the

26 activist self dissolves,” and, finding no morally unsoiled ground from which to articulate a challenge to the social order, “sinks back into the private” (117). The consequences of this idea are the subject of Chapter 3.

9 The shift away from business models designed around economies of scale, toward new models emphasizing specialized small-batch production and catering to niche markets made profits dependent on the ability of firms to respond to feedback from consumers.

10 The development of reader-response criticism helped to pave the way for models of active consumption by shifting attention away from the text to the act of reading. For example, Hans-Robert Jauss argued in Towards an Aesthetic of Reception that the effect of meaning produced by a text depended on the historical and cultural context in which it was read. Much closer to de Certeau’s model of an active cultural consumption unique to the individual consumer is Barthes’s notion of the writerly text, developed in S/Z (1970). Barthes does not go quite as far as de Certeau in opening up the freedom of the consumer to engage on his own terms with any text at all. Instead he distinguishes between texts that invite passive “evaluation” and those that demand active “interpretation.”

11 Don Slater notes that “consumer culture is rediscovered every few decades; or, to be uncharitable, it has been redesigned, repackaged, and relaunched as a new academic or political product every generation since the sixteenth century” (1).

12 Notable examples that have contributed significantly to the development of this thesis include Don Slater’s work to construct a comprehensive social history of consumption in Consumer Culture and Modernity (1997) and Daniel Miller’s vision for a “consumption studies,” laid out in Acknowledging Consumption (1995). A more recent but equally significant work is Robert Dunn’s Identifying Consumption, which provides a thoughtful overview of theoretical and critical approaches to consumption in the 20th century.

27 Chapter 1

Utopias of Production and Consumption in Latin American Politics and Culture

The Colonial Period, Independence, and Modernization

The idea that social order must be produced or cultivated though deliberate, coordinated efforts is an assumption that has endured in Western political culture throughout most of the modern period. The conception of politics as the project of constructing a modern society was especially significant in Latin America, where, as Ángel Rama famously argues in

La ciudad letrada, the colonial leadership first laid the foundations for this “cultural model” of power when they applied the ideals of Europe’s baroque culture to what they perceived as the tabula rasa of a “new” continent—virgin territory on which to build a perfectly rational society from the ground up.

Podría decirse que el vasto Imperio fue el campo de experimentación de esa forma

cultural. La primera aplicación del saber barroco, instrumentado por la monarquía

absoluta (la Tiara y el Trono reunidos) se hizo en el continente americano, ejercitando

sus rígidos principios: abstracción, racionalización, sistematización, oponiéndose a

particularidad, imaginación, invención local. De todo el continente, fue en el segmento

que mucho más tarde terminaría llamándose Latino, que se intensificó la función

prioritaria de los signos, asociados y encubiertos bajo el absoluto llamado Espíritu. Fue

una voluntad que desdeñaba las constricciones objetivas de la realidad y asumía un

puesto superior y autolegitimado; diseñaba un proyecto pensado al cual debía plegarse

la realidad. (24-25)

Thus the project of producing Latin American society was born of a political culture that continued the hierarchical, highly concentrated power structure of the monarchy, but under a

28 new set of circumstances in which the balance of theory and practice could be radically reconfigured. Theory could come before practice. This meant that the power structure could be less concerned with the physical force and realpolitik required to impose discipline on the spontaneous, wild territory of the kingdom, and more focused instead on the abstract, symbolic forms of knowledge that would allow for the creation of an ideal social order.

According to the utopian dream of the colonial elite, training in history, philosophy, science, and aesthetics would make it possible to design a polity so perfect that it would maintain itself.

With the intellectual and cultural work of building cities firmly established as the locus of the forces of and modernization, the consumption of commodities soon became a point of political contention. As Rama notes, the abundance of riches accessible even to low- level officials in smaller outposts and hubs of the mining trade gave rise to a class of nouveau riches whose luxurious habits were perceived by colonial authorities as a threat to the nascent utopia.1 The acquisition and display of luxury goods by “improper” owners was a significant source of anxiety for the imperial leadership on multiple levels. Not only did the inappropriate circulation of these status symbols subvert the hierarchical sociopolitical class structure, it also undermined the purity of the colonial project, corrupting the perfect order of the new, controlled society with imported habits and vices.

In this latter sense especially, the threat of excessive or unauthorized consumption was intensified by the particular political culture of the Spanish Empire, but the evils of unchecked consumption of any kind were a well-known trope of early modern European morality. Indeed, more recent concerns over the damaging effects of “consumer culture” belong to a long tradition of alarmism about immoderate spending and unrestrained appetites.2 Even before the various modern uses of the word “consumption” came to be assimilated into a single conceptual process (as they would in the early 20th century as consumer goods began to become available to a significant portion of the population), all of consumption’s etymological

29 ancestors carried negative connotations of wastefulness and destruction. Prior to the , the English word “consumption” referred primarily to the disease—a malady that that would lay waste to the body, rather than sustain and nourish it. Economic consumption, too, was understood to have an analogously enervating effect on the health of the society as a whole, as any kind of international spending depleted the finite supply of of the nation or kingdom, and weakened its position relative to neighbor powers.3

The basic form of this moral-social mapping of production and consumption endured in

Latin American political culture even after the colonial period ended and the democratic model of sovereign nation-states replaced the old imperialist power structure. As responsibility for the social order was transferred from an insular elite to a broader population, the shift was accompanied by widespread anxieties surrounding the education and “civilization” of that population. These concerns point to the continuity of early Enlightenment assumptions about the kinds of knowledge needed to govern effectively; even in a post-Revolutionary context of political enlightenment and liberation, it was understood that the social order still needed to be planned and produced through intellectual work. However, the advent of democracy brought about new emphasis on the kinds of training (e.g., in the arts and sciences) that the people and their leaders would need in order to cultivate and civilize a modern nation.

Accordingly, anxieties surrounding consumption shifted to reflect the urgent problem of education. While the rise of modern capitalism and laissez-faire economic theory in 18th- century Europe had introduced a morally neutral concept of consumption as a component of the capitalist productive cycle, in practice the relationship between consumers and commodities was still subject to much moral scrutiny. Consumption still fell squarely on the wrong side of the dual, hierarchical model of subjectivity—mind and body—which modernity had inherited from Pauline Christianity. Enlightenment philosophy perpetuated the Christian assumption of an oppositional relationship between the mind’s thoughts and the body’s

30 feelings and desires, assigning to the former (as per Descartes’s famous postulation, for example) a position of unambiguous superiority in relation to its primitive, transient, and irrational counterpart. Thus, especially in places where Protestantism was influential, consumption was a spiritual issue:

The negative connotations of destruction and waste were incorporated in popular moral

and social discussion of ways of using things and spending money in modern societies.

Puritan were suspicious of modern consumption not only because it might

encourage excessive spending rather than saving, but also lest it encourage a desire for

luxurious items over and above those necessary for the satisfaction of basic human

needs. (Bennet et al 57)

In Catholic Spain and Latin America, though, out-of-control consumption continued to be understood as a social and political problem more than a moral one. Poor taste was a sign of barbary masquerading as civilization; bad consumers needed to be educated, not punished.

The political model of the rationally administered baroque city may have been initially well-suited to the era of industrial capitalism, with its values of optimization and planning.

However, the processes of urbanization and modernization in the late 19th- and early 20th centuries posed a practical threat to the theoretical purity of the modern city, as immigration and rapid growth outpaced the planned administration of the city and introduced unanticipated social and cultural tensions. The result was a reconfiguration of the political culture that transformed and broadened earlier conceptions of the “production” of the social order. While politics continued to be conceived of as the expression of human agency in the implementation and enforcement of the values of the society through “production,” the nature of that production changed to reflect the challenges of organizing, housing, and feeding a diverse population with preexisting needs rather than creating a perfect society from scratch.

31 As cities matured and grew, intellectual work began to be upstaged by an image of power rooted in physical and economic strength. Juan Pablo Artinian documents how, in the era of industrialization and urbanization, political iconography began to de-emphasize the importance of the leaders’ vision and focused instead on their charisma—that is, their ability to inspire and organize what emerges at this moment as the true source of political agency, the workforce that will propel the machinery of an industrial, modern form of prosperity forward into the future. By the early- to mid-20th century, an emergent populist political culture was replacing the exclusive “lettered” culture of the old guard with a visual culture of symbolically loaded imagery to cut across linguistic and cultural barriers,4 making images of workers themselves central to the political culture. Thus a new image of the body politic emerged in the place of the old imperialist model depicting the empire as a reflection of the King’s own body.

The new image situated power and sovereignty in the collective strength of the masses at work.

The new visibility of workers’ bodies also made caring for and nurturing the body of the worker a matter of national and class pride. Demands for “pan y trabajo” characterized consumption and production as symbiotic processes for the first time on the national political stage. Thus, by the turn of the 20th-century, consumption was beginning to be seen as a potentially positive force.5 Among the middle- and upper classes, modernization brought widespread contact with new technologies of communication and transportation lent a more hopeful sheen to consumer goods. These changes introduced possible defenses of an emerging consumer culture, laying the groundwork for a polemic that would become a staple of social and cultural commentaries in Europe and the Americas throughout the 20th century.

For some, anticipation of a future filled with modern and new pleasures helped to ease suspicions of the adverse moral effects of heightened consumption, and commercial consumer products were celebrated as an expression of the collective achievements of

32 modern society. For others, the increasing importance of commercial consumer products in the lives of ordinary people could at least be justified to some extent as compensation for the hard, dull, work needed to sustain industrial capitalism.6

Yet modern consumer culture introduced new dangers, too. The prevalence of consumer goods and modern conveniences seemed to distort basic components of the human experience in problematic ways. Marx had argued that people’s psychological and social wellbeing was intimately connected to their sense of productive capability.7 Thus, for most

Marxist thinkers, the consumer culture associated with industrial capitalism was dangerous not because the conveniences of modern life were inherently immoral (as the Puritans had long argued), but rather because in valuing objects as commodities instead of as the results of a process of production, people were likely to lose sight of the true value inscribed in the products’ origin and use—thereby stepping onto a slippery slope that would ultimately leave them vulnerable to manipulation and ideology. The idea that participation in modern consumer culture robbed people of an important essence of their humanity remained an important, recurring theme for skeptics of this utopian view of modernity.

Postwar Consumer Culture and

In keeping with historical pattern, the economic turmoil of the Great Depression and the recovery programs that it spawned interrupted this incarnation of the critical debate over the evils of consumer culture. By the time the conversation was taken up seriously again, after the end of World War II, a new set of concerns had emerged. Across much of the developed world, a series of international ideological conflicts between fascism and liberalism had replaced intra-national policy debates as the most pressing political issues. The spread of extremist politics on an international scale coincided with the rapid growth of mass media, the industrialization of culture, and the Golden Age of Hollywood cinema. For a generation of

33 intellectuals whose lives had been profoundly disrupted by the rise of fascism, what Walter

Benjamin called the “aestheticization of politics” now focused concerns about the social impact of a culture of mass consumption around cultural products in particular.8 The result was a reinvigorated critical debate over consumer culture that managed to unite the old Marxist view of the symbiosis between and ideology with the tradition of

Protestant-inspired, moralist critiques of consumerism. When it came to the mass consumption of cultural products, consumerism skeptics from both camps could agree that pleasure was inherently dangerous. Marxist critics of the mid-20th century—most notably, Theodor Adorno and his colleagues—argued that the mind, not the soul, was made weak and vulnerable by the easy gratification of mass culture. They remembered all too clearly the devastating consequences of conformism and the role of Nazi propaganda in fomenting the

Holocaust. Independent, critical thought was essential for the protection of democratic values like freedom and equality.

Adorno, like the Romantics before him, found in the arts a remedy uniquely suited to the ills of modern life. He believed that aesthetic engagement offered an antidote to the modern dangers of political propaganda and ideological mind-control in the age of mass culture.9 The Romantics saw the aesthetic as a solution to the problem of fragmentation and division in modern life. For Adorno, by contrast, legitimate aesthetic experiences were needed to protect fragmentation at all costs. Only “true” aesthetic experience could engage individuals in independent questioning, thereby opening up tiny fissures in the illusory order of an ideological regime. The rise of a manipulative and mind-numbing mass culture threatened to eliminate altogether this productive confusion, replacing the possibility of confronting the truth with a standardized pleasure that only reinforced the values and furthered the goals of the existing economic and political structure.

34 Thus for Adorno, individualism was an important deterrent to potential overreaches by the state. Although his choice to assign such great value to the critical capacity of the individual subject was heavily influenced by the cultural and political developments of the previous decade, his theory of aesthetic experience also drew on the long-standing dual model of subjectivity discussed above. Indeed, the Enlightenment’s hierarchical division of the self into mind and body maps neatly onto Adorno’s scheme, providing invisible support for his premise that mass culture is insidiously manipulative because it appeals to the subject on emotional grounds. Engaging him in an area where he is naturally weak, mass culture prompts acquiescence rather than facilitating the cerebral process of aesthetic reasoning.

Although Adorno’s esoteric taste and prickly elitism has rendered the specifics of his aesthetic theory largely unpalatable to later generations, his mistrust of mass culture certainly resonated with the protagonists of the 1960s counter-culture movements, for whom conformism and consumer culture were deeply intertwined. The protagonists of the counter- culture embraced the same values Adorno associated with “true art”: open-mindedness, independent thought, and creativity, but they updated his staid model of aesthetic engagement for the era of sex, drugs, and rock-n-roll. Treating the body, emotion, and desire as allies in the mind’s quest for emancipation, the counter-culture movement removed the final remaining vestiges of the Enlightenment cult to reason still present in Adorno’s thought.

The idea that the body and the mind were equally capable of being oppressed—and equally in need of liberation—was spreading quickly around the developed world. In the last half of the 20th century, a new series of political and scientific developments had begun to call into question the mind’s domination of the body on numerous fronts, revealing the repressive elitism and flawed assumptions inherent in the tradition of mind-body dualism. In philosophy, anthropology, sociology, and the emerging field of , the seeds of the so-called linguistic and cultural turns were changing the prevailing understanding of the origins and

35 evolution of social values and creating awareness of the discursive nature of knowledge and history. Structuralism and post-structuralist thought raised questions about the Enlightenment cult to reason, rendering the supposedly limitless possibilities of objective and disinterested knowledge increasingly implausible. Not only the subjective, value-laden rhetoric of politics, but also the appearance of reality, and knowledge itself, were now understood to be shaped by imperceptible cultural and linguistic systems. So while the urges of the body might be destructive, it was increasingly apparent that the reasoning processes that had been thought of as relatively objective were equally fraught with invisible dangers; the moral and intellectual superiority of the conscious mind over the “irrational” feelings, emotions, and desires ascribed to the body could no longer be taken for granted.

The international political culture of the 1960s also reflected the idea of an intimate and reciprocal relationship between the liberation of the body and that of the mind. The mass demonstrations and public gatherings that characterized the student and minority movements of the 1960s had developed around an image of political agency which took quite literally the spatial metaphors that had traditionally conveyed the democratic notions of representation and the sovereignty of the people’s will. The idea was to manifest a unified voice and presence, physically filling symbolic spaces of government (the public square), ideology (the university, the Church), and daily life (lunch counters and buses in the American South). While there were some detractors, and splinter groups formed to test out more radical tactics as time went on, for many the symbolic expression of unity through physical assembly was a declaration of faith in the democratic system that was as important as the specific goals of the movement. By enduring violence and humiliation, crowds of “passive” bodies in protest highlighted the illegitimacy of the state’s use of its power.

The Cold War and the Reinvention of Freedom

36 The visibility of such outbursts of democratic energy on the international stage suggest that a significant reconfiguration of the political culture was underway by the end of the 1960s.

Mistrust of the “lettered city” and heightened sensitivity to the costs and human suffering inscribed in the social order that it produced had begun to strengthen a competing political- cultural paradigm. That new paradigm claimed “liberation,” rather than “production,” as its chief objective, and relied more than ever on the symbolic force of collectively politicized bodies to communicate its values.

The shift caught the notice of those who feared it, too. In The Cultural Contradictions of

Capitalism (1976), the influential North American sociologist and public intellectual Daniel Bell captured the drama of the political climate by conjuring up an image of a civilization teetering between the canyons of two visions of nihilism. The first of these apocalyptic fates is a

Nietzschean image of “modernity at its extreme”—a society choked to death by a life-sucking and self-perpetuating rationalism; the second, inspired by the anarchist notion of die Tat, posits a society “so fragile” that “a single act, an exploded bomb, can tear the fabric to shreds, destroy all the roles, and leave men bare to their impulses” (6).

Bell invokes these contradictory diagnoses of the threats posed by chaos and order, respectively, for the sake of diffusing the reigning hyperbolic language and advocating a longer view of history and political institutions; his point is that neither one of these extremes is a realistic threat. Yet his chosen examples also resonate on a deeper level with the many voices and bodies rising up in protest against an oppressively hyperrational order. For the students and minority groups who were demanding a more open and equal society, a healthy dose of disorder seemed called-for to bring society to its rightful balance—a contention that made the threat of chaos all the more urgent in the eyes of conservatives.

To Bell, the mere fact of the disagreement between the two sides seemed to him to be sign of a coming descent into chaos. He read the dispute as evidence of a kind of fatal

37 “disjuncture” in contemporary society—an irreconcilable contradiction between the cultural values of republican democracy (e.g., equality, representation, the universal rule of law, a coherent national identity, etc.) and the cultural values required to sustain a productive capitalist society (discipline, thrift, and work ethic). In Bell’s view, contemporary capitalism was outgrowing the assumptions it had once shared with the American democratic project at an alarming rate; the was encouraging a consumer culture of self-gratification that was fundamentally incompatible with the bourgeois, Calvinist ideals of hard work and civic duty upon which the American political system, and the capitalist economy itself, had been built. The historical and linguistic overlap between political and economic “liberalism,” and political and economic “freedom,” seemed to him to be nothing more than a coincidence—and a dangerous one at that,10 because it concealed a fundamental cultural rift that now threatened to unravel the component parts of the social order. He writes:

There remains the argument that capitalism serves as the basis for freedom, and for a

rising standard of living and the defeat of poverty. Yet even if these arguments were

true—for it is clear that freedom depends more upon the historical traditions of a

particular society than upon the system of capitalism itself; and even the ability of the

system to provide for economic growth is now questioned—the lack of a

transcendental tie, the sense that a society fails to provide some set of “ultimate

meanings” in its character structure, work, and culture, becomes unsettling to a system.

(21)

Thus, although Bell was distressed by the hedonism and immorality of what he described as the contemporary “culture of rebellion,” he acknowledges that many of the political conflicts of the day are difficult to resolve because they are inherently subjective in nature—in his words, conflicts of “right versus right”:

38 The problem […] is how to adjudicate the claims of group versus group, where the

problem is clearly right versus right, rather than right or wrong; of weighing the claims of

group memberships against individual rights; of balancing liberty and equality, equity

and efficiency. The starting point, I believe, has to be a recognition of the public

character of resources and needs (not wants), and the principle of relevant differences

in deciding the justice of various claims (29, emphasis in the original).

The crux of Bell’s argument here is stashed between the parenthesis. His basic claim is that we would be in a better position to resolve our differences and solve our collective problems

(inflation and pollution are a few of the ones he names) if we would all just agree to focus debate in the public sphere on issues of necessity, while letting the private sphere work out questions concerning mere “wants.” Indeed, according to Bell’s narrative, capitalism’s cultural problems began when the production of consumer developed to the point where economic growth began to depend on fulfilling consumers’ wants, not just their needs.

Advertising, market research, and consumer credit arose to meet the challenge by blurring the distinction between need and want. Thus Bell’s solution is to reassert that distinction. By drawing on shared cultural traditions, he hopes to reinvigorate a weakening sense of common purpose—or “ultimate meanings”—and thereby clear a path back toward a reasonable, universally-accepted “starting point” for negotiations. However, even as he wrote, the Cold

War was reconfiguring global politics in ways that would ultimately cement what was still for

Bell an uneasy discursive alliance between economic and political notions of freedom.

For Bell, the ideal starting point for political negotiation was a map of interests neatly subdivided into hierarchical categories like nations, minority groups, needs and wants.

However, as the international alliances of the post-war era weakened and the struggle between the US and the USSR intensified, political projects across the globe found themselves subjected to the blunt sorting mechanism of the capitalism-communism binary imposed by the

39 two superpowers. This framework reconfigured the symbolic language of politics once more by divorcing the image of an organized and well-administered republic from a new set of

“democratic” values. Chief among these was the new notion of freedom that gained acceptance through the collaborative efforts of American officials and business leaders to limit

Soviet influence and foster the spread the US’s democratic-capitalist way of life in unaffiliated territories around the world.

These efforts were particularly intense in Latin America, a region the US continued to think of as its own “backyard”—politically, culturally, and commercially.11 In The Decline and

Fall of the Lettered City (2002), Jean Franco documents at length how, in addition to the infamous covert military operations carried out by American intelligence in Central America, the

Caribbean, and Chile, the CIA was also engaged in a sustained struggle for across the region. This was not a new strategy; American companies seeking new markets abroad had long treated marketing to Latin America as a kind of economic “missionary” work—a way to impart the ways of modern American life to foreigners and secure the economic and cultural dominance of the US in the world market. However, the tensions of the

Cold War added an extra political urgency to that ongoing project, helping to incorporate the pedagogy of consumption into a codified discourse of “freedom” that equated the right of citizens to freely choose their government with the right of consumers to choose among products in a free market. In the expansive vision of “freedom” put forth by the US’s multifaceted interventions, personal liberty, democratic sovereignty, and were one and the same.

By extension, the clear and universal line Bell had wanted to draw between “wants” and

“needs” now registered as dangerously undemocratic. Democracy no longer allowed for any such thing as a universal “need.” Indeed, even while behind the scenes, the US was fully committed to deploying the heavy machinery of its flourishing cultural-industrial complex to

40 further its political agenda, publicly the program was to reject the model of politics as social- cultural production altogether—to deny the cultural components of politics. This meant also rejecting (at least superficially) the kind of overarching, cohesive system of national values whose absence from 1970s America Bell found so troubling. As central as the project of building a cohesive cultural value system was to the US strategy, the party line was now to insist that the only way to keep both culture and politics “free” was to keep them from contaminating one another.12 Thus, the secrecy that was the unifying theme of the US’s Cold

War foreign policy allowed the US to (disingenuously) promote a system of values that could pose as universal by purporting not to impose any specific content on anyone. (Whatever it accomplished by force, it accomplished offstage…). This duplicitous strategy made it possible for the US to publicly downplay both the costs of its decisions and the particular, nationalist interests that motivated them. Values like duty, sacrifice, and tradition—ideals that implicitly acknowledged tradeoffs between individual, group, and national interests—were overshadowed by a new ideology of freedom rooted in the principle of individual choice.

Again, we can find confirmation of the significance of the new political-cultural paradigm advanced by one group by observing the changing strategies of resistance of its opponents. As American propaganda politicized the body of the individual citizen by making the choices of consumers a primary site for the expression of political values, critics of

American imperialism responded in kind. Franco shows how interventions designed to call attention to the body itself became a recurring theme in the performance art that protested the repressive dictatorship in Chile. In particular, acts of public self-harm “drew attention to the disciplining of bodies by the military regime,” she writes, in reference to artist and writer

Diamela Eltit’s self-mutilation and the poet Zurita’s attempted self-blinding (180). Indeed, as was true of the protests of the 1960s, the symbolic violence of these gestures called attention to the transgressions of the state against its own body politic. However, the fact that in this

41 case the (self-inflicted) violence is perpetrated against a single body suggests an important change in the locus of political agency. In Eltit’s piece, the power of the gesture no longer radiates from the symbolic evocation of the collective, sovereign will of the people (i.e., through the physical assembly of many bodies). Instead, the performance acknowledges and responds to the new logic of Pinochet’s neoliberal, US-backed regime by making a single individual form the representative site of power. Thus the artist’s self-harm contests the values of the reigning political order—i.e., by resisting the doctrine of self-interest and the accompanying imperative to fulfill the body’s desires through consumption—but it makes its message of opposition legible within the regime’s own symbolic language of politics.

Yet the darkness of Eltit’s work also points to another shift set into motion by the successful military coups throughout the Southern Cone and Brazil in the 1970s—the relocation of resistance from the public square to the margins as the idealist fervor of the previous decade faded away. The somber tone of resistance in the 1970s reflected the grim fate met by the labor movement and socialist activism at the hands of the military dictatorships in Chile, Uruguay, and Argentina (and Brazil, though the situation was somewhat less dire there). Once in power, the militaries of those nations quickly dismantled the opposition and subjected their respective populations to brutal “dirty wars,” in which they tortured, kidnapped and “disappeared” not only their political enemies, but large portions of the general population—anyone vaguely suspected of political or cultural “radicalism.”

If the use of bodies in the social movements of the 1960s constituted a declaration of faith in the universal values of democracy, then the rise of a single body as the conveyed distrust of all universals by inscribing its messages upon the one local region still eligible for political sovereignty in the age of struggle against ethnic, cultural, sexual, and political oppression. At once the perpetrator and the victim of physical and symbolic violence, this conflicted individual body announced the arrival on the international stage of a new political

42 subjectivity—a subject at once radically free and completely isolated; an irreducible, and, as we will see, ultimately unrepresentable subject, fully absorbed by a supposedly unique and perhaps incommunicable experience of thinking and feeling: the global consumer.

The Rationalization of Politics

By the end of the Cold War, the building blocks of modern political liberalism, including notions of citizenship, representation, and nationalism, were rapidly losing the credibility they had enjoyed during the most hopeful moments of the previous two centuries. Thus, paradoxically, the formidable presence of government in people’s lives under the military dictatorships was assimilated into an international political narrative that emphasized the inefficacy of government management and the exhaustion of democratic politics.

In the late 1970s, the Carter administration tried to make the US more accountable to its official positions on freedom and human rights by attenuating the US military’s tacit support of state terrorism in Latin America, and Argentina in particular.13 However, international pressure continued to actively limit the real meaning of nationhood in the countries of the Southern

Cone throughout the 1980s and 1990s as the underhanded influence exerted by the US executive was gradually replaced by the power of the IMF and other global financial institutions. The debt crisis that swept across the continent in the 1980s left the region’s national governments increasingly dependent upon loans from the IMF—and increasingly at the mercy of its terms. In addition to the ongoing decentralized threat of capital flight, the debt crisis provided occasion for explicit interventions in the fiscal priorities of affected countries.

Thus, dominance of those nominally international financial institutions allowed the US to continue to play an active role in reshaping the political economic landscape in its Latin

American “backyard” throughout the transition to democracy. The shadow of economic recession and national debt left its imprint on that process, dampening what might otherwise

43 have been a hopeful moment with a sense that what was to come was only more of the same.

Democracy, it seemed, would not be enough to rein in the growing gap between the rituals of

“official” politics (i.e., collective decision-making by debate and vote) and the invisible exercise of real power.14 Moreover, what was striking about this particular moment was the perceived cause of the disparity between the discourse of power and the exercise of power, which had less to do with the corruption of any particular officials, or even with any flaws in “the system” itself, than it did with the inefficacy of political planning and top-down administration in general.

Meanwhile, the social movements of recent decades had already reduced the relevance of the nation-state as a cultural-symbolic entity. As Néstor García Canclini argues, the idea of democratic citizenship had become increasingly detached from the nation as consciousness of other allegiances emerged to compete with national identity:

La insatisfacción con el sentido jurídico-político de ciudadanía está llevando a defender

la existencia, como dijimos, de una ciudadanía cultural, y también de una ciudadanía

racial, otra de género, otra ecológica, y así podemos seguir despedazando la

ciudadanía en una multiplicidad infinita de reivindicaciones. (García Canclini 1995, 21)

The new claims—and responsibilities—implied by these infinitely multiplying citizenships caught the old model of representative democracy in a bind. The site of political agency was at once a shrinking collective body politic, or an expanding irreducible whole. On one hand, the increasing legitimization of the diverse needs of the citizenry, which had previously gone entirely unrecognized by the power structure, promised the possibility of fuller forms of representation. However, it remained unclear how the system could accommodate that representation. A tradeoff emerged between the possibility of fuller forms of representation, and the possibility of any representation at all. The tensions that emerged trapped the polity in a kind of cartographer’s dilemma, as an increasingly complete and detailed political landscape threatened to render any faithful representation of it impossible.

44 The result, it seemed, was a list of demands whose diversity and specificity transformed any effort to represent them into a useless life-sized map like the one Jorge Luis Borges imagines in the story “Del rigor en la ciencia.” Competent democratic administration of the “public ” required some kind of simplification—but with needs and wants hopelessly intermingled, the emergence of a monolithic capitalist-democratic world system left Bell’s longed-for “starting point” more elusive than ever.

The last decade of the 20th century found Argentina and its neighbors undertaking the task of re-democratization under inauspicious conditions. Disillusionment with the reality of limited local sovereignty and the efficacy of centralized management produced a political climate of pessimism. The resulting widespread disengagement and resignation to the status quo made it next to impossible for the new government to regain the trust of its constituents, despite President Alfonsín’s personal dedication to the cause of prosecuting the leaders of the former regime for their crimes. These circumstances, combined with the rise of competing allegiances informed by international cultural trends, eroded the Latin American nation-state as a significant economic, political, and even cultural entity and helped to solidify the narrative of inevitability that was already weaving itself into the story of the coming wave of economic and .15

When it happened, the fall of the Berlin wall was not immediately interpreted as the definitive marker of the triumph of capitalism and democracy; it would not take on that symbolic meaning until ten years later, when global capitalism was thriving in most countries.

In 1989, however, media coverage of the reintegration was mixed, reflecting the uncertainty that still prevailed.16 In contrast to the mood of self-confident interventionism that had produced the Marshall Plan at the conclusion of the Second World War, the gradual resolution of the Cold War was experienced more as a consensus of fatigue, or the exhaustion of alternatives. There was little appetite for planning and programming—and even less for debate.

45 Tellingly, in this atmosphere of exhaustion with the idea of conflict and crisis itself, the most widely-circulated document addressing the political economy agenda for the aftermath of the Cold War (at least on the Latin American battlefield) was an unassuming 1989 memo whose contents came to be known as the “Washington Consensus.” That shorthand, like the language of the paper itself, bears witness to a significant tonal shift in the political sphere from a discourse of struggle to more conciliatory and conflict-avoidant register.

The memo begins with a somewhat indirect description of its own intent, fitting for the modest parameters of the burgeoning genre of technocratic think-tank analysis (politics posing as science): the text will outline a number of policies that might be implemented to “deal with” the Latin American debt crisis. Any value judgments on the part of the author (John Williamson) are buried deep beneath layers of objective, investigatory endeavors:

No statement about how to deal with the debt crisis in Latin America would be

complete without a call for the debtors to fulfill their part of the proposed bargain by

“setting their houses in order,” “undertaking policy reforms,” or “submitting to strong

conditionality.” The question posed in this paper is what such phrases mean, and

especially what they are generally interpreted as meaning in Washington. Thus the

paper aims to set out what would be regarded in Washington as constituting a

desirable set of economic policy reforms. (Williamson n. pag.)

The gestures of distance multiply as Williamson explains that his intervention is merely meant to gloss a consensus that already exists, and in fact only a particular version of that consensus.

However, the ethnographer’s neutrality that is so effortfully made explicit here wears increasingly thin as the arguments unfold. Couched in continued assertions about what is a

“standard” viewpoint and what is “generally assumed,” those arguments are not presented as challenges to conventional wisdom, but rather, as ways in which the author “would wish to see the consensus view modified.”

46 The lengths to which Williamson goes to protect the illusion of “consensus” make it clear that he anticipates an audience that shares his own low tolerance for a subjective, humanist approach to politics. In sorting through the variations on the current “consensus” regarding appropriate economic policy from fiscal priorities to interest rates, he repeatedly dismisses the “arbitrary” criteria of bureaucrats in favor of the sensible choices of “technocratic

Washington.”

A number of factors conspired to paint economic neoliberalism as the perfect defense against the shortcomings of government as manager of the social order. First, the Cold War had expanded the political function of economic statistics, bringing new visibility to the role of economic theory and policy in the political sphere. Whereas the wellbeing of the economy had been understood as a significant responsibility of government since at least the Great

Depression,17 measures of economic outcomes like GDP had so far been understood as tools to be used primarily for domestic purposes, to help governments gauge and fine-tune their interventions. But in light of the international conflict between communism and capitalism, rates of economic production and growth in the US and the USSR took on new meaning as neutral arbiters of the relative success of the rival systems. In the early 1960s, politicians conveyed the urgency of the capitalist cause with rhetoric that highlighted the immeasurable value of qualitative, cultural aspects of American life.18 But later on, as the bleak economic situation in the Soviet Union began to seem irreversible, ideological and discursive justifications made way for “objective” evidence of capitalism’s superiority.19 In the end, such explanations seemed to indicate weakness; it did not matter why capitalism was the right choice if the GDP growth of capitalist countries was consistently outperforming the communists on neutral, “scientific” tests.

Second, the heightened political visibility of economic policy within a climate that favored technocratic approaches in general was symbiotically aligned with a number of trends

47 within economic theory itself. In the 1960s, Gary Becker had begun to pioneer the expansive application of economic methodologies and quantitative analytical tools to a wide range of social phenomena. By the 1980s, his approach had taken off, and economics was emerging as the definitive paradigm for evaluating human behavior and decision-making in all areas, from family life to conflict resolution. Increasingly, it was accepted that economic concepts like scarcity, costs, probability, and utility constituted a “universal grammar of social science”

(Hirshleifer 53). From there, was a short leap for the field of economics to gain recognition as a kind of universal and neutral measure of social wellbeing and government objectives. As Lee

Boldman argues, the developments within economics in the 1980s and 1990s paved the way for an “economic vocabulary”—and above all the state of Pareto-optimality glowingly referred to as “efficiency”—, to become “the dominant value to be served by government policy” (40).

Economic theory—and more specifically, liberal and laissez-faire theories of capitalism—has a long history of being recruited as a justification for eliminating social safety nets and other policies aimed at protecting the poor. Indeed, contemporaries of and Jeremy Bentham were already exploiting and distorting their writings for such purposes in late 18th-century England. Historian Paul Mantoux puts it succinctly: “Theory and interest, walking hand in hand, proved irresistible” (quoted in Boldman, 20). As the Soviet Union began to crumble, the moment was now right for that powerful combination to gain sway again. The world was tired of conflict and desperately craving consensus; the field of economics was quickly gaining both caché and credibility as a legitimate, objective science; moreover, in the wake of the collapse of Soviet communism, self-interest appeared as an especially convincing model of human behavior.

It was just a bonus that “theory and interest” found a superstar spokesperson in Milton

Friedman. To be sure, Friedman’s scholarship played an important role in bringing about the expanded influence of his discipline. (His important early work on consumer behavior

48 questioned the psychological bent of Keynesian analysis, reasserting the emphasis on rational decision-making as the root of economic outcomes that had fallen out of favor in the last decades; Friedman’s advocacy of predictive power as the primary basis for evaluating economic hypotheses paved the way for the innovative applications that his student, Becker, would find for economic analysis.) However, it was as a public mouthpiece for economic policy that Friedman most directly helped to usher in the era of neoliberal globalization.

The unifying theme behind Friedman’s policy positions, from his pet project,

“,” to his campaign against rent-control and his notorious opposition to the Food and Drug Administration, was the effort to limit the active intervention of government in the operation of “free” markets through . Deregulation, in his view, would limit the damage inflicted by the inevitable ineptitude of human management. In this sense, Friedman’s widely publicized positions helped to consolidate the link between economic and political freedom that was the centerpiece of the emerging “objective” justification for global free markets. For instance, Friedman claimed that the liberalizing reforms implemented under

Pinochet (such as opening up the economy to foreign investment and establishing free-trade agreements with major economic powers) had not only restored economic prosperity after the recession of the early 1980s subsided, but actually brought about the end of the military dictatorship and ushered democracy into Chile.20 Since then, other economists have increasingly refuted Friedman’s characterization of the Chilean recovery and offered competing explanations for it,21 and for the success of the Asian “Tigers,” that actually tied them to state initiatives like poverty-relief and regulation.

Curiously, consensus among Friedman’s longtime colleagues and intellectual sparring partners holds as one of the most remarkable features of his legacy the sharp contrast between his thoroughness and restraint as an academic researcher and the doctrinaire perspectives he promoted as a public intellectual. Paul Krugman notes that the success of

49 Friedman’s earliest contribution to economic theory—his rigorous defense of the rationality at the core of all human behavior—in a sense foreshadows his greatest limitations as a thinker, too: his absolutism and his single-mindedness. Robert Solow has a similar take:

Under Milton Friedman’s influence, the free-market ideology shifted toward unmitigated

laissez-faire. Whereas earlier advocates had worried about the stringent conditions that

were needed for unregulated markets to work their magic, Friedman was the master of

clever (sometimes too clever) arguments to the effect that those conditions were not

really needed, or that they were actually met in real-world markets despite what looked

a lot like evidence to the contrary. (n. pag)

The rise of neoliberalism entailed a significant and, in retrospect, completely unnecessary departure from the existing framework in which economic policy was considered.

Prior to the political conflict between communism and capitalism, it was for the most part universally accepted among economists that markets were the most effective way to organize knowledge and distribute resources without incurring the undue costs of excessive centralization; debates within the field focused on when and how to regulate markets so as to correct their inevitable failures and ensure morally and socially acceptable outcomes. Certainly, fringe groups had always pushed for “purer” and more “rational” expressions of the free market.22 However, the politics of the Cold War gave extremists a major advantage by reframing the debate over regulation as a matter of collectivism vs. markets. Approaching the question through that lens, Solow notes, “more or less guarantees that all the important practical questions about economic policy and social policy will disappear from view,” making it “all too easy to fall back on the defense of capitalism against the encroachments of , on which everyone could agree, to no great purpose.”

Indeed, the neoliberal policies advanced in the name of defending freedom and capitalism (from a threat that was by now mostly nonexistent) share the common, convenient

50 premise that markets generally work on their own. Fiscal discipline, minimal interference with interest rates, low taxes and tariffs, encouragement of foreign direct investment, and, whenever possible, the and deregulation of industry; there is a kind of abstract beauty to this system, a radiant internal, truth-eating coherence that preemptively resolves all of the thorny potential conflicts of “right vs. right.” Who needs debate when there is faith that, in the aggregate, individual decisions based on self-interest produce the best outcomes for society as a whole?

In the early 1970s, Bell observed that it was becoming increasingly difficult to even begin to hold a civilized political debate. The rise of neoliberalism in the 1980s confirms that he was not alone in that perception. In many ways, post-communist era neoliberalism was well equipped to deal with Bell’s concerns. After all, it provided just the kind of coherent belief system he had suggested was missing. What Bell could not predict, however, was that this unified cultural system would present itself to the world—and, moreover, successfully root itself in the terrain of “common sense”—as above moral and humanist concerns. But this is what happened. By the turn of the 21st century, the coupling of superficial scientism with a religious-like reverence of doctrine produced a new brand of liberalism—aptly described by

George Soros as “”—that managed to discredit humanist concerns, and to a significant degree, reason itself, within the culture of politics.

While few would go so far as to suggest that neoliberalism and the ideology of market fundamentalism would not have come to occupy a prominent place in international politics without the help of Friedman’s efforts, the contradictions in Friedman’s work—which persisted, and even intensified over the course of his career—illustrate just how powerful the appeal of a seamless, pure program of governance had become by the 1980s. I argued in the introduction that the 21st-century dream of scientific, managerial governance is different from the positivism that grew out of the Enlightenment in that it is driven not by the linear forward march

51 of human reason, but by the exponential irruption of new kinds of knowledge and information— knowledge that often paradoxically reveals the shortcomings of human intuitive reasoning even as its very existence affirms the vast achievements of humankind. This is, in effect, Friedman’s world. In it, the lettered city has been fully dismantled, and then rebuilt as a “numbered” city in which the social order is maintained (not produced) through a very different kind of intellectual work. The significant distance between Friedman’s legacy within academia and the positions he defended in his role as a public figure is an arresting indicator that in an important sense the work of politics had become an anti-intellectual work posing as rational, post-humanist analysis and dispassionate technocracy.

It makes sense that the thought of theoretical purity should be so comforting in this universe. We have already considered how the global consumer market can be a confusing place, full of decontextualized information, disorienting disparities, and black-box superpowers. These features of contemporary life lend themselves to an unflattering picture of the individual subject: gullible, easily distracted, prejudiced, and irrational. The irony is that

Friedman’s unwavering faith in rationality and his mistrust of intuition and subjective reasoning led him to follow his own “too clever” reasoning toward a position of theoretical extremism so rigid as to close itself off from reality. In this way, Friedman’s logic is an early iteration of the sometimes counterintuitive view of human intelligence—and moreover, the limitations of that intelligence in comparison to the rationality and consistence of machines—that would gain a foothold in the public imagination with the coming information revolution.

Global Consumer Utopia

By the end of the 1990s, the collective fantasy of the rational global city remained powerful. Yet against the backdrop of a generally prosperous global economy and rapid technological advancement, it took on a lighter sheen. The relative stability of the late 1990s

52 helped to turn the focus toward the possibilities opened up by economic and cultural globalization. By the ten-year anniversary of the reunification of Berlin, the significance of that moment had been reimagined as an unambiguous triumph—the advent of a new global age of freedom. Certainly the economic boom enjoyed in the US and much of Western Europe, and the growing strength of the European Union, were largely responsible for this hindsight re- estimation of past uncertainties. But how was the optimism of 1999 assimilated into cultural perceptions and theories of global capitalism as a political system? The following section traces how enthusiasm about the political and economic opportunities afforded by globalization in this moment helped to reshuffle the culture of politics once more. The model that emerged at the turn of the 21st century attributed to the individual subject unprecedented power to intervene directly in the production of the social order by situating his agency in a surprising new locus: consumption.

The fall of the Berlin wall became a potent symbol of freedom in part because the new rational order promised emancipation through the breaking down of all kinds of arbitrary borders. The same technologies that were expanding the scale of economic operations also promised to facilitate a new version of freedom by tearing down the barriers that had irrationally and artificially restricted cultural and intellectual exchanges in earlier periods.

Certainly, some critics were already pointing out that such barriers were not being broken down at equal rates—or at all—not for everyone.23 But the fast pace of change, combined with the rapid reduction in the costs of consumer communications technologies, lent credibility to the case of globalization enthusiasts who were excited by the democratizing potential of technological innovations that could alter our experience of time and distance.

For example, the utopian culture of the internet, with its cult to openness and its promise of creative expression freed from the ties of material resources, appeared as a beacon of a new era of post-national, or even post-republican democracy. The popularization of the

53 internet fostered newly specific visions of how the deterritorialization of identities might become a reality, bringing together digital communities of shared interests with little to no regard for geography. In this way, it began to seem possible that the challenge to democratic representation presented by the apparently “infinite” multiplication of group allegiances within the space of the nation would be offset by the increasing interconnectedness of the lives of people across different nations. Instead of merely guaranteeing them a platform to make their demands public, the internet offered users the radical autonomy to form their own communities. It became possible to imagine a new multicultural utopia in which everyone would enjoy the freedom to build their own identities and citizenships from among an ever- expanding array of non-exclusive options.

By the 1990s, the exhaustion of representation had begun to look less devastating politically, but this did not eliminate the challenges of mapping the diversity of global capitalist culture. Surveying the irregular and unpredictable circulation of cultural artifacts through the global capitalist system in Modernity at Large (1996), Arjun Appadurai wonders if any form of representation could produce an adequate map of values and meanings. As of now, he argues,

“even the most complex and flexible theories of global development are inadequately quirky”

(33). Appadurai’s view is that the relationships that structure the global economy are so complex and unpredictable that they cannot be theorized, at least not with anything like the theories we used before. In place of a universal theory of globalization, then, he proposes a social model with multiple centers, corresponding to five types of global flows: ethnoscapes, mediascapes, technoscapes, financescapes, and ideoscapes. “The suffix -scape,” he explains,

“allows us to point to the fluid irregular shapes” of contact, influence, power, and meaning in a global world (33). This model, like García Canclini’s description of overlapping citizenships, casts multiplicity as freedom. Emphasizing the importance of individual choice, both theorists paint an increasingly complicated picture of individual political identity in which cultural

54 globalization comes to signal potential liberation from the narrow constraints of identities allotted by the circumstances of one’s birth—and from the entrenched conflicts of interest such group identities inevitably produced.

The idea that people construct their own identities and citizenships through voluntary and partial group participation was appealing in part because it promised a convincing, definitive solution to one of the dangers that had been ascribed to cultural consumption in the era of mass culture—the 20th-century fear of passive spectatorship and vulnerability to mind- control. In this sense, the multiplication of possibilities reduced the threat of cultural imperialism by calling attention to the infinite combinations of text and context. Instead of fragile essential truths or a national spirit vulnerable to co-optation by Hollywood’s cultural machinery, it was becoming easier to imagine a new type of negotiation between a free, unique individual and a global horizon containing the cumulative possibilities of human culture from all places and times.

For Appadurai, the imperialist otherness of imported cultural products is redeemed by the unique meaning those products take on in a local context. The troubled and violent history of intervention by the United States in the Philippines, for instance, does not mean that

American culture cannot become part of an authentic [and therefore desirable] Filipino cultural identity. “[…] the United States is no longer the puppeteer of a world system of images but is only one node of a complex transnational construction of imaginary landscapes,” he explains

(30-31). Thus, the potential meaning of any given exchange need no longer be measured as the outcome of a zero-sum negotiation between opposing interests (e.g., center and periphery, imports and exports, equity and efficiency, goods and services, or base and superstructure— or, as we will see, production and consumption). Rather, the multidirectional flows that shape material and cultural values in the global capitalist order splinter these 20th century binaries,

55 producing a new dialectic that emphasizes the individual’s direct access to an enormous and inexhaustible cultural universe.

The increased visibility of multiple and overlapping political and cultural identities in the

1990s set the stage for the rise of the global consumer subject by affording the individual subject a significant degree of responsibility for his own freedom. However, the global consumer subject’s emblematic sense of direct engagement with the whole of the social order also drew on theoretical models of “active” consumption of goods that emphasized the way users actively construct the value and meaning of their interactions with products, not just by choosing between different products (as from Appadurai’s “cultural warehouse”), but also by actively assigning different functions to those products in relation to unique local cultural and social contexts. As we saw in the introduction, one of the most influential articulations of the emerging global consumer utopia is the model of cultural “poaching” described in de Certeau’s

The Practice of Everyday Life (1984). In that work, he challenges the assumptions of the

Frankfurt School about the public’s “passive” and intellectually stupefying experience of mass culture. Marshaling evidence from interviews in which he asked subjects to describe their experiences as they engaged with different kinds of cultural products, de Certeau depicts cultural consumption as “another production” carried out at the moment of reception. In his account, the effective meaning of even the most insipid and cliched cultural products is never reducible to the “message” their creators intend to convey; all cultural meaning must be on some level actively constructed by the consumer.

Even though the practice of “poaching,” is not necessarily restricted to the contemporary global culture, de Certeau’s description of cultural consumption is evocative of the mobile, highly virtual culture of globalization. The cultural consumer occupies a place that is neither here, in the moment of reception, nor there, in the moment of production; his place is

“[…]neither the one nor the other, simultaneously inside and outside, dissolving both by mixing

56 them together, associating the texts like funerary statues that he awakens and hosts, but never owns. In that way, he also escapes from the law of each text in particular, and from that of the social milieu” (174). That is, the multiple, overlapping and above all indeterminate site of consumption is, for de Certeau, an unambiguous liberation.

The final step in the rise of consumption as a site of political agency was set into motion as this theory of active cultural consumption became increasingly applicable as a description of economic consumption, too.24 As increasingly detailed information about consumer preferences and behaviors allowed customization and responsiveness to niche markets to become a driving force of profits in the consumer economy, the Fordist model of mass production was gradually replaced by a more flexible model. These changes exponentially expanded the array of options available in the global market—and in turn, created a need for companies to find new strategies for distinguishing their products. Anthropologists (and advertisers) had long been aware of the way consumer products could become the building blocks of social and political identities, but an even stronger form of consumer agency connected participation in the global market with opportunities to “produce” the global order.

Companies began to exploit the potential of the market’s ‘neutrality’ and precision as social aggregator by making consumption a political forum. Whereas marketing and strategic packaging had given consumers opportunities to express and communicate their social values before, the politics of consumption became increasingly overt. More often, purchasing a given product could mean making an indirect donation to a charitable cause, or directly “supporting” a particular form of industry (“green,” “local,” “fair trade,” etc.) Such claims are more or less reliable in different cases; the important point here is that the “miracle of aggregation” first insinuated by the rise of so-called “point of purchase” politics proved resonant as a broader alternative model of representation. Through the miraculous of the market, countless micro-decisions made throughout the day by individual consumers were cast as a legitimate

57 mode of democratic participation on par with making informed choices in the voting booth. The underlying expectation is that the market automatically transforms consumers’ enacted values into reality with an immediacy and a directness inconceivable within the traditional legislative cycle.

The order that finally emerged from the contradictions of global capitalism was an agreement-to-disagree that reassembled the cohesive “whole” of the cultural-political order under the universal rubric of faith in the “objective” principles of the market. The miracle of aggregation promised to resolve to the problem of democratic politics in a global, post-post- colonial era by eliminating political conflict between opposing interests altogether. This new political utopia would be administered by Miller’s “aggregate ‘global dictator,’” whose contradictory power—“repressive as well as enabling”—would become the new site upon which the difficult philosophical problem of the individual’s relationship to society would be negotiated (8).25 The assumption that the social order needed to be designed and produced through the democratic process was replaced by a new conventional wisdom, which posited a notion of material self-interest as the only effective motivator of human behavior.26 After the definitely dark turn taken by the idealism of the 60s, it seemed best to leave the “design” to a force beyond reason: the infallible, invisible hand of the market. In the absence of a representable, imaginable link between individuals and the larger society, the “arbitrary” intervention of Williamson’s anonymous bumbling bureaucrat had come to represent all human efforts to actively shape the world around them: disruptions of an order that would naturally reproduce itself efficiently if just left alone.

As Bell anticipated, the fate of capitalism now appears to be reducible to a fundamental question about the nature of civilization. Do the rationalizing, ordering forces of modern society exist in tension with the individual’s innate yearning to be free, so that civilization is sustained only by a delicate structure of ideologies that might be shaken off if the right pressure were

58 applied? Or, is the social impulse so strong in us that we are more at risk of surrendering our individual creativity to the dulling and homogenizing forces of conformity? Which is the greater threat, chaos or totalitarianism? Are we more likely to fail to produce a sustainable social order, or to be consumed by the order we have produced? Modern history has been shaped by the cyclical waxing and waning of these two fears. Really, they are two sides of the same fear, or the same belief, that fleeting individual needs and desires are incompatible with the long-term, shared goal of a sustainable civilization.

For a brief moment, the fantasy of economic rationalism made it possible to believe that a new, global order would finally release us all from the endless swinging of that violent pendulum marking the rhythm of human progress. At that moment, the same “disjunctures”

Bell feared would destroy the fragile social order, became for Appadurai cause for celebration—proof that no single force or interest could grow to dominate all the rest. At the end of the Cold War, the spontaneity and dispersion of power in “disorganized” capitalism offered reassurance against totalitarianism. It was reassuring to think that together, the illegible, agile forces of the underdog everyman would always be stronger than any traditional clumsy, top-down form of power.

The preceding sections have retraced the steps by which consumption emerged as the primary model of agency in the political . We have seen how in the late

20th century a political and intellectual climate marked by the failure of bureaucratically planned societies and growing sensitivity to the discursive nature of knowledge, history, and progress complicated the democratic ideal of a society produced through reasoned discourse.

These developments reshaped the relationship between individuals and society in the image of a paradoxical miracle whose very illegibility signaled its profound truth. The ideology of market fundamentalism reinvented freedom as civic duty as it transformed the market from a mechanism that could organize competing interests into a prophetic image of the true social

59 order. Such a feat was only possibly through the “miracle” of aggregation: a series of transubstantiations carried out in the name of the singular conception of freedom as the ideal standard of economic, cultural, and even moral value: what went into the free market as self- interest emerged as a contribution to the social order. The pursuit of immediate satisfaction became precaution. Pleasure-seeking could take on the functions of hard work and labor; consumption could be productive. Through the market, anything was possible.

Consumer Capitalism in Crisis: The Case of Argentina

The compromise at which we have arrived as citizens of a global capitalist order is to accept a more indirect relationship between the future outcomes we hope for and the decisions and actions we undertake in the present. Freedom-as-duty entails resignation to the impossibility of collective decision-making through traditional political discourse. In the lives of individuals, this translates into Aira’s “black box society”: we have to give up specific knowledge of our own contributions, and let go of the illusion of control over their effects. The loss of these satisfactions is balanced by the relief of anticipating a global consumer utopia in which all of our actions will be automatically transformed into social good. But what happens when the transformation does not materialize? In the last decade, and persistent recession have become familiar features of global capitalism, serially disenfranchising consumers in most parts of the world. And yet, even though the idea of consumer agency has lost much of its appeal, the myth of the consumer dictator and the ideology of market fundamentalism persist. Their continued hold complicates efforts to evaluate alternatives to the current social order, lending urgency to the problem of how, and from where, it is possible contest an all-encompassing, such as global capitalism.

Argentina’s cultural production of the last decades offers an especially rich catalogue of these complications. At the most basic level, the fifteen years that have passed since the

60 events of 2001 have given rise to a plentiful and sophisticated corpus of cultural and scholarly diagnoses of the failures and limitations of consumer capitalism. As echoes of 2001 Buenos

Aires continue to be felt around the globe, the value of that conversation is more easily recognizable than ever. Yet none of those echoes have reached quite the same magnitude.

A number of factors contributed to the singular intensity of Argentina’s experience of the crisis, which was lived even as it happened as a moment of indisputable historical and cultural significance. These include the unprecedented scale of the default and the severity and duration of the country’s ongoing depression. In the introduction I suggested that a framework of ambivalence, guilt, and confusion, resulting from widespread perception that the whole population was implicated in the collapse, also played a significant role in defining the crisis as a cultural experience. The urge to expunge or drown out a nagging sense of partial responsibility fanned the flames of a semi-performative outrage that captured the world’s attention and monopolized national media and culture for years to come. Uncertainty, that signature mark of the moral culture of consumer capitalism, demanded the continuous rehearsal of outsized reactions to the crisis, and imbued the subsequent recovery process with a heavy awareness of history in the making. As a result, the crisis was represented and re- represented in myriad ways; it became a unifying thread of Argentina’s national conversation in the 2000s and a universal paradigm for making sense of all kinds of experience.

We can now expand on this interpretation of the cultural significance of the crisis by examining the role of the democratic administrations of Menem and de la Rúa in carrying out the neoliberal economic reforms that were more or less unanimously understood to have caused the collapse of the national economy. Certainly, the relative robustness of the new democracy in Argentina (which was confirmed, in a way, by the peaceful removal of the president) made it feasible for the crisis to become a public spectacle in practical terms, but it also complicated resistance on a theoretical level, diffusing the potential target of blame. (Just

61 as in newly democratic Spain, the loss of a cause against which to organize introduced the possibility of an unlikely, conflicted nostalgia conveyed in the wistful refrain “Contra Franco vivíamos mejor”). In this regard, getting rid of de la Rúa only allowed more blame to settle on the general public, since it proved that the villains of the story had indeed derived their power from the consent of the people.

The problem of Menem’s and de la Rúa’s democratic legitimacy compounded the destabilizing effect of the broader demise of “the planning state” on the usual expressions of resistance. Above, we saw how the co-evolution of aesthetic theory and Cold War politics inaugurated the space of the irrational as a crucial site of resistance to hegemony. Under the dictatorships in Chile and Uruguay, the celebration of the “ugly,” the marginal, and the untranslatable performed an apparently contradictory desire that called into question the political and social values espoused by the regimes and the rationalizing forces of the market at the same time. Staking out illegible desires that could not be fulfilled by the market was their way of denying a system that professed itself eager to please in every way. With or without language, these were discursive forms of resistance that engaged in symbolic battles by highlighting that which could not be assimilated into the dominant value systems. Exposing the gaps and contradictions in those systems, they revealed the duplicitous nature of a discourse of “rationality.”

But contradiction itself was a defining feature of power under neoliberal democracy. As

Hugo Hortiguera and Carolina Rocha explain, “On one hand, the period was characterized by a democratic continuity not seen since the beginning of the century; on the other, the benefits of this democratic stability were unmatched in the socioeconomic realm” (7). These unresolved contradictions helped to reinforce the mythic invisible power of consumer dictator. That is, the identification of contradictions does not weaken the power of the consumer dictator, because apparent contradiction is the default mode by which his power expresses itself. (Your inability

62 to understand its operations is proof that it is working, that it knows more than you.) Far from threatening him, contradiction is the secret source of the consumer dictator’s power.

This is one more way in which Argentina’s unique circumstances fostered paralyzing ambivalence as a response to the crisis—and another way in which the crisis felt more like continuity than change. David Pion-Berlin argues that what set the Argentine Proceso apart from the dictatorships in nearby Uruguay, Chile, and Brazil was the regime’s special talent for spreading around the blame. In addition to a scheme to share power at the top by rotating command through the three branches of the armed forces, the regime worked deliberately to involve as much of the population as possible in the looting and the atrocities they carried out so that the “collective sharing of guilt” would indemnify the leadership from future accusations

(15). Reliance on “disappearances” as the primary tactic of repression was also part of this comprehensive hedging strategy. It allowed the authorities to consistently deny any involvement in their own reign of terror, while simultaneously ensuring that everyone knew who was responsible. The trick was to imply that the violence was perpetrated only by certain officers acting in violation of official policy. Yet, Pion-Berlin writes, “the excesses were the orders.”

Concealing its power and intentions behind deliberately vague language, the military dictatorship laid the foundations of the powerful combination of fear and guilt that would later serve—and oppress—the consumer dictator. In both cases, pretending to a non-discursive, purely rational, authority, allowed the powerful to leave to the weak the burden of explanation.

As Elizabeth Jelin explains:

Un mecanismo cultural perverso atrapó entonces una parte de la sociedad argentina: la

sospecha de que había alguna racionalidad en la detención y la desaparición. El ‘por

algo será’ que el sentido común trataba de aplicar para comprender las detenciones

63 arbitrarias y clandestinas se fue deslizando hacia la sobrevivencia: debe haber alguna

razón que explique quiénes iban a sobrevivir. (51)

In Argentina, this manipulative strategy of oppression finalized the apparent exhaustion, within the culture of global consumer capitalism, of those forms of resistance, which, like Adorno’s notion of the aesthetic, operate by exposing the limitations of a discursive power. The global market accommodates, and even imposes, previously unimaginable and, moreover, indescribable, fetishes and kinks. (More difficult to question than the system that purports to please you, is the system that purports to understand your desire better than you do.) Even self-harm is no longer sufficient to defy the hegemony of the market’s imperative to consume.

The union of confusion and productivity within the market shatters the idea that the weak and strong occupy opposing “sides” of some conflict; it abolishes the very possibility of conflict, assimilating even terrorism into its ideology of non-ideology by casting resistance itself as the incriminating mark of the unenlightened, the guilty, the infidel.

The narratives studied in the following chapters search for new spaces of resistance.

They make work a site of potential empowerment and redemption of the consumer. My critical readings of that effort suggest that moving beyond the consumer dictator’s debilitating tendency toward self-incrimination may require a different approach to selfhood and responsibility, not just consumption and production. But the only motives of this study are sympathy and understanding. In the next chapter, this means a feat that is not so difficult: sympathizing with the urge to make a clean break with the past, and with society itself—to strike out and make a new start in one of the few remaining free and open spaces avowedly untouched by the messy web of the global market.

64 Notes

1 As Rama explains, that threat of out-of-control consumption represented to the social order led to a number of royal edicts issued from the capital in an effort to regulate the use of luxury goods like carriages and silk garments (26).

2 Dunn makes a helpful distinction between the cultural aspects of consumption in general, modern “consumer culture,” and the more recent phenomenon of “consumerism.” He explains: “While consumption as a social practice has always rested on cultural foundations, consumer culture is a uniquely modern (some would say postmodern) formation with its own distinctive characteristics. What is perhaps most momentous about consumer culture, however, is that its raison d’être extends far beyond a calculated and managed satisfaction of individual needs and wants. Consumer culture has been a breeding ground for the notion that we should embrace the pleasures of consumption-for-its- own-sake. Thus, the essence of consumerism is the principle that consumption is an end-in-itself” (8, emphasis in original). Throughout this study, my use of the term “consumer culture” corresponds to this definition.

3 See Slater 177.

4 Communist and Peronist political posters depicted the physical dominance of workers over their enemies by featuring disproportionately-sized figures with exaggerated masculine characteristics. (These images contrasted with portrayals of capitalist and other opponents of the movement as effeminate and elegantly dressed.) See Artinian pp. 106-08.

5 The incorporation of the needs of workers as consumers into political rhetoric and iconography at this time coincides with changes in how consumption was understood as an economic process. According to Bennet et. al, “Only in the eC20 was consumption conceptualized by economists explicitly as the satisfaction of human needs through economic means, prefiguring a positive rather than a neutral sense” (57).

6 C. Wright Mills observed in White Collar (1951) that a new social class had arisen, for whom (otherwise meaningless) work was neither a matter of immediate survival, nor personal and social fulfillment, but rather a means to achieve the pleasures of consumption.

7 Marx explains in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts (1844): "According to the economic laws the estrangement of the worker in his object is expressed thus: the more the worker produces, the less he has to consume;; the more values he creates, the more valueless, the more unworthy he becomes; the better formed his product, the more deformed becomes the worker;; the more civilized his object, the more barbarous becomes the worker;; the more powerful labor becomes, the more powerless becomes the worker;; the more ingenious labor becomes, the less ingenious becomes the worker and the more he becomes nature’s slave" (30-31).

8 In “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Benjamin writes: “Fascism attempts to organize the newly created proletarian masses without affecting the property structure which the masses strive to eliminate. Fascism sees its salvation in giving these masses not their right, but instead a chance to express themselves. The masses have a right to change property relations; Fascism seeks to give them an expression while preserving property. The logical result of Fascism is the introduction of aesthetics into political life. The violation of the masses, whom Fascism, with its Führer cult, forces to their knees, has its counterpart in the violation of an apparatus which is pressed into the production of ritual values” (241).

65

9 The social function of art and its relationship to ideology in one of the major themes Adorno takes on in his Aesthetic Theory. Adorno’s understanding of the autonomy of the aesthetic experience in relation is explored in greater detail in chapter four of this dissertation.

10 Bell makes a point of distinguishing between political and economic conceptions of liberalism in his introduction: “Though capitalism and democracy historically have arisen together, and have been commonly justified by philosophical liberalism, there is nothing which makes it either theoretically or practically necessary for the two to be yoked” (14).

11 Alan Wells describes US foreign policy strategy in Latin America as a continuation and an intensification of the paternalistic relationship suggested by the Monroe Doctrine in the previous century.

12 As Franco points out, the heightened stakes on the cultural front produced not only vast amounts of propagandistic culture, but also a great deal of suspicion of culture. Such a climate was especially conducive to a two-pronged strategy like the one the Americans were assembling. Under the still- tenuous rubric of the new conception of freedom, they could, if not entirely justify censorship of communist-leaning culture, then at least preemptively devalue displeasing cultural messages by marking them as nefarious, double-speaking propaganda. At the same time, they could lay the groundwork for an implicit two-tiered defense of the efforts of the CIA and its various cultural subsidiaries to influence cultural production at home and abroad. Those interventions could be understood as an expression of “freedom” in two senses: First, they were free, independent acts by non-governmental, apolitical agents. If that disguise failed to convince anyone, then they could still be salvaged as valiant defenses of the universal value of freedom.

13 See Schmidli.

14 As Miller argues, “[t]o varying degrees in most countries there is a similar “division of ‘significance’ between the properly politicized and the daily mundane world” (13).

15 Amy Skonieczny shows how an underlying assumption of inevitability has persisted in discourses on globalization despite many efforts to contest that characterization.

16 See Somerstein.

17 The concept of a national economy began to emerge as a standard feature of political discourse in the early 20th century. Prior to the Great Depression, “economy,” referred to rather than to the whole system of capitalist production and consumption in a given region. But the 1930s brought the role of the national government in economic wellbeing to the fore. In addition to the advent of national financial policies, the Depression saw the first attempts to quantify the health of the national economy by measuring aggregate levels of production and consumption.

18 See Goldstein and Kestenbaum.

19 In the wake of this “victory,” the significance of GDP as an “objective” measure of the success of economic policies took off in the United States and the international financial organizations closely aligned with it. See Coyle.

20 Friedman makes this general argument in Capitalism and Freedom (first published 1962). For its applicability to the case of Chile, see Friedman 1991.

21 See, for example, Stiglitz 2009.

66

22 E.g., the Mont Pèlerin Society, which first convened in Switzerland by Hayek in 1947, and was later headed up by Friedman beginning in 1970.

23 For example, in Globalization and its Discontents (1998), Saskia Sassen calls attention to the way social and economic inequalities are worsened by a transnational “politics of those who lack power,” and have only “presence” (xxi).

24 The groundbreaking work of Mary Douglas and Baron Isherwood helped to bridge economic and cultural understandings of consumption. In The World of Goods (1979), they helped to pave the way for a more literal-minded politicization of consumer agency by adding material production and consumption to the list of modern binaries being dismantled by new, broader views of cultural knowledge and agency ushered in by global capitalism (local/foreign, popular/mass, material/symbolic, etc.). They argued that “the theory of consumption has to be a theory of culture and a theory of social life” (xxii). Integrating anthropological and economic understandings of how goods acquire value and meaning, the authors portrayed a world full of found objects, both naturally occurring and manmade, in which human creativity flowed freely in interactions with objects in both categories.

25 For Miller, the central contradiction of global capitalism is that the “primary victim of capitalism and the primary beneficiary may be one and the same person” (9). In Miller’s analysis, the paradoxical status of the victim-beneficiary is exemplified by the figure of the “First World” housewife who is forced to decide between the immediate “benefit” she derives from purchasing low-cost goods (say, from that archetypical villain of globalization, Walmart), and the potential costs of her decision in the long run (in the form of lower wages, for example).

26 The idea that self-interest and desire could become the guiding forces of a spontaneous order was taking off in other arenas as well in this moment. The burgeoning gamification movement promised to incorporate the pleasures and rewards of videogames into all areas of life, from physical exercise, to lawfulness. The goal of gamification is to reinvent self-interest as virtue or social contribution. Its guiding assumption is that an efficient, well-run society will make the responsibilities of citizenship pleasurable. In a similar vein, the rise of “Big Data” capitalizes on the capacity of computers to perform their own ‘miracle’ of aggregation, transforming the biased and short-sighted choices of individual actors into meaningful knowledge about the workings of the human mind itself. (Just as the godlike forces of ‘the market’ turn consumption into a productive behavior, they turn ignorance into knowledge.)

67 Chapter 2

Global Citizenship and the Cultural Value of Labor in Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad and

Adrián Caetano’s Bolivia

The year is 2001, and Argentina is on the verge of economic crisis. By December, the government will be toppled by popular uprisings protest against bank freezes and austerity measures. Not long ago, Argentina’s economic revival had been the IMF’s pet project in Latin

America. As recently as 1998, the nation had been celebrated at that organization’s annual conference in Washington for having the courage to implement market reforms. Three years later, that optimism is a distant memory. Argentina is now an example of everything that has gone wrong with the neoliberal model of privatization and deregulation of industry: unaffordable prices, unemployment, and disillusion with the political class.

In this environment, the impotence of the worker became a particularly potent symbol of the disordered state of the nation. The high rate of unemployment was only one of the symptoms of the broken labor market. Another problem was widespread payroll freezes in both the public and private sectors. Fear of layoffs led many workers to continue to do their jobs every day even though they were no longer being paid. This occurrence is a standard feature of the recent crises of global capitalism. Yet the phenomenon seems to defy one of the basic tenets of market fundamentalism—the idea that the goal of work is to earn the privilege of consumption and the benefits and powers that go along with it. If work ceases to be a source of economic wellbeing—(of the buying power that is ultimately the root of economic agency for the consumer subject)—then how do workers make sense of the experience of laboring to produce goods and services when the market fails to recognize (and provide

68 adequate compensation for) the value of their time and their labor? What value do consumer subjects get out of work when it is not a source of economic agency?

The two films analyzed in this chapter each center around the experience of characters engaged in economically “irrational” forms of production. Because they each live in a world in which agency is exercised through consumption, they “restore” the value of their work by entering an artistic mode of production. Working not as laborers but as artists, they appeal to a model of cultural consumption in which the “work” of producing meaning (or value) is understood as an act of simultaneous production and consumption. Thus they assess the value of their work not as a contribution to a process of production, nor as the means to acquire buying power and become self-sufficient as consumers, but as a valuable experience in itself: an expression of consumer agency. While La libertad offers a more hopeful perspective on this redemptive artistic mode of production, Bolivia depicts a dreamy and impotent artistic production that is ultimately overpowered by global economic forces, leading to the disintegration of any sense of order and community.

Part I. La libertad

Escape from Buenos Aires

Sometime during these tumultuous months leading up to the crisis, not long before his fellow residents of the capital were gathering in the city’s symbolic Plaza de Mayo and banging together empty pots and pans with enough force to disable the government, a young, recent graduate of Buenos Aires’s Universidad de Cine found himself in a sparsely populated province in the country’s interior. He had recently arrived in the rural town where his father grew up, and he was getting to know his neighbors. Among them was one Misael Saavedra, a young woodcutter who had emigrated from Chile as a boy. He now worked alone in the woods of La

Pampa, and he was soon to become the protagonist, of sorts, of a film called “Freedom.”

69 So goes the origin myth of Lisandro Alonso’s 2001 feature film La libertad, as reproduced in interviews with the director and promotional materials. In the 73 minutes of artfully edited film that would ultimately be produced from this encounter, audiences follow the camera as it meticulously registers the events of Misael’s workday. We see him eat, work, defecate, listen to the radio, drive to town, sell the day’s lumber, call his family, buy supplies and gas at a convenient store, and finally, catch and cook his dinner over an open fire.

Throughout the slow, meditative and decidedly unromantic semi-documentary, our hero rarely speaks or expresses emotion. The result is an intriguing if enigmatic portrait of a possible most distant point from the ongoing clamor in Buenos Aires.

In the context of a national cultural imperative for artists and intellectuals to be explicitly engaged with national and international politics, the film’s deliberate flight from the contemporary, urban political context has puzzled critics. Despite its evidently isolationist spirit, much of the critical debate surrounding La libertad is concerned with whether, or in what sense, the film can be understood as “political,” or as an “anticipation” of the economic and political crisis that exploded in Buenos Aires shortly after the film was finished. For instance, there is Christian Gundermann’s claim that the film symbolically manipulates visual signs of multinational commerce in order to orchestrate a nuanced, ironic commentary on the tragedy of privatization and the resulting precarious state of Argentina’s workers (Gundermann 3).

Drawing a parallel to the clever acts of vandalism that made use of the double meaning of

Spanish word detención to convert municipal signs for “bus stops” into “detention centers” during the last dictatorship, Gundermann interprets a traveling shot that slowly pushes part of

YPF’s slogan out of the frame as an indictment of the botched privatization of that .

He writes:

Es como si a la hora de la entrega del combustible, se revelara el hecho de que el país

queda excluido, poniendo al desnudo la mentira de la publicidad. La duración total del

70 plano en que se lee la frase de YPF es de casi treinta segundos, es decir, la frase

publicitaria (y luego la parte truncada) subtitula todo el intercambio gasolinero entre

Misael y el quiosquero, dándole amplia oportunidad al espectador de reflexionar sobre

la problemática relación entre país, empresa extranjera y consumidor nacional en un

país que es a la vez posindustrial y neocolonial. (2)

The impressive acrobatics of this reading illuminate a provocative response to the sequence, one that is certainly possible; but it is important to keep in mind that the film does not actively encourage this particular interpretation. In a film largely devoid of recognizable symbols, where changes in rhythm and composition are responsible for directing our attention, there is little aesthetic evidence to suggest that this movement of the camera is more meaningful than the others that immediately precede or follow it. Moreover, as Gundermann acknowledges, the director persistently discourages his audiences from seeking out such specific political messages in his work.

Gundermann is right that we would be naïve ourselves to take Alonso’s “ingenuidad discursiva” as a transparent description of his methods as a director (2). Nevertheless, to dismiss the filmmaker’s persistent and adamant refusal to characterize his films as “political” is to ignore a significant and fascinating component of the film’s public life. But why is it so tempting to ascribe a deliberate political intervention to a film that essentially flees the scene and the urgency of political unrest in early 2000s Buenos Aires, choosing instead a slow, intentionally timeless, rural landscape?1 Can we justify the urge to interrogate Alonso’s project through the lens of broadly political social and economic concerns? And if we can, what does the filmmaker gain by distancing himself publicly from those issues?

These questions suggest that the difficulties of characterizing the politics of Alonso’s film arise in part from the conflicting definitions of the term “political.” After all, Alonso’s contention that “cinema is not an appropriate tool for playing out politics” naturally arouses

71 suspicion in a critical community accustomed to considering the political implications of all actions, artistic or otherwise (West and West 35). For such critics, any choices can have

“political” meaning—even more so in the contemporary context of free market democracy and supranational agency. In this light, not only is Alonso’s work indisputably political, but his gesture of abstention makes him an irresistibly ripe target for politically-minded cultural criticism. However, as Ana Amado points out, “political cinema” in the Latin American context refers to a narrower category of interventions, one interested in a certain type of questions, a specific treatment of contemporary historical context, and a particular configuration of social and aesthetic practices that found its most potent expression in the militant, conscious-raising cinema of the 1960s and 70s (9).

La libertad is far from militant, but the comparison to an expressly “political cinema” is not entirely unjustified on the grounds of its aesthetic and conceptual composition. The film shares many formal similarities with the tradition of neorealism that has been the dominant strain of political cinema in Latin America since the 1960s, most notably the decision to emphasize images and sounds over narrative storytelling, and the depiction of subjects traditionally underrepresented in the studio system.2 According to Deleuze’s widely accepted reading of neorealism, the distillation of filmed events into sound and image works to create a deliberate effect on the spectator. Such “visionary” cinema (“cinéma de voyant”) opens up possibilities of perception that are not accessible either in daily life or in films centered around narrative action (Deleuze 83). Rather than sweeping up the viewer in the story, the intent is to continually disrupt the illusion and activate an engaged participation, inviting an educated, middle-class viewership to perceive with new attention and clarity the realities of life for the marginalized classes.

On the surface, the slow wandering of the camera, the absence of plot as a driving force, the improvisational spirit, and the imperfect, difficult-to-understand speech of the non-

72 professional actors in La libertad place it in dialogue with the neorealist tradition. However, the overall effect of these features is quite different in La libertad. The openness of space and time in the film does not serve to educate audiences; in fact the film self-consciously disregards the audience, as much in its formal composition as in its conceptual existence as a subject of discourse and cultural experience. Rather, La libertad purports to be about the education of a director, that is, the evolving relationship between the director and the subject. Rather than

“visionary” cinema, it is a cinema of encounter.3 In a 2011 interview with Cineaste, Alonso maintains that he uses filmmaking as a way to seek out social encounters he would not otherwise come across:

“Yes, [I always use nonprofessional actors] because I’m interested, as Birri was, in

going out and finding people you don’t see every day in magazines, on television, or in

the cinema in Buenos Aires… Ever since I was a kid and visited the countryside—my

father was from the province of La Pampa—I have been very curious about the rural

areas and most interested in people who resided outside, rather than inside, Buenos

Aires. I like to leave the capital behind and seek out experiences with people I don’t

know. And the best excuse I have to get to know them is to make a movie with them”

(West 33).

Just as Alonso accounts for his preference for nonprofessional actors as a means of enhancing his own experience rather than as an aesthetic choice, he explains his observational, on- location filming method in a similar way: “[…S]eeing all that makes me a more interesting and well-rounded person… getting educated as a person, as a human being. When I film I attempt to increasingly open up my world” (35).

Consistently throughout this and other interviews, Alonso deemphasizes both his final product and, indirectly, his audience, in order to prioritize his process, the experience of filmmaking. Of course, this discursive focus suppresses much of the real work involved in

73 making film: the solitary and time-consuming labor of post-production, not to mention the work of promotion and distribution. However, it is not necessary to take his statements in interviews at face value in order to appreciate in his discourse a coherent philosophy of art. Rather than force Alonso’s film into a gesture of denunciation consistent with the activism of neorealism, it makes sense to ask of his film how its own politics work—what kind of broader proposal might reconcile the form and content of his work with its surrounding mythology. Such an approach could take as its point of departure the most overtly “political” maneuver in the film’s cultural life: its declaration of a right of refusal, or a right to absolute self-determination.4

La libertad, as its title implies, proclaims several “freedoms”: from tradition and institutions, from the expectations of audiences, and ultimately from the idea that the goal of filmmaking—or of art more generally—is a final product. The following discussion traces the ways in which these freedoms articulated in Alonso’s discourse on his work are explored formally and thematically in the film La libertad. The reading of the film is followed by a conclusion that reexamines the “politics” of the project as a whole, considering what social function, if any, the project conceives for art, and whether its own life as a work of art fulfills that function.

Resisting consumption

The first depiction of “freedom” within the film itself is a visual representation of Misael’s autonomy. In the opening sequence, Misael—wearing a red t-shirt (visually reminiscent of the bright red lettering of “La libertad” on the last title card)—wanders in and out of the frame. At the same time, the frame itself seems to be taking its own ambling route through the green vegetation of the pampa. Without an establishing shot of sky or ground, the goal of either trajectory—Misael’s, or the camera’s—is not immediately apparent. The only dynamic tension in the sequence is the relationship between the two routes. Neither follows the other. The

74 back-and-forth of the movements echo one another, but each path maintains its autonomy, until slowly, tentatively, the camera begins to follow Misael.

These six minutes establish the rest of the film as an encounter between two independent and autonomous agents, camera and subject. Although the camera eventually settles into a focus on Misael and mostly follows his movements, it retains sufficient autonomy to venture off on its own periodically. It does so several times over the course of the film. When

Misael takes a nap, the camera wanders around the surrounding area as if waiting for him to wake up. Another time, while Misael is making excruciatingly slow progress slicing away a tree trunk with his hatchet, the camera turns to the chainsaw he has left hanging from a nearby tree, as if to suggest a different approach. Later, the camera “waits” with a dog in the back of the truck while Misael climbs off to attend to some unknown matter.

These effects are a formal manifestation of the priorities of Alonso’s “cinema of encounter.” The relationship between camera and subject is a kind of tentative friendship whose boundaries we see negotiated over the course of the film. By reminding us of its own independent will, the camera refuses to let the film “represent” Misael or convert him into a

“product”—a story, a message, a metaphor—for consumption. Or, to think of it another way, the independent camera stands in for a fictionalized director/narrator, reminding viewers that we are second-hand consumers of his experience. The personified mechanical eye of the camera frequently hints at the private communication between himself and Misael that we cannot access, for instance by seeming to know where and when to “meet” Misael when he is about to reappear after one of his absences. As spectators, we are allowed to look over the shoulder of our narrator, watching him interact with the subject, but we are not allowed to hear what they say to one another. From this position we are constantly aware of our role as outsiders. If we accept that role, we might find a way to enjoy our own “freedom,” letting our thoughts wander in and out of the frames along with Misael, bringing something of ourselves—

75 our private thoughts, assumptions, concerns—into the encounter. However, that work must take place outside of the film itself, in a separate, virtual space of response, because we are perpetually excluded from the space shared by Misael and the camera.

In keeping with the narrator’s refusal to share privileged information with the audience,

Misael, too, reminds us that we are not important. The most sustained, personal view we get of

Misael comes in the form of the dark, flickering mid-distance shot of his bare head and torso that precedes both the introductory and closing title sequences. During the longer sequence at the film’s end, we watch for several minutes as Misael picks and eats the meat he has just cooked. Having just witnessed Misael’s entire day, including the preparation of his dinner, we now know how to make a rudimentary narrative sense of the images that were baffling at the beginning. Yet the additional context only enhances the mystery surrounding Misael. We still have almost no insight into his inner life. His eyes flit from his hands to an undefined point on the horizon as he cuts away pieces of meat and puts them into his mouth. From time to time his focus grazes the lens of the camera, and through it, the audience. Yet there is nothing special about the lens to him. If his eyes meet it for an instant it is only in transit to another distant point. What is the camera, what is this portal to a strange, urban context, compared to the open sky and the menacing thunder announcing the coming rainstorm? Finally, he seems to take an interest; his gaze quiets dangerously near to the camera. However, it immediately becomes apparent that the stillness is only a byproduct of his concentration; he is working some indigestible bit of flesh around in his mouth. He leans across the eye line of the camera, and spits violently. Whatever feeling this near-encounter evokes, it does so because the spectator lets it; within the diegesis, the gesture is as self-sufficient as it is definitive. If we found ourselves eager to hold Misael’s glance, ready to accept a message from him, the only message to be received is that our impulse was misguided.

76 Self-made cinema

Another freedom advanced by the project is its independence from the very idea of a cinematic tradition. This concept of freedom is less sustainable within the film itself. Although it does not participate overtly in any of the games of homage and allusion so often found in independent film, the film as product nevertheless participates in a genre, conforms to conventions of length, medium, circulation, and technology. It offers no radical reconceptualization of what a “film” should be or do. Still, as a cultural process, the film asserts its autonomy in two significant ways: by downplaying the significance of its relationship to other films, and by rejecting the steps of the filmmaking process as solidified by the demands of institutional funding opportunities.

First, like many of the other recent Argentine films to be classified by critics as examples of a New Argentine Cinema, the director denies the association, as if it were insulting to be classified as part of that, or any, category. This attitude, while common among contemporary filmmakers, marks a departure from earlier generations who developed styles and schools in a spirit of cooperation documented in the film journals in which they tested out their principles and even published manifestos.5 For his part, Alonso takes the isolationist gesture to an extreme. He claims that he rarely watches films, and professes ignorance or lack of interest with regard to canonical works in the medium. A graduate of private film school and a professional sound engineer, he lacks the requisite biography of an outsider artist, but his attitude emphasizes the individuality and autonomy of his work on every level. He deliberately avoids classifying his project, or even identifying its basic themes, in hopes of leaving all possibilities of meaning and direction open all the way through from its conception to its narrative to its eventual interaction with audiences.

Again, Alonso accounts for his improvisational method as a personal, even selfish choice:

77 If I am sure about something, I’m not interested in doing a film about it. If I think I

already have a preconceived idea about something, or a certainty, or an answer, I’m not

interested in filming the subject. I’m more interested in articulating my questions; and

the more questions a film raises, the better it is for me (35).

Yet this approach also reflects a response to the conditions of production. During the filming of

La libertad, from 1997-2002 Argentina’s National Institute of Film and Audiovisual Arts (INCAA) was forced to suspend its program of grants and subsidies for national films due to a shortage of funds. As a result, filmmakers turned to creative strategies for financing their projects.

Combining multiple sources of funding, collaborating with international producers, bartering services in an informal network, and covering expenses out of pocket became typical of what

Aguilar has called the “adventure” of funding and producing independent film in contemporary

Argentina (10). In this environment, flexibility and an improvisational spirit are less active choices than necessary conditions of production.

Seen in this light, Alonso’s remarks on the personal nature of his projects might be read as something of an anti-grant proposal. His discourse of independent self-interest turns the scarcity of institutional avenues for funding film projects into an opportunity to throw out old conceptions about the social function of film in favor of more modest projects like the filmmaker’s own pleasure or edification. After all, a film funded by INCAA is at least implicitly a public good, worthy of public funding. Its very possibility is tied up in a socially determined understanding of the work of art. Whether its contribution is to the advancement of a broadly conceived national treasury of fine arts or to a more overtly political and historical project of national memory and identity, the film, at some point in its trajectory from idea to circulation as a finished project, must engage with external systems of value.6

Thus, perversely, the difficult conditions of production and the temporary collapse of national support for independent film become, in Alonso’s vision, a form of freedom for the

78 artist. (Again, it is best not to dig too deeply into the authenticity of this claim in a biographical sense; in Alonso’s own case, that precarious freedom is dependent on the support of his privileged family). Nevertheless, his declaration is provocative in that it constitutes a departure from the prevailing logic by which a product (i.e., the film) is understood to be the valuable good we receive in exchange for the costs (labor and capital) that go into the production process. Alonso’s formulation of his project reclaims the value of the process itself as a meaningful experience for participants.7

Abstract labor

As is true of most of Alonso’s other film projects (Los muertos, 2004 and Liverpool,

2008), the narrative trajectory of La libertad closely follows the movements of a solitary, mostly silent, male protagonist over the course of short period of time. Long, lingering shots offer the viewer an intimate look at Misael’s movements as he works, to the extent that most of the film’s admittedly minimal dramatic “action” consists quite literally of Misael’s actions—and more specifically, of the transformations he implements on his environment. Throughout the entire first half of the film we watch him turning an upright, unwieldy, living tree into a straight, smooth log ready for sale. Then, after a brief excursion to town to sell his lumber and buy personal supplies, the remaining quarter of the film focuses on his efforts to transform a live, wild armadillo into soft, cooked meat and eventually sustenance for his own body.

The immediate, spatial-physical challenges presented by these tasks serve as the film’s most important source of dynamic tension and release. Thus, in keeping with the tradition of neorealist social semi-documentary, the protagonist is of interest to the audience primarily in his function as a worker. However, as we will see, in this case the concerns of the worker are not social (e.g., working conditions and hours, compensation, etc.). Rather, Misael’s “work” is framed as a series of abstract, aesthetic interactions with his surroundings. The problems that

79 make up the limited narrative component of the film are immediate problems of spatial strategy. (How will he manage to weaken the trunk, at what point will it fall, etc.) An audience unfamiliar with Misael’s work only understands the challenges he faces as they arise. What is even more striking is that Misael himself seems not to anticipate any part of his work that lies more than a few minutes ahead. Rather, he tends to move according to a logic of patient, contented wandering—for instance, as he does in the opening sequence, when he forges a zigzagged path back and forth across the forest rather than moving with purpose toward a known destination.

He applies a similar approach, almost of trial-and-error, to the project of cutting lumber, removing a few branches from one tree, pausing, then heading off to work on another; he hardly seems intent on finishing the tasks he begins. His activity is portrayed as a constant and open-ended process of decision-making rather than as the execution of a preexisting plan. In fact, since so little of what he does clearly needs to be done, the actions we might construe as

“work” due to our own assumptions about why a person might cut down a tree might not really constitute work at all within the framework of the film.

If the film’s interest in Misael’s actions is not primarily concerned with their ends, neither is it concerned with the means, per se. That is, his movements are not meant to incite fascination because of the skill or grace with which he carries them out. It is true that at times

Misael works with the steady confidence of an expert, as when he uses the side of his hatchet to swiftly chip away the rough exterior of a tree he has just felled (22m). For a few moments during that scene, the even rhythm of his strokes, the steady gaze of the camera, and the simple, predictable nature of the transformation of the wood from dark and rough to light and smooth, create a hypnotic and reassuring audiovisual sequence. However, the spectator’s relief from the strain of not knowing where to look or what to anticipate is only momentary—a brief counterpoint to the dominant mode, wherein Misael’s interactions with his environment

80 are characterized by an understated but consistent unpredictability. The editing of the film also enhances the feeling that there is no set plan. Misael often appears in new places suddenly—in a phone booth, in a store—frustrating any effort by the spectator to anticipate his movements.

The suppression of these transitions causes every movement to come across as an active, impromptu decision, unconnected to previous actions.

Overall, Misael is not presented as especially skilled or unskilled at what he does. The film purports to depict a “typical” day for him; however, several moments undermine the stability of this narrative premise, suggesting that Misael’s routine is relatively unfamiliar. (In one striking example, the owner of the truck he borrows to transport his daily output to the lumber yard feels it necessary to remind Misael how to drive.) In this way the film avoids fetishizing Misael’s embodied knowledge of his labor. To notice the relative aesthetic value of his movements—their beauty, their efficiency—is not at all the point. What matters is that he is constantly in the process of making autonomous decisions.

Although he works with wood, not horses, and is in fact a Chilean immigrant, Misael’s solitary, self-sufficient work in the Argentine Pampa invites comparison to the 19th-century figure of the gaucho, as incorporated definitively into Argentina’s social mythos by Domingo

Faustino Sarmiento’s 1845 social-historical treatise Facundo and the gauchesca literature of the late 19th- and early 20th century. For Sarmiento, the gaucho’s coarse, masculine independence—and ultimately his resistance to civilization and social life—is due in part to his mastery of the skills associated with his work with horses in the vast, untamed space of the

Pampa. The gaucho’s expertise with knives, ropes and the other tools of his trade constitute an embodied knowledge naturally opposed to an intellectual knowledge based on principles of reason and progress. His physicality is inherently resistant to the order imposed by the urban and European influences of the capital.

81 Against exchange and beyond use: Solidity as value

The physicality of La libertad—both its privileging of abstract relationships between image and sound over fictional storytelling, and its thematic interest in the minute details of

Misael’s manual labor—cultivates a similar opposition between the emptiness of the wilderness and an urban, global world crowded with messages. If the capital is incompatible with the gaucho’s way of life because it organizes itself according to abstract, foreign and inherently social kinds of knowledge, a globalized Buenos Aires is incompatible with Misael’s universe because it deals in symbolic values. Although the film itself makes little reference to the capital city, or indeed to any place beyond its own setting, the city remains an important presence in the broader experience offered by the film’s production and reception: the capital is the conceptual point of origin of the film, not just as the home of its director and the site of his intellectual formation, but also expressly as the starting place of the film’s journey.8

In contradistinction to the constant flow of symbols in and out of a globalized Buenos

Aires, Alonso presents the space of the Pampa as an essentially physical realm, one in which actions and objects are solid. That is, the value of all things is contained entirely within their presence in the moment in which they are visible, not layered with potential past and future meanings. In this eternal present, evoked through the film’s ongoing refusal to conform its narrative to any sustained conflict or challenge, values are dependent on a single time and place; they are nontransferable. Thus the film takes place in an imagined universe in which symbolic exchanges of value are impossible. This principle of self-contained, immediate value is at the heart of the radical freedom the film explores.

An example will help to clarify the concept of present-bound value I am referring to here as ‘solidity’: we can consider the Mets cap Misael wears during most of the film. The bright blue cap with its orange insignia stands out against the homogenous greens and browns of the forest landscape and Misael’s plain red T-shirt. Noticing that cap, a viewer might be inclined to

82 imagine the complex global and commercial flows that led to the appearance of a cap bearing the logo of a foreign baseball team in such an unexpected place. Yet, just as with the YPF logo at the gas station—or the Ford decal on the truck Misael borrows, or the brand name of the soda he drinks—the scarcity of such symbols in the film does not intensify their meaning.

There is no indication of how Misael came into possession of his hat; nor is there any suggestion that such information is relevant to anything going on in the film. The cap’s only functions are immediate and physical, determined by the ways we see it used by the director and the character. It calls attention to Misael’s body against the backdrop of the vegetation; it provides a modicum of privacy while he squats to defecate, it cools him when he splashes water onto it after his lunch break. What happens before and after these moments exists only in the spectator’s imagination; in fact, we never see Misael take it off, although he is no longer wearing it by the film’s end. The cap simply vanishes from the filmic universe. To think of it in its absence is to act independently of cues of the film (or, perhaps, to use our “freedom” as spectators). The film’s sparse narrative opens up that freedom, but does not suggest that we use it in any particular way.

The solid quality of the imagery carries over into the film’s sparing use of speech. The first words we hear uttered aloud are the lyrics to a cumbia that plays on the portable radio

Misael flips on half-way into his lunch. The words themselves are repetitive and banal; the singers use a mix of Spanish and English clichés to encourage imaginary dancers. Dissociated from its intended social context, the language is emptied of its symbolic register. The syllables are condensed into rhythm and pitch, and made indistinguishable from the song’s instruments or even from the other ambient sounds. We have just seen Misael interrupt his lunch to retrieve the radio and position it next to him on the table, but his impassive reaction as the music begins conceals any emotional response of pleasure or recognition. His attitude reinforces the film’s refusal to acknowledge verbal and artistic content as special in any way.9

83 Other instances of spoken language, such as the conversations that take place during

Misael’s trip to town embed more real meaning in words, but each verbal exchange is carried out in a manner that consistently subordinates the symbolic power of language, i.e., its capacity to call up referents which are absent, or events past or future. For instance, when an acquaintance gives Misael driving directions, they are so vague as to be impossible to follow for anyone truly unfamiliar with the route. Their uselessness as instructions is inconsequential, since Misael has already indicated that he knows the way before the speaker, undeterred, proceeds to direct him. In the continuous present temporality of the film, the ineffectual description will be forgotten before the journey starts anyway. It serves its purpose now, as it is spoken: a gesture of friendly encouragement as Misael embarks on his short trip.

Significantly, the only verbal exchange that does operate symbolically is the negotiation that takes place between Misael and the wholesaler who purchases his newly chopped wood to determine how much Misael will earn for his labor. The exchange constitutes a marked departure from the immediate temporality and solidity of action that characterizes the rest of the film. As Misael drives to the lumberyard, an unprecedented frequency of establishing shots offer extensive views of the horizon, expanding the camera’s perspective. Meanwhile, the camera covers ground more quickly than it has before, keeping pace with the truck. These aesthetic changes mark the transition to a new spatial order, one organized by more distant relationships than the solitary, slow space of the forest. In effect, the camera takes a step back in order to capture the limits of Misael’s world. The lumberyard, with its long rows of freshly cut logs, appears as the point of contact between Misael’s work and the outermost link of a chain of transactions that leads toward the global city. (Unlike the out-of-place logos considered earlier, the image of the stacks of logs we see now does have meaning in this context; the first part of the film has taught us to read that quantity as a multiplication of Misael’s morning labor by other mornings and other workers).

84 The moment of the exchange represents the greatest threat to Misael’s autonomy in the film. Misael’s power to physically transform his surrounds has thus far been a source of independence for him, but this transformation (wood for money) introduces another agent, and therefore another competing source of desires; Misael’s control is no longer complete. The change is evident in his demeanor; the moment of exchange is the only time in the film when he does not appear at ease and in control. Compared with the fluid speech of the wholesaler,

Misael’s silence reads as submissive and passive. The former character initiates each part of their exchange, and Misael either mumbles a response or agrees by remaining silent. The singularity of the moment is confirmed shortly afterward, when Misael’s freedom is restored on the walk back to camp. On the way, as he crosses an open field, he is visibly content for the first time. He playfully swings the container of fuel he carries and even sings to himself briefly.

Although we cannot see his face—in fact the camera lingers behind as he walks far off into the distance—the emotional content of the scene is, for once, clear. Misael is content to be alone again. He has returned the borrowed truck and paid for his supplies and he is no longer beholden to anyone.

At this moment, Misael showcases his self-sufficiency by easily catching an armadillo, which will be his dinner. Much like Sarmiento’s gaucho, Misael’s physical adeptness is synonymous in this scene with strength and independence. But the action itself occurs off- screen; the physical contest implied in taking the animal captive does not become the object of the same fascination as do the challenges of woodcutting. This is because Misael’s physicality, in contrast to that of the gaucho figure, is less a demonstration of power and skill than of the freedom referenced in the title, which is now finally articulated in full, as a freedom from need.

Compared to the slow wait to be served by the wholesaler and the other characters with whom he interacts during the trip to town, what stands out here is the quickness with which Misael can respond to his own needs. For the audience, it was never apparent that

85 anything was lacking. The problem of dinner did not exist until it was solved because there was no indication he was hungry; perhaps he did not know either, until the armadillo was in his hand. As Misael transitions from the “production” activities of his day to the leisure, rest, and

“consumption” of his evening, the impossibility of anticipating the capture of the armadillo highlights for a moment the otherwise elusive vacuum of desire that has prevailed throughout the solid, present-bound temporality of the film.

Art and work outside the market

So far we have traced the articulation of several gestures that assert the value of artistic freedom within the film and in the broader context of the conversation about its social contribution. As La libertad proclaims its freedom from the cultural center of Buenos Aires, from politics and institutions, from tradition, from the expectations of its viewers, from narrative and symbolic languages, and even from the continuity between past and future (from time itself), what is left is an alternate economy in which things exist eternally as they are, solid and whole in the eternity of the present. Objects exist unfiltered by the psychology or desire of any subject; there are no characters who experience sustained lack or want.

Instead, Misael’s work and movement constitute a basic self-expression whose range is limited to varying degrees of autonomy, indicated by the extent to which Misael’s physical manipulation of space allows him to control how his environment changes. (That is, he has most control when he is the only person around to make changes, when his figure looms big and powerful in the frame, and least control when he interacts with others; in town his brightly colored clothing makes him blend in, whereas in the woods it sets him apart). Throughout, his nearly constant impassivity empties the film of any potential pathos, tragic or nostalgic.

Emotion and even value itself, in any measurable sense, are unthinkable in this world devoid of comparison and transfer.

86 To return to the original inquiry into the film’s “apolitical” self-presentation, we might now ask, how does the creation of a fictional space without change, without desire, illuminate the work’s contribution to the conversation about the social function of art? What might be the social and political work of art here, in the film’s universe, where there is apparently no political work to be done?

It will be helpful to approach this question from a slightly different angle. Let us imagine for a moment that Misael’s world is not a representation of our own world—i.e., the world we live and work in, and make art about—but rather, that his is the world in which modern art lives.

Following Rancière’s interpretation of the category, modern art—or the “aesthetic regime,” as he prefers to call it—is unified by a problematic and self-contradictory claim of autonomy from other realms of social activity (26).10 Ever since Kant’s assertion of the autonomy of aesthetic value became an important tenet of the philosophical understanding of art, theorists of modern culture have had to grapple with the idea that the realm of art—the reign of aesthetic measures of value—is incommensurate with all other systems of value, and as such distinct from all other contributions to social welfare: moral, material or otherwise. According to this logic, the aesthetic realm constitutes an imagined space that is entirely self-sufficient and self-defined; a perfect “outside” from which to articulate a critique of the rest of society. Unlike other kinds of activities, which are tangled up in complex chains of cause and effect, art possesses, in the modernist fantasy, a sui generis completeness created and governed by its own rules. This is not so different from the solid, timeless world of La libertad. Misael is an artist in the sense that he makes choices in a utopia of the present, in which everything present is necessary and everything necessary is present.

Yet Misael’s world also replicates the conceptual instability of art’s freedom in the aesthetic regime—what Rancière calls its “constitutive contradiction” and Theodor Adorno its

“double character” of “autonomy” and “fait social” (Adorno 229; Ranciere 26). That is, the

87 apparently complete, self-contained purposefulness of each element within an artwork exists in tension with the apparent purposelessness of art within broader social frameworks of value, since the freedom of art is effectively confined to the space left to it by the society that proclaims it useless, devoid of recognizable or transferrable value. Understood simultaneously as freedom and exile, the autonomy of art acquires a troubling duplicity as its “social functionlessness [is] wrenched into autonomy in a more productive sense: art as a deliberate turning in upon itself, as a mute gesture of resistance to a social order which, in Adorno’s phrase, ‘holds a gun to its head.’” (quoted in Eagleton 370). In the same way, Misael’s freedom from desire is both defiant and passive. The unfaltering completeness of his existence constitutes an act in defiance of a consumer experience characterized by constant desire and lack, but it is also a way of accepting his own exclusion from that experience.

The notion of an oppositional function of art also provides a grounds on which to compare the film’s contested politics to other types of intervention in Argentina’s recent cinematic history. If modern art is oppositional in part because it attempts to conceive of and promote forms of meaning different from the forms of meaning deployed by hegemonic power, then neorealist films of the 1960s countered the contemporary language of power—the slick escapist fantasies characteristically produced in the publicly-funded studio system—with dirt, poverty, and aggressive realism. Similarly, allegory became the art form of choice for processing the violence of dictatorship in the years following the Dirty War. In the face of an absolute power with a will to simplify and control information, art reveled in a slippery duplicity, unfolding multiple layers of dynamic, interconnected meanings that evaded censorship and threatened straightforward military values.11

Following the same logic, we could imagine that at the turn of the current century, power itself is eager to perpetrate the allegorist’s old trick of diversion and distraction, preferring to appear less centralized and direct than it is in order to pass off its own interests as

88 those of independent consumers. The “interest” of global capital (if we may substitute a clumsy anthropomorphism for the complex, interconnected incentive structures addressed elsewhere) is to promote an unending cycle of apparently organic desire for the new, suppressing both the fullness of the present and the violence and injustice concealed in the past of the commodities we desire. Value in this system follows a logic of marketing whereby production itself is made invisible and only the product matters. Alonso’s cinema of encounter reverses this order of things by celebrating its own process of production as it devalues the product. However, to say that La libertad presents an alternative to the hegemonic language of potential and symbolic values is not to assign it an explicit political agenda. As we see in the wood-selling scene, it is true that the market violates the film’s principle of the solidity of manual labor.

Global trade and speculation operate on the principle that value is subject to context, and that objects contain potential values that can be accessed in other spaces, in other times.

However, the film cannot practice such an activism because the solidity of its own language makes it difficult to conceive of change.

The tenuous evidence that justifies treating the film as a protest against Argentina’s political and economic situation is further weakened by moments in the film that discourage the sympathetic gaze. We have already discussed Misael’s expression of disdain for the audience—his refusal to become a legible subject—in the closing sequence. In another scene,

Misael’s radio transmits a program in which a host accepts calls from the unemployed. The topic is the relationship between unemployment and crime. Is crime ultimately to be blamed on the state’s failure to foster a sustainable economy with full ? As background noise during Misael’s dinner preparations, the terms of the debate seem somehow absurd. Misael’s work at this moment could easily be a pure expression of poverty and subsistence. Yet there is nothing lacking from Misael’s dinner and the voices on the radio have nothing to do with him. It

89 is not clear if he even registers their meaning—certainly he betrays no flicker of recognition to suggest that they have a special meaning for him.

This moment illuminates the political consequences of the film’s solid, nonrepresentational language. If psychologically, the compression of time, space and meaning constructs a world lacking in interiority and desire then, politically it marks the impossibility of symbolic representation. The film’s economy, though characterized by scarcity rather than excess, is not one of “poverty” because it does not admit comparisons to other levels of comfort and consumption. Each action, use, and value are independent of others, not part of a chain, and in this system no one thing can represent another.

Conclusions: freedom and exile

What emerges from all this neutrality, all this freedom and independence? The usual vocabulary of political cinema—that is, activist cinema; cinema created in order to educate and activate responses—falls short of describing the politics of La libertad. The film does not raise awareness; it does not impress its viewers with depictions of suffering or injustice, nor does it incite spectators to action. Neither does it humanize or romanticize a marginalized other. One answer we have considered is that the film’s creator simply does not care about its reception.

From this perspective, the real work of the film as a cultural object is an experience, or an encounter. The film itself, the product, functions as the residue of the filmmaker’s first-person encounter. We are free to experience it any way we like because our experience of the film is only indirectly and insignificantly related to the meaning and purpose of the primary experience.

This idea is enticing, and consistent with many aspects of the way the film has circulated, but, like the world created within the film, it is a fiction, completely incompatible with the reality of the contemporary world of art. That fiction is resonant precisely because of

90 its incompatibility with a particular configuration of symbols and powers in Argentina in 2001, one that insists that culture consists of products, not processes. The “work” of Alonso’s art is its fantasy of upsetting that configuration, inviting us to imagine an impossible solidity, a wholeness and a fullness of meaning that is compelling precisely because it is impossible.

That is, in spite of, or rather because of all its contrived maneuvers aimed at avoiding its political context, Alonso’s project presents a political ideology in the hopeful sense Adorno gives to that term. For Adorno, ideology itself is not entirely untrue; what is untrue is ideology’s suppression of the difference between itself and reality (32). In his view, the “spirit” of art, born of art’s dual existence in the material world and the realm of abstract knowledge, allows for the possibility of transcending the falseness of certain claims to arrive at a more significant truth. In his commentary on Adorno’s theory of aesthetics, Ross Wilson shows just how slippery the

“spirit” that separates truth from false consciousness can become. On the one hand, he notes,

Adorno suggests that “[a]rtworks may inherently fail… in so far as they are ideological, but their very claim to freedom is also part of their wish for freedom, that is, part of their truth” (159).

However, he observes, “the paradoxical nature of autonomous art in contemporary society— that is, of art that obeys no law other than its own—goes still further. […] While autonomous art may suggest opposition to a free society, it may also falsely suggest that some consummate freedom from society is in fact possible.”

In its denial of the political and its celebration of autonomy, La libertad embraces both of these contradictory axioms—that art’s existence is proof of its freedom, and that art’s freedom is proof that it cannot exist in any important way. That is, the film’s political intervention lies in the confrontation it forces between the boundedness and the limitlessness of its titular freedom. In its unstable identity as an artistic product which actively refutes its own status as a commodity product and even its social use value, La libertad endlessly reenacts the paradox of contemporary art’s autonomy in exile.

91 We have traced the political intervention of La libertad from its premise of freedom from

Buenos Aires to the resulting creation of an imaginary universe in which the optics of consumption and production are reversed. If in the life of the film Buenos Aires represents the global city where material and cultural products are consumed, La libertad ignores Buenos

Aires in order to forget that final phase of the economic cycle and reveal instead the process of production that Buenos Aires seems to have forgotten. As such, the politics of the film consist of an alteration of the experience of time and space that shifts attention to aspects of the political economy that are not easily observed within the dominant modes of perceiving time and space. This is a fitting intervention within a political power structure that has itself become invisible, embedded as it is in private transactions and the mundane practices of everyday life.

Part II. Bolivia

Consumer power in an unmappable postnational economy

Adrián Caetano’s 2001 feature Bolivia also expresses its politics by manipulating space and time, even though it also overtly addresses such politically charged themes as illegal immigration, racism, and unemployment. The film tells the story of Freddy, a displaced Bolivian farmer who comes to Buenos Aires in search of work. He soon lands a job earning a paltry salary in exchange for long hours as a line cook at a neighborhood bar. In addition to his poverty and misfortune, one of Freddy’s most striking features is his repeated and innocent victimization. His undeserved suffering is at the center of the traditional political gesture with which the film denounces its hero’s circumstances. Freddy is essentially a bystander in the dispute that leads to his sudden and violent death; those circumstances echo the earlier loss of his livelihood in Bolivia as collateral damage of “Yankee” anti-drug campaigns. Freddy’s killer, on the other hand, is remarkable for his inexcusable cruelty. El Oso is an out-of-work porteño

92 taxi driver who is unsympathetically rendered as an entitled, lazy bigot whose drunken rage produces the tragedy of Freddy’s death. Nevertheless, the film’s indictment of El Oso’s behavior is complicated by the pronounced instability of time and space within the film. El

Oso’s crime cannot be excused, but other narrative and non-narrative elements in the film, including the use of music and cinematography, suggest that in the clash between El Oso’s worldview and Freddy’s, neither character grasps the full consequences of his actions, in large part because the world of the bar—a microcosm of the global city—exists amid conflicting spatial and temporal configurations that defy a single, conclusive order. The miniature economy of the bar is pervaded by contradictions that muddle the question of blame. While it is clear to the audience that El Oso is wrong, the film also takes care to show us how it is that a character like El Oso could come to believe, so wrongly, that he is right. The conflicting spatial and temporal configurations that pervade the bar obscure both Freddy and El Oso’s perceptions of reality, leading them both to make poor decisions that cost them dearly.

Contradictory Geographies

The earliest indication of conflicted space in Bolivia is the incongruity between the title and the film’s setting. Although most of the scenes take place within a nondescript neighborhood bar in Buenos Aires, the discrepancy between the film’s visuals, on one hand, and its title and extradiegetic soundtrack—comprised exclusively of anthemic popular folk songs by the Bolivian band Los Kjarkas—immediately establishes the theme of exile, suggesting that the film is really about a space that is left behind. Bolivia is present only in its conspicuous absence. The film repeatedly calls the viewer’s attention to the invisibility of the symbolic space of Bolivia in the eyes of all the Argentine characters. As Catherine Leen observes, their persistent inability to remember that Freddy is Bolivian, not Peruvian, becomes a kind of morbid joke, as they continue to ask him about “Peru” even when he has just told

93 them where he is from.12 This basic lack of interest in Freddy’s personal history is an effective denunciation of the other characters’ racism and self-interest; Freddy is the protagonist, Bolivia is the name of the film, and they are clearly missing the point of the story. However, their tenuous grasp on geography extends beyond Freddy, creating holes and spaces of instability and confusion within the map of their own city.

The first sequence after the credits depicts a conversation between Enrique, the owner of the bar, and Mercado, a taxi driver who is a frequent customer. When the audio begins,

Enrique is in the process of relating a story, either gossip or an item he has read in the paper, about a scuffle between transvestite prostitutes and the police. He attempts to explain where the story takes place, somewhere near the intersection of “Charcas” and “Nicaragua.”

Mercado, a taxi driver familiar with the city streets, responds that this is impossible; those two streets are parallel. Enrique waves this objection away, repeating that he is referring to the area known as Palermo Viejo, “donde están todos los paises centroamericanos, Perú y todo eso.”

Enrique’s understanding of the layout of the city, like his assumption that Freddy learned to cook “allá en Perú” is rife with mistakes and inconsistencies. As Mercado points out, Peru is not in Central America but South America. Moreover, Enrique’s casual way of describing the streets produces the comical implication that he really believes that several Central American countries are contained within this sub-district of Buenos Aires. Enrique’s impatience with

Mercado’s interest in the details of his description suggests that his vague understanding of the area is less a matter of ignorance than of indifference. His only point in making a geographical reference at all, it seems, is to corroborate the marginality of the space in which his story takes place. Transvestites and prostitutes and day wage cooks like Freddy are crammed in alongside streets, neighborhoods, countries and continents in the impossible space evoked by his “todo eso.”

94 Enrique’s flawed conception of space is a privilege afforded him by his status as the owner of the bar and the character with the most resources at his disposal. As the film’s most hegemonic voice, he articulates a violent compression of geographic space, and, as we will see later, of time, that he can impose on others. From his position of economic power, he is free to set the standards that regulate the other characters’ lives. He makes the rules for his employees and, in setting their salaries, determine how much their time is worth. Just as high rates of unemployment and underemployment in Argentina in the late 1990s made work into a precious resource, the same is true of the film’s fictional universe. Enrique seems to be conscious of his unassailable negotiating position when he invites Rosa to quit if she objects to the hours. The inequality that structures the labor contract is even more pronounced in

Freddy’s case, due to his undocumented status. Upon learning that Freddy’s papers “se están tramitando,” Enrique promptly assigns his new employee’s time the value of fifteen pesos a day. From Enrique’s perspective, the question of Freddy’s work visa is not a matter of his legal right to work; a later scene where Freddy is frisked by the police as he walks home from work confirms that Freddy, not Enrique, is the one who needs to worry about the legal consequences of this transgression. Rather, Freddy’s status officially establishes his marginality and his vulnerability to exploitation, transferring power, and ultimately value, to

Enrique.

It is clear from this exchange that capital (in this case, the bar), and not labor, possesses the power to produce economic value. Enrique’s ownership of the bar also secures him privileges over his customers, including the ability to distribute economic value by extending or denying credit. That power also takes the form of the regulating who can be inside the bar, and when. One of the earliest scenes in the bar shows Enrique telling his employees to eject several customers who have overstayed the welcome afforded by their purchases. As a result of these concrete powers, Enrique acquires a broader political authority

95 to intervene in his customer’s disputes and generally oversee their interactions. That is,

Enrique’s freedom to set the standards by which other characters experience space and time in the bar allows him to organize that universe according to his own perceptions. If he says

Peru is in Central America, it is because for him it might as well be. His customers are in no position to assert otherwise.

As in the conversation with Mercado cited above, Enrique’s reconfiguration of geography according to his own perception of value implies the erasure of vast real spaces.

However, while it makes sense to him, in the context of the film the absurdity of the map he produces subverts the hegemony of his vision, making the invisibility of the symbolic space of

“Bolivia” conspicuously visible to the audience. The viewer’s growing awareness of the distorted, unstable character of the film’s spaces is encouraged by the editing of the scene.

The audio of the conversation—already interrupted by Enrique’s instructions to Freddy about how to prepare the grill—plays over a series of stationary shots showing different parts of the bar from varying distances. We see the outside of the bar, the slumped bodies of patrons asleep over their tables, and Freddy’s workspace. When the camera finally reveals the counter area where the conversation takes place, the speakers have fallen silent, and Enrique is taking a sip of coffee. The shots are assembled between fades or jump cuts, so that the spectator must build a conceptual map of the bar’s interior slowly, deliberately reconciling the dimensions of each image with the new perspective offered by the next shot. The images must each be integrated into an imagined overall layout of the bar that is continually subject to modification.

The editing of the scene in which Enrique describes Palermo Viejo provides an early example of the film’s particular mode of commentary. Thematically and formally, the scene presents spectators with a carefully curated series of contradictions. Unlike in La libertad, the enunciation in Bolivia calls attention to the deliberate construction of the film. It directly

96 addresses the audience through an aesthetics of disjointedness and discrepancy that pairs sounds with non-matching images and shifts abruptly between camera angles. Bird’s-eye shots and high-angle shots, stills, extreme close-ups, and the intermittent use of slow motion produce the overall effect of a hegemonic perspective that is constantly de-centered and destabilized. The spectator is left to consider the relationships between these perspectives, but reconciling the disparate elements into one system proves impossible. While the events that unfold at the end of the film definitively condemn El Oso, the composition of space in the film offers a kind of non-narrative sympathy for El Oso. The difficulty of assembling an accurate map of the bar makes it easier for the spectator to relate to the spatial anxieties and the lack of perspective that ultimately advance the conflict to its violent end.

Contradictory temporalities

The experience of time is also an important problem both narratively and formally. In the same way the viewer is tasked with assembling a coherent mental image of the bar through a sequence of shots from different angles, the isolated filmed moments must also be integrated into the story of the two days over which the narrative runs its course. In this case, close-ups of the clock take the place of establishing shots of the space of the bar. Many scenes begin with the camera focused on the clock, as if the image of the moving hands could help us order the narrative. However, the symbolic role assigned to the clock creates the expectation that it will provide structure only to point to its failure to do so.

The integrative social function of the clock is constantly subject to challenge within the narrative. Employees arrive late to work, customers stay too long, and finally Enrique accelerates the crisis that leads to Freddy’s death when he makes an unpopular decision to close early. In between, the characters hypothesize that the clock must be broken and try to fix it. The hands are moving, but the time does not feel right. Time itself is disordered and broken

97 because its social authority has been usurped by Enrique. As the owner of the bar and the boss of its two employees, Freddy and half-Paraguayan waitress called Rosa, Enrique structures time within the bar, reminding his employees when to begin each task, when to eat, etc. We have already seen how Enrique arbitrates the value of his employees’ time by setting their wages. His power over their time is accentuated by the fact that the job requires open- ended hours. Even though Freddy makes the same fifteen pesos every day, on weekdays that fifteen pesos buys eighteen or nineteen hours of work, from seven in the morning until one or two the following morning; on weekends he will be required to stay “toda la noche.”

This conversation initiates a three-scene sequence that explores Freddy’s experience of time. In order to make the phone call, Freddy must also ask for an advance on the day’s wages. Enrique gives him ten pesos and instructs him to go around the corner to an unofficial payphone business, or locutorio, where he says mentioning his name will get Freddy a discount. There, Freddy learns that his ten pesos will buy about five minutes of time on the line with La Paz. The simple arithmetic of Freddy’s transaction with its neat multiples of five, steadily diminishing in value, belies the impossible distortions of time and value that lurk behind it. Two thirds of Freddy’s long workday, some six or seven hours, are exchanged for five minutes of access to the “accelerated” time of technology, and hardly a truly advanced technology at that.

There is a sinister circularity to this equation of exploitation by which a member of the global workforce leaves his home, trying to catch up with the accelerated flow of capital, only to find that capital consumed by the call home he makes to let his family know he has found work. Freddy is not so much excluded from the accelerated space-time of globalization as he is trapped in it. His low wages and the exorbitant cost of his phone call are mutually constitutive; his vulnerability and desperation as a migrant worker sustain the illegal business of the locutorio. The distinction is subtle but important. The inequality Freddy experiences is

98 not an aberration in the widening homogenous space-time of the global market, but the source of the comparative advantages that make that market possible. There is no fictive homogenous time that can integrate this transaction into a coherent and sustainable order.

This troubling observation is at the heart of the film’s concern with the disordered nature of work in the global marketplace, and it makes its ghostly presence felt from the very beginning. The opening credits sequence exploits the film’s aesthetics of discrepancy in order to illustrate the impossibility of a shared experience of time—or the relative nature of the value of time—across nations. During the credits, heavily edited footage from the 1998 World Cup qualifying match between Bolivia and Argentina serves as an audiovisual metaphor that exposes the constitutive role of disintegrated time in the global economy. As Freddy aligns himself proudly with his homeland, countering Enrique’s assumption that he is Peruvian with an affirmation that he is in fact from “Bolivia,” the film transmits us abruptly from the bar to clips from the telecast of the football match. We watch the teams take the field and begin to play while on the soundtrack a rapid rhythm of percussion and panpipes kicks off the song “Condor

Mallku” by Los Kjarkas. Over the sound of the music, the excited voices of announcers can be heard as Argentina quickly scores a goal.

Taking Benedict Anderson’s concept (developed in Imagined Communities) of the simultaneous temporality of national identity as his point of departure, Daniel Quirós interprets the insertion of the images from the soccer match as a representation of a homogenous

“national” temporality that integrates spectators into a shared national identity by means of their simultaneous focus on the game:

“La idea es que a través del país, personas de todo tipo y clase asisten a la transmisión

del partido, identificándose y construyéndose como ciudadanos de Argentina. En el

partido de futbol, el tiempo es homogéneo, constante e incambiable, una experiencia

99 compartida por todos los ciudadanos de la misma manera, no importa dónde estén o

quiénes sean….” (237-8).

In Quirós’s reading, the homogenous experience of time established by the game contrasts with the “slow” and “relative” temporality of the bar scenes that precede and follow the soccer clips. He argues that the contrast between these temporalities works as a critique of the theoretical tendency to paint the experience of the era of capitalist globalization as a universal

“acceleration” of time and “compression” of space. In Quirós’s view, the film is more closely aligned with Doreen Massey’s contention that access to the speed and fluidity of the global economy is unequal, and that such claims privilege a North American and Western European experience of globalization at the expense of a global economic periphery that includes Latin

America (239).

This interpretation of the sequences surrounding the opening credits as a meditation on disparate experiences of time is well justified. Indeed, as Quirós notes, the prominent placement of close-ups of the clock on the wall of the bar at the beginning of each series of stationary shots before and after the credits confirms the central role of time as a source of conflict in the narrative. By contrast, within the soccer sequence, the commentators emphasize the quickness of the Argentine offense, praising the players’ agility in taking advantage of an opportunity so early in the game.

However, in keeping with the film’s language of audio-visual contrast, it is also important to consider how the additional “perspective” offered by the accompanying music complicates our impression of the homogenous national temporality of the match even before it is set against the world of the bar. Both the sound and the lyrics of “Condor Mallku” evoke regional pride and sentiments of Pan-Americanism. The traditional folk music, and the image of the condor, shared national symbol of many South American countries, reinforce the message of “hermandad” and unity of the “corazón americano” conveyed in the lyrics. The singers

100 celebrate the freedom and hope symbolized by the flight of a Bolivian condor across an open sky, “desafiando toda inmensidad.” The narrative of the song parallels Freddy’s journey across the heart of the continent and hints at its futility as a journey emerging from dreams “más allá de toda realidad.” In conjunction with the images of the Argentina-Bolivia match, though, the song introduces an imagined, harmonious, experience of globalization that calls attention to the unsettling double resonance of the sports event.

The World Cup is an event that showcases international cooperation and, to continue

Quirós’s line of reasoning, one that institutes a homogenous or simultaneous experience of time even across nations. Like a fantasy of the international marketplace, it fosters a productive form of competition based on artificial but universally accepted rules and measurements. Each team is allotted an equal period of time to accomplish its goals, and despite the presence of oppositional interests, the system holds together because its participants agree to uphold the terms of an invented universal justice. “Condor Mallku” highlights this cooperative aspect of the images, while the voices of the commentators celebrating the Argentine side’s aggression—“que bien”—and criticizing the weakness of the Bolivian defense—“terrible”—and the frenzied roar of the crowd serve as reminders of the brutality of the competition and the history of violence associated with the sport in Latin America.

Here, as in Enrique’s description of Palermo Viejo, again the film’s formal composition underlines the unstable relationship between contradictory experiences of the same event. The combination of these two irreconcilable elements in the scene reveals the depth of the film’s critique of the perceptions of time and space created by the neoliberal globalized market.

Rather than point to the characters’ exclusion from the freedom and speed of the visible national temporality of the match, the most immediate function of the sequence is to call attention to the fissures in a hegemonic experience of time and space that parades as international cooperation. The problem of time in Bolivia is not just a matter of its unequal

101 acceleration, nor the underlying inequality of access to new technologies and the mobility they create. Rather, the split character of the match hints that the rupture of homogenous “national” time is in fact a necessary condition of production in the global marketplace. Time cannot perform its “national” or integrative social function when the national territory expands to encompass the entire planet. The formal composition of this montage complements the story of Freddy’s hours and wages to show that the contradictory or disintegrated time depicted in the World Cup scene is not just an effect of global inequalities, but an essential component of the logic of global capitalism.

The final effect of the sequence is that the match is neither the dream of brotherhood advanced in “Condor Mallku” nor the bloodthirsty struggle the fans make it out to be. Both perspectives are accurate to some extent; neither offers a full picture of the experience. The experience produced by the film’s depiction of the match is unstable and subjective in a way that makes it incompatible with the conciliatory gestures of nationhood and of narrative itself.

Indeed, the scene calls attention to the violence inherent in nations and narratives. The dual nature of the match also foreshadows the clash between the Bolivian Freddy and the Argentine

El Oso. They will become opponents, but it is their similarity that sets them against one another.

Freddy’s Collaborative Dream Economy

Despite the increasingly apparent illusory nature of his efforts to alleviate his family’s financial hardship, Freddy remains connected with the ideas of progress and hope throughout the film. Even after his death, Freddy’s hopeful presence is echoed by the final Kjarkas song that plays over the credits. The song, “Bolivia,” describes Freddy’s symbolic homeland as a place of desire for redemption from past sufferings, a place where “el futuro sonría prometedor.” At the most basic level, Freddy’s hope is made possible by his faith in the

102 redemptive capacity of labor. Notably, Freddy is the only character in the film who believes that physical work will improve his circumstances.

An appreciation for the continuity between past, present and future is key to Freddy’s optimism about the outcome of his labor. As we will see below, the film makes it clear that his hopeful vision of labor is predicated on a perception of space and time as integrated. The assumption that his experience of the physical world is—or at least should be—shared with those around him gives rise in turn to an expectation of a certain continuity in the economy in which he works. He believes that the values exchanged in the economy must “add up.” His economic mission in Buenos Aires corresponds to a perceived economy that is temporally, spatially, and ultimately morally coherent. As he explains to his daughter during his phone call home, work (doing her schoolwork and obeying her mother) will produce value (in the form of presents from Buenos Aires).

Only when compared to the behavior of the other characters does Freddy’s basic belief in an economy coherent enough to support basic chains of cause and effect begin to seem extraordinary. Freddy’s unique appreciation for the capacity of time to integrate past, present, and future states into a meaningful narrative is reflected in a dynamic narrative arc that distinguishes him from the other characters. While the same few workers and customers appear to be stagnating in the inert environment of the bar, so much so that it becomes difficult to distinguish one day from the next, Freddy stands out as a newcomer. Significantly, he is also the only person who definitively leaves the bar before the film ends. Freddy moves in and out of the bar because his actions are motivated by specific objectives. Freddy is the single character in the film whose work is driven not just by a vague need for money but by the concrete and immediate goal of supporting his family and eventually rejoining them in Bolivia.

The other characters allude only to vague problems with uncertain causes. Of the three taxi drivers who frequent the bar, Mercado is separating from his wife and el Oso’s car seems to

103 have been repossessed. Their conversations focus on the difficulty of their respective situations rather than questions of cause and fault. Only in Freddy’s case is the chain of events that led to his current troubles clear, and clearly beyond his control.

The narrative movement associated exclusively with Freddy highlights the way time seems to stand still for his companions. That contrast culminates in the final scenes following

Freddy’s death, when it becomes apparent that even the experience of a brutal murder is not enough to alter Enrique and Rosa’s impassive resignation to the status quo. The film closes on the two characters at work in the bar, barely speaking as usual, while Enrique re-writes another handwritten sign identical to the advertisement seeking a cook we saw him take down in the very first scene. Apparently, their perceptions of their environment are so disintegrated that they are unable or unwilling to see how their actions (or rather, their inaction) may have contributed to Freddy’s death. Impotent or indifferent, they do not connect cause and effect enough to be fazed by the thought of initiating another cycle of violence.

The flatness of time in the bar is completely unlike the fullness of Misael’s experience of an eternal present. The solidity of Misael’s perception of time affords him a strong sense of his own agency, producing satiety and eliminates desire. However, for the listless and underemployed customers in Enrique’s bar, the amorphous duration of the present is experienced as a lack of agency. In their despair, they can only mitigate the eternal absence of the agency they desire with temporary distractions: beer, sports, movies, and arguments.

Rosa is an object of sexual desire for many of the men in the bar, including her boss, but none of them makes any sustained effort to earn her attention. Even Marcelo, one of the more competent figures in the bar, limits his pursuit to an increasingly whiny suggestion that she “go for a ride” with him after work. His approach demonstrates how little faith he has in his ability to achieve his goals through action and effort rather than luck. His objective is hardly unattainable, and his failure cannot be attributed to any circumstances beyond his control.

104 Rosa’s receptiveness to Freddy suggests that a successful campaign to win her affections does not require any resources that Marcelo lacks; moreover, their interactions suggest that

Rosa has accepted Marcelo’s offer in the past. The hopelessness that pervades the bar—the tenuous connection between past, present and future moments—does not affect Marcelo’s ability to experience desire in the present, but it discourages him from exerting effort for the sake of a future reward.

While others only treat Rosa kindly at closing time, as if, like another item on the menu, she merits their attention only when appetite and occasion strike, Freddy tries to engage her throughout the day. He is the only one who converses with her about anything beyond work and sex. His inquiries about her past indicate that he is the only one who recognizes that a personal history must have brought her to the futureless world of the bar. Although Rosa is initially resistant to his questions, she soon demonstrates her appreciation by offering to help him find a better place to stay. Freddy’s success with Rosa eventually leads to his most significant betrayal of his future when he drunkenly sleeps with her; nevertheless the film makes it clear that Rosa chooses Freddy because he sees her as a person with an independent existence. Even if Rosa’s own movement as a character seems to have been overwhelmed by the centripetal force of the bar, she is evidently pleased to have her past trajectory through desire and hardship acknowledged, something the unsuccessful overtures made by other characters fail to do.

Freddy’s awareness of the passage of time and of the future stands out within the film.

This is not just because his untimely death contrasts sharply with his faith in his own agency and his own future—a faith the cynical, selfish culture of the bar must punish him for—but also because of the way his belief in the integrating functions of time and space shapes his actions all along. For Freddy, the fact that he is together in time and space with the other workers and customers in the bar is enough to create a sense of togetherness and shared purpose. He acts

105 in accordance with this notion of an immediate spatial-temporal community when he treats

Rosa with dignity, and again when he refuses to join the others in mocking a gay street vendor who stops by the bar. In Freddy’s eyes, the bar is a potential nation in Anderson’s sense of the word, with its own unifying, simultaneous temporality. Being present is sufficient guarantee of basic rights of citizenship, an inalienable worth independent of the power and resources at one’s disposal. Later we will see that it is El Oso’s violation of this premise that leads to the escalation of the discord between them. In order to understand Freddy’s reaction to that transgression, we must first take a closer look at how, from Freddy’s perspective, an aestheticized, collective labor transforms the workplace of the bar into a micro-nation of shared experience, cooperation, and productivity.

The film offers a crucial insight into Freddy’s first-person experience of his new workplace during the singularly expressionistic and lyrical sequence that takes place towards the end of the first half of the film, when Freddy makes his phone call home. In the locutorio,

Freddy’s voice slowly fades out as the camera zooms in to an extreme close-up of a portion of his face. This change in perspective initiates an aesthetically distinct sequence marked by the use of slow-motion playback and the sound of a melancholy Andean folk song. (Later, when

Freddy is back at work in the bar, a similar close-up will end the sequence). These facial close- ups serve as the frame for a series of mid-distance shots of the people around Freddy and closer shots of his own hands, indicating that during this interval we are perceiving time and space from Freddy’s perspective. Just as Freddy’s enunciation of the word “Bolivia” seems to cue the music at the start of the opening credits sequence, here too the lyrical interlude functions as a symbolic externalization of Freddy’s state of mind.

The “cue” that sets off this interlude is Freddy’s voice, trailing off as he reassures his wife that she should not worry; he is working. (“Sí, estoy trabajando en un restaurante. Sí, como cocinero…” [23:30].) This prelude of sorts, a gradual distortion of Freddy’s voice from its

106 ordinary speaking register to a more rhythmic, repetitive form of expression sets up the ensuing sounds and images as a kind of meditation on his work in the bar. As the movement of the images slows, ordinary actions are transformed into a kind of dance. The steady slowness of all the characters’ gestures makes them appear deliberate and peaceful, matched to one another and to the rhythm of the plaintive singing in Quechua. The movements of the customers are aesthetically indistinguishable from those of the workers. Gone are the sounds of clattering utensils and bickering customers. The synchronization of individual movements into an aesthetically coherent whole unifies the bar with a kind of steady motion, creating an impression of dynamism and productivity that contrasts with the previous torpor of the atmosphere.

While the film follows Freddy’s perspective, the contrast between that apparent social and aesthetic harmony and what we know to be the real environment of the bar lends the images an unsettling quality of falseness and partiality. Accordingly, the lyrical interlude comes to a close when Freddy’s fantasy of labor in the global city as an experience of freedom and brotherhood is violently interrupted by a cut to the real-time sounds and images of a boxing match between Mike Tyson and Evander Holyfield. Raucous cheering of the crowd of spectators within the bar immediately follows. The remainder of the film will follow the same model, countering Freddy’s naïve optimism with violence and cruelty until he finally succumbs to the forces of social disintegration of the bar.

El Oso’s Disordered Economy

The film subverts Freddy’s belief in the redemptive capacity of labor by surrounding him with other characters who have more thoroughly internalized the cutthroat logic of global capitalism. El Oso’s economic woes are also severe, but rather than try to work, he sits at the bar lamenting the injustice of his poverty. He spends his time eating and drinking on the credit

107 Enrique extends him and spouting racist and anti-immigrant economic theories to his friend

Marcelo. His laziness and his exaggerated xenophobia make him extremely unsympathetic, but nevertheless the film’s focus on his frustration and despair makes viewers acutely aware that his behavior arises from his inability to cope with his own very real pain. Moreover, it is also clear that the assumptions underlying his choices are in some ways more attuned to reality than Freddy’s. Despite his often illogical cruelty, El Oso does understand one bleak truth about the global economy: labor is not an effective way to produce economic value.

At one point, Marcelo’s complaint that all Hollywood villains are non-whites provides El

Oso with an opportunity to lay out his views on the international economy. As an Argentine, he believes he is entitled to a position of superior wellbeing in Buenos Aires than the Bolivian and

Peruvian migrants who work in the city illegally. However, he accepts the depiction of Latinos in the United States as criminals as realistic because, as he explains to Marcelo, there the relatively lower standing of Latinos, even Argentines, limits their potential for economic success and drives them to a life of crime. His response reflects his view that the potential for financial success depends on one’s relative position in the global economy—on access to capital, rather than labor. In other words, arbitrary position in a series of local and international hierarchies, rather than work, is what distributes value. In El Oso’s disintegrated experience of space and time, cause and effect are dissociated so much that deliberate movement from one position to another is not within the realm of possibility. In this light, El Oso’s apparent passivity, his reluctance to take action to improve his lot, makes perfect sense, as does his eagerness to secure his position as Freddy’s superior. He understands that the winners in the capitalist system are those who manage and direct, not those who labor; by extension, physical labor is actually a form of humiliation. To El Oso, Freddy’s work is a sign of his inferiority, thus potentially a sign of El Oso’s superiority. By this logic, Freddy’s work is a

108 source of value not to Freddy but rather to El Oso. El Oso repeatedly attempts to exploit this value by making a show of “managing” Freddy whenever his own status is threatened.

Part of what makes El Oso’s financial difficulty so unbearable to him is that his indebtedness to Enrique constitutes a threat to the privilege El Oso believes to be his due, as a native Argentine and as a customer, within the local hierarchy of the bar. Early in the film, tension begins to build between El Oso and Enrique when the latter cuts off El Oso’s credit, telling Rosa not to make the sandwich El Oso has just ordered. As soon as Enrique exerts power over El Oso in this way, El Oso pulls Freddy into the conflict.

Eager to re-establish his position as capitalist, not laborer, El Oso walks over to

Freddy’s workstation with instructions about his order: “Que esté bien cocido.” Freddy nods in ascent, but the silent acknowledgement of the directive is insufficient for El Oso’s purposes; it does not reach its intended audience, Enrique. Then El Oso becomes more aggressive, loudly accusing Freddy of denying him the respect he deserves:

EL OSO: ¿No me escuchaste, o no te enseñaron educación? Que esté cocido, te dije.

FREDDY: Te dije que sí.

EL OSO: ¿Qué estás murmurando, man?

FREDDY: Que me enseñaron a pedir con educación.

EL OSO: ¿Qué decís?

FREDDY: Te dije que hay que pedir con educación y respeto. (29:30-29:55)

El Oso’s attempt to reestablish his standing as a peer of Enrique’s and confirm the social distance between himself and Enrique’s employee fails because Freddy refuses to let El Oso’s standing override what he understands to be his basic right to be treated with respect.

Freddy’s response is consistent with his integrated worldview and his resulting tendency to respect others, including himself, as equally worthy members of a community defined by a shared presence in the same space at the same time. That is, for Freddy, people’s worth is not

109 limited to their standing or value in the pecking order of their immediate surroundings. Social identities are not created by the relations that make up a community; instead, the participation of individuals in a simultaneous social experience of time and space is what establishes social relationships and creates communities.

El Oso’s disrespectful tone is an intolerable violation of Freddy’s value system, just as

Freddy’s refusal to acknowledge El Oso’s status is a violation of the hierarchy to which El Oso ascribes. Yet Freddy’s attitude is hardly the only violation of that hierarchy that occurs; El

Oso’s entire financial situation attests to the failure of his value system. El Oso finds some relief from the burden of his humiliation by directing his anger at Freddy. However, by his own twisted logic, El Oso comes to be somewhat dependent on Freddy to maintain the very sense of righteous entitlement he accuses Freddy of violating: Freddy’s transgression offers an explanation for the disorder in which El Oso finds his social landscape.

El Oso’s need for Freddy to continue to act as a scapegoat in order to hold together the fragments of his own self-worth gives his violent rage against Freddy troubling overtones of self-destruction. The formal parity of their exchange highlights this irony. With perfect poetic justice, Freddy comes to admonish El Oso, justifiably, for the exact discourtesy El Oso has just criticized, undeservedly, in Freddy. Even their language is perfectly matched, down to the emphatic “te dije” Freddy adds, repeating El Oso’s phrasing. As he walks away, El Oso is now the one who is muttering under his breath, echoing Freddy’s last phrase in a mocking tone.

The parallel structure of this scene is particularly striking if we consider that at this moment the conflict between these two characters with extremely different perspectives takes shape in such a way as to accentuate the formal closeness between their voices even as their words deepen their mutual antipathy. Although Freddy unquestionably occupies the moral high ground in this scene as he does throughout the film, the dialogue quoted above suggests that the antagonism between the two men has its root not in their similarity. El Oso’s problem is not

110 that he does not understand how the economy works; in fact, his acute awareness of the injustices of the global economy creates is even more striking in light of Freddy’s obliviousness. El Oso is only blind, perhaps willfully so, to his own position within the hierarchies he describes. The possession of capital, and not any arbitrary cultural credential, is what creates value, status and power in the global capitalist economy reproduced within the bar. Freddy’s greatest offense, then, is what he has in common with El Oso. Both characters are powerless and valueless in the global economy. El Oso cannot stand Freddy because he recognizes himself in Freddy. In Freddy, the truth of his own impotence is visible for the whole world to see.

Conclusions: Freddy vs. El Oso

Indeed, one characteristic that sets El Oso apart from the other characters is that, aside from Rosa, he is the only one who consistently remembers that Freddy is from Bolivia. El Oso’s attention to this detail is clearly connected to his anxiety to distinguish himself from Freddy. For instance, he makes reference to his own superior Argentine status as compared to Freddy’s

Bolivian status as a way of countering Enrique’s efforts to control him. As the tension in the bar nears its climax, Enrique tries to diffuse the conflict by closing the bar early. In doing so, he exercises his power as owner of the bar and arbiter of its space and time. But El Oso rejects that assertion of power, claiming that Enrique’s authority does not apply to him because, unlike

Freddy, he is not a worker and he is not Bolivian: “¿Vos te pensás que yo soy ese bolita que está transpirando ahí? A mí me vas a respetar, entendés” (00:59:08). El Oso uses the same tactic again later when Freddy reasserts his presence by helping Marcelo to restrain El Oso.

The latter rebukes him for overstepping the bounds of his social role, as if he too were Freddy’s boss. He calls attention to the social distance between them by spitting out Freddy’s

111 nationality like an insult: “Pelotudo, ¿pensás que necesito un boliviano como vos para pararme?”

El Oso is acutely aware of who Freddy is and what his origin stands for because, like

Freddy, he does not have the luxury of forgetting. In his own way, he also inhabits Bolivia, a place that can easily be overlooked because he lacks the power (or the resources—in the film these are the same) to impose his perception of reality onto others. Like Freddy, he is vulnerable to the violence of a hegemonic compression of time and space. In fact, although they play the principal roles of aggressor and victim, their conflict turns out to have very little to do with them at all.

It is already clear that Freddy has no direct involvement in El Oso’s real struggle, which is with his creditor, Enrique, and the other economic power represented by the unknown party in control of his cab. However, Freddy’s role as bystander takes on an important symbolic meaning as his disagreement with El Oso upstages the root conflict between the powerless and the powerful, the oppressed and their oppressors. The true political character of that conflict is superseded by a dispute between two victims, the outcome of which can only determine which one of them will become more of a victim. Their distractingly violent one- upmanship hides the reality that nothing at all is at stake in the confrontation between these two powerless figures. The formal structure of the fight sequence accentuates the lack of perspective that causes it; the absence of any kind of order or logic to the struggle is represented visually by fast-paced, disorienting jump cuts and mismatched angle shots that obscure causality and narrative. In this manner the physical altercation between Freddy and El

Oso functions as the definitive instance of the aesthetic principle of dissociation and discrepancy within the film.

In the resulting chaos, one of the most obvious contributing factors to Freddy’s death is a spatial transgression. Rather than return to his place behind the bar, as Enrique orders,

112 Freddy continues to make his presence felt in the struggle. He hovers near El Oso, instructing

Marcelo to calm him down. The other men do their best to mollify El Oso, who by now is so drunk he can barely stand, but Freddy, just as stubborn as El Oso in his own quiet and sober way, refuses to back down. When El Oso takes a swipe at him, knocking him over, Freddy answers with a much more forceful blow, opening a wound on his opponent’s face that gushes with blood. Even after El Oso leaves the bar, Freddy stands in the doorway watching him defiantly. Meanwhile, still attempting to salvage the order in the bar and diffuse the situation,

Enrique demands repeatedly that Freddy retreat to his workstation. However, ignoring Enrique,

Freddy remains in El Oso’s line of sight, effectively positioning himself within easy range of El

Oso’s as yet unseen handgun.

Thus, the conflict that was first set into motion by one transgression against the spatial and temporal order imposed by Enrique—El Oso’s refusal to accept the early closure of the bar—culminates with a second transgression of Enrique’s authority when Freddy’s choice to ignore his boss’s order gives El Oso the perfect opportunity to carry out his misguided revenge. In a mercilessly ironic twist, El Oso’s final grasp at power ends up enforcing Enrique’s orders to Freddy.

Bolivia offers a portrait of an economy of impotent actors entrenched in an unfair and unyielding status quo. Although the mechanisms of that economy, the forces that reinforce the distribution of value, are fully intact, the narratives that attempt to explain it are completely unraveled by the end of the film. This is reflected in the breakdown of a shared, ordering or

“integrative” experience of time and space. The disintegration of the culturally coherent experience of community is represented spatially by a preference for narrow shots that refuse the viewer an overall understanding of the space. Time, too, is disordered: the clock is broken, the rituals of the workday interrupted and suspended, and at times even the pace of the movement of the images is distorted and inconsistent. El Oso’s rants become progressively

113 less coherent as he sinks deeper into a drunken, desperate rage and baits Freddy into a pointless conflict that is only a distraction from his real problems. As their verbal dispute dissolves into physical violence, the film establishes a kind of parity between them that further accentuates the gratuitous nature of their conflict, and eventually, of Freddy’s death. As the film’s story comes apart at the seams, the only salvageable message is the destruction of the possibility of order that Freddy represents. The film even undoes its own effort at creating meaning by ending just as it began, with Enrique putting up a help wanted sign in the window of the bar.

In La libertad, work and art have a redemptive potential. Misael’s independence, the fullness of time and space he experiences as a result of his self-sufficiency, frees him from the violence of a compressed global time-space through a retreat within himself. Out in the woods, away from cities and the global flows that connect them, Misael is restored to a complete, primitive power as an individual. In Bolivia, such a redemption through solitary work is not possible because the film portrays the loss associated with a global market order as a loss of collective experiences. The characters who attempt, successfully or otherwise, to ignore their connections to other people and places—Enrique and El Oso—are oppressors, not liberators.

Their actions reject the fantasy of cooperative globalization which provides the only momentary escape from the cruelty of the bar throughout the course of the film.

Part III. Conclusions: The cultural value of labor

In the contemporary global economy, consumption is hyper-visible. The urge to consume is conspicuously present in the urban landscape in life-sized color advertisements, in politics, in the relationship between humans and the physical environment, in the academy where it is the subject of more and more cultural and sociological research. Production is much harder to see; high unemployment gives rise to a counterintuitive reality in which work itself

114 becomes a coveted resource, the work available to people is less clearly connected to sustaining the cycle of human life. More jobs are in the service industry or involve functions that are quite distant from the most basic sense of production as making something. Even in traditional manufacturing jobs, production is fragmented as the processes of assembly and distribution are spread out across the globe. As a result of all these factors, it is becoming difficult to trace the transformation of human labor into economic value; a clear sense of what it means to work is increasingly elusive.

The films considered in this chapter critique the inefficacy of work in the contemporary economy, linking the disordered, unproductive state of labor to broader cultural concerns about the dissolution of national or social identities and the loss of individual and collective agency. The dysfunction of labor is most readily apparent in Bolivia, where work and employment are conspicuous thematic concerns. Critics of that film have interpreted its commentary on work in different ways. Drawing on the positive imagery of labor presented in the lyrical interlude, which she calls the “dream sequence,” Joanna Page sees work in Bolivia as a constructive force capable of structuring time and creating a meaningful existence (59).

However, Anna Sødal argues that work is understood by the characters as a kind of humiliation, a proof of their low social status. She supports her claim by citing a derisive reference El Oso makes to Freddy’s sweat while he is trying to make a case for his own standing as an equal of Enrique’s. El Oso’s implication, Sødal rightly observes, is that the outward signs of Freddy’s hard work are also signs of his low standing in the social hierarchy.

Both of these readings of work are convincing, but neither fully captures the function of work in the film, in part because they consider the social or cultural function of work alone. In fact, this rather glaring limitation of the critical discussion reveals a good deal about the contemporary cultural expectations surrounding the theme of work. In the next section we will consider how an association between art and labor allows for discourses and assumptions

115 about the value of art in the modern world to be transferred to the act of work. First, however, it is important to acknowledge the most salient and unambiguous critique of the state of work in

Caetano’s film: the general failure of the capacity of work to produce concrete, economic value in the form of goods, services, or wages.

After all, Bolivia is set in a workplace in which nothing gets done. The occasional tasks of cooking and cleaning performed by Rosa and Freddy are disconnected from any overarching productive process. (This is quite different from the depiction of labor in La libertad, where Misael’s labor is the principal force responsible for organizing time in the film; the step-by-step progression of Misael’s work allows the audience to mark the passage of time). In Bolivia, by contrast, the film’s discontinuous, broken temporality further shatters the continuity of the workday and the tasks that comprise it. Moments of the day are selected to be shown in an apparently random fashion, at least insofar as the workers’ labor is concerned.

Significantly, although the film takes place in a restaurant over the course of almost two full days, we never see a mealtime rush. The overwhelming monotony of the day and the high- contrast, grainy quality of the picture make it difficult to determine the time of day throughout most of the film. The absence of meals also obscures the actual work being done in the restaurant. As a result, physical labor is depicted as arbitrary and value-less; yielding no significant products or transformations.

The film’s treatment of the financial transactions that govern labor also testify to the nonproductive nature of work for workers. As we saw above, Freddy spends more money than he makes during the film: together his ten-peso phone call and the eight pesos he owes the landlord for one night’s stay at the cheap pensión Rosa suggests already exceed the fifteen pesos we see Enrique give him at the end of the first day; he does not live to receive the wages for his second day of work. In short, the only apparent result of Freddy’s labor is the maintenance of a status quo in which the bar’s owner enjoys absolute power over his

116 customers and his employees. In this sense, the film’s most basic critique of work is a traditional, Marxist one: work is dysfunctional because workers are unable to access the value extracted from their own labor.13

Despite its professed avoidance of such overt political formulations, La libertad also portrays the failure of labor to produce economic value for workers. After a day’s hard labor,

Misael spends an unsettlingly large portion of his earnings on a can of soda and enough gasoline to replenish what he used transporting his cut lumber. As I argued previously, the moments in which Misael participates in the national and global economy by buying and selling products are aberrations in the demeanor of absorbed concentration and quiet competence that characterizes his attitude and gestures in the rest of the film. During the economic transactions that constitute the final stage of his labor, Misael appears uncomfortable, shy, and soft-spoken, suggesting that his participation in the market makes him aware of his insignificance as a lone, semi-skilled worker at a remote edge of the global system.

Even though these moments emphasize the inability of Misael’s labor to earn him recognition as an economic agent or producer of value, La libertad reconstructs the productivity of work by transforming labor into an artistic mode of production. We have seen how Misael’s labor is linked to the work of the filmmaker as an artist. In the eternally complete and present world permitted by his self-sufficiency, Misael experiences a satiety akin to that of the autonomous artist whose production is exempt form the material constraints of the market.

Likewise, in Bolivia, Freddy’s conception of work is linked to a distinctly artistic experience of time and space. As noted above, that film uses music and conspicuously non-realist, aestheticized distortions of the moving image to demarcate Freddy’s perspective.

In both films, the association between the work of making a living and the work of making art reflects the perceived expulsion of labor from the generation of value in the contemporary economy. That is, labor is depicted as an artistic activity in these films because

117 it is also a marginalized form of production, wherein the mechanisms of the market fail to properly evaluate the products. If contemporary art—especially marginalized independent film—envisions itself in an imaginary outside, excluded by the value system of the global capitalist economy, it often justifies itself against that system by claiming to deal in a different, more abstract, and purer kind of value: cultural value. That value is understood to be everything that market-determined value apparently cannot be: intangible, unquantifiable, unique, un- exchangeable, indispensible. Incapable of providing physical wellbeing, art nourishes spiritually and intellectually. It takes on meaning based on idealistic and abstract criteria: aesthetics, reason, tradition, virtue. In a modern universe conceptually divided into two realms of value, the assumption evident in these films makes perfect sense: as manual labor becomes increasingly obsolete as a source of economic value for workers, its productivity must be explained in other ways. Like its economically-challenged cousin—art—labor must produce cultural value.

This is the hopeful logic by which La libertad transforms a woodcutter into an artist. The film is less concerned with the production of economic value, or what Misael earns in exchange for his labor, than it is with the capacity of labor to directly produce cultural and psychological value. Even though Misael is always in a tenuous position economically, his physical labor lessens the burden of his poverty by providing psychic wellbeing: it gives his perceptions of his environment a coherent and stable meaning and creates a refuge from the anxieties of constant consumption in contemporary urban life. Insofar as he is cut off from the global market and his labor is directed toward effecting transformations of his immediate environment, Misael is free from desire and dependency. That freedom endows his life with the fullness or “solidity” of an eternal present resonant with the temporality of the work of art.

A similar cultural function of labor is explored, though ultimately challenged, in Bolivia.

Whereas, in La libertad, the temporal and spatial solidity of the artist’s labor—its lack of

118 connections to other places and times, its therapeutic isolation—offer an antidote to the disempowering scale of the global market, in Freddy’s fantasy the artistic components of labor provide an opportunity for collaboration. The rhythmically coordinated work he imagines unifies the fragmented space of the bar, creating a sense of community even in a world of constantly expanding borders. Although the two films articulate labor’s potential for producing cultural value via opposing mechanisms of solitude and togetherness, both films incorporate physical labor into a broader modern conception of artistic production in which artistic products— aesthetic value, symbolic value, and “culture”—offer a wholeness and an integrity missing from the slippery and distorted maneuvers of global trade. That is, in these films workers participate in the alternative value system of an economy of artistic production in which all the parts are visible and fit together. In this way, both projects consider how labor might be imbued with a generative capacity independent of its economic productivity, allowing physical labor to do the cultural work of art by filling in the voids left by the market and making whole the human experience.

While La libertad critiques Misael’s economic circumstances, but permits his labor to shape a satisfying cultural life for him, Bolivia takes that critique a step further. The unreal and singular quality of Freddy’s fantasy of a collaborative international experience of labor casts the real non-productivity and social isolation of his work in sharp relief. We have seen how, over the course of the film, Freddy’s naïve faith in labor as a solution to his economic distress is revealed as a dangerous misreading of the nature of production in a global city where value only accrues to those who already have power. The same logic applies where cultural value is concerned: As the conflict in the bar escalates, Freddy’s belief in an integrated social world governed by universally recognized standards of respect and justice proves to be not only ignorant but also deadly.

119 Of the contradictory experiences of time and space associated with the different characters, Freddy’s is no less accurate than any other. Certainly, it cannot be less so than

Enrique’s deranged conceptual map of Latin America. What Freddy misunderstands is not the world, per se, but the hierarchy of values that will decide the outcome of the power struggle between himself, El Oso and Enrique. In that contest over what and who will be valued within the microeconomy of the bar, Freddy’s crucial error in judgment is his assumption that because his own system of values is internally coherent, it will hold up against the incoherent beliefs of others. In other words, Freddy’s downfall is set into motion when he lets abstract, cultural—(e.g., aesthetic, linguistic, and moral)—standards of value guide his actions instead of acknowledging the truth that is so painfully obvious to El Oso, that only economic value counts as a form of power.

Enrique’s worldview is an aesthetic disaster; it does not adhere to any principle of order or reason. Nor does it benefit from a particularly close resemblance to reality. Rather, in an expression of power, it conforms the reality of other characters to its own mechanisms for assigning value. As we saw above, the violence of the film’s ending comes as the result of two transgressions of Enrique’s order: El Oso’s refusal to acknowledge Enrique’s decision to close early, and Freddy’s decision to ignore Enrique’s command to stay behind the bar. In the end, the film proposes that labor cannot be culturally productive in a meaningful way because only economic value is a source of power. Whatever cultural value Freddy’s labor produces—and perhaps it does produce some, making his own life more tolerable during his brief employment—it is destined to remain an individual fantasy, since its author lacks any means of recourse to impose those values on others.

The lesson of Freddy’s death sheds light on the limitations of Misael’s world as well.

Misael’s labor may produce a sense of autonomy, but it only does so within the closed-off economy of his solitude. In a sense, Caetano’s film pushes the premise of Alonso’s project to

120 its limits. Bolivia calls attention to a shortcoming of labor’s cultural productivity overlooked in

La libertad—its failure to structure and regulate cultural experiences such as identity, time, and space in contemporary social life. Labor’s products fall short of forming a real alternative economy of cultural values because they lack a currency, a universal mechanism of exchange that could uphold the standards of cultural value.

Bolivia’s exploration of the absence of such a mechanism also helps to elucidate part of the broader instability of Alonso’s cinematic project. In his formulation of a “cinema of encounter,” the most important product of his work as an artist is fundamentally social.

According to his own vision, his filmmaking is only the residue of his real work of forging an alternative path through the socioeconomic landscape. The essential product of that labor is an unlikely encounter, one not easily imaginable amid the one-way flow of products toward their destiny of being consumed. However, his unwillingness to acknowledge the inevitable consumption of his own film—its value as a product—limits his gesture to a simple reversal of the problem it critiques. The film constitutes itself as a work of art in part by capitalizing on the cultural value acquired by Misael’s life and work as they traverse the distance to Buenos Aires and the global film community. Yet Alonso’s project has no way of acknowledging its own consumption of its subjects. It maintains an artificial separation between production and consumption, still refusing to acknowledge the processes as mutually constitutive. Alonso’s path backward, toward an imagined point of origin of the production process is just as unidirectional and incomplete as the highly visible flow of products to consumers it is intended to disrupt. In a sense, the film’s mission to rescue the cultural value of labor arrives successfully at the farthest outpost of the global economy by imagining a site of pure productivity where consumption is absent. But the expedition never returns to Buenos Aires— or rather, the return to Buenos Aires is never documented, is forgotten. The journey’s preoccupation with the trip out at the expense of the trip back predetermines the limits of the

121 scope of the encounter occasioned by the project. Any possibility of real and open contact between producers and consumers is cut off when Misael, the filmmaker himself, and his audience, are denied the opportunity to play both roles at once. The production process is reconstituted in La libertad, in that its value and importance are restored, but the final result leaves the economy conceptually severed. The reconciliation of production and consumption remains deferred.

This problem is present throughout the trilogy of Alonso’s first three films. Like La libertad, Alonso’s second feature film, Los muertos (2004), is an aesthetically tight and narratively vague portrait of a solitary man’s physically taxing journey through a wilderness that is spatially and temporally remote in relation to Buenos Aires. Again, that film functions as a kind of pretext for the director’s own journey to a space outside the global city, where production is more present than consumption. The final project in the La libertad trilogy could be read as an attempt to retroactively correct the one-sidedness of the “encounters” of the first two films by extending to both previous protagonists the mobility only the filmmaker experiences in La libertad and Los muertos. In Fantasma (2006), Misael Saavedra and

Argentino Vargas, the protagonist of Los muertos, wander around Buenos Aires’ Teatro San

Martín and attend a screening of Los muertos. Significantly, the final film lacks the aesthetic coherence and intensity of the first two, perhaps because the actors, made more self- conscious by the unfamiliar environment and contrived circumstances, lack the quiet confidence or the sense of purpose that characterizes their earlier performances. They no longer hold their own against the curious gaze of the camera; moreover, neither is allowed to remain as the primary occupant of his own filmed universe. The effect is not unlike the unsettling feeling of watching newly captive lions take in the strange new environment of a zoo.

In its tentative approach and its inability to transcend the contrivance of its premise, Fantasma fails to extend the “cultural value” of the trilogy to all the workers involved in its production. The

122 resulting sense of discomfort that pervades the film exposes Alonso’s own “cinema of encounter” as a nonreciprocal, unacknowledged act of consumption.

If La libertad inadvertently fails to restore the balance between consumption and production due to its inability to face its own participation in both processes, Bolivia comes across as more self-aware with regard to its limitations. It portrays the failure of the products of artistic or cultural work to impose their moral authority on a material world of capital and power whose chaotic status quo is only ordered by physical realities of wealth, desperation and violence. With Freddy’s death, the narrative of what should be or what could be loses out to the inexplicable truth of what is. But then what, if anything, can be produced in the world

Bolivia imagines?

Instead of assimilating the products of physical labor into an immaterial realm of aesthetic and cultural value, as in La libertad, Bolivia suggests that in order to become effective in a real way, artistic and cultural production must find a way to become integrated into the physical world. Accordingly, while Caetano’s conception of the cultural life of his project is far more traditional than Alonso’s, its subtle deviations from the conventional terms of artistic discourse are consistent with the rejection of an artistic state of exemption carried out in his film. A self-taught director, Caetano consistently rejects the idea that filmmaking is a special kind of work or that being an artist makes him different from other people. He presents himself as a humble, middle-class porteño: a devoted football fan who describes his work in slangy, unassuming terms traditionally associated with blue-collar physical labor, like “laburo” and

“curro.”14

While Alonso’s conception of art reinforces the modernist fantasy of its autonomy,

Caetano’s goes out of its way to disrupt that fantasy by presenting art as a part of ordinary life.

Yet both formulations constitute attempts to secure the apparently unstable place of art in the contemporary configuration of the social and the economic. If, as many theorists of work in the

123 global market posit, contemporary capitalism is transforming labor from the manipulation and movement of things in the physical environment to the cultivation and circulation of immaterial goods—the social and cultural knowledge and value of workers themselves—then perhaps

Caetano’s attitude toward art is less of a departure from the modernist conception than it first appears. If economic work occupies the immaterial realm, perhaps his interest in finding a material expedience for artistic work is a way of maintaining the same conceptual division between art and the socioeconomic and political context in which it exists. Even as the content of the conceptual categories of “art” and “economy” undergoes a radical shift, the categories themselves remain intact. These two radically different films are repeatedly aligned as much by the real exclusion of art from economic productivity as by their reluctance to give up the stubborn fantasy that it could truly escape. The next chapter analyzes two more texts set during Argentina’s recent depression, in which work is once more imagined as a culturally productive activity, exempt from the law of competition that governs the order of global consumer capitalism. In these pieces, the fantasy of culturally productive work is not just an individual coping mechanism, but a collective undertaking aimed at restoring justice and hope to a community overrun by greedy consumers. Increasing the stakes of the dream of a symbolic reinstatement of producer agency, they call into question the validity of modernity’s art/economy binary in the era of global capitalism, and with it the “innocence” of workers’ fantasies of productivity.

Notes

1 Alonso has said of his films that, were it not for the music, one would be unable to tell if they took place fifteen years earlier or fifteen years in the future (See Klinger).

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2 Inspired by the Italian neorealism of the post-WWII years, the Argentine filmmakers known as the “Generation of 1960” and their Brazilian counterparts in the Cinema novo movement reacted against the manipulative, glossy realism of Hollywood style by making low-budget, bare-bones films that showed a gritty social reality. An explicit goal of the movement was to critique the “passive” and “parasitic” form of viewership cultivated by the studio system with its highly controlled, artificial process of production. In order to elicit a more active reception from audiences, directors influenced by Fernando Birri’s Escuela Documental de Santa Fe replaced tight story-telling and elaborate sets with slow, meandering explorations of real environments. They abandoned the rules of continuity editing and included unpredictable jump cuts that called attention to the presence of the camera. They chose novice actors whose diction lacked the stylized smoothness of trained professionals and relied on improvisation rather than detailed scripts. These effects were intended to alert viewers to the ways in which films distort time and space and prompt them to actively make sense of the images. Tamara Falicov provides a comprehensive overview of the movement and its relationship with the studio system in The Cinematic Tango.

3 The notion of the cinematic encounter is encompassed within Deleuze’s definition of neorealist “visionary” cinema. In this respect, Deleuze builds on Cesare Zavattini’s classic description of neorealism as a “cinema of encounter” in that it drives the director outside of the studio in search of a vital confrontation with “reality.” For Zavattini the significance of the encounter is to capture and convey on film a collective awareness; the director tries to make himself a medium for the encounter on behalf of his audience. As it applies to Alonso’s film, however, the idea idea of “encounter” entails a distinction between the desire of the filmmaker to fabricate an otherwise unlikely social encounter, and the product that encounter will create. In this regard, it has more in common with the work of Brazilian filmmaker Eduardo Coutinho in documentaries like Edifício Master (2003) and Babilônia 2000 (1999). For Coutinho, the essence of the encounter is an irreproducible shared moment between director and subject: “A imanência desse momento é fundamental. Por isso, a presença de um ao outro, e a presença da câmera filmando esse encontro, é o que importa. De repente, nessa interação, nesse diálogo, nesse encontro, se produz uma experiência que só faz sentido para mim se eu sentir que ela nunca aconteceu antes e que jamais vai acontecer depois. O que não quer dizer que aquela pessoa que estou entrevistando não tenha dito as mesmas coisas antes, ou que não venha a dizer depois para outras pessoas. Mas sei que ela nunca vai dizer da mesma forma porque a forma como ela disse depende também da minha própria intervenção” (quoted in Figuerôa et. al. pp. 216-217).

4 This “refusal” is not unique to Alonso’s films; as Gonzalo Aguilar notes, a common “refusal” is one of the only features that can be considered characteristic of the varied films that make up the so-called New Argentine Cinema movement that began in the 1990s: “Two major refusals are written in invisible ink in the scripts and stories of the new movies: of the political imperative (what to do) and of the identitarian imperative (what we are like)—that is, of pedagogy and of self-accusation…. Instead of a message to decode, these movies offer us a world: a language, an atmosphere, some characters… a brushstroke—a brushstroke that does not respond to questions formulated insistently beforehand but sketches out its own questioning” (Aguilar 16).

5 E.g., directors associated with movements like Dogma 95, Nouvelle Vague, Neorealism, and Surrealism.

6 Marcos Adrián Pérez Llahi notes that the imperative to create a cinematic product that performs a service to the nation by synthesizing or expressing national identity is one aspect of the burden of “Third World Cinema” that applies to the case of the Argentine film industry. Constraints on nationally- subsidized “third world” cinema limit its focus to realist, spatially-grounded endeavors and prohibit the development of fantasy or genre films.

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7 The gesture carries over into the film itself, where the same principle applies to Misael’s labor. His output is by any measure less valuable than the work that goes into it. After the first quarter of the film is devoted to the slow, multi-step process of felling one tree, time accelerates. Many logs appear, already stacked, at the spot where Misael waits for a ride into town; not long after, they disappear forever, left behind at the lumber yard where they are already indistinguishable from hundreds of others.

8 Alonso articulates his motivation to film in the province of La Pampa as an interest “in people who resided outside, rather than inside, Buenos Aires.” The province depicted in the film is not La Pampa in a documentary sense, but a fictional landscape that emerges from a desire to be someplace other than the center. Similarly, Buenos Aires (along with other global cities—Cannes, San Sebastian, New York, London) is the principal setting for reception of the film and the encounter it stages with viewers. Alonso goes on to explore this dynamic in his third feature, Fantasma, which follows the protagonists of his first two films as they explore a cinema in Buenos Aires. That film endeavors to reverse the optics of La libertad and Los muertos by setting the encounter between filmmaker, subject and audience “inside”— both indoors and in the capital—thus making the city the fictionalized foreign place. Thus the gesture of completion and reciprocity inherent in the premise of Fantasma makes explicit the implied presence of the city in La libertad.

9 The same flattening out of the symbolic value of language into the solid, aesthetic sounds repeats each time dialogue occurs. Misael’s brief phone call home is full of verbal fillers and vague inquiries after the wellbeing of family or friends that can only be answered with a generalized “bien”—the same word we hear Misael use on his end to sum up his own physical and mental state. The reflexivity of the conversation culminates in Misael’s longest and most specific utterance to the person on the other end of the line, his announcement that he needs to end the conversation because his credit on the payphone will soon run out. The whole dialogue transmits little in the way of information, only that in a month or so Misael plans to go home. This imprecise and non-urgent message cannot be the reason for the phone call. Instead, its value to the protagonist lies in the irreducible action of making sounds together over the telephone with the other speaker (whose voice we never hear—another instance of the film’s pose of indifference toward the viewer).

10 The choice of the denomination “aesthetic,” rather than “modern,” attempts to eliminate what Ranciere considers to be a certain willful confusion among modern artists and thinkers between the specific, historical features of the first wave of artworks produced under the aesthetic regime of the arts, and a broader understanding of the mechanisms of that regime (22). In the previous “representative” regime, the category of art was comprised of select “ways of doing and making”—namely those practices of production whose recognized social value was derived from their capacity to relate to a represented subject matter. What distinguishes the aesthetic regime, he holds, is not the disintegration of such a consensus about the social value of art, but the presence of a new consensus that the value of art is at odds with all other kinds of social value: “The aesthetic regime asserts the absolute singularity of art and, at the same time, destroys any pragmatic criterion for isolating this singularity. It simultaneously establishes the autonomy of art and the identity of its forms with the forms that life uses to shape itself” (23).

11 Philippa Page explains parallels between political neoliberalism and aesthetic neorealism, and dictatorship and allegory, this way: “Much of the effort to empty out the Menemist discourse is still negotiated along the boundary between aesthetic performance and social performance, but theatre and cinema now assume the role of stripping political theatre of the excessive levels of theatricality it reached under President Menem rather than matching them. The appropriation of documentary and the recovery of the real thus serve as a challenge to political theatricality, which is associated with artifice. As politics becomes further removed from reality and conceived increasingly in terms of a fiction, theatre and cinema reinvent themselves along neorealist lines in order to step into the void left by politics” (131).

126

12 See Leen p. 9

13 Whereas Marx’s concern in Capital is with the way the capitalist labor market prevents workers from enjoying the of their labor, here the exploitation is even more extreme; the value of labor to the worker is even less than the value of his time is to him.

14 For example, in a 2002 interview with Clarín’s Mariano del Mazo, Caetano speaks plainly and humbly about his start in the film industry: “En Bolivia éramos todos pibes, algunos vivían con los padres, teníamos otros trabajos. Así es sencillo comprometerse con un producto independiente. Ahora todo cambió. Un oso rojo fue otro tipo de laburo, con un equipo desconocido para mí: ahí me di cuenta de que no sé dirigir.”

127 Chapter 3

Consumer power and social responsibility in Fabián Bielinsky’s Nueve reinas and Aníbal

Jarkowski’s El trabajo.

This chapter explores the relationship between the increasing acceptance of consumption as the primary site of individual agency and perceptions of shifting moral standards in the global city. If the ideology of free market capitalism reimagines individual consumption—the act of taking away from the —as socially “productive” through the

“miracle” of aggregation, then how should individual consumers make sense of their part in the production of the social order? Is it even reasonable, let alone practical, to be concerned with such a thing?

The analysis that follows explores the reach and the limitations of consumers’ social responsibility—or irresponsibility—as it is depicted in two fictional universes where the pressures of competition in the global market have upset the balance between the interests of individuals and the shared interests of the local community. Both texts explore the heightened temptations of violence and aggression that result when the local economy is subsumed into a global capitalist system whose scale exceeds the regulatory reach of local political authorities and weakens the cultural identity and moral standards of the community. Fabián Bielinsky’s crowd-pleasing heist movie Nueve reinas (2000), and Aníbal Jarkowski’s enigmatic novel El trabajo (2007) each depict a Buenos Aires in which the myth of the lettered city has been replaced with a new image of chaos, greed, and unrepentant criminality. In this environment, survival often requires willingness to bend the rules of the social contract. This is especially true for the disadvantaged; most of the work available to those without resources is either outright illegal (theft, prostitution), or else occupies a moral gray area where the deceit and

128 exploitation are of a subtler variety. Does the absence of any meaningful sense of mutual obligation to a “community” make these behaviors justifiable? Does the reigning ethos of the global market transform its subjects into “mere” consumers of this social order, cleansing them of their complicity in its continuation? Or are consumers implicated in the ‘production’ of what they consume?

Nueve reinas and El trabajo invite readers to contemplate these questions as they explore the complicated problem of understanding moral and social accountability in a consumer capitalist order. Reflecting the disillusionment with neoliberalism at the height of the

Argentine depression of 1998-2002, Nueve reinas takes a critical look at the defenses an unrepentant social scavenger who has internalized the competitive ethos of the market offers for his selfish violations of what little social trust remains in his community and searches for signs of hope that mutual respect and group loyalty could be restored. Written several years later, El trabajo looks back on the worst period of the crisis with less outrage and finds it necessary to resort to much more radical measures to avoid resignation to a social order in which incivility and greed appear increasingly inevitable. Yet in both texts, the investigation into the violence of the contemporary social order is thwarted by a more pressing problem: the difficulty of finding definitive answers in a global order full of decontextualized information and conflicting individual interpretations. Portraits of crime in a world lacking trustworthy authorities or reliable justice, these post-national, post-social whodunits are detective stories without detectives: a catalogue of the obstacles to order in the chaos of a commons where consumers—and their subjective assessments of value—have the ultimate word.

Marcos, the small-time conman antihero of Nueve reinas, understands that asserting his power as a consumer is essential to survival in a city that has become a battleground for global capitalism’s never-ending struggle between the weak and the strong. Where there are only victims and victors, he is determined to consume rather than be consumed. Early in the film,

129 Marcos brings the viewer into his world with a monologue in which he exposes the cutthroat reality lurking behind the façade of elegant skyscrapers and professional hospitality in a

Buenos Aires hollowed by the indifference and anonymity of the global economy and hardened by years of depression. As the camera moves over the downtown rush hour crowd, Marcos’s words cast suspicion on every image, turning each strange face into a thief lying in wait or a potential mark:

…Están ahí, pero no los ves. De eso se trata. Están, pero no están. Así que cuidá el

maletín, la valija, la puerta, la ventana, el auto. Cuidá los ahorros, cuidá el culo... Porque

están ahí, van a estar siempre ahí. Chorros... (00:24:19)

His intention is to relieve Juan, his new partner, of the burden of his moral hang-ups by opening Juan’s eyes to a city besieged by perpetual, hidden threats. Here, a sense of social responsibility is not just an unaffordable luxury; it has become a liability. Residents savvy enough to pick up on the deceit and betrayal hiding on every corner know that no one else is looking out for their interests; each individual is responsible for his own destiny now.

As Marcos sees it, the social order imposes this selfishness on its subjects. However, other residents of the city, including Juan, are less ready to adjust to this bleak new reality.

This difference between the two lead characters complements and complicates the suspense plot; while waiting to discover whether, or how, Marcos and Juan will pull off their plan to defraud their mark, a rich foreign with an unlikely weakness for rare stamps, the viewer is invited to compare the worldviews of both characters.

From the beginning, it is easy to identify with Juan, a newcomer to the conman’s underworld that is, for Marcos, the only world. Marcos is prompted to take his companion on a tour of his moral universe when Juan criticizes Marcos for being cheap. (Showing off, the latter has just conned his way into a “free” newspaper.)

JUAN: ¿Tan rata sos? ¿No podés comprarlo?

130 MARCOS: ¿ A quién le dijiste "rata"?

JUAN: ¿Estás ofendido?

MARCOS: Claro que puedo comprarlo, boludo, pero también puedo no comprarlo.

Como harían todos, si pudieran.

JUAN: ¿Creés que todos estos pibes son igual que vos?

MARCOS: ¿Como yo? Casi todos. Lo que pasa es que no tienen los huevos para

bancársela. (00:23:25)

Marcos justifies his actions first on social grounds: a real man scams not out of economic need, but rather, because the fact that he can is a reflection of his superior status. In the anonymous, binary ecosystem of winners and losers that Marcos observes around him, self- interest no longer constitutes a departure from the social contract. A reputation for generosity, or even for honesty, is no longer a valid social currency. Instead, aggressive and ruthless consumption is the most effective way to communicate power and virility—and to adhere to the real ideals of the global community.

Thus, Marcos’s justification for his behavior also rests on an unspoken but constantly insinuated claim to a superior knowledge of that community. The ability to distinguish between what seems to be valuable, and what really is valuable, quickly becomes the supreme virtue when the global market—that is, the aggregate of individual assessments—is the only reliable measure of value. In the global society of consumers, where self-interest is the only universal principle, more and more is left up to individual interpretation.

This is the case even when it comes to apparently objective, quantifiable values like money; that much comes across in the first scenes of the film, in which Marcos and Juan manage to quickly multiply their supply of cash by performing several magicians’ tricks of suggestion in front of a series of unsuspecting and distracted waiters and cashiers. The prospect of any universal standard is even more tenuous when it comes to social values like

131 duty, respect, and loyalty. The frequent twists and reversals of the film’s plot consistently undermine the possibility of any valid code of ethics or circle of trust. Marcos’s family is divided by an ugly fight over inheritance; Moreover, each time a figure of legitimate and lawful authority (a policeman, or an expert art authenticator, for example) appears on the scene and temporarily restores order and accountability, a subsequent scene reveals him to be an impostor. Again and again, the film taunts the audience with the promise of a restored social- ethical code only to deny it.

As Marcos explains, this is just how things work now; everyone has a price. He has a point: in this drastically unequal and tumultuous global economy, they would be crazy not to.

The promise of unfathomable gain combined with the reality of widespread corruption renders all principles negotiable. This flexibility extends even to the taboo of homosexual contact in a criminal underworld once governed by a culture of machismo. A quick demonstration allows

Marcos to illustrate. Would Juan have sex with another man, he asks. No? Then what about for

$10,000? $20,000? With each new increment he adds another paper towel to the stack he is building on the sink of the hotel restroom that is the venue for this business meeting. After a pause, he stops separating the individual towels and simply adds the entire contents of the dispenser, silencing Juan’s implied protest.

A little bit of additional context helps to drive home the point of this parable of the paper towels: the problem of moral relativity is not an affliction exclusive to those who choose to enter a realm of illicit temptations. Like Marcos, the viewer knows that Juan’s father is in jail, awaiting trial by a notoriously crooked judge, who is sure to issue a harsh sentence unless

Juan comes up with the money to bribe him. Would he not be less of a man if he let his pride stop him from keeping his family together? Even Juan, with his old-fashioned manners and his priceless “cara de buen tipo,” has to concede that traditional mores lose their value when the

132 rest of the community abandons them. A chain reaction makes hard choices with high stakes a part of everyday life even for the innocent.

The speech is a triumph for Marcos. Deploying his art to convince the neophyte Juan to accept his interpretation of the situation as superior, he regains the power that was diminished in the previous scene, when their mark—the arrogant Spanish businessman Vidal Gandolfo— saw through Marcos’s showmanship and mocked him for his provincial ineptitude. Set against the homophobic subtext of the speech, these rapid transformations of Marcos’s demeanor and position hint at the real parameters of the performance of manhood in a market society divided into two genders: consumers and the consumed. Just as Marcos experiences his failure to convince Gandolfo as a humiliation (one Gandolfo rubs in by mimicking Marcos’s accent and gestures in an effeminate manner), in the next scene he is elevated by his success in persuading Juan—in convincing Juan that he, Marcos, is the one who sees things as they really are.

In this social order defined by the decisions of consumers, where value is always subjective—and thus, always a point of contention between subjects—the ultimate expression of virility and dominance is to be the cleverest salesman and the savviest consumer. It is left to each individual to make sense of the world, and to live with the consequences when his interpretations fail.

In other words, by the logic of Marcos’s code of individualism, it is the newspaper salesman who makes his own fate to be swindled when he buys into the false story Marcos sells him. Thus, somewhat paradoxically, embracing a consumer ethos of self-defensive greed empowers the individual by reducing the scope of his responsibility to others. Released from the burden of his social obligations, the consumer can more freely choose among his options.

That freedom of choice is a dismal freedom, one that cannot aspire to heroism. Indeed, although his successes are thrilling, Marcos’s behavior can be hard to watch. Often his

133 slickness reads as justification as much as conviction. But even if he is an unlikely winner of our compassion, much of what happens suggests that he is right about the world. The film presents an apparently infinite sequence of betrayals and thefts; the two conmen repeatedly find themselves victims of others’ scams en route to carrying out their own swindle. Even

Marcos’s self-righteous sister appears to be caught up in some questionable off-the-books duties at her otherwise legitimate job. Juan, too, eventually puts his faith in Marcos’s assessment when he agrees to trust Marcos with his savings.

And yet, the greatest reversal is still to come, as a surprise ending reveals that even the uncertainty itself was not as it seemed. The scam Marcos believed he was orchestrating was in fact an elaborate conspiracy by his former victims and their friends to trick him into returning what he stole from each of them. The true mastermind is Juan, who turns out to be Valeria’s fiancé. The last scene of the film exposes this one final “truth” by showing all of the collaborators—almost the entire cast, aside from Marcos—seated at an enormous round table, celebrating their victory and divvying up the spoils. The appearance of the whole cast together puts an end to the possibility that new information or additional perspectives will surface to produce yet another reversal.

The image of an intact community has an important symbolic function as well. The justice that is restored when Marcos finally gets the fleecing he deserves for betraying his friends and family marks the reinstatement of the modern democratic social contract and the revitalization of a utopian dream of collective agency grounded in the coordinated efforts of the group. (This is true at least from the perspective of the viewer; for Juan and his collaborators, these community standards have been in force all along.) Unlike Marcos, the conspirators never betray the mutual trust that binds them as a family. Together, they successfully co- produce a functional social order by planning and implementing the enforcement of their shared values, punishing Marcos for his violations. Completing this celebration of local

134 sovereignty, the success of the endeavor even brings to fruition a national romance of sorts, as the redistribution to its rightful owners of the property stolen by Marcos now makes it possible for Juan and Valeria to marry and, the film suggests, continue the reproduction of the social order.

If Marcos’s story seemed plausible—we were beginning to believe that because individuals acting alone had no power to impede the inevitable hollowing out of the social- moral order by forces of the capitalist market, neither was it possible to do so working together—then we can be reassured by the revelation that Marcos’s vision of a cruel new kind of social justice was merely an illusion that never posed a real threat to the underlying social contract. The reassertion of shared interests will reactivate the sovereignty of the community.

In the end, the film suggests that if there has been too much emphasis on what individuals perceive to be their own interests, it is only because individual judgment is always vulnerable to manipulation and deceit. Nueve reinas showcases the appeal of a notion of agency practiced exclusively through consumption. Obligated by circumstances beyond his control to prioritize his own interests if he is to be in any way an effective actor, the consumer becomes a sympathetic figure who deserves to be excused from social accountability if it helps him cope with the difficult choices he is forced to make. Yet, by the end of the film, it is clear that the prevalence of self-interested consumption comes with its own psychic costs. For the consumer subject, the burden of responsibility for the other is replaced by an increasingly taxing burden of interpretation. The consumer’s burden of bearing the sole responsibility for his own destiny is only relieved by the reintegration of a community in which shared values provide context for the problems of interpretation that arise, reducing the weight of each individual’s interpretative task.

We have seen how the film cons its audience into accepting the social chaos of a global consumer society as inevitable, only to reveal its trick at the last second. In this way the

135 surprise of the ending aligns the viewer with Marcos, catching her together with him in a shared misinterpretation of the plot. Yet the film is quick to absolve its own consumer of her

“bad” reading, immediately reestablishing a moral universe in which the only assessment that matters is that of the community. Perhaps this structure is part of the appeal of this popular film. It extends the possibility of catharsis to a public implicated in the causes of the economic disaster insofar as it bought into the false promise of a neoliberal miracle which would have cast self-interested consumption and tough competition as necessary to the production of a robust society.

In this case, ignorance is a sufficient excuse; it is what distinguishes the film’s viewer from its villain. The audience turns out to be the only party to know less even than Marcos. And unlike Marcos, who brought the revenge plot on himself by violating the trust of the community, imposing on it his view of a consumer society, the viewer cannot be expected to anticipate the secret agreement between the other characters. Even if the consumer of the film did naively buy a lemon, Marcos’s outright deception is a greater sin than poor judgment. The message is clear: the real power, and the real responsibility, has always rested with the supplier.

The conclusion may be unambiguous, but the sudden and complete reversal required to get there undermines to some degree the moral clarity that is restored. A viewer relentlessly instructed by the film itself to become attuned to the importance and the difficulties of interpretation cannot arrive at the end of the film without a twinge of discomfort.

That discomfort is compounded by the fact all we see of this collaborative effort by the community to enforce its interests and hold its members accountable is its result. The cooperative process that enabled the group to overcome the apparent dominance of individualism—most important, the negotiation to determine the rights and responsibilities of each individual in relation to the group—remains unseen. The film avoids showing the potential

136 costs of such cooperation to the individual consumer: the possibility of her interests being compromised, or even sacrificed, for the good of the community.

The true appeal of the fantasy of harmonious co-production lies in the relief it offers from what it has shown all along to be the exhausting burden of interpretation borne by the subject of global consumer capitalism. The “invisible” collaborative effort that triumphs over the self-sufficiency of the individual consumer at the end of Nueve reinas serves most of all as the site of a general fantasy about relief from the consumer’s never-ending task of single- handedly protecting his own interests. Cooperative production—or rather, the idea of it— becomes the locus of restored moral and social order, but the motif of production remains an empty marker of the consumer subject’s own fantasy of relief from his dual burdens of competition and interpretation. In this manner, even as the film critiques Marcos’s parasitic self-serving consumption, it perpetuates the central myths about the invisible, perfect social agency of the consumer subject by moving the process by which individual interests are integrated offscreen.

Critical responses to Nueve reinas have called attention to the ways in which the frenzied final moments of the unraveling of Marcos’s scheme uncannily anticipate the banking freeze that would take place in December, 2001.1 Similarly striking is the parallel between the film’s denouement and the trope of “waking up” from a dream that was a common feature of narratives of the collapse.2 In both cases, the situation is essentially the same as it was shortly before, and yet everything now seems to have a different meaning.

The resonance of the “awakening” trope reflects the significant and highly visible role of reinterpretation in explanatory and descriptive accounts of the crisis. That emphasis on

“reinterpretation” helped to sustain a fantasy of immediate and spontaneous healing, which, although it was expressed through a symbolic vocabulary of collaborative production,

137 continued to privilege many of the features of the consumer capitalist order it ostensibly reacted against.

The neoliberalism implemented in Argentina over the decade of the 1990s saw the reduction of the role of government in many areas of the nation’s social and economic life, most notably in the privatization of national industries, including the vertically integrated oil and gas company Yacimientos Petrolíferos Fiscales (YPF) in 1991. At least in hindsight, the transfer of ownership to transnational corporations was widely denounced as a “theft” of public resources by the administration of president Carlos Menem. By 1998, less than halfway through the second decade of democratic leadership after the end of the most recent military dictatorship, the country began to feel the full economic costs of these policies. While the period of democracy had brought an end to the overt repression of the previous order, the violent presence of the military state had been replaced by a new kind of violent absence as the corruption and short-sightedness of the leaders failed to defend the interests of the citizens against foreign investors and their own political cronies. As the recession worsened, the public became disillusioned not just with specific leaders, but with the idea of representation itself.

As a result, many protestors attempted to take matters into their own hands rather than trying to address their concerns through a political system crippled by clientelism and corruption. In her account of the movements born of the economic crisis, Horizontalism, Marina

Sitrin documents the common, intertwined themes of frustration with global capitalism and with representative government. Rejecting both systems, activists emphasized an ideal of direct, participatory democracy and “auto-gestión”: self-organization, self-sufficiency, local autonomy, and consensus-based decision-making. Accordingly, the occupation of symbolic spaces and the act of physically gathering together was not just rhetorically significant (i.e., as a means of calling attention to their demands), but also had an important affective component, providing a way for people to “feel their collective power.” Some of the protestors Sitrin

138 interviews even saw the weakness of the political system as a sign of the strength of the alternative social models they were implementing, bragging that their efforts had the power to

“expel four governments in less than two weeks” (8).

The “movement of movements” included the establishment of neighborhood assemblies to create local bartering networks, soup kitchens, and community gardens, as well as the “recovery” of factories and other businesses by workers. These expressions of dissent reimagined economic production and exchange as social processes structured by cooperation rather than competition. Though critical of the rationalizing effects of the global market and its incursions into basic human rights, the local marketplace became an important symbolic site of equality and dignity.

Bielinksy’s film anticipates the particular nature of collaboration privileged by the protests in its emphasis on the immediate, voluntary action of individuals over planning, negotiation, and coordination. As we saw above, the internal tensions of the film also hint at a difficulty the movements would face: their over-reliance on symbolic gestures at the expense of substance. Although the shortage of cash in the economy did make bartering useful, these exchanges, which frequently involved “luxury” items like massages or handmade jewelry, also served to affirm the value of the participants’ productivity and creativity as contributions to the vitality of the community.

Further testament to the importance of this symbolic function is the prevalence of creative and artistic forms of production in these spaces, a feature consistent across many responses to the crisis as well as the discourse surrounding them.3 The fact that many of the most visible forms of political protest were creative ones, including street theater and improvisational musical performances like murgas, drum circles, and even witty graffiti, contributed to the general sense that an artistic and cultural revitalization had arrived to signal the triumph of a new social order over the grim and sterile culture of neoliberal globalization.

139 The celebration of local ingenuity carried over into yet another “dream” of instantaneous revitalization that gained currency in the wake of the crisis: the theory that the economic collapse had triggered a general cultural and artistic renaissance in the capital. The perception that Buenos Aires had become the epicenter of a second earthquake, this time a “cultural boom,” gained traction as the media registered growing participation and interest in the local arts scene, countering dismal economic and political headlines with encouraging notes about the achievements of the city’s cultural institutions and the strong attendance at events like book fairs and film festivals.4 The enthusiasm generated by the idea of a cultural renaissance suggests that the same function co-production takes on in Nueve reinas was more generally attributed to artistic forms of production. Aesthetic and cultural production, specifically, became important signifiers of restored social agency and citizenship across all sectors of society. As then-cultural secretary of Buenos Aires, Jorge Telerman, explained to one journalist, “My greatest challenge is to bring a protest-movement participant, a neighborhood- assembly member and a lady in a fur coat to sit alongside each other in the Colón. This would go a long way to creating a new citizen that recognizes public spaces as his own” (quoted in

Goldberg).

While much of the discussion of the cultural boom included statistics about attendance rates at cultural fairs and museums, the coverage was somewhat lacking in context, if not outright misleading.5 Indeed, in a study of trends in Argentine cultural production in the early

2000s, María Pons notes the significant coverage of the “cultural boom” in the press, but finds little evidence of an increase in any measurable indicators of cultural activity (rates of production, publication, sales, etc). However, in spite of these findings, she concludes that the phenomenon of the cultural boom was meaningful:

Los datos arriba mencionados sugieren que, en gran parte, ese tan

mencionado boom cultural es un espejismo producido desde la ciudad de Buenos

140 Aires. Pero la vitalidad de la cultura no sólo se percibe como el último bastión que le

permitió a la sociedad reconocerse en un país que se había derrumbado, sino también

le permitió a muchos rescatar algún sentido de dignidad humana y ciudadana

cotidianamente amenazadas.

As the passage suggests, the idea that cultural production—even imagined production—could help to fix the social problems caused by the economic depression proved surprisingly tenacious, despite growing evidence that a large part of the appeal of this “solution” was its intangibility.

In general, the discourse surrounding the boom was inflected with a kind of eagerness to both document and celebrate the revitalization of the arts that led to a contradictory idea that the city’s cultural activity occurred both because of, and in spite of, the crisis. The increased interest in culture was attributed to financial and psychological causes connected to the depression: many cultural activities were relatively affordable; people turned to culture to try to understand the social changes around them or to seek refuge from the dismal economic and political situation. However, these explanations coexisted alongside assertions that the cultural life of the city was remarkable and unique.

These contradictions suggest another explanation for the phenomenon of the cultural boom: that the arts and culture became resonant symbols of resistance and resilience precisely because their value was understood to be “subjective” in nature. Like the off-stage collaboration that brings about a new, just, social order at the end of Nueve reinas, artistic production, too, became a marker of the desire for consensus. Under the sign of a subjective utopia of the aesthetic, there was plenty of room for individual interpretations to differ without becoming a source of social conflict. Another way to understand the significance of the cultural boom, then, is as a fantasy that social conflict itself is only imaginary.

141 It is not surprising that the ideal of a politics of consensus rather than compromise held great appeal in the immediate aftermath of the crisis. Unlike compromise, consensus held the promise of relieving the consumer’s burden of interpretation and ending the violence arising from the individualism inherent in the consumer capitalist order. And for a moment, consensus seemed politically plausible, too. The “cultural boom” occurred in a moment when Menem’s neoliberal policies and the mismanagement of the nation’s finances by the de la Rúa administration were almost unanimously believed to have caused the economic collapse.

Moreover, the “corralito” and the default made the middle classes feel the pain of the depression acutely, infusing unemployed workers’ movements with new energy and widespread support from sectors of the population that had generally viewed their efforts as an annoyance in the past.6

Within a year or two, the vast majority of the hundreds of local born of that post-crisis moment had dissipated. Founded largely on abstract values like consensus and social trust which could not easily be implemented on any scale greater than the neighborhood, the assemblies could not offer communities much protection from the volatility of the international market. Consensus proved complicated at many worker-recovered factories, too, where the dicey legality of the takeovers continued to be a source of tensions and occasionally even violence between workers and the police. In the end, the near-universal condemnation of the leadership brought about few political reforms, and even years later the moderate gains in economic recovery that had been achieved were still uncertain. Where individual judgment had failed before, now collective judgment seemed equally ineffective.

Thus, by the time Aníbal Jarkowski’s novel El trabajo was published in 2007, it was becoming difficult to place stock in the power of local consensus to mitigate the injustices of global consumer capitalism. Yet, remarkably, even as political consensus ceased to play a central role in the in the imagining of a renewed social justice, the arts remained a potent

142 symbol of the perfect alignment of individual judgments and interests even after the optimism of the immediate post-crisis faded. In El trabajo, artistic production continues to represent a path toward social reform even as the rationalizing forces of the global market come to be understood as unavoidable.

Taking as its point of departure the implied logic of the cultural boom by which social conflict is, at essence, imaginary, the novel considers a number of cultural remedies for the violence that results from prejudice, discrimination, and stigma. The text chronicles the efforts of an unnamed narrator to combat the stigma faced by performers at the burlesque theater where he works as an assistant to the manager. As he gets to know “las chicas del elenco,” as he calls them, he becomes sympathetic to their struggle to get by, both economically and emotionally, in an exploitative and unequal social order. His crusade against the damaging effects of irrational, antiquated moral culture begins after he learns about “the curse of the burlesque” from a dancer called Naanim:

Todos los hombres me quieren cojer [sic], me dijo una madrugada mientras

esperábamos su colectivo, pero nada más que una vez. Ése es mi problema. Después

de que cojemos empiezan a preguntarse cómo aprendí, quién me enseñó y prefieren

no verme más. No me lo dicen, pero yo sé que es así. Me doy cuenta. Es la maldición

del burlesque. Los hombres no saben qué pensar de mí. Se acercan imaginado todo lo

que soy capaz de hacerles pero no toleran que se los haya hecho. (141)

Naanim’s description emphasizes the irrationality of the prejudice against her: the same attributes that make her attractive to men also decrease her value in their eyes. The stigma is especially hypocritical given the reality of a labor market in which the unfettered reign of a concentrated and highly sexualized consumer desire has crowded out traditional productive activity. The boundaries between work and private life have collapsed, leaving the mostly- female workforce—(women, in the novel’s simplified sexual economy, are the “suppliers” of

143 sex)—subject to the controlling demand of the male characters in every facet of their existence.

In this regard, the main differences between office work and Naanim’s stripteases are only nominal. So it is understandable that the narrator comes to view the prejudice against Naanim as a disruption of the market’s otherwise impartial and amoral justice.

But Naanim’s problem is not just theoretical. She is afraid that her boyfriend will abandon her when he learns the truth about her work. Further exaggerating the fanciful logic of the “cultural boom,” the narrator comes up with a plan to help her. The most important part is the composition of a “libretto” for Naanim to perform at the burlesque theater. The idea is that once Naanim’s work is recognized as belonging to the universal category of the arts, the community will afford her the dignity befitting her “condición de artista” (155).

The point is not to appeal to the audience’s empathy by calling attention to Naanim’s human dignity through the universal language of the aesthetic, but rather, to secure her dignity as an artist. That is, for the narrator, what demands respect is not the common humanity that connects Naanim to her audience, but rather her difference from them. This detail highlights the difference between the symbolic function ascribed to production in Nueve reinas and its role here in the narrator’s scheme: whereas before creative collaboration symbolized a relief from the consumer’s burden of interpretation through consensus, here artistic production symbolizes the possibility of suspending potentially harmful subjective judgments altogether.

As it turns out, this strategy is a well-known trick of the burlesque trade. When a new dancer, Diana, is about to take the stage for the first time, she gets this advice from Iram, a more experienced colleague:

[…L]e recomendó que hiciera creer a los hombres del público—lo pongo en mis

palabras—que no bailaba para todos sino para cada uno de ellos y los convenciera de

que cada nueva parte del cuerpo que les dejaba ver era más íntima y secreta que las

anteriores y por eso mismo más valiosa—las piernas más que el rostro, los senos más

144 que las piernas, las nalgas más que los senos, el pubis más que las nalgas--, pero ella

no lo creyera nunca porque esas distinciones eran morales, no artísticas, y para una

bailarina su cuerpo tenía que ser igual que un libro para un escritor, que comprende

que los lectores, por alguna razón, puedan preferir una página sobre las otras, aunque

para él todas tienen el mismo valor porque en cada una está su arte, su trabajo. (196)

Again, a universal category of “artistic” value is presented as a shelter from the public’s demeaning “moral” judgment. Yet, in the same breath as Iram insists that the true meaning of a dancer’s performance lies in its “artistic” value, she also reminds Diana to play up her own shame by dramatizing the intimate, personal nature of what she reveals. Iram articulates the precise logic by which the act acquires its “moral” meaning (the one recognized by the audience), but she leaves its “artistic” significance unspecified beyond its negation of the moral one. The content is not the point; for Iram, as for the narrator, the value of the arts lies in the dignity that adheres to the efforts behind the production. Divorced in this way from their effects, the efforts of an artist represent a kind of pure distillation of productive intent: all process, and no product to consume. In essence, the case for the recognition of effort is an argument against the merits of interpretation.

In other words, the subjective utopia of the arts is supplanted by a new supra-subjective utopia. But soon even the powerful begin to recognize the limitations of their judgment and turn to the arts seeking to surpass those limitations. Behind a desk piled high with anonymous resumes and unspecified reports—all the trappings of a corporate non-place7— “the manager” spends his afternoons watching as his secretary performs Nijinsky-inspired ballets for him in their shared suite. As the manager explains to his secretary, Diana, when she comes to interview for the position, what sets him apart from other, less successful, businessmen is his willingness to recognize his own limits as a rational, thinking subject and pursue the fertile, irrational territory of the aesthetic:

145 “…donde el contenido de la mente eran puras visiones sin lenguaje. […] Él había

entrevisto esa dimensión apenas algunas veces y nada más que por instantes, pero

aún así había descubierto soluciones nítidas, fulgurantes, que vibraban fuera de los

muros de la razón […L]e dijo que eso mismo [el ballet] era lo que él buscaba en el

mundo de los negocios; alcanzar el tormento de la sinrazón y volver con soluciones

inauditas para aumentar las ganancias de la empresa. (34-35)

If the logic of how this endeavor generates profits for the firm proves somewhat difficult to grasp, again, this difficulty is precisely the point. The manager pursues a transcendent experience not unlike Kant’s description of the sublime: contemplating the representation of that which is boundless and unrepresentable, his imagination brushes against the boundaries of his own reason, revealing to him in fleeting waves of inexplicable sensation the presence of a supersensible and timeless truth.8

In Kant’s account, the tension between imagination and reason terrifies as it pleases. Any contact with the supersensible is a traumatic departure from the modern subject’s default state of trust in his perceptive and cognitive faculties. For the manager, however, the sublime is sheer ecstasy—fleeting release from the constant struggle against the limitations of what he knows to be his own inadequate capacity to reason and perceive. This is because for him the sublime is not a byproduct of the effort of judgment; the explicit goal of his effort is to transcend judgment.

In this sense, the manager’s work calls to mind the social function Theodor Adorno ascribes to the contemplation of “true”—that is, challenging—art. In his Aesthetic Theory,

Adorno argues that the struggle to make sense of an apparently irrational aesthetic stimulus provides an opportunity to shed one’s everyday passive and conformist perceptions, looking past the “dialectics of appearance,” or the illusions that make up what we mistake for reality.9

This active spectatorship offers a potential glimpse of a truth otherwise obscured by both the

146 necessary limitations of a particular set of historical coordinates (time, place) and by the distortions of ideology.

It is worth noting that despite Adorno’s apparently dim view of the ability of individuals to reason their way to the truth, his theory of the aesthetic is based on an implicit assumption of the inherent value in the subject’s attempt to reason. It is the individual’s struggle to synthesize his conflicting perceptions into a coherent interpretation of reality that holds the potential to crack through his ideologically induced blindness, lighting the path to a possible resistance.10

By contrast, the manager’s description of his work implies a radical lack of “productive” or creative agency. After all, what he is really seeing in his trances only appears to be irrational because of his own insufficient understanding of a system so vast it surpasses the capacity of any individual to grasp its totality. His altered consciousness affords him access to the proper order of things as it will eventually shake out. The idea is to make his mind into an empty vessel that can apprehend and harness incomprehensible bits of this supersensible and effectively objective truth. Incorporated into the firm’s business model, these retrieved glimpses will provide a slightly more accurate reflection of the true values only the future will reveal.

This “business model” finally completes the circle of the logic of the cultural boom, bringing the subjective utopia of conflict avoidance first conceived as an alternative to capitalist competition back onto to the market itself. The unexpected alignment of creativity and rationalism, the symbolic and the material, at the center of global capitalism highlights the fundamental symbiosis between the “cultural boom” and neoliberal ideology. In the face of real conflict, the wishful thinking behind the “cultural” solution to the social challenges of global capitalism can only resolve its own contradictions by devaluing subjective judgments entirely. If the interests of individuals seem to conflict, it can only be because they misunderstand their own interests. Thus the aesthetic utopia eventually repeats the gesture of the market’s invisible

147 hand, promising that what are experienced as conflict and competition are in fact signs of the emergence of a global community in which the future interests of all individuals are perfectly integrated.

Like the narrator and Iram, then, the manager’s use of the arts as a tool for suspending his own judgment is instrumental. As Adorno anticipated, the cooptation of art’s difficulty for predetermined ends—i.e., expecting that difficulty and recognizing it, rather than struggling with it) empties the encounter with autonomous art of its radicalizing potential: “making it a raison d’etre, it converts its own malediction into a theodicy” (quoted in Hitchcock 41). That is, if the idea that art gets to break the rules of reality is used disingenuously, then art easily becomes a dangerous space of exemption from the laws regulating power and resources.

Indeed, as we saw above, Iram’s failure to articulate how the “artistic” meaning of her performance differs from its “moral” meaning suggests that she does understand artistic production in moral terms. After all, only in the realm of moral philosophy is “intent” recognized as a factor that affects the final value of an outcome.

Beatriz Sarlo criticizes the discourse about arts and culture on the same grounds in a

2004 op-ed in La nación, reminding would-be enthusiasts of Buenos Aires’s cultural renaissance that art does not possess an inherent moral value. “El arte,” she writes, “no es un remedio como parecen creer algunos funcionarios que se confunden y envían a contingentes de desocupados a pintar murales, según lo informó hace poco una asambrosa noticia.” In fact, the popular tendency to view coverage of the arts as inherently “good news” actually damages the arts by replacing the hierarchies, debates, and conflicts that would be evidence of a truly robust and productive cultural community with an insipid, shallow, and homogenous enthusiasm: “La vitalidad de un intercambio crítico desaparece por el frenesí de los acontecimientos presentados como puntos en una infinita y eterna primera línea.” In other words, artistic production, like any other kind, benefits from competition. To ignore the finite

148 nature of cultural resources is to contribute to a “cultural inflation” that ultimately weakens the market and impedes output.

As Sarlo’s commentary suggests, the non-competitive artistic production depicted in El trabajo produces an illusion of community and exchange that can only be sustained as long as its content is not interpreted. Thinking back on a theatrical performance the protagonist

(narrator) attended in his youth, what he remembers most is the strangely comforting vagueness of the experience:

Conservaba imágenes sueltas de una función semiclandestina en un galpón de chapas,

con una escenografía de cajones de cerveza y bolsas de arpillera rellenas con arena,

una pareja de jóvenes que había transgredido alguna prohibición en una comunidad

rural, una escopeta de caza, una luz cruda y general que no distinguía entre el

escenario y la platea, y recordé también que o más extraño había sido ver a los actores

desnudos mientras el público seguía la representación frotándose las manos y envuelto

con bufandas, abrigos y gorros de lana para protegerse del frío que atravesaba las

chapas. (254)

In his memory, the play consists of a series of images, objects and actions suspended in space with no fixed relationship to one another. They appear in his mind’s eye as nouns freed from grammar and from their effects on one another. Their indeterminate configuration empties each image of any individual significance, fusing them into a single sensation whose meaning is, if not unknowable, then at least incommunicable.

In this sense, the play in the shed exemplifies Fredric Jameson’s description of postmodern culture as characterized by a schizophrenia-inducing “breakdown in the signifying chain” that links the real to the representational (26). It obscures the difference between reality and representation, subjecting all aspects of life to a universal aesthetic (or representational) logic. The narrator experiences something similar here. His ‘aesthetic’ mode of perception

149 imbues the space of the improvised theater with a social fluidity that mimics Jameson’s portrayal of the schizophrenic, blurring the line between the audience and the performers (26).

Standing in the same, small space with the performers affords the play’s audience the possibility of empathizing with the cold the actors must feel, but the ‘aesthetic’ nature of the experience allows the public, or at least the narrator, to register the performers’ exposure to the elements as “strange” rather than familiar (i.e., as an even more intense version of the cold everyone feels). Thus the feeling of closeness is cancelled out by a radical distance that aestheticizes and neutralizes what would otherwise be unavoidable evidence of the experience—and the suffering—of the other.

Jameson connects this kind of aesthetic experience to a “multinational” capitalist culture riddled with self-evident gaps between individual perception and the truth of an underlying reality. The effect of those gaps is not merely disorienting; it empties the individual’s point of view of its significance. The final consequence of this transformation is a generalized schizophrenia: the ego itself dissolves as the subject finds himself unable to distinguish between self and other, or between the material and the symbolic. This diagnosis prompts

Jameson to call for a new kind of representation—a “cognitive mapping”:

some as yet unimaginable new mode of representing [the world space of multinational

capital], in which we may again begin to grasp our positioning as individual and

collective subjects and regain a capacity to act and struggle which is at present

neutralized by our spatial as well as our social confusion. The political form of

, if there ever is any, will have as its vocation the and

projection of a global cognitive mapping, on a social as well as a spatial scale. (54)

The world of El trabajo is consistent with Jameson’s description of the culture of in that the problem of the limitations and unreliability of “the monadic ‘point of view’ of the world to which we are necessarily, as biological subjects, restricted” creates a great deal of

150 “social confusion” in the novel, too. However, an important difference situates the novel in a later capitalism than Jameson’s. Writing at a moment (1991) when the tide of the global consumer market was still rising, Jameson depicts the logic of the market as boundless and unrestrainable. (Despite his Marxist impulse to critique the deceitful superficiality of capitalist culture, he manages to do so only indirectly, by insinuating ironic distance: “Benjamin thought

[the aestheticization of reality] meant fascism, but we know it’s only fun” [x].) Accordingly,

Jameson suggests that the solution to postmodernism’s point-of-view problem must be an entirely new mode of representation, qualitatively different from language. By contrast, in El trabajo it is less certain that the shortcomings of narrative (i.e., its being unavoidably grounded in somebody’s perspective) are sufficient cause for abandoning the effort to narrate in favor of a new, fuller, cartography. In fact, as I will explain in the following section, the manner in which the novel frames its narrator’s personal point-of-view problem points to the dangers of using indeterminacy as an excuse to dismiss the meaning contained within linguistic and aesthetic systems.

The contrast between the positive emotional value that the memory of the play carries in the narrator’s mind, and the chilling, antisocial implications of the original experience begin to flesh out Sarlo’s suggestion that the inflationary effects of ascribing a universal moral value to cultural production is not just unhelpful, but actually harmful. The latter half of the novel considers how this view of the arts, particularly those which are nonverbal, can fuel an impossible dream of escaping the burden of interpretation. Understood as a space in which the subjective intent that motivates an action is liberated from the apparent value of its immediate effect, the realm of the arts lends those who think of themselves as artists dangerous freedom to distance themselves from the consequences of their actions.

For example, while the freedom Iram borrows under the sign of the arts may be harmless, the manager’s use of the “arts” as a moral category raises the specter of more

151 sinister implications. Perhaps this account of the timeless poetics of the market is merely an attempt to pass off his voyeurism and laziness as a meaningful contribution to the community.

Does he hire Diana because he is impressed with her training and her artistic sensibility, as he alleges, or is it because she demonstrates an extraordinary willingness to submit to his prurient gaze, preempting the typical euphemisms and games of the interview script and granting his desire to see her naked body before he gets around to hinting?

The answer might be obvious in another context, but in El trabajo, as in Nueve reinas, the text deliberately denies its consumer the luxury of context. The reader is subjected to a distorted social landscape in which the landmarks of guilt and innocence have been rearranged, giving him cause to second-guess his moral compass. To begin with, the sympathetic portrayal of the burlesque dancers and the emphasis on the cruelty and stigma they endure primes the reader to seek out the moral high ground of open-mindedness and an extreme version of sex positivity, casting objections to the sexual content of any “art” as prudish and reactionary. In the same way, repeated allusions to Vaslav Nijinsky’s L’Après-midi d’un faune, the now-classic ballet whose sexually explicit nature was the subject of much hand-wringing when it premiered in Paris in 1912, serve to frame the sexualized labor depicted in the novel within the long historical perspective that has so often turned so-called depraved trouble-makers and convention-breakers into visionary heroes.

Most of all, though, it is the willingness of the novel’s kind, socially-minded narrator to entertain the manager’s outlandish theory which complicates any instinctual disapproval of the manager’s apparent voyeurism. As the figure of the narrator gradually emerges from behind a mostly third-person narration, the reader comes to understand that the radical rationality and amorality of the society he depicts is in large part an effect of the narrator’s own efforts to avoid making subjective judgments. As the reader is made increasingly aware of his dependence on a narrator who is too cautious to do his job well, the focus of the novel begins

152 to shift from the question of whether the subjective utopia (mirage) of the cultural “solution” can do some good (providing relief from the psychic burdens of global consumer capitalism) to an exploration of the dangers and risks inherent in such a radically risk-avoidant strategy.

The turning point comes when tragedy strikes the community of the burlesque theater.

Having learned that her boyfriend is already married to another woman, Naanim ends her own life. Her unexpected violent death abruptly ends the “experiment” of the narrator’s literary crusade and introduces the detective story that will occupy the second half of the narrative.

The nature of the crime makes it impossible for any one party to bear full responsibility, and yet the violence must be explained. The resulting examination into the ways in which those who knew Naanim may have contributed to her suicide provides occasion for an exploration of the partial moral accountability of the subjects of global consumer capitalism’s system of organized irresponsibility. To what extent do individuals bear responsibility for the risks they misinterpreted or chose to ignore?

In his desire to celebrate and value the efforts of Diana and the other dancers, the narrator overlooks the content of their work and fails to consider its contextual meaning. To what extent does his omission implicate him in the continuation of the real social wrongs his artistic interventions do not right?

Above, Sarlo’s argument about “cultural inflation” was considered as a refutation of the logic of Iram’s claim regarding the intrinsic value of her “artistic” efforts. However, Sarlo’s criticism is not really directed at someone like Iram. While she blames the spread of the notion of art as remedy on the naiveté of the public and the misguided efforts of bureaucrats, she does not hold them accountable for its most pernicious effects. The real damage of “cultural inflation” for Sarlo—what impedes artistic production and creativity in general—is the sterilization of competition and debate. Her emphasis on the role of journalists and a community of professional cultural workers points the finger at someone more like the narrator

153 of El trabajo: a cultural worker who, in his eagerness to uplift the community, promotes artistic efforts as if they had an intrinsic moral value and neglects his responsibility to judge their effects. Such a deferral produces the mirage effect of a cultural “solution.” A strong version of this argument would make cultural workers like the narrator indirectly responsible for

“producing” the continued social violence which is the outcome of that non-solution.

The character tasked with bringing the guilty to justice in El trabajo ultimately arrives at just this conclusion. The discovery of the signed manuscript on Naanim’s bedside table immediately makes the narrator a suspect in the police investigation into her death. “The commissioner” is more interested in identifying a perpetrator than in sorting through the nuances of partial or indirect responsibility. In the end, the police decide to charge Naanim’s boyfriend, but the commissioner makes sure the narrator knows that he has just escaped a close call. “Si no lo encontrabamos a él, te veníamos a buscar a vos,” he explains (165). He goes on to warn the narrator not to ask any of the other dancers to perform his piece. “A ver si se mata,” he jokes.

The macabre suggestion that the narrator is the “author” of Naanim’s death is only a vague and indirect accusation, but it has a profound effect on the narrator. For him it confirms what he already fears: that his actions are capable of unleashing a violent chain reaction that is impossible to control or anticipate. The commissioner is not the first figure of authority to suggest that fictional representations of violence are as deserving of punishment as the real thing; the narrator’s previous project, a novel, already got him into trouble with the law when it was declared obscene and pulled from shelves. That case was decided by a judge who had recently been horrified to find his teenaged daughter reading the book in secret. Unable to undo her exposure to what he thought was inappropriate content, he punished the narrator instead.

154 The authorities in the novel may be unreasonable in holding the narrator accountable for the unforeseeable consequences of this artistic production—as if they did not recognize any difference between the idea of violence and the act itself—but the narrator’s reaction is just as unreasonable. Rather than question the judge or the commissioner, the narrator becomes convinced that his own judgment must be insufficient since he was unable to predict the judge’s reaction. Strangely, his reaction to the possibility that his work will be misinterpreted by others is not to explain or defend his intentions, but rather to surrender any interpretive claims whatsoever, radically distancing himself from the meaning of his creations.

The final chapter of the novel shows the narrator’s cowardly behavior in the presence of authority, suggesting that all along his extreme “caution” against prejudice and misinterpretation has been motivated more by selfishness and fear than by intellectual or artistic conviction. One evening, as he works the lights backstage at the new theater he has opened with Diana, he observes the commissioner in the audience. The officer’s presence makes him suddenly self-conscious. He has every reason to be startled; the commissioner has vaguely threatened to come see the show, hinting that he might create trouble for Diana.

However, instead of becoming concerned for his partner, he becomes distracted and preoccupied with his own vulnerability. As he contemplates the visibility of his own body (can the commissioner detect his presence in the darkness of the theater?), he also imagines his own body of work as it might appear to an outsider. The various elements of his creations assemble themselves before his mind’s eye, making him newly aware of the common themes that unite his oeuvre:

Nunca, ni al escribir el libreto ni al ver los ensayos o las funciones con público, se me

había ocurrido que el número pudiera tener alguna relación con mi novela, aunque esa

noche, con el comisario en el galpón, tomé conciencia de que, al menos en cierto

sentido, las dos historias eran parecidas y, sobre todo, coincidían en ser la

155 transcripción en palabras de ideas que antes, necesariamente, habían estado en lo más

profundo de mi imaginación y, por esa misma contiguidad, podía ocurrir que también el

número ofendiese a alguién del público y lo decidiera a denunciarme por obscenidad.

(267-68)

Through the eyes of the commissioner, the narrator experiences the unsettling “discovery” that his creative projects share a terrible, secret connection: him. In effect, the strange and sudden change in perspective transports him out of his ordinary routine—where he himself is the invisible central organizing principle of every component—and lets him glimpse his own role in a larger social order. Like the consumer who is suddenly caught up in the “sweatshop sublime” when he imagines the complex global operation it has taken to assemble his shirt or to bring him his cup of tea, the narrator is paradoxically overwhelmed by his own power, which he perceives as vast and unknowable.

The parallel highlights the similarities between the narrator’s experience of his social responsibility as a producer of symbolic goods, and that of the global consumer. Like the contemporary consumer, the cultural worker understands that he influences the production of the social order through his choices, his judgment, and his subjective interpretations. Each choice he makes carries risk—not just for himself, but for others, too.

Robbins argues that the consumer’s epiphany inevitably does not lead to action because the empowering aspects of the experience are balanced out by the consumer’s consciousness of his own complicity in each of the injustices he wishes to correct. He writes:

“[…]to glimpse even for a moment the unimaginable face of society as a whole is to go through a near-death experience in which the activist self dissolves” (116-17). No one who consumes is innocent; no one has the moral leverage to act.

For the narrator, too, the threat of becoming responsible for the untold acts of violence whose seeds may be contained in his art has a paralyzing effect. The prospect of discovering

156 that he is complicit in the violence of the social order to which he belongs leads him to shy away from judgment altogether—even from defending himself—because it is too terrifying to contemplate his potential guilt. He is so afraid of what others will read into his work that he looks upon his creations from the outside rather than as one who remembers creating them.

Even in this moment in which the potential reach of his artistic production seems to him enormous and threatening, the act of production itself remains unknowable. In his account, the ideas simply happened to “have been” in his mind (“habían estado en lo más profundo de mi imaginación”). Denying the significance of his own intention, he relinquishes ownership over the purpose and direction of his work and accepts only that strange, passive form of authorship unique to the consumer: power without control.

And yet, this denial gets him nowhere; it is impossible to escape the consumer’s burden of interpretation—and of choice. In fact, the narrator’s efforts to avoid making judgments—to find a position of neutrality, or invisibility—prove more harmful than anything else he does. In contrast to the elusive and terrifying responsibilities that the sighting of the commissioner evokes for the narrator, the immediate effects of his presence are decidedly pedestrian.

Distracted, the narrator loses track of time and misses the cue to dim the lights at the end of the show. Lost in the contemplation of the infinite indirect consequences of his actions, he neglects his direct responsibilities to his collaborator. His inattention leaves Diana exposed and vulnerable on the brightly lit stage as the show ends, transforming her from a captivating actress back into a woman standing naked before strangers. Among these is the commissioner, who has already demonstrated not only a callous and entitled attitude toward the dancers at the burlesque, but also a willful disregard for the difference between fiction and reality.

The error at the lighting box initiates a new cycle of paranoia and oversight, as the narrator’s paralyzing uncertainty about his own moral accountability for remote and indirect

157 outcomes prevents him from executing his real duties as a friend and a partner several more times before the night is over. Before the end of the evening, Diana will be brutally attacked— the commissioner, it seems, has finally made good on his threatening hints.

Thus the ripple effect of the missed signal spreads quickly, in ways both within the narrator’s control and beyond it. The narrator is not directly responsible for any of these events, and yet, it is still unforgivable that he misses so many chances to prevent them. Distracted by the abstract and the theoretical ways in which he himself might be responsible, (the thought of his unknowable consumer agency) he ignores the concrete cues that should have helped him understand the real danger.

He seems to finally understand his mistake in the final scene of the novel, when, seeing

Diana’s apartment for the first time as he carries her broken body home, he is startled by the difference between the reality of her home and his own image of it: “Esas pocas cosas, que por primera vez eran cosas y no las palabras con que Diana las nombraba cuando me contaba su vida, me hicieron sentir que no la vería nunca más—y así fue…” (296). With these words, for the first time he correctly anticipates what will happen instead of being blindsided by it. This insight about the fragility of his friendship—and perhaps, his friend’s mortality—occurs when he comes face to face with the finite, specific reality of Diana’s life. As the artifacts of his friend’s existence materialize before him, he is confronted with the insufficiency of his prior conception of them as purely literary and symbolic.

In a sense, then, the novel’s ending provides the moment of reckoning Sarlo demands: an end to the bubble of cultural inflation. Even if he still cannot verbalize it, the immense sense of loss the narrator connects to the sight of the apartment suggests that he finally intuits that his naïve faith in an ideal of the arts an “infinite” source of moral integrity and human dignity was deeply irresponsible. His compulsive need to aestheticize and theorize has actually endangered his friend, subjecting her to risks he would have recognized had he acknowledged

158 the imperfect, occasionally unpredictable practice of reality. Like Naanim, Diana cannot live in the theoretical, timeless realm of the aesthetic; she must negotiate the opportunities and risks that correspond to the specific context that is her destiny, messy and unfair as it is.

However, the narrator’s new mood of contrition is hardly more comforting than the oblivion and paranoia that it replaces. Even if his own guilt is becoming visible to him, there is reason to suspect that this new awareness has the same blinding effect as his former ignorance when it comes to understanding the complex interaction of direct and indirect causes that is truly responsible for the violence that plagues his consumer society.

The moment of the narrator’s awakening to his own culpability alarmingly echoes the commissioner’s suggestion that in representing Naanim’s suffering in the libretto, the narrator caused her death. In a similar way, the “realization” prompted by the narrator’s encounter with

Diana’s apartment erases the difference between the symbolic and the material. Her things, in becoming things, cease to be words; confronted with the undeniable truth of the signified, he dismisses the signifier as useless, taking the undeniable thing-ness of Diana’s possessions as evidence that he was wrong to think of them as words. Certainly he was wrong to think of them as words, or as only words—but the completeness of the reversal empties the words of any value, closing off the possibility of any reflection on the relationship between the truth of the thing and the truth of the sign. In much the same way, the novel’s obsessive exploration of the narrator’s hypothetical guilt leaves the direct, material causes of the violence depicted in the text unexamined. As in Nueve reinas, the most unsettling moment of the text is the resolution of its central questions. In both cases, the investigation into the indirect and partial social responsibility of the consumer arrives at a vision of “justice” too definitive, too sure of itself, to be quite satisfying. The reversal is too complete. The coherence of the film’s plot depends on the absolute incompatibility between two readings of the film’s events. (Just as the logic of the conspiracy against Marcos posits consumption as the only significant site of agency, the logic

159 of the film’s resolution depends on the total negation of any consumer agency whatsoever.)

Either the subject assumes full responsibility for his poor judgment as a consumer as it affects him, or else he bears no responsibility at all for the effects of his consumption.

Confronted with a similar choice between two conceptions of the degree to which he can be held accountable for his judgments and their consequences, the narrator of El trabajo also switches between extremes of total denial and full responsibility. Although he ultimately begins to appreciate the importance of trying to arrive at the truth even at the risk of being wrong, the contemplation of his own guilt is so distressing to him that he becomes fixated on his own errors in judgment, overlooking the difference between those failures and the deliberate deceit or direct violence carried out by other characters.

In both texts, a more complete justice is obstructed less by the material and political structures of global consumer capitalism than by the intellectual and epistemological challenges such an order presents. Chief among these is the difficulty of maintaining perspective in a global culture flooded with decontextualized information. Under these circumstances, the most pernicious obstacle to social justice and moral accountability is not the rise of consumption as a site of agency; nor is it the need to expose the “myth” of consumer agency. The texts studied here reveal a far more urgent problem: the lack of tolerance for uncertainty and imperfection. Though they are no more real in this moment than in others, these twin discomforts have become increasingly unavoidable in the era of global capitalism, driving ordinary consumers and artists alike to new lengths to avoid them. In order to do so, Bielinsky’s film is forced to make the real exercise of power completely invisible.

Jarkowski’s novel takes a subtler, more self-conscious route, but threatens to arrives at similar endpoint as the narrator reasserts a pre-Foucauldian primacy to the order of things.

Whether the power and responsibility attributed to the decisions of the consumer are infinite or nonexistent, the effect of both of these answers is to preclude any attempts to

160 theorize a power exercised through processes of consumption and production which are not necessarily analogous. While it would certainly be more helpful to see consumption as one of many sites of social agency, the 2001 economic crisis did not invite this kind of nuanced examination of the factors that brought it about. Because it was experienced as both a crisis (a change in the social order) and an awakening (a return to awareness of the social order), it seemed to call for reinterpretation. Perhaps because the call came with such a misleading urgency, the answers included extreme reinterpretations that reversed everything about the previous understanding—re-conceptualizations of power and responsibility so different that they were the same. Even so, at the very least the unlikely points of confluence between these reversals suggest one new addition to the list of exhausted binaries whose supposed opposition shields the ideology of market fundamentalism from critical examination: symbol and material, economy and culture, production and consumption, knowledge and power—and now, too, guilt and innocence.

Notes

1 For example, Eun-kyung Choi writes: “La película de Bienlinsky filmada en el 2000, pudo prever, como lo hizo Insomnio en 1985, lo que pasaría en la crisis económica de Argentina en 2001, donde la clase alta sacó su capital al extranjero con la divisa fija, lo cual es una de las razones que trajo la bancarrota del país. En el film de Bielinsky, la escena de la gente que no pudo sacar dinero de su propia cuenta bancaria se asemeja demasiado al día de la crisis económica en 2001 en que e congelaron los ahorros bancarios. Es casi una réplica anticipada” (Choi 237). See also: Gomez Morgaras (32).

2 See introduction.

3 For example, emblematic successes of the Movimiento Nacional de las Empresas Recuperadas (MNER), including the Hotel Bauer and the printing press Chilavert, were used on the weekends as community cultural centers, and even served as satellites for art exhibitions hosted at the city’s iconic Palais de Glace. See Chiavaralli.

4 The cultural activity was centered in the performing arts. Unlike in the publishing industry, where the economic depression led to significant reductions in the output and circulation of books and drove many magazines out of business, the difficult economic situation had a democratizing effect on the theater

161 scene in Buenos Aires. The storied Teatro Colón, for example, brought in pop artists to fill seats, and relocated the premieres of two operas to larger venues in order to stay afloat financially while reducing ticket prices to a more accessible level. See Goldberg.

5 The media buzz over book festivals was especially deceptive. Hortiguera and Rocha documents how the economic squeeze on Argentina’s middle class in the late 1990s reduced the size of the reading public, and as a result led publishers to scale back production.

6 As Marina Sitrin notes, the slogan “Piquete y cacerola, la lucha es una sola,” highlighted the new sympathy between these groups. The popular protests on December 19-20, 2001, and the general upheaval that accompanied the impending default greatly accelerated the growth of the unemployed workers’ movements. Before then, only a dozen factories had been repossessed by employees; that number approached 100 in the next year.

7 Marc Augé explains that the non-places of contemporary global capitalism (or “supermodernity,” in his terminology) are shaped by the rationalizing logics of the market (exchange, eternal present) rather than memory and tradition. Accordingly, subjects passing through non-places become anonymous and interchangeable. The notion of non-place resonates with Jarkowski’s depiction of Buenos Aires as a city without a name or a history. The center of Jarkowski’s non-Buenos Aires is the business district that is home to “the manager” and “the company” where Diana finds employment.

8 Kant describes the sublime in the essay “Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and the Sublime” (1764) and in the Critique of Judgment (1790). His most important contribution adjustment of 18th- century thought about the sublime is his emphasis on the oppositional feeling produced by the simultaneous activation of competing processes of understanding (practical and theoretical). As Slobodan Zunjic explains, “We experience the sublime when our imagination fails to comprehend the greatness of natural events by means of determinate concepts of the understanding but supplants this failure with a delight stemming from its ability to grasp these aspects of nature by virtue of an idea of reason” (n. pag). It is this tension between ways of knowing that connects moral and aesthetic judgments.

9 For Adorno, following Kant, the social function of art (i.e., the knowledge about society made available through aesthetic reasoning) is inextricable from its dialectical relationship to other processes of cognition (such as the rationality of “science”). The impossibility of explaining either within the logic of the reigning ideology, or without that logic, makes the aesthetic a place where the limits of ideology— that is, the universal—can be imagined. “By constantly admitting into the production of his work an element of negativity toward his own immediacy, the artist unconsciously obeys a social universal: In every successfully realized correction, watching over the artist’s shoulder is a collective subject that has yet to be realized. The categories of artistic objectivity are unitary with social emancipation when the object, on the basis of its own impulse, liberates itself from social convention and controls” (231).

10 Adorno writes: “Because the social content of art is not located externally to its principium individuationis but rather inheres in , which is itself a social reality, art’s social character is concealed and can only be grasped by its interpretation” (232).

162 Chapter 4

The critic as consumer: George Yúdice and Josefina Ludmer

With the understanding that the rise of a global consumer culture presents an opportunity—and an imperative—to reinvigorate the study of culture, this final chapter moves away from the fictions of the economic crisis to consider how cultural criticism can address the challenges to public discourse on contemporary culture that have come to light over the course of this study. The goal is to help refocus and advance the current discussion of consumer culture and cultural consumption within the field of Latin American cultural studies— and suggest how a clearer understanding of the consumer subject’s complicated and indirect form of agency could facilitate a more rigorous and relevant public conversation about the meaning and value of the arts.

In order to establish a framework for understanding the advantages and shortcomings of potential strategies for incorporating the significance of consumption into critical discourse on contemporary culture, I compare two recent efforts by widely-read and well-regarded Latin

Americanists to do just that: Josefina Ludmer’s Aquí América latina: una especulación (2010), and George Yúdice’s The Expediency of Culture (2003).

Dissatisfied with the current frameworks for understanding consumer culture, both of these projects seek to advance the critical conversation beyond outdated and reductive “pro or con” debates over the advantages and disadvantages of consumption as a mode of cultural expression. This attitude allows me to consider these works as manifestos (albeit sometimes reluctant ones)—calls for scholars in the humanities to rethink the parameters of cultural interpretation and communication in order to reinvigorate the public conversation about what culture means and why (or how) it matters. They demand innovative strategies for overcoming

163 the obstacles that face the consumer subject as he broaches what he understands to be paradoxically elusive and dangerous intellectual territories: the communal, the universal, and the normative. In the process, they confront a number of the obstacles considered in this dissertation: the complexity and scale of the global consumer’s “community”; the surfeit of decontextualized information, conflicting messages, and disorienting changes in scale and perspective that he is forced to navigate; his resulting aversion to interpretation, and his perpetual hunger for certainty. Yet they also attempt to conceive of the consumer’s values as potential intellectual strengths. Embracing the consumer subject’s independence, creativity, tolerance, and fierce loyalty to the principle of self-determination, they endeavor to deploy the same principles as tools to correct the assumptions, simplifications, and over-generalizations of the political culture of modern capitalism.

In pursuit of their common goal of rethinking the social value of modern cultural criticism, both texts confront the ways in which the agency of the global consumer encroaches upon the authority of the as a privileged interpreter of culture. Thus their efforts to disentangle our understanding of consumer culture from the myths surrounding the global consumer dictator pay special attention to theoretical models of cultural consumption, like de

Certeau’s notion of “poaching,” which ascribe significant “freedom” to the consumer (as reader, spectator, or “user” of culture) to engage with cultural products by “appropriating” them—that is, by ascribing meaning and value to them according to his own needs, desires, and circumstances.

Yet, while both authors stake their bids to reassert the authority of the critic as public intellectual on the insufficiency of “appropriation” as a model of cultural reception, they critique it on opposing grounds. Yúdice takes the more straightforward approach, building his case against the notion of the cultural consumer-dictator by calling attention to the public and social frameworks that shape the uses of culture. In doing so, he methodically exposes the limitations

164 and hypocrisies of an emancipatory model of consumption. And yet, even as he does, the invisible burdens attached to a consumer agency exercised only indirectly through the market continue to haunt The Expediency of Culture. Those burdens make their presence felt most acutely when they prevent the author from neatly sewing up the seams whose closure would transform his case studies into a broad diagnosis of global capitalist culture. Yúdice is forced into silence at these crucial moments by a claim to authority still bound up in a notion of truth as the removal of subjective biases. Though his intervention is explicitly conceived as an effort at dethroning the consumer dictator, he does not carry that gesture far enough to convincingly contest the general mechanism of aggregation and the sharp divide between objective and subjective forms of knowledge imposed by capitalist culture. Thus, his careful deference to

“objective” market outcomes as the definitive determinant of meaning often drives him to a kind of hyperobjectivity that neuters his most ambitious and consequential claims.

If Yúdice’s critique of consumption announces itself boldly, but ultimately shies away from the messiest problems that become visible under its bright lights, Ludmer’s approach follows the opposite course. Aquí América latina seems at first to eagerly embrace private consumption as a means of personal and even professional liberation. Its free-flowing, spontaneous-seeming and intimate portrait of the author’s own cultural consumption announces—indirectly—a new mode of public discourse suited to the culture of global capitalism: concepts and messages vie for visibility (rather than credibility or acceptance) as consumption launches them into circulation in the “public imagination.”

Yet between the lines of this “liberation,” a number of restrictions on consumer agency gradually become visible, too. Written across multiple “temporalities” and “territories,” Aquí

América latina is at once a gesture of radical transparency that attempts to lay bare all of the irredeemable messiness of cultural interpretation, and also an elaborately orchestrated declaration of the critic’s right to keep her own secrets, nurture hidden biases, and even

165 manipulate readers. The result is a partial, flawed, and indirect critique of consumer culture— but one that reflects the impact of the ongoing wave of crises of global consumer capitalism on the image of consumption as a form of freedom. Aquí América latina, written in Argentina and the US over a ten-year period spanning the peak and the aftermath of the financial crises suffered in both countries, complicates the picture of consumer agency we have seen so far, bringing into focus not only the costs of consumption, but also the costs of freedom itself as a supreme guiding principle. In contrast to Ludmer’s “post-crisis” book, it becomes possible to see in The Expediency of Culture the limitations of a “pre-crisis” criticism of consumer culture:

Yúdice, writing before the impact of the global financial crisis reached his institutional home base the US, can only push back against the myth of the consumer dictator by exposing the consumer’s freedom as bounded; hence, The Expediency of Culture leaves intact a version of that freedom that is smaller, and circumscribed, but no less an ideal.

The comparison that follows highlights the political and cultural “lessons” of the recent global financial crisis, with the ultimate goal of contributing to a fuller picture of the relationship between the epistemological crisis unleashed in the humanities by the rise of a monolithic global market system, and the economic crises that have plagued that system in the last decade and a half. My readings of Yúdice and Ludmer suggest that the crisis of the humanities in a sense foreshadows the economic crises that followed. Following the theoretical model of consumer agency to its final consequences for cultural consumption, the texts expose the gaps between the model and reality. Yet their efforts to resolve those inconsistencies while upholding the main tenets of the consumer model also anticipate the persistence of the broken model—and its perceived inevitability—even after the financial crises cast doubt on the consumer utopia promised by free market ideology.

The social function of the arts

166 Since the rise of the modern economic and political system in 18th-century Europe,

Western aesthetic philosophy has been dominated by the view that the value of the arts to society stems from their potential as an oppositional force, capable of counteracting the pressures imposed on society by a divisive and pitiless market. Expanding along the way to include challenging or balancing any politically dominant structure or institution, the kernels of this understanding of the arts, as oppositional, and also universal, would continue to bear fruit for generations of modern aesthetic philosophers, from Kant, to Hegel, and eventually, by way of Marx, to Adorno.

In one of the earliest articulations of the notion of aesthetic autonomy, Schiller locates the social relevance of poetry in its very irrelevance. He argues that the arts reintegrate the individual to his full, whole potential, serving as a point of contact with a ‘big picture’ that the market obscures with its ever-increasing division and specialization of labor. As he sees it, good art can restore the subject to his whole, god-given condition, healing the damaging alienation visited upon humanity by capitalism’s original sin:

With the isolation and fragmentation of our mental faculties, necessitated by the

expansion of knowledge and the division of labor, it is poetry almost alone that reunites

the separate faculties of the soul, that employs head and heart, shrewdness and

ingenuity, reason and imagination in a harmonious alliance, that so to speak restores

the whole person in us. (Schiller, quoted. in Woodmansee 72)1

Thus, from the very beginning, the modern understanding of the social value of artistic activity is simultaneously bound up in its presumed autonomy from a divisive, alienating capitalist market, and in the supposedly universal, unifying character of the aesthetic experience.

This operation also rests on a third assumption: that the modern capitalist subject is not already whole. The premise is so familiar that it seems obvious, but it is worth taking a moment to appreciate again its strange and paradoxical logic. Schiller’s argument posits a subject

167 alienated from parts of himself—and in particular, from those parts of himself in which his connection to the universal resides. Because the experience of living in a market society divides him unnaturally against himself and others, he yearns (even if he does not know it) to understand himself, and his fellow man, as part of a single, coherent system.

In other words, the principle of aesthetic autonomy rests on the idea that the modern capitalist subject cannot himself be whole because he cannot experience himself as a fully realized part of the true whole. Only by somehow extracting himself from the values of the market society—by entering the territory of the aesthetic—can the subject experience (or at least, begin to imagine experiencing) the whole of the social order, and in turn, his own potential wholeness.

Like the modern capitalist subject, the subject of global consumer capitalism finds life in the market society alienating. He lives his experiences of production (contribution to the social order) and consumption (taking away from that order) as unrelated processes; he is unable to reconcile his daily activities into a cohesive identity as part of a universally meaningful system. In the age of mass (national) consumption, the market expands to the point where its violent divisiveness becomes invisible, or is forgotten. In the age of global consumption, the market expands to the point where the subject learns to cherish his isolation, understanding it as the universal truth, and calling it a “right” or a “privilege” (freedom). (In a turn of events that would have been thoroughly confounded Schiller, he even begins to suspect the market of a unifying violence—of imposing homogeneity and conformity upon him.)

Skeptical (often with good reason) of efforts to convince and distract him, wary of hidden agendas and the symbolic violence of and ideology, doubting even the language of his own thoughts, and disoriented by conflicting experiences of time and space, he finds it difficult, and even dangerous, to think about his relationship to society in general or

168 universal terms. Instead, the consumer subject looks within, to his most private and primal desires, for an image of his own true and whole nature. It is in acting out those desires—as a consumer—that he feels most whole.

And so the purely symbolic (the aesthetic) no longer appears before him as the promise of salvation from the unnatural violence of the market society. The fall of Soviet communism and the rise of an essentially monolithic global capitalism signals to the global consumer the triumph of liberty over order, and truth over ideology, casting representation itself as an agent of corruption. The idea of the global market itself takes over as an infinitely better image of what is total and universal than any representation. Any image less complete becomes an undesirable compromise of the inner, unique self: a corruption of his innate potential wholeness.

These circumstances account for the generally dismal view of the consumer subject’s intellectual life, at least by traditional measures, which we have observed in the fictions considered in this dissertation. Moreover, they help to explain why the inclinations of an apparently “anti-intellectual” and conflict-avoidant consumer subject have proven disproportionately challenging to the pursuit of cultural knowledge. The technological and scientific advances that have accelerated the growth of global consumer capitalism have been quickly and for the most part painlessly integrated into the projects of the pure sciences. The same can be said for the social sciences, where any additional complications have been well compensated by the explosion of development that the recent “information revolution” has triggered in those fields. However, capitalizing on the new kinds of knowledge available in the global culture has been far less straightforward in the humanities. This is because many of the intellectual and social achievements of consumer capitalism have undermined the kinds of generalizations and claims to universality that theorists and scholars of culture—and especially the arts—are in the business of making. Indeed, the rise of the consumer subject has

169 unleashed a series of declarations of the definitive “crisis” of literature.2 This in itself is hardly evidence of the imminent collapse of literary production, or literary criticism, for that matter. We saw above that the notion of a cultural “crisis,” or the idea that the true essence of civilization is under threat by impending extinction, is a founding principle—or at least a perennial trope— of modern aesthetic theory.

What is fascinating about the current wave of terminal diagnoses of the arts is that it is not caused by a “crisis” as much as by the exhaustion of a crisis: the dissolution of modernity’s constitutive tension between economic and aesthetic or “cultural” systems of value. This collapse of ‘the economic’ and the ‘cultural’ gives rise to a very different problem from the one that concerned Adorno and the modern critics of consumer culture.The existential fear of critics under the regime of autonomous arts was that the arts would be overrun, or colonized, by the ideology of the market. This fear is no longer plausible in the eyes of a consumer subject for whom succumbing to deception (whether through deliberate manipulation at the hands of his self-interested peers, or simply as a result of the frailty of his own limited mind) seems a far more likely and devastating downfall than any fate arranged by the invisible hand of an all- encompassing, unbiased, and impartial global market. In fact, the entire raison d’être of modern cultural criticism—i.e., to understand and communicate what it means for a human to be “whole”—is, in the eyes of the consumer subject, a great transgression. As long as potential restoration (and ultimately, freedom) are understood to be situated within the private desires of the individual, the project of imagining and articulating an image of what humankind should aspire to can only be seen as a reprehensible violation of another’s inalienable right to arrive at his own interpretations and define his own values.

We have arrived at the root of the problem that is, it should now be clear, not merely another rehearsal of the perpetual social crisis of the arts, but a legitimate epistemological

170 crisis in the humanities. That is, the two functions once ascribed to culture, and by extension, overseen and shepherded by critics, now seem irreconcilably at odds with one another.

The union of these dual assumptions—the restorative effect of the aesthetic experience, and its universal significance—not only governed the notion of “the arts” as a coherent conceptual category for modern theorists, they also lent urgency and public significance to normative judgments of aesthetic value. For Kant and his intellectual heirs (i.e., for Western aesthetic philosophy from the 19th century until very recently) aesthetic judgment was the crucial point of contact between the private experiences and desires of the individual subject and a shared, objective reality. Kant posits that aesthetic judgments are unique in that even while remaining ensconced in the realm of opinion (impossible to prove), they carry with them an unrealizable intent to convince (they demand universal recognition).3

The global consumer culture, with its cult to the innate wholeness of the consumer’s desire, deprives the aesthetic of this special double status and empties critical debates of their political and social potency. Criticism of consumer culture can no longer aspire to teach us what we should find beautiful, or moving, or valuable in any way for that matter. The rise of the consumer subject finalizes the messy divorce of subjective beauty from enforceable, undeniable brawn, forcing any work of cultural criticism to choose sides.

Both Yúdice and Ludmer take this scission of political and aesthetic value as their point of departure. Even if they never identify their respective choices explicitly, it is perfectly clear to their readers which camps they have chosen. The Expediency of Culture, with its appreciative nod toward the social sciences, has found a (mostly) warm homecoming among devoted practitioners of the recent tradition of U.S. cultural studies—scholars who, like Yúdice, are eager to cleanse the legacy of literary scholarship of the elitist, ethnocentric stains of aestheticism and formalism with progressively-minded analysis of the politics of culture.

Ludmer’s book, in turn, has generated interest and debate among scholarly audiences

171 interested, as Sandra Contreras puts it, in continuing to think about contemporary literature “en términos de valor” (9).4

Yet, in spite of occupying evidently clear-cut positions within the broader arena of Latin

American cultural criticism, neither author is willing to settle for half of the resources critics once enjoyed. In the next two sections, I trace how both narratives forge paths away from their respective initial positions, feeling their way toward a public debate over the meaning and value of culture with restored significance—or toward a new conversation altogether.

The Expediency of Culture

Yúdice finds in the obsolescence of aesthetic autonomy an opportunity to raise the stakes of debates over culture by erasing the difference between “the arts” and other public forums where actors with diverse interests negotiate over what is meaningful and valuable (e.g. politics, education, etc.). In essence, his argument inThe Expediency of Culture is that culture has become a form of power; its value in contemporary society can best be understood by measuring what it accomplishes. Foregrounding the institutional context of cultural and artistic practices over interpretations derived from the formal “content” of those practices, Yúdice presents an iteration of an existing cultural-studies formula—replacing aesthetic judgments with the evaluation of “cultural politics”—that is less unprecedented in its objectives and assumptions than in its apparent willingness to make those assumptions explicit. Indeed, as

Caren Irr observes, the expediency framework achieves its expansion of the significance of cultural criticism, paradoxically, at the risk of “demot[ing] humanists (and literary critics in particular) to the status of handmaidens of social scientific empiricism” (606). Certainly,

Yúdice’s approach borrows heavily from methods developed in the social sciences, and in sociology in particular. Yet rather than see the expediency model as a capitulation to cultural studies’ rival disciplines, it is perhaps more illuminating to consider how it responds to

172 problems that plague any inquiry into subjective forms of knowledge in the era of global consumer capitalism.

If consumer capitalism looks to culture primarily as a vehicle for self-expression (i.e., a forum for the expression of the preexisting social needs of its users), then Yúdice’s treatment of culture as a resource allows him to open up the consumer’s private relationship to culture, recognizing that desire itself has public and universally recognizable components. Emphasis on the significance of context makes it possible for Yúdice to contest the premise of the consumer’s “black box world,”—and with it, the neoliberal cult to freedom—by bringing the processes of valuation at work within the individual consumer’s use of culture out into the sphere of the objectively “knowable.” In Yúdice’s model, every instance of cultural contact, regardless of whether it constitutes “expression” or “reception” of meaning in traditional terms, occurs within a particular historical, social, and institutional context—what he calls a “field of forces”—that shapes the use of culture in visible and predictable ways. In other words, if the global consumer subject insists that the meaning of cultural objects themselves is too

“subjective” to pin down, then Yúdice’s answer is to make the act of consumption itself the focus of his research.

Not unlike Bourdieu’s analysis of fields of cultural production, Yúdice’s readings of cultural contexts bring the messages conveyed through artistic practices into focus by giving precedence to their social function. His interpretations of meaning derive authority through the integration of a breadth of diverse perspectives, applying a kind of wide angle lens to the specific cultural site considered in each subsequent case study. Accordingly, The Expediency of Culture expands the object of cultural criticism by recognizing not just texts, but also local consumers’ interpretations and “uses” of the arts as position-takings in a political struggle for recognition. The intended result is a comprehensive image of the totality of one cultural context—a portrait of the conditions of production and reception in a given arena.

173 Once constructed, these “maps” of cultural meanings allow Yúdice to assemble interpretations with a legitimate claim to universality within the paradigm of consumer culture.

Focusing on the social and relational components of a performative culture allows him to attribute relatively stable meanings to cultural practices within fixed, local sites of consumption through a kind of “market analysis.” Thus, Yúdice treats the paradigm of a users’ culture as an opportunity to reestablish the authority of the critic through the construction of a new kind of critical “outside.” Since meaning is specific to local sites of reception, the critic can intervene as an impartial, objective—and, once more, a privileged interpreter.

For instance, in Chapter Four Yúdice takes on the case of the rise of “funk culture” in

Rio in the mid-1990s, drawing on historical and political context to explain how a group of young fans of U.S. black music who turned to that music in search of reprieve from their nation’s racial tensions came to be reviled as dangerous troublemakers. The argument is roughly this: foreign funk music held special appeal for Rio’s young, black, poor residents at a moment (following the ratification of Brazil’s new constitution in 1988) when they felt especially alienated from national politics. This reading of funk culture is characterized by remarkable restraint in the sense that Yúdice chooses not to denounce, in terms of political expediency, the desire of Rio’s funkeiros to “opt out” of the national political conversation. He even makes a point of defending the funkeiros’ appropriation (and even, he acknowledges, their frequent outright piracy) of the intellectual property of often-exploited black artists in the US. Forgoing the opportunity to pounce on this apparent hypocrisy, Yúdice declines to participate in the game of progressivist oneupmanship into which less thoughtful contemporary criticism has been known to devolve.

Giving up that kind of political judgment, Yúdice works instead to construct a “neutral” or “objective” image of local meaning. This means of seeking the “universal” within the local yields two distinct advantages over the former. First, it allows Yúdice to illuminate locally

174 specific meanings within cultural texts that circulate globally. Moreover, that solution paves the way for an argument with more significant theoretical implications. As I suggested above, one of the most important contributions of The Expediency of Culture is its sustained critical examination of “freedom” as a cultural value. Yúdice’s consistent effort to explore the local, social function of claims of freedom and emancipation from a disinterested critical “outside” repeatedly highlights the neoliberal ideology inherent in the view that the diverse meanings ascribed to culture by its users are a pure expression of individual freedom. In this sense,

Yúdice’s opening-up of the private act of consumption is an important departure from the branch of cultural theory (in Yúdice’s view, “extreme”) that posits consumption as a private expression of agency and potential resistance (i.e., de Certeau’s notion of “poaching”). For

Yúdice, such models “[fail] to give sufficient attention to the negotiated character of reception, which is never squarely in the hands of any one person or group” (128).

Whereas the crisis in the study of culture has largely been understood a kind of impasse between two equally-matched, deeply flawed approaches—the blunt force of Bourdieu’s camp vs. the ethnocentrism and myopia of Adorno’s legacy—Yúdice’s comparative, context-heavy approach calls attention to the way both approaches are limited by their inability to reconcile local forms of meaning with the universal.5 The sheer scope of The Expediency of Culture—its collected case studies span decades and reach across the Americas, incorporating sites both rural and urban, as well as mainstream and marginal, into the framework of expediency— already challenges the model of cultural politics Adorno develops in Aesthetic Theory. As many critics of Adorno have pointed out, his sophisticated rescue of the emancipatory potential of aesthetic formalism depends on an assumed universal trajectory of artistic progress; Adorno’s model of the interaction between the artist’s creative innovation and a preexisting, historically determined artistic “material” fails the “globalization test,” so to speak, because it has no way of accounting for the simultaneous evolution of diverse artistic traditions around the world.6

175 Therefore it is not surprising that Yúdice consciously departs from Adorno’s strategy for reading political value into the aesthetic by denying cultural practices the special standing afforded them by Adorno and his followers as “heuristic devices through which the critic gains a knowledge of social reality otherwise unavailable” (130).

Yet Yúdice’s attention to the interaction between global and local simultaneously serves to mitigate the “reductionism” of sociological interpretations of culture. His comparative approach is explicitly conceived as a solution to the “ethnocentric” or universalizing implications of Bourdieu’s market-friendly notion of the cultural field with a comparative approach. While Yúdice acknowledges the value of the cultural field model in making visible the biases concealed within scholarly views as a result of the given “force fields” in which those scholars practice, he contests the idea that an analysis which purports to consider only those meanings recognizable within a local field of cultural production can produce a legitimately ‘universal’ perspective. To this end, he intervenes in an ongoing meta-critical debate over the application of US-centric racial paradigms to the Brazilian context. While he concedes that “Bourdieu and Wacquant are correct in pointing out that US scholars are permeated by views that emanate from the specific force field of US social relations,” he notes that the authors’ attempt to privilege the local context fails to question the “myth of Brazilian

‘racial democracy’” which has itself been recognized as problematic in Brazilian scholarship since at least the 1940s (81-2).

Thus Yúdice’s contradictory goal is always to have distance—a total, birds-eye view of the cultural site as market—while at the same time having a privileged and expert knowledge of each element within that site. In the end, Yúdice manages this feat of balancing distance and familiarity to produce an authoritative portrait of the marketplace of cultural messages in a given context astonishingly often, especially given the considerable diversity of sites of consumption he analyzes over the course of the book.

176 But even when he pulls it off, his analysis never manages to fully extricate itself from the complicated problem of defining the site. Essentially, Yúdice’s “patches” the FCP model by stipulating that the boundaries of the sites of consumption he studies should never be imagined as fixed, or as fully knowable. However, this attention to the availability of specifically local positions in relation to a global horizon of possibilities turns what is in Bourdieu’s model a peripheral awareness of the multiple, overlapping structure of the cultural field into a constant presence in The Expediency of Culture.7 Yúdice never loses sight of the infinite possible combinations of fields—nor of the effectively arbitrary nature of the parameters by which he defines his sites.

The unwieldiness of this problem in The Expediency of Culture is the downside or

“cost” of Yúdice’s adjustment to the cultural field model. Yúdice’s comparative framework makes him aware of the problem of the performative and structural components of his own argument, but prevents him from addressing the problem. Indeed, Yúdice tries to deal with the problem of his own ‘performance’ by reminding his readers that he is aware of the problem.

(See above: “I, myself, of course, cannot pretend to be free of that force”). The strategy of transparency makes perfect sense, and Yúdice is hardly being unreasonable in asking his readers to forgive him for writing and thinking from the limited perspective of a single human being. The only problem, then, is that Yúdice is apparently unwilling to extend himself the same courtesy.

In The Expediency of Culture, everything has to be qualified and justified. Yúdice scarcely allows himself any leeway for subjective judgment even when it comes to choosing to research topics that interest him. He goes to great lengths to justify his interventions, framing them as

“objectively” necessary clarifications of clearly-delineated, preexisting disputes over meaning.

In this, despite the will to transparency Yúdice professes elsewhere, he consistently camouflages his own choices behind a register of hyperobjectivity. Thus, in the chapter on

177 funk, Yúdice begins with a direct encounter with “everyday” culture (the lyrics of two sambas), but moves systematically away from that object as he develops his argument. First, he transitions smoothly from the artistic arena (the artist’s interpretation of his own work), to the broader domain of (a documentary rife with clichés about samba) until finally alighting in the familiar realm of academic criticism, where a neat conflict in existing interpretations provides objective documentation of the need for another opinion.

There is no fault inherent in this structure; in fact it is often successful. It is noteworthy only because Yúdice’s dependence on it over the course of the book gradually paints the picture of a compulsion to demonstrate that his interpretations are both welcome and necessary—a compulsion that inevitably draws Yúdice farther away from the “everyday” uses of culture, and deeper into an academic-critical labyrinth of commentary upon commentary.

Indeed, he often takes this gesture to the extreme, obfuscating his own points by burying them in layers of remove from the fundamental issue. One particularly knotted example of this phenomenon is the framing device he uses to set up his discussion of localized cultural expectations in his second chapter, “The Social Imperative to Perform.” The point of departure for the chapter is the author’s own reaction of surprise to his audience’s reaction to a series of talks he had given in Brazil. Yúdice’s presentation included footage of Donna Haraway poking fun at racial stereotypes in a lecture for a US audience; Yúdice’s Brazilian listeners did not understand why Haraway’s talk made her own listeners laugh. Yúdice is ultimately interested in how Haraway relies on affective logic to win over her listeners; rather than “prove” her case by means of strict argumentation, she relies on implication, association, and “postmodern finger flexing”—to communicate with an audience she has invited to join her in a “pact” sealed with

“ritual irony” (42). The discussion of Haraway’s lecture and its reception serves to document to the performative aspects of contemporary cultural scholarship.

178 In the chapter that follows, Yúdice explains the mystery of the laughter not to his Brazilian listeners, of course, but to a third audience—readers of The Expediency of Culture. Why, then does he add a seemingly superfluous additional layer of audiences and speakers what is already an unwieldy meta-commentary? The analysis of Haraway’s talk requires a multi-page detour to explain Haraway’s own argument in light of her own implied audiences (“at least two”) and the implied audiences of the source material she critiques. During all this, Yúdice’s own reader might be forgiven for having forgotten altogether about the frame of the Brazil talks, especially since all we know about that subplot is that Yúdice was “surprised by [his] audience […] in the discussion period” following his talk; we are already several layers (and several authors) deep in the problem of performativity before we learn what the surprise was.

Certainly it is too late to elaborate a frame for the sake of introducing the subject. However,

Yúdice’s evocation of the “puzzlement” of his Brazilian audience serves a different purpose: it justifies the author’s intervention. The point is that Yúdice is authorized to explain how

Haraway’s lecture works. Even though his authority is derived from his status as outsider, he is also not just an outsider, one more voice piling on an arbitrary opinion; he offers answers not out of arrogance, but because he has been asked.

But the endorsement of his authority comes at a cost. I have taken the time to reproduce the steps of Yúdice’s argument here in detail because this moment in particular illustrates succinctly what might be thought of as the tragedy of The Expediency of Culture. That is, that the same conscientious and relentlessly thorough comparative analysis that gives the text its considerable analytical rigor and depth also limits its power to convey the significance of its findings. Even as Yúdice’s sensitivity to the dynamics of the cultural field generates remarkable insight into the cultural politics of criticism, it also surfaces intermittently as a crippling self- awareness that drives Yúdice to dilute his observations and muddle his claims with excessive justifications. And so, although his case studies are nothing short of exhaustive, the shadow of

179 those other possible fields haunts them, in a way that tends to become exhausting, as he tries to carefully scrub away all traces of his own subjective bias (or the local context from which his analysis originates).

The problem of Yúdice’s own performance is most pronounced when he makes general claims. From the opening paragraph, Yúdice’s justifications of his thesis point to a persistent slippage in the text between the broad claim that the object (culture) has suffered an important transformation, and a very different claim, which locates the transformation in the ways in which that object is, or can be, studied.

I argue in this book that the role of culture has expanded in an unprecedented way into

the political and economic at the same time that conventional notions of culture largely

have been emptied out. I do not focus on the content of culture—that is, the model of

uplift (following Schiller or Arnold) or distinction (following Bourdieu) that it offered in its

traditional acceptations, or more recently its anthropologization as a whole way of life

(Williams), according to which it is recognized that everyone’s culture has value. Instead

I approach the question of culture in our period, characterized as one of accelerated

globalization, as a resource (9 - emphasis in original).

In these introductory remarks, what stands out is the intimate, but ambiguous connection

Yúdice establishes between the new “role of culture” and the “emptying out” (i.e., ) of a series of prior conceptions of culture’s social function or value. Yúdice is only willing to state explicitly that the two phenomena are contemporaneous. Yet the phrasing of the sentence makes “at the same time” into a pivot point, implying a degree of tension between these two phenomena. Does the opposition merely echo the respective movements of a rising notion of cultural “expediency” and the list of receding “conventional” models that follows? Is it only natural that the new understanding of culture pushes out old ones? Or is the contrast more significant, suggesting that a paradox is at work? Are we meant to marvel that a

180 (single) concept—culture—could be both growing and shrinking? The images of expansion and emptying refuse to converge or diverge; they simply exist uncomfortably next to one another, as the narrative rushes past them, anxiously fielding several anticipated objections. Yúdice continues:

Allow me to bracket for the moment the requisite reference to Heidegger’s discussion

of resource as standing reserve (Bestand) and to the myriad discussions of

globalization. I will return to these questions, but the point I would like to stress at the

outset is that culture is increasingly wielded as a resource for both sociopolitical and

economic amelioration (…). It could be argued that culture has simply become a pretext

for sociopolitical amelioration and economic growth, but even if that were the case, the

proliferation of such arguments, in those fora provided by local culture and

development projects as well as by UNESCO, the World Bank, and the so-called

globalized civil society of international foundations and NGOs, has operated a

transformation in what we understand by the notion of culture and what we do in its

name (9-10).

By the end of this first breathless paragraph, Yúdice’s reader knows a great deal more about the claims Yúdice is not making than the claim he is making. Yúdice has already qualified and excused his thesis in at least six ways before making any effort to resolve any of the uncertainties he left open already. The effort to clarify and refine the scope of his proposed model is not in itself surprising; what is remarkable is the way these defensive limitations precede and upstage the effort to explain it.

And so, while Yúdice does go on in the following chapters to enumerate many more precise claims about the new era of culture he posits, throughout the book he remains so tentative in asserting his thesis⁠ that Gregory Lobo expresses skepticism as to whether Yúdice himself even believes it, or if the argument that contemporary culture can only really be

181 understood through the lens of expediency is only “one of those calculated exaggerations which seem to be the currency of the high-stakes business known as the humanities and social sciences” (Lobo 108).

Lobo’s suspicion is understandable. Throughout The Expediency of Culture, such disciplinary and institutional pressures often become perceptible at precisely the moment when

Yúdice makes broad claims about “culture” as a whole. Whenever the author promises to extract the general from the particular, the narrative falters, and the argument is interrupted by hesitation and disclaimer. The text oscillates between the objective register and excessive self- awareness without ever bringing the two together. (“Culture has been emptied out…”; “I do not focus…”). It is as if Yúdice were repeatedly bracing himself to launch into the territory of the unknown, only to change his mind at the last minute; he knows exactly what kind of subjective act of generalization (Ludmer would say speculation) is expected of him, and yet he is so uncomfortable with the prospect of making such a claim that he retreats, as in the passage cited above, to the safe, narrow scope of personal opinion.

The turn to the first person in these moments offers an important clue as to the source of the hesitation. The problem is not exactly that Yúdice does not believe his own thesis; in a much broader sense, he does not seem to really believe in the possibility of this kind of thesis.

His writing reflects a deep discomfort with the prospect of assessing what other people are doing with culture. And that discomfort is the result of the rise of a model of culture that ascribes agency to consumers—thus displacing the autonomous critic from his role as a kind of cultural midwife, who prepared the work of artists for consumption by a general public.

Once the reader becomes aware of it, Yúdice’s barely-concealed unease makes its bothersome presence known everywhere—even, puzzlingly, where his argument is otherwise tight and compelling. This is what happens at the end of the chapter on funk culture discussed above, where the very completeness of Yúdice’s analysis seems to paint him into a corner. Left

182 with few remaining open-ended questions with which to make a graceful exit, he pivots abruptly to a new type of concern, noting that “[f]unkeiros do not need the cultural critic to tell them how their social reality is structured; they know it quite well and make use of that knowledge to further their own ends…” (130).

It is highly unlikely that at any point in the process of researching or writing “The

Funkification of Rio,” Yúdice imagined Brazilian teenagers as his primary audience. This staged confrontation between the critic and his own irrelevance within the cultural site that is the object of his study stands in for a different dilemma that is more difficult to articulate. The real problem is not the critic’s relationship to the consumer of culture, but rather, the limitations on what criticism can say at all in the era of consumer subjectivity—that is, without falling into bland reductionism or the empty heroism of an outdated Gramscian framework.

Neither of these possibilities appeals to Yúdice. In fact, he returns to the perspective of the funkeiro here not because he yearns for the funkeiro to identify with his interpretation of funk, but rather because he identifies with the figure of the funkeiro. The funkeiro’s desire to take refuge in an apolitical space apart echoes Yúdice’s own decision, announced a few paragraphs earlier, to “opt out” of critical debates over the political power of the cultural consumer, on the grounds that it “does not tell us very much about the larger institutional and transnational context of popular practices” (130). In other words, the critical discussions within which his findings might be recognized as meaningful contributions to the advancement of knowledge are, to Yúdice’s mind, too small.

This objection might seem like a strange departure, considering the sorts of anxieties I have highlighted so far. Where did this narrator come from? Yúdice has often found it difficult to stand behind any but the most minor expressions of opinion. Now, amid a dozen half- realized and indirect expressions of frustration with the irrelevance and insignificance of its own

183 argument, he is suddenly dismissing offhand several significant conversations and asserting his right to shape the conversation?

The transformation continues. When he interprets the meaning of funk songs, as in the passage cited above, he writes beautifully, allowing the sentiment of the lyrics to soar above innumerable almost-articulations of his own theses—as in this appreciative gloss on the funk hit “Dance”:

“[…T]here is no extension here of the emotion from the individual to a larger social

formation, such as a social movement or the nation. This funk song expresses, rather,

the desire to let go, to have the freedom to let go, which is continually denied whenever

the favelado or suburbano steps off the dance floor. The emotion, which is experienced

as rage in the act of dancing, is untapped for a “greater” social or political purpose”

(131).

Indeed, it is only when Yúdice speaks through the borrowed voice of the funkeiro that his words take on the full-throated conviction and passion they lack elsewhere.

Yúdice’s wistful recognition of the liberating purposelessness of the funkeiro’s experience of music and dance is perhaps unexpected, given that the attitude he ascribes to the funkeiro violates on a basic level the thesis of The Expediency of Culture. But this is precisely the source of the attraction: paradoxically, what fascinates Yúdice about funk culture is its self- proclaimed freedom from the empty political discourse that surrounds it. He staunchly defends the funkeiros’ use of “transnational culture and technology […] for their own purposes, which are clearly not political” (130 - emphasis added).

That funk music should express a desire to avoid, or reject, political discourse is by no means an obstacle to the operation of the critical combine by which cultural studies and the social sciences sort cultural practices into “progressive” and “conservative” values. And yet,

Yúdice goes out of his way, even breaking to some degree the codes of disciplinary protocol of

184 which he is usually so conscientious, to avoid rendering this final judgment.8 He portrays that judgment as if it were a betrayal of the users of funk culture, but a far more plausible victim is the author himself.

The meaning of all this becomes perceptible only if we recognize that this passage occurs at the moment in Yúdice’s argument when the conventions of genre dictate that the critic shake off his pose of neutral observer and objective (market) analyst: the conclusion. This final stage of the argument requires the writer to reclaim the authority of his critical voice in order to explain the significance of his findings. It is a delicate trick to pull off. As Yúdice notes,

“This [“evaluation”], of course, cannot be an innocent enterprise” (130). The comment betrays the narrator’s heightened preoccupation with the unspoken rules as he prepares to enter the tricky zone of the conclusion: Yúdice is clearly aware that in order to avoid becoming guilty of contaminating his hard-earned objectivity with an unseemly value judgment of the object (as if issued from on high), he must shift away from the site of his object (funk culture), to a new site—one where he is an active participant. That is, existing critical debates. But rather than complete the transition he has set up, Yúdice hesitates, finding excuses to prolong his stay in the outside. When he does leave the outside, he still does not to return to his own “site,” but instead speaks through the funkeiro.

The significance of the return to the funkeiro’s perspective at this moment is that the short-circuit in the argument (these questions that ask something like what they want to say, but not quite it…) is produced by a logical contradiction in “evaluating cultural politics.” Yúdice is clearly aware of how he could exit the article gracefully. However, in a rare moment of stubbornness, perhaps inspired by the funk songs he quotes, he refuses to complete the reductive gesture he knows is expected of him. In doing so, he calls attention (inadvertently, it seems) to the hollowness of what Robbins refers to as the “empty call for action,” so often used to smooth over the roughness Yúdice leaves exposed here.

185 Yúdice’s claim to authority is so inextricably linked to the ideal of objectivity (and, implicitly, to the consumer subject’s notion of personal freedom) that Yúdice is unable to break with it enough to make value judgments even when he is expected to. This extreme attachment to objectivity, or his “hyperobjectivity,” produces apparent inconsistencies in his argument where he attempts to explain what the purpose of his argument is. The operative word here is explain; the purpose is something he knows, but cannot convey. This accounts for the otherwise inexplicable resonance for him of a cultural phenomenon that looks a lot like aesthetic judgment.

What is interesting about these contradictions is that they arise from Yúdice trying so very hard to follow the “rules” of cultural studies (i.e., the study of cultural politics: the approach to cultural scholarship that is intertwined with the rise of global consumer capitalism.)

Earlier, we saw how Yúdice explicitly critiques some aspects of the relationship between neoliberalism and the US model of cultural studies (and its French progenitors). Yet, even though they are compelling, and even though they are by now quite familiar, those critiques have not exactly generated a lot of productive discussion about how to improve upon the current model of consumer-culture criticism. Hence it is actually Yúdice’s “accidental” critiques—those observable in the disruptions and contradictions that the messy divorce of politics and aesthetics imposes on his text—that have a better chance of sparking the interest and creativity of his audience of fellow scholars.

The disproportionate resonance of apparently unintentional communication in the global consumer culture is not lost on Josefina Ludmer. While Yúdice wages a losing battle against his readers’ anticipated objections, apparently unable to let himself imagine a universe in which his audience could recognize and value his subjective opinion, Ludmer addresses her text to a different, “post-crisis” public. Her implied reader is no less wary of subjective claims

186 than Yúdice is; however, life amid the fallout of the failures of the global market in the 2000s has Ludmer’s audience skeptical of the “objectivity” ascribed to the market as well.

Aquí América latina: una especulación

We have seen in The Expediency of Culture’s most effective moments a poignant illustration of how the impossibility of openly mourning the loss of the aesthetic transforms the act of speaking publicly about culture into a harrowing passage through a minefield. As we will see, in Aquí América latina Ludmer still does not mourn aesthetic autonomy, exactly, but she does link the unresolved epistemological crisis within the humanities explicitly to the aftermath of that loss. For Ludmer, the end of literature is the end of the possibility of disagreement and conflict over literary value:

“[…E]s el fin de las guerras y divisiones y oposiciones tradicionales entre formas nacionales

o cosmopolitas, formas del realismo o de la vanguardia, de la ‘literatura pura’ o la ‘literatura

social’ o comprometida, de la literatura rural y la urbana… es el fin de las luchas por el

poder en el interior de la literatura.” (153-54)

Yet even in the midst of this evocation of the proud militarisms of the past, quotation marks around the terms of the debates inflect Ludmer’s description with a slight condescension; the essay is pointedly not an expression of nostalgia or loss. Instead, Ludmer’s distance and skepticism convey her pose of authoritative mastery over those stilted battles and her liberation from the pretense and constraint of those ultimately unnatural rules of war.

Ludmer defines the freedom of her forward-looking postautonomous criticism not only in contrast to the structured critical discourse of the 19th- and mid-20th-century heyday of literary autonomy, but also against more recent forms of oppression. From the first sentence,

Ludmer’s exuberant and coy writing announces a deliberate and striking departure from the hyper-objective and jargon-dense academic prose that is one of the more unfortunate and

187 enduring legacies of the critical theory movement. In the introduction, Aquí América latina announces itself as an irrepressible release from the constraints of the genre. Ludmer’s style, at once self-assured and elliptical, is evocative of an avant-garde manifesto: “Supongamos que el mundo ha cambiado y que estamos en otra etapa de la nación, que es otra configuración del capitalismo y otra era en la historia de los imperios” (9). The combativeness of this opening statement is sustained throughout the brief text that follows, in which the author condenses the key features of the introduction to an academic monograph (hypothesis, explanation of methodology, historical and theoretical context, bibliography) into a series of fragmentary assertions regarding “el mundo,” “la nación,” and other similarly vast and vaguely defined categories. Evidently standing in for some forty pages of reference-dense argument and contextualization, Ludmer’s list of unqualified, unexplained statements offers only the exposed skeleton of that would-have-been introduction—the speculative kernel that remains after the conventions of argument and presentation—and all obvious signs of effort to convince—have been purged.

Recall that for Yúdice, the culture of expediency is associated closely, but ultimately imprecisely, with the failure of a series of imagined outsides, each rendered obsolete by the discovery of its limitations and its subsequent commodification. For Ludmer, however, the conditions of post-autonomy that govern contemporary culture arise from a single qualitative and irreversible change. Thus, in Ludmer’s “post-crisis” paradigm of “post-autonomous literature,” it no longer makes sense to try to restore the “poder crítico, emacipador y hasta subversivo” (154) of the aesthetic by rebuilding the virtual outside it represented in a new location.

She sketches out this shift in “Literaturas postautonomas.” That essay, first published on the author’s own website in 2006 and later included in Aquí América latina,9 sets the stage for the book by announcing as its point of departure the collapse of the dialectics of modernity

188 (culture, economy, reality, fiction) into a single “imaginación pública.” In Ludmer’s view, this shift signals unambiguously and definitively the end of the model of cultural power known as

“literature,” and calls for a new mode of cultural discourse. Contemporary “writings,”

[“escrituras”]—i.e., the kind of texts that perhaps would be literature, if they did not belong to a postliterary era—she asserts, “no admiten lecturas literarias” (149). That is, it is impossible to make arguments about whether or not they are “good”—because “todo depende de cómo se lea la literatura hoy o desde dónde se lea” (155).

Thus, while Yúdice turns to an “objective,” bird’s-eye perspective in search of control over his contribution to public discourse, only to his tongue tied by self-censorship, Ludmer takes control by inverting the consumer culture’s restrictions upon public meaning. She treats complete subjectivity as a guarantee of her freedom to disregard her readers’ expectations and interests.

The liberation that Ludmer claims for herself extends beyond the style of her writing to the scope of her claims. By the rules of Yúdice’s consumer culture, Ludmer’s choice to speak freely and subjectively ought to circumscribe her assertions within the private sphere of the individual subject; however, Ludmer makes no attempt to suppress her interest in the universal. In spite of her deliberately rebellious tone, Ludmer’s view of the overall social function of the arts is actually quite traditional, in a sense. Choosing as the parameters of her object categories so broad as to retain a semblance of universality even in the era of postautonomy (“temporalidades” and “territorios”), she grounds her project in a surprisingly modern understanding of cultural value as both subjective and universal. The difference is that rather than seek the universal, she makes it her point of departure. Her approach, she explains,

“parte de lo que nos toca a todos, algo común que nos iguala en tanto seres humanos” (11).

In other words, Ludmer suggests that the way to the public, or the universal, is through the private: “En el lugar de lo público se borra la separación entre el imaginario individual y el

189 social; la imaginación pública, en su movimiento, desprivatiza y cambia la experiencia privada.

Lo público es lo que está afuera y adentro: el secreto, la intimidad y la memoria se hacen públicas” (11, emphasis added).

The “Diario sabático” that makes up most of the first half of Aquí América latina presents itself as a personal notebook that Ludmer has edited and published; a private-public space where the author collects observations, reflections, and notes about a range of personal experiences loosely classified as “cultural.” In this sense she pushes postmodernity’s subversion of the high/low distinction past the point of incorporating television and popular music, to include also irreproducible acts of consumption like a hot chocolate shared with a longtime friend. Thus, the private, biological rhythms of her life in the city become the most obvious organizing thread of the diary: In the morning, she reads the newspaper; later she goes out, or meets with friends and acquaintances; at night she dedicates herself to “las ficciones nocturnas”: mostly novels, but also plays, movies, and TV shows circulating in Buenos Aires in the year 2000.

Her tone is erratic, enthusiastic, and cryptic, full of seemingly unprocessed and unfiltered emotional reactions. “¡Felicidad!” she exclaims frequently upon describing her encounters with friends and colleagues. These brief, semi-articulated outbursts imbue the text with a kind of carefree, frenetic energy that muddles the various experiences to which the author is responding into an amorphous cultural soup; it is unclear whether the emotional reaction of

“felicidad” is prompted by the sight of a familiar face, by a particular comment that has pleased

Ludmer, or sometimes even by the food she is consuming. The implication is that what is real, and eligible to be documented, is the author’s experience of consumption.

Throughout the text, the narrator’s impulses and emotions are what is tangible—Ludmer is always reminding us that it is her delight, or boredom, that determine the meaning of the culture she experiences and in turn, drive the direction of the narrative. Ludmer serves her own

190 needs first and foremost not only in her selection and presentation of her “corpus,” but also in the conceit of her arguments. She never justifies the relevance of her observations to her implied reader; in fact she never explicitly recognizes her writing as a matter of potential public interest at all, so that the fact of her book’s publication and circulation is always more or less present as a tension below the surface of the narrative.

So, while it is possible to extrapolate at least one sustained “thesis” from the diary, the

“argument” of the text is always presented as secondary to the private desires from which her public, scholarly efforts arise. What passes at first for a variation on the commonplace introductory trope of “how I came to notice this problem”--“Aquí la gente está mucho más ocupada que antes, ¿o es mi tiempo sabático y el ocio lento que engendra? Decido escribir un diario para explorar el tiempo” (26) –is, ten pages later, still (more so, even) a solution to a problem unique to the writer: “Qué otra cosa hacer para pasar el tiempo sabático que explorar el tiempo del 2000 in Buenos Aires?” (35). That is, the ideas introduced and developed over the course of the entries never fully leaves the nest of what Ludmer herself needs, either for personal reasons or as a result of the institutional context in which she finds herself.

In much the same way as she refuses to dispose of the “detachable hook” of the personal narrative that frames her research project, Ludmer leaves the final published version of the diary full of prominent markers of a multi-year process of editing and selection; many of the entries document multiple dates of writing, or include anachronistic comments and references to events that took place years after 2000. Because the author offers no narrative account of her activities after that time, these recurring features become distracting interruptions of the story of her sabbatical trip. They foreground the “invisible,” or unrepresentable, work that went into publishing Aquí América latina, suggesting that the writing process is not finished because it is impossible to finish. In this way, the visible remainders of the unknowable, infinitely complex interplay between a person and a persona, or between

191 personal and subjective thoughts and public forms of knowledge, become reminders of the secret influence of the private on the untraceable path by which meaning is “made public.”

“Speculation” is one of the guiding principles of Ludmer’s consumer criticism. A

“speculation” is not a product; it does not make a pretense to being finished, because it recognizes meaning as an always-ongoing, always somewhat-mysterious process—for all participants. As “speculation” separates the production of knowledge from conscious control over that process, it also collapses the distinct functions of writer and reader into a single action: looking.

Ludmer first defines the practice of “speculation” as a kind of mirroring or reflecting of what is seen. To this end, she calls attention to the latin root that the term shares with the

Spanish word espejo: “con el espejo y sus imágenes, dobles, simetrías, transparencias y reflejos” (9). The mirror metaphor allows the critical act to be simultaneously passive and active. Just like the consumer who becomes an active producer of the meaning of a cultural object, the speculator-critic looks for, sees, and creates meaning at the same time.

A second definition (this one drawing on the branch of the term’s etymological history which it shares with the English verb “to speculate”) emphasizes this point. It traces the same circular path between reception and creation (or consumption and production) in the opposite direction: “Y especular como verbo (del latin speculãri): pensar y teorizar (con y sin base real, todo podría ser una pura especulación). Y a la vez maquinar y calcular ganancias. Tiene un sentido moral ambivalente” (10). Here Ludmer renders the aggressive actions of “thinking” and

“theorizing” innocuous by inscribing them within a (potentially) imagined universe.

Thus, by the logic of “speculation,” consuming culture becomes indistinguishable from evaluating it or creating it; the critic becomes (as Bourdieu predicted) an artist herself.10 The advantage of this is that it affords Ludmer the privileges (or the freedom) of the poet to dismiss responsibility for the meanings ascribed to her words. She adopts the discourse of the artist

192 who embraces the critic’s disdain for artistic intent preemptively, arming herself against potential criticism or misappropriation.

It is through this framework of visibility that Ludmer is able to explain her own power as a critic (what Yúdice could never do). She describes appropriating the concept after a conversation with the novelist Martin Kohan. At the time of the meeting, Kohan had recently published a new novel which, because it was released as part of a popular series of historical fiction, enjoyed a much greater circulation than other books he had published previously with small, literary labels. Ludmer praises the novel by noting Kohan’s skill as a narrator (“ […] su manejo del tiempo es excelente” [53]). Kohan, in turn, dismisses the comments, dutifully keeping up his end of the rivalry between contemporary fiction and criticism. However, while he professes not to be interested in a discussion of why his book is good, he does readily credit critics with a significant role in the success of his work as literature:11

Pero si esa colección ya no era vista como parte de lo que de veras pasaba en la

literatura argentina, el libro podía tener plena circulación y, pese a eso, no tener

visibilidad. Por eso la mediación de la crítica resultó para mí absolutamente

fundamental. Por suerte, las lecturas críticas que recibí casi siempre lo primero que

hicieron fue despegarme de la moda de novelas históricas (María Esther Vázquez en La

Nación, Ariel Schettini en Los Inrockuptibles, Guillermo Saavedra en Trespuntos). (54)

That is, the value of criticism is its capacity to turn his work into “literature”—but not by explaining or otherwise opening up the work itself to a broader audience. Here, the fact of the judgment matters more than its content. In this way, the paradigm of “visibility” empties the category “literature” of the question of aesthetic value, and reinvents it as a market aware of its own status as a market (but not the market). Accordingly, the function of the modern critic’s normative aesthetic judgment is replaced by a performative one—a judgment that will be

193 evaluated on the basis of who speaks, or from where, rather than on the merits of the argument.

Thus Ludmer, like Yúdice, understands consumer culture as a framework that heightens the importance of performance in the construction of meaning. Yet where Yúdice aspires to speak as the market, bracketing his own scholarly or critical performance as a kind of unavoidable barrier to be minimized, Ludmer embraces performativity as the essence of her contribution. Eliminating altogether explanations, justifications, or any perceptible effort to convince, she works through the market, allowing her own preferences and observations to stand as complete units of meaning.

Ludmer signals her allegiance to this principle of performativity, or “visibility,” by scattering her prose with markers of her bias, subjectivity, and inadequate authority. Upon learning in the newspaper of the sudden death of the cult hero and folk icon Rodrigo in a highway accident, for example, she notes in the Diario that the news of his death is also, for her, the first news of his existence. Perhaps that unfamiliarity would be an obstacle to interpreting the cultural significance of singer’s career, and even of his death, but it is in no way an obstacle to appropriating the event in order to incorporate it into her study of the

“temporalities” of “aquí y ahora”: “Decido que este tipo de estallidos que cortan el tiempo […] son acontecimientos centrales del 2000 en Buenos Aires” (31 - emphasis added).

This is the ambivalence of “speculation”: on one hand, the incorporation of alternative modes of judgment (emotional, personal) expands the possibilities of critical judgment. It means activating the personal, drawing on preferences, tastes, and even biases (assumptions, ) that cannot quite be explained. But at the same time, it is a suspension of judgment. To speculate, Ludmer hints in the “Literaturas postautónomas” essay, is to accept that what is not known is not knowable: “no se sabe o no importa si [estas escrituras] son o no son literatura” (149).12

194 In this sense, at least, Ludmer’s “freedom,” seems to be rooted in a kind of irresponsibility. (In passing, it surfaces that Ludmer organizes the various forms of work along a virtual spectrum from slavery to art).13 Unlike the slave, who is forced to use his strength and skills in service of another’s will, the artist’s only project is to express his own (innate, whole, or

“inspired”) desire, recruiting whatever resources he pleases, regardless of their provenance, to serve his own purposes. The “art” of speculation, she explains, “toma ideas de todas partes y se apropia de lo que le sirve” (10).

However, Ludmer’s “speculation” is actually quite different from the willful ignorance of the consumer subject—most of all because it is not motivated by doubt and insecurity. On the contrary, it is through an almost absurd leap of faith that Ludmer restores the possibility of conviction to literary criticism.

Moreover, speculation does not always feel like a liberation. In fact, Ludmer and the other characters comment with remarkable frequency on the difficulty of communicating directly. For instance, Kohan introduces the idea of using a popular genre to “camouflage” his literary projects. In other encounters, Ludmer records her own impulse to “disguise” her true opinions and to justify her real interests with “alibis.”

In a marked departure from the principles of the consumer subject’s aesthetic utopia,14 the need to hold back from fully expressing value judgments is not motivated in this text by the desire to avoid conflict or disagreement. For example, there is the account of a conversation with a particular publisher whose projects Ludmer views as unworthy, where the author describes awkwardly avoiding the question of literary value. The delicacy is clearly not a matter of diplomacy, for when the publisher makes it known that Ludmer’s disdain would find welcome company with his own complicit disapproval, the author redoubles her efforts to

“repress” her own natural response (in her words, “ya bastante convencional en estos pagos”

[55]). Instead of accepting the invitation to complicity as a potential relief, Ludmer opts to pass

195 off her rejection of the fiction as a dismissal of the idea of judgment itself: “Pongámonos por encima de esas consideraciones ‘de gusto,’ le digo” (55).

The exchange captures Ludmer’s sense of being trapped in what she describes comically, but also seriously, as “una parodia del campo literario [de Bourdieu]” (87). The expansion of the market principle turns the meaning of every possible message into an exchange value assessed relationally. Now, the imaginary “Sistema Literario Argentino” bounded by Ludmer’s aquí y ahora catalogues not only the possible meanings of literary texts, but also any opinion that the critic might hold.

Ludmer’s careful navigation of the cliches (or “positions”) available to her in this encounter calls attention to the stifling effect of her hyperawareness of the anticipated reception of her words. She is as actively engaged with the “market” (or “field”) of possible positions, as she is with the immediate context(s) of her conversation (interpersonal, social, linguistic, etc.) and with the actual content of the discussion; each of these factors conditions the meaning of her words. So it is not out of fear of judgment that she holds back, but rather because she is aware that to confess to her conventional feelings would be to reveal her position in the cultural field, thus making her intentions visible and giving away her advantage as a negotiator by removing any chance of convincing her interlocutor that her needs are in fact his needs. In other words, because the image of the market has become the model for all kinds of interactions, it becomes hard to communicate not because the public will not understand, but because they will. In a society where every exchange takes place not just in

“the market,” but in multiple, overlapping markets, deception becomes the condition of possibility for persuasion.

Ludmer hints at this strategy in her third and final definition of speculation. To speculate, she says, is to operate under the cloak of secrecy, and with “un sentido moral ambivalente. En este libro especular sería pensar con imágenes y perseguir un fin secreto” (10). The ultimate

196 purpose, or meaning, of the book is secret—that is, invisible, but perhaps not unknown to the author herself. Thus, if the power of autonomous literature was rooted in battles, Ludmer ushers in the next phase of conflict: a warfare of spectacle, or a kind of terrorism, guided by the idea that power comes from visibility and not the strength of one’s argument. But visibility is not the same thing as transparency. Working through the market, it turns out, does not have to mean working cooperatively.

Ludmer accepts the mutual saturation of literature and market, but she distinguishes between participating in markets and accepting the role of the consumer, positioning herself as an advertiser. Throughout the diary, Ludmer’s performance of consumption borrows heavily from the techniques developed by advertisers over the history of consumer capitalism. The text avoids provable assertions, appealing instead to its readers on the grounds of pleasure, fantasy, emotion, and ultimately, a poetic logic that defies debate. So too, the meaning of its messages is dependent entirely on the context in which they appear; isolated from that context they simply do not make sense.

In these important ways, Ludmer’s “speculation” operates according to the principle that

Martin Davidson identifies as central to advertising practice in his history of the marketing industry—“that what you write isn’t necessarily what people read” (Davidson 148). That is, the one thing that is predictable about the consumer’s reading habits is that he will not be satisfied to interpret any message according to the intentions of the sender. The intent of the other (the suspected propagandist/advertiser…) is deliberately dismissed, or even subverted. If the consumer subject treats all cultural messages like commodities (self-contained potential fulfillments of never-ending appetite for expressing his identity, or his desire), then, in anticipation of this hostile audience, the writer can only hope to influence the way his words are used by making his meaning elusive, multiple, and secret.

197 It is in Ludmer’s account of her dialogues with other cultural actors that her diary is most effective as a portrait of the process by which public discourse on culture becomes meaningful. On these occasions, the format of the diary allows Ludmer to highlight for her readers the grammar of a performative criticism while still abiding by its rules. By recounting these conversations before a third party—the readers of her diary—can Ludmer let the secret intent of her previous performance unfold openly, affording readers an unobstructed view of a model of cultural discourse in which communication is a dynamic, partially-hidden, and indirect process. Therefore, even though the introduction of other speakers into Ludmer’s narrative produces restrictions on what can and cannot be said, the presence of these limitations on the narrator’s “freedom” is in fact a signal that her strategy is working. In Ludmer’s “post-crisis” text, freedom ceases to be the only recognizable objective. In fact, the failures of the diary as a mode of communication suggest that the over-abundance of “freedom” is itself a significant obstacle to communication.

In those moments when Ludmer’s is the only perspective that shapes the narrative, she enjoys an inherently complete, spontaneous authority over her subject matter. Her words conjure an experience of culture that is never less than whole, and never compromised, as in this description of Buenos Aires:

Sensación de vivir en la utopía realizada de la comunicación universal y de la

circulación universal de bienes. La ciudad está llena de locutorios y de negocios de

computación. La gente anda con los celulares en la mano. Buenos Aires ya tiene un

primer mundo interno en Puerto Madero, según el model global de la ‘ciudad creativa’,

basado en la idea de que la innovación cultural es un motor de crecimiento económico.

(25)

In Ludmer’s depiction of the global market society, “universality” is imagined as a state of intrinsic completeness. The global city may afford precedence to the desire of the individual,

198 but it renders unfulfilled want as inadequate or even logically invalid, so that the need that fuels the transformation of the ever-expanding market into an image of the universal can never be experienced directly, much less captured and expressed. Accordingly, even when the succession of thoughts that makes up the narrative of the diary wavers back and forth between ideas, the order established by previous thoughts remains unshaken. The text simply documents the passage from one state to the next, expanding into a list of possibilities whose relevance and truth cannot be unseated by any subsequent understanding. This “mirroring” of ideas that refuse to confront one another accelerates as the entry continues:

Sensación de que aquí hay otra temporalidad, otro código de tiempo. O que mi tiempo

sabático es otro tiempo. Es posible que la ilusión de que en Buenos Aires hay otro

tiempo provenga de mi posición en otro tiempo. La semana que viene parece ser el

futuro y el pasado tiene una densidad mayor que la del presente… (25)

In the second passage it becomes clearer that these uncontested assessments also lack the context required to imbue them with significance. There is no need to argue for the validity of a particular interpretation here, but there is also no possibility of argument. Without anything to push against, interpretations that might otherwise compete simply glide past one another.

The result is another kind of aesthetic utopia, without tension, without rise and fall; in short,without stakes. In this more extreme utopia, the ethos of tolerance reaches beyond the social (the avoidance of interpersonal conflicts) into the depths of intrapersonal space, where its quieting effect on rigorous intellectual work is even more pronounced.

In other words, just when Ludmer should, in theory, be most free to express her personal perspective, the text verges on incoherence. In these moments of pure freedom, Ludmer’s scattered, unpolished tone creates distance rather than intimacy. Indeed, when the reader has so little context to cling to in the first place, Ludmer’s lack of hand-holding begins to read less

199 as the oversight of a charmingly absentminded hostess, and more like a program of systematic disorientation.

Were the “Diario sabático” a traditional diary—that is, a found manuscript intended to be kept private and published at least without the author’s knowledge, if not against her wishes— then its periodic lapses into the less-than-rational and the impossible-to-follow might read as harmless, even intriguing features. In Ludmer’s text, however, their effect is the opposite. They become bothersome reminders that the narrative lacks such transparent sincerity. The diary’s

“inauthenticity” makes the reader uncomfortably aware of the inaccessibility of Ludmer’s thoughts and experiences. In this sense, then, the diary fails to live up to its name. The publicity stunt falls flat; the audience does not “buy” it. Yet, in the context of the author’s project of establishing a mode of critical discourse suited to a culture of consumers, the intermittent “failures” of the diary are themselves revealing. After all, if the premise of

“speculation,” like advertising, is that “todo depende de cómo se lea la literatura hoy o desde dónde se la lea,” then in theory it should not matter what Ludmer intends to communicate or not; what ought to count is what the reader chooses to make of her words (155). But instead,

Ludmer’s refusal to plainly state her motives makes her writing dangerous, and as a result, off- putting.

Ludmer’s secrecy can only matter if the consumer purports to privilege his own innate desire out of fear of exploitation and co-optation and not out of—well, desire. Thus, while

Ludmer begins by stating her intent to arrive at the public through the private, her text is actually most effective and provocative when it asserts, publicly, the right to privacy; this move is her most significant subversion of the myth of the consumer dictator. If it matters so much to the consumer what her intent is, then the consumer’s fantasy of dictatorship is exposed as, in part, disingenuous. The willful ignorance of the consumer subject allows him to act as if his own limitations are a source of freedom, slipping easily from “no se sabe” to “no importa.”

200 However, the the diary’s problematic opacity reframes that slippage in a way that highlights its obstruction of public cultural discourse, or the making-public of values. The consumer’s eagerness to forget any responsibilities that are partial, shared, or incomplete plays out in the diary not as a form of liberation—i.e., through the practice of an all-encompassing freedom of expression—but rather as an interruption in the circulation of meaning.

In this way the “marketing” strategy of the diary is both critical of the consumer subject and compassionate toward him. It recognizes that his pose of individualism is not a symptom of selfishness or moral decadence, as held by earlier generations of social commentators.

Rather, it is a rehearsal of collective expectations and anxieties—a reaction that is understandable, predictable, and even sympathetic, but not “natural” or “inevitable.” In a word, cultural. Recognizing the apparent “exhaustion” of debates and arguments over aesthetic value as a cultural-linguistic shift instead of a legitimate epistemological crisis (now that the crisis of neoliberal capitalism has exposed the limitations of consumer agency), the diary attempts to speak to its consumer-reader in the familiar language of advertising.

Speculation does not give up on the possibility of reason and argument—not when these methods are broadly construed as efforts to convince, anyway. Instead, it conceals its reasons and motives, hoping to more effectively promote them in the cultural marketplace of ideas through what amounts to a sophisticated advertising strategy: refusing to deliver to her readers a neatly packaged image of her overall agenda. Thus, while Ludmer might seem to be embracing the consumer’s cult to the self (“a mí me gustan…”), in fact the way her text works, when it works, is actually to dissolve the boundaries of the self. By illustrating the inconsistencies of private desire and the constraints imposed on that desire by the “field,” (i.e., the elaborate maneuvering required to communicate when meaning is determined relationally),

Ludmer reveals the over-importance of the single perspectives ascribed to individuals. True freedom, the diary suggests, is not the freedom imagined by the consumer subject—the

201 freedom to fully express the self—but rather, freedom from the performance of self demanded relentlessly by the market.

Conclusion

I have argued that The Expediency of Culture is limited in its efforts to demystify consumption and dethrone the consumer-dictator by its continued deference to the mechanism of aggregation. Despite his efforts to be precise and clear, Yúdice’s need to scrub all traces of subjectivity from his claims forces him to communicate indirectly, obscuring the significance of his analysis. In Aquí América latina, on the other hand, Ludmer embraces the mechanism of the market as part of the predetermined social circumstances that shape how ideas circulate in the public sphere—but this does not mean she internalizes the contradictions and limitations on the consumer’s agency. Claiming a different role for herself, she lets the contradictions in her perspective remain just as visible as the ideas she intends to “make public.” Her messy, impure performance of self is what situates her writing definitively after the financial crisis. In contrast to The Expediency of Culture, Aquí América latina makes it clear that the obstacles to public cultural discourse are obstacles to communication, shaped just as much by the anxieties of the consumer subject as a writer, as by the intellectual challenge of knowing what things mean. Whereas the complications of the global consumer culture drive

Yúdice off course—and even back toward an obsolete model of aesthetic autonomy—in search of ever-purer models of knowledge, Ludmer’s tolerance for a theory muddied by reality dares to imagine a world in which Yúdice’s dream of “letting go” could be realized not just in the safety of a favela dance floor, but in any here and now.

202 Notes

1 As Woodmansee notes, Schiller’s conception of aesthetic value was likely inspired by a “crisis” of his time—the collapse of the patronage system and the rise of a capitalist publishing industry in late-18th- century Germany. Schiller’s response to that crisis justified his own, relatively obscure work, against that of his popular rivals by arguing that truly “good” art could not be judged by the market’s popularity contest—a case advanced by poets such as Burger, whose work was readily embraced by “the people” (74-75).

2 While for most of the literary world, literature continues to be written, published, sold, read, taught, and discussed, more or less untroubled, within critical discourse, the end of “literature” is a commonplace assumption. This diagnosis serves as a point of departure (and even a condition of possibility) for interpretive gestures aimed at texts ranging from the “postfictional” movement of testimonio (classified as “antiliterary” or “extraliterary,” in John Beverly’s 1989 essay “The Margin at the Center: On Testimonio”) to Diamela Eltit’s antitestimonio. Although these two projects have been understood as ideologically opposed to one another, Eugenio Di Stefano sees both as examples of a sustained attack on the principle of aesthetic autonomy by leftist intellectuals in Latin America—a cultural context where “dismantling aesthetic autonomy becomes a site of intervention directed against capitalist ideology and state-sponsored terror” (465).

3 Kant explains in The Critique of the Power of Judgment that, although aesthetic judgments are not cognitive because they do not deal exclusively with those assertions which are objectively knowable, they do share with cognitive judgments an inherent claim to be ‘universally valid’ (Kant, qtd. in Skees 918). In Hannah Ginsborg’s gloss, this means that “someone who judges an object to be beautiful speaks… with a ‘universal voice’ claiming to represent not just her own attitude, but rather the attitude which everyone who perceives the object ought to take to it, whether or not they in fact do so” (329, emphasis in original).

4 The authors’ respective choices of terminology also reflect their allegiance to the assumptions taken for granted by a particular implied community of readers. Yúdice speaks broadly of “culture,” evoking an interdisciplinary, heterogenous grouping of practices unified by their intent to express the social and political values of their users. This, in spite of the fact that for the most part his objects of analysis fit squarely within a traditional modern conception of “the arts.” Ludmer, for her part, prefers to frame her intervention as a conversation about “literature” and “literary value,” even though her work draws on a diverse range of sources, including many objects (conversations, meals), that fall outside of the bounds of any traditional definition of that category.

5 Jane Gallop makes a similar observation about the “battle” over theory within literary studies in recent decades. However, she reminds readers of the overlooked common ground between theoretical and new historicist approaches in defense of the practice of close reading, not comparative cultural studies.

6 In some ways, the acceptance of an active understanding of consumption, a la Michel de Certeau, was in some ways only a slight variation on what Adorno had been saying all along. (The effort of reception was what set ‘true art’ apart from the opiates generated by the culture industry). But Adorno was unwilling to go so far as to imagine a “dictatorship” of the cultural consumer, one that could turn any input into an active, creative process. With the fall of the Berlin wall, down came the high/low divide, too, opening up a world (literally: globalization) of culture that could not be assessed within any one tradition or approach. Formalism could no longer aspire to universality, not any more than the extreme, utopian, conception of cultural consumption that gained traction in the 1980s and 1990s, could coexist with the idea of aesthetic value. As Raymond Geuss explains, “Concretely, the price Adorno pays for construing art as essentially a way in which a historically given society reflects on itself, either admiringly or critically, and for his commitment to the Hegelian principle of ‘internal criticism,’ is a difficulty in giving

203 any plausible account of the possibility of appreciating the art of other societies. […T]he historical story one must tell about progress and regress in order to have a proper understanding and appreciation of art […] must be one that leads up to us, by a series of steps that have a kind of retrospective inevitability” (310-311, emphasis in original).

7 Although Bourdieu’s critics accuse him of determinism, Bourdieu does take care to remind his readers that the precise interplay between the structure of the field and the strategies of individual actors can never be known. And so while he holds that “the most personal judgments it is possible to make of a work, even of one’s own work, are always collective judgments in the sense of position-takings referring to other position-takings through the intermediary of the objective relations between the positions of their authors within the field,” he qualifies that stance with this warning: “But one should beware of taking as the basis of all practice the strategies half-consciously elaborated in reference to a never more than partial consciousness of structures.” (133) In this way he leaves open a space that can account for the development of unique traditions.

8 Indeed, this “failure” to deliver a political judgment is the point on which Yúdice’s book has most frequently been criticized. For example, Jon Beasley-Murray portrays Yúdice’s focus on the social processes that give rise to meaning as a way of avoiding “assaying his own interpretation of the product itself” (2). In a similar vein, Fernando Rosenberg identifies this “problem” with The Expediency of Culture as a caveat to his general endorsement of Yúdice’s approach: […C]onsidering that Yúdice’s sympathies are clearly on the side of global social justice, the conclusions regarding the consequences of the expediency of culture in each case under scrutiny are often ambivalent, as if the author had not made up his mind yet regarding who takes the lion’s share in this state of affairs (334, emphasis added). What these commentators do not acknowledge is that this withholding of judgment is an integral component of the same methodological “innovations” they profess to admire in the work.

9 Unless otherwise noted, the citations included here refer to the version of the essay published in Aquí América latina.

10 Bourdieu notes: “It is significant that the progress of the field of restricted production towards autonomy is marked by an increasingly distinct tendency of criticism to devote itself to the task, not of producing the instruments of appropriation—the more imperatively demanded by a work the further it separates itself from the public— but of providing a ‘creative’ interpretation for the benefit of the ‘creators’” (116). Thus, as we will see later on, although Ludmer defines postautonomy as “el fin del ‘campo’ de Bourdieu […] porque se borran las identidades literarias, que también eran identidades políticas,” the “end” to which she refers is not the exhaustion of the “identities” or positions as classified by Bourdieu, but rather the fact of their having become visible (Ludmer 2010, 154). The visibility of the circumstances of both “production” and “consumption” of cultural meaning present a single challenge to the postautonomous literary critic. Eliminating the possibility of a critical outside—even as a virtual space or a pretext—they make the subjective nature of critical production problematic.

11 Regardless of the likelihood that Kohan’s remark is less than candid, its importance is confirmed by the enthusiasm with which Ludmer’s character receives it: “Adopto inmediatamente el concepto de visibilidad de Martín Kohan” (54).

12 In an earlier version of the essay, Ludmer’s dismissal of the universalizing pretense of aesthetic judgment is even more direct: “A mí me gustan y no me importa si son buenas o malas en tanto literatura” (Ludmer 2007, VIII).

13 She writes: “Imaginemos que en el trabajo de hoy (en la forma trabajo) están, virtual y potencialmente, todas las formas anteriores desde la esclavitud hasta el arte; que en la familia están todas las formas pasadas de familia; que en el imperialismo se incluyen todas las formas pasadas de familia; que en el

204 imperialismo se incluyen todas las formas de territorialización del imperio y todas las formas de lucha y resistencia” (116).

14 See chapter three for explanation of the aesthetic utopia in consumer culture.

205 Conclusion

The culture of global consumer capitalism assigns value to the thoughts and desires of the individual subject to an unprecedented degree. The global market bombards him with signs of his own importance. Wherever he goes, the flattering messages of advertisements strive to appeal to his particular interests and desires. The smallest of daily tasks can unfold into a relentless series of decisions with high social, moral, and political stakes. Already-mundane consumer technologies (cars, phones, laptops) cast cyborg-like powers as basic requirements of social existence. Meanwhile, the constant introduction of new gadgets and applications teaches the consumer to expect ever-expanding capabilities. His imagined future of an always- evolving capacity to create comes accompanied by the guarantee that he can never be finished with the unsettling task of making sense of himself—of understanding his own nature as homo faber. For the powers of consumption have not only social costs, but psychic costs too. The unmappable circulation of goods, texts, and information in the global market provides a constant reminder of the limited power of any consumer to understand the vast social order that governs his humble existence—let alone to predict or direct the shape of that order.

The disorienting experience of daily life in the global consumer economy is compounded by the emergence of a weakened neoliberal state and the rise of what Néstor García Canclini calls a “consumer citizenship,” as traditional forms of civic engagement and guaranteed democratic rights (from voting, to participation in debates, to expressions of patriotism) are supplanted by more and more opportunities to exercise “buying” power in the global market.

The result is a transformation of the culture of politics that relocates agency from production to consumption. The neoliberal miracle of aggregation turns the market into the sole executor of a direct, post-representational democracy where each transaction earns the consumer a turn to cast his ballot in the virtual forum of international politics. As Daniel Miller observes, the

206 contemporary political economy casts the global consumer subject as a dictator whose collective authority adjudicates on all matters. This virtual consumer dictatorship is especially compelling as a portrait of the political and cultural agency of consumers in that it captures the absolutism and single-mindedness imposed by a political culture that promises its subjects total autonomy to define their own values and make their own fates. However, the consumer dictator is destined to rule over a nation with a single inhabitant, because he acquires his unqualified “freedom” and control through a crisis of faith in representation that makes communication and collaboration difficult.

Politically, the consumer dictator disproportionately prefers consensus to compromise; he expects others to recognize his freedoms and reciprocates by honoring others’ values with tolerance. Economically, fulfillment means self-sufficiency; unmet needs are internalized as a humiliating reflection of his own inadequacy. Defined by his private-most desires, he nevertheless prefers to suppress them and deny himself rather than allow the absence of any desired object to make the shame of his wanting publicly visible. Consequentially, while good fortune makes him generous, creative, and exuberant, want, as well as doubt and fear, drive him into social isolation. He avoids responsibility; he buries his head in the sand, he embraces the inevitability of the status quo and calls ignorance bliss.

In times of economic prosperity, consumer agency has been imagined as the mechanism of utopian democracy; in more difficult periods, however, the same model of power is often

“revealed” as the operative principle of a dystopian society rife with selfishness, exploitation and inequality. The prominent place of consumption as a site of agency in these divergent diagnoses points to the remarkable tenacity of the idea that consumers wield supreme power.

The financial crisis that paralyzed Argentina’s economy in 2001 gave rise to a number of artistic responses that showcase the inflated significance of consumption—including depictions of dysfunctional work that perpetuate the visibility of consumption even as they call

207 attention to alternative models of agency. In the aftermath of the crisis (with almost a quarter of the workforce unemployed, and more underemployed or unpaid), work in all its forms—basic manual labor, as in Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad; migrant work in a globalized service industry, as in Adrián Caetano’s Bolivia; petty crime, as in Fabián Bielinsky’s Nueve reinas, or the creative work of artists and public intellectuals in Aníbal Jarkowski’s El trabajo—acquired heightened symbolic power as a site of resistance to consumer capitalism. Concerned with what work means to workers—what workers expect from their work, what it really gets them, and the various levels on which they ascribe value to it—each of these texts reacts against the significance of consumption in contemporary life by situating a quest for fulfillment and agency in the productive capacity of the subject.

Thus, in the context of the collapse of the neoliberal state in Argentina the space of work functions as a staging ground for alternatives to the current social order; this is the point of departure for understanding how productivity and power are configured in these texts and in the cultural moment to which they belong. This vantage point reveals that the rebellious effort to produce in a consumer society consistently brings out tension and conflict. Within the diegeses these disruptions are marked by dysfunctional work environments, failed projects, misunderstandings, and violence; when left unacknowledged within the narrative, they inflict contradictions and inconsistencies on the text which are just as revealing.

La libertad transforms solitary manual labor into an artistic practice in its own right, making it a force capable of restoring power and virility to the impotent subject of global consumer capitalism. Misael’s independent work frees him to inhabit his own private universe far away from the humiliations, injustices, and obligations associated with participation in the global economy. Yet his emancipation is contingent on his isolation from the rest of society.

The implicit limitations of this conditional restoration of productive agency are treated to a closer examination in Bolivia. Freddy, like Misael, fantasizes that his labor empowers him. He

208 imagines his hard work in a Buenos Aires bar as a contribution to a new utopian order based on values such as harmony, beauty and equality. However, Caetano’s film reveals that fantasy to be an empty wish. Freddy’s values and his virtuous intentions prove irrelevant. As an undocumented migrant worker, his species-essence is easily sacrificed on the altar of marginal benefit; he is destined to play the part of a producer pawn in a universe where consumption is king. Both films imagine simple hard work as a way out of an exploitative and violent capitalist order where the power to consume means everything. But the productive agency expressed in these fantasies of work clashes with the reality of a competitive global economy where value is no longer produced; instead, it is extracted from differences. As a result, the effort to challenge the market’s production of the social order forces the characters of both films to stake out their own dictatorships, or else be consumed themselves.

The system itself imposes individualism, and even selfishness, as a matter of survival. Or is that just a convenient defense? Nueve reinas and El trabajo examined the competitive ethos that dominates neoliberal Buenos Aires as they bring into focus the social contract that binds

(or does not bind) the individual to a local community within the global capitalist order. In

Bielinsky’s film, justice is restored when the innocent victims of a greedy scam artist unite to win back their stolen property through an elaborately orchestrated heist; collaborative effort and careful planning prove to be exactly what is needed to restore the virtues of loyalty and brotherly love to a broken Buenos Aires caught in a dystopian tailspin of selfishness, desperation, and greed. In Jarkowski’s novel, collaboration is once more a site of potential salvation from the unfeeling rationality of the global market. When the unnamed narrator of El trabajo partners with a talented ballet dancer to mount an innovative theater project, the artists’ creativity begins to awaken empathy and kindness in a community numbed by the pain of a long economic depression and inured to the injustices of a consumer-take-all market.

209 Like the other two films, these pieces draw on Adornian notion of the aesthetic as an experience of subversively productive illogic. They symbolically link work with cultural productivity to signal that production is a space of resistance to the hegemony of consumer capitalism. The collaborative artistic efforts featured in El trabajo and Nueve reinas use the model of a “subjective,” open-ended notion of aesthetic value to construct a new, cooperative order under the sign of the aesthetic. But the utopian consensus they build is suspiciously like the market society it supposedly replaces. It suppresses conflict and difference instead of resolving them. While this unspoken compromise is apparently acceptable in Nueve reinas, in

El trabajo the consequences of such a superficial and reactionary idea of “community” unfold when a sudden, violent attack on one of the artists thwarts the redemptive power of their work.

Although the narrator is blind to the signs that foreshadow the attack, its arrival completes the cycle of self-fulfilling prophecy set into motion by the narrator’s exaggerated consumer anxieties. Overly sensitive to the risks of consumer agency (e.g., a potential after-the-fact discovery of some harm to others caused by his past actions), the narrator is perpetually preoccupied with the idea of being held accountable for some ripple effect of his actions, far beyond what he can reasonably be expected to anticipate or control. To the extent that the narrator’s anxieties about the past lead him to act irresponsibly in the present, the novel illustrates how an otherwise successful effort to assert productive agency is derailed by the narrator’s internalization of an all-encompassing ideology that justifies the status quo on the basis of the moral and intellectual failings of its subjects rather than the merits of the system.

Unlike Nueve reinas, El trabajo does not absolve the consumer of his indirect complicity in the violence that pervades his community. Instead, the novel’s resolution offers an implicit critique of public intellectuals and cultural authorities who accept the self-image imposed upon the consumer by his role in the global market: potentially complicit; with a limited perspective of the world and therefore an insufficient understanding of it. The novel suggests that

210 advancing the cause of social justice requires letting go of an unproductive attachment to pure, absolutist theories of morality. In order for the consumer dictator to escape the confining absolutism of his supposed autonomy and connect with others in a world where official forms of representation are unreliable and language is unstable, courage and common sense are needed more than genius and virtue.

These challenges are not unique to the world of duplicitous authorities, exploitative capitalists, and false advertising depicted in these texts—they are embedded on a deeper level into the culture of late consumer capitalism. If meaning and value are no longer understood to be fixed or contained within goods, words and symbols, but are instead actively produced as they circulate, then communication becomes an uncertain and volatile process. The fictions analyzed in this study approached this dilemma as the displacement of politics (or negotiations between opposing interests) from the public forum. However, in cultural criticism the problem is experienced as a double displacement. As politics is expelled from language, cultural criticism loses its social significance as the (self-declared) center of debates over shared, subjective values.

In The Expediency of Culture, George Yúdice proposes to restore the relevance of criticism to the culture of consumer capitalism by identifying public, shared structures that influence consumers’ “uses” of culture in predictable ways and making these the focus of an

“objective” discussion of cultural values. However, in staking his claim to authority on the

“objectivity” of his perspective, Yúdice perpetuates the consumer’s cult to objectivity. He only permits himself to issue clear judgments when he occupies the omniscient perspective of the

“market”—a position that can only be attained through an involved performance of transparency that becomes an exhaustive labor itself. This framework condemns The

Expediency of Culture to rehearse the self-censorship imposed by the market’s impossible standard of theoretical purity, obscuring its most insightful critiques of consumer agency

211 behind an indirect and hesitant language. This outcome suggests that even though the problem of a cultural consumer dictatorship is in theory a problem with how texts are read (i.e., by empowered cultural consumers who freely appropriate them), in practice the damage radiates primarily from the internalization of the model by cultural producers and the steps they

(understandably) take to arm their writing against appropriation.

Recognizing this dilemma, Josefina Ludmer opts to cast off all uncertainty from her criticism, freely drawing on her private and subjective experiences as a cultural consumer to arrive at her claims about what culture means within the confines of a site of consumption determined by her own movements. Yet this performance of freedom, which appears to abandon any effort to control the reception of her writing, is deceptive; Ludmer’s text, too, is carefully designed to resist appropriation. What Yúdice treats as defensive exercise, requiring the author to marshal an enormous amount of brute analytical force to protect each point,

Ludmer approaches as a seduction. Relying on her capacity to anticipate and manipulate the reader’s desires, she deliberately invites him to approach her writing as a space for expressing his own creativity. The unexpected lesson of Ludmer’s successes and failures as an

“advertiser” is that what most consistently derails her efforts to communicate is not the transparency of her duplicitous intent, but rather its distracting opacity. In this way Aquí

América latina calls attention to the cultural consumer’s surprising preoccupation with authorial intent. After all, nothing frustrates the consumer’s freedom to appropriate like falling victim to manipulation. To be a discerning consumer is also to understand production.

The lesson of the crisis—or, more precisely, of its continuity—is that challenges to the misleading absolutism of an exclusive consumer agency cannot be successful if they merely choose sides, rescuing an idealized notion of work, community, or even communication, that returns planning and effort to the center of the production of the social order. Global consumer capitalism demands a new representation of agency, one that recognizes that the relationship

212 between production and consumption is cooperative—and yet, not free of tension. In naming production and consumption as distinct, overlapping, and partial expressions of power, we will not rid ourselves of the untruths, misrepresentations, and exaggerations that find a home between words and things. All we can hope to achieve is a slightly more precise taxonomy, or, with luck, a slightly clearer picture of our social confusion. But it is only a superficial scientism

(or a shallow, thoughtless theology) that takes purity as a sign of truth. A more honest account recognizes that getting closer to the truth requires questioning tyranny in all its forms, including those that insist on perfect freedom.

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