Late Book Culture in Argentina 1623566169, 9781623566166

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Late Book Culture in Argentina

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Late Book Culture in Argentina Craig Epplin

N E W YOR K • LON DON • N E W DE L H I • SY DN EY

Bloomsbury Academic An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc

1385 Broadway New York NY 10018 USA

50 Bedford Square London WC1B 3DP UK

www.bloomsbury.com Bloomsbury is a registered trade mark of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published 2014 © Craig Epplin, 2014 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or ­refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury or the author. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Epplin, Craig. Late book culture in Argentina/Craig Epplin. pages cm Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-62356-270-0 (hardback) 1. Books and reading–Argentina. 2. Literature and society–Argentina. 3. Publishers and publishing–Social aspects–Argentina–History. 4. Argentine literature–History and criticism. 5. Authors, Argentine. I. Title. Z1003.5.A7E67 2014 028’.9–dc23 2014006811 ISBN: HB: 978-1-6235-6270-0 ePub: 978-1-6235-6074-4 ePDF: 978-1-6235-6616-6

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The book has always been an experimental object. – César Aira

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Contents Acknowledgments Introduction

viii 1

Part 1  Genealogy

1 2 3

First Publish, then Write Flight Forward Cardboard and Cumbia

25 43 57

Part 2  Morphology

4 5 6

The Book as Performance The Book as Manuscript The Book as Database

Epilogue Notes Bibliography Index

73 91 105 119 123 139 149

Acknowledgments I owe debts of gratitude to many friends and colleagues who have influenced my thinking over the past years. First among them, Reinaldo Laddaga and Graciela Montaldo have been generous mentors, animating my work and inspiring me with the high standards they set as readers of contemporary literature. The present volume owes much to their guidance. This book would also not be possible without my friends who generously read and commented on portions of it, from its germinal dissertation phase to the finished manuscript, and helped me sort out my ideas along the way—Ben Johnson, Sam Steinberg, Sharon Larisch, Selma Feliciano Arroyo, Andrea Cote, Adam Morris, Justin Read, Phill Penix-Tadsen, Dierdra Reber, Michael Solomon, Madera Allan, Aaron Ilika, and Laura Catelli, among others. I cannot thank them enough for their support and insight. Likewise, many thanks to Sergio Chejfec and Arturo Carrera for their friendship and encouragement as I was finishing this project and also, of course, for their prose, poetry, and literary energy. My thanks are also due to Haaris Naqvi, my editor, for taking this project on, and to the readers he recruited, whose critiques have been invaluable for its completion. I have had the good fortune to discuss many of the authors mentioned in this book in my classes, particularly at Reed College and Portland State University. Thanks are due to my students there and elsewhere; our conversations have helped me better articulate my ideas on literature and culture. Finally, Dejan Lukić was a warm presence through much of the final writing process. And Allegra Jongeward, my most constant interlocutor, patiently helped me give shape to my thoughts and intuitions, supporting me in countless, unclassifiable ways.

Introduction Flying books One afternoon in December of 2012, I found myself walking through the San Telmo neighborhood of Buenos Aires. I had been stood up by an interviewee and had some time on my hands. Ruminating with my head down, I happened to look up from my thoughts as I passed the old national library. The doors at the top of the steps were open. Curious, I climbed the stairs and walked in. One doorway opened onto another. Inside, many open books—around five hundred, I later learned—had been hung from the ceiling. The tense wires holding them were of different lengths, giving the mass of books an organic feel. They reminded me of a school of fish or a swarm of bees. The woman who was working the exhibit told me that dance performances had taken place among the books—performances in which, I imagined, the dancers had been carefully choreographed to avoid contact with the dangling objects as they moved around the room. She invited me to walk through the exhibit, lie on the ground, take pictures. I did all that. Looking closely at the contents of the open pages, I could discern no textual pattern. I noticed only that all the books were old. I asked the attendant if there had been any sort of criteria for their selection, and she told me that, indeed, all the books were old. The idea, she continued, was to breathe new literary life into what was once an important, highly symbolic place of reading. Her metaphor of the breath seemed appropriate, as a slight breeze passed through the open doors and made the books move. The exhibit was titled Flying Books, and it had been installed by the French artist Christian Boltanski (see Figure 1). The website for his interventions in Buenos Aires describes the books as “flying and swaying in the scant breeze, restoring with their presence colors, forms, sizes, and the sound of the movement of those thousands of pages, the life of a singular space.”1 This spatial intervention had been conceived as a homage to Jorge Luis Borges, once the library’s director. However, this reference seemed to me a bit odd, for this particular assemblage of books was nothing like Borges’s own fictional collection of books: the fantastic library conjured up in his famous short story “La biblioteca de Babel” (“The Library of Babel”). This story begins with a description of the austere architecture of the library. It is “composed of an indefinite and perhaps infinite number of hexagonal galleries, with vast air shafts between, surrounded by very low railings.” These galleries frame a vision of homogeneity: “From any of the hexagons one can see, interminably, the upper and lower floors. The distribution of the galleries is invariable. Twenty shelves, five long shelves per side, cover all the sides except two; their height, which is the distance from floor to ceiling, scarcely exceeds that of a normal bookcase.” And so on. These minute details matter for the picture of

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Figure 1  Christian Boltanski, Flying Books. (photograph by Craig Epplin) regularity they paint. We further learn that the books are lined up like soldiers, as if clad in uniform: thirty-five books per shelf, four hundred ten pages per book, forty lines per page, eighty characters per line. They vary only in the permutations of these characters.2 In other words, the Library of Babel, which is also the universe, is a vast and inexhaustible but wholly organized place. As is the case with so many of Borges’s texts, the genius of this story lies in the way it pairs rigid order with a sense of chaos. The sheer expanse of the library renders it incomprehensible as a totality. As Hernán Díaz has put it, the library’s “order is one of the random results of chaos.” Due to its “combinatorial excess, there is no way to crack the code,” which is why rival sects proliferate among bibliophiles.3 The narrator, for example, has “squandered and wasted” his years seeking “the Man of the Book, ”—the hypothetical librarian who has access to the one volume that is the compendium of

Introduction

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all the rest. This man is “analogous to a god,” and his book would render comprehensible the world’s disorderly order—what Borges calls the Order.4 The capital letter signals the transcendent reconciliation of patterned, architectural regularity with the utter chaos of dissemination. Despite the fact that Borges is named as an inspiration for Flying Books, Boltanski’s arrangement corresponds to a very different literary world from the one indexed in “La biblioteca de Babel.” In Borges’s story, the physical medium that gives a home to text aims for neutrality. The book’s format is purely functional; it acts as a repository for meaning, which is of paramount concern. No combination of characters exists, we read, “which the divine Library has not foreseen and which in one of its secret tongues do not contain a terrible meaning.”5 In other words, what is inside the books is variable, rich, and potentially transcendent or horrifying, all of which contrasts with their outwardly staid, uniform appearance. The seemingly inexhaustible mysteries revealed by the regular lines of letters contrast with the banal regularity of their container. In contrast, Boltanski’s hung volumes, visually unique and aleatorily arrayed, could never hope—and, in any case, don’t aim—to cipher the order of the universe. They could never inspire the sort of exegesis performed by the various sects that proliferate in the Library of Babel. Initially curious about their meaning, I was promptly dissuaded from this line of inquiry, and besides, the installation’s description makes no mention of the books’ content. In other words, Boltanski’s exhibit does not encourage a quest for meaning. It aims, rather, at the more immediate, formal effects of retinal impact and spatial delineation. As I walked among the hung books and recalled Borges’s short story, I shuffled mentally between the two works, which seemed the avatars of two sets of attitudes about the idea and function of books. Writing within a milieu that prized literature as a gateway to the tense coupling of the transcendent and the common, the auratic and the accessible, Borges exemplifies what I call modern book culture. In its literary guise, which is what will concern me in this study, this culture’s defining attribute is the notion of aesthetic autonomy, a concept whose development hinged partially on the gradual expansion of publishing outlets and readerships on a national and regional scale over the course of much of the twentieth century. Boltanski’s exhibit, conversely, illustrates key features of another, more contemporary configuration, which I call late book culture. With this modifier, I don’t mean to predict the ultimate demise of books, even of print books, but rather to describe a transitional period in which the status of the book as a literary medium is increasingly uncertain. In adopting this qualifier, I follow Fredric Jameson in his well-known use of the concept of lateness. The adjective “late,” he notes, “rarely means anything so silly as the ultimate senescence, breakdown, and death of the system as such. . . . What ‘late’ generally conveys is rather the sense that something has changed, that things are different.”6 Much has indeed changed; things are indeed different. Flying Books places emphasis on the book as a material object, and likewise, the notion of late book culture that I will advance here is premised on the foregrounding of the materiality of the literary object. In this cultural conjuncture, the  book becomes a problem, a fragile object of inquiry. Or, from another perspective, it  becomes a solution, a hybrid object of conceptual and

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material durability. In both cases, the specific character of the medium itself comes to matter a great deal, if only because other literary interfaces consistently place it in relief. Simultaneously vulnerable and robust, the books of late book culture are embedded within an increasingly complex and increasingly digital media ecology. They hover, like Boltanski’s do, confronting us with the double gesture of dissolving into the background and dangling in plain sight. Theirs is the world of books in the moment when the book cannot be taken for granted.

Late book culture The literature written in Argentina over the past few decades is far from the first to inquire into the nature of the medium of the book. Furthermore, many contemporary writers, there and elsewhere, are certainly happy to pay this question no mind. However, all writers today contend, willingly or not, with a volatile media landscape in which the ways readers gain access to written words, the nature of the assemblages that connect books to other media, and the very definition of the book seem to be in a state of flux. The tectonic shift represented by the ongoing transition from a primarily print to a primarily electronic media culture is one that affects all contemporary literature, often in unexpected ways. The fact that in Argentina the emergence and consolidation of this particular media environment have overlapped, intermittently but often enough, with periods of economic decline means that its literature increasingly takes on hybrid forms, incorporating the lettered tradition, digital tools, artisanal techniques, and ad hoc solutions. My object in this study is to trace the various ways in which certain significant Argentine writers and collectives inscribe this complex literary ecology into their works. They do so, first, by presenting the book as a problem, placing it under the microscope, estranging it, and probing its limits and capabilities. What are books made of? Novelist César Aira (1949–present) asked and answered that question in a 1995 essay. Anything, he remarks, books are made of anything. The book is, and always has been, an “experimental object,” capacious and flexible enough to take on any form. He goes on to catalogue some of the many incarnations of the book: novels, catalogues, collections of letters, manuals, illustrated books, hardcovers, twenty-page or seven-hundred-page volumes, enthralling reads, books for children, poetry collections, travelogues, bestsellers, technical publications, volumes stamped in a die, classics, Chinese-language books or others printed on rice paper. . . . Now within everyone’s reach, this multiplicity demands new forms of erudition, so new that we cannot imagine them and that nevertheless are already in operation.7

His answer has two parts: a list and a gloss. The list seems to recall another of Borges’s stories, “El idioma analítico de John Wilkins” (“The Analytical Language of John Wilkins”), which takes categorization to its absurd limit. As in that story, Aira’s answer

Introduction

5

respects no hierarchies. Genres and page counts intermingle with production methods and sales figures. All descriptors are leveled by the common denominator of the book. The idea that all knowledge, even the universe itself, might end up in a book has a long lineage, dating back at least to medieval times, but this is not the point Aira is making.8 By blending modes of categorization, he is not asserting the transcendent nature of the book. He is rather pointing to the infinite particularity of any one of its possible material manifestations. This is a crucial point for late book culture, in which the book is increasingly not a relatively transparent, model receptacle for knowledge, but rather one medium, one “experimental object,” that circulates among many others. Aira’s gloss hints at this broader social horizon. He cryptically describes a world, our own world, in which a multiplicity of materials calls forth new and unimaginable forms of knowledge—imperceptible forms that toil away under the surface. The mutability of the book, which itself is nothing new, is suddenly thrust before our eyes, demanding and forging new sorts of aesthetic experience. Aira’s “new forms of erudition” are thus connected to the myriad textual possibilities now lying “within everyone’s reach.” The appearance of these new possibilities owes primarily to the upheavals of the digital revolution, which has placed new forms of reading, writing, and distributing texts within the reach of many. As always, this technological change both generates and demands new conditions and forms of knowledge: media are not neutral vehicles for communication; rather, they constantly inflect and mold it. In this direction, we might speculatively understand Aira’s motley list as formally mimicking the technology that has come to replace the book as today’s dominant image of thought—the searchable database. Aira’s list approximates this form, thus inscribing into his answer a further question, one that makes sense to us today, even if he asked it precociously: in the age of the sprawling, seemingly infinite web of digitally encoded writing known as the internet, what sort of thing is a book? The merging of the book with digital technologies is reflected in the materiality of many writing practices today. “In the contemporary era,” writes Katherine Hayles, “both print and electronic texts are deeply interpenetrated by code. Digital technologies are now so thoroughly integrated with commercial printing processes that print is more properly considered a particular output form of electronic text than an entirely separate medium.”9 With this assertion, Hayles means that literature today almost inevitably passes through various digital applications on its path from writer to reader—word processors, typesetting programs, and distribution networks, for example. In an earlier text, she had spelled out the difference between composing on a typewriter and using a computer. “The relation between striking a key and producing text with a computer is very different from the relation achieved with a typewriter,” she writes. This is because the “computer restores and heightens the sense of word as image—an image drawn in a medium as fluid and changeable as water.” This interaction with the liquid, mutable image on the screen generates kinesthetic knowledge of the fact that “the text can be manipulated in ways that would be impossible if it existed as a material object rather than a visual display.”10 To this insightful formulation I would add only that the flickering screen image is also “material,” even if manifested differently.11 That is, while the difference noted by Hayles is crucial, we should resist the temptation

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to find in the older technology a mode of construction that is ontologically fuller or more real. As Ted Striphas has pointed out, the typewriter’s ascent was once seen in terms of a loss, and if we go all the way back to Plato, so was the hand that writes.12 That point aside, Hayles’s affirmation that digital technologies introduce new folds into the production of literature remains crucial. Among these new dynamics, textual manipulation and distribution have been greatly accelerated in the digital age. Aira’s work comments, often directly, on these practices; he simultaneously invokes slower modes of production and models their opposite: speed and textual flight. He is not the first writer in his milieu to engage in a critical dialogue with literary production techniques. While Borges is often mentioned as a forerunner of the transition between print and digital culture, and while Julio Cortázar foresaw some version of noncontiguous reading, both writers generally couch this transition more in terms of a conceptual, and not material, problem.13 Hence they are of less immediate relevance than another of Aira’s compatriots, Osvaldo Lamborghini (1940–85). Lamborghini was Aira’s mentor. He lived most of his life in Argentina and spent his final years in Barcelona. Best known in his home country for the violent, allegorical short story El fiord (The fjord), Lamborghini also published a collection of poems, a fragmentary novel, and a handful of shorter texts during his lifetime. The 1988 publication of his collected novels and stories, compiled by Aira, first made his work accessible to a broad audience. This edition was expanded in 2003, and his collected poems as well as another long novel appeared in short succession. A pornographic collage of words and images titled El teatro proletario de cámara (The proletarian chamber theater) was published just a few years ago, as was a long biography of the writer. It’s not a stretch to trace Aira’s interest in the materiality of literary culture back to Lamborghini, who used to take published books, scribble words in between the lines, and slap on a homemade cover. He had a slogan for this practice: “First publish, then write.” This was a playfully paradoxical statement in the 1970s; today some version of it is common practice—as anyone who’s registered, designed, and subsequently abandoned a blog can attest. The desire was the same then as it is now: to see one’s words become public at virtually the same moment of their writing—or better, for publication itself to precede writing. In his various prefaces to his friend’s work, Aira makes much of the fact that Lamborghini’s writings abound in dates, analog timestamps of a sort. His own novels have dates too, invariably placed on the final page, as if meaning to mark the present tense of their own writing, itself obscured by the publishing timeline ciphered in that other date that appears on the copyright page, the date that marks the gap between production and dissemination in print culture. Lamborghini’s most productive years were the 1970s and 1980s. Aira continues to write, but the fundamentals of his poetics were set firmly in place by the early 1990s. This is why there is something eerie about the way they both anticipate the vast transformations in writing and publishing brought on by the appearance of the internet and its corresponding applications. To be sure, the net dates from the 1960s, but it wasn’t until the advent of the World Wide Web and its commercialization in the 1990s that broad repercussions began to be felt. New avenues of reading and writing opened up, exemplified by the advent of free blog-hosting sites toward the turn of the

Introduction

7

millennium. Blogs can certainly take on any number of forms, but in the early days they often aimed at creating the effect of spontaneous expression, something that today we associate with more compact forms like tweets.14 The self and its writing merge together, as the medium becomes a stage for the procession of words, images, and videos identified with that self. In this textual economy, writing and publication would advance apace. The timestamp ciphers both of them together, annulling the separation that characterizes the dynamics of print publishing. This scenario is one of the possible worlds anticipated by Lamborghini and constantly refracted through the looking glass by Aira. The web opens up new places where reading and writing happen. Of course, its reach has penetrated more deeply into certain corners of the globe than others, and it has likewise taken form in many different spatial configurations. For example, one of the ways that the web’s presence has been felt in Argentina, and certainly in many other places, is in the proliferation of the hybrid private and public space of the internet kiosk or café. Alejandro López’s 2005 novel keres cojer?  guan tu fak (Wanna fuck?  Ker-es co-hair) captures this dynamic in both its content and form. Long fragments of the text are made up of Microsoft Messenger transcripts, presented visually as such, and much of the action happens in internet cafés. At several points, we are presented with a link to short online videos that represent portions of video chat sessions. As such, the novel asks us to navigate our own spatial and technological environment as part of the reading experience even as we engage with the novel’s representation of a similarly fragmented media world. As the object and the site of a reading experience, this novel occupies a unique, material nexus of paper, screen, and bodies, crystallizing the complex media ecology characteristic of late book culture.15 López’s novel was published as a paper volume. Perhaps this decision represents a conservative choice, or perhaps it simply reflects the reality that the potential readers of a print novel in 2005 were certainly more numerous than the potential readers of an online novel. It likely owes partially to both concerns, reflecting a persistence of paper that complicates any notion of a headlong rush into the digital horizon. In this direction, it is worth noting that one of the signal phenomena of recent Argentine literary culture is the resurgence of small presses engaged in paper-based publishing.16 With names like Interzona and Eterna Cadencia (among the more standard sort) and Mate and Vox (among the more artisanal), many new publishing houses represent small-scale efforts that join thoughtful design to the business of publishing. The newfound visibility of such small operations, which inhabit the outskirts of the sphere of publishing behemoths like Alfaguara and Planeta, owes in part to their integration with the digital environment. They straddle the line between paper and screen, between the physical bookstore and Twitter, something that is reflected in the production process as well: small publishers today benefit greatly from the increased accessibility of sophisticated technologies of formatting and design. This development is not entirely new, but its repercussions are only now being fully felt. By the mid1990s, one historian has noted, “text and images could be prepared, edited and even typeset on the computer. With the introduction of the laser printer, high-quality printing too became a desktop operation. Every aspect of the traditional publishing

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industry had been made accessible, except the mechanisms of distribution.”17 If that was true of the 1990s, it is even more so today, and this availability facilitates further aesthetic experimentation with the physical medium of the book itself. Assuming that e-readers become more commonplace in Argentina in the years ahead, even the task of distribution will be transformed and, one assumes, simplified, producing perhaps more instances of straddling the paper-screen divide.18 One way to go about bookmaking is to exalt it. Another way, equally stylized, is to debase it. A version of the latter strategy has been pursued most famously by the small press Eloísa Cartonera (2003–present). As the project’s name indicates, its guiding light is the cartonero, or cardboard collector, who is one of the iconic figures of Argentina’s most recent cycle of austerity, crisis, and aftermath—which corresponds roughly to the decade of the 1990s through the early years of the twenty-first century. The cartoneros have been singled out by one historian as harbingers of a new political order. Aira wrote a novel about them. Eloísa Cartonera took things one step further, buying their reclaimed goods and inviting them into the workshop.19 Established in 2003, the press occupies a workshop in the historic Buenos Aires neighborhood La Boca. In a retrospective text from 2007, its founders describe their ambitions: “The idea of the project is to generate genuine work through the publication of books of contemporary Latin American literature. To do so, we came up with a very simple way of working that consists in the fabrication of cardboard books.” They detail their economic practices as well: “We buy cardboard on the street. From it we cut out the book covers. We paint the title and the name of the author with tempera paint and stencils. Then we print, staple, and bind the originals.”20 The press has participated in various art exhibits and international literary conferences. It has spawned a new, unmistakable style of publishing, with imitators from Paraguay to Mozambique. In its appeal to “genuine work,” it is clear that the press seeks to craft a response, even if just a symbolic one, to the instability of labor conditions in transnational capitalism, which in turn would be implicitly identified with something like “fake work.” They crystallize the ambition to elude its reach in the practice of making artisanal books. A text on their website lists Aira among the authors that have inspired their work.21 Together, Lamborghini, Aira, and Eloísa Cartonera comprise an abbreviated genealogy of aesthetic engagement with the form of the book. Foretelling and inhabiting the complex media landscape of the present, they combine theory and practice to signal alternatives to the modern, mass-produced print volume. From handwriting to wood-carving to recycling, from self-publishing to intervening in the architecture of literary encounters, they imagine and model forms of production that go beyond the standard, uniform book. In this way, their work casts the book as a problem to be solved, a strange object that is open to all sorts of sacred and profane uses. The first three chapters of the present study are dedicated to unfolding the aesthetic programs that animate the inquiries of this genealogy. Following those chapters, I delve into the various solutions offered to this problem. These chapters center on three ways in which the book is refracted through the material lenses of other media.22 The first lens is that of performance, particularly as it is manifested in the work of Estación Pringles (2006–present). This collective experiment

Introduction

9

is the brainchild of poet Arturo Carrera, activist Chiquita Gramajo, and various others, and it comprises a poetry community in the Argentine pampas. It coordinates festivals and other literary events, and also hosts visiting writers and translators. It aims at constructing a space where literature expands beyond the book and becomes performance—a notion of performance fully animated by the book and conceived along its lines. Included as part of that diffuse, ongoing performance, perhaps paradoxically, is the production of occasional paper volumes, which are thus inserted into a larger sort of invisible book under constant construction, one that materializes in an actual place. The construction of that place, of an alternative aesthetic geography, is the explicit aim of Estación Pringles. There is a common fallacy that digitally enabled finance capital, and along with it the cultural production of late capitalism, represents a general turn away from the importance of concrete places. Deindustrialization is certainly real and complex financial products are often a fiction, but transnational capital still requires an elaborate material infrastructure. For example, what Saskia Sassen calls global cities— with New York, London, and Tokyo providing the paradigm—agglomerate services and high rises in specific places. Global cities are carved up, with financial centers and gated communities at a remove from the population at large. In the same way, the effects of financial capitalism are felt in the flesh. They alter modes of living. They shift the sediment of communities and societies. Literature is no different in its need for spatial delineations. No matter how immaterial or ethereal literary production may sometimes seem, it only becomes manifest in concrete spaces and encounters. True, the bookstore is threatened by online commerce, but acts of reading and writing still happen in private homes and libraries, cafés and bars, among friends and in classrooms. Estación Pringles, drawing on the aesthetics of Lamborghini, Aira, and Eloísa Cartonera, seeks to imagine and construct new such interfaces for the experience of literature. Estación Pringles’s geographical concerns surface differently in the work of novelist Sergio Chejfec (1956–present), whose spatial interventions take on various forms. At their simplest, they correspond to the fictional representation of space in his novels, whose protagonists are often characterized by their propensity to walk around. The geographical contours of these representations tend to be blurry, as the hinterland bleeds into the metropolis and the virtual incessantly produces the actual. The fuzziness of these outlines is further reflected in Chejfec’s own practice of self-curation, concretely in the act of displaying the digitized versions of certain of his handwritten drafts on his own blog. This action, alongside his own theorizations of what he calls “digital originals,” complicates the relationship between the different possible modulations of the written artifact—handwritten in a notebook, typed mechanically or digitally, published in print form or online, and so on. With this gesture, Chejfec disseminates the aura of handwriting, even if it means turning it from ink to pixels. This act of confounding the usual boundaries among formats both mirrors and extends the representation of space in his novels and essays. In other words, Chejfec’s manipulations of his draft manuscripts form part of a broader intervention in the geography of literature. While Chejfec uses a digital medium to display a print artifact, Pablo Katchadjian (1977–present) moves in the opposite direction, importing a thoroughly digital sensibility into print. Among his more notorious interventions, Katchadjian has alphabetized

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Argentina’s national epic poem, augmented one of Borges’s most famous short stories, and filled an entire book with quotations from the daily newspaper. His young literary career has so far been anchored by such conceptual tasks, as he breaks verbal expression down into units that can be recombined in various manners. This is true even of his works that are less explicitly experiments in the possibilities of literary postproduction. Characters and scenes and tropes reappear constantly, in absurd configurations that seem to want to find out just how many assemblages can emerge from a limited number of discrete elements. His literature models, in this fashion, the form of the database. His own writing acts like an algorithm that orders a finite number of aesthetic units. And his books, several of them self-published, represent improbable sites in which to incorporate such digitally inspired gestures into paper. The collective works of these authors and projects span from the late 1960s to the present, though my focus will fall on the period beginning in the 1980s. The conceptual center of my readings lies in the way they present the book as a problem and then offer solutions or models that reframe the book, in turn, along the lines of other media— performance, the manuscript, and the database. In doing so, this constellation of writers and collectives constantly draws our attention to the material construction of literary culture. In other words, this group is collectively focused, in various ways, on the processes through which the object and experience of literature comes into being. That this happens in an era in which those processes are undergoing vast transformations, in a technological sense as well as economically and aesthetically, is not surprising. As the material and conceptual supports of modern literary culture have come undone, an active reframing of new materials and concepts becomes imperative. This is the task assumed by the corpus of authors and projects under consideration here.

Autonomy and after A manifest interest in the materiality of the book is not the exclusive province of creative writers, publishers, and curators of cultural forms. Within the academy, for example, we have witnessed a decades-long uptick in interest in the physical book and the cultures—literary and otherwise—that surround it. This interest seems natural, for our present transitional moment represents, from the perspective of many observers, an era of crisis for print formats. In her introduction to a journal issue devoted to the discipline of book history, Leah Price quotes Karen Winkler’s judgment that “the advent of the screen has made it harder to take the page for granted,” a shift in perspective that is easily reduced to an aphorism: “the death of the book means the birth of its history.”23 More than a decade ago, Terry Cochran remarked that the “printed book, along with the literature and history that are necessarily its immaterial parasites, is no longer alone in its ability to give a mass-produced view of time and space.”24 And even further back, Roger Chartier noted that the electronic “revolution” would be “obviously more extensive than Gutenberg’s.”25 Over the past years, similar views have proliferated, spawning numerous studies and subdisciplines. Scholars have interpreted phenomena as diverse as the Bible and Protestantism, the Enlightenment

Introduction

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and Oprah’s book club, through the lens of book history. Genetic criticism and similar archaeological or reconstructive approaches are normal. Lapidary titles like The Future of the Book and The Future of the Page have become routine.26 The book, it seems, is either relegated to the past or faces an uncertain future. Facing this conjuncture, I’d like to propose that we center our attention on the present of books, and furthermore on the disparate forms of aesthetic labor and imagination that go into the constant formation of that present. I take inspiration here from Adrian Johns’s emphasis on contingency in the early modern forging of print practices. In The Nature of the Book, he calls for a “historical understanding of print” that attends to “the labors of those actually involved in printing, publishing, and reading.”27 In the details, my approach will differ markedly, as the labor I emphasize comprises primarily the aesthetic work through which contemporary writers and collectives imagine, inhabit, and transform these different roles. In doing so, however, I take from his study the insight that it is crucial to situate books and other media in the world of practice—analogous to what Howard Becker calls “art worlds”—instead of ascribing inherent properties to this or that sort of medium.28 Put more briefly, no technology affects the rest of the world unilaterally or invariantly. Technologies may well determine their effects, but not in any linear, simple way. Hence I’d like to propose an understanding of the book’s present that excavates the ways in which the characteristics of this medium intersect with contemporary aesthetic programs: a materially grounded approach to the aesthetics of late book culture. As part of this excavation, it may be useful to outline briefly some of the circumstances that antedate the advent of late book culture in Argentina, circumstances most easily understood through the lens of autonomy and what succeeds it. To modify a formulation by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, there is no autonomy and never has been.29 Autonomous processes are always in touch with the churning, productive energies that generate the sense of a “world apart, subject to its own laws.”30 Autonomy is real and imaginary at once, and its imaginariness does not sap its strength. Within the delimited sphere of literary book culture, it crystallizes a number of attitudes and practices that can be stated concisely: literary autonomy means the relative independence of literature from political and economic pressures.31 This definition is taken from Pierre Bourdieu’s study of France’s nineteenth-century literary culture, but the desire to found an independent “Republic of Letters” corresponds to many other cultural contexts, twentieth-century Argentina among them. For sure, absolute independence is a necessarily illusory goal—for literature, no matter how autonomous, can always be or become the tool of political or commercial agendas— but this relative impossibility does not overshadow the fact that the achievement of literary autonomy was one persistent goal of many writers over the course of the twentieth century.32 Never complete, always on the horizon, and always emanating from a continuum of discourse, practice, and media, autonomy has to be, and has been, articulated insistently, produced and reproduced constantly.33 In a discussion published in the Argentine review Punto de Vista, Matilde Sánchez once referred to the moment of “autonomous publishing splendor” of the late 1960s, the moment of Cortázar’s “Rayuela published by Sudamericana.”34 In tying the 1963

12

Late Book Culture in Argentina

publication of Rayuela (Hopscotch) to the famous press Sudamericana, she seems to allude to a notion of autonomy as regionally determined independence, when Argentine presses could produce literature uncompromisingly. Concretely, her formulation refers to the preponderance, during the culminating moment of the late-1960s boom in Latin American literature, of what Ángel Rama calls “cultural” presses. These are defined by criteria that exceed strictly commercial considerations. They are characterized by “a  tendency that they manifested, on occasions, against the normal commercial tendency of a business, causing them to publish books that would predictably have few readers but whose artistic quality made them run the risk.”35 Autonomy, which Rama insists was the desired state of affairs among mid-century writers, is here conceived as  the condition of exemption from narrowly defined economic demands, which lends such presses an effect of transcendence beyond the sphere of commerce.36 In this picture, they become agents of cultural uplift, publishers of the putatively best and most important sort of writing. While the 1960s have been, within Latin American studies broadly, the object of much discussion about autonomy, the embryo of this configuration lies, in Argentina specifically, in the late nineteenth century.37 The Buenos Aires publishing space is unique in Latin America for its early modernization. Josefina Ludmer has identified the consolidation of the modern Argentine state, in around 1880, with the initial, tentative separation of the political sphere from cultural and literary production.38 In more bibliographically precise terms, Leandro Sagastizábal concurs with her, taking the appearance of a catalogue of scientific and literary publications that would appear yearly from 1879 until 1887 as an inaugural moment for both the modern Argentine state and a correspondingly modern cultural apparatus.39 He connects this publication to a vast social reorganization, brought on by mass immigration and the construction of effective state administrative channels, and elsewhere ties these developments to the emergence of a modern book culture: “New places of encounter were born: bars, clubs, promotional groups, and popular libraries. Through this process a new urban model was formed: the educated citizen, that is, he who had access to higher education and for whom the consumption of books is an important interest.”40 This figure of the citizen (generally male and at least upper middle class) thus became an emblem of public life, in part by engaging in one of its correlate practices: the consumption of books. Following this period, the two decades between 1900 and 1919 would be marked by the diversification of publishing practices, the consolidation of a market for lowcost books, and the emergence of “intellectual practice as a separate profession.”41 A result of population growth and state-sponsored literacy campaigns, the consolidation of a small but expanding reading public brought about several consequences, among them the increased circulation of newspapers and magazines. Various new publishing ventures appeared concurrently. Among them, the Biblioteca de La Nación series was exemplary and closely affiliated with the periodical press.42 This undertaking, begun in 1901 and reaching 875 editions, produced books that resemble, at least in their external appearance, the volumes described in Borges’s imaginary library. Uniform in their blue spines, varying above all in their content, and promising access to the means of cultural uplift, these books—along with those produced under rubrics like

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Ricardo Rojas’s Biblioteca Argentina, José Ingenieros’s La Cultura Argentina, and Juan Torrendell’s Editorial Tor—sought to address a still relatively small urban, middleclass market.43 Building on such developments, from the 1930s onward, numerous presses would appear in Argentina, particularly those founded by exiles of the Spanish Civil War (1936–39). As was the case with New York, the destination of many Jewish intellectuals during the ascendancy of Fascist and Stalinist politics in Europe, the cultural life of Buenos Aires was enriched in important ways by the influx of exiles.44 The press EspasaCalpe moved to Buenos Aires in 1937 and spawned, through its eventual defectors, a number of presses that would be of capital importance in the following decades, namely Losada and Sudamericana. This latter enterprise counted among its original group both Victoria Ocampo and Oliverio Girondo, names associated with the journal Sur, which had created its own press in 1933 and whose catalogue would be amply reprinted in subsequent years by Sudamericana.45 These presses, José Luis de Diego has noted, were “individual, almost artisanal enterprises.”46 They published translations and Spanish writers, and sought to include works at the forefront of international literary modernism. And, particularly with the establishment of Francisco Franco’s dictatorship in Spain, their catalogues increasingly featured writers from Argentina and elsewhere in Latin America, just as they developed continent-spanning distribution networks. Sánchez speaks of the importance of Cortázar being published by Sudamericana, but perhaps a more important example from this period is its 1967 publication of a non–Argentine novel, Gabriel García Márquez’s Cien años de soledad (One Hundred Years of Solitude), as this book’s success marks the high-water point of Argentina’s mid-century publishing culture in the broader context of Latin America. If the autonomous publishing world of mid-century Buenos Aires began small (“individual, almost artisanal”), by the late 1960s it had boomed into a full-fledged business of books whose products would, in subsequent years, circulate massively and internationally. That literary autonomy would portend business success, and that its products would circle the globe, becoming beach reading in Barcelona or a cipher of thirdworld consciousness in the United States, should come as no surprise, for autonomy corresponds to a rhetorically and materially inflected situation. As Timothy Reiss has argued, the “divisions of discourses and practices often put under the rubric of ‘autonomy’ were always less a matter of experience than of claim—although no doubt from claim they could readily become something like ‘experience.’”47 This is to say, once again, that autonomy is never a situation that can be conceived outside of its production. Literature’s autonomy is produced and affirmed in certain circumstances, among which the development of an expansive reading public and a sophisticated system of publishing and distribution are crucial. Thus the literary crescendo of the 1950s and 1960s corresponds, at least partially, to mundane, strictly economic concerns. In Argentina, the trajectory of the national publishing industry had previously been driven by the demand left unsatisfied by Spain’s floundering, heavily censored literary scene. While a significant growth in the national readership certainly marked this period, Argentine presses still exported 40 percent of their production to

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Late Book Culture in Argentina

Spain, providing up to 80 percent of the latter country’s book consumption.48 When the Spanish publishers began to recover this market, during the same period in which Franco’s government abandoned autarky and welcomed American military bases, the Argentine presses suffered. However, this period of decadence was short lived, as by the early 1960s domestic and Latin American markets for literature had replaced the declining Spanish demand. Up through the following decade, relatively new publishers like the Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires (EUDEBA) and the Centro Editor de América Latina (CEAL) greatly expanded their operations and enjoyed market success, even in nontraditional spaces such as magazine kiosks and supermarkets.49 Autonomous production and the boom in literary production of this period thus went hand in hand with the dynamics of book circulation. The fact that autonomy stems from such economic considerations meant that literature, understood as a realm that should remain untainted by commerce, had to be constantly purified.50 It had to be constantly reaffirmed, often anxiously. At one telling moment in Rayuela, Cortázar draws a distinction between the sorts of literary tastes associated with his ideal, masculine reader and “his” opposite, the “female-reader”: “Demotic writing for the female-reader (who otherwise will not get beyond the first few pages, rudely lost and scandalized, cursing at what he paid for the book), with a vague reverse side of hieratic writing.”51 “Hieratic writing,” with all its transcendent and priestlike connotations, is opposed to a sort of mass, “demotic writing.” Significantly, the latter sort is also associated with a concern for the price of the book. It is as if seeing the book as a mere commodity ruined the implicit compact between writer and reader. The paradox lies in the fact that only once the book becomes a commodity and circulates massively, can a writer like Cortázar dedicate himself fully to literature, consolidating his own mass appeal. This tension—which lines up nicely, religious overtones and all, with Walter Benjamin’s distinction between “cult value” and “exhibition value”—is fundamental to modern book culture.52 Transitional moments are complex, owing to multiple, irreducible causes, but one way to index the passage of modern book culture is to note a key characteristic of Argentine publishing in the subsequent decades: the perceived triumph of commercial concerns over more strictly aesthetic criteria. Rama had already noted in 1981 that the “publishing autonomy of Latin America”—thus including but not limited to Argentina—“begun in the thirties [had] been drastically reduced by the advance of multinational book companies.”53 His comment presages the later dominance of Spanish publishers, which in turn often form part of large multimedia conglomerates, over the Latin American book scene, a trend that became particularly salient in the 1990s.54 The case of Sudamericana—which passed from its independent status to forming part of Random House Mondadori, itself later incorporated into the German media conglomerate Bertelsmann, which in turn later merged its trade book operations with Penguin, itself controlled by Pearson—is exemplary. In terms that Rama had previously used, Malena Botto has written that these companies are not “cultural agents in a traditional sense”; rather, profit margins are their primary concerns.55 We should be wary of assuming that this scenario generates, as if mechanically, a wasteland of the same market-tested formulas being repeated one after another.

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The literary market, like any market, is heterogeneous and full of niches.56 That said, the market for literature has certainly been transformed by the increased presence of transnational media concerns. Literature now moves within the same temporality as other objects.57 It is difficult, today, to see literature as an autonomous “world apart, subject to its own laws,” to return to Bourdieu’s formula. This scenario forms the basis for the common discourse of lamentation about the commercialization of literature. In this vein, two Argentine poets chronicling the connection between writing and publishing in recent years have cited the closing of traditional avenues of publication, as daring or risky or simply literary writers increasingly confront, in their terms, the “absolute impossibility” of seeing their work appear on a major or mid-sized press.58 Two of the founders of the Rosario-based press Beatriz Viterbo, which has provided the channel for much of Aira’s work, once affirmed something similar. “Today’s ‘difficult’ author,” they wrote in 2001, who aims at a small but often impassioned readership, is unlikely to “find market success.”59 Their press was founded in response to this situation, and in doing so they have sought to retain a central outgrowth of literature’s autonomy— namely, the notion that literature allows and furthers oppositional stances. Adriana Astutti and Sandra Contreras, the editors of Beatriz Viterbo, thus couch the founding of their press in terms of a resistance to the commercialization of literature, what they call the culture industry’s “economic rationality”: “When we began to work on the Beatriz Viterbo catalogue we believed, and we still believe, in the disturbing, tenacious, and resistant power of literature. In the at once intimate and impersonal experience that is the experience of reading we still see a possibility (although microscopic, no less absolute) of resistance and freedom.”60 Given this emphasis on resistance and complexity, it comes as no surprise that Astutti and Contreras have traced the beginnings of their project back to a reading of Theodor Adorno’s Aesthetic Theory.61 They are not alone in reclaiming this theoretical lineage. In an interview with Leonora Djament, the editor of Buenos Aires’s Eterna Cadencia press, similar attitudes and points of reference emerged, and this publishing house’s catalogue reaffirms this orientation. However, in that same conversation, Djament brought up the specter of a different configuration, what Ludmer has more recently called literature’s “postautonomy.”62 Writing about Aira and others, Ludmer has sought to draw out a trend in contemporary Argentine writing characterized by blurry boundary lines. In spite of “post-autonomous” works’ many similarities with “literature,” this concept doesn’t fully capture their nature. They represent a literature, rather, in flight or “exodus”: They appear as literature but cannot be read through criteria or categories such as author, work, style, writing, text, and meaning. They cannot be read as literature because they empty it out: meaning (or the author, or the writing) is left without density, without paradox, without undecidability . . ., and it is occupied entirely by ambivalence: these texts are and aren’t literature, they are both fiction and reality.63

A significant part of the blurriness inherent to the concept of literature today, Ludmer goes on to suggest, owes precisely to the shifts mentioned by Astutti and Contreras,

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Late Book Culture in Argentina

and already documented in Rama’s work from the early 1980s: the dominance of transnational publishers and media conglomerates over the “language industry.”64 In this sense, the activity of emptying literature out, ascribed to the writers of “postautonomous literature,” would be a mimetic gesture, perhaps reveling in the very impossibility of literature today. It seems to me that the matter is not so simple. Ludmer also ascribes a certain levity, a lack of density, to contemporary literature (or nonliterature, or postautonomous literature). A similar image had been glossed previously by Aira himself in a 1995 essay, in which he invokes a literature in suspension that flits around like a “butterfly,” and he contrasts it with the weight of inherited literary culture.65 In Aira’s work, this image is not a mimicry of the harsh realities of contemporary publishing. Rather, it is an alternative, a proposal for small-scale experimentation, carried out in a place where one might celebrate artisanal or performative or handwritten or archival modes of production. Such practices are evanescent, liable to disappear. They float and threaten to dissolve. They hang, like books from a ceiling, as if observant or skeptical about their surroundings. This hesitant suspension is a response to the erosion of traditional boundaries: boundaries between literature and its outside, a division that becomes apparent even in the boundary between the print edition and its others. As Striphas puts it, citing John Updike, books tend to have edges. “In other words, there seems to be a certain solidity and a literal boundedness to the objects most of us call books.”66 However, he is quick to point out that these edges may not be as sharp as they sometimes seem. Books need not coincide neatly with works. Any one volume might play host to numerous works in different states of roughness and completion: boarding houses or campgrounds of tents. The levity of the literary work that Aira imagines responds, in this understanding, to the postautonomous universe sketched by Ludmer, a universe that erases lines all around, opening up a manifest continuum between literature and the world, between the book and its outside, and between print and other media. As Reinaldo Laddaga has aptly put it, “for the first time in a long time, it isn’t clear that print is the principle vehicle for fiction.”67 In this world, literature extends outward, and the immanence that has always underlain its pretensions to autonomy reveals itself.

Public and private The passage of modern book culture and the arrival of late book culture shadow parallel developments in Argentine culture more broadly, a summary sketch of which will close this introduction. It makes sense that the mid-century readerships of many Latin American countries would often be understood as metonymic of national cultures. Benedict Anderson has famously tied the popularization of print, and in particular the novel, to the construction of national consciousness, and Elizabeth Eisenstein has more deeply traced the effects of print culture on notions of collectivity.68 “The wide distribution of identical bits of information,” she writes, “provided [in early modern

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Europe] an impersonal link between people who were unknown to each other.” Such a link would later be fundamental for Anderson’s imagined communities, yet Eisenstein also emphasizes that such distribution simultaneously helped foster a sense of privacy and individual experience. “By its very nature,” she continues, “a reading public was not only more dispersed; it was also more atomistic and individualistic than a hearing one.” Whether or not such atomism held true in all or even most cases, this formulation certainly helps elucidate later developments in our concept of what a society is composed of, since the “notion that society may be regarded as a bundle of discrete units or that the individual is prior to the social group seems to be more compatible with a reading public than with a hearing one.”69 Eisenstein thus draws a clear link between the emergence and consolidation of reading publics, and the establishment of modern nation-states and their citizens. It is worth emphasizing that this link is not necessary or absolute. No technology yields invariant results. Johns highlights this point in his critique of Eisenstein’s study. He writes that “early modern printing was not joined by any obvious or necessary bond to enhanced fidelity, reliability, and truth.”70 All of these are elements that we today attach to the printed objects of reputable presses. However, Johns is right to insist that they are not natural outgrowths of the technology of print, but rather of long historical processes. One example that he brings up to illustrate how print may generate many different cultural practices is what we today call piracy. In the early modern period, he writes: Piracy and plagiarism occupied readers’ minds just as prominently as fixity and enlightenment. Unauthorized translations, epitomes, imitations, and other varieties of “impropriety” were, they believed, routine hazards. Very few noteworthy publications seemed to escape altogether from such practices, and none at all could safely be regarded as immune a priori. It was regarded as extremely unusual for a book professing knowledge—from lowly almanacs to costly folios—to be published in the relatively unproblematic manner we now assume.71

Given this background, it is clear that the uniform edition did not spring naturally from the technology of print, but rather needed to be created. In the present age of digital technologies, however, the “danger” of piracy is not that it will introduce falsehoods into trustworthy works. Much to the contrary, at least in Argentina, pirates have become skilled at not only reproducing texts faithfully, but also getting the look and feel of a volume exactly right. One report even highlights contemporary book pirates’ skill at introducing knock-offs into mainstream bookstores, offering discounts to booksellers who, to protect themselves from prosecution, sometimes buy a few copies through official channels and then sell the cheaper volumes more profitably.72 This is just one example of the way that print lends itself to a multiplicity of practices. However, what stands out in tracing Johns’s critique up through the present is the way that Eisenstein’s idealized vision of print has, at one level, won the day. The uniform print edition has been so successful that even the threatening others—pirate editions— now seek to embody the values of “fidelity, reliability, and truth.”

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Late Book Culture in Argentina

The uniform print edition is the central artifact of modern literary autonomy throughout Latin America. As Rama puts it, when writers sought to establish an autonomous position, they did so through “what seemed a free professional relationship with the consuming public.” The object of consumption, the book itself, thus establishes a compact between writer and reader. A passing detail mentioned by Rama illustrates how this relationship worked at a symbolic level during the 1960s. In an interview with Life magazine, Cortázar reportedly asked, rhetorically, who his readers were if not the pueblo of Latin America.73 Conflating readers with citizens, Cortázar inscribes himself into a heroic position from which to address them.74 That this equivalence, even if imaginary, was plausible at all demonstrates the assumed transparency of the literary utterance. In his pact with his readers, addressed directly through the massprinted edition, Cortázar offers an implicit analogy with a principle at work in what Charles Taylor calls our “modern social imaginary,” namely the idea of a “directaccess society” in which all members are “immediate to the whole.”75 Both notions— Cortázar’s equation of readers and people and Taylor’s concept of a social imaginary in which we imagine ourselves as individuals that are immediately connected to our fellow citizens—represent ideal constructions. However, as is the case with autonomy, these constructions are powerful, and they reaffirm a persistent longing in modern book culture: the idea that literature, incarnate in the print edition, might contribute to forging national culture. This concept was roughly coterminous with the mid-century swell of nationcentered economic policies that sought to cultivate and integrate popular, particularly urban subjects into a national project. This project becomes particularly visible in the distributions of public space that accompanied it. Thus Pablo Ciccolella and Iliana Mignaqui tell us that the post–World War II period of import-substitution industrialization induced “either directly or indirectly a substantial growth in the residential space of popular and marginal sectors.”76 Maristella Svampa, writing on the same period, highlights the public spaces where these different classes would often commingle, “the plaza, the neighborhood corner, or the patios of a state-run school.”77 The attempted integration of previously excluded classes into the space of the nation, an effort we can roughly (though not exclusively) associate with the emergence of Peronism, thus impacted the way public space was occupied. To this spatial configuration we can draw a literary analogy: just as these public spaces sought to provide the foundations of a collective notion of citizenship, so did the mass-printed edition aim to open up access to a common experience of readership. It has been much remarked that public spaces have undergone striking developments over the past few decades, and furthermore that the logic of privatization is not just about economics but also about how our bodies circulate. In the case of Argentina, Svampa points out that spatial fragmentation was accelerated during the 1990s, under the presidency of Carlos Menem. His rapid dismantling of what remained of the Argentine welfare state—the wholesale neoliberalization of the national economy, which implied a continuation of trends set in motion during the dictatorship of the late 1970s and early 1980s—went hand in hand with tendencies toward spatial segregation.78 Ciccolella and Mignaqui note, for example, the increasing appearance, over the past

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few decades, of consumption sites like malls and entertainment complexes, as well as segregated spaces for “state-of-the-art office districts” and “gated communities for upper-class residents.”79 For new and old members of the upper class, along with many members of the middle class, this process has translated into the abandonment of an “ethics of citizenship” or “collective moral sense”—in short, a trend away from a notion of the public sphere as the ultimate horizon of one’s social existence.80 Similar features are notoriously characteristic of the world of late capitalism, whose name provides a slightly distorted mirror for the face of late book culture. The concept of late capitalism refers to the most recent stage in the trajectory that takes us from early market capitalism through its monopoly variant and on toward the present moment. It is characterized by the transnational corporation, the hegemony of finance capital, and the erosion of national boundaries. None of these would be possible without new digital technologies that move business beyond a world of paper. Jameson has spelled out the consequences of this transition elegantly: On the telephone people can no doubt give tips on future developments and place tentative orders, but these messages must still coexist with the body of paper itself—the bills of exchange or lading, the weight of documents, the very bundles of paper money itself, as the last makes its cumbersome way laboriously around the world. Speculation on such bills is another matter; it is no longer a question of buying things but rather of juggling whole labor forces. One can electronically substitute one entire national working class for another, halfway around the globe, wiping out industry after industry in the home country and dissipating accumulated months of value-producing labor overnight.81

The technologies that make the operations of late capitalism possible are the same ones that are slowly coming to populate and characterize the literary world. To return to Hayles’s formulation, nearly all literature today is electronic in some sense—including that of many smaller, more artisanal presses. The penetration of these technologies into almost all spheres of our lives, literature included, does not in itself portend any one result. That is, digital technologies are not necessarily the correlate of neoliberalism. However, the former are instrumentalized constantly by the latter, and the advance of both has influenced the nature of late book culture. This influence is particularly acute in writers’ perception of their potential readership. The notion of a common public—indeed, a public sphere in expansion that could be interpellated as a community of readers—long represented the ideal horizon for many writers ensconced within modern book culture. Chejfec has elegantly commented on the consequences of the move away from this configuration, affirming that “to wonder about the public is to wonder about the meaning of one’s own voice. But when the public is an empty place, not a series of questions without response but rather a series of unformulated questions, then it is probable that writers won’t recognize themselves as writers.”82 His emphasis on the “empty place” of the public stands as a reminder that literature always happens in concrete places, which are constantly constructed through channels of circulation and encounter. As Chejfec tells it, such places are increasingly

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Late Book Culture in Argentina

private: “The fragmentation of knowledge, discourses, and sensibilities, which happens in general from the eighties onward, makes literature an almost private activity, and on many occasions very specialized. Just one among so many formats taken by the versions or fables of historical or social life.”83 If Chejfec’s delineation of contemporary literary culture is accurate, then we are today witnessing a new set of private delineations that run parallel to the general privatization of public space. New developments in media culture are not solely responsible for this transformation. The “fragmentation of knowledge” that Chejfec mentions is a hallmark of postmodernism in its most canonical expression—as, precisely, the “cultural logic of late capitalism.” Thus Jameson has written of the postmodern acceleration of “the immense fragmentation and privatization” that began in modern literature. He ties it to an air of uncertainty, also palpable in Chejfec’s passage about the task of the literary writer. In Jameson’s own blunt terms, “it is no longer clear what the artists and writers of the present period are supposed to be doing.”84 If this is the case, then it is natural that we would find evidence of those strategies that, for him, typify postmodern cultural production—for example, pastiche, the death of the subject, and the nostalgia mode—among many contemporary writers. The corpus studied in this book is not an exception in this regard. Yet the strategies of postmodernism do not fully explain their respective and collective aesthetic attitudes. More concretely, while postmodernism has involved, as Jameson later elucidated, the twin gestures of rejection and repudiation, the writers and collective projects studied here take a more constructive stance.85 They seek not—or not only—to relativize and deconstruct their literary inheritance. They rather actively seek out new ways of mediating this literary experience today, in an age in which both the medium of the book and the spaces in which it circulates have been transformed by digital technologies. Hence their intense focus on constructing new means through which to articulate experiences of literature—or, at least, experiences that owe a great debt to the literary tradition. Lamborghini, Aira, and Eloísa Cartonera thus rearticulate a certain idea of literature through a sometimes wide-eyed examination of the book and its limits and possibilities. They break the book down into pieces and try to see how the pieces fit back together. As if in response, Estación Pringles, Chejfec, and Katchadjian take this puzzle and introduce new elements, other conceptions of media through which to understand the object of the book. Such is the outline of the argument I will advance. I will elaborate it through attention to a specific national context, that of Argentina. This decision is based on two fundamental considerations. The first is pragmatic and emergent from the corpus itself: these writers and projects form a rather organic group. There are numerous affinities among them—relationships of mentorship, literary kinship, and common sensibilities. When I first began to explore these writers and projects, I was struck by the fact that they all engaged with the concrete medium of literature in ways that were unique but which resonated with one another. Thus one of my ambitions is simply to explain the cohesion of this group through their varied relationships to the book. The second reason is more programmatic: I believe that despite the dynamics of globalization, which decenter and distribute relationships, nodal points generally

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emerge in geographical proximity, or they bear the traces of proximity, and that attention to the global energies that pass through these points can reveal much about the nature of circulation today. I thus decided to focus on a specific locality and the ways in which this locality is distributed and touched by other places. Among these are outposts such as Barcelona (where Lamborghini lived his last years), New York City (where Chejfec resides), and Coronel Pringles (the site of Estación Pringles). This geographical distribution is further reflected in the varied origins of the intertexts that are woven throughout this book, texts from France, the United States, Cuba, Chile, and elsewhere. Put briefly, late book culture is a global phenomenon, but the rifts it carves are most clearly visible through its geographically delimited effects. The present volume is also a late book, in as much as it is immersed in the same increasingly digital media ecology that characterizes contemporary literature. My aim in what follows is to dwell in that ecology, to inhabit the texts that have sprung up within it, and to work to understand how they engage with the form of the book. Roger Chartier has said that the historian’s task is to be “neither prophetic nor nostalgic”: this is particularly good advice for the literary critic when it comes to books, which often inspire both modes.86 I hope to avoid both pitfalls in the following chapters, seeking at once the distance of critique and the intimacy of close reading.

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Part One

Genealogy

24

1

First Publish, then Write Cigarettes and hotels Dates abound, César Aira remarks, in Osvaldo Lamborghini’s work. He emphasizes this point with good reason: “Dates: matter,” Lamborghini insists in one of the many asides that populate his work.1 Cigarettes also abound and also matter—their slow, ammonia-fueled burn marking the passage of time. They are the hourglass of a writer who is obsessed with the duration and experience of the present, a writer who seeks to cipher that obsession in his work. The dense first page of his 1982 text “El convenio colectivo” (The collective accord) improbably includes reflections on the white of the page and the white of Moby Dick, on napping and Diderot, all of it encompassed by a cigarette and its parenthetical extinguishing: “(the butt in the ashtray went out all on its own).”2 This cigarette measures time’s passing, which is also the time of a sprawling, mobile experience of writing. In another text, a cigarette signifies something else. “I feel nostalgic for literature,” Lamborghini writes in Las hijas de Hegel (Hegel’s daughters), “but the truth is that I’ve come to know other pleasures—the play of the wrist and hypochondria; lighting the last, but really the last, cigarette of the night.”3 A cigarette again marks time, here by capping off the night, and it also tells us that literature is, for the speaker, the object of a distracted longing. His suggestion seems to be that literature or a certain kind of literary culture has been lost. What might replace it remains unclear, unless it is some composite of those small pleasures listed by the narrator: bodily tics, hypochondria, and smoking. However, within the realm of Lamborghini’s work, we can discern his position more precisely: Lamborghini is interested not only in writing but also in new ways of constructing the medium of the literary encounter. Working against received conventions of literary circulation, Lamborghini insists on minor, even private literary experiences.4 These experiences are modeled on practices like scrawling, self-publishing, and underlining. In this sense, a publicly engaged literature really can become the object of a not-entirely-sincere nostalgia, and private experiences really can come to replace it. As Ariel Ídez remarks, Lamborghini’s most immediate intellectual peers pursued a sort of masturbatory aesthetics, seeking “solitary pleasure that not only admitted to onanism but took pride in it.”5 In Lamborghini’s writing, this model takes form in a literature of reduced dimensions but heightened intensity, whose central object is not the mass-produced volume but some sort of artisanal edition. This model of writing recurs consistently throughout his work. It appears variously in Las  hijas de Hegel

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Late Book Culture in Argentina

and, years later, pornographically in the posthumously published Teatro proletario de cámara (Proletarian chamber theater). It is a writing coupled irremediably to its own construction and display and one that seeks to collapse the time between the two: a writing of the restricted dimensions of the present. As such, Lamborghini’s work announces some sort of end: not exactly the end of literature, but of a literature modeled on the transcendent, public encounter. Hence his wry nostalgia, which also helps explain why, according to a recent critical intervention, his writing remains “current.” “In spite of not being contemporary,” write Natalia Brizuela and Juan Pablo Dabove, “[Lamborghini’s] work is indeed radically current, in particular within the Argentine literary system, because there we can retrospectively read a certain end of literature.”6 The distinction that Brizuela and Dabove draw between the contemporary and the current is highly significant. There is something dated, something very context specific, about much of Lamborghini’s writing. It is the product of an era, between the late 1960s and early 1980s, that seems more and more like the distant past. This is particularly true of the first half of that era. As Brizuela and Dabove perceptively write, “‘One, two, three Vietnams’ is untranslatable as ‘One, two, three Iraqs,’” just as other signal phenomena of that period, militant Peronism, for example, are inassimilable to the present.7 Everything points to the almost archival character of Lamborghini’s moment. The painting imagined by Luis Chitarroni as a crystallization of the aesthetic culture in which he was immersed—a “naked caricature of a painting with Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Lacan, and Barthes himself in a sort of Déjeuner sur l’herbe”—is the visual representation of a particular moment in the history of thought in Argentina: the moment when French theory began to leave its mark on intellectual culture in that country.8 Lamborghini belonged to a circle that was particularly influenced by this strand of thought, by the writers that congregated around the magazine Literal, and his writings are peppered with references to French structuralism and poststructuralism.9 These were the thinkers of the theoretical avantgarde, who by now are the hallmark figures of the linguistic turn’s received wisdom. Lamborghini’s work occupies the threshold that linked the consolidation of this aesthetic and theoretical universe to both some notion of the end of literature and some promise of its rebirth. It is far from my own intentions to mark the precise date of that death (for all such celebrations or wakes are somewhat arbitrary). I’d like simply to note that Lamborghini’s work occupies, often self-consciously, a generally transitional period in recent Argentine literature. Ídez has noted, in this regard, that already with the 1969 publication of his first work, the twenty-seven-page story El fiord, Lamborghini signaled a new direction within Argentine letters. El fiord “opened an experimental path at odds with the realist poetics that dominated in that moment, and it demonstrated that another way of approaching literary language was possible, without needing to turn away from politics.”10 The “path” marked by Lamborghini represents an alternative to other committed forms of writing from the era—those represented by Julio Cortázar or Rodolfo Walsh, for example.11 His first text and those that followed were cult works, politically charged but aimed at a minority of readers. It is in this sense that Luis Gusmán once wrote that El fiord was “unreadable at the level of the market.”12 A few

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years later, Josefina Ludmer wrote something similar, remarking that Lamborghini’s subsequently published text, Sebregondi retrocede (Sebregondi retreats), was “mute” and “illegible” and did not propose to “communicate” with us in any normal sense of that term.13 The dialectic identified in the previous chapter, wherein literature straddles the line between circulation and withdrawal, between exhibition value and cult value, is resolved or abandoned in favor of the second term. In this way, while Lamborghini’s work might not exactly mark an absolute endpoint within Argentine literature, it certainly ciphers some sort of historical inflexion. This sense of transition perhaps explains why Lamborghini’s work so consistently enacts a cannibalization of the literary past. He devours modern literature and nowhere more visibly than in Las hijas de Hegel, a three-part novel of sorts that was written between Buenos Aires and Mar del Plata. It is a complex, nomadic text, resistant to exhaustive analysis. Its thematic elements drift in and out: obscure criminal acts, meditations on literature and the arts, active interpellations of the reader, parenthetical notes, and finally, the intermittent stories of three women. The writing often seems distracted by itself and its immediate surroundings, bored with its own characters and events. Its punctuation is irregular. The novel resembles a set of notes or sketches for a more neatly and organically composed text, becoming what Reinaldo Laddaga calls an “abandoned and half-opened archive” that the reader stumbles upon.14 And this archive is, among other things, the archive of literature itself, as a litany of names from the Southern Cone (and particularly Argentine) literary canon—Lucio V. Mansilla, Horacio Quiroga, Oliverio Girondo, Leopoldo Lugones, Vicente Huidobro, Eduardo Wilde, Jorge Luis Borges, and above all José Hernández—appears scattered throughout the text.15 The archival function of Las hijas de Hegel corresponds to Lamborghini’s tongue-in-cheek nostalgia for literature, just as it foresees the dawn of late book culture in Argentina. It is difficult to know how fully to characterize the writing of Las hijas de Hegel. A simpler task is to ask where it takes place—or rather where it performs itself as having taken place: in a hotel, and not just in any hotel, but a stagnant, malaise-inducing one, a hotel that alludes to the one that Hernández himself occupied while he wrote the Martín Fierro, Argentina’s national epic. Hernández prefaced the first volume (1872) of his long poem with a letter. He writes that he’s decided to publish his “poor Martín Fierro, which has helped me tolerate the malaise of this hotel.”16 These same words (in the original, alejar el fastidio de la vida de hotel) show up repeatedly in Lamborghini’s text as he narrates his own restless stay in a different hotel. His is a double of Hernández’s, though it is a distorted rendition. In contrast to the hotel of the Martín Fierro, which is a kind of refuge from which the writer emerges heroically extenuated, finished text in hand, Lamborghini’s hotel is a transitory place of passage, ideal for shady business deals or tawdry affairs. Cigarettes mark time, and hotels mark space. Together, they delineate the compact dimensions of Lamborghini’s ideal literary experience. Particularly through the latter, Lamborghini carries out a somewhat ventriloquized dialogue with Argentina’s national epic—a dialogue that obliquely reflects the scalar difference that he imagines. He does so by speaking with and through Hernández, his puppeteer’s performance

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offering an exposition of both his own aesthetics and his relationship to the literary past. The novel begins with a date and an ellipsis, followed by an invocation of the poet: “October 15, 1982 / . . . José Hernández, no (nothing to do with this). . . .”17 Hernández is mentioned only to be parenthetically cast off. This is because, the narrator tells us, he “barely ever spoke about women; even less about whores: and precisely, the story I plan or threaten to tell is about María Yiraldín, a high-priced whore, born in Buenos Aires, who plied her wares downtown and in residential areas.”18 He says he wants to tell his story cleanly, straight to the point, but Hernández keeps getting in his way. He haunts him, he tells us over and again. “José Hernández,” he writes, “Martín Fierro. I’ll never get him out. Of my fucking head.”19 Lamborghini performs wanting to write, but literature, of the most canonical, classical sort, keeps getting in the way. In 1872, José Hernández shuts himself up in a hotel and writes the Martín Fierro. Roughly a century later, Osvaldo Lamborghini attempts to tell, or performs the attempt to tell, the story of María Yiraldín but seemingly can’t help but dwell on Hernández. In the interim, a complex literary culture blooms. The first step in this process, whereby literature achieves a qualified but real autonomy, was the splintering of literature’s longstanding pact with the state. That is, literature increasingly sought to reach beyond the state’s instrumental needs. As noted previously, Ludmer dates this separation, in Argentina, to the year 1880, one year after the second volume of the Martín Fierro was first published. Literary autonomy, however, is not something that appears overnight. Rather, it names a gradual process, and the Martín Fierro occupies a crucial moment in this historical unfolding. Hernández’s second volume coincides with the beginning of an important 30-year period (1880–1910) in which a “new sort of reader,” frequently a member of the middling or popular classes, emerged in Argentina.20 Adolfo Prieto has sustained that the mass character of this reader—and hence the possibility of an eventually expansive, autonomous literary culture—is first made starkly apparent precisely by the success of Hernández’s poem, which sold 48,000 copies over the course of its first 6 years.21 This mass circulation doubtless owes partially to the quality of the work itself, but it also reflects a growing, increasingly literate population.22 The continued expansion of this potential readership, whose existence is cast into relief by the Martín Fierro, would form the basis for the modern book culture that grew up in the wake of Hernández’s poem. As such, in spite of its own avowedly instrumental nature, the Martín Fierro signaled the underlying conditions for literature to grow into the autonomous “world apart” named by Bourdieu.23 The text’s readership was reflected in its physical format. Jorge B. Rivera has noted that Hernández astutely chose the feuilleton as the initial medium for the Martín Fierro. The low cost of this format allowed it to circulate widely among the “new potential public” that Hernández had foreseen. This accessibility facilitated the text’s integration into atypical literary spaces—pulperías or bars, for example, where the text could be purchased and was often read out loud. Besides the volumes being cheap, ample numbers of “fraudulent” and “clandestine” versions could also be found.24 All of this contributed to what Prieto calls “a sort of reading of absolutely spontaneous and contagious identification” with the text.25 In his prologue to the second volume, Hernández makes much of this success, cataloguing his previous commercial triumph

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in great detail. He also describes the physical appearance of the new volume, which is a far cry from the original newsprint feuilleton. The paper will be expensive. Lithographic prints will adorn it, supposedly the first such occasion in Argentine literature. Five print runs of 4,000 copies each are planned. Hernández brags that it will enjoy “the most advantageous artistic conditions.”26 If the poem’s first volume signaled the existence of numerous potential readers, this second installment seeks to capture this mass character and couple it to the cultish veneration demanded by the work of art. In his own work, Lamborghini cultivated the second but not the first. His works generated a small but impassioned readership. One reader recalls, years later, that “in order to read El fiord, one had to go up to the counter of a bookstore on Corrientes Street and ask for it, in a very soft voice, from a complicit bookseller.”27 His other poems and stories were published by small publishing houses and in little magazines. Ídez notes that the early 1970s, the years of Lamborghini’s initial publications, coincided with something of a boom in small presses in Argentina, some of which even managed to compete with some of their larger rivals.28 His literature eventually circulated more clandestinely, photocopied for example, which points to a literature not only under conditions of censorship but also literature as the cult object of a devoted minority. Such minor forms of circulation are certainly not rare in literary history, but they are decidedly not characteristic of the horizon toward which modern Argentine writers would often strive. To be sure, the modern book culture that forms the backdrop against which to read Lamborghini’s work is exemplified not by the photocopy nor by either the feuilleton or the deluxe edition, which correspond respectively to the first and second volumes of the Martín Fierro. Rather, its central literary object draws on the nature of both, seeking to marry wide distribution to an autonomous standard of quality determined not solely by the fact of this distribution. Modern book culture had an icon, one still familiar to readers in the present: the widely available, mechanically reproduced book. As outlined previously, this object became an important social interface for the delineation of subjectivities, particularly in urban areas. The roots of this development stretch far back, as the consolidation of republican order in Argentina in the late nineteenth century was concurrent with an initial growth in urban, middle-class book culture. As the twentieth century progressed, the role that the book would play was transformed. Initially tied to pedagogical functions, the book eventually came to represent the promise of a transcendent encounter: a fusion between the individual reader and a culture at large, an integration of disparate social bodies in a common narrative, an experience of the ecstatic beyond the quotidian. This was, and still is, an experience that typically implies sustained attention, relative solitude, and a temporal lag between the time of writing and the time of reading. These are the conditions against which Lamborghini would define his literature. His literature thus celebrates less the finished object—the standard edition, that is—than the more spatially and temporally restricted arts of improvisation and performance. Arturo Carrera, once one of Lamborghini’s co-conspirators, has written about these sorts of performance. He says that vocalization brings out the “little theater” that lies at the heart of every poem.29 The concept can help us understand

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how Lamborghini conceived his own writing. “Lamborghini links,” writes Laddaga, “the possibility of writing to the possibility of making a scene.”30 He makes a scene not only the way lovers or children do but also in the more physical sense of imagining himself on stage. His notion of literature would take the form of a little performance, a play of dubious qualities, a cabaret that takes place in someone’s kitchen. It would be a play like the “palace of applauses” that he and Carrera wrote about in 1981, in a script that narrates, from a mise-en-scène in Coronel Pringles, the drama of the actors’ mere presence. This text is punctuated by calls for applause, so much so that the emission of enthusiasm comes to eclipse the events, if in fact there are any worth remembering, of the play itself. This is literature as a transient event, as a little theater. This model is a distant echo of the Martín Fierro itself, whose recitations were similarly evanescent and improvisational. It also represents the underlying truth to Lamborghini’s most famous slogan, which can be found in various versions throughout his work and serves to summarize his experiments with textual circulation: “First publish, then write.” This formula is absurd, though as Laddaga remarks, “just by reading it slowly, one finds real sense in it.”31 Indeed, it corresponded to an actual ritual, a concrete practice that Sergio Chejfec has described: According to those who knew him, Lamborghini had a personal publication plan, to which he referred with simple irony: “Publish, then write.” To do so, he’d glue a homemade cover over the cover of some book. Thus, magically, the book became his own: author and title right there on the front cover. What was left was to write, which he did on the pages inside, in between the lines of the printed text. I think that in Lamborghini this simultaneously simple and complex idea, which affiliates him with Duchamp and Macedonio Fernández, can be interpreted as a joke and as a literary identity; he tells us that his art is written where that of others is silent, and which on the other hand he needs to silence in order to exist.32

The book itself is just a readymade, as Chejfec makes clear, until Lamborghini turns it into something else. He paints a mustache on a Mona Lisa postcard with his homemade covers. The books he altered had likely come off the press at a far remove from their readers. For them, the moments of writing, publishing, and reading had occupied discrete spheres. Lamborghini brings all these moments back together in a sort of theater of publishing, turning the scene of production into a minimal work of performance art. At a remove from the mass literary culture that would swell throughout the twentieth century, Lamborghini turns a paperback into the vehicle of a minor, private experience. The homemade book, or the home-altered book, becomes another figure like the cigarette and the hotel—the index of a literary experience small in its dimensions.

Notebooks In this way, Lamborghini presents the book as a strange object, diverted from its common function. Books, for him, are not instruments of long-distance, temporally dilated

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literary encounters. They are small, movable stages for the performance of writing, publishing, and reading. The first of these is crisscrossed by dates that document the present tense of its appearance; the second is understood as the act of saying something, anything, even if it ultimately means nothing; the third is more akin to underlining— which is to say, an inscription that signifies only minimally—than to what we normally call reading.33 All three actions coalesce in Lamborghini’s own notebooks, which are thoroughly documented throughout Las hijas de Hegel. The novel, Aira tells us in his annotations, was written in three notebooks; he goes on to mention their brand names and to remark that each volume is footnoted by Lamborghini. Two of these notes refer back to the same oddly worded phrase: “reason, to have it and lost.”34 The other leads into another, equally cryptic formulation: “the calls of little material details, clamors within a single clamor.”35 The reference, doubtless, is to the objects just mentioned, the notebooks in which the time of writing interrupts the time of the narrative. According to this dual temporality, the notebooks are “little material details,” singular clamors that distract us from the clamor in singular. These are notebooks in which, presumably, one might do something like publish before writing. And to follow Lamborghini’s claim, they also represent, in some capacity, a loss of reason. Reason, seemingly possessed but ultimately lost, corresponds here to something like intelligibility or communicability, the transcending of a finite particular instance and the accession to a universal dimension. This formulation might explain why Hegel appears in the title. Lamborghini’s reference is most certainly not a casual one. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, often accompanied by Jean Hyppolite’s glosses on it, was required reading among theoretical circles in the Argentina of Lamborghini’s era. To give just one example, in a novel by novelist Tununa Mercado, it is the book that gathers together a circle of Argentine exiles in a Mexico City reading group. Given this background, some key passages from Hegel’s text can help us understand why Lamborghini’s notebooks are tied up with a loss of reason. One of this text’s foundational concepts is that any particular use of language already participates in a universal mode, given that to access language is to enter into consciousness.36 This is a crucial formula for the tradition of European philosophy that coalesced during the 1960s. It is difficult to overstate the importance of this tradition for Lamborghini and the rest of the Literal writers. In Hegel’s conception, regardless of one’s intention to refer to this specific notebook, or to the particular moment of smoking this cigarette, language absorbs this specificity into the universal realm. What is “merely meant” and what is actually expressed are two different things. On the one hand, the speaker wants to refer to an absolute particularity, but this contingency is impeded by the nature of language. To put it in the form of a tautology, expression corresponds to the expressible; it is necessarily a social and not a private language. On the other hand, this radical singularity—the “unutterable” that inhabits the province of  the “untrue, the irrational, what is merely meant”—is not abolished, but rather survives through the operation of mediation.37 Hyppolite explains how this works in his notes on the Phenomenology of Spirit: “the moment of intending will subsist and, through the calvary of mediation, consciousness will rediscover that identity with which it had started as truth that is certain of itself.”38 Put differently, “[w]hat I

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experience but am unable to express in any way has no truth,” but through the machine of the dialectic the specific is conserved within the universal and reveals itself, in the end, as absolute knowledge.39 The place where reason is lost, then, equals that realm of the “untrue, the irrational, what is merely meant” and therefore not communicable. In Hegel’s formulation this moment persists, taken up in the progressive march toward absolute knowledge; for Lamborghini it remains inassimilable: “metaphysics—no, nothing to do with this,” he writes, echoing his own dismissal of Hernández; “nothing of Hegel,” we read at a later moment.40 Discarding metaphysical inquiries, Lamborghini prefers a writing that preserves the dumb particularity of material inscription. He constantly refers to his notebooks as a sort of ground on which the novel’s writing advances. Structured around the lead up to 17 October, the foundational date for Peronism as a movement, the novel insistently marks its own materiality: “In two notebooks the seventeenth grows near.”41 The approach of this day is ciphered not in the action, but in the specific notebook where its writing is taking place. Later, again, Lamborghini comments on the novel as a whole: “It’s already begun in two notebooks: ‘The daughters of Hegel.’”42 His notebooks are full of writing, which would inevitably involve a linguistic sublimation, but Lamborghini cares little for this. What matters most is their brute materiality, the graphite etching in their pages. One of his notebooks has been damaged. Lamborghini tells us so twice: “With the notebook torn, an enormous hole in the paper.”43 The hole is, in the first case, “proportionately inverse to the extension of thought.” Here the hole signals the shrinking of thought’s extension; as it grows larger, the reach of reason (“to have it, and lost”) grows smaller.44 On the second occasion, something similar is asserted, as the hole now becomes the channel through which form itself escapes: “Form escapes through there. Light—no use—light another one. Damnedly, when form escapes (cigarette) it’s pleasure that escapes, the familiar escapes, the familiar that has all the air of a novel.”45 The motif of the cigarette here returns, as it becomes the futile substitute for the loss of form and everything attached to it—most notably perhaps the “air of a novel.” The hole in the paper is where that form, that air, is lost, along with reason. Lamborghini, we might say, is not writing a novel and is not creating a form; he’s doing something more aimless and formless: scribbling in a notebook. “Page after page, after page,” he writes elsewhere, “all that matters to me is filling after page, keeping on and continuing and filling page, obviously, after page.”46 The act of filling pages, even torn pages, takes precedence over any pretension that those pages full of writing might become anything but the remnants of that specific action.47 “On the floor of meaning there are always crumbs, particles of dust”: thus reads a passage from El palacio de los aplausos, the theater script that Lamborghini co-authored with Carrera.48 In a similar spirit, in Las hijas de Hegel, Lamborghini draws an equivalence between his own text and the notion of absolute particularity, something beyond the universal’s reach. Within the text itself this equivalence remains a theoretical, perhaps fanciful conceit. However, in light of Lamborghini’s own practice as a maker of books, it acquires a very practical dimension. The idea of the material text as nothing but a support for performance is translated into the idea of the

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notebook as an absolutely particular object. Performances, no matter how reiterative they turn out to be, are similarly situated in their own radical present and their own rooted locations. To create a text that would correspond to such a dynamic is the quixotic ambition that lies within Las hijas de Hegel, in which Lamborghini constantly calls attention to the material support of writing, the notebook itself. In this effort, he works against the notion that the medium can be transparent. This is important, for one ambition of modern literary culture in Argentina had been the desire to make absolutely particular materials—foreign and local, literary and nonliterary—transparent, immediately communicable to a broad population. For this to happen, however, a kind of translation is necessary, either in the literal sense of rendering a text from one language into another, or by taking a contingent, particular situation and molding it into a literary object. Borges offers a unique example in his famous essay “El escritor argentino y la tradicion” (“The Argentine Writer and Tradition”), for there he declares that traditions, both foreign and national, are potentially malleable substances, immediately available to the writer due to the transparent character of literature itself. Argentine writers, Borges sustains, are uniquely situated to take advantage of this situation, due precisely to their peripheral place in western culture: “I believe that we Argentines, we South Americans in general . . . can handle all European themes, handle them without superstition, with an irreverence which can have, and already does have, fortunate consequences.”49 In this conceptual operation, Borges identifies literature with a realm of transcendent communicability, indeed of universality. These central elements of the literary book culture that reached its peak during the middle decades of the twentieth century would find their double in the distributed, reproducible edition itself. Lamborghini does the exact opposite. He renders his literature opaque, forcing us to contend not with the literary tradition that he constantly mentions, but with the material medium where he makes these mentions. This struggle with the medium helps explain how exactly to relate Las hijas de Hegel back to Hernández. Lamborghini began to write at the moment when the modern book culture that was, in some sense, inaugurated by the Martín Fierro was reaching a transitional point. And in response to this transition, Lamborghini seeks a return to one of the original strands of Hernández’s poem: the oral, performative part of its history. It is on this basis that we might read his experimentation with, in Aira’s words, the “immediate and material present” or the “now of writing.”50 This is what we can read in his figuration of his notebooks as the place where reason is violently lost, where communication becomes impossible because of the mute, incommunicable character of the medium’s “material present.” This property of his writing is channeled through his consistent engagement with the book itself. However, Lamborghini’s writing does not simply dwell in incommunicability, in its own resonant materiality. His is not a writing of immobility. Rather, he makes visible the brute, material nature of his experiment in inscription, taking it as the basis for a new mode of constructing a text. Las hijas de Hegel lays out the stakes and historical circumstances of his efforts to “first publish, then write,” but it is elsewhere in his oeuvre that we find actual instantiations of his model for constructing a text. To see

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this model in action, we’ll have to turn to the posthumous text that occupied him in the latter years of his life, the pornographic collage of words and images known as the Teatro proletario de cámara.

Chamber theater The Teatro proletario was not, in any literal sense, published before it was written. It appeared only in 2008, more than two decades after its author’s death, having lain dormant in the realm of speculation in the interim. In its present incarnation, it is an art book, a thick volume with a cardboard case, its pages plated in gold. Here we find another strange parallel with Hernández: the second volume of the Martín Fierro was a glitzy object in comparison with the first, just as the Teatro proletario represents a finely wrought contrast with the handmade and occasional volumes that Lamborghini produced during his lifetime. In his glosses on the volume, Aira does not draw this exact parallel, but he does connect it to Lamborghini’s artisanal production and also, significantly, to his notion of publishing before writing. The format of the Teatro proletario, Aira writes, is difficult to define: an illustrated book, an album of memories, a modified [intervenida] pornographic magazine, a portable museum. . . . Its deliberate division into volumes, besides lending it, a priori and hollowly, a monumental dimension, suggests a “collection,” and thus an editorial task. This task gives us a clue as to the most immediate antecedent to the Teatro Proletario de Cámara, not necessarily previous in time: the construction of artisanal books, of which Lamborghini made quite a few, some of them by binding blank pages (which generally were only illustrated, painted, or written on up through the first few pages), others by reforming already existent books (covering the text in white paint, drawing or writing over the printed text, or gluing cut-out figures). He “made” the book; later he would take the time to write it; he thus put into practice his famous recommendation: “First publish, then write,” subtracting from the word “publish” its social aspect so as to make it into a solitary and secret game, a “chamber” game.51

Aira here covers some of the same ground that Chejfec had previously surveyed, both of them linking the notion of publishing before writing to the production of occasional, secretive volumes. What is more, the Teatro proletario, for Aira, radicalizes Lamborghini’s slogan, as he goes so far as to publish without writing—without a practice of writing, that is, which is tied to any sort of communicative intention. This is a writing that exists only as a convention to fill pages, an interstice or support for the book object itself, all of which would amount to a reversal of the normal order of things. This is not the only way that Lamborghini sidelines writing in the Teatro proletario. He also does so more simply by relying so heavily on images. The book is in large part a collage of mostly pornographic photographs trimmed from the magazines and

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novels that Lamborghini read at a breakneck pace in his small apartment in Barcelona. It also contains drawings by his own hand, often overlaying the photographic images. One of the first pages, for example, represents a woman viewed from behind as she accommodates herself on an erect penis, over which she hovers momentarily (see Figure 2). Facing the page is a typewritten poem, with portions of it crossed out either with a row of Xs or with ink smudges. There are handwritten revisions as well. This early text in the first of the text’s eight volumes couches the project in poetic terms: “It’s time, let’s begin: - Rhyme/Or whatever this whore is called/Proceeds always sideways/Like the astute serpent.”52 Rhyme, which recurs irregularly throughout this short poem, is a “whore,” and it intervenes sideways, like a snake. A poetic convention, in other words, will wind its way into and through the text, but only surreptitiously, as if sneaking up on it. It is difficult to know how to understand this mention of rhyme. Lamborghini’s text is far from conventional, and yet unrhymed poetry, by the time he was constructing the Teatro proletario, was no novelty in poetic culture. Perhaps it is the snake itself, with its phallic associations, that is the central element in this particular text, as it seems to be the antecedent referenced in the following lines, wherein a nurse riding a bus approaches an “irresistible backside/Gluteous and buttful” with “it” (here a feminine pronoun, referring to the snake). He is arrested, and that’s the end of the story. But it’s not the end of the poem, whose second half centers on an “enfermo” (a sick man, and also an indirect reference back to the nurse, “enfermero”), enslaved by Eros. The opening anecdote is thus thrust into the realm of myth, all of which deserves neither “praise” nor “grimace,” for as the poem explains in its final, enigmatic, handwritten lines, “Nuns also use the wimple [or touch: toca]/And the Devil doesn’t carry them away.”

Figure 2  Osvaldo Lamborghini, Teatro proletario de cámara. (image reproduced with permission from Anxo Rabuñal, Elvira Lamborghini, and Hannah Muck)

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In itself, the poem breathes the same air as much of Lamborghini’s writing: it is a casual-seeming piece, rife with neologisms and wordplay, which levels the mundane and the transcendent on the flat plane of the page. Faced with the image, it becomes a sort of caption or legend, explaining the scene that is represented visually. More than that, it amplifies the image, giving it a context and back story. This happens throughout the Teatro proletario, as Lamborghini’s writing seeks to tell the elaborate particulars of what is happening in the images that he has drawn or arranged. This interpretation betrays a readerly desire—the desire that image and text might line up in some orderly way. The Teatro proletario, however, consistently thwarts this desire. True to his generally antinarrative orientation, Lamborghini’s writing doesn’t often give context at all. It sometimes refers us back to his other written works, as in the case when a picture of a muscular, mustached, naked man is accompanied by the name “EL CLOACA IVÁN,” a reference to a character in a manuscript that dates from his final years.53 He also uses captions to make bad jokes and worse puns about what is represented, and other times he makes references, as he does throughout the written portion of the text, to contemporary Spanish and Argentine politicians. Still other times he draws uncertain analogies with the realm of myth, as in the case of a photo of two naked women sitting cross-legged, whose bodily contours Lamborghini has traced and above whom he has written “CAIN AND ABEL.”54 In this case, as in many others throughout the text, the association he has drawn obeys reasons impossible to discern. The work’s composition is entirely contingent, and its system of referents remains hermetic. Lamborghini’s blend of text and images can be usefully compared with a tendency that Roland Barthes has noted in the work of American painter Cy Twombly. The latter’s work is famously littered with a combination of nonlinguistic scribbles and semi-legible writing, so much so that the distinction between the two becomes nearly impossible to determine. Writing and painting, in other words, become one and the same thing. Barthes seizes on the proliferation of names on Twombly’s canvases as an instance of the “impurity” of his art. Names, he writes, are facts: they stand there on the stage, without settings or props: Virgil, Orpheus. But their nominalist glory (nothing but the name) is also impure: the writing of it is a little childish, irregular, clumsy; nothing to do with the typography of conceptual art; the hand that writes them gives these names all the blunders of someone learning to write; and perhaps in this, once again, the Name’s truth is more apparent: doesn’t the schoolboy learn the essence of table by copying its name in his laborious handwriting? By writing Virgil on his canvas, it’s as if Twombly were condensing in his handwriting the very immensity of the Virgilian world, all the references of which this name is a repository. This is why, in Twombly’s titles, we must not look for any induction of analogy. If the canvas is called The Italians, do not look for the Italians anywhere except, precisely, in their name. Twombly knows that the Name has an absolute (and sufficient) power of evocation: to write The Italians is to see all Italians.55

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Much of what Barthes notes here, and also in a previous essay on Twombly, applies equally to Lamborghini’s Teatro proletario. There is a childish quality in the work of each, which is the source of impurity in them.56 Their immaturity is visible above all in the refusal or lack of categorization in their respective oeuvres. Written words bleed into painting on Twombly’s canvases, while poetry and prose spill over into drawing and collage in Lamborghini’s Teatro proletario. The two share an air of innocence, of what the world must feel like before we attain knowledge of the disciplines that divide it up. That said, it is unclear whether the status of writing that Barthes imputes to Twombly’s paintings is precisely applicable to Lamborghini’s volume. The contrast between the two is instructive. Barthes sees words like “Virgil” or “The Italians” as conjuring up worlds—the world of Virgil or the world of all Italians. Words are capacious and evocative; names have “an absolute (and sufficient) power of evocation.” The words that accompany images in the Teatro proletario, however, seem to follow a different pattern—or rather different patterns, for there is no singular logic at work. They resist the absoluteness Barthes describes. An example comes in the text’s long second volume (see Figures 3 and 4). The foreground of one image shows a man with a leather jacket, a denim shirt, and blue jeans. These are unzipped, and he holds his protruding penis in his hands. It is a scene of voyeurism, as he peers through a doorway at a seminude woman who lies on a bed masturbating. Over the image is a single typed word, “KICKED OUT!” The function of this caption is not so distinct from the function Barthes finds in Twombly’s work; we might say that by interpreting the photo in this manner, Lamborghini evokes the entire world of the rejected man. However, when we turn the page, this interpretation becomes less plausible. This is because the image is repeated, now with ink lines showing us the man’s line of sight. His eyes are fixed on the wall above the woman, and this modification is accompanied by a new text. At the top of the page, now in Lamborghini’s own handwriting, we read the following: “KICKED OUT! (Controlling avant-garde painters was his forte)/ Proletarian Chamber Theater, second stage. Archive and filing cabinet.”57 And then below the image, in the same handwriting: “Guy Cortina, Serguei’s great-grandson, also turned out to be a spy. A spy and a Tolstoian, like his boring [pesado] art.” The latter addition seems to be a jocular imitation of mystery fiction, which along with the anterior text expands on the previous iteration of the same photograph. However, it is in relation to the head caption that a real distinction can be drawn between the respective functions of writing in the Teatro proletario and Twombly’s canvases. If, as Barthes writes, in his paintings Twombly took the specific and made it absolute, Lamborghini here does the opposite: he takes the specific and renders it even more particular. Instead of making the man in the photograph into an archetype, he makes him entirely contingent. He gives him a flat, readymade story, which in turn explains why his line of sight is fixed on the paintings on the wall above the woman, and he also locates him within a text: on the plane of the Teatro proletario itself, which is described simultaneously as an archive and a filing cabinet. This man, in other words, is not the abstraction of a man kicked out of a bedroom, a stand-in for all such men, but rather one who inhabits the specific location of the archive that is Lamborghini’s book.

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Figures 3 and 4  Osvaldo Lamborghini, Teatro proletario de cámara. (images reproduced with permission from Anxo Rabuñal, Elvira Lamborghini, and Hannah Muck) This is one way that the poetics of this work dovetails with the ambition earlier delineated in Las hijas de Hegel. Both attempt to preserve absolute particularity through a refusal of abstraction or generalization. In Las hijas de Hegel this insistence on finite particularity extends to the object of the book, which is why Lamborghini makes so many references to the specific notebooks in which the text was written. The Teatro proletario mirrors this insistence and also represents its concrete enactment. This enactment takes place through the way that the book traces and conserves the various gestures—writing, tracing, drawing, and painting—that create it. Hence the various instances of modified repetition in the text. There are numerous cases in which an image recurs twice or more in the volume. In its first notebook, we find a painting that depicts a kneeling woman holding a man’s penis over her head, an image that is accompanied by the handwritten text, “MIGRAINE/An unforgettable woman.” This exact combination of writing and image is repeated in the second volume, but this time as a photograph and typewritten words (see Figures 5 and 6).58 The likeness between the two images is precise enough to assume that Lamborghini had two copies and painted over one of them. What lies between the two pages, then, is the motion and imprint of the author’s hand. This is not to be understood as a sovereignly creative intervention, but rather as the simple conservation of a gesture. The metaphorical distance between the two combinations of image and words is the time required to enact this gesture. Repetition with difference here serves to make this gesture materialize and remain on the page.

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Figures 5 and 6  Osvaldo Lamborghini, Teatro proletario de cámara. (images reproduced with permission from Anxo Rabuñal, Elvira Lamborghini, and Hannah Muck The centrality of this gesture in the Teatro proletario points to another way in which Barthes’s essays on Twombly speak to Lamborghini’s work, this time in a more exact manner. Of writing, in Barthes’s understanding, Twombly retains the gesture, not the product. . . . What is a gesture? Something like the surplus of an action. The action is transitive, it seeks only to provoke an object, a result; the gesture is the indeterminate and inexhaustible total of reasons, pulsions, indolences, which surround the action with an atmosphere (in the astronomical sense of the word). Hence, let us distinguish the message, which seeks to produce information, and the sign, which seeks to produce an intellection from the gesture, which produces all the rest (the “surplus”) without necessarily seeking to produce anything.59

These three last terms—message, sign, and gesture—encompass a useful constellation that might be projected over Lamborghini’s work. The message of the Teatro proletario, if understood as a composite of the numerous signs that make it up, is nearly impossible to determine. This is because so much of the text seems to involve an obsessively secret conversation. “I do nothing all day but talk to a boggy wall,” we read on one page in the sixth notebook.60 We read it twice on that page, as it is written and rewritten, as if to create a sort of shadow of the original. And then if we turn the page we read it twice again. There is a sort of echo chamber in the Teatro proletario whose echoes result not from sound rebounding off walls, independently of their speaker, but rather from the

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insistent action of a writer’s hand. That hand seems to insist on reminding us of its own action, the production of the excess of meaning and all communication, that “all the rest” that Barthes describes. That excess is a gesture that, to use Barthes’s words again, Lamborghini makes “linger.” Barthes’s description has one more italicized word that might be helpful in understanding the poetics of the Teatro proletario. The word is “atmosphere.” Barthes notes parenthetically that he means “the astronomical sense of the word.” This is the case because he is not invoking the feeling or vibe of Twombly’s work, but rather the real surroundings that give the work sustenance. These surroundings are not limited to the physical infrastructure that allows art to exist and circulate. They also include the artist’s action and everything that leads up to it. To say so is not to invoke the artist’s biography as a way of explaining his work, only to note that certain artists, Twombly for example, demand that we think of their work as being tied to a life—or rather to life in an absolute, pulsating state: the entire complex of impersonal and personal gestures that we constantly make and that sometimes remain on the canvas or the page. Lamborghini’s Teatro proletario works like that. He invokes a whole atmosphere of action. This is how the multiple drawings over photographs and drawings of photographs that populate this volume can be explained. They are vehicles for inscribing a convergence of bodily forces and gestures into the book. The ambition of the Teatro proletario seems to involve the forging of an object that would preserve and allow the physical force of the artist’s hand to linger. The genre of the text is important in this regard. For although Aira mentions a number of them that can apply to the Teatro proletario, he overlooks the most obvious: the diary. Lamborghini writes about this genre in the seventh and penultimate volume of the text. In a handwritten text titled “The Personal Diary,” he writes about the journal of Ernesto Guevara. His reflections on the genre are short but substantial: A genre that pleases, offers, and lasts. By chance perhaps. There must be more, but I am familiar only with Ernesto Guevara’s: an intimate text par excellence—no confession, a complete absence: of stupidities and/or filthy personal anecdotes. So soon does he die and they disperse his corpse, something that he also excludes.61

It’s often difficult to determine with what level of irony Lamborghini is writing, but his praise of certain aspects of Guevara’s diary—its absence of a confessional tone, the lack of anecdotes—seems sincere. His last sentence is particularly significant, for he notes that Guevara also omits his own death from his diary. That its inclusion would have been a real impossibility is not what is at stake here. Rather, Lamborghini seems to propose that to include it would imply a sort of sentimentality or grandiosity, whereas the impersonal nature of Guevara’s diary is precisely what renders it most intimate. There is a parallel here with Lamborghini’s own practice as keeper of the sprawling diary that is the Teatro proletario. His inclusion of mass-produced, readymade images is precisely what allows him to conserve a gesture, a Duchampian gesture of cutting and pasting, that is at once intimate, forceful, and impersonal.

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History That reflection on Guevara’s diary is titled “History,” and it appears on the page immediately following a poem of the same name. This poem begins with a reference to a hotel, the same one that is the scene of the writing of Las hijas de Hegel, the Astor Hotel in Buenos Aires. In this text, the hotel serves to situate the composition in a concrete place and time, both analogous and irreducible to the scene of the Martín Fierro: Those days in the Astor Hotel, hands empty, regulations nailed to the wall (and to be an addict does not preclude one from being a drunk), the debatable Right to Admission, the Malvinas Islands to top it all off: we were few, grandma gave birth, your absence that shot through my heart: an absence in morning flower, fragrant and pearled with dew.62

This is the atmosphere, in Barthes’s very physical sense of the word, of Las hijas de Hegel. It is evoked years later in Barcelona, toward the end of the Teatro proletario’s seventh notebook in a handwritten poem that seems to have been written in a hurry and whose final lines also invoke the days of Las hijas de Hegel and the Malvinas War with the United Kingdom: “They don’t need military coups/Rule is absolute:/the queen of the seas/is tenacious, incompetent. They are thankful for fog.” Lamborghini continues, with nearly indecipherable handwriting at times, but the spirit of the poem lies here, in the invocation of a world in which military coups are unnecessary because the most recent ones have rendered the power of capital absolute. This is not strictly true in retrospect, given the persistence of direct military force in the present, but from Lamborghini’s vantage point this was plausibly the case, for he saw that certain aspects of the most recent dictatorship—concretely, the reordering of society along neoliberal lines—had been conserved in the transition to procedural democracy. This is one of many direct political statements in the Teatro proletario, and given its reference to the composition of Las hijas de Hegel, it doesn’t seem too farfetched to relate it to the poetics common to both. To do so means situating these texts not only at the end of literature, but also at the end of the long era in which the nation-state was the primary actor in organizing collective life. Modern book culture has run parallel to the nation-state’s primacy, and the latter’s decline in the face of the ascendance of transnational capitalism marks an era in which neither of the two can be taken for granted. Therein lies the final political charge of Lamborghini’s work, his poetics centered on the act of making, of assembling a text: in an era of nebulous imperatives, all that is certain is the act of production itself. Hence the way Lamborghini insists that physical construction must conserve the traces of its production, that these are integral to the final object. The notebook in which writing first happens and the archive that houses images and scrawls represent sites that must be conserved and incorporated into the aesthetic object. We see the flipside of this poetics in the fact that the editions that have made Lamborghini’s writings available to us today, more or less cleanly presented and bound, bear these traces only in their content, not in the objects themselves. In other words, these volumes

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necessarily betray their author’s own poetics. This, of course, is true of many writers, but what is particular to Lamborghini’s case is the way he seems to insist that what we are reading is not the text itself. The real text exists somewhere else and at a time gone by. It exists as an assembled literary experience in those private spaces where the performance of production takes place. Lamborghini’s emphasis on these spatial and temporal coordinates and his insistence on reminding his readers of them constitute a direct response to the broad horizon of late book culture. He attempts constantly to cipher the act of production throughout his texts, and thus the book itself ceases to be a received form, becoming instead a problem, one he articulates through the material practices of scribbles and scrawls and gestures.

2

Flight Forward Dates César Aira opens a short treatise on reading by discussing the work of the English writer and painter Denton Welch. His texts, Aira contends, have something simultaneously complete and incomplete about them. They seemingly aim to encapsulate every shard and strand of memory. They advance slow and steady, written at a rhythm of “two paragraphs per day.” They comprise an ongoing experiment with the “alchemies of speed.” And they highlight their own distribution across a series of dilated but dated events (composition, publication, and storyline).1 All of these characteristics apply equally well to Aira’s own work. His short novels often feel incomplete, or as if they took too long to get started; they play constantly with our expectations of compression and extension.2 They too shift speeds as they alternate among genres high and low, and the myth of their production is that of a gradual, improvisational process of daily accretion. Finally, they mark, systematically, the temporal difference between their date of completion and their date of publication. The two writers coincide in all these ways, and their overlap is mirrored in Aira’s descriptions of the other, generally obscure or minor writers discussed in this volume, titled Las tres fechas (The three dates). The book represents the “avant-garde in a pure state,” in Graciela Montaldo’s words, and the particular aspects of the avant-garde that it represents—art and life unfolding together, literature as a tool to open up an extended present, the book as a readymade—are those that Aira has grafted into his own practice as a novelist.3 To stitch these different aspects together, Aira uses the concept of dates in succession. However, when it comes to drawing out the consequences of this conceptual lens, he is somewhat dodgy. He even doubts, upon presenting his method, whether it is applicable beyond the case of Welch’s work. And as he proceeds through the biographical and literary sketches that make up Las tres fechas, he becomes more immersed in the details of their particular oeuvres and lives than in the general scheme introduced at the outset. It seems that the system of dates matters above all as a way of orienting our attention to the numerous links between living and writing, to the moments when one turns into the other. The scope of Las tres fechas jumps between the microscopic and the broadly panoramic, with little articulation between the two scales. Aira’s fiction often follows a similar pattern, and through his own system of dates we can often discern pertinent connections between the story told and the medium of its telling. The insides of Aira’s short novels often contain parallels or perform

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mordant commentary on their outsides, their condition as objects in the literary market. As Héctor Hoyos has aptly put it, Aira “knows that the apparatus that regulates the circulation of books is part of the event of literature.”4 He knows that literature encompasses its own tools and techniques of dissemination, and he ciphers this knowledge in various ways throughout his work. The short novel El volante (The flier) is exemplary in this regard. It comprises a fanciful but insightful meditation of the task of writing. The book presents itself as a flier that spins out of control, becoming in the end something like the object we hold in our hands. The flier is its ideal type, but it has been forced into the form of a book by both its length and publishing conventions. The text extends out in all directions. It is full of asides, which themselves obsessively reflect on the object’s own material construction. One of them is particularly telling. In it, the narrator claims that she is making the flier with a homemade wooden typeface that she herself has carved with a needle. With these roughly hewn letters, she stencils her text, which will be printed later. The narrator describes her laborious practice: I’m using the method called, in English, “stencil,” or “extensil” as you’d pronounce it, and I’ll print it out later on a mimeograph. Today fliers are made with the photocopy system, I checked it out, but it was quite expensive. And besides, even to make simple photocopies (more expensive still, although with the advantage that I could make them as I distributed them), it was necessary to have a typewritten original, and it just so happens that I don’t have a typewriter.5

Unable to afford a typewriter and much less a more sophisticated photocopy machine, Aira’s impoverished narrator joins writing to bookmaking. “Since I don’t have a typewriter,” she continues, “I carve by hand, with a needle, imitating printed type as best I can.”6 The writer becomes an artisan, as the flier becomes a novel. Writing sheds the skin that seemed to seal it off from the messy world of textual production and circulation. In the age of digital reproduction, the broad historical horizon of Aira’s work, he symbolically couples the intellectual labor of writing to the artisanal task of carving fonts in wooden blocks. The aesthetics of manual labor ciphered here is further inflected by the relationship between the two dates that bookend the text. The date 17 December 1989 comes at the end of El volante; the copyright page is dated 1992. The intervening years represent a succinct allegory: the flier’s narrative passage from the mimeograph to numerous front doors stands in for the material transition from Aira’s manuscript to its final incarnation as a printed book. Aira’s novels almost invariably repeat this tale, as they all bear dates that mark the time that elapsed between writing and publishing, and many of them obsessively represent conditions of textual construction. A more recent, relevant example is Yo era una mujer casada (I was a married woman). The short novel resembles many others by Aira in that it folds a tale of woe into the framework of monstrosity. These terms are laid out clearly in the first sentence: “I was a married woman, and I suffered because of it. Like so many before and after me, I drew the short straw in marriage. I had married a true monster.”7 The protagonist’s husband subjects

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her to all classes of abuse, and he squanders their scant income on drugs. He sits on the couch all day, getting high, while she toils away miserably. She feels that she “works just to be able to pay her way to work.”8 Her unexpected escape path, which occurs to her one day as a sort of illumination, is her decision to work as a clown. She needs a stage name and shuffles through a couple of options though, as she tells us, the name she’ll settle on is the least of her concerns. It is a simple marketing device: “I thought about it just for the flier, which I had to edit, send off to the printer, and hand out in the neighborhood.” She’ll put this task off for a little while, but when she takes it up she’ll need something catchy. Her best option, she decides, is to tell the story of her married life, which not coincidentally is the topic of the book we are reading: “No matter the time it might take me, nor the amount of paper needed to print the flier. Essentially, I saw it as an infinite labor.”9 Thus this recent novel marks a return, a reenactment of the flier-become-novel penned in 1989 and published 3 years later. In the two decades that separate one flier from the other, much has changed. For one, the narrator of Yo era una mujer casada has access to a printer. What was excessively expensive in the first case has now become accessible, even if the two protagonists are similarly impoverished. This difference is the fingerprint of an entire universe of technological change, which has placed many of the tools of textual production at hand for many, a circumstance that has catalyzed, among other things, a significant expansion of small press publishing in Argentina and elsewhere. But at the same time, much has remained the same across those 20 years—much, in particular, in Aira’s own aesthetic program. His philosophy of literary production has remained remarkably stable over the course of the past few decades, ever since he began his experiment in publishing one short novel after another, an experiment that he himself has baptized a “flight forward.” This Deleuzian image has been central to many of the critical interventions around his work, and it remains so for me. However, I want to advance a step beyond simply describing the conceptual energies animating Aira’s writing. Rather, by placing his poetics in book-historical terms, we can see that his aesthetic program comprises, simultaneously, a mimicry, even a foretelling, of forms of production identified with digital culture, even as he continues to emphasize the material particularity of the literary object. In this way, Aira draws explicitly on his literary affiliation with Lamborghini. The latter’s idea of publishing before writing prefigures digital textual production at the same time as it points to the absolute particularity of the object and experience produced. Ideally, Lamborghini’s texts would look nothing like the volume of Novelas y cuentos, originally published by Serbal in 1988 and reprinted, in expanded form, by Sudamericana in 2003. His ideal text is conceived not as something polished and accessible, easily purchased at a large bookstore in Buenos Aires or electronically on Amazon, but rather as a singular, contingent object tied to the process of writing, unassimilable to the uniform edition.10 Something similar holds for the short novels that Aira has been publishing over the past few decades. Graciela Montaldo has perceptively written that “everything seems to be one in Aira’s work,” and indeed Aira’s poetics meshes well with this description.11 This is a stance toward literature that, in its quest for absolute particularity, emphasizes the uniqueness of the gestural process of

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construction over the reproducibility of the finished product. Like Lamborghini before him, Aira seems intent on forging a literature of the present tense. The concept of the flight forward is, as I have mentioned, by now well known and much remarked among Aira’s readers, and it has gained him some notoriety. Few figures in contemporary Latin American literature have achieved his level of renown while simultaneously provoking such befuddlement and, perhaps just as often, disappointment.12 His work no longer suffers from a paucity of critical reflection, once noted in several places, but Aira still remains something of an outlier.13 His work is odd, if only for the sheer number of texts he has published since the early 1990s. It is another commonplace that it seems impossible to state accurately how many “little novels” (novelitas, as he calls them) he has authored. Published by presses large and small, though more by the latter than by the former, Aira’s novels seem impossible to gather together for a simple head count. Sandra Contreras, a key agent in the dissemination of Aira’s work, mentioned “a few more than thirty-five stories” in 2002, while only 4 years later Aira’s mother made the claim, quoted on a prominent literary blog, that her son had produced “close to ninety novels, essays, and a dictionary of writers.”14 The disparity in the numbers should not obscure the fact that whether he has published sixty or ninety texts or more, Aira is uncommonly prolific among contemporary authors. This seems undisputed, although it is a characterization, strangely, that he has denied. In an interview from 2004, he makes this discrepancy in perception clear: I’ve become accustomed to clarifying that I don’t write a lot but rather little, even very little. I never write more than a page a day, slowly negotiated with all sorts of preparations. And it’s not even every day. It’s true that I publish two novels a year, but they’re little novels of fewer than a hundred pages. And it’s true that I’ve been doing so for thirty years.15

By highlighting this paratextual affirmation, I do not mean simply to point out a contradiction or to begin a debate about how many novels one has to publish in order to qualify as prolific. Rather, what seems noteworthy here is that to make his claim Aira first refers us back to his daily writing practice, only addressing his actual published works afterward. This is a key element of both Aira’s appeal and his difficulty. After all, accustomed as we are to reading books and to accessing writers through a text that appears before us as the crystallization of a finished creative process, a writer who insists on an anterior moment to this appearance is bound to represent a challenge. Here, as in Lamborghini’s case, we are faced with a mode of writing that presents itself fundamentally as a material, irreproducible practice, highlighting an ephemeral, situated act that ultimately trumps the product that emanates from it. The topic of Aira’s writing process has been central to some of the most accomplished critical approaches to his work. It is a guiding concept in Contreras’s book, and it plays an important role in shorter pieces by Montaldo, Reinaldo Laddaga, and Graciela Speranza, among others. It has also attracted attention in English-language reviews of translations of his novels.16 Still, it bears a brief review here. Aira described his practice

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in a 2005 interview. He constructs the plot of a novel, he says, through improvisation. That is, I begin with a somewhat vague idea, an idea for the first page, and from there I make something up each day. I always write a page per day, little more. I don’t know what is going to happen tomorrow. Sometimes I have a somewhat general idea, but I always improvise, inventing, one page at a time.17

Here, again, Aira emphasizes the act of enunciation itself as much as what is actually enunciated. The performance of inventing something every day, of writing as a constant process of improvisation, is key to Aira’s conception of the task of writing and how it interacts with the publication and circulation of books. He goes on to give an account of these dynamics. Upon finishing a novel, he continues, “I always intend to correct, revise it. But when I finish one, I put it away, I leave it there for several months. When I take it back out, I read it, and it seems fine to me.” The uncorrected text is then published in this same form, with minimal changes at most.18 Whether or not Aira effectively works in this manner, it has become an important part of the particular mythology that he has spun around his works in interviews and critical interventions. This procedure has come to encapsulate the practice of publishing one short novel after another, themselves putatively the product of a constant forward progression that eschews corrections or revisions. In an article on Aira’s 2001 novel Un sueño realizado, Dierdra Reber has identified this aspect of Aira’s work as the preferred object of critical reflection on it. She cites numerous “arguments that seek to define his entire oeuvre as a unified set of unorthodox procedures either suggestive of or identifiable with those of the historical Vanguard artists.” This critical tendency, she suggests, inevitably portrays Aira’s emphasis on procedure as a form of resistance to commercial imperatives. This approach limits us in important ways, Reber sustains, because it ignores “the specific ways in which he gives representation to contemporary culture.” Through a shift in emphasis away from “Aira’s literary profile” to a “close-reading foray into Aira’s present,” her study reveals Aira’s consistent and extended “commentary on neoliberal commodity culture and the status of Argentina as a peripheral ‘have-not’ within the global market system.”19 This is an approach that would draw our attention away from process and toward the specific representations of global culture within Aira’s work. Taking this recommendation to read Aira more closely, we would thus find, among other things, complex reflections on commodity culture that exceed reflections on the procedural element of his work.20 This critical appraisal is highly useful. After all, Aira’s work is populated not only by absurd textual devices and hallucinatory chains of events. He also often describes the contemporary world, particularly certain areas of Argentina, in great detail. To stick to an example already cited, Yo era una mujer casada is studded with descriptions of a hollowed-out Buenos Aires. For example, at one point the protagonist stumbles upon an abandoned plaza, which she describes, almost dumbfounded: “Vacated and marginal neighborhoods, full of spontaneous constructions, most often precarious and erected without authorization, shuttered businesses, winding dirt roads that

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opened onto open spaces, dumps and minefields under the open sky. Who would want a plaza there?”21 While this description is of architectural decay, other instances detail the decay of social relations among humans: “Getting in touch with someone who knew how, asking a favor, demanding the solidarity of a neighbor: that too had become impossible for me. The lack of time, shame, fear, everything had isolated me from my peers. I felt shipwrecked in the growing human tide.”22 Yo era una mujer casada abounds in these sorts of decay, particularly in as much as its central conflict stems from a husband’s cruelty and indifference toward his wife. Aira’s novels are certainly not bereft of spontaneous forms of solidarity, but they are also populated by instances of hostility and violence.23 He often captures, with black humor and realism, little microcosms of the world of late capitalism, in which the individual is reduced to an anomic consumer stripped of communal ties. It is worth wondering how Aira’s descriptions of this world square with the other dominant feature of his work, his emphasis on procedure. After all, even when we follow Reber’s suggestion to move away from Aira’s public persona and toward close readings of his texts, we still find in them a plethora of scenes that detail the material production of texts. All throughout the landscapes he describes, Aira obsessively returns to the precisely dated and catalogued act of fabrication—of books, most often, but also of fliers, writing machines, notebooks, mazes, and wicker trumpets. The sum of these acts of construction should not be treated as an individual sphere in Aira’s work, set off from his more realistic descriptions of places and interactions. Rather, we should understand them as aesthetic responses, to the conditions of both contemporary literature and, more broadly, life in common today.

Miracle cures Aira thus addresses the dynamics of market culture, but the market is not a monolith. The rise of global capitalism allows us to make certain generalizations across realms, but it is often more enlightening to study its effects by looking at specific regions of culture. Aira allows us to do so with the contemporary literary world, which has certainly been subject to the flows of transnational capital and also been the site of numerous responses to its ascendance. The link between the literary object and the world of commerce is a central concern of Aira’s process-centered aesthetic. To return to El volante, for example, the poverty of the artisan-flier-maker, her lack of access to technologies of production, reads as an oblique comment on the conditions of the contemporary business of books. The material constraints hyperbolized in that book are, on the one hand, nothing new to the world of publishing. Throughout the twentieth century, presses in Argentina (and elsewhere in Latin America) faced numerous economic difficulties, including seemingly uninteresting problems such as the high prices of paper, postage, and translation rights.24 Aira’s narrator dramatizes these difficulties. These concerns are magnified for the small, independent presses that make up Aira’s immediate literary milieu. Montaldo has described his relationship with these presses as a sort of survival strategy, though the desire to propagate a specific style is just as

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much his concern.25 The opening pages of Yo era una mujer casada give the customary short biography of the author, noting a couple of titles published during each decade from the 1980s to the present. However, the brevity of this sketch is not mirrored in the length of what follows—the list of presses that have published his books. Twenty-five garner mention, most of them small and independent. Aira’s reliance on these sorts of presses fits in well with his own aesthetics of improvisation. A book published by Beatriz Viterbo is more austere in its design than a book by transnational presses like Alfaguara or Mondadori, and yet this very quality lends it a certain kind of prestige and elegance. It tends toward being a unique object—a singular, contingent one—if only because there are few objects identical to it (for print runs are small). Aira’s artisanal aesthetics thus seems to approximate a limit case of these small publishing projects. This case becomes highly visible in the short novel Las curas milagrosas del Doctor Aira (The Miracle Cures of Dr. Aira). In it, Doctor Aira, a sort of medicine man, has obtained a sum of money on which to live for some 10 months while he edits and publishes his collective works, which are quite extensive: “He was in the position of a poet who had written ten thousand poems, and the moment had arrived to think seriously about editing them.”26 But the problem is that what he has written does not take the form of discrete, identifiable units such as poems. Rather, his amorphous body of writing extends in all directions. We read that “over the course of the past years he had filled an incredible quantity of notebooks with the development of his ideas; he had written so much that to write more about the same topic was directly impossible.”27 Editing such a mass of writing means parceling it out, and Doctor Aira has decided that the most adequate format for his work will be the serial installment. This is a particularly advantageous mode of writing, for it will seemingly allow Aira’s fictional stand-in to fulfill, in some way, Lamborghini’s desire to publish before writing. And thus “he wouldn’t have to finish the entire work before beginning to publish; this last point was important above all because he hadn’t thought of a defined endpoint to his labor; he saw it rather as an open work, which would incorporate within a fixed frame the changes in his ideas, perspective, and even humor.”28 A text will be published, in other words, that also represents the scene of a continuous mutation, subject to the changeable dispositions of bodily production. Here again we find a description of the poetic philosophy that has guided Aira’s own narrative production. A web of texts will appear within a “fixed frame” that remains open and flexible enough to accommodate a certain level of change. The reference to specific historical phenomena is also evident, as the publication of these installments harks back to the nineteenth-century serial novel, while simultaneously evoking twentieth-century genres such as telenovelas and sitcoms. Yet several discrepancies with these traditions are also apparent. While the nineteenth-century serial novel and more recent televised narratives have been well integrated into the culture industry, Doctor Aira’s texts will at least partially eschew such a link, for this project “did not contemplate the sale of the installments, for which he would have had to set up a commercial sort of enterprise, formalize his role as editor, pay value-added tax, and a thousand things that he didn’t dream of doing. He would give them away; no one could stop him from doing that.”29 And similarly, while Charles Dickens, to take a well-known

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example from the tradition of the serial novel, allowed for a limited feedback loop with his readers, through which the trajectory of a given story could better respond to the public’s demands, Doctor Aira rejects a priori the possibility of collaboration, “so great was his fear of yielding any control over any aspect of his work.”30 This description points us toward a reflection on the relationship between Aira’s work and the economic conditions that surround it. In this regard, it is worth noting that much criticism written on the work of recent Argentine writers focuses on their problematic, resistant, or complicit relationships with capitalist dynamics of production. With regard to Aira’s particular case, Francine Masiello’s formulation is exemplary: In the style of Macedonio Fernández, who knew that the unfinished work was the one that most resisted the market, Aira leaves a sense of fragmented knowledge, which resists linear recuperation, and refuses a turn to nostalgia. As such, his texts remain outside the usual forms of best-seller commerce and sales and instead celebrate the dissolution of identity politics along with the dissolution of conventional narrative form.31

In this passage, Masiello joins a number of features of Aira’s work: its seemingly unfinished quality, its often unconventional narrative form, its anti-essentialism with regard to questions of identity, and a perceived resistance to the demands of the market. She couches these characteristics within an artistic tradition that would produce objects immune to easy consumption that instead reveal, by way of negation, glimmers of utopia. Her comment exemplifies the critical consensus that, in Reber’s formulation, “insistently signals the Vanguard link,” here embodied by Fernández, “as a shorthand means for codifying Aira’s cultural dissidence—patent though not readily classifiable—as one of anti-commodification.”32 This notion deserves further comment, for we can legitimately wonder what sort of resistance to the market for cultural goods can be claimed around a writer who has published on nearly every major press in the Spanish-speaking world. Masiello likely does not mean to deny that Aira’s novels often circulate as commodities, published by the likes of Planeta, Alfaguara, and Mondadori; rather, she seems to be pointing out that they are formally and conceptually heterodox. Of course, there is no reason to suppose that this sort of heterodoxy is not, at least partially, recuperable by strictly commercial actors such as the large multimedia firms that have taken to publishing some of Aira’s novels. Such instances of co-optation are, after all, common in the world of contemporary capitalism. What this means is that there is not a uniform or cleanly and simply delineable gesture of resistance to commercialization in Aira’s literature. Rather, he situates himself at the messy intersection of capitalism and literature characteristic of late book culture, so as to theorize alternative responses within it. One of his strategies has involved a consistent reliance on small presses from throughout Latin America, particularly Argentine ones, among which Beatriz Viterbo has been the most important for the real-world appearance of Aira’s continuum of texts. Such presses have underpinned a literary project that seeks to signal something unintelligible, or something approachable only at a tangent: the existence of a procedure,

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a writing experiment, a continuum of experience that approaches the dimensions of the “little theater” of Lamborghini’s work. Such a project is possible due above all to the freedom given to the author by independent presses. Aira has explicitly commented on this relationship: If a press is too large, too serious—and my novels are smaller and smaller, and less and less serious—then I don’t know, I don’t feel the same freedom as when I deal with some kid who started a press here. I can give him or her anything [cualquier cosa], which is what I like to write: just anything.33

That phrase, just anything (which evokes one of Lamborghini’s stories, “Escribir como cualquier cosa” [Write like just anything]), is here identified with projects of limited— “almost clandestine,” Montaldo notes—extensions, small books and small presses.34 Most of Aira’s books are indeed short, limited to around one hundred pages in most cases, and yet the texts he describes would be exaggeratedly less so—less extensive and also less serious. They would be the sort of texts that would plausibly result from his conceptual flight forward. And certain of them would be texts that can perhaps only be published by a press for which aesthetic criteria trump considerations of potential sales. An exemplary text of this sort might be a book like El cerebro musical (“The Musical Brain”). An absurd short story, it is best summarized in reverse order. A female dwarf, on the lam from the circus following a scandalous love triangle with her husband and brother-in-law (also circus dwarves), has turned into a gargoyle and laid an egg. The whole town of Coronel Pringles gathers around her perch atop the municipal theater and watches as she flies off, leaving her single egg in the hands of the local librarian. Simultaneously urged by the crowd to protect and to destroy the egg, the librarian decides to balance a book delicately on it, which results in an image that in popular lore marks the founding of the local library. We see all this through the eyes of a little boy, César, who happens to be at the scene because of his family’s (and his own) curiosity to see the “musical brain” on display inside the theater. The brain is a pink object that emits a slight, tinny music that some find offensive and others charming. Almost coinciding with the appearance of the dwarf-become-gargoyle, César’s little sister accidentally breaks the brain, revealing the diminutive dead bodies of the other two dwarves. The significance of this coincidence is not clear, for the different events in the story are linked together only tenuously, as the narrator (César himself, speaking many years later) remarks: “The very strangeness of the story grants me partial pardon; its different episodes, while indeed chained together in an inevitable order, are also isolated, like the stars on the firmament that were the only witnesses of the story’s dénouement, up to the point that the figures making it up must owe more to fantasy than to reality.”35 Here Aira admits the absurdity of his narrative, presenting the text as a loosely connected chain of singular events. Aira links this sort of text to a certain sort of press—small, independent, open to publishing just anything—and indeed, my own copy of El cerebro musical was published by Eloísa Cartonera, a press that will be the topic of a more exhaustive discussion in the next chapter. The text’s front cover is hand-painted in multiple tempera colors, and

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the author’s name is simply “C Aira.” It is bound in cardboard, cut out from a box of Ala brand laundry detergent. The text of its twenty-three pages is mostly set in a light blue, serif font. From one page to the next the body text is not evenly aligned. In all, the physical text has a make-do, amateur feel to it, similar in ways to the flier that Aira describes in El volante. Such a text would necessarily be unique, just as the website for Eloísa Cartonera long proclaimed that no two covers of its editions are alike. To publish a text by this sort of press indeed means ensuring that, at the level of production, the resultant objects form a chain of ones, to return to Montaldo’s formulation, each of them irreducible to the others.36 This squares, of course, with a broader claim about Aira’s texts: that they resemble a chain of singularities, a series of marginally intelligible speech acts. In these texts, Aira develops a poetics that constantly signals an antecedent writing activity that is given precedence over the book we have in our hands. And this is a poetics intimately tied to a theorization of publishing practice in which such activity comes close to merging with the final product, ultimately through the elimination of intermediate channels. Doctor Aira plans for his little volumes to be directly given away. This situation would free Doctor Aira from the demands or the pretensions of reaching a wider audience, allowing him to cultivate an amateur, idiosyncratic kind of writing, certainly akin to the literature published under the name César Aira. This is a literature in which just anything might appear, and it ideally conceives of itself as the immediate product of an act of writing, an artisanal writing procedure, a “notebook” (bloc de apuntes), in Speranza’s words, for a work that is not to be written.37

Avant-garde tinkering Speranza’s description of Aira’s work returns us to the notebook motif. In Lamborghini’s work, the notebook functioned as an antecedent to the literary text, a reminder of the material present of writing, inassimilable to the published text. Aira also mentions notebooks in his work, for example in La serpiente (The snake), a novel that contains the fantasy of a machine that would render the thought of the present always palpable. “It would be a good business,” we read in that novel, “to make a notebook and pen set adapted to cerebral hyperactivity. It would surely garner demand, but it would be difficult to achieve a good design; it’s a real challenge to the imagination.”38 A pen and notebook connected to the brain, admittedly difficult to construct, adapted to the mental activity of its owner: this would be an ideal technology for registering the scene of writing. It would allow for a version of the automatic writing famously envisioned by André Breton in the first Manifesto of Surrealism. Breton portrays surrealist artists as “simple receptacles of so many echoes, modest recording instruments” who are subject to an imperative: “Write quickly, without any preconceived subject”—achieving a speed great enough to evade the mind’s critical faculties.39 With his notebook-pen-brain machine, Aira aims at a similar speed of recording. This convergence with Breton’s formula is not surprising, for it is well known that Aira regards the historical avantgardes as marking the central moment in modern artistic culture. He understands his

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own work within their lineage, and he couches their own interventions in terms of a recuperation of what he calls an “amateur’s gesture.”40 The aficionado, the amateur, just anyone doing just anything—this is the artistic subject that Aira sees imagined in the gesture of the avant-gardes. His notebook connected to the brain would be a useful tool for such an artist, one who could perhaps describe literature as a minor art, a pastime for aficionados, practiced by just anyone. Breton is not the only, or necessarily the best, point of reference for this notion of literature. Automatic writing is certainly the implicit reference point of La serpiente, but Breton’s famous procedure bears an important distinction from Aira’s. Surrealism was intent on uncovering and revealing deeply hidden truths that are obscured by the realm of surface appearances. Automatic writing was meant to tap into the individual unconscious, and other procedures were meant to discover a sort of collective unconscious. Aira’s avant-garde gesture seems more about accepting and recording anything and everything, surface or submerged, that occurs. It is, in this way, a strangely democratic notion of aesthetic action, akin to the forms of “uncreative writing” that Kenneth Goldsmith associates with the literary heirs to Marcel Duchamp and John Cage.41 Aira is among those heirs, not because his writing lacks creativity but because he understands aesthetic production as the act of an amateur, not the specialist. Aira’s notion of literature seems to suggest a world of tinkerers—it has affinities, for instance, with the world that grew up around radio culture in the early twentieth century in Argentina and elsewhere. Beatriz Sarlo has described the “anarchistic spontaneity of the radio pioneers,” who were “self-taught, learned from manuals rather than institutions and from peers rather than teachers, and formed horizontal relationships with other amateurs.” This sort of culture, which bears important similarities with the open-source software movement of recent years, was possible because of the relative simplicity of the technical knowledge required as well as the abundance of channels (print periodicals, clubs, radio programs) through which this knowledge circulated.42 Such a culture ran up against barriers when broadcasting became something other than a hobby for aficionados, that is, when it became primarily a conduit for mass entertainment and came to be considered above all a channel for delivering content.43 And it almost goes without saying that such a culture would not be exactly replicable in that other, much more expensive and technologically complex medium contemporary to the rise of amateur radio culture in Argentina, the cinema. “Whereas radio had created not only an audience but also, and even before that, a widespread network of amateur technicians,” Sarlo writes, “film created an industry almost from the start, along with a world of spectators whose only relationship with cinematic technology was by way of the imagination.”44 The difference, thus, between early radio culture and twentieth-century cinema culture is one of levels of possible participation by the user or the audience. The culture of tinkering in early radio culture thus recalls the “amateur’s gesture” that Aira approvingly notes in the avant-garde. He holds that their experiments in the literary field essentially made up a reaction to the professionalization of writers. “In effect, and here restricting ourselves to the art of the novel,” he writes in what is probably his most famous essay, “once the ‘professional’ novel exists in such a state of perfection that it cannot be improved upon without abandoning its own premises—novels by

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Balzac, by Tolstoy, by Manzoni, for example—the situation risks becoming static.” The possibility of stasis in the form of the successful novel, which Aira sees exemplified in these nineteenth-century writers, gives way to a host of products that repeat their formula, resulting in the “interminable torrent of old-fashioned novels, written to entertain or to propagate an ideology, or commercial fiction.” What is lost in this process, Aira would say, is the process of invention, above all the invention of new procedures, something that would only be recuperated in the avant-garde impulses of artists like Duchamp or Cage: “The great artists of the twentieth century are not those who made artworks, but rather those who invented procedures for artworks to make themselves, or not. What do we need more artworks for? Who wants another novel, another painting, another symphony?”45 The invention of procedures, and not the construction of works, should thus be the central aspect of aesthetic practice. Keeping this in mind allows us to understand Aira’s attraction to a figure like Edward Lear, about whom he has written a monograph. Lear is best known as a composer of limericks, popular five-line poems with an aabba rhyme scheme that began to be written down in Victorian England. The content of these poems was often nonsensical, and thus they allowed for the appearance of any element, as long as it fit the generic requirements. They are, in this sense, formulaic, and at first glance to compose limericks would be to do the opposite of inventing a “new procedure for works to make themselves.” In this sense, Lear’s practice would take us far afield from the inventions of the avant-gardes that Aira so admires. On the other hand, however, Lear’s limericks have something important in common with these movements, which is precisely the gesture of the amateur. Aira emphasizes that the limerick is an improvised poetic form, and that Lear’s limericks were most likely brief constructions meant as presents for the children of friends or patrons, and that each of them includes a drawing. Lear was a well-traveled landscape painter, and yet his capacities as a draftsman were mediocre at best. This is what for Aira gives Lear’s drawings a modern feeling: “Something that makes these drawings seem modern is their improvised, unelaborated air, their certain drafty clumsiness. The way they came out on the first try, that’s how they remained, documents of the instant.” Lear’s drawings, here, are the result not so much of technical proficiency as of a momentary improvisation. Aira juxtaposes them to the watercolors of Lear’s professional activity, noting that they provide the written text of the poem with a “fantastic documentation,” born of “the mechanics of invention.” The text of the limerick itself serves as a kind of pretense for this improvisational drawing, a dynamic between image and text in which “the limerick takes on the character of process, it becomes the machine for processing meaning, which results accidentally from the tension of linguistic forces. The drawing illustrates the scene that has crystallized during this accident.”46 Thus the formulaic character of the limerick becomes in the end a process for generating the documentation of an accident, the conjunction of tensile forces in the nonsensical language of the poem itself. And, although Aira does not underscore this, the text is also a kind of documentation of another such occasional encounter, which is the meeting of Lear with the children for whom the limerick is written and recited in the first place. In this sense, the written text is both a record and a generator of an improvisational act.

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This is what would ultimately link Lear with Aira’s version of the avant-garde artist— an emphasis on procedure rather than on the creation of finished works. For although the limerick is an ancestral form, a sort of oral poetry that goes back centuries, Lear imports it into his context as a kind of found object for the production of a scenario— the instance of an invention or of a quickly executed, improvised drawing. The way Aira describes this drawing—as representing “an almost diabolical ability, a sort of ‘drawing without knowing how to draw’”—recalls many other moments in his own work.47 For example this process described in the opening essay of La trompeta de mimbre: The maquette of the particle can be constructed at home, in a low-cost workshop, and in your free time. And here we’ll have to guard against a common error: perfectionism. If we wait until we have the most adequate materials for constructing the elements, and until we have the right technology to put them in motion, we’ll never get it done. But scrap materials are good enough: wood, cardboard, paper, strings, rags. It doesn’t matter if it comes out looking like a monstrosity: what matters is making it.48

What is the concrete object being constructed here? Aira’s terms are deliberately generic, as they are so often when he describes how objects are constructed or distributed in space. We could even say that for him this is a description of artistic practice in general, one that resembles Lear’s drawings perhaps, or the texts published by Eloísa Cartonera. Like Lamborghini’s notebooks, these pads of paper—Lear’s sketchpad, Eloísa Cartonera’s cardboard books—lay emphasis on the procedure, over and above the finished product itself, for constructing an object, a work, or a roughly hewn text.

Technique Aira’s amateur-centered, process-based aesthetic program builds on Lamborghini’s work. The latter carried out a dialogue with the long tradition of literature and publishing in modern Argentina, situating himself at the end of this tradition. Aira takes this dialogue and continues it in the era of fully flowered late capitalism. Speaking figuratively, Lamborghini’s insights and conceptual machinations become palpable, incarnate in the slew of books published under Aira’s name. The two writers’ respective historical trajectories thus matter a great deal. Lamborghini is a sort of bridge figure, writing at the dawn of late capitalism, as modern book culture was reaching its moment of literary saturation. Aira, on the other hand, inaugurates a new era. The composition of El volante is dated 1989, one of the touchstone years that have come to symbolize a passage into the era of capitalism untrammeled. It was around that time that Aira began his experiment with writing and publishing furiously and without restraint. The theoretical thrust of this experiment can be summed up as a dual emphasis on process and contingency, on the act of production and the particularity of the results. And it is through this double orientation that Aira’s work constitutes a unique response to the material—which is to say, technological and social—circumstances of late book culture.

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His response is not so much found in the representational content of his works, as in their presentation of themselves as media of construction. In this way, Aira’s work recalls a famous distinction made by Walter Benjamin in 1934, a distinction through which he attempts to establish how a work of literature might relate to the general circumstances that frame it: Rather than asking, “What is the attitude of a work to the relations of production of its time?” I would like to ask, “What is its position in them?” This question directly concerns the function the work has within the literary relations of production of its time. It is concerned, in other words, directly with the literary technique of works.49

This formulation allows us to establish criteria for how a work might be considered politically relevant. It is so when it addresses the relationship between its own technique and the multiplicity of techniques of production that surround it. Along these lines, it is worth pointing out that Aira’s work, in many ways, mirrors forms of production identified with digital production. That is, within a social horizon characterized by instant communication and the constant mutation of artifacts, Aira carries out a literary project seemingly based on similar principles. However, the parallel is not so neat and clean, for at the same time Aira jams the spinning wheels of digital technologies with the weight of objects—material remainders of the process of construction. Books, in other words, are presented as opaque and resistant objects, not as clean panes of glass that seem to disappear. Put differently, Aira’s books hypermediate the literary experience. Put still differently, the weight of Aira’s books is the weight of the atmosphere, in Roland Barthes’s sense: they represent the sum of conditions that support and constrain contemporary literary culture. That is, they symbolically stand in for the particular, infinitesimally localized experience of the actual process of writing. And they are stand-ins in as much as they can only approximate this experience, an experience of opaque particularity that cannot be sublimated into transparency. This experience remains, to an important degree, an ideal. After all, Aira’s writings also circulate widely. They are also transparent, at least partially so. My copy of El cerebro musical is a roughly constructed object bearing certain traces of its production, but a quick internet search for “The Musical Brain” reveals that a translation was published, in December 2011, in English and in The New Yorker. Aira has thus been canonized, in a small way, by one arbiter of establishment good taste in the American cultural universe. And not only that, but this work is fully monetized and accessible online—behind a pay wall, to be sure, but still there in the liquid world of digital text. His presence in that magazine follows his presence elsewhere in American literary culture, particularly in a spate of translated paperbacks published since 2007. That this is possible at all demonstrates the partial fungibility of local scenes of late book culture around the world. Argentina can, at least in some manner, be transposed to New York and elsewhere. Aira’s work travels, that is, and in doing so it reveals the fraught, entirely enmeshed nature of any attempt at preserving particularity today.

3

Cardboard and Cumbia Workshop as interface A jerkily dancing image welcomes visitors to the website of the small press Eloísa Cartonera (see Figure 7). It has the approximate proportions of a book cover, though it’s been fragmented and set in halting motion. The project’s name, splayed out in a multicolored, stencil font and framed by red stars, occupies the center, while further information (an address and contact information, as well as the identifying phrase “Latin American Publishing Cooperative”) spans the bottom third of the image. The various textual components of this passageway into the rest of the site don’t correspond exactly to the functions normally present on a book cover—title, author, and publisher—but this might be the point, as the project seeks to highlight its collective and practical nature over individual and purely stylistic alternatives. This is not to say that Eloísa Cartonera does not conceive its books as formal interventions. Even a cursory glance at the press’s website gives the impression of a clear aesthetic sense. The image in motion is composed of three discrete frames, which succeed each other as if in a slow-moving flipbook. They simulate pieces of cardboard, which is the material that the press uses for its own books’ covers. In the same spirit, the background of the webpage is composed of overlapping images of torn corrugated boxes, recycling signs and barcodes figuring prominently. Together, these components comprise an improvised, trash sensibility. This sensibility is incarnate in the press’s books: their roughly stapled and glued binding and pages reflect an aesthetics of ad hoc reuse. This sensibility ciphers the project’s mode of operation. A couple of clicks into the page, we read a succinct description of the publishing house that emphasizes its concrete location (the Boca neighborhood of Buenos Aires), as well as the press’s mode of operation: “We make books with cardboard covers. To do so, we buy the cardboard that the cartoneros collect in the street. Our books are by the most beautiful Latin American writers that we have known in our lives as workers and readers.”1 This brief summary outlines the practical model of the press. It conceives of itself as the collective undertaking of workers and readers, seeks to establish relationships of some sort with marginalized social actors, and publishes authors from throughout Latin America. These characteristics are assumed to become manifest in the cardboard book itself. Waste cardboard comes to house literature, in an attempt at bridging the divide not only between high and low culture, but also between art and trash. Furthermore, these

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Figure 7  Eloísa Cartonera, website image. (image reproduced with permission from Eloísa Cartonera) books also seek to house, or rather conserve, something else: the concrete gestures and efforts that go into producing an object. The cardboard book seeks to become the archive of its own production. In this way, Eloísa Cartonera seeks to integrate the traces of production into the literary object itself. Osvaldo Lamborghini represents a clear precedent in this regard, and this kinship helps explain the centrality of César Aira as a point of reference for the press. In its focus on cardboard, Eloísa Cartonera seems to follow explicitly his dictum that books can and should be made of “just anything.” Perhaps owing to this conceptual affinity, Aira was among the first authors published by the press, which by now lists three of his titles in its online catalogue.2 An entire ethos of the workshop permeates both his work and theirs. This ethos, however, is diffuse. It takes numerous and often indirect forms. Washington Cucurto, one of the press’s founders, has drawn out its theoretical implications in an essay on the work of one of his early collaborators, Fernanda Laguna, who writes under the pseudonym Dalia Rosetti. Cucurto finds

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in her work and in Aira’s—as well as in the writing of a few predecessors: Roberto Arlt, Felisberto Hernández, and Copi—a common interest in generating the effect of immediacy. Theirs is an aesthetic program that attempts to make life and art proceed apace. Reinaldo Laddaga has commented briefly on this desire, summing it up as the fantasy of “a text that registers and displays the concomitant unfolding of life and writing, writing inciting the unfolding of life, life forcing its inscription into writing, a circuit where they come together in the same vast improvisation, which includes at once bodily actions and inscriptions.”3 Cucurto, in other words, finds in the work of one of his co-founders an impulse to join life and aesthetic action together under the banner of circumstance. And he identifies this ethos of improvisation in part by drawing a lineage through the work of Aira. These aesthetic programs are united by their asymptotic approach to a literary experience of the present moment. This tendency is already manifest in Lamborghini’s practice of joining the acts of publishing and writing, and Aira extends it to an entire program of novelistic production. With Eloísa Cartonera, however, a new version of this aesthetics takes form, now focused on the concrete task of making books in a collective space. That is, where Lamborghini and Aira theorize and write under the sign of a literature of immediacy, Eloísa Cartonera seeks to mobilize a space and social dynamic that would make it possible as a publishing practice. And in doing so, the putatively central object of the project’s labor—the book itself—finds itself paradoxically displaced as the primary locus of literary experience. If the traditional book is uprooted from the center of the literary encounter, then it remains to be seen what replaces it. The most immediate response in the case of Eloísa Cartonera is that the workshop itself comes to play the role of literary interface. That is, the building that houses the press itself, full of machines and raw materials and often buzzing with people, stands in, partially, for the actual books it produces. That this solution is in many ways unsatisfactory is readily apparent, for by restricting access to those in immediate proximity, the press would relinquish its ability to reach an audience beyond rather circumscribed geographical bounds. Only visitors or participants would have access to its literary site. The project’s exhibition value, to return to Walter Benjamin’s lexicon, would disappear, replaced entirely by cult value, which is why this solution is not the sole one the press embraces. Rather, the project seeks to populate numerous places at once via a mobile medium, the cardboard book, that retains, both materially and symbolically, the traces of its own emergence. It seeks, in other words, to push the workshop into spaces beyond its own enclosure.

Crisis and collectivity Eloísa Cartonera has experienced real success in populating numerous literary and nonliterary spaces. Its model has been held up as exemplary, “a progressive new publishing paradigm that challenges and contests neoliberal political and economic hegemony,” and this exemplarity has helped its practical model attract considerable

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attention over the past decade.4 Cucurto and his collaborators have presented the project in various literary forums, academic and otherwise, and their work has been warmly received within the visual arts, as it effectively straddles the boundaries of performance and publishing. Thus from its early days the press formed part of visual arts exhibits like ArteBA (2004) and Civilización y Barbarie (also 2004), both in Buenos Aires, as well as the 2006–07 show Lo Material No Cuenta in Madrid. Likewise, within academia, the press has been the object of various studies, and it participated in a 2009 conference at the University of Wisconsin alongside a number of other cartonera publishers from throughout Latin America. These latter projects reflect Eloísa Cartonera’s wide reach, as a host of similar publishing houses throughout Latin America have followed in its footsteps. Rare today is the large Latin American city that does not have its own cartonera publishing house. The model forged by Eloísa Cartonera is, after all, easily replicable, and it has also tapped into broad cultural forces that render its model both palatable and aspirational. In this regard, the project’s immediate context is crucial. Founded in 2003, the work of Eloísa Cartonera is inextricable from the damage wrought by the 2001–02 economic and political crisis in Argentina. This moment represented a particularly severe point in a decades-long economic decline during which more than half the country’s population fell below the poverty line, investors fled, and savings seemingly evaporated. It has been widely remarked that this period, including the years leading up to the crisis, witnessed the emergence of new political subjects. For example, Luis Alberto Romero, writing in the wake of the crisis, singled out, among other groups, the highly visible cartoneros: groups of nocturnal workers who sell the fruits of their labor by the kilogram at dismal rates. Drawing on a long tradition of literary representations of marginality, various writers, among them Marcos Herrera and Aira, have written novels in which cartoneros figure prominently.5 In the allied case of Eloísa Cartonera, the relationship with cartoneros is less directly about representation, as the project seeks rather to incorporate their labor—more generously compensated than on the open market, as the cardboard books’ copyright pages insist—into the sphere of literary production itself. In this way, Eloísa Cartonera seeks to intervene, both symbolically and practically, in the reconstruction of collective activity in the Argentine capital. The press conceives its activities in terms of learning to inhabit the new social landscape. In a retrospective text published in 2007, the collective describes itself as “a social and artistic project in which we learn to work in a cooperative manner.”6 This emphasis on cooperation goes hand in hand with an accent on social responsibility, as their website tells us: they pay the cartoneros five times the going rate for their materials. The desire here is to mark a contrast with the policies and dominant ethos of the Carlos Menem years (1989–99), which centered on attracting foreign investment at any cost, taming inflation, and maintaining the one-to-one convertibility between the peso and the dollar. While these policies produced an impressive rise in GDP and quelled the hyperinflation of Raúl Alfonsín’s term (1983–89), they tolled the bell for long-established forms of coexistence, carrying forward, in this way, the process of social reorganization that had begun under the most recent military dictatorship (1976–83), which was

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officially and significantly known as the Proceso de Reorganización Nacional. Against the continuation of policies that “reorganized” Argentine society, Eloísa Cartonera seeks to foster an economic and aesthetic program of cooperation and collective responsibility. In its emphasis on collective action, Eloísa Cartonera is not alone in the Buenos Aires aesthetic scene. Andrea Giunta has identified a host of cultural practices that evince a similar “post-crisis” sensibility. Her book Poscrisis links labor practices such as reclaiming vacant factories to a number of organizationally cognate aesthetic actions. The common strand that she identifies in these practices is one of collectivization. And thus we learn that following on the crisis, the “figure of the artist creating alone in the workshop lost, for a time, legitimacy; in order to sign one’s name, one had to act from within a collective.”7 The artistic collective became, for Giunta, the index of a “radical change of scene,” wherein the street would come to replace the studio as the ultimate horizon for artistic action.8 This development, in Giunta’s reading, has played out against the backdrop of a decay of traditional institutional arbiters—a decay that the crisis itself had precipitated: “At the same time as the crisis dismantled institutional structures, collectives of artists organized ad hoc forms of intervention.”9 In other words, economic crisis catalyzed the process of shifting the aesthetic order in a more collective direction. Eloísa Cartonera participates fully within these parameters. In this same direction, the project also manifests affinities with a related mode of cultural production, one characterized by Cecilia Palmeiro as a “trash anti-aesthetic.” Palmeiro contextualizes this anti-aesthetics by tracing a genealogy back to the work of Néstor Perlongher, whose itinerant poetry and activism between Argentina and Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s sought to reclaim difference and minority-becomings as generative forces. His poetry and politics hinged on the articulation of difference, an imperative that, Palmeiro argues, has occupied a similarly central place in contemporary Argentina.10 She draws numerous relevant connections between the two cultural moments, detailing for example the lineage that connects Brazilian artisanal literature of the 1970s and 1980s to the foundation of the art gallery Belleza y Felicidad, a forerunner of Eloísa Cartonera, in Buenos Aires during the 1990s. Crucially, both moments shared an insight about the nature of books and their relationship to literature: the notion that “literature exceeds the closing of the work” and that alternative modes of literary production can represent a combative political position against the dominant players in the publishing business.11 This marks one facet of “a series of avant-garde proposals, previously unarticulated in Argentina.” Palmeiro goes on to spell out these related proposals, namely that literature should cease being a luxury object and can be something cheap, that the mode of production is inseparable from the text (and thus both the notion of the text and of the work must be revised in light of the concept of “literary life” and network), and that literature, besides being writing, proposes differential modes of socialization and is able to rehearse not only personal, bodily insurgencies, but also alternative modes of community.12

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While these proposals had long been gestating—for example, in the work of Lamborghini and Aira—Palmeiro’s postulates certainly resonate with the work of Eloísa Cartonera. In her reading, this resonance connects the project to the surfacing of an “alternative militancy” and “the emergence of a queer-trash counter-canon” within the literary sphere.13 Our cultural landscape, however, is awash in counter-proposals that end up being subsumed within the same culture that they seek to contest. As such, it is worth noting, as Palmeiro does in her conclusion, the way the success of Eloísa Cartonera has generated its own series of contradictions. Aspiring to an aesthetics of marginality, the project’s workshop has become, in Palmeiro’s apt phrase, “a sort of Mecca of progressive tourism” in Argentina. The minor literatures that it has promoted, in turn, have come to comprise “a trash canon,” that is by now taught in universities around the world and whose products are stored in the rare book collections of research libraries.14 This is to say the underground currents of postcrisis Argentine literature, among them the work of Eloísa Cartonera, have achieved, in various contexts, a significant level of mainstream respectability. As such, it is worth placing the project within an even broader framework. In one footnote, Palmeiro calls Eloísa Cartonera a “fake NGO.”15 This passing reference melds well with something that stands out in the press’s rhetoric, in particular its emphasis on the common as the horizon of its labor.16 The clear ambition is to fill a void left by the social erosion characteristic of the neoliberal years. These are years characterized by, for example, the growth of the urban underclass in the megacities and hypercities of the global south, what Mike Davis calls a “surplus humanity.”17 He cites a 2003 UN report titled The Challenge of Slums: “Instead of being a focus for growth and prosperity, the cities have become a dumping ground for a surplus population working in unskilled, unprotected and low-wage informal service industries and trade.”18 In these cities— and Buenos Aires is one to which Davis returns repeatedly—numerous unprecedented forms of sociality have emerged to fill the void left by the developmentalist state.19 The state’s abandonment of poor city dwellers does not imply an absence of forms of top-down dynamics among them. Nongovernmental organizations, tens of thousands of which now operate throughout the global south, are increasingly important administrative agents in these areas.20 While NGOs assume numerous forms, observers have often emphasized their roles as mediators between centers of global power and local populations. Davis has criticized these organizations for “co-opting local leadership” and updating the practices characteristic of “traditional clientelism.”21 He goes on to cite other critics, such as Rubén Gazzoli, who, commenting on urban Argentina, “complains that NGOs monopolize expert knowledge and middleman roles in the same way as traditional political machines.”22 P. K. Das is even more scathing in his judgment that NGOs maintain a “constant effort . . . to subvert, dis-inform and de-idealize people so as to keep them away from class struggles.”23 This last critique is consistent with the better known position of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, for whom NGOs are the humanitarian mask of capitalist expansion over the surface of the globe, providing Empire with its “moral instruments,” fulfilling a role analogous to that of the Jesuits in the early modern period of European colonization.24

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I bring up this context in light of Palmeiro’s comment because it is not difficult to see Eloísa Cartonera as another of these sorts of “moral instruments,” closer to a real NGO than a fake one. The community the press seeks to forge is conceptually coherent with the goal of integrating excluded populations through cultural means. That is, the project’s symbolic interventions seem to offer a prime example of the recent tendency, explicated most famously by George Yúdice, for culture, broadly conceived, to function as an “expedient for managing conflict and promoting development.”25 In other words, the management of what Davis calls a “surplus humanity” is here managed through cultural means. All this is to say that we should understand Eloísa Cartonera not only along the lines of its own desire to inhabit the border that delineates the literary tradition from social marginality. Rather, we should frame this desire within the broad, late-capitalist imperative to administer marginal and excluded populations by means other than direct state control. It is within the context of this imperative that we can understand the appeal of Eloísa Cartonera. Not only does it tap the energies of good intentions and real forces of social transformation, and not only does it appeal to a long tradition of aesthetic fascination with the abject; it also exhibits a common postindustrial sensibility in which the abject comes to be understood as the repository of history. Writing about the boom of “ruin porn” in the United States, centered mostly on run-down metropolises like Detroit, John Patrick Leary has made this connection explicit, explaining that ruins are imagined as connecting us to other times, past and future.26 The phenomenon of ruin porn is not restricted to the United States. Giunta, for example, writes poignantly of a tendency in contemporary art wherein the work becomes “an attractive program for a short vacation in the misery of others.”27 Both instances reveal a common desire: the desire to inscribe a sense of reality into what feels like an evanescent present.

Book as precipitate However useful and necessary a starting point, this critique does not fully explain the mode of production mobilized by Eloísa Cartonera. It tells us little, for example, about the idea of the book that the project proposes. Circling back to this idea, we find a pair of assumptions, both of which allow us to understand more completely the project’s cardboard aesthetics. The first assumption is that the book can and should retain and exhibit the traces of the labor that formed it. And the second is that it can and should act as a mobile stage for collective existence, integrating itself into the spaces that we inhabit with our bodies—the space of the neighborhood or of the entire city for example. These assumptions, above and beyond the rhetoric of social responsibility, are integral to Eloísa Cartonera’s model. I’ve already touched briefly on the first of these assumptions, but it is worth fleshing out further. In its insistence that each cardboard book be unique, that each cover be painted by hand, that it reflect the particular provenance of the materials that make it up, Eloísa Cartonera seeks to retain and display the labor and material conditions

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that went into the book’s production. The goal, quite clearly, is to establish a difference between these books and the sorts of books typically produced by modern, mechanical means. Geoffrey Nunberg has developed a useful lexicon for making this distinction: A traditional mass-produced book is two kinds of object, whose relation is determined by the uniformity of the print edition. One is the set of copies or instances that readers actually engage, objects that belong to private life, even if they happen to be shelved in public places. The other is the work or type, a scattered object that inherits a spatial location from the locations of its copies and a temporal location from the date of their production. This is the object that can come to have a public life, as when we talk about the book as a “locus” for a certain idea; that is, a linguistic fixed point that we can use to calibrate our subsequent discourse. But our access to these public places is always mediated through copies.28

The “work or type” is the text, the “locus” of ideas, whereas the “set of copies” corresponds to the physical mediator between the text and its readers. And as Nunberg points out, our access to the work is possible only through specific copies. Eloísa Cartonera seeks to highlight this process of mediation. The particularity of the copy is emphasized over and against the universality of the work. This emphasis on particularity is visible in the practice of foregoing the uniformity of mass production in favor of the artisanal variance of the unique cover. This process is not straightforward or simple. After all, when we open a cartonera book, the text is always the same. It has been formatted, printed, and photocopied digitally. The covers, also, are all the same size, and even the painted letters are stenciled, which mostly negates much of the variability of the naked hand and paintbrush. These uniform characteristics, however, add rather than detract from the press’s emphasis on the materiality of the book object. Upon encountering a cardboard book, we are faced with a variety of production techniques, and this variety calls attention to the process underlying the object. The mélange of techniques that produces these books highlights the mediated materiality of our access to the written word. This mediation is further made evident in the fact that these books are often unwieldy, somewhat difficult to keep open and physically read. Cardboard makes a poor cover, and the paper is often clumsily folded against its natural grain. If the design of a traditional, mass-produced book seeks to recede into the background, the design of a book by Eloísa Cartonera wants to take center stage. Another, more metaphorical way to understand this particular characteristic is that the cardboard book seeks to function as a precipitate within a liquid environment. I take this latter term, first, from the work of Zygmunt Bauman, who over the past decade has elaborated variously on the concept of “liquid modern society,” which refers to a phase in the development of capitalism in which the lifestyles of both the wealthy and the poor become increasingly unstable, with palpable effects on “our jobs and the companies that offer them, our partners and networks of friends, the standing we enjoy in wider society and the self-esteem and self-confidence that come with it.”29 Such instability is an outgrowth of “a condition in which social forms (structures

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that limit individual choices, institutions that guard repetitions of routines, patterns of acceptable behavior) can no longer (and are not expected to) keep their shape for long.”30 To modify a canonical formula that dovetails with Bauman’s position, anything that has remained solid, or even semi-solid, increasingly melts into water. Bauman’s formulation is broad and capable of encompassing phenomena of myriad types. However, a second, more precisely defined use of the term “liquid” will help advance the present discussion. We find it in Andrew Lakoff ’s ethnographic study of the interplay between the traditional psychoanalytic culture of Buenos Aires and the increasingly powerful international pharmaceutical culture. He makes recourse to the notion of liquidity to explain how a particular diagnosis—for instance, bipolar disorder, which lies outside the lexicon of traditional psychoanalysis—can become valuable information for large research-based firms. Lakoff borrows the term not from Bauman but from the realm of finance, where the production of liquidity involves “the creation of generalized knowledge about value out of idiosyncratic personal knowledge.” Similarly, in the case he analyzes, in which a French pharmaceutical company wanted to gather DNA information among bipolar patients, “the patients’ illness assumed potential informational significance—and therefore value—only insofar as their specific life trajectories could be brought into the same space of measurement.”31 In this use of the term, which overlaps conceptually with Bauman’s, liquidity corresponds to the abstraction of certain common properties (a process that, indeed, forges this commonality along the way) from numerous individual cases. Or to put it in Lakoff ’s own terms, the information sought by the pharmaceutical company becomes “the coin of the genomics realm.”32 Coins are interchangeable, as are their paper and electronic counterparts. However, Eloísa Cartonera insists that its books are, in some sense, not: each volume seeks to retain and exhibit its own particularity. To extend the financial metaphor, instead of focusing on the abstract value of the coin, the project might call attention to the imperfections and wear of each individual one. An older version of Eloísa Cartonera’s current website proclaimed loudly, “No two covers are the same!”—highlighting the particularity of each copy. Somewhat paradoxically, this emphasis on variability might be seen to align the project with certain properties characteristic of our most common experiences of the internet. After all, as the transformations in the project’s own website demonstrate, any visit to a given page is liable to be unique, something that is particularly true in the case of sites that are frequently updated. The paradox, of course, lies in the fact that the web is simultaneously the engine of a further liquidation and abstraction—by means of a generalized commodification—of concrete forms of action. This happens through the conversion of particular instances of production into the vast, liquid substance of information. Daniel Schiller, for one, has presented a convincing case for the idea that the rise of digital information corresponds to a  new enclosure, the private accumulation of forms of knowledge that “had been widely formalized, built up at collective expense, and put in motion by skilled social labor.”33 These are forms of knowledge commonly associated, in wealthy regions, with “[s]chools and colleges, government agencies, post offices, museums, and libraries” and in poorer areas with “[f]amily and local community-based stocks of indigenous,

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vernacular, or traditional knowledge about farming, healing, and learning.”34 In this scheme, the commodity form, which increases mobility and facilitates circulation through the leveling of differences among disparate products of labor, couples to innovations in digital technology to dissolve earlier forms of knowledge into liquid information. Eloísa Cartonera’s books are certainly commodities, inasmuch as we can buy them. However, the project expressly seeks to retain something original, unique, or gestural in each object. As such, reading Eloísa Cartonera against the backdrop of liquidity allows us to see that the project seeks to represent an alternative not only to the massproduced edition but also to certain characteristics of the world of digitally based knowledge production and co-optation. Conceived in opposition to both forms of circulation, the cardboard book points stubbornly to its own material emergence, to the concrete circumstances that produce it. This is not to say that the project eschews circulation of all sorts. On the contrary, its second key assumption seems to be that the cardboard book is allied, or can be allied, with concrete spaces of collective, bodily circulation. The books themselves are accessible at the press’s own workshop and have also been sold at bookstores around Buenos Aires and online. However, the project’s website also includes several texts that invoke forms of face-to-face interaction that fit in with the emphasis on the concrete, situated character of workshop-based construction. One such example can be accessed through the website’s archives. It is a short novel by the Paraguayan writer Cristino Bogano. The introduction to the text occupies its first paragraph, with no device or heading to separate it from the rest of the story. It tells us that this text, titled Punk desperezamiento (Punk stretching out), dates from 1993, and that Eloísa Cartonera obtained the rights to it one night of drinking and reading. The introduction lists another publication by Bogano, his nationality and date of birth, and furthermore the different manners by which a reader might contact him: “And if our readers want to find him there are two alternatives: go one morning to the Plaza Uruguaya, in Asunción, and look for him among the yerba mate drinkers who down liters and liters of herbal water. Or otherwise, send an email to xinotopy@yahoo. com.”35 Two sorts of encounter are imagined in this introduction: an email exchange and a conversation in person. The text itself follows this introduction, but it is not the only, or even the preferred, form of encounter with the author. Rather, the text becomes a sort of secondary appendage to more conversational, informal, and bodily modes of contact. The author disappears in the modern tradition, fading away behind the autonomy of the work, itself accessible via the mass-produced book. Here that formula is reversed, as extratextual contact with the author is explicitly encouraged. In a similar vein, another link from the site’s main page takes us to a “Washington Cucurto Exclusive”—a text comprised of eight hyperlinked chapters that was later published as a traditional paper novel. The structure of the online “exclusive” is explained in tongue-in-cheek terms that join writing with partying: Washington Cucurto, the author of the Latino bestseller “Cosa de negros,” has published on our portal a piece of a novel written especially for the readers of our

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site. What a privilege for the web-surfers who are curious about Eloísa Cartonera! Once a week, before heading out to dance at the Bronco or the Samber Disco, Cucurto wrote a chapter one hundred percent in the most scattered style.36

This introduction illustrates Laddaga’s observation about the fantasy of life and literature merging together in Cucurto’s literature. The chapters of Cucurto’s story are composed not according to the autonomous pace of writing, but at the speed of his visits to bars and clubs in Buenos Aires. Literature is joined with, or even subordinated to, cumbia and the encounters it opens up.37 The “scattered” quality of Cucurto’s writing will reflect the speed of these encounters, as the qualities associated with writing are secondary to the schedule according to which each chapter must appear. This dynamic illustrates Giunta’s notion of moving from the atelier to the street. It also reflects Cucurto’s own version of publishing before writing: the timetable, complete with opening and closing hours, is set; all that remains is to fill it with words. In Cucurto’s case, the narrative of this text, titled Hasta quitarle Panamá a los yanquis (Until we take Panama back from the Yankees), revolves around points of reference common throughout his literature: eroticized bodies, blowjobs, sentences that run on like balls of libido rolling around the street and dance floor. The first paragraph introduces the “king of cumbia,” a version of Cucurto himself, as an unstoppable force: “No creature of the night can stop him.”38 Everything is sifted and understood through cumbia: “Ay, this immediate, incorrigible, inevitable need to move all around, to grow sad too from the lyrics to the cumbia villera, which represent our life, which are a drop of blood of our lives and sensations.”39 Cumbia villera, the music of the lower class—of “weekend dances in sheds turned into discos that cater to the working class and slumdwelling kids”—indeed mediates everything in this novel.40 Love and courtship, for example, are filtered through the beats of cumbia, as the main character returns incessantly to the dance floor to meet women and men. But so is the political imagination. Early on in the text, the narrator describes his Fridaynight excursions in political terms: “Another Friday we’re here to carry out the only revolution possible: dancing cumbia and picking up a nice Paraguayan whore.”41 Later on, he makes out with a young man in the bathroom of another club, which is described in nationalist left-wing terms: I kissed him right there, in the popular and peronísimo bathroom of the dance hall, the only Peronist thing left in this fucking country full of shitty oligarchs and thugs, or else why do you think we are the way we are and these dance halls exist, the Spanish phone companies and Dominican fucking, cartoneros, Carrefour, yes, yes, because of the shitty oligarchs and thugs that governed this country for centuries and centuries.42

What both quotes have in common is the connection between dancing and politics. Both are charged with macho bravado, and both, significantly, describe dancing as what is left over after traditional politics fails: “the only revolution possible,” in the

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first case, and the question “why do you think we are the way we are,” in the second. It’s as if to say that the rhythms and pulsations of dancing exist as analgesics, as the remnants of mass politics, represented by the reduction of Peronism to the dimensions of a bathroom. This politics of resignation casts a somber feeling over the trajectory of Cucurto’s main character—a character who, it is worth recalling, is presented on the website as the model of a trajectory that readers of Eloísa Cartonera’s site might follow around the city. This resignation, however, is tied to palpable pleasures, not only in the baroque, cumulative, Lamborghini-esque prose, but also in certain moments of the novel’s action itself. For example, one of the narrator’s pursuits ends in a park with a young man giving him a blowjob. As he sits on a bench with the man’s body between his legs, the protagonist reads his poems. “I sat down on a bench,” we read, “and I gave him what we both wanted, while he did me I read his poems, typed and corrected by hand. I read his poems and it was total happiness, dusk falling over us and filling us with all its colors, the divine music of poetry exiting his mouth and crashing into the depths of my soul.”43 The mouth of the young poet sings as he sucks, sings through the medium of his typed pages or through the narrator’s ecstatic body. Paper blends with flesh. Poetry melds with corporeal pleasures. If pleasure and joy are understood in certain moments of this novel as what’s left over after politics, here they are coupled to literature, which in turn is cast as something bigger and better than traditional politics. Resignation and joy, then, run throughout this novel, as cumbia and literature come together to forge a sensibility that characterizes, also, the aesthetics of Eloísa Cartonera. An ethics of reuse and recycling that the press espouses, as well as an emphasis on the joy of production—both of these are conceived in concert with the cardboard book and its symbolic circulation through the semi-marginal neighborhoods of Buenos Aires. The act of reading is allied to dancing, the production of books to the production of transient, passing encounters.

Imperfect publishing These books and these encounters have rough, barely defined edges: they bleed into the texture and rhythms of the city around them. In this direction, we can productively understand them in light of an aesthetic program from beyond Argentina. In the halcyon days of film under the Cuban revolution, director Julio García Espinosa theorized what he called “imperfect cinema.” He explains this concept first by dismissing polished, cleanly edited cinema: “Today a perfect cinema—technically and artistically accomplished—is almost always a reactionary cinema.” He seems to be saying, from the outset, that an elegant, clearly articulated and bounded cinema works in the service of harmony rather than critique. His is a Brechtian notion of aesthetics, one that resonated profoundly in the most politicized redoubts of militant art from throughout Latin America. Similar formulations recur, for example, in the writings and practice associated with Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino’s “third cinema” or Augusto Boal’s “theater of the oppressed.” In this way, García Espinosa would inscribe

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his notion of cinema within the same currents as other militant visual manifestations of the same era. However, his notion of imperfect cinema goes beyond the critique of the third wall. The question he begins with is why the director is understood as a specialized worker, why the director feels the need to justify cinema in intellectual, philosophical terms. Cinema can go beyond this horizon, becoming something accessible to all. While it had been linked, up to his moment, to a specialized minority who had access to the scarce technologies of production, new technologies promised to open up new possibilities. “[W]hat happens,” he asks, if the future is the universalization of university instruction, if economic and social development reduces hours worked, if the evolution of cinematic techniques (of which there is already evidence) makes it possible for [cinema] to cease being the privilege of the few, what happens if the development of videotape solves the inevitably limited capacity of laboratories, if television devices and their possibility of “projecting” independent from the main device make the infinite construction of cinemas unnecessary? What happens then is not only an act of social justice, the possibility for everyone to make cinema, but rather an extremely important event in artistic culture: the possibility of rescuing, without complexes or feelings of guilt of any sort, the true meaning of artistic activity. What happens is that we’ll be able to understand that art is a “disinterested” activity of man. That art is not a job. That the artist is not properly a worker.44

The developments that will democratize art, in other words, will not emanate from art proper. Rather, they will emerge because of changes in the world—namely because of changes in technology and access to it, which happen, in his narrative, through the process of revolution. With the revolution, in other words, specialization disappears. If Plato established the principle, as Jacques Rancière has argued, that “a person can do only one thing at a time,” then García Espinosa would represent the contrary: everyone can be an artist even while working and struggling—indeed, precisely through working and struggling— because revolutionary art is integrated into everyday life.45 He quotes Marx beautifully, writing that “in the future there will no longer be painters, but rather, at most men who among other things practice painting.”46 The contamination of realms abounds, or in other terms distinct realms disappear. Spectators become authors, as “popular art is carried out as just another activity in life.”47 As García Espinosa optimistically sees it, this achievement lies on the horizon. One of its consequences is doing away with not only specialized realms, but with the basis for the perceived superiority of the artist—specialization, on the one hand, but also an entrenched bias for the spirit over the body. The argument here proceeds by way of rhetorical questions: “Doesn’t our traditional rejection of the body, of material life, of the concrete problems of material life, owe also to the fact that we believe that things of the spirit are more elevated, more elegant, more serious, more profound?” This is the case, the text implies, and we can respond by doing away with this prejudice

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against the body and its material reality, understanding that “the soul is in the body, as spirit is in material life.”48 Spirit, in other words, along with the aesthetic mystifications that it underpins, is just one more illusion that needs to be abandoned. Imperfect cinema—or imperfect art of any sort—represents a vehicle for this abandonment. In García Espinosa’s words, imperfect cinema “shows the process of problems”; it is a question as much as it is a response; it cares little for quality or technique; it can be made with any sort of tool; finally, its “essential objective is to disappear as a new poetics.” It will dissolve into the practice of life itself: “Art is not going to disappear into nothing. It is going to disappear into everything.”49 It is in this last respect that imperfect cinema represents a unique, anachronistic interlocutor for the aesthetics of Eloísa Cartonera. This press takes advantage of the fact that technologies of book production are more and more accessible. It seeks to fuse the functions of workers of the spirit and workers of the body. It emphasizes materiality of all sorts. It aims at producing an art for everyone. Above all, however, the affinity between imperfect cinema and Eloísa Cartonera’s publishing aesthetics lies in the emphasis on process, on revealing and reveling in the process through which an artifact emerges as such. In the late 1960s, in the context of the Cuban revolution, García Espinosa could credibly propose these principles as a way of liberating artistic practice from the strictures imposed on it by its own autonomy. A cognate sort of formulation seems less viable today. After all, we inhabit a world in which the revelation of process is not particularly transgressive. Reality television, cinema that exhibits its own apparatus, and a visual arts culture in which works conceived as open-ended projects abound— our own aesthetic horizon is saturated by process-centered artifacts. In this direction, Eloísa Cartonera is aligned not only with trends in the visual arts, but also in our media landscape in general. In this way, it is hardly surprising, let alone oppositional, to place such an emphasis on process as a basis for aesthetics. But perhaps this is not the most pertinent question to ask. Perhaps the most instructive context for understanding Eloísa Cartonera is not whether it fulfills the modernist criterion for truly and wholly oppositional art. Perhaps, rather, we should see it in a more narrowly defined context: that of book culture, a realm in which the emphasis on process has long been a minor tendency within a larger sphere focused on the finished, perfectly delimited product. In this way, Eloísa Cartonera’s significance, within the contemporary book scene in Argentina, resides in the way it draws on the energies of predecessors such as Lamborghini and Aira and seeks to place their theory into concrete practice. Like these antecedents, the book is understood, for this press, as a problem to be solved, and imperfect publishing might best name the tentative solution it proposes.

Part Two

Morphology

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4

The Book as Performance Participation Estación Pringles is a literary community in the Argentine pampas. Founded in 2006 by, among others, Arturo Carrera and Chiquita Gramajo, this project is anchored simultaneously in a once abandoned, now rehabilitated train station and a similarly repurposed school. Intermittent gatherings punctuate the rhythms of these places, events that blur the lines between written text and bodily performance—poetry festivals and cabarets, caravans and raves, residencies and workshops. These events attract a broad range of attendees, from local residents to university students and artists, and together they make up the imagined center of this project, whose goals involve forging a participatory, interactive dynamic. As Estación Pringles describes its aims in a founding document, it seeks to elaborate fictions that “promote new forms of socialization.”1 The site becomes a laboratory, an experiment in forms of human interaction. This orientation places Estación Pringles in dialogue with a central trend in contemporary art—the participatory paradigm that has, in recent years, become commonplace in the international art world. Claire Bishop has thoroughly traced this tendency’s historical lineage, most exhaustively in her recent book Artificial Hells. She points to previous, analogous moments in the history of western art, tying them to specific breaks in the political status quo. Thus she pairs the historical avant-garde with the Russian revolution, the neo-avant-garde of the 1960s with the explosion of protest movements around the world, and finally the current upsurge of participatory works with the fall of communism. She sees these three moments as drawing an arc that traces “the triumph, heroic last stand and collapse of a collectivist vision of society.” In other words, they are all moments when political questions of collective life have come to the fore, and thus it is no surprise that they would coincide with participatory aesthetic experimentation. Estación Pringles proves no exception to this tendency, coming in the wake not only of the end of communism, but more specifically of Argentina’s failed experiment in orthodox neoliberal governance. It invites participation constantly, seeking to create a new medium for that participation to take place. In participatory works, as Bishop describes them, “people constitute the central artistic medium, in the manner of theatre and performance.” They represent experiments in how human beings relate to one another. The centrality of people in circulation, participating in some way in the emergence of an artwork, means that the artist, now

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cast as an organizer or coordinator, yields some level of control. The individual creator is partially displaced in favor of a collaborative, less strictly controlled dynamic.2 Similarly, the participatory work loses its sharp edges. It becomes an imprecisely demarcated “project” rather than the “finite, portable, commodifiable product” that Bishop associates with traditional artworks.3 Estación Pringles seeks to foster a similarly open-ended, project-centered dynamic, conceiving of itself as a site of participation and coproduction that primarily generates situations instead of objects. It is worth noting briefly that “participatory” is a broader, more expansive modifier than the adjective “relational,” which names a movement that became prominent in the 1990s and has been closely identified, in both theory and practice, with curator Nicolas Bourriaud. His book Relational Aesthetics described and advocated for the program of relational artists. In their work, he writes, human interactions “in the gallery or museum space” become “the raw matter for an artistic work.”4 Though Bishop’s concept of participation seems close to synonymous with this description, she has offered a very clear and sharp critique of relational aesthetics in a 2004 article. In it, she cites a turn away from contemplation and toward the integration of the audience into the material of the work as the dual basis for Bourriaud’s claims about the politics of relational art. Interactivity, in his scheme, is considered “superior to optical contemplation of an object, which is assumed to be passive and disengaged, because the work of art is a ‘social form’ capable of producing positive human relationships.” This bias, according to Bishop, weds Bourriaud to the somewhat mechanical notion that the relational work is “automatically political in implication and emancipatory in effect.”5 However, she argues  that this attitude ignores the manifest content of those relationships. Politics proper does not really happen in relational works, primarily because of their marked emphasis on conviviality and consensus, on everyone getting along. The relational artwork, Bishop proposes, “produces a community whose members identify with each other, because they have something in common.”6 She contrasts such works with the antagonistic, confrontational dynamics of works that aim to disrupt dominant social codes and norms—works, for example, that seek “to tarry with the nihilistic consequences of producing coercive situations.” The gulf that, for Bishop, separates relational aesthetics from certain strands of participatory art thus represents the differing attitudes toward negativity and antagonism characteristic of each.7 Bishop identifies one particular site of aesthetic antagonism in Artificial Hells when she discusses participatory works in Argentina during the 1960s, particularly under the dictatorship of Juan Carlos Onganía (1966–70). Among the works she discusses, the most famous is Tucumán arde, a collaborative installation and informational campaign first carried out in 1969. The work was a large, multidisciplinary denunciation of working conditions in the sugar-producing province of Tucumán. Visitors to the installation were immersed in a sensory environment that combined words (newspaper reports of corruption and influence peddling), images (photographs of impoverished inhabitants of Tucumán), numbers (statistics of residents’ dismal economic situation), and sounds (interviews with residents playing over speakers). Other tactics were more symbolic in nature—blackouts and sugarless coffee to represent, respectively, childhood mortality and an artificial, management-coordinated sugar shortage. Bishop sums up

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her discussion by highlighting the confrontational nature of the installation: “It did not reinforce an already-existing aesthetic programme, but embodied an activist, partisan approach to a social and political crisis; the aim was to expose the viewer to the reality of social injustice, and to generate press that would reveal the truth of the situation.” This is art as activism, art generating social interactions that extend beyond the gallery, bleeding into the press and the sphere of politics more generally.8 Estación Pringles is also participatory and immersive in its own way, but it is embedded in a quite different political context, one that demands distinct sorts of strategies. Much like Eloísa Cartonera, this project emerged in the wake of Argentina’s most recent economic crisis, and it too exemplifies an ad hoc, practical ethos associated with community building. It is utopian but simultaneously pragmatic; it calls itself, paradoxically, a “center of attainable utopias.”9 Tucumán arde, on the contrary, marked a high point of radical political activism in the late 1960s, in the early days of the consolidation of transnational capitalism and before the neoliberal consensus took hold. It aimed to denounce loudly, not work within limits. However, despite the gulf between the two projects, Tucumán arde remains an important antecedent to Estación Pringles, particularly because both sought or seek to agglutinate large numbers of participants in an immersive aesthetic environment located beyond the geographic boundaries of the capital city. This last detail is significant in the Argentine context, given how large Buenos Aires tends to loom in the country’s aesthetic production. There is, of course, a long tradition in Argentina—stretching from the writings of Domingo Faustino Sarmiento all the way to recent films by Lisandro Alonso, Lucrecia Martel, and Carlos Sorín— that centers our attention on the countryside. Tucumán arde focuses on a particularly striking instance of rural impoverishment, and Estación Pringles seeks to transculturate the aesthetic imaginary of Buenos Aires through an encounter with the rural world. The main difference between the two projects lies in their manner of political engagement. Estación Pringles, unlike its forerunner, is hardly confrontational. At most, it is experimental, with its politics residing more in the ways it seeks to distribute knowledge and authority and less in the denunciation of suffering. Nevertheless, even that effort of distribution reveals traces of its affiliation with its more radical forerunner.10 That effort is visible in the project’s desire to construct experimental interfaces among its participants. It proposes mediations of experience that are literary but not exclusively so, that relate to the format of the book but cannot be reduced to it. After all, Estación Pringles’s explicitly participatory orientation meshes uneasily with the medium of the book. A book typically resembles something like what Bishop identifies with the discrete, nonparticipatory artwork: a “finite, portable, commodifiable product.” It has clear edges. Estación Pringles couches its actions in opposite terms. In its founding statement, it defines its own form as that of a diffusely delimited “poetic post.” The project imagines this “post” as a sort of extended stage: “a place of passing and multiple interventions, a platform or a scene where aesthetic practices dispersed throughout a lateral space can be gathered, articulate themselves, become visible.” This stage is imagined and framed in terms of both place and space—the former understood commonsensically, as a relatively small demarcation of space, which in turn is expansive, though not necessarily abstract. The space that is “lateral” to Estación

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Pringles—which is to say, touching or juxtaposed to it, perhaps also sprawling out around it—is populated by practices that can be gathered and put into contact with one another. If a book is bound by folding and stitching and gluing, Estación Pringles seeks to articulate its outer limits through ritual and performance. Specifically, these performances involve minor verbal artifacts. They are “minimal cultural situations, which come from old social and artistic practices,” among which oral forms like reading, jousts, and tournaments are prominent. So are collective art forms like choruses, municipal band performances, and small theaters.11 All these practices are distributed spatially, but they can, through the act of gathering, come to be housed in a place. Yi-Fu Tuan has called place “an object in which one can dwell,” associating space rather with the experience of “having room in which to move.”12 The extended stage conceived by Estación Pringles blends the two notions. Dwelling is certainly an important aspect of the project. For example, Carrera and Gramajo have instituted newly a semi-regular residence for writers and translators. The project’s website highlights this residential aspect with its archive of the visitors who, over the years, have inhabited or visited the house in Coronel Pringles, the town where the “station” is based.13 At the same time, the project highlights its own mobility, calling itself a “flexible and mobile society” and underscoring its “web-like” structure. The concept of Estación Pringles lies somewhere between dwelling and moving—which is to say, elsewhere than in the production of discrete objects. This explains why the events coordinated by Estación Pringles are, while decidedly literary, not exactly bookish encounters—theater and performance suffuse its operations. That said, the project also retains and theorizes its own concept of the book. Books of some sort are present from the project’s outset. Its founding statement begins by invoking its own origins in the novels of César Aira and the poetry of Carrera. Both writers originally hail from Coronel Pringles, and they have both made numerous references to the town in their respective written works. In other words, the project springs conceptually from literatures that circulate through the form of the book. More historically speaking, Estación Pringles locates its own existence within a temporality defined by the threshold between the closing of the book and its reincarnation in other forms—generating an image of a liminal place between different media of aesthetic experience: Charles Fourier and his utopian worlds seemed to dissolve and disappear upon closing his books; but it was the effect of that dissolution that later created that magnificent sentence by Italo Calvino, who writes: “The utopia I seek today is not more solid than gaseous: a pulverized, corpuscular, suspended utopia.”14

The closing of Fourier’s books does not efface the utopian imaginary sketched in them. Rather, the desire for utopia—a nowhere place that constantly inspires the construction of real places—floats like dust and settles (“pulverized, corpuscular, suspended”) on the imagined cities described in another book, this one by Italo Calvino. Estación Pringles, foretold and inspired in books, thus seeks to move beyond the medium of the book even as it conserves a close parentage with it.

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In other words, the relationship between Estación Pringles and the medium of the book is not one of negation. It involves, on the contrary, summoning up and mobilizing a complex of locations and materials. The project does not draw a sharp dividing line between different media. Between the long-distance conversation of print and the immediacy of face-to-face encounters extends a scale of gradations, not a sharp boundary. And thus it seems natural that the project also publishes paper-bound volumes by both the winners of prizes held under its auspices and certain authors who have been residents at the station. These books, like all books, are not simply the virtual or projected twins of real places; they are spatial delineations themselves. To return to Geoffrey Nunberg’s paradigm, the location of a book comprises both the materiality of private consumption and the conceptual location of its discursive textuality. That is, books exist geographically. As objects, they circulate through material channels, and their ideas are located in the conduits of discourse. The capacious nature of this concept of the book is mirrored in Estación Pringles’s multitiered, disperse approach to the medium. At the heart of this notion is the idea of the book as an interface of performance. The book becomes a stage—or at least is conceived as one. It registers encounters. We can elucidate the nature of this stage through two related lenses, which together work as lighthouse-like points of reference. The first is the work of Buenos Aires–based theater director Vivi Tellas, who has participated directly in Estación Pringles’s activities, and the second is the lineage of performance-oriented poets and theorists that stretches from Stéphane Mallarmé through Carrera himself. These complementary genealogies lead up to the actual books produced by Estación Pringles, which in turn work to retain the traces of the performative encounters that give rise to them. Thus the book as concept and the book as object both participate in the performance-centered paradigm of Estación Pringles.

Declamation A theatrical lineage is already perceptible in Estación Pringles at the time of its launch in October 2007 with a festival centered on poetry declamation (see Figure 8). The event’s flier affirms that its goals include “reestablishing the relations between poetry and memory, and orality and writing.” In his introduction to the event, Carrera subsumed both aims under the aegis of theater: “Declamation includes a little theater inside the poem: so as not to forget.” Memory, here, is tied not only to poetry, but also to the performative mise-en-scène of its vocalization. Enunciation is both shared and private, and thus memory is neither fully collective nor entirely individual. It is rather an occasion on which the speaker makes public what had been intimate knowledge. The poem that has been learned by heart (por corazón, says the text, a phrase that shares an etymology with the verb recordar, to remember) circulates beyond the confines of the heart. “The economy of the memory of poetry keeps its coins in a very old piggybank,” says Carrera.15 Coins, the social abstraction of value, are stored up, held and hidden, until one day they emerge and begin to circulate again. It’s fair to say

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Figure 8  Estación Pringles, promotional flier. (image reproduced with permission from Arturo Carrera) that this metaphor incarnates the two-sided concept of poetry and performance that underlay Estación Pringles’s initial event. The centerpiece of the event was a caravan of listeners that regularly stopped to witness the performances of individual declaimers, who were stationed at various points around town. The declaimers had been trained and the event was coordinated

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by Tellas. The scattered documentation of this original event and subsequent ones gives us some idea of what sort of practice it involved. A brief video on Estación Pringles’s website shows excerpts from the 2008 festival, which expanded the original 2007 version. We see images of girls and women gesticulating as they declaim. We hear fragments of poems by Juana de Ibarbourou and Rubén Darío, among others.16 A 2007 review by Daniel Link gives the impression that the initial event blanketed the town, with the caravan of spectators and listeners encountering declaimers at every turn, hidden like snipers until the time came for them to perform. Perhaps the most interesting note he makes is of an English actress reciting a poem by Alejandra Pizarnik. He writes that she did so “phonetically,” which is to say, possibly without understanding the words.17 Her memorization is entirely rote and thus dependent on potentially nonsignifying sound, which makes her perhaps the ideal participant in this event. Just as the archive stores files but knows nothing of their content, or just as a piggybank ignores the provenance of the coins it holds, the declaimer can store and circulate words without necessarily understanding them. If the performers at Estación Pringles can be understood to be somewhat like living archives, holding old or new “documents,” this is due in large part to Tellas’s coordination. In her own theatrical practice, the archive is a central concept. Since 2003, she has staged at least six installations of her “Proyecto Archivos,” a series that understands the human being as a store of experiences and ideas and sensations, the examination of which happens on stage. These plays star nonprofessional actors who simply act out scenarios from their lives: visits to the doctor, workplace routines, family conversations. They tend to include documents and depend on the idea of the person as a source of documentation. While Carrera understands the poem’s manifestation as being triggered by a theatrical impulse, Tellas makes the text emerge through the performance of staged subjectivity.18 These archives reflect unique off-stage practices. They originally grew out of another cycle of works, known as “Biodramas,” which involved invited directors selecting “a living Argentine person and, together with an author, transforming their life story into dramatic material.”19 The somewhat distant nature of these works is the counterpart of the often intimate connections between Tellas and the subjects of her “Archivos.” In an interview, she explains that her criteria for choosing a scenario to be represented begin with her own enthusiasm and always include a measure of theatrical or fictional energy: In order to become theatrical archives, the worlds must be worlds I have personally experienced. That’s the first condition. The second is that the worlds should have some coefficient of theatricality. What interests me is the threshold where reality itself begins to make theatre, what I call the Minimal Threshold of Fiction (Umbral Mínimo de Ficción, or UMF). There is UMF, for example, in the natural tendency toward repetition that is found in human behavior.20

This concept is productively fuzzy, and it might simply mean that Tellas seeks out situations that are interesting to her. It is fuzzy because the implication of her

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explanation seems to be that any situation can contain a UMF—any situation, that is, which follows a pattern of iterated performativity. If this is the case, her explanation acquires a new level of richness: if anything can be performed, then everything in the world is aesthetically determined. Life and theater infuse each other constantly. Indeed, Tellas hints at such a concept further on in the same interview, stating that she is “doing” (or perhaps “making”) worlds “without adding anything. The worlds are already there, like the Surrealist Objets Trouvés or the Duchamp ready-mades. I don’t produce them: I postproduce them.”21 Here, she refers implicitly and obliquely to Bourriaud, who in a later book, Postproduction, associates his titular concept with “the invention of paths through culture.”22 DJs and web surfers present two versions of this paradigm, centered on the act of carving itineraries through what has already been produced. Bourriaud deploys this trope to posit that many contemporary artists seek not originality of form but novelty of use. And while the emergence of digital technologies has likely accelerated the uptake of this mode of creation, its use is not inherent to it. “It is a matter,” Bourriaud explains in broad terms, “of seizing all the codes of the culture, all the forms of everyday life, the works of global patrimony, and making them function.”23 Thus the world of postproduction is not just a world of DJs. It is also the world of anyone seeking to navigate an excess of representations—the world of reality television, the world of Andy Warhol’s long, boring films of people sleeping or the Empire State Building standing firm, the world of Georges Perec’s attempt at exhausting a place by sitting and describing in minute detail the passing events viewed through a café window, or, to return to the Argentine context, the world in which Aira fantasizes about a writing machine hooked up to the brain that records one’s every brief, passing thought. It is the world of banal and gray quotidian experiences, and also of sudden clarities of black and white contrast. Tellas’s plays stage this world. The first installation of Proyecto Archivos was titled Mi mamá y mi tía (My mother and aunt), and it starred, in effect, Tellas’s mother and aunt. It opens with music playing and the two women sitting opposite each other at a table, sewing. One stands up and begins to dance around the stage; the other is more hesitant. She sits, claps, and sways before standing and asking for direction. They stop dancing and begin to describe a few photos, which they hold in their hands. They talk about relatives—their character, their clothing and appearance, their intimate lives. They talk about the drama of childhood encounters with organized religion. They talk about household sleeping arrangements and walking in on their parents having sex. They recall a particular tango, sing it, and finally begin to dance again. All this happens in the first ten minutes. Throughout what seems like a one-sided conversation with the audience (an impression that owes to the informal familiarity of the women’s speech), Tellas occasionally intervenes, as do audience members. The scene gives the impression of taking place in a living room, a cross between a talk show and a children’s program.24 “Although it wasn’t my intention,” says Tellas, “all of the archives touch on the problem of the extinction of a world, a sensibility, a way of life.”25 Thus the archival experiences she stages often star older people, whose memories indeed stretch back to previous, perhaps sometimes extinct, ways of living. These forms of life are visible

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in gestures and embodied memories. The use of the term “archives” to describe this store of behaviors does not precisely line up with another well-known deployment of the term. Diana Taylor has famously distinguished the archive from the repertoire— she associates the first of these terms with power, with writing, and with the twin myths of immediacy and permanence, whereas the second signals something more avowedly minor, oral, and bodily. “The repertoire,” she writes, “enacts embodied memory: performances, gestures, orality, movement, dance, singing—in short, all those acts usually thought of as ephemeral, nonreproducible knowledge.”26 The two terms almost never exist in isolation, and their complex interlacing allows the past to be transmitted into the present. This intertwining is made clear in Tellas’s performances—her notion of the archive comprises both Taylor’s archival technologies (as documents often trigger the onstage action) and the repertoire (of dancing, of gesture, of dialect and accent, etc.). Memory is propagated through this broad, hybrid sort of archival action. The notion that the person can operate archivally—in Taylor’s terms, as both archive and repertoire—is one key aspect of Tellas’s theater that finds its way into the activities of Estación Pringles. The project is explicitly focused on “old social and artistic practices”—which is perhaps to say, along with Tellas, practices that cipher the “extinction of a world, a sensibility, a way of life.” Or perhaps the arrow runs in the opposite direction, figuring a resuscitation, not a lament. After all, the aim is to channel these cultural forms into new “fictions or images” in the present. Either way, an important point of convergence between Tellas’s work and that of Estación Pringles is the idea of reaching back into history and bringing older cultural forms into the present. The performance, in this scenario, becomes the vehicle through which these forms pass into a collective experience. Perhaps a more salient way in which Tellas’s work informs the operations of Estación Pringles is in their shared attitude toward spectatorship, an attitude that emerges most clearly in light of the concept of the “emancipated spectator.” Jacques Rancière’s book on this notion represents an extension of both his own notion of the “distribution of the sensible” and his interest in radical forms of sharing knowledge—aesthetics and pedagogy, in other words. Rancière himself begins by locating the origins of The Emancipated Spectator in his earlier book on education The Ignorant Schoolmaster. The premise of the latter text is simple—that the ignorant are capable of teaching the ignorant. Rancière centers on the figure of Jacques Jacotot, a teacher who, exiled in Belgium after the Bourbon restoration of 1814, eventually sought to overturn what Rancière calls “the myth of pedagogy, the parable of a world divided into knowing minds and ignorant ones, ripe minds and immature ones, the capable and the incapable, the intelligent and the stupid.”27 The interest of this pedagogical myth for the problem of spectatorship is that this paradigm mirrors the structure of western theater. The relationship between master and student constantly reinstates the gap between them, and theater enacts the same separation. The “paradox of the spectator” thus emerges: spectatorship is integral to theater, but it is a bad thing. Being a spectator means remaining ignorant (“viewing is the opposite of knowing”) and also passively immobile (“it is the opposite of acting”). This paradox explains, for Rancière, the various attempts at doing away

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with spectatorship altogether over the course of the twentieth century, either through stirring audience members to knowledge or shocking them into action.28 Both notions, associated with Bertolt Brecht and Antonin Artaud, respectively, reinscribe the notion of passivity into spectatorship. What matters to Rancière is the line that separates the spectator from the spectacle. It is the allocation of roles, the distribution of sensory experience that he interrogates. His inquiry hinges on the question of equality, particularly the equality of intelligences. This concept refers not to the equality of the capacities of everyone on all matters, but rather to the fact that the master’s knowledge is the same sort of knowledge as that of the student. “There are not two sorts of intelligence separated by a gulf,” Rancière writes. “The human animal learns everything in the same way as it initially learnt its mother tongue, as it learnt to venture into the forest of things and signs surrounding it.”29 One consequence of this view is that our knowledge and intelligence are necessarily promiscuous. Out in the “forest of things and signs,” learning empirically as if learning to speak, one’s experience is bound to be heterogeneous. And in the process, one is similarly likely to encounter others doing the same thing, and thus likely to alternate between roles of teacher and student. A baseline of equality thus provides the impetus for crossing between spectator and spectacle. To do so implies doing two things at once. This, Rancière has explained elsewhere, was the first prohibition in Plato’s Republic. The republic “knows only one evil, but this is the absolute evil: that two things be in one, two functions in the same place, two qualities in one and the same being.”30 It is precisely art that first transgresses this prohibition. The painter of horses and riders knows “nothing about horsemanship, saddlery, or joinery.” Painted horses, saddles, and joints are mere imitations of mere imitations, torn away from any sort of use. “He will make horses, horsemen, and even— God knows for what use—shoemakers and carpenters.” The uselessness of the painter, however, is at least restricted to silent, two-dimensional reproductions. The theater takes the imitative tendency of all art to its extreme: “And on the theater stage the imitator will mix everything into a cacophony: works of nature and those of artisans; thunder, wind, and hail; axles and pulleys; flutes and trumpets; and dogs, sheep, and birds.”31 If doing two things at once is the cardinal transgression of the republic, then the multisensory experience of the theater crosses the line time and again. The prohibition on doing two things at once forms the basis for hierarchy. “All that remains is the prohibition,” in the end.32 This social hierarchy is mirrored in our attitudes toward spectatorship and speech in the theater. In Tellas’s work, this division is somewhat eroded, as the speaker on stage has recourse to his or her own archive and repertoire, modeling not so much an individual past but rather the generic act of excavating the past. The mundane character of this excavation in turn works to demystify the stage even further. The spectator is somewhat emancipated here and so is the actor, in as much as both roles are emptied of exemplarity. It is easy to see oneself as a potential participant in Tellas’s work. And it is easy to imagine one’s life consisting of the blend of outward self-representation and inward remembrance that she stages. The demand to choose between watching and acting becomes a demand to do both.

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This disposition—theorized separately by Rancière and Tellas, and put into theatrical practice by the latter—has exerted a strong influence on the concrete operation of Estación Pringles. In its desire to recirculate memories and cultural forms from the past, memory becomes a vector that passes through a radically present formation of speakers and listeners. This is not memory of trauma, as so much important aesthetic work in postdictatorship Argentina has been, but rather an articulation of the commonality of experience through a role-shifting rescue of time-worn cultural forms—declamation, key among them.33 Declamation, as Estación Pringles understands it, articulates memory by forging a shared, loosely bounded present. Furthermore it delineates a pedagogical site, as the declaimer’s intimate memories are “revealed” to others. Poetry acquires new “shine and opaqueness,” fleeting impressions that last as long as the performance. Thus the collective experience of declamation erodes both the stage and its authority. And this notion exemplifies the central place occupied by performance in Estación Pringles’s theory and practice. However, this theatrical lineage is not easily reconciled with the project’s manifest interest in the medium of the book.

Book and stage Estación Pringles also draws on a tradition that seeks to join the printed word to more corporeal, performative forms such as music, dance, and theater. Mallarmé, a key point of reference in Carrera’s own writing, represents an important antecedent in this regard. The centrality of performance in his written work is well established. Mary Lewis Shaw has made clear that his elaborate, ambitious plans for a project known simply as “the Book” incorporated both writing and performance. Scouring his notes for this project, she details the precise choreography imagined to be necessary for its performance. A blend of poetry and theater provides the model, the latter discipline acting as a supplement. “[T]he performing-arts code in Mallarmé’s poetic texts is supplementary,” Shaw proposes. “The reference to absent, or extratextual, performances appears paradoxically superfluous yet necessary to the completion of these works of art.”34 In other words, literature and theater will not exactly meld into one another; their relationship more closely resembles a dance.35 The resultant performance is not metaphorical, for Mallarmé conceives it in quite literal terms—the Book, we read, includes concrete plans for its own production. Its author not only imagines the connection between writing and performance. He also “shifts from the plane of representing performances to the beginning stages of producing them.”36 In other words, the pinnacle concept in Mallarmé’s oeuvre joins the written word to a bodily choreography of performance. This mix of word and gesture permeates his work, extending even into social gatherings. Mallarmé’s weekly salons were dinners that included poetry readings, testifying to the importance of intimate encounters to his concept of the poem, what Anna Sigrídur Arnar terms the “communal celebration of language.”37 She further underscores the centrality of lectures—oral performances that are captured in writing—to his overall musical understanding of verbal expression. For Mallarmé,

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“words have the capacity to reverberate; like musical notes, they evoke sensations within our bodies and minds.”38 This point becomes clear in the essay that gives its title to Arnar’s expansive study, “The Book as Spiritual Instrument,” where Mallarmé is transparent about the connection between poetry and music, tying the kinship of writing and sound to the intricately constructed layout of the page. As he writes in that essay, the fabrication of the book, in the whole thing that unfolds, begins at the first sentence. Immemorially, the poet has known where each verse belongs, in the sound that is inscribed for the spirit or on pure space. In turn, I mistrust the volume and the marvels announced by its structure, if I can’t, knowingly, imagine a certain motif in a certain place, page and height, casting its own light on the work.39

The physical disposition of words on the page becomes central to the resonances opened up between writing and the performing arts: Mallarmé choreographs the page, the experience of which ceases to be solitary, as it becomes also a “communal celebration.” This notion of choreography has served as inspiration for subsequent poets and other artists. For example, Shaw mentions John Cage’s multi-genre work The Untitled Event, held at Black Mountain College in 1952, as representing an outgrowth of Mallarmé’s aesthetics. This meandering event, inaugural for the genre of performance art, drew on the unique brew of structure and randomness that Mallarmé had theorized and that would mark Cage’s work for decades.40 Shaw describes this combination of choreography and chance: “Although preparations for the performance were minimal, it was not absolutely unstructured. The performers determined individually what they would contribute, but they were given a precisely timed score indicating when they were to perform.”41 The artist’s task involves creating a framework but not overdetermining the contents. Similar procedures would remain central to Cage’s compositional work, most famously in his “silent” piano work 433 (also composed in 1952), and they are present in his printed lectures as well. The former eliminates the piano’s music, while the latter infuse writing with musical structures. In the instructions to one edition of his famous 1959 “Lecture on Nothing,” Cage spells out exactly the number of “measures” in each line of words, as well as the number of lines “in each unit of the rhythmic structure.”42 In other words, he follows Mallarmé in the desire to plot music and writing together. The connection between the Mallarmé–Cage lineage and Estación Pringles runs directly through Carrera’s own aesthetics. In a 2006 lecture on the concept of rhythm in poetry, he expanded on the affinity between the two, citing Mallarmé and Cage together. He begins the essay by quoting at length a number of poets, drawn largely from the romantic and modernist canons, on rhythm, as if to draw a constellation of definitions. This constellation gravitates around an anecdote about the origins of Carrera’s own writing—a childhood letter written to his late mother. He interprets this episode as representative of a childhood “biorhythm”—a fundamental palpitation that straddles the spheres we conventionally call nature and culture.43 This little origin myth

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ties poetry to bodily actions like breathing or speaking. A natural extension of the body, poetry thus acquires the dimensions of a dialect, never those of an official language. Hence the tactical maneuvers that Carrera isolates as typical of his own poetics at the time of Estación Pringles’s founding: “The system of pleasures I now invoke is minimal: exchanging metaphor for another, less boastful figure, metonymy, which connects words through slight and sometimes rustic associations. Incorporating fragments of conversations, the sayings of children or old and normal folks who speak with a bit of rhyme perhaps.”44 Poetry becomes a technology for indexing the biorhythms of others. The natural rhythms of their speech, not the restraints of genre, infuse this poetics. Carrera’s interest in heterogeneous, lived, breathed, and heard rhythms partially explains his attraction to the figures of Mallarmé and Cage. These are not the rhythms of “ancestral orderings of movement,” which is Carrera’s way of framing the rhythms of conventionally metered poetry.45 But they would also not be the improvised rhythms typical of a musical form like jazz. Rather, they would be the molecular rhythms of absolutely free verse, understood as “an individual modulation” or “a rhythmic tangle” of the soul.46 Carrera cites this last notion, introduced by Mallarmé in an 1894 lecture titled “Music and Letters,” directly, though he barely glosses it. These lines reflect the centrality of nonverbal expression to Mallarmé’s aesthetics: “Music and Letters are two sides of the same coin,” he writes.47 And their imagery recalls Carrera’s idea of memory as a sort of resonant piggy bank. Shaken up, the coins strike the inside walls at irregular intervals, producing resonances of different durations and intensities. The “soul” of the thing, in other words, traces the tangled lines of a complex, irregular rhythm. Chance takes the place of compositional order, a notion that Carrera borrows from Cage’s work, which he also cites in order to introduce doubts rather than certainties: the impossibility of knowing where an aesthetic experience begins and ends, or the impossibility of measuring its duration or, alternately, measuring the emptiness stretching out between durations. Where aesthetics bleeds into everything else, where poetry indexes lived rhythms—these are the places imagined by Carrera in this lecture. They are the places that are condensed in Estación Pringles. Carrera partially frames his lecture on rhythm as an explanation of his most recent poetry. In particular, he affiliates his own free-verse practice with Mallarmé’s notion of individual, idiosyncratic rhythms. However, an emphasis on a choreography of irregularity had been present in his work from its earliest incarnations. His postersized work Momento de simetría (Moment of symmetry), for example, comprises an experiment in the visual elaboration of alternate rhythms. Drawing on the tradition of Brazilian concrete poetry, Carrera places words that are white like stars over a large black sheet in what comes to resemble the night sky. Reading the work is a challenge, for the progression from one “verse” to the next is unclear. The reader is in the position sketched by Cage, haltingly wondering whether to “measure” the verses themselves or the distance between them. The work makes more sense not as a poem, but rather as an elaborate choreography for some other event. The concrete poetry notion of the verbivocovisual—word, voice, and image together—seems an apt description of this work, which points us toward a performance, even if we cannot precisely envision of what sort.48

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The notion of the written word as the site of a performance thus recurs in Carrera’s own poetry. It ciphers with Nancy Fernández calls the “essential incompletion” of his work.49 This incompletion at the level of the poem is a germinal source for the necessary inconclusiveness of Estación Pringles. Fernández cites the fragment as an essential aspect of Carrera’s poetry, and gatherings at Estación Pringles are similarly fragmentary, in as much as they cannot exhaust the project itself. Thus drawing on the long performative writing tradition, Carrera’s own poems represent an important forerunner to the project.50 Through them he channels the previous work of Mallarmé and Cage, whose concept of poetic composition as a ciphering of music, dance, and theater on the page help form the conceptual armature for the notion of Estación Pringles as an experimental book of poems under construction—products of a force, we read, that is “none other than that of poetry.”51

Test of solitude Estación Pringles frames itself as a sort of experimental, performative book, but the project has also edited and published several paper-based texts of its own, often in collaboration with the established small press Mansalva. In most cases, these texts work by marking an experience. Stage-like and indexical, they are sometimes the product of a formal competition—the contemporary version of those older verbal jousts described in the project’s founding statement—and other times they are marked by a locally delimited encounter, whether among poets or with visual artists. In this way, they exemplify the aesthetics of performance and place-based construction that animates Estación Pringles’s relationship with the medium of the book. One of these books is a short volume titled Prueba de soledad en el paisaje (Test of solitude in the landscape), which compiles poems by four authors from several Latin American countries: Christian Aedo (Chile), Inti García Santamaría (Mexico), Leandro Llull (Argentina), and Valeria Meiller (also Argentina). The four poets were residents at Estación Pringles in late 2010, and in both the book’s prologue and the project’s call for applications, this geographical place is emphasized. The “privileged enclave” of the pampas and the sierra is conceived, along lines originally spelled out by poet Juan L. Ortiz, as the site of a unique challenge: “the confrontation of writing with things that don’t respond, in nature, in what we here call the humid plains.”52 The poets’ experience of the place, in other words, is to be the motor behind the poems that will emerge from it. These poems reflect both the landscape and its enclosures. The collection of work of these poets reveals constantly the concrete traces of Estación Pringles. Of the four, Aedo most clearly articulates a version of the relationship between place, writing, and memory that, as we have seen, animates the project in general. The first of his two long poems begins by invoking what underlies the landscape, the “living forces” that make the image of the ground and everything on it appear. The “hand of

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the landowner” is the first such force, its anteriority suggesting that the land cannot be conceived outside of property relations: “the distribution of the land, to each his own.” The colonization of the land, however, does not necessarily imply its humanization. The land is not the mere reflection or symptom of property relations. It too participates in its own capture as an image, as a landscape, and thus the flat plain is the necessary antecedent of “the open spring of the sierra.” The landscape, the site of the “test” in this encounter among poets, is complex, home to beings of numerous sorts: ideas the death of others those that came and stayed those that left those that never arrived, those that were always there and no one saw above all those carried away by the wind the light comes and goes at moments it falls grazing the landscape How many words exist to say desert or to define a state of perpetual abandon53

Aedo’s landscape comprises ideas and the numerous small histories of the different waves of settlers that have, over the years, arrived in the Argentine countryside. His last question, unpunctuated, about the lexicon of the desert vividly recalls this multiplicity of origins and trajectories. He seeks to summon up these trajectories as generative elements of his poem. Another poet in this collection cites the work of Ezequiel Martínez Estrada, the essayist whose Radiografía de la pampa (X-ray of the Pampa) famously sought to interpret the Argentine nation through an understanding of the land encompassed by it. Aedo himself echoes the Radiografía’s idea of joining a collective, generic biography with the writing of history: “The history of the landscape,” writes Aedo, “is the biography of its inhabitants.”54 This antecedent matters greatly for Aedo’s poems. For Martínez Estrada, the plains are irremediably marked by the struggles that have left the scars whose shape is drawn by their inhabitants. “In struggle this land was populated,” he writes, adding that the colonial and postcolonial wars of the provinces imbued the plains with a martial character. “That network of towns, born of the event of persecution, lent the Republic a military, not a political or economic, aspect. The map of settlements is a map of trenches turned into bodegas and taverns.”55 Battles and their material supports form the substrate of modern civilization, in other words. Aedo invokes a similarly marked and blood-smeared landscape. The title of his first poem is “El Arroyo de las Achiras” (Stream of achiras), and he ties this final term— achira, a kind of flower—to its Quechua etymology via a citation from Wikipedia: “From the Quechua term Achuy, its principal meaning is ‘sneeze.’ This leads to the idea of ‘transporting something in one’s mouth’ and thus that which the human soul emits or expresses with spontaneity.”56 The stream that gives Aedo his title is in this way tied to a once grand, now defeated oral tradition, whose loss and persistence are

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symbolically underscored in the poem’s early verses: “the Achiras flourish in the small, germinal spaces within History.” Defeated traditions survive as a trace, as the name of a stream (itself also a watery trace, lacking the force and volume of a river). They form part of the landscape that becomes an image through visual representation, specifically photography: “decadence and decomposition, light materials for tourists/ digital cameras pass and capture/unperturbed on the sierra.”57 Aedo thus casts the scene of Estación Pringles in the shape of its own human and nonhuman geography, past and present. The dialectic between land and inhabitants marks, throughout this poem, the present state of this hybrid geography. Lines have been carved into the earth, and they cipher the “fiction of history”: “How many carts passed through this place/before a track became a street.”58 This metaphorical representation of the train tracks that laid the bases for Argentina’s late-nineteenth-century, export-driven economy acquires a concrete character here, and even more so at other moments: “the soy processing plant is the consummation of the Campaign of the Desert,” a reference to the extermination campaign against the indigenous inhabitants of the plains, the same plains that today are used for the cultivation of soybeans bound, again, for export.59 This sort of connection between past and present is constant throughout this text. We read that Argentina is once again a growth market (in part due to high soy prices), and that the railroads have been replaced by highways.60 The constant motif in this trajectory is struggle, and the combatants—striking union workers, Montoneros, and the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo—all bear their own proper names. They fight to win hegemony over the struggle that is constitutive of Argentina. But these struggles trample or drown the flowers, the achiras that history can barely count: 100 mm of water were enough to drown the fields it seems ridiculous that such a small number could leave so many flowers underwater the victims always disappear inside a number even the largest and most complex is not enough to say that one of every three thousand flowers drowned to death61

The echoes of those flowers, which cipher in their etymological past the traces of an economy of the spoken word, haunt the history of Argentina. They live improbably and joyfully, “incontrollable” and “in spontaneous flight.”62 They cannot, finally, be fully trampled or even drowned. Aedo does not exactly portray the achiras as an excess of history, a blind spot in the conventional narrative. Rather, what survives of them in the present exists in the same way as everything else that populates the pampas: they remain semi-legible through the lines they have carved into the landscape, which emerges as a scene through that act of carving. The participants in this scene—the scene of Aedo’s writing, of the

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encounter between him and the other poets, of their collective encounter with the world of Estación Pringles—are constantly disseminated. His other poem in this collection adds to this picture a chorus of animals. The sounds of frogs and birds, cicadas and bees, whorl through the air. There are “infinite lines of ants” mirroring the lines bored into the ground in the previous poem.63 These animal hordes in circulation are also compared to participants in a more conventionally understood politics: Inevitably Proliferating existing like the plaza de mayo in the middle of the night the landscape is illuminated64

Aedo situates the experience of the countryside, its nomadic history and its buzzing present, in the symbolic center of the nation, and at the end of the poem he returns to the image of flowers that are speech that become the multitudes announced in a phrase most often attributed to Eva Perón (“I will return, and I will be millions”): something like the flowers that resist along the edges of the roads words that in the wind will go to other places and when they return will be millions tons of fireflies like lines that announce the arrival of summer65

Peronism, today in power again after various iterations, symbolically envelops the flower, which is the unruly word, which is the past. This is, on the one hand, a way of saying that the politics of hegemony constantly feeds itself on the energy of the multitude.66 But it is also a way of highlighting the always incomplete character of that process. Hegemonic narratives always leave something out. Or rather, they leave everything out, as they themselves are only possible because of the wayward forces that constitute them. Aedo’s two long poems represent an attempt at portraying the disorder of these forces, their multitudinous clash that transcends the lines of species and politics. This attempt mirrors one of the stated aims of Estación Pringles in general—to resurrect the oral, musical, and performative traditions buried in the habits and histories of the Argentine countryside. The idea is not to conserve or monumentalize these practices, but rather to place them in circulation in a participatory, rhizomatic dynamic. Hence the emphasis, in the project’s own programs, on oral enunciation and bodily presence—its theatrical, performative practice, ideally in constant motion. This emphasis on mobile, flexible performance lends the project’s relationship  with  the medium of the book a unique character. When Estación Pringles mentions the book, it is often as a phantasmal or antecedent object, tied up with attempts to cipher performativity in written form—in the work of Mallarmé, Cage, and Carrera himself, for example. The book is an animating concept. However, at the same time it is very

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concrete, just like the encounter and events indexed by its own paper volumes. Aedo’s poems exemplify this indexical quality, and they dovetail with the desire to represent the multitudinous energy that always underlies collective encounters. The plains become “an open hand” for whoever “seeks fragments/loose words.”67 Those words—always in circulation, never completely domesticated—are the raw material for both the participatory book in motion and its stiller, paper counterparts generated by Estación Pringles.

5

The Book as Manuscript Electronic originals In a short essay from 2012, first presented in Seville at a congress on the “future of literature after the book,” Sergio Chejfec begins by recounting a conversation with a younger writer about their individual, respective writing practices. This writer has grown up in the age of word processors; Chejfec also uses a word processor, he says, but he also remembers the complexity of the world of textual production previous to this technology’s appearance. Through their conversation, he recalls, like a native informant, the many sorts of writing machines he has used over the years, underscoring their relative difficulty or ease of use. Those machines, it seems, impose themselves, demanding constant workarounds and physical interventions, which is why, for Chejfec, typing on a computer most closely approximates the “natural” experience of writing by hand.1 Like a smoker recalling the world of bars before smoking bans, Chejfec attributes a ceremonial aspect to typing. He calls it artisanal, somewhat equivocally contrasting the practice with the “ritually manual” task of chaining words together in a word processor.2 This anecdote is illuminating for the way that Chejfec extrapolates a theory of textual objects from it. The physical efforts involved in typing, particularly on older machines, correlate with a consciousness of the text as artifact. The typewritten text can be held, can be reproduced only with effort, and it exists only minimally—it is a singular material object. The flipside of that minimal paper existence is the nature of electronic documents. These too exist minimally, a minimum in terms of weight, but they also live infinite lives, free from any origin and simple to reproduce. They exist as waves, not as particles. “My impression today,” Chejfec writes, “as regards the processing of ‘electronic originals’ is, in the first place, that these manuscripts do not exist on their own, but rather as a reflection of a source that cannot be localized in any verifiable place.”3 Most literary labor today, in these terms, entails the manipulation of copies without originals, a simulacrum that annuls the idea of an inaugural document with a paper trail leading back to a scene of production.4 The story could end here, and if it did we would be reading a somewhat conventional account of the way that digital technologies have recently superseded their analog counterparts. This would be the story of a great unmooring from finite materiality, a liberation from paper through the proliferation of infinite identical copies. However, Chejfec’s story is more subtle. He continues with another anecdote, describing the

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“somewhat autistic” blog that he has sporadically updated over the past few years, a blog with minimal links to other regions of the web and that seeks to maintain a level of privacy even as it is almost universally accessible. This blog, he writes, opens up new avenues. They are familiar ones, sought in other ways by Osvaldo Lamborghini, César Aira, and Eloísa Cartonera—avenues toward coupling the act of writing to the act of publishing. Chejfec thus notes that his blog allows him to act as his own editor, as well as to create assemblages that cross media boundaries: The internet page allows me to negotiate the book format and other related units, and also to combine texts with different ranges of physical existence. Nothing impedes me, for example, from giving the same title to textual fragments from a novel and photographs of manuscript fragments of the same text. The image of the handwritten “original” is more auratic than the corresponding text, but the homogeneous virtual writing assumes a more enigmatic presence—I’d call it autonomous or self-sufficient—that protects it from physical injustices.5

The practice described here mediates distance in various ways. The “unique appearance of a distance,” which Walter Benjamin attributes to the concept of aura, is here associated with the image of handwriting, more so than with the printed and published text. But the two objects are also not unconnected, for the blog opens up a continuum between them—specifically, two kinds of continuum—a textual continuum in as much as the same title can refer to different artifacts, and a media continuum to the degree that the webpage envelops the handwritten original and its digital copy (including the copy that has no original). In this way, rather than insisting on the absolute separation of digital and analog forms, Chejfec experiments with their interpenetration. He recognizes differences of degree, but not of kind. Understood alongside other elements in his oeuvre, Chejfec’s practice of including images of scanned manuscripts on his blog is a complex gesture, corresponding to a general poetics of assemblage and process.6 Scenes of production of all sorts are common in his novels—much as they are in Aira’s work. That said, the paradigm of process in Chejfec’s work is not limited to the production of textual artifacts. Or rather, his gesture of straddling print and electronic media corresponds not merely to a question about how books emerge. It also connects his interest in the materiality of the literary object to the delineation of specific terrains in his work. Concretely, his use of the digital manuscript corresponds to an equally digitalized, augmented, and blurrily defined geography.

Augmented geography One way to understand this geography is by beginning with the term “IRL fetish,” which was first coined by Nathan Jurgenson in a short essay published in 2012.7 His essay diagnoses a common tendency among technology writers to romanticize

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offline, “in real life” experiences—those moments when we find ourselves accidentally phoneless, or without reception, or simply engaged with something other than a screen. The trouble with this tendency, Jurgenson argues, lies not just in the often self-congratulatory discourse of logging off. Rather, it also obscures the ways in which digital and analog reality are enmeshed. Reality is “augmented,” to use another of his descriptors, which means that “our reality is both technological and organic, both digital and physical, all at once.”8 Geographical locations are tagged and monitored by digital means; we move around the world guided by these monitoring technologies; we contribute to their sophistication anytime we add to the store of digitally processed data about our physical wanderings. As Jurgenson puts it, “our lived reality is the result of the constant interpenetration of the online and offline,” which is to say that the two spheres constitute and transform each other.9 We shouldn’t even see them as two spheres, but rather as two regions of the same immanent geography—composed of organic and inorganic materials, online and offline spaces, all of which are terms that name real, multifaceted phenomena. Chejfec addresses this geography in various works across web-based and print media. For example, in Mis dos mundos (My Two Worlds), his ambulatory narrator comments on the effect of digital technologies on the experience of geographical, bodily displacement. “When I walk,” this narrator says, “my impression is that a digital sensibility overtakes me.” The feeling he describes must be increasingly common today. As our knowledge and experience of the world becomes more mediated by digital mapping technologies, we rely on them to discover and find our destinations. Furthermore, these technologies translate the very concept of “destination” into something unrecognizable as such. Real-time representations of our movement on a map hold out the promise of never getting lost, producing the fantasy of a seamless continuum between our bodies and the unperturbed, mobile blue dot on the screen. However, while Chejfec’s “digital sensibility” hints at this current reality, these two scenarios do not line up perfectly, and not solely because his novel was published when smartphone-based maps were still in their infancy. Rather, it is because he specifically invokes the early days of internet browsing, previous to the days of ubiquitous satelliteguided directions, when haphazard associations seemed the rule. It was a time “when wandering or surfing the Web was governed less by destiny or by the efficiency of search engines than it is today, and one drifted among things that were similar, irrelevant, or loosely related.” The process he mentions is not efficient and point-to-point; it is engrossing, random, and time-wasting. The parallel between the street and the net is, in this narrative, a question of distraction and tangents, not of destination-oriented GPS navigation.10 A time when search engines were bad, when information flowed somewhat chaotically, when it was easy to follow links down the rabbit hole—this is the moment in the history of technology that has formed Chejfec’s narrator’s “digital sensibility.” It is an image of the web as a place to get lost. It evokes various famous peripatetic figures—Charles Baudelaire’s flâneur, Guy Debord’s drifter, Michel de Certeau’s walker, and Rebecca Solnit’s wanderer, to name just a few.11 The narrator himself refers

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to this tradition in his mention of “the idealization, initially during the Romantic Era, then the Modern, of the long walk.”12 Chejfec’s city/web-surfer adds to these figures a specific form of encountering objects, a form that is filtered through his experience with the web: The places or circumstances that have drawn my attention take the form of Internet links, and this isn’t only true for the objects themselves, which are generally urban, part of the life of the street or of the city as a whole, shaped precisely and distinguished from their surroundings, but the associations they call to mind, the recollection of what is observed, which may be related, kindred, or quite distinct, depending on whichever way these links are formed. On a walk an image will lead me into a memory or into several, and these in turn summon other memories or connected thoughts, often by chance, etc., all creating a delirious branching effect that overwhelms me and leaves me exhausted.13

The forked paths that this narrator experiences when walking in the city correspond not to the streets themselves, but rather to a mental geography of associations. He has internalized the internet to such a degree that the habits it induces in his browsing now characterize his experience with objects that lie beyond the screen. Each of these objects remains discrete, but also immersed in a web of memories and associations. Like a musician who can’t help but keep constant time with her fingers, the narrator sees hyperlinks everywhere. And this development is not positive. The narrator describes his acquired sensibility “not with pride but with annoyance: nothing worse could happen to me, because it affects my intuitive side and feels like a prison sentence.”14 The web has infiltrated his body, imprisoning him from the inside. Chejfec emphasizes search and hyperlinks, rather than geotagging and status updates, but his narrator still reflects the situation described by Jurgenson—both present us with characters whose behaviors have been entirely restructured by the internet. Thus while Jorge Carrión has written of this novel that Chejfec presents information technology as a “metaphor for the definition of thought in motion,” I think that the relationship is more direct.15 There is no gap between the online and the offline, or between technology and thought. The narrator’s walk through the city becomes a path through linked objects, each of which opens up, in turn, numerous haphazard mental associations. More applicable here is the image Carrión proposes about another of Chejfec’s texts: the “theatricalization of the real.” This image aptly corresponds to a description of the novelist’s work in general, in the specific sense that reality itself is entirely conflated with its representation.16 The digital map and its corresponding digital territory become one. Carrión deftly ties Chejfec’s description of internet browsing to the narrative structure of Mis dos mundos. The novelist, he writes, “situates the text at the unstable center of a web of hyperlinks with the visual, literary, and audiovisual arts of our present.”17 Indeed, this novel, like Chejfec’s oeuvre as a whole, wanders. It draws unexpected

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connections based on encounters with objects. This wandering is perceptible even at the level of the sentence, where meandering twists and turns often end with the word “etc.” The attendant suggestion is that there is always something more to add—one more hyperlink to open or one more corner to turn. When the narrator of My Two Worlds invokes the “exhaustion over the needlessly prolonged Internet journey,” he is simultaneously ciphering that “etc.”18 In short, the geography of Chejfec’s work is suffused with the experience of the internet. His reality has been “augmented” by information technology. And the line between the offline and the online is not the only geographical boundary that is erased in his texts. We could say something similar about the relationship between the way he represents urban and rural spaces. In this case, Chejfec presents an alternative to what Martin V. Melosi calls “the declensionist narrative” in geography. This narrative delineates a sharp distinction between human and nonhuman spaces, most commonly understood as analogous to the divide between city and countryside or between artifice and nature.19 Chejfec’s cities, however, mesh together with the nonurban wild. He describes this mesh eloquently in an earlier novel, Boca de lobo (The Dark): “One couldn’t really call it a city, that place where one begins to walk and finds only damaged ruins and abandoned earth, just as one couldn’t call it the countryside, that territory marked by improvisation and indolence.”20 This space is not exactly liminal. It reveals the mutual augmentation of the rural and the urban. It does not mark a point of hazy transition between them. Rather, it reveals that the haze of limit spaces infuses all spatial experience. Boca de lobo is exemplary for this uncertain, hazily defined terrain. The novel centers on the relationship between a middle-class man and a factory worker named Delia. Their main activity consists in walking together around the outskirts of some city. Narrated through internal monologue, the novel has been aptly described as “dystopic fairy tale”—the story, or fable, of a love that ultimately does not render class lines inoperative and whose main plot line ends violently, with the narrator raping Delia and then abandoning her, pregnant.21 Much of the narrative is devoted to describing the novel’s landscape in great detail, even if this detail never manages to render this space comprehensible. Indeed, the inexhaustibility of the landscape, its capacity to welcome always more description, is what makes it akin to the digitally mediated landscape described in Chejfec’s later work—in Mis dos mundos, for example. The primacy of space in this novel has attracted ample critical attention. Patrick Dove describes its representation of economic relations in geographical terms, highlighting the “topography” of the neoliberal present that contrasts with the “landscape” shared by the narrator and Delia.22 Stephen Buttes similarly seizes on delineations of the ground as a cipher of human relations in times of economic transition. He interprets the novel in terms of chorography, which is to be understood in contrast to the abstract representation of space. That is, while “modern mapmaking seeks to represent the totality of a terrain over an abstract geographic plane,” chorography rather “aims to represent a country, a region, or a territory in all its particularity.”23 Boca de lobo, Buttes contends, carries out such a chorographic task. As he charts his own memories in

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space, the narrator creates a “‘mobile map’ capable of registering the effects of certain neoliberal processes in 1990s Argentina.”24 Both critics, in this way, tie the exploration of a relationship with the earth to an exploration of economic life. Buttes draws out this relationship at length. He writes that human beings and landscapes are, in this novel, engaged in an endless process of borrowing and lending. Chejfec’s lexicon makes this clear, as one and the other filter each other, “lending” each other a unique character, for example. This process is mirrored, Buttes argues, in the practice of lending and borrowing clothing among workers and also money between workers turned loan sharks and their poorly salaried ex-coworkers. The novel inscribes these loans into the relationship between characters and landscape, and thus the map drawn by the narrator reflects the dynamics of a nascent neoliberal economy: “In as much as that map reflects a structure of debts and loans that would seem, in principle, to benefit the workers, permitting them to acquire desired objects, we would be faced with a map of neoliberalism.”25 The world becomes entirely somatic, infused with the biopolitical structures of neoliberal economics. Chejfec’s chorographical narrative would allow us to understand this process. The novel begins with an explicit reflection on geography, with the supposition of the earth’s solidity: “I’ve always felt uneasy over the fact that geography doesn’t change, in spite of our own changes and the changes produced in it.” The first clause takes as a given that the earth remains always self-identical, but by the end of the sentence the opposite is simultaneously true. The paradox is that the terrain doesn’t change in spite of its own palpable transformations. This play of identity can be explained by the narrator’s attitude about change in general, which is initially a product of “something immaterial” but that soon is expressed in terms of residual, physical properties: “The same thing happens with the temperature of bodies: they maintain a residue of previous warmth, that residue allows them to keep being themselves, but at the same time the change is the measure of difference. Bodies are and are not; they are less and more at once.” Geography, Chejfec continues, works in the same way, which is why it is “indocile.”26 Kate Jenckes takes this word to refer to “something living,” a breath or spirit. The novelist’s “enigmatic observation,” she writes, “seems to suggest that change is possible, even when the geographical surface does not reflect it. Change is discussed in terms of corporeal warmth: physical contact changes bodies, creating an ‘indocility’ that makes them greater than they were on their own.”27 Put briefly, Chejfec describes a landscape whose stable identity is coterminous with the possibility of its own instability. The narrator returns to this concept toward the end of the novel. “As I said at the beginning, it is disturbing that geography does not change, in spite of time’s passing; there is something essential that remains always.” What changes is not the series of assembled objects that he subsequently mentions in passing, but rather the mediated experience of those objects. They are modified through contact. Relations render them labile, transforming their solidity. Neither Delia nor the narrator “would have doubted the autonomous existence of reality,” but at the same time neither of them “cared to believe in it, because each new day and repeated night was, for us, the first.”28 Reality

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exists, and it remains stable, but it is temporally transformed through contact with the characters’ wanderings. These passages comprise something more than a simple exploration of the limits of perception. This exploration inheres in them, but more interesting is the way they cipher a relationship with the environment that runs parallel to the textual economy introduced at this chapter’s outset. They represent, that is, a complex relationship between an original and its subsequent stability or changeability. The earth is original and stable. It is modified constantly, however, even if this does not transform its ultimate nature. This formulation rearticulates, in a different context, the basic structure of Chejfec’s idea of the relationship between the manuscript and its copies. To return to his own words, the “image of the handwritten ‘original’ is more auratic than the corresponding text.”29 That is, handwriting—analogous here to the ground—remains “auratic,” and thus seemingly distant and inaccessible, even as it is mediated digitally, a process that would seem to bring it always closer.30 Chejfec insists, in a somewhat deconstructive manner, that any concept of originality is necessarily enmeshed in an economy of mediation. But some mediated originals are more “original” than others. The “corresponding text” is even less original than its digital and visual mediation. Reality is, in this primary sense, comprised of many mediations that come before any meaning that one might attach to it. A series of homologies thus run through Chejfec’s various spatial delineations—his geography corresponds to his textology. The description Buttes offers of a complex landscape filtered through economic relations finds its echo in the notion of a world filtered through a “digital sensibility.” Both correspond to the augmentation of a given reality by its representational extensions. In the same vein, Chejfec’s “digital original” is also highly mediated and yet no less “original” for it. The original, whether the ground or the text or something else, is augmented from the very outset. This point is not exclusive to Mis dos mundos and Boca de lobo. Another, more recent novel makes a similar point about geography, comparing the reach of Google maps to the reign of a god.31 These structural similarities run throughout Chejfec’s work, and they are furthermore evident in the way that he understands the relationship between digital manuscripts and print objects, a point best illustrated through the display of digitized manuscripts on his blog.

Digital handwriting To date, fragments of two novels’ manuscripts have been posted on Chejfec’s blog (see Figure 9). They are revealing in several ways, some more significant than others: Chejfec’s handwriting is difficult to read, for example, and we can also see that the ink on the yellow notebook pages is sometimes smudged, as if damaged by water; finally, we can discover that, once deciphered, the text on the scanned page is difficult to match with the clean copy of the novel. This is because the manuscript is more a series of drafts than simply a handwritten original. We might suppose them to be

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extensive notes, particularly in light of Chejfec’s affirmation that he composes on a computer. Either way, we can appreciate the disjuncture between handwritten and final texts at various moments, for example in this passage from the notebook pages: “After my ostracism, when I left Pedrera, a fair number of the occurrences seemed to me impossible. While this is a feeling that seems to be frequent, in a significant way all this felt unreal because I felt myself confronted with a real tragedy.” The corresponding section of the novel reads slightly differently: “When I left Pedrera, a fair number of the occurrences with Delia seemed to me impossible. There are notions that accompany us all the time, for example the series of proofs that indicate to us where we are and, ay, what we represent in each circumstance. Nevertheless, after my ostracism.”32 In their similarities and differences, the two passages trace the movement from rough to final draft. This has clear consequences for Chejfec’s deployment of the concept of aura. If the digitized manuscript in general retains the aura’s mystery, here Chejfec presents us with an even more recondite, distant, and less immediate artifact—not only an original, prepublication text, but the handwritten, incomplete antecedent of the finished novel. It comes to us against all odds; it shouldn’t have survived the process of textual transformation; as Henri Lefebvre has put it, somewhat in passing, “the fate of an author’s rough draft is to be torn up and tossed away.”33 The draft contains not only a secret, but one that should be hidden forever, destined for the landfill. Chejfec rescues it and places it on display.

Figure 9  Sergio Chejfec, scanned notebook. (image reproduced with permission from Sergio Chejfec)

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It is not difficult to discern, in this gesture, an affiliation with Lamborghini’s ambition to publish before writing. His Teatro proletario de cámara is also made up of a series of notebooks that, we can imagine, he might have placed online had he lived to see the internet age. (And indeed, various aficionados of his work have, appropriately, uploaded fragments of the volume to the web.) Aira’s work also contains notebooks, and his novels are dated like diary entries. Similarly, any book by Eloísa Cartonera resembles nothing so much as a homemade notebook. Beyond these similarities, Chejfec’s gesture also involves a sort of pre-posthumous publication, as the notebooks of writers are most often excavated, reconstructed, and published after their death.34 Chejfec beats his future readers to the punch, exhibiting, at least partially, the private, archival artifacts that precede some of his published books. They help explain the cryptic title of his blog—Parábola anterior can somewhat obliquely be translated as “anterior word,” at least when we understand parábola as a reference to the etymological root of palabra (“word”). In this respect, it is worth noting that by the time these drafts are placed on display the novel has already been published. And furthermore, when Chejfec had published, in an earlier post, an excerpt from the same novel (its last three paragraphs), he cited its final page numbers and publication details.35 The novel is contemporary with its fragmentation into pieces. There is, in these different instances, a kind of posterior anteriority, as if we could read the novel in fragments on the one hand, or as if we could enter into contact with the original, antecedent artifact on the other. In these ways, the literary topography occupied by the novel finds itself complicated by the introduction of electronic materials. One way to understand the act of publishing one’s own handwritten rough drafts is through perspectives introduced by genetic criticism. In 1996, a special issue of Yale French Studies offered a survey of this branch of critique. The volume’s introduction defines its field of inquiry as the composite “avant-texte,” which is to say “everything—drafts, sketches, outlines, etc.—that comes before the published text.”36 While this approach might seem to portend a search for origins, the editors draw a distinction between the quest of genetic criticism and that of classical philology. Against the latter, “genetic criticism attempts . . . to reinscribe the work in the series of its variations, in the space of its possibilities.”37 Drafts and other materials, in other words, don’t reveal the truth of a work, but rather draw out its numerous possible iterations. The consequences of this new emphasis are potentially far-reaching—the editors write that this perspective dethrones, in a very material sense, our “classical notion of the monumental and stable work,” which is now faced with “a growing interest in that part of the work that is movement, action, creative gesture, solidified ephemera.”38 That emphasis on action changes not only how we think about literature, but also how we think about writing in general, as from this perspective it ceases to be a metaphor, becoming a literal practice of inscription. As Laurent Jenny points out later in the same volume, writing, for genetic criticism, “serves to designate the material generation of the work over the source of a specific period of time.”39 In other words, this body of criticism highlights the messiness of production over the cleanly bound finished product.

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Philippe Lejeune has elsewhere chronicled a unique case of such criticism—the genetic critique of autobiography. He isolates this particular genre because, he claims, it functions differently than others with respect to genetic research. While, on the one hand, knowledge about the avant-textes of a poem or novel “may be of interest to specialists who think about creative mechanisms, . . . it changes nothing about how these texts function for a reader.” With autobiography, however, “knowledge of the avant-textes is relevant and relates directly to the central purpose of the text and to the reader’s expectation.” This aptness owes to the fact that the topic of an autobiography is the writer’s life, which means that drafts and other supplementary materials add to the richness of the representation of that writer as a character.40 Lejeune mentions one concrete experience with the drafts of an author’s autobiography. The writer had handed over these materials to Lejeune, and his task became to systematize them in some way. This task ultimately proved impossible, as the drafts sprawled out, recommenced several times, and in general escaped any sort of finality. Even with the writer alive and available for consultation, the traces of writing remained disorderly.41 This example allows us to establish an interesting parallel with Chejfec’s use of his own drafts. In both instances, writers have made available the materials that precede their finished texts—either by these materials to a literary critic or by displaying them to anyone who stumbles upon the writer’s blog. Furthermore, while Chejfec’s novels are not autobiographies (however much they often seem to be), Lejeune’s notion that the avant-textes of this genre amplify the lens through which we glimpse the writing subject is highly relevant to his case. In his work, the drafts serve not necessarily to add to the reality of the author as character, but rather to expand our access to the material process of textual construction itself. In both cases, our interaction with the text and its antecedents straddles levels of reality between a final representation and its auxiliary preparations. In exhibiting those preparatory materials, Chejfec reveals, among other things, the potentially conjoined activities of writing, publishing, and reading today. That is, while he typically publishes his work through normal, often transnationally based outlets (with small presses sometimes, but more commonly with Alfaguara), Chejfec simultaneously alludes to other possible forms of production and circulation. In this way, he sends his reader back to a much earlier moment in the history of writing—not only to a pre-print era, but also to an era before the division of production spaces. Tracing the origins of that division to the preparation of manuscripts in early modern Europe, for example, Marcel Thomas notes that by the fifteenth century specialization had already acquired a spatial dimension. While in the “monastic era” (pre-1200, more or less) some division of tasks had occurred, the collaborative process of making books still took place in the same place: “scribe and illuminator still worked side by side in constant collaboration.” This unitary space would be fragmented in subsequent centuries. “In the secular age,” Thomas writes, “it became more and more common for separate workshops to be set up, with copyists in one shop, rubricators perhaps in another, and illuminators in another. Thus quite recognisable production lines slowly came into being, involving a large number of artisans, each of whom had his specific task.”42 This configuration set the stage for the division of labor in the modern era,

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and it is one that is still identifiable in much literary production today. However, digital technologies threaten to upend this situation, allowing the author to engage in writing, technical production, and distribution all from the same space. Roger Chartier has commented on this possibility, noting that “the economy of electronic writing makes possible the simultaneous production, transmission, and reception of text.” This situation, he continues, “unites—as never before—the tasks of author, editor, and distributor within one person.”43 When Chejfec exhibits his drafts, he is explicitly invoking this possibility. Granted, understanding Chejfec’s work through this genetic lens is limited by the fact that he has seemingly anticipated this critical perspective. In other words, rather than allowing the critic to access his drafts and draw conclusions from them, he incorporates them into his own expanded work. Drafts and novels become synchronous objects, escaping the game of anteriority and posterity implicit in a genetic approach. The task thus becomes not to play detective, exploring the multiple avenues opened up by comparing drafts to the finished novel. Rather, it involves understanding the level of reality accorded to each of these. To return to Chejfec’s own comments on this practice, “electronic originals” exist only as “the reverberation of a source that cannot be verifiably placed anywhere.” And along these same lines, the practice of displaying them on his blog allows him “to combine texts with different ranges of physical existence.”44 Significantly, this question is consequential not only for his textual economy; it also transforms the way we understand the terrains he represents in his work. In this direction, it is worth turning briefly away from genetic criticism and toward the conceptual pair of the virtual and the actual. The topic of an essay by Gilles Deleuze, a short text that itself is made up of a reconstruction of notes, these concepts inhere directly in a division sustained by Chejfec himself, namely that of minimal existence and its implied, maximal opposite. “Purely actual objects do not exist,” writes Deleuze toward the beginning of his essay: “Every actual surrounds itself with a cloud of virtual images.” These virtual images, in turn, are distributed throughout a series of circuits, which lend density to the actual: “The varyingly dense layers of the actual object correspond to these, more or less extensive, circles of virtual images.” The layers, in turn, constitute the object’s vitality, or “the total impetus of the object.”45 It is difficult not to imagine, in the scene painted by Deleuze, the figure of an atom, its electrons running circles around its nucleus. This image, however, is not wholly appropriate, for we imagine the nucleus as a constituted reality, whereas the actual exists in a state of becoming. The “process of actualization” is constant. The virtual is responsible for the push toward the actual, and thus “[a]ctualization belongs to the virtual.”46 The dynamic of capture and consolidation, of stable reproduction, is thus contrasted with the situation of flux and becoming.47 These terms can help us understand the media dynamics of Chejfec’s oeuvre. The published book exists as an actual object, for it is where the many virtual antecedents in motion—all the avant-textes, some of which are digitized and displayed online— come to rest. That said, it is worth repeating that “[p]urely actual objects do not exist,” for each individual book also works virtually, escaping stasis and existing always in a state of circulation, no matter how minimal.48 This dynamic holds not only for the

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textual economy, but also for the general spatial economy of Chejfec’s novels. So much in the spaces his characters inhabit seems nebulous, on the cusp between actual and virtual existence. Returning momentarily to Mis dos mundos, the narrator describes, in generic terms, the nature of many entities in these spaces: These unreliable and of course unpredictable beings I see from time to time follow a regime that I’d describe as floating. They seem available, open to establishing contact, or at least within one’s reach, and capable of sensing our approach, but they float or are soft: when we draw near they move away, pushed by the ripples of air our movements create. They’re unstable, not so much in their fleetingness as in their haphazardness; seemingly dominated by forces beyond them, one moment they’re close, then far away the next, or suddenly gone. I don’t know whether they sink or rise, or whether they hover in place before passing through the next wall or acquiring another shape.49

Such beings, which abound in Chejfec’s geography, hover, sink, or float—all verbs that conjure up images of their simultaneous accessibility and unreality. They are constantly becoming something else, which also means that they are becoming themselves. Just as Chejfec’s texts inhabit various levels of reality, the objects distributed throughout his spatial worlds also straddle the line between the virtual and the actual. In an article on the geographical experience of Las Vegas, Rob Shields writes that the city’s tourist areas are imbued with an affective force that “recasts the event of meeting into a flow or durée of momentary states and dispositions of the self—a process that involves both virtualization and actualization.”50 Meetings among pedestrians activate different potentials. They actualize what previously lay virtual. Shields’s antecedent on this point is not only Deleuze’s essay on the virtual and the actual, but also his description of street meetings in his 1978 lecture on Spinoza. There he imagines a scene in which “I run into Pierre, for whom I feel hostility, I pass by and say hello to Pierre, or perhaps I am afraid of him, and then suddenly I see Paul who is very charming, and I say hello to Paul reassuredly and contentedly.”51 Deleuze describes these two encounters as a “succession of two ideas” (Pierre and Paul), each of which generates a different disposition. These encounters demonstrate the dance of actual and virtual forms of existence—what Shields calls their “flickering quality”—that is characteristic of the various levels of reality in Chejfec’s textual and geographical ecologies.

Tunnels through postcards This flickering quality transcends the boundary between the worlds represented within certain of Chejfec’s texts and the external world of circulation occupied by those texts. Boca de lobo presents us with hybrid, physical spaces that are difficult to delineate, and this presentation is mirrored in the extended, media-crossing conjunction of the physical novel and its partially digitized draft manuscripts. Furthermore, Mis dos mundos theorizes the textual geography of the earlier novel, describing encounters with

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a digitally augmented space. Finally, the essay with which this chapter began spells out the routes linking different textual incarnations across the digital and print worlds. There is, in Chejfec’s work, one immanent geography—not an imaginary world inside the novel and a dynamic of circulation beyond it. A continuum runs between the two, which are simply regions of the same world. In a text that Chejfec read at a 2007 conference in Venezuela, he explains beautifully the consequences, for the reader, of this understanding of the world. This essay, titled “Apropiación de la ciudad” (Appropriation of the city), begins with his 1990 arrival in Caracas, where he would live for 14 years. Some 48 hours after landing, like a character from one of his novels, he sets out on a walk. He relates encountering a store that seemed to be going out of business—the few articles left for sale are available at bargain prices. He happens to spy, on his way back out to the street, a collection of old postcards. They represent the Caracas of the 1950s (the decade of the dictatorship of Marcos Pérez Jiménez). “They reminded me,” he writes about the postcards, “of those films with scenes of panoramic exteriors: the city as a space where everything flows in an orderly way, and where the monumental hierarchy of spaces organizes perspective.”52 This is the city as the state represents it, as an orderly urban idyll, so willfully removed from the uses to which its inhabitants inevitably subject it. Chejfec proceeds to buy the set of postcards. The act itself mirrors the essay’s title: “It was a gesture of appropriation, and at the height of my vanity I imagined sending these postcards to friends,” allowing them to imagine the “exoticism and shared experience” that are the twin desires of nostalgic postcards.53 The idealized picture of the city painted in color by the photographer, however, has been corrupted—moths or termites have tunneled their way through these postcards, which must have once been stacked (for the holes occupy the same location, relative to their edges, on each of them). Initially, Chejfec regards these small imperfections as positive indications of the passage of time. It is as if they ciphered the temporal distance between the world represented in the photographs and the geography of Caracas’s present. They exemplify the transformations of the ideal into a rough-edged reality. But the termite holes eventually come to represent something else. Chejfec conceives of them not merely as symbolic markers of the city’s decay. He brilliantly turns their tunneling into something else—a “concrete manifestation” of “elements of realityfiction.”54 What he means by this becomes clear as the essay ends, when he draws connections between elements of the different postcards—a streetlight communicating with a roof terrace, a sidewalk with a car moving down a different street, a red roof with a racetrack, an empty lot with a park—based on the termites’ holes that they share in common. He sees these connections as trajectories, the termites’ own ways of mapping the city: [The termites’] excavations proposed possible itineraries; they joined not only distant and arbitrary points, always emblematic ones, but also different times: with the passage of time, the holes ended up being the only true thing about these postcards: the rest could have been demolished or, what amounted to the same, ceased to exist as a consistent datum of reality. They had changed the coordinates

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and scales of Caracas; the landscape had acquired a different meaning; the urban motifs were different; the idea of the use of space and its regulatory capacity had been modified, etc.55

In other words, the termites have not only devoured bits of these postcards. They have also modified the texture of the city—not in symbolic terms, but rather quite literally. This is because, in this essay, there is no gulf between representation and reality. The two bleed into one another. This is not to say that the termites have created actual wormholes between different points in space. Rather, they “propose possible itineraries,” which, far from remaining mere proposals, transform the substance of the city, for it is partially constituted by the itineraries taken through it. The geography of the postcards’ images, itself a small subset of the city itself, is inseparable from the geography of that same city. Like a little Aleph (a reference made by Chejfec in the essay’s first paragraphs), the stack of postcards is a concrete condensation of reality. The collection of postcards makes up a sort of notebook, for in the end Chejfec assimilates the action of the termites to the action of writing. He proposes that they exemplify, precisely, a sort of inscription. In this way, the postcards become something like the termites’ own manuscripts, and their combination of writing and mapping resembles the delineation of trajectories that so often takes place in Chejfec’s own writing. These trajectories appear in the interior as well as outside his textual universe. That is, textual routes are drawn through his fictions and by their physical manifestations, itineraries that mirror one another. Chejfec’s fictions, in other words, always threaten to spill over the edges of the book housing them and expand out into the rest of the world. They threaten to become the avatar of a manuscript; they threaten to become an excerpt; they threaten to return to their previous incarnation as a “digital original.” They become regions, in other words, that potentially connect to others through the communicating vessels of the complex media environment that they inhabit.

6

The Book as Database Echo chamber A recent book by Pablo Katchadjian consists of, almost entirely, a long chain of newspaper excerpts, each of which in turn encloses an internal quotation. Titled La  cadena del desánimo (The chain of despondency), the text begins by quoting a reporter quoting the Argentine president: “‘This belief in genetic identification smacks of Mengele to me. What is this, that someone is born predetermined—it seemed very Nazi,’ said President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner.”1 Her opinion, reproduced exactly as it appeared in a newspaper, provides the mold for the hundreds of quotations that follow. Each subsequent item invariably follows this same basic pattern. Politicians feature heavily, often making similarly confrontational or dismissive comments, and the Argentine president is both the source of dozens and the topic of many. Katchadjian’s text numbs and bores its reader—though perhaps not more so than the news itself. This is certainly his point, as his title makes clear. The word “cadena” means “chain,” but it also refers to a simultaneous broadcast over several TV or radio channels. The one appearance of the titular phrase in the body of the text, in which a central banker denounces the media’s tendency to “uninform and distort reality,” straddles the line between these two acceptations.2 The “chain of despondency” thus refers to the endless stream of infotainment emanating from the media as well as the emotional state that it produces. In this way, this book aims to become an echo chamber in which the news cycle resounds. I borrow the term “echo chamber” from César Aira, who has also used it to describe Katchadjian’s work. However, the book he was referencing, El Martín Fierro ordenado alfabéticamente (The Martín Fierro ordered alphabetically), could scarcely be more thematically distinct from La cadena del desánimo. It comprises, as the title indicates, an alphabetized list of all the verses of the first part of Argentina’s national epic poem, the Martín Fierro. Aira suggests that Katchadjian’s book is made of echoes, each verse shepherding the allusions of its original context into new textual surroundings. The new resonances opened up allow Aira to read this experiment as a successful attempt at maintaining the integrity of a literary classic while at the same time evacuating its content. The voice of the reciter is both present and absent, provoking a surprised realization in the reader: “we have been freed from precisely what had annoyed us most: that insistence of a voice to tell us something, make itself understood, convince us.” José Hernández, the author of the Martín Fierro, or anyone who has decided

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to recite his poem thus loses all authority over the text. Liberated from intention and meaning, or at least from their extended elaboration, we can, Aira writes, now appreciate the materiality of the poem’s rhythm.3 Furthermore, the imposition of a new order “reminds us that there was an old order: the verses of Hernández’s Martín Fierro followed an order too”—for example, the demands of the plot, as well as metric and rhetorical conventions.4 Katchadjian’s gesture, in this sense, returns us to the scene of textual construction. With the old order denaturalized, what remains is to forge a new one. What Aira identifies and appreciates in Katchadjian’s text dovetails with his general approach to literature—his attention to procedural elements and the invention of mechanisms for creating artworks over and above the character of works themselves. This gesture is what Aira approvingly finds in the avant-garde, particularly the strand identified with Marcel Duchamp and John Cage. Aira inscribes his own work into this tradition, emphasizing his own procedural mechanism over the works he generates. What matters is the making, not what’s made. However, the technique Katchadjian deploys—in these texts and, I will argue, in his more traditionally narrative works—is not arbitrary. In La cadena del desánimo, he compiles fragments from the newspaper, and in El Martín Fierro ordenado alfabéticamente he treats  a classic literary work, similarly, as a collection of singular units. Each volume is conceived as a collection of discrete elements that have been explicitly manipulated and reordered. His procedure involves breaking a text into pieces and putting it back together otherwise. Put differently, Katchadjian treats these texts—the daily newspaper and the Martín Fierro—as databases, and he subjects them to his own algorithmic interventions. According to Lev Manovich, these twin concepts, database and algorithm, correspond to a relatively new aesthetic paradigm. In an essay from 1998, he affirmed the ascendancy of the database form over more common, narrative-centric channels, specifically the novel and cinema. Unlike these forms, his notion of the database is inextricably bound up with digital objects and their relations, and thus he highlights the fact that “[m]any new media objects do not tell stories.”5 Rather, Manovich notes, many websites and other database-structured objects “don’t have a beginning or end; in fact, they don’t have any development, thematically, formally, or otherwise, that would organize their elements into a sequence. Instead, they are collections of individual items, where every item has the same significance as any other.”6 Manovich certainly simplifies the relationship between database and narrative, something noted in several critiques of his work, but his overall description of an emergent database consciousness holds true today.7 And his formulation illuminates Katchadjian’s work especially well, particularly his less narrative works, such as the ones mentioned in the preceding lines. This affinity, however, is complicated. Whereas the connection that Manovich draws between databases and digital technologies is intuitive, books, which provide the format of Katchadjian’s texts, prove less amenable to database-style works. The words stay there on the page, always in the same order, and the text has no means of expansion or shuffling. What does it look like when a book is conceived as a database? And what does it mean for the act of writing to be assimilated to the

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application of an algorithm? Katchadjian’s work opens these questions up. His texts consistently model the form of the database, and at the same time, they signal the limits of the book’s capacity to mimic digital media forms.

Uncreative writing and database aesthetics A significant portion of Katchadjian’s work is not only database-like. It is also uncreative, in the specific sense given to this term by Kenneth Goldsmith. Uncreative works, he posits, are avowedly not original; rather, they appropriate, transform, or reframe texts that already exist. Goldsmith begins his recent exploration of such works by describing the situation confronting contemporary writers. They are “faced with an unprecedented amount of available text,” and all this text yields a unique scenario: “the problem is not needing to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity that exists.”8 Navigating among what Roger Chartier once called “textual archipelagos that have neither shores nor borders” means working with “infinitely manipulable fragments of text.”9 In other words, the internet and its noncontiguous textual surfeit seem to require that we discard, among other notions, the old romantic idea of originality. According to Goldsmith, contemporary writers should learn from the long tradition of uncreative, appropriative aesthetic interventions. Duchamp and Cage are, again, the most obvious antecedents, as they both centered their actions on the conceptual task of framing something that already existed beyond their agency: mechanically produced artifacts or the air of Paris, for example, or the incidental noises of a concert hall. Such artists anticipated, for Goldsmith, the situation of today’s writers, wherein the task becomes sifting through the existing world of text, not producing more of it.10 The fact that both artists worked in disciplines other than literature is relevant. Goldsmith explicitly argues that literature in particular has languished in a creative, expressive paradigm that has been largely abandoned by many visual artists and musicians. This lag makes sense when we consider the technological restraints historically involved in the reproduction of text. In the era of typewriting, for instance, copying text was laborious. True, the Xerox machine allowed for a certain sort of reproduction, which is why Goldsmith ties it to techniques like William Burroughs’s cut-ups.11 However, literature long remained, and still remains, decidedly on the side of creating new works from scratch. The personal computer, with its copy and paste functions, acting in tandem with the wide availability of digitally encoded text, has changed this dynamic entirely. It has become possible to construct texts entirely via manipulation of the already existing words of others. And this is true not only of words, for the digitization of all media also means that image and sound files are also comprised, at a deeper level, of long strings of language. In this direction, Goldsmith details a number of possible interventions—opening such files in a word processing program and manipulating them from the inside, for example—that exploit the coded, written structure of many aesthetic objects today. In other words, with the advent of digital culture, uncreative interventions have become native to the writing machine itself. The word processor seems to demand uncreative writing.

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Manovich would likely agree. Uncreative writing can be understood as an expansion of the database paradigm that he first theorized in the late 1990s. While Goldsmith mentions this term only in passing, the act of framing or manipulating text that he describes meshes well with the image of algorithms mapping itineraries through vast stores of data. Similarly, both theorists identify the advent of new forms of aesthetic action with the appearance of digital technologies. For Manovich, the database is today’s dominant “symbolic form,” a term he borrows from Erwin Panofsky to designate a “way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world.” New technologies transform that experience, which now seems to consist in “an endless and unstructured collection of images, texts, and other data records.” Faced with this proliferation, “it is only appropriate that we would be moved to model [the world] as a database.”12 In this way, it is not only that technology allows us to write in new ways; it also infiltrates our very conception of the world, making it more likely that we will conceive everything around us as a vast database subject to algorithmic interventions. And in doing so, new possibilities for bypassing the individual, creative self emerge. In short, digital media technologies, the database among them, infuse our sense of being in the world, transforming the aesthetic possibilities open to us. Hence Manovich began his inquiry by declaring the importance of exploring the “poetics, aesthetics, and ethics” of database culture.13 In years subsequent to his original essay, he and others have given some indication of how such cultural forms might become manifest. The project Soft Cinema, for example, comprises a number of database-centered videos and other artifacts. Among them, the one that most clearly expresses the possibilities of database aesthetic production is a short film titled Texas. Introduced to us as a “pure” database film, it has no fixed narrative or order of images. Rather, what we see and hear is generated by an algorithm choosing among various options, which will appear differently in subsequent viewings. Watching it several times, one begins to know the elements, but the relationship among them remains indeterminate. In this way, the film, along with the others in Soft Cinema, seeks to put into practice Manovich’s earlier notion of database as an alternative to narrative. As such, this project allows us to understand narratives as emergent artifacts that result from the feedback loop between an algorithm and a database. Soft Cinema illustrates Manovich’s notion of the database as a symbolic form in cinematic terms, and it also unwittingly elucidates the comparison with Goldsmith’s later concept of uncreative writing. The key point of interest, in both cases, lies in the processes that produce works of art. In Manovich’s database cinema, the creative action lies in the production of options and instructions. The director aims to establish possibilities and constraints. The actual narrative that emerges responds to rules determined beforehand. The analogous figure in Goldsmith’s system, the uncreative writer, is similarly engaged in forging the procedures and limitations through which the work emerges. While the operations they describe require different technological aptitudes and operations, both thinkers understand aesthetic action as the creation of frameworks that enclose and order discrete elements. This common conviction provides a basis for understanding the uncreative, database-like operations put into motion by Katchadjian.

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To bridge these theories and practices, it may be helpful to compare his work to another database project from contemporary Argentina: an online poetic network. This project is alternately titled “Las Afinidades Electivas” (Elective affinities or LAE) or “Las Elecciones Afectivas” (Affective choices or LEA). Founded in 2006 by poet Alejandro Méndez and hosted on a decidedly minimalist website, this expansive, inconclusive network connects the avatars of numerous Argentine poets on the basis of self-determined affinities.14 It comprises, in simple terms, a mutating anthology and database of contemporary poetry. Each new poetic addition to the site, which, at least in its early days, expanded by means of a snowballing number of invitations, transforms it, though without obeying any predetermined poetic philosophy or sense of a past. It is, in other words, an anthology without teleology and with no real sense of history. This is not to say that the project does not leave traces; in fact, it is made of them. One of the most noteworthy aspects of the site is the way it maintains intact the vectors that connect the different poets to one other—vectors that are made visible by means of a list of “mentions” in each poet’s entry. That is, the poets’ relationships to the site and their alignment with other participants are thoroughly documented. This emphasis on lines of articulation between the site’s discrete elements—the poets that comprise it along with the poems they contribute—helps account for the reference, in the project’s second name, to affect. Understood in Spinoza’s sense as the capacity to affect or be affected, this term refers to forces that exceed the individual subject.15 A complex of such forces, made of “elective affinities” between poets, comprises the key structural element of the site.16 This structure bears important implications for how we read this site. Since every poet is connected to at least several others, there is no real origin, only multiple ways into the network. We might choose, for example, to begin by reading the poems of Gabriela Bejerman, who has also collaborated with Estación Pringles as a cabaret performer. Her first poem on the site, titled “el show no puede continuar” (The show can’t go on) tells a brief story of lust and disappointment. The poetic voice disparages herself as she is faced with her own foolishness: “this ignorance/of wanting to buy love with sexy weakness.” This simple sentiment is expressed, throughout this short poem, through images of partying and its aftermath: “like the floor of a club at dawn,” she begins, later adding “I can’t keep dancing on a table of broken glass.”17 The vanity of unrequited love is thus assimilated to coming down off the high of dancing. The poem is simple, and its effects are not particularly surprising. It acquires more complex levels of meaning, however, in light of its connections to other poems. On the one hand, the poem that follows immediately amplifies the theme of lust as the speaker relays the story of a ménage-à-trois to her lover. And on the other, the poets to whom Bejerman is connected, via the mechanism of elective affinities, cast her work in new perspective. For example, one poet mentioned by Bejerman, and who mentions Bejerman in turn, is Cecilia Pavón. Pavón was one of the founders of the art gallery Belleza y Felicidad, which formed part of the initial ferment from which Eloísa Cartonera emerged. Her first poem on this site centers on a minimal encounter: two writers witness the end of the world and begin to write again, carving the first letters of the new alphabet into a parquet floor with a Swiss army knife.18 As was the case with

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Bejerman, the message here is simple. However, what’s interesting is what happens when we read these two very distinct voices together. After all, they are expressly linked by mutual affinity, and thus it is natural to ask after that connection. In this case, we find a common emphasis on the mediations of human intimacy: a mediation through language in Pavón’s case, through other people or spaces in Bejerman’s. This common strand becomes starkly apparent once we read the two poets in light of each other—which is to say, in the context of the affective network set up by LAE/LEA. That is, the nature of the site itself highlights affinities that might remain hidden if we read the poets in isolation or according to a different rubric. Thus the structure of this site, a database wherein individual elements are organized by means of self-selected affinities, transforms our reading of individual poets. Our reading practice becomes lateral, moving among poets based on their mentions of one another. This reading is facilitated by the hyperlinked names of poets, indexed in a column off to the left side of the page. Furthermore, the digital format of the site allows it to expand and to be shuffled, something that happens periodically when the poet featured on the homepage changes. The site tells many stories, not one, and it has no determinate endpoint. It represents, in this way, a clear case of Manovich’s database aesthetics, and it exemplifies how this aesthetic sense is tied to technology: the site’s architecture is made possible by digital technologies, and these technologies mark the forms of reading opened up by the project. Those forms of reading are inflected by the opening of new resonances among poets. The production of resonance and association, of course, is the same characteristic that Aira identified in Katchadjian’s intervention in the Martín Fierro. However, the differences between media, in this case, between a website and a book, mean that the way these resonances appear is distinct in each case. In LAE/LEA, the expansive structure of the site facilitates the reading of poems in the context of shared sensibilities. Poetic nodes are tied together by affective lines. Katchadjian, on the other hand, relies on his readers to establish associations between a canonical text and his own remix of it. The stable structure of the book engenders dynamism in a largely associative manner through its contact with the reader, whereas the mutable architecture of a website allows such dynamism to be incorporated into the text itself. This is one important way in which the database structure works differently in a book than in other media formats, and it allows us to see the difficulty in importing this structure to the paperbound volume.

Repetition, variation, softness This structure is perceptible even in Katchadjian’s more traditionally narrative texts. These works also display a database-like structure, in which individual units recur in recombinant patterns. The 2011 novella Gracias represents a case in point. Written as an absurdist account of a slave rebellion, the novel is told by an unnamed first-person narrator who is taken to a rather unremarkable island. The main geographical points of reference in this world are generic: there is a port at one end of the island and a

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town at the other, places whose names in Spanish, puerto and pueblo, read almost like versions of one another. Katchadjian’s characters are paper thin, and his somewhat fantastical plot advances as if by improvisation. The novella opens with the purchase of the narrator by a man named Aníbal, who on the following morning asks his new slave to accompany him on a hunt. As a hunter, he is unconventional. He fires his rifle wildly into the air, randomly killing a few birds, and he demands that the narrator follow his lead. He does so, and soon the two find themselves in a scene of absolute carnage: “I looked around from atop my horse; there were little monkeys, birds and birds of prey, even a horned animal. All of them dead.”19 The scene is reminiscent of a Yosemite Sam cartoon, and the combination of utter silliness and cruelty here in the book’s first pages—a combination that permeates the novella—sets the stage for the story’s subsequent development. The plot advances quickly: a new slave, named Hugo, is brought to the house; he and the narrator each pair up with a female servant, one of whom, Nínive, is subjected to constant abuse by Aníbal; they and others begin to hatch a plot to kill their owner; the narrator, individually charged with this task, is held up when he gets lost in the woods, where he passes time with a “savage girl” who teaches him to eat roots; he returns and assassinates Aníbal, freeing the slaves; together, they burn a giant manure deposit, unleashing waves of ash and smoke so thick that worms begin to grow from it; their lives threatened, they escape the ash and worms to the other side of some mountains, where they begin to plan another military campaign; the expedition succeeds, thanks to the strength acquired by eating those same roots; during the planning of yet another advance, the roots are mixed up with hallucinogenic ones, and in the book’s longest chapter, Hugo and the narrator experience a drug-induced schizophrenia; finally, the ash and its worms catch up to the freed slaves, who are forced either to perish or find passage off the island; the story ends with the narrator, now on a boat and deaf from the ash, shaking water out of his ears. This quick summary gives some idea of the novel’s plot, but it leaves out Katchadjian’s most distinctive stylistic characteristic: his constant reuse, often with slight modifications, of certain sentences and scenarios. The most clear example of this technique comes at the beginning of many different chapters. Each morning, the narrator is improbably served breakfast in bed. By the time he wakes up, his food is waiting for him on a table. And each time this scene occurs, we find some slight variation on the same few sentences: “The next day I woke up and saw my breakfast on the side table. I reached my hand over to the kettle and felt that it was warm.”20 He then stands up and looks out the window. Often he sees the navy’s artillery exercises. There are slight variations on this basic setup—he sometimes vomits, sees something else from the window, or notes the absence of breakfast—but these variations stand out precisely because they underscore the modification of a common underlying pattern. This example, already present in the earliest chapters and repeated through the end, points further to other recurring elements in Katchadjian’s prose. This constant narrative recycling is significant, for in spite of its wandering plotline, Gracias is made up of just a few disparate motifs that come together constantly in varied formations: weapons, slaves and masters, ambivalent or juvenile sexual relations, edible roots, fires gone awry,

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cups and handles, and perhaps a few more. These seemingly random elements acquire different meanings according to context—guns in the hands of hunters or in the hands of rebel slaves, benign or hallucinogenic roots—which underscores their malleability. Their recurrence generates a succession of refrains, in the sense that Deleuze and Guattari once gave to the term “refrain”: “any aggregate of matters of expression that draws a territory and develops into territorial motifs and landscapes.”21 These repeated elements, intensified or minimized in their various deployments, populate the novel’s terrain. Or better put, they forge and mark the boundaries of the narrative itself. To use an image provided by Katchadjian himself, these basic building blocks recur by disappearing and resurfacing. His concrete image for this dance of absence and presence is that of the black hole. In the long chapter in which the narrator and Hugo have eaten hallucinogenic roots, they show up, or feel themselves showing up, suddenly and randomly in different geographical locations. They are sucked into the black hole and wrest themselves free. The narrator describes their initial experience in confusing terms: I don’t know what was the order of what. What I can say is that with the first root, which was blue and had little dots like eyes on top and little legs like a bird down below, I entered, or we entered, a black hole in the middle of nothing, and that this entry only lasted a few minutes, although it is difficult to know for sure, and that afterwards we ate that blue root again, though perhaps I also added some fluorescent strands to it, and then we went back into the black hole, which was nothingness, but a nothingness in which something seemed to be preparing its appearance. That, at least, is what we felt.22

What follows this initial entry is a virtuosic narrative of vanishing and reappearance. The narrator, whose separate selves, we read, are farther from each other than Hugo’s are, pops up outside and inside, looking at cups or ripping cups’ handles that have somehow been attached to different people. “When I left I was still in the room, but now I’m sitting on the ground, contemplating a cup.”23 Throughout this section, we hear a constant refrain: “I went back into the black hole; and when I came out. . . .” This refrain marks the order of appearance of the novella’s limited number of component parts. In this stuttering repetition lies a model for how Katchadjian’s narrative functions in general. It is as if its different elements were laid out like dominoes on a table, some face up and some face down. We can read the former and know implicitly the content of the latter (as they are made up of the same numbers). Katchadjian turns some over, connects the numbered dots in some way, and then hides them again. The process begins again and repeats until the novel ends, which happens for no clear reason and with no real resolution. In this way, the narrative progresses and ends, but the interplay of its variable elements overshadows this progress and dénouement. The strategy of deploying a limited number of elements in a haphazard, or at most improvised, order is even more clearly visible in a short novel from the previous year: Qué hacer (What is to be done). This text more explicitly subordinates plot and character development to a recombinant dynamic. Two main characters, an unnamed

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narrator and his friend or accomplice Alberto, experience a number of persons, places, and things in a dreamlike story that, like Gracias, seems to have no real finality. A few common figures recur throughout the text: students, Léon Bloy, ill-defined elderly people, and groups of eight hundred drinkers. They tend to inhabit a similarly small number of places: a British university campus, the trenches of war, bars, and toy stores. Finally, a few things or events traverse these characters and settings: old rags, brooms, and the hood of a jacket, as well as the experience of suddenly growing or shrinking and the feeling of heaviness. Each of these lists is incomplete, but these are among the most common elements. They are the basic units that make up the short novel’s precarious narrative. Some of these elements recur with more frequency than others. Old rags, for example, appear constantly. Already at the end of the first section, Alberto is described as lightweight, seemingly “made of a rag,” something reiterated in the next section and that, in the following one, is applied to the narrator.24 The way this description migrates—at first Alberto is light like a rag, and then the narrator is—illustrates the promiscuity of discrete elements in this text. Characters and the story’s plot become empty vessels that house these elements, which are let loose to migrate across the text. Thus throughout the text, rags are used variously. They sop up saliva. They incarnate people and trees. They occupy ditches. They make up the bottom layer of the dream retold in Qué hacer. They are wrapped around a mummy. They act as gags and weapons. They filter and ruin wine. They infest the air with their moldy odor. They do other things as well, but suffice it to say that the multifarious uses of rags, their mutability and mobile capacities, exemplify in the extreme a common characteristic of this novella: the recombinant energies of discrete elements. One other element that repeats often is the experience of variable scale, including cases of growing or shrinking suddenly. Students in this novel are almost invariably very tall. The one whose nonsensical, unanswerable question (“Is what the philosophers say correct, or is it about a double?”) opens the novel, for example, is two and a half meters tall. This measurement is common to other tall students throughout the book, the one exception a student who measures a full three meters. Their stature is reinforced by their aggression: they seem to intimidate the narrator and Alberto, and several try to swallow the latter.25 Besides these examples of the exaggerated scale between the protagonists and certain students, we witness other occasions in which a body part grows or shrinks. One student “grows until reaching the ceiling.”26 Other times a head shrinks or grows relative to the rest of a body: Alberto and I feel that our heads are shrinking; Alberto says to me: What are we going to do with our hands when we no longer have heads? I respond with difficulty, because my jaw is stalling; I tell him that I don’t know. At that moment we feel something like equilibrium in our surroundings, but our heads keep shrinking anyway.27

They begin by noticing the difference between their body parts, one of which shrinks and, at another point, expands. We can imagine that their heads shrink relative to their

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hands, but it isn’t clear whether the environment is dissipating too. After all, they feel it at equilibrium. We can imagine the scene heading toward an asymptotic, infra-thin resolution wherein the hands are the only thing left visible.28 In these scenes, characters’ bodies are endowed with a plasticity that mimics the tendency toward mutation of the novel itself. This plasticity can be understood within a broad upsurge of malleable, mutational, and thoroughly networked forms in many redoubts of culture. Heather Warren-Crow has argued that, particularly in our architectural surroundings, we increasingly inhabit “an anxious cultural imaginary of softening, deforming, tilting and swiftly falling forms.”29 This anxiety finds its representation in Qué hacer in numerous instances of phase change, for example the various scenes in which the narrator and Alberto have cold butter in their pockets and they fear that it will melt.30 And beyond stretching and melting, the novella represents a number of aspects identified by Warren-Crow as characteristic of today’s built environment. The characters’ plasticity and cartoonish aspect echo architecture’s new emphasis on soft, programmable buildings, their surfaces reflecting “the logic of animation in architectural discourse.”31 This logic exceeds the confines of buildings, extending to organic bodies, as “animated architecture both creates and relies on a notion of the living body as mobile, mutable and soft.”32 Such buildings and bodies rely also on digital technologies. Alexander Galloway and Eugene Thacker have argued that our soft, biological selves are now understood as entirely networked entities.33 And in his individual work, Thacker has argued that the exchanges made possible by database-like banks of bodily substances—blood, sperm, and ova, for example—are entirely tied up with informational forays into the body.34 Put even more simply, in today’s biopolitical age, “the body is a database, and informatics is the search engine.”35 Though not expressed in terms precisely the same as Manovich’s, the idea remains roughly the same: biology participates as much in the database form as do art and literature. From contemporary architecture to current notions of life itself, database-structured mutation is the rule.36 In Qué hacer, Katchadjian portrays this double scenario, in which the database invades both the environment and bodies. He does so at a thematic level, as the characters constantly confront soft or stretchy beings that are liable to mutate at any moment. But the novella’s form is equally imbued with this same mutational capability. The plot morphs as its small and limited number of elements dance and recombine with each other. Like Gracias, its structure mimics a database whose component parts emerge in new and unpredictable combinations, and in doing so, it largely bypasses the traditional demands of plot. Even more so than the latter novel, it mimes the movement of storyless, aimless combinations, without progression and without teleology.

A new Aleph Qué hacer contains fifty short chapters. This, Aira points out, is also the number of elements in the list of things viewed by Borges’s alter ego in “El Aleph” (“The Aleph”). This point is relevant because Katchadjian has also published an amplified version of

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this short story in which he has inserted short phrases or extensive passages into the body of the text, more than doubling it in size.37 Since its publication in 2009, El Aleph engordado (The Aleph engorged) has become the most notorious of Katchadjian’s interventions. An online search for his name turns up a number of interviews and news articles about this volume, many of them related to the lawsuit brought against him by María Kodama, Borges’s widow and literary executor. Kodama’s allegations, filed in 2012, were recently dismissed by a judge who came to his decision without hearing the defense’s expert witnesses, among them Aira and literary critic Beatriz Sarlo. The judge’s decision was based on the fact that Katchadjian had acknowledged, in a short postscript, that Borges was the author of the original story and also on the grounds that the author sought no material benefit from his book—a book that, it is worth pointing out, was published cheaply with an austere cardstock cover by Katchadjian’s own press in a print run of just two hundred copies.38 Such publication details are relevant not only for reasons pertaining to the lawsuit. Rather, they bear consequences for our reading of the text itself. Borges’s “Aleph” is already, in several ways, a short story about the refractions of experience through different media, the book among them. Katchadjian retains this thematic focus in his interventions into the text, expanding Borges’s own insights in a way coherent with his overall database aesthetics. While El Aleph engordado has attracted much attention in the media, sustained interpretations of it remain scarce. Aira’s comments on it are brief. He calls attention to the number fifty, mentioned above. The word for fifty in Spanish, cincuenta, he remarks, sounds exactly the same as the phrase sin cuenta, or “innumerable.” Borges reports what he sees in the aleph, the spinning globe in the basement of a house that contains every point in the universe, and he names fifty things—which is to say, innumerable things if we follow the homophonic association. Katchadjian’s amplification of Borges’s text contains twenty-five elements, exactly half, which Aira brilliantly interprets as a  “demonstration of the known mathematical truth that half of infinity is equal to all  of infinity.”39 In other words, Katchadjian pays wry homage to his own text’s famous antecedent, positing his own intervention as both a reduction and a mirror of the original. A more extensive reading of Katchadjian’s Aleph engordado has been offered by Juan Caballero. He understands Katchadjian’s work as a contamination of the “Borgesian monad” that appropriates and continues the work of his predecessor, performing “a playful new permutation in the history of literary contaminations, knowing plagiarisms, and textual infiltrations of which Jorge Luis Borges was a Promethean founder.”40 Part of Katchadjian’s fidelity to this tradition, however, is the critique of this “founder,” as the new work “vandalizes and sullies Borges’s pristine classic in various unforeseen ways.”41 In other words, Katchadjian walks through the door that Borges had opened, even if it was only half open. Caballero’s perceptive close reading of the novella highlights the overall effects of Katchadjian’s surgical operation. He details how the narrator—originally named Borges, now also Jorge Luis—becomes, through added description and internal monologue, more self-conscious and self-doubting. He is nervous and somewhat obsessive. This

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transformation, Caballero notes, is reflected also in the nature of the narrator’s rival and interlocutor, Carlos Argentino Daneri, who over the course of the story acquires a complexity and somewhat sympathetic character denied to him in the original. In this same vein, Daneri fights back with sarcastic barbs on par with the narrator’s; they seem equally matched. Finally, Caballero notes the explicit political implications of certain additions to the story’s climactic scene, in which the narrator descends the stairs and sees the Aleph. Katchadjian adds a number of qualifiers that demonstrate a consciousness of colonialism, conflict, and exploitation, thus “replacing what Borges has painstakingly removed from his universalized and apolitical Buenos Aires.” This last operation is emblematic of Katchadjian’s project in general, which for Caballero consists in the constant infiltration of a classic text by “anti-aesthetic” impulses, giving us “an infected form of literature as ugly and banal as the violence of history it can never hope to escape.”42 Katchadjian certainly infiltrates Borges’s classic story. However, he does so not merely to introduce differences in taste or in style. Where these differences are introduced, their effect is less monstrous or ugly than minor and critical. For example, one word that Katchadjian’s narrator uses on various occasions is librito or “little book.” Its first appearance comes in a conversation with Daneri, in which the latter has just expounded on the nature and virtues of “modern man.” The narrator, bored with the discussion, suggests that his interlocutor should publish his deep and significant thoughts: “I asked why didn’t he write them down and publish a little book.” In the original story, Borges had written the same sentence, minus the suggestion of publication. The addition is highly significant, for Katchadjian makes us aware that his Daneri would never deign to publish in such a minor format. He responds, “[p]redictably annoyed,” that he has already written them down and that they form part of a long poem, “whose extension impeded any thought of a little book.” The poem’s pages, a clearly bothered Daneri continues, already numbered over a thousand. The narrator gets the point and, in order to calm Daneri down, asks him to read a passage out loud, a passage from what he now calls a “great work.” The poem’s author proceeds to read four lines, which Katchadjian has expanded from their original form, and he subsequently extends Borges’s original glosses.43 Daneri’s poem is titled La tierra (The earth), just as in Borges’s original. It aims also at the same goal: to render an exhaustive account of everything on the planet.44 It is the supreme database, a verbal map of the world, and thus deserves a more august home than what the narrator implies with the word librito. The word has a clear meaning in the publishing culture of contemporary Argentine literature, and this meaning is exemplified by the characteristics of Katchadjian’s own books. They are short; they are published by small presses, including the one that he himself runs; their design is simple but elegant; their print runs are minimal, and thus they are hard to find. El Aleph engordado is a librito; Daneri’s poem is not. This note on publishing establishes a surprising quasi-system of equivalences between “El Aleph” and Katchadjian’s book. The narrator, Borges, appears as a smallpress author like Katchadjian, decidedly minor in his appeal and circulation, while Daneri is eventually affiliated with more prestigious, established publishing houses.

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In this aspect, Katchadjian is faithful to key elements of Borges’s story. For example, Borges’s eponymous narrator originally justifies his presence in the home of Daneri’s deceased cousin, Beatriz Viterbo (also the namesake of the Rosario-based small press), by bringing his own books as an offering. He soon realizes they go unread, since the pages are never cut. (He eventually resorts to cutting them beforehand, in order to spare himself this embarrassment.)45 Similarly, the literary work of the Borges figure in both versions goes unappreciated in comparison with that of his rival: while Daneri wins the National Prize in Literature, the narrator’s entry receives not a single vote. His only consolation is pure sour grapes: “Once again,” he exclaims, “misunderstanding and envy have triumphed!”46 Katchadjian’s narrator, similar to the original Borges character, is thus a minor author who lies somewhat outside of mainstream literary production, not unlike Katchadjian himself.47 This rearticulation of the theme of minor literary publishing is not the only way in which Katchadjian comments on the concept of the book as it appears in “El Aleph.” One of the main tensions of the original story is articulated around two different ways of comprehending the complexity of sense perception. Upon witnessing the compact, luminous Aleph, the narrator reflects on the impossibility of recounting what he has seen. In an unaltered, lapidary sentence, we read in Katchadjian’s text: “What my eyes saw was simultaneous: what I’ll transcribe, successive, because language is.”48 What follows is Borges’s famous attempt at accounting for his vision, rendering an account that is necessarily incomplete. This impossibility, of course, undermines the attempt, undertaken by Daneri, at registering the entire world. But it also points to the natural limitations of literature and, more specifically, the book. The linearity of writing and the limited boundaries of the book render any such attempt ridiculous. The technology is simply insufficient. Even the massive collection of the library of Babel, which includes every possible combination of letters, would be insufficient, lacking the visual simultaneity opened up by the Aleph. Katchadjian captures and mimes this impossibility. Thus he writes, expanding a passage from the original, on the futility of description: each thing (the moon of the mirror, let’s say, for example) was infinite things, because I clearly saw it from all points in the universe, and as the points of view are infinite, each object among the infinite objects in the universe was in itself infinite. At the same time, each object is made up of infinite points. . . . And each one of these points is infinite in itself. . . . That, I insist, cannot be described.49

In this sense, expanding Borges’s catalogue doesn’t make a dent in the description of the universe. This is Aira’s point in his reading of the novella, but I think its real significance becomes apparent only once we consider its relation to Katchadjian’s work as a whole. His poetics relies on a notion of text and world being reducible to small parts, individual elements that can be catalogued and recombined at will. The Aleph, in turn, sends up any attempt at carrying this effort at cataloguing to its logical extreme: Daneri’s experiment in creating the great poetic database of the planet is ridiculous in its basic premise. In this sense, it is better to work with small numbers of elements,

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which is what Katchadjian does in Gracias and Qué hacer, and it is perhaps why his additions to Borges’s list number half of the original. His database aesthetics requires a small set. Katchadjian’s inscription of a database-like structure into the medium of the book is unlikely, if only because the medium of the book is a poor home for any database. This poverty is precisely the question at the heart of one of Goldsmith’s most recent works, Printing Out the Internet. The crowd-sourced work consisted in files sent to Goldsmith, who printed them out and filled a Mexico City art gallery with the paper. The project’s desire—“to literally print out the entire internet”—is as absurd as Daneri’s attempt to represent in a poem the infinity captured in the Aleph or in the world. The irony behind Goldsmith’s proposal mirrors what Katchadjian seems to suggest in El Aleph engordado: that database forms are ultimately incompatible with print technologies. But perhaps his full suggestion exceeds this notion. Perhaps Katchadjian is proposing that the transposition of an uncreative, database-centered, recombinant aesthetic program can only be carried out in the print book in a very specific way. What it comprises, we are led to understand, is the necessity of limitation, of working with a select amount of material. In this sense, it is worth looking at the sorts of materials he has chosen, among which are two classics from the Argentine literary canon: the Martín Fierro and “El Aleph.” This is not coincidental. Hernández writes at the dawn of Argentina’s modern book culture, and he engages print’s relationship to oral expression. Borges, on the other hand, examines the threshold between print technology and its fantastic others, all while rendering ridiculous the pompous tradition represented by a man whose middle name, Argentino, corresponds with his nationality. Katchadjian’s interventions scramble the narratives of both texts. He reduces the first to its component parts and reorders them in a formulaic way. And he demonstrates, in the second case, the futility of the search to turn the finitely specific into the expansively universal. All that we can ever access is a particular textual combination, which is always liable to mutate and become something else. In this way, Katchadjian suggests that the textual conditions of late book culture mark an end to the textual conditions of modern Argentine literature. The new Aleph ciphers the exhaustion of the old one.

Epilogue The latest Ariel Ídez’s 2011 novel La última de César Aira (The latest by César Aira) begins with exhilaration: a small press has just acquired a new novel by Aira, and its owner is ecstatic. Ídez’s narrative opens with the founder of this still gestational press, Joaquín, gushing to his friend that “as soon as we finished giving form to the project, César Aira calls us to offer us an unpublished novel of his.”1 The young editor’s excitement belies his absolute lack of knowledge about the novel: he hasn’t read it to completion, and it may not even be finished. He doesn’t even know its title. What he has is the first chapter, which he has received in an email from Aira. The opening, Joaquín enthuses, reveals the novelist’s characteristic style: “some guy is walking down the street, a lark shits on his head, and the guy begins to follow it all over the city, half seeking revenge and half because he has been fascinated by that sort of bird since he was a child when his uncle took him to. . . .”2 The description breaks off with that suspension, an apt stand-in for the next flight of fancy that will extend the adventure a little longer, until around page one hundred it stops quickly, resolved in some fantastic or violent fashion. It is plausible that the editor of a small publishing house would accept a novel by Aira without having read it. In this case, Joaquín claims that the prestige and distribution possibilities opened up by the author’s name are what finally convinced his parents to offer financial backing for his operation. It is perhaps less likely, however, that a basically nonexistent press would receive a call from Aira in the first place. This detail initially slips by without comment, but an explanation eventually surfaces—Aira is a mad genius with a plan to destroy Argentina. From his base in Flores (also his reallife neighborhood in Buenos Aires), he is making moves to inundate the world with a flood of novels, all published simultaneously, with the object of oversaturating the symbolic system on which the idea of Argentina rests.3 To this end, he has coordinated with more than fifty presses—national and international, small and large, past and present—to publish a slew of new novels on 25 May, the national holiday that commemorates the May Revolution of 1810.4 Aira’s phone call to Joaquín is simply part of the plan. The plot itself reads as if it belongs in an Aira novel—even if it feels less haphazard, more elaborately coordinated and developed. It echoes, for example, the 1999 novel El congreso de literatura (The Literary Conference), in which a narrator named César Aira makes ill-fated plans to engineer an army of clones of Carlos Fuentes, whose status as international literary superstar will allow César to take over the world. And this is far from the only echo of Aira’s own work in Ídez’s novel. References to his little novels

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abound, both covertly and explicitly. At one point, Dante—the novel’s protagonist, also known as the Sexiest Dwarf in the World—arrives in Flores in search of Aira, and he experiences déjà vu, realizing suddenly that he recognizes it all from Aira’s novels, particularly La villa.5 Two real writers—Arturo Carrera and Luis Chitarroni, both part of Aira’s literary circle—appear in the text, and other characters bear names and nicknames whose extravagance and exoticism are typical of his novels. The plot, with its combination of apocalyptic fantasy and detailed realism, is similarly evocative, and the novel’s characters repeatedly analyze the tenets of Aira’s literary universe: the emphasis on procedure, his publishing strategies, his authorial mythology. In short, Ídez achieves a satirical mimicry of Aira’s narrative strategies, and he subjects these strategies to a constant meta-commentary. Within that commentary, no aspect plays as important a role in the novel’s plot as the representation of book culture in contemporary Argentina. The drama of Joaquín’s new press runs throughout the novel. His difficulties in getting it off the ground, in tandem with his casual self-confidence, lends the undertaking an entirely improvised feel. Meanwhile, Aira’s malicious plans unfold bit by bit, and the clues to the mystery are often revealed by Dante’s “literary dealer,” who clandestinely sells stolen books out of his apartment. What Dante calls “the obscene creative exhibition of César Aira” in turn forms the basis for the plot, as his constant publication on both large and small presses is what opens up the possibility of a literary overload.6 Aira’s practice is what initially sends Dante, also a writer, on a quest to find his new rival, as his cultivation of an unperturbed prose is interrupted by Aira’s exhibitionism.7 The list of presses set to publish the flood of novels on 25 May, along with many less parodic mentions of Aira’s publication details, further underscores the importance of book culture for Ídez’s plot. Aira allows Ídez to open a window onto the material world of contemporary Argentine literature. He occupies the node where aesthetics and business concerns meet. In this way, La última de César Aira functions as a convenient final articulation of late book culture in Argentina. It is here that the lineage of writers and projects gathered under this rubric turns back on itself. It is significant and natural that Aira is the figure that allows Ídez to execute this meta-commentary. No other figure in recent Argentine literature has so insistently placed the processes of literary production into view. No other figure has so forcefully articulated the nexus of avant-garde and minor literary strategies. And no other figure has done so while simultaneously portraying contemporary Argentine culture through the dual lenses of vivid realism and hallucinatory fantasy.

After the latest Aira is mentioned at least once in every chapter of this book. This owes not to any conscious intention; it is, rather, a result of the way he works as both theorist and practitioner of strategies inherent to late book culture. He engages the materiality of the book explicitly, and this engagement renders visible the existence of similar strategies

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among affiliated writers and collectives. He reveals parentages and alliances forged through common sensibilities. Thus Osvaldo Lamborghini’s experiment in publishing before writing comes to resonate with the construction of a scene of publication by Eloísa Cartonera, whose stage-like workshop in turn evokes the literary performativity of Estación Pringles, whose emphasis on site-specific construction elucidates the geography of Sergio Chejfec’s digital manuscripts, which are objects that, finally, shed light on Pablo Katchadjian’s attempt to fuse the book with a database-like aesthetics. All these practices make sense together only when we see them as different facets of the construction of literary media. And Aira is the writer who, in contemporary Argentina, has most intensely and consistently brought this question to light. In doing so, he articulates a central tension in contemporary literature, a tension best conceived not as a cord but rather as a net, its strands incarnate in the suddenly multiplied channels through which to access literary artifacts. The expansion of digital technologies has been an important catalyst of this multiplication, which is manifested in a promiscuity of textual formats. To offer a personal example of this multiplicity, my own reading for this project involved a large number of devices, delivery systems, and portals. I bought and borrowed books online or in person. I photocopied or scanned articles or read them on JSTOR. Some of them had been stored in a filing cabinet, a relic from my early days in graduate school, while others are alphabetically housed in a neat Dropbox folder titled “Research.” I found obscure texts on Scribd. I read Aira’s El volante in its paper incarnation, published by Beatriz Viterbo, and his Yo era una mujer casada as a .mobi file, published electronically by Blatt & Ríos. In none of these practices am I much of an exception today, and these various ways of reading reflect the complex landscape of late book culture. This complexity is mirrored on the side of production. The writers and projects studied here bear witness to the multiple avenues through which a work can be published. It can be mechanical or artisanal; it can circulate widely or among small groups; it can be scanned or typeset, uploaded to a blog or photocopied and passed around, and so on. None of these production techniques is without its own ideological and aesthetic trappings, and one key aspect of the lineage that extends from Lamborghini to Katchadjian is an explicit, even if many times uncertain, engagement with these trappings. These writers and projects pose political questions—often vague and indirectly articulated ones, but real ones none the less—through their interest in the medium of literature. Through persistent inquiries into the nature of the means through which literature emerges and circulates, they engage with the limits of collective and individual, public and private, literary experiences. Far from fading into the background, the process of literary production becomes the site where labor and aesthetics meet. This coupling is necessarily bound to local conditions, but it also transcends the particular circumstances of contemporary Argentine literature. It extends beyond national boundaries for the simple reason that the conditions experienced by this literary culture are clearly paralleled by similar conditions all over the world—most literary cultures have witnessed both the consolidation of presses by transnational corporations and the concomitant spread of alternative venues, often digital ones, for publishing. In this way, the writers and projects that engage with the conditions

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of late book culture in Argentina open up a local window on a global phenomenon, allowing us some glimpse of the present and proximate future of literary cultures all over the world. In particular, they shed light on the place occupied by the book in that present and near future. In 1995, Aira wrote that “the future, if there is a future, lies in selfpublishing.”8 Subsequent years have seemingly borne this prediction out, though only to a degree. However, the most interesting aspect of his statement lies not in its predictive power, but rather in the moment of doubt: Aira addresses the future, but only if there is a future. This dependent clause does not likely mark an apocalyptic outlook; it refers, instead, to the future of something more specific but vaguely defined—the future of literature or of books or of the link between the two. The paradigm of self-publishing lies on the horizon, Aira seems to say, but it is dependent on the continued existence of that horizon. Aira’s uncertainty has been, ever since I began my own engagement with this literary universe, an animating impulse to place texts in relief against that flickering horizon line. It is in the spirit of that uncertainty that the adjective “late” prefaces “book culture.” This modifier points to something more than the fact that electronic technologies will certainly continue to replace their paper counterparts, even if the phase out will likely be only partial. It also seeks to open up something more productively imprecise about the idea of lateness: the notion that the dusk of book culture signals also the passage of its common bedfellow, literature, through a transitional moment, out of which new possibilities, limitations, and aesthetic forms are certain to emerge. The nature of those forms is impossible to predict, but whatever does emerge will demand new sensibilities and techniques of reading. In this sense lateness, understood in a metaphorical, circadian sense, turns into its opposite: something early, the tentative stirrings of the dawn.

Notes Introduction 1 Boltanski, Flying Books. Unless otherwise noted, all translations from Spanish are my own. 2 Borges, Labyrinths, 51–52. 3 Díaz, Borges, 111–12. 4 Borges, Labyrinths, 56. 5 Ibid., 57. 6 Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, xxi. 7 César Aira, Trompeta de mimbre, 132. 8 Dunn, “Don Juan Manuel,” 227–28; Chartier, Forms and Meaning, 23. 9 Hayles, Electronic Literature, 5. 10 Hayles, How We Became Posthuman, 26. 11 As Johanna Drucker succinctly puts it, “[e]lectronic instruments are no less material in their operation and embodiment than print objects.” Drucker, “Cult Future,” 1. 12 Striphas, Late Age of Print, 25. 13 Witness, for example, Borges’s prominent presence in Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s canonical New Media Reader. The more recent collection Cy-Borges, edited by Stefan Herbrechter and Ivan Callus, channels a focus on media into a more general posthumanist framework. Cortázar’s Rayuela (Hopscotch) was, in some sense, prescient of the sort of nonsequential reading that would come to mark the internet age. 14 Blood, “Weblogs,” 10. 15 That complexity is constantly morphing. While internet cafés have, since the publication of López’s novel, not disappeared, they are becoming somewhat less relevant to the lives of many. Close to 92 percent of the internet-using population in Argentina, which itself comprises around 50 percent of the nation’s entire population, now accesses the internet at home, rather than at public kiosks. eMarketer, “Internet Cafés.” 16 As one report describes this phenomenon, the past decade has witnessed “the emergence of a new sort of press, generally small, of an alternative or independent guise, that has begun to replace the symbolic spaces of carefully selected catalogues that publishing giants seem to have lost or reduced.” SInCA, “Valor y símbolo,” 49. 17 Rowland, Spirit of the Web, 345. 18 In their introduction to an important volume of essays on book history, Jeffrey Masten, Peter Stallybrass, and Nancy Vickers emphasize such cases of overlap as new media emerge, positing that “new technologies redefine and resituate, rather than replace, earlier technologies.” That said, the number of users of e-readers and tablets in Argentina today remains small. Assuming it grows, easily designed ebooks will likely carry the tendency toward cheap dissemination further, as digitally based, broad

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19 20 21 22

23 24 25 26

27 28

29

30 31

32 33

Notes distribution becomes possible as well. At the forefront of this process today are two prominent electronic publishing projects—Determinado Rumor, focused on poetry, and Recursos Editoriales, which functions as an umbrella for various independent publishers. Masten, Stallybrass, and Vickers, “Introduction,” 1; Igarza, “Ebooks,” 40–41. Romero, Crisis argentina, 114. While Aira’s novel La villa was penned before the worst of the crisis, it already reflects the growing impoverishment of large swaths of Argentine society in the lead-up to the events of 2001–02. Eloísa Cartonera, No hay cuchillo, 5. Eloísa Cartonera, “Por qué.” This refraction bears some similarity to Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin’s concept of remediation, defined as “the representation of one medium in another.” This process, they argue, includes two logics—that of immediacy, the desire for the medium to disappear, and that of hypermediacy, wherein media are multiplied and experienced in themselves. The link between them is one of necessity: “Immediacy depends on hypermediacy.” Bolter and Grusin, Remediation, 6, 45. Price, “Introduction,” 9. Cochran, Twilight of the Literary, 29. Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 15. Ibid.; Eisenstein, Printing Revolution; Sher, Enlightenment and the Book; Striphas, Late Age of Print; Deppman, Ferrer, and Groden, Genetic Criticism; Contat, Hollier, and Neefs, Drafts; Nunberg, Future of the Book; Stoicheff and Taylor, Future of the Page. These references are meant only as a small indication of the vast reach of book history as a critical lens, not as a representative sample of the field. Johns, Nature of the Book, 28. Becker defines “art worlds” as the collective units “whose activities are necessary to the production of the characteristic works which that world, and perhaps others as well, define as art.” The idea translates equally well to the more circumscribed realm of literature. Becker, Art Worlds, 34. Deleuze and Guattari write that “[t]here is no ideology and never has been”; Jon Beasley-Murray cites their formulation and builds on it, opening his recent book with a structurally similar negation of hegemony: “There is no hegemony and never has been.” Both cases resemble my understanding of literary autonomy, in as much as it also results from immanent, decidedly nonautonomous forces. Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 4; Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony, 190, ix. Bourdieu, Rules of Art, 48. Ibid., 61. In the broader Latin American context, this relative independence has its origins in what Julio Ramos calls the “fragmentation” of the alliance between writing and the state. In his telling, the project of rationalization through representation, whose main Argentine exponent is Domingo Faustino Sarmiento, becomes increasingly divorced from a properly literary mode of writing over the course of the nineteenth century. In this period, a mode of authorization not dependent on the letter of the law becomes visible within the sphere of writing itself. In short, literature comes to be theorized as an autonomous sphere with its own criteria of judgment and circuits of communication. Ramos, Divergent Modernities, 41, 55. This desire goes hand in hand with the desire to accumulate “literary capital,” which shapes what Pascale Casanova calls the “world republic of letters.” Casanova, World Republic of Letters, 12–17. Rama, “El boom,” 92.

Notes 34 35 36 37

38 39 40 41 42 43 44

45

46 47 48 49 50

51 52

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Gramuglio, et al., “Literatura, mercado y crítica,” 8. Rama, “El boom,” 67. Ibid., 92. Drawing on Rama’s work, Idelber Avelar highlights the way the perceived achievement of autonomy during the 1960s is contemporaneous with the increasing devaluation of literature as a force for molding citizens: “the moment when literature became independent as an institution . . . coincided with the total collapse of its raison d’être in the continent.” In the same vein, Brett Levinson similarly affirms that the narrative boom of the same decade marks the “closure” of literature’s capacity to continue fulfilling its modern function. As he sees it, this closure marks the culmination and end of literature: “the Latin American Boom should be understood as the last great literary movement of the West and as the expression and thematization of the end of that movement.” Avelar, Untimely Present, 30; Levinson, Ends of Literature, 28. Ludmer, Gaucho Genre, 201. Sagastizábal, Diseñar una nación, 18. Sagastizábal, Edición de libros, 62. Merbilháa, “1900–1919,” 29. Ibid., 29–32. Ibid., 41. Tor published the first paperback editions in Argentina in 1933, marking a key moment in the gradual democratization of literary reading. Williamson, Borges, 193. Schiffrin, Business of Books, 15–31. Mexico City represents another important Latin American destination for Spanish publishers in exile. In that capital city, contacts with Spanish emigrants gave rise, for example, to the renowned Fondo de Cultura Económica. Díaz Arciniega, Historia de la casa, 40. Diego, “1938–1955,” 96. Sudamericana was a key player in Argentine publishing during this period. Founded in 1938 and closely linked to the nation’s economic elite, it both led the charge into foreign markets and, on the production end, into cheaper, pocket-like formats such as those of the Piragua collection, which were modeled on Penguin’s pocket editions. SInCA, “Valor y símbolo,” 54. Diego, “1938–1955,” 97. Reiss, Against Autonomy, 36–37. Diego, “1938–1955,” 112. Ídez, Literal, 31–32. The process of purification characterizes, for Bruno Latour, all modern processes. Latour has made the case that modernity activates two contradictory movements— one that mixes all sorts of materials together and a second one that then “purifies” or disciplines them into distinct categories—nature and culture, for example, or human and nonhuman. To these pairings we could add literature and nonliterature. Latour, We Have Never, 10–11. Cortázar, Hopscotch, 396. Benjamin, Work of Art, 25. Claudia Kozak has made a similar point when she asks and answers a question in this same vein: “But weren’t there texts from throughout the twentieth century that posited literature as a replacement for the (publishing) market? Of course there were, and they were always texts of tension between their potential to be something else and their material conditions of enunciation.” Kozak, Deslindes, 14.

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53 Rama, “El boom,” 68. 54 Gras Miravet, “Del lado de allá,” 15–29. 55 Botto, “1990–2000,” 219. Kozak has argued further that this process has gone hand in hand with the literary field’s loss of prestige relative to other cultural spheres. Kozak, Deslindes, 13. 56 Sánchez-Prado, “Más allá del mercado,” 46. 57 Ibid., 19. 58 Mazzoni and Selci, “Poesía actual.” Sánchez-Prado would disagree, observing that the nationally based branches of transnational publishers like Alfaguara do take risks on young writers. It is possible that the discrepancy is simply because of different expectations of risk, and this multiplicity of experiences is perhaps a further symptom of the market’s fragmentation. Sánchez-Prado, “Más allá del mercado,” 22. 59 Astutti and Contreras, “Editoriales independientes,” 771. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 772. 62 Djiament, interview. 63 Ludmer, Aquí, 149–50. 64 Ibid., 150. 65 Aira, Trompeta de mimbre, 83. 66 Striphas, Late Age of Print, 11. 67 Laddaga, Espectáculos de realidad, 19. 68 Anderson, Imagined Communities, 37–46. 69 Eisenstein, Printing Revolution, 105–06. Chartier would place emphasis elsewhere— not on the printing press as an agent of change, but on the much earlier emergence of the codex, which among other things facilitated the practice of writing while reading (something that is difficultly achieved with a scroll, which requires two hands). He also notes that practices of reading aloud and quietly were not strictly demarcated in time by Gutenberg’s invention. In other words, while Eisenstein’s schema works well in its general outlines, the details reveal a messy, complex transitional period. Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 16, 18–20. 70 Johns, Nature of the Book, 5. 71 Ibid., 30. 72 Szklarz, “Book Piracy.” 73 Rama, “El boom,” 61. 74 Ibid., 94. 75 Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries, 157. 76 Ciccolella and Mignaqui, “Buenos Aires,” 309–10. 77 Svampa, Sociedad excluyente, 137. 78 Ibid., 108. 79 Cicolella and Mignaqui, “Buenos Aires,” 309–10. 80 Svampa, Sociedad excluyente, 120. 81 Jameson, “End of Temporality,” 705. 82 Chejfec, Punto vacilante, 16. 83 Ibid., 18. 84 Jameson, Cultural Turn, 5–7. 85 Jameson, Jameson on Jameson, 44–45. “Constructive” is here meant not as a value judgment, but rather as an attitude toward the task of writing. 86 Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 5.

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Chapter 1

1 2 3 4



5 6 7 8

9

10 11 12 13

14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28

Lamborghini, Novelas y cuentos I, 212. Ibid., 183. Ibid., 232. For the most exhaustive discussion of Lamborghini in the context of the “minor,” see Adriana Astutti, who concisely describes his work as “unstable, revulsive, and abject.” Astutti, Andares clancos, 16. Ídez, Literal, 64. Brizuela and Dabove, “Introducción,” 18. Ibid., 17. Chitarroni, “De la novela al mito,” 99. Jacques Lacan was a particularly important point of reference for Lamborghini, particularly once Oscar Masotta, who first introduced his thought into Argentina, began to collaborate with Literal. Ídez, Literal, 41–43. Beyond Ídez’s excellent study, Luis Gusmán has offered a first-hand testimony of Lamborghini’s collaboration with Literal, and Héctor Libertella has edited a compilation of writings from the magazine. Gusmán, “Sebregondi no retrocede,” 34–40. Ídez, Literal, 39. Ibid., 25–30. Ibid., 44. Libertella, Literal, 134. Ludmer has also commented similarly on El fiord, signaling the way it connects incomprehensible voices (“the violent bottom of language”) with official and literary discourses (“the ritualized words of politics” and “the entire volume of the literature translated and read at that time”). Ludmer, Gaucho Genre, 150. Laddaga, Espectáculos de realidad, 94. Santiago Deymonnaz has put it well: “Lamborghini’s writing insistently sends us back to the literary institution”; his texts “take literature as a given.” Deymonnaz, “Tomo lo que encuentro,” 259. Hernández, Martín Fierro, 1. Lamborghini, Novelas y cuentos I, 205. Ibid. Ibid., 211. Prieto, Discurso criollista, 14. Ibid., 52. Rivera, “Ingreso, difusión e instalación,” 547–48. Bourdieu, Rules of Art, 48. Rivera, “Ingreso, difusión e instalación,” 547–50. Prieto, Discurso criollista, 52–53. Hernández, Martín Fierro, 261. The testimony is from Elsa Drucaroff. López Casanova, Narración de los cuerpos, 192. Astutti confirms this situation, noting that from the beginning of the dictatorship onward, Lamborghini’s texts would “circulate as photocopies, by hand, often unpublished.” Astutti, Andares clancos, 13. Among the small presses mentioned by Ídez are De La Flor, Galerna, Carlos Pérez, Brújula, and Jorge Álvarez.

128 29 30 31 32 33

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57

Notes Carrera, “De corazón.” Laddaga, Espectáculos de realidad, 98–99. Ibid., 98. Chejfec, Punto vacilante, 110–11. In this respect, the passage through time of one of Lamborghini’s most famous phrases, “He never read, but his underlinings were perfect,” is instructive. It first appears in “La causa justa” (The just cause), as an off-handed description of a “typesetter-semi.” Aira later quotes it in his introduction to the Teatro proletario, and between 2011 and the following year it served as a slogan for a lecture series at Buenos Aires’s Latin American art museum (MALBA). The series invited writers to talk about the markings they have made in their own books as a way of understanding how “traces of past readings are superimposed in the present.” This iteration of the concept marks a significant conceptual distance, I would offer, from Lamborghini’s own obsession with a radically circumscribed present tense of performative underlining and scribbling. Lamborghini, Novelas y cuentos II, 9–12; Aira, “Prólogo,” 11; MALBA, “Libro marcado.” Lamborghini, Novelas y cuentos I, 213, 250. Ibid., 224. Hegel, Phenomenology, 66. Ibid. Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure, 82. Ibid., 85. Lamborghini, Novelas y cuentos I, 211, 232. Ibid., 224. Ibid., 226. Ibid., 234, 250. Ibid., 234. Ibid., 250. Ibid., 162. “In Osvaldo,” Ludmer has written, “the draft coincided with the final text”; her formulation very much anticipates the poetics that Aira will develop in Lamborghini’s wake. Ludmer, Gaucho Genre, 154. Lamborghini and Carrera, Palacio de los aplausos, 25. Borges, Labyrinths, 184. Aira, “Nota del compilador,” 300. Aira, “Prólogo,” 8–9. Lamborghini, Teatro proletario, 22–23. Ibid., 46. Ibid., 53. Barthes, Responsibility of Forms, 180. This childish quality also reflects the somewhat submerged affiliation between Lamborghini and Witold Gombrowicz, the Polish author who lived significant years of his life in Argentina and whose Ferdydurke, a novel about immaturity, was translated in collaboration with a committee of writers during his years in Buenos Aires. Ídez has made this connection indirectly; Aira has drawn it out more explicitly. Ídez, Literal, 39; Aira, Epplin, and Penix-Tadsen. “Cualquier cosa.” Lamborghini, Teatro proletario, 167–68.

Notes 58 59 60 61 62

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Ibid., 87, 122. Roland Barthes, Responsibility of Forms, 160. Ibid., 471. Ibid., 534. Lamborghini, Novelas y cuentos I, 210.

Chapter 2 1 Aira, Tres fechas, 13–20. 2 As Reinaldo Laddaga has put it, Aira’s novels effect “a certain hesitance to begin, as if the writer doubted the pertinence of writing the book he is writing.” Laddaga, Espectáculos de realidad, 118. 3 Montaldo, “Vidas paralelas,” 107. 4 Hoyos, “First Publish,” 5. 5 Aira, Volante, 45. 6 Ibid., 44–45. 7 Aira, Yo era una mujer, location 38. 8 Ibid., location 530. 9 Ibid., location 949. 10 Several of Lamborghini’s most famous texts are, at the time of this writing, available in Kindle format. 11 Montaldo, “Vidas paralelas,” 104. 12 “Reading his work,” Montaldo notes, “tends to provoke a certain disappointment that not even Aira’s personal charm can ease.” Montaldo, “Obscure Case,” 184. 13 Both Reinaldo Laddaga and Patrick Dove once noted this critical oversight. Laddaga, “Literatura de la clase media,” 37–48; Dove, “Mass Media Technics,” 3–30. 14 Contreras, Vueltas, 11; Link, “Fan Club.” 15 Aira and Escobar Ulloa, “Entrevista con César Aira.” 16 For example, Marcelo Ballvé invokes the concept in a review of How I Became a Nun, noting appropriately that “[e]diting is an abhorrent idea in Aira’s continuum. To edit oneself would be to retrace one’s steps, go backwards, when the idea is to always move forward.” Ballvé, “Literary Alchemy.” 17 Aira, Epplin, and Penix-Tadsen. “Cualquier cosa.” 18 Ibid. Sergio Delgado has noted that this practice makes Aira the polar opposite of a writer whose draft manuscripts are sold to US research libraries: “We can imagine Aira survived simply by his books. Books as manuscripts, in turn, of other books. Manuscripts without additions or crossings out, without repentance, in which one edition corrects the previous one, and in which each novel is in turn a draft, fleeing forward, of the novel that follows.” Delgado, “El aacento,” 276. 19 Reber, “Cure for the Capitalist Headache,” 375. 20 Several articles do move in this direction, most notably Dove’s intervention, as well as Patrick O’Connor’s earlier reading of the novel La prueba. 21 Aira, Yo era una mujer, location 858. 22 Ibid., location 465.

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23 Among the instances of solidarity, Dove gives the example of Maxi, a middle-class youth in La villa who seemingly without reflection spends his evenings helping the cartoneros pick up trash. As for violence, it is nowhere more crudely present than in the grocery store massacre with which La prueba ends. 24 García, “Historia de la empresa editorial, 38. 25 For Montaldo, Aira’s “is probably the most successful method of carrying on writing literature in the midst of the demands of the culture industry.” Contreras also understands Aira’s work in terms of “survival.” Montaldo, “Obscure Case,” 187. Contreras, Vueltas, 21, 133. 26 Aira, Curas milagrosas, 38. 27 Ibid., 39. 28 Ibid., 42. 29 Ibid., 51. 30 Ibid., 43. 31 Masiello, Art of Transition, 103. Julio Prieto has further spelled out the conceptual parentage between Macedonio Fernández and Aira, particularly with regard to the strategies of incompletion on display in Las curas milagrosas del Doctor Aira. Prieto, “Vanguardia y mala literatura,” 187. 32 Reber, “Cure for the Capitalist Headache,” 374. 33 Aira, Epplin, and Penix-Tadsen, “Cualquier cosa.” 34 Montaldo, “Obscure Case,” 184. 35 Aira, Cerebro musical, 16. 36 I have noted the connection between Aira and Eloísa Cartonera elsewhere, in an article titled “Theory of the Workshop.” Margarita Remón-Raillard has also made brief note of this connection. She posits that “Aira interrogates not only the process of writing, but also the contingent character of the work of art, the book”—an interrogation that would become clear in his relationship with the cardboard-based publisher. In a forthcoming article, Adam Morris further draws out the relationship between the two, reading them in terms of narrative recycling alongside Mexican novelist Mario Bellatin. Remón-Raillard, “Autoficción y simulacro,” 93; Morris “This Product.” 37 Speranza, Fuera de campo, 300. 38 Aira, Serpiente, 25. 39 Breton, Manifestoes of Surrealism, 27–29. 40 Aira, “Nueva escritura.” 41 Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, location 206–21. Speranza has also offered a farreaching reading of the Duchamp effect in Argentine cultural production over the course of the twentieth century in Fuera de campo. 42 Sarlo, Technical Imagination, 103–10. Lawrence Lessig has explicitly drawn out the comparison to the internet: “Radio at its start looked a lot like the Internet at its start.” Lessig, Future of Ideas, 74. 43 Sarlo, Technical Imagination, 114. 44 Ibid., 118. 45 Aira, “Nueva escritura.” 46 Aira, Edward Lear, 150–52. 47 Ibid., 153. 48 Aira, Trompeta de mimbre, 23. 49 Benjamin, Work of Art, 81.

Notes

131

Chapter 3 1 Eloísa Cartonera, “Mucho más.” 2 To date, the most exhaustive reading of this catalogue’s general outlines is a doctoral dissertation by Djurdja Trajkovic. Trajkovic, “Made in Buenos Aires,” 119–69. 3 Laddaga, Espectáculos de realidad, 19. 4 Bilbija, “What Is Left,” 85. 5 Romero, Crisis argentina, 114. Herrera’s novel is titled La mitad mejor, while Aira’s is La villa. 6 Eloísa Cartonera, No hay cuchillo, 4. 7 Giunta, Poscrisis, 26. 8 Ibid., 26, 54–55. 9 Ibid., 63. 10 Palmeiro, Desbunde y felicidad, 14. 11 Ibid., 16. 12 Ibid. 13 Ibid., 18. 14 Ibid., 332–35; Trajkovic, “Made in Buenos Aires,” 185–93. 15 Palmeiro, Desbunde y felicidad, 336. 16 Eloísa Cartonera, “Mucho más.” 17 Davis, Planet of Slums, 174. 18 Ibid., 175. 19 David Harvey has argued that the expansion of slums corresponds to an outgrowth of a crisis in capital accumulation. He presents this process as analogous to earlier such crises, such as the one that preceded Haussman’s reorganization of Paris. Harvey, “The Right to the City,” 26. 20 Davis, Planet of Slums, 75. 21 Ibid., 76. 22 Ibid., 77. 23 Ibid., 78. 24 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 35. 25 Yúdice, Expediency of Culture, 1. 26 Leary, “Detroitism.” 27 Giunta, Poscrisis, 27. 28 Nunberg, “Places of Books,” 27–28. 29 Bauman, Liquid Times, 10. 30 Ibid., 1. 31 Lakoff, Pharmaceutical Reason, 21. 32 Ibid., 18. 33 Schiller, How to Think, 42. 34 Schiller, 42–43. Schiller’s understanding of information formed part of the basis for my previous discussion of Eloísa Cartonera in the context of digital technologies. Epplin, “New Media, Cardboard,” 387–88. 35 Bogano, “Punk desperezamiento.” 36 Cucurto, Hasta quitarle. 37 In this regard, Bilbija’s comment that “Cucurto believes it is his civic and writerly duty to have a direct relationship with his present and future readers” is highly insightful. Bilbija, “What Is Left,” 93.

132

Notes

38 Cucurto, Hasta quitarle, 10. 39 Ibid., 11. 40 Graham-Yooll, “Cumbia Villera,” 174. Cecilia Palmeiro describes Cucurto’s Buenos Aires similarly, as revolving around rhythms that render the city “a cosmopolitan center for the poor with an ethnic and cultural diversity that the project of the Argentine nation always sought to dissimulate.” Palmeiro, Desbunde y felicidad, 302. 41 Cucurto, Hasta quitarle, 12. 42 Ibid., 32. 43 Ibid., 54. 44 García Espinosa, “Por un cine.” 45 Rancière, “Order of the City,” 269. 46 García Espinosa, “Por un cine.” 47 Ibid. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid.

Chapter 4 1 Estación Pringles, “Estación Pringles.” 2 As previously noted, Andrea Giunta has also noted the rise of collaborative dynamics in postcrisis Argentina. Also, Bishop has observed elsewhere that the elevation of the idea of collaboration places the curator in a privileged position. Bishop, “Antagonism,” 53. 3 Bishop, Artificial Hell, location 93. 4 Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics, 37. 5 Bishop, “Antagonism,” 62. 6 Ibid., 67. 7 Bishop, Artificial Hells, location 2255. 8 Ibid., location 2584. Andrea Giunta has also famously analyzed Tucumán arde, casting it as “a controversial combination of information and reports borrowed from the social sciences, advertising, and an organization of actions whose features were based in the political practices of leftist sectors.” Giunta, Avant-garde, 274. 9 Estación Pringles, “Estación Pringles.” 10 The artist Roberto Jacoby represents something of a bridge figure between the two moments. He participated in Tucumán arde and more recently coordinated the now defunct Proyecto Venus, an alternative economy that shares many assumptions about the task of art with Estación Pringles. A skeletal website remains as documentation of the project, and Reinaldo Laddaga has also written about it in the context of both Jacoby’s past actions and other “emergent” aesthetic works. Proyecto Venus, “Proyecto V”; Laddaga, Estética de la emergencia, 88–96. 11 Estación Pringles, “Estación Pringles.” 12 Tuan, Space and Place, location 203. 13 Estación Pringles, “Casa de los poetas.” 14 Estación Pringles, “Estación Pringles.” 15 Carrera, “De corazón.” 16 Estación Pringles, “Poesía y memoria.”

Notes 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27 28 29 30 31 32 33

34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55

133

Link, “Declámame mucho.” Tellas, “Investigación” and “Desarrollo.” Tellas, “Conexiones” and “Biodramas.” Tellas, “Kidnapping Reality,” 248. Ibid., 251. Bourriaud, Postproduction, 18. Ibid. Tellas, Mi mamá y mi tía. Tellas, “Kidnapping,” 251. Taylor, Archive and Repertoire, 19–20. Rancière, Ignorant Schoolmaster, 6. Rancière, Emancipated Spectator, 2–3. Ibid., 10. Rancière, “Order of the City,” 272. Ibid., 275. Ibid., 291. To cite just one example of a recent work on the memory of dictatorship, Lola Arias staged, in 2009, a series of actors born in the 1970s and 1980s as they encountered clothing and props that belonged to their parents, who were adults during the most recent dictatorship. Despite their clear differences, the points of contact between this project and those of Tellas or Estación Pringles are interesting: both orientations depend on intimate props and the staging of memory. Arias, Mi vida después. Shaw, Performance in Mallarmé, 185. Ibid., 222. Ibid., 223. Arnar, Book as Instrument, 5–7. Ibid., 7. Mallarmé, Divagations, 228. Mallarmé’s famous formulation, “a roll of the dice will never abolish chance,” is Cage’s clear antecedent. Mallarmé, Coup de dés. Shaw, Performance in Mallarmé, 229. Cage, Silence, 109. Carrera, “Misterios rítmicos,” 2. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 6. Ibid., 11. Mallarmé, Divagations, 184. Mallarmé, Divagations, 189. This imprecision is native to concrete poetics, which is oriented toward “making an object to be perceived rather than read.” Solt, Concrete Poetry, 7. Fernández, Experiencia y escritura, 205. I have previously made the case that much of Carrera’s recent poetic work, particularly the 2004 collection Potlatch, constitutes a relevant antecedent for Estación Pringles. Epplin, “Poetry, Potlatch,” 193–94. Estación Pringles, “Estación Pringles.” Estación Pringles, “Convocatoria”; Aedo et al., Prueba de soledad, 6. Aedo et al., Prueba de soledad, 15. Ibid., 16. Martínez Estrada, Radiografía de la pampa, 13. Martínez Estrada, Radiografía de la pampa, 37.

134 56 57 58 59 60 61 62 63 64 65 66

67

Notes Aedo et al., 11. Ibid., 15. Ibid., 17. Ibid., 16. In this same direction, it is worth noting that Estación Pringles is named, precisely, after a train station. Ibid., 17–18. Ibid., 20. Ibid., 19. Ibid., 22. Ibid., 23. Ibid., 27. As Jon Beasley-Murray puts it, describing the balcony of Peronism, “the Peróns acquire their own sublimity as, larger than life, they now dominate the frame with a power borrowed from the thousands thronging the square who give their presence meaning.” Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony, 244. Aedo et al., 26.

Chapter 5

1 2 3 4 5 6

7 8 9 10 11

12

13 14 15 16

Chejfec, “What Comes Next.” Ibid. Ibid. Hayles, Electronic Literature, 5. Chejfec, “What Comes Next.” I have described this idea of the assemblage in a previous reading of the novel Baroni, un viaje. Epplin, “Literatura como producción,” 251–53. Jurgenson, “IRL Fetish.” Jurgenson, “Digital Dualism.” The name of the blog where this post appears, “Cyborgology,” clearly ciphers its own precedent in the work of Donna Haraway, whose “Cyborg Manifesto” rejects similar sorts of dualism. Jurgenson, “IRL Fetish.” Chejfec, My Two Worlds, 18–19. This lineage is manifested in others of Chejfec’s novels as well. Edgardo H. Berg has noted that “Chejfec, in almost all his texts, introduces characters of a vagabond and wandering nature who begin a pilgrimage through the city.” Berg, “Memoria y experiencia,” 119. Chejfec, My Two Worlds, 43. Chejfec has spelled this tendency out elsewhere, for example in an essay on an experience in Caracas: “the best way to walk is when I’m heading somewhere so far away that the walk becomes such a long crossing that I forget from time to time that I’m going anywhere in particular.” Chejfec, “Apropiación,” 51. Chejfec, My Two Worlds, 18. Ibid. Carrión, “Entre Sebald y Google,” 293. Ibid., 295. The idea of the “theatricalization of the real” also connects Chejfec’s work to the ambitions behind the theater of Vivi Tellas.

Notes

135

17 Ibid. 18 My Two Worlds, 19. 19 Melosi, “Humans, Cities,” 7. This parallel is not haphazard. Both the offline and the rural have often been identified with something like a truer, more authentic experience of the world, whereas the digital and the urban are commonly seen as their artificial parasites. Chejfec elides the romantic underpinnings of this distinction entirely. 20 Chejfec, Boca de lobo, 118. 21 Jenckes, “Myopic Witnessing,” 223. 22 Dove, “Territorios de la historia,” 164. 23 Buttes, “Sombras y umbrales,” 147. 24 Ibid., 150. 25 Ibid., 154. 26 Chejfec, Boca de lobo, 9. 27 Jenckes, “Myopic Witnessing,” 222–23. 28 Chejfec, Boca de lobo, 190. 29 Chejfec, “What Comes Next.” 30 Benjamin Work of Art, 23–24. 31 Chejfec, Experiencia dramática, 9. 32 Chejfec, Boca de lobo, 125. 33 Lefebvre, Production of Space, 113. 34 Philippe Lejeune has remarked on this tendency in contemporary literature: “It has become more common to keep rough drafts; authors are interested in the traces of their own work. If they are famous, they are also aware of the market value of autographs. Yet it is problematic for authors to capitalize upon them while still alive. Such a practice puts the author in a kind of space beyond the grave, takes away control of the work, and, when the work is autobiographical, takes away life itself.” Lejeune, “Auto-Genesis,” 201. 35 Chejfec, “Boca de lobo.” 36 Contat, Hollier, and Neefs, “Editors’ Preface,” 2. 37 Ibid. 38 Ibid., 4. 39 Jenny, “Genetic Criticism,” 12–13. 40 Lejeune, “Auto-Genesis,” 195–96. 41 Ibid., 201. 42 Thomas, “Manuscripts,” 153. 43 Chartier, “From Mechanical Reproduction,” 110. 44 Chejfec, “What Comes Next.” 45 Deleuze, “Actual and Virtual,” 148–49. 46 Ibid., 149. 47 The distinction mirrors other concepts from Deleuze and Guattari’s work together— for example, the pairing of the war machine and its domesticated counterpart, the state’s army, or also rhythm and meter. 48 This point, that the book itself becomes virtual, reminds us that the concept of the virtual, in Deleuze’s thought, does not correspond to the way the term is often used to refer to the online or the digital. 49 Chejfec, My Two Worlds, 32–33. 50 Shields, “Tourist Affect,” 120.

Notes

136 51 52 53 54 55

Deleuze, “Cours Vincennes.” Chejfec, “Apropiación,” 52. Ibid., 52–53. Ibid., 53. Ibid., 54.

Chapter 6

1 2 3 4 5

6 7

8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15

Katchadjian, Cadena del desánimo, location 23. Ibid., location 790. Aira, “Tiempo y lugar,” 7. Ibid., 8. Manovich, “Database,” 39. Films and novels are of course often experienced through digital forms, but they were born and long lived in analog media. Ibid. Both Katherine Hayles and Jerome McGann have noted the over-simplification implicit in opposing narrative to database, the former by arguing that the two are “natural symbionts” and the latter by criticizing the “easy” nature of the binary itself. Yet the more general notion that the database has become an important “symbolic form” in the present remains true. One recent study of the phenomenon of data underscores its centrality for our understanding of the world today: “Data underlie the protocols of public health and medical practice, and data undergird the investment strategies and derivative instruments of finance capital. Data inform what we know about the universe, and they help indicate what is happening to the earth’s climate.” In other words, while database and narrative might not be at odds, and while the latter seems in no danger of being entirely displaced, the database is increasingly prominent as a mode of representing the world. Hayles, “Narrative and Database,” 1603; McGann, “Database, Interface,” 1589; Gitelman and Jackson, “Introduction,” 1. Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, location 101. Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 18. Chartier has distinguished between the “intensive” reading of very few texts and the “extensive” reading of many, dating the slow emergence of the latter to the second half of the eighteenth century, particularly in France, Germany, and England. Today’s reader is certainly much more on the extensive side of things, which helps explain why models such as Franco Moretti’s “distant reading” have gained some traction in recent years. Chartier, Forms and Meanings, 17. Goldsmith, Uncreative Writing, location 186. Manovich, “Database,” 40. Ibid. Significantly and appropriately, the project has spawned a number of similar sites around the world, many of which share the same name and mode of operations. Deleuze has explained some of the intricacies of Spinoza’s concept of affect in several places. He delineates the two terms we translate as “affect”: “The affectio refers to a state of the affected body and implies the presence of the affecting body, whereas the affectus refers to the passage from one state to another, taking into account the correlative variation of the affecting bodies.” Deleuze, Spinoza, 49.

Notes

137

16 I argue this point more thoroughly in a forthcoming article on LAE/LEA, titled “Afinidades electivas: redes, afectos y poesía.” 17 Bejerman, “Poemas.” 18 Pavón, “Poemas.” 19 Katchadjian, Gracias, location 85. 20 Ibid., location 124. 21 Deleuze and Guattari, Thousand Plateaus, 323. 22 Katchadjian, Gracias, location 1095. 23 Ibid., location 1118. 24 Qué hacer, 8–12. 25 Ibid., 7. Both examples come from the book’s opening page, though they are repeated on various occasions. 26 Ibid., 9. 27 Ibid., 33. 28 Such a scene is not unprecedented in Latin American literature. Various of Virgilio Piñera’s short stories, most famously “La caída” (“The Fall”), contain similar scenes of bodily disappearance, transformation, or mutilation. 29 Warren-Crow, “Soft Body,” 137. 30 Katchadjian, Qué hacer, 23. 31 Warren-Crow, “Soft Body,” 133. 32 Ibid., 135. 33 Galloway and Thacker, Exploit, location 565. 34 Thacker, Global Genome, 3, 7. 35 Ibid., 25. 36 Warren-Crow cites Manovich explicitly, noting his couching of all digital cinema in terms of animation. Warren-Crow, “Soft Body,” 135. 37 Coincidentally, I assume, its pages also number fifty. 38 Genovese, “Sobreseen al escritor.” 39 Aira, “Tiempo y lugar,” 10–11. 40 Caballero, “Borgesian Monad Contaminated,” 2. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 6. 43 Katchadjian, Aleph engordado, 13–15. 44 Ibid., 14. 45 Ibid., 9. 46 Ibid., 47. 47 This identification is supremely ironic, given the public fame and renown that Borges would eventually attain. 48 Katchadjian, El Aleph engordado, 40. 49 Ibid., 41.

Epilogue 1 Ídez, Última de César Aira, 7. 2 Ibid., 7–8. 3 Ibid., 167.

138

Notes

4 Ibid., 85–86. The full list of presses, some of which have been defunct for years is as follows: “Ada Korn, Aguilar, Anagrama, Adriana Hidalgo, Alfaguara, Amigos del Libro, Amorrortu, Ateneo, Ariel, Beatriz Viterbo, CEAL, Círculo de lectores, Circe, Claridad, De la Flor, Del Serbal, Del Zorzal, Edhasa, Editorial de Belgrano, Eloísa Cartonera, Emecé, Eudeba, Fondo de Cultura Económica, Gallimard, Guillermo Kraft, Interzona, Losada, Mansalva, Minotauro, Jorge Álvarez, Niños Expósitos, Oxford University Press, Perfil Libros, Paradiso, Peuser, Planeta, Plaza y Janés, Plus Ultra, Porrúa, Random House, Seix Barral, Siglo XXI, Siruela, Spiral Jetty, Sudamericana, Santiago Arcos, Simurg, Thor, Tusquets. . . .” 5 Ibid., 46. 6 Ibid., 34. 7 Ibid., 18–21. 8 Aira, La trompeta, 131–32.

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Index actual and virtual  9, 101–2 affect  102, 109–10, 136n. 15 Afinidades Electivas  109–10 Aira, César  4–8, 16, 20, 43–5, 105–6, 110, 114–15, 117, 120–2 avant-garde and  52–5, 80 Eloísa Cartonera and  51–2, 58–9, 60, 62, 70 Estación Pringles and  76 Osvaldo Lamborghini and  25, 31, 33–4, 40, 45 politics and  55–6 publishing and  15, 46–52, 92, 99, 119–20 urban space and  47–8 Alfaguara  7, 49, 50, 100, 126n. 58, 138n. 4 Alfonsín, Raúl  60 algorithm  10, 106–7, 108 amateur  52–5 Anderson, Benedict  16–17 architecture electronic  110 literary  1–3, 8 soft  114 archive  27, 37, 41, 58 space and  76 theater and  79–82 Arlt, Roberto  59 artisanal techniques books and  4, 16, 25, 34, 44, 49, 52, 61, 64, 91, 121 publishing and  7–8, 13, 19 art worlds  11, 124n. 28 atmosphere  39–41, 56 augmented geography  92–3, 95, 97, 103 aura  3, 9, 92, 97–8 see also Benjamin, Walter; cult value and exhibition value automatic writing  52–3 autonomy  3, 11–16, 28, 66, 70, 124n. 29, 125n. 37 publishing and  11–16, 18

avant-garde César Aira and  51, 120 participation and  73 procedure and  52–5, 61, 106 Barthes, Roland  26, 36–7, 39–41, 56 Beatriz Viterbo  15, 49–50, 121, 138n. 4 Bejerman, Gabriela  109–10 Belleza y Felicidad  61, 109 Benjamin, Walter  14, 56, 59, 92 Bertelsmann  14 biodrama  79 see also archive biorhythm  84–5 see also rhythm Bishop, Claire  73–5 blog  6–7, 121 Sergio Chejfec and  9, 92, 97–101 Boltanski, Christian  1–4 book consumption  12, 13–14, 18, 50, 77 book publication alternative forms  8, 98–9, 115, 116, 119–20 history  12–16, 17, 29 internet and  6, 121 performance and  30 speed and  43, 47, 49 see also publishers; self-publishing; small press Borges, Jorge Luis  10, 27 digital technology and  6 modern book culture and  1–4, 12 Pablo Katchadjian and  114–18 translation and  33 Bourdieu, Pierre  11, 15, 28 Breton, André  52–3 Buenos Aires  8, 18–19, 27, 28, 41, 47, 75, 116 circulation in  66–8 publishing and  12–13, 47, 57, 61–2 see also global city; space and place; urban space

150

Index

Cage, John Arturo Carrera and  84–6, 89 César Aira and  53–4 uncreative writing and  106–7 see also Duchamp, Marcel Calvino, Italo  76 cardboard books and  8, 34, 52, 55, 57–9, 68 labor and  60, 63–4, 66 Carrera, Arturo Estación Pringles and  9, 73, 76–9, 83–6, 89, 120 Osvaldo Lamborghini and  29–30, 32 see also Estación Pringles cartonero  8, 57, 60, 67 CEAL (Centro Editor de América Latina) 14, 138n. 4 censorship  29 Chartier, Roger  10, 21, 101, 107, 126n. 69, 136n. 10 Chejfec, Sergio  9, 21, 121 digital technology and  91–102 Osvaldo Lamborghini and  30, 34 on private experience  19–20 urban space and  102–4 see also walking Chitarroni, Luis  26, 120 cigarettes  25, 27, 30, 32 see also immediacy coins  65, 77, 85 collectivity labor and  57, 59, 60–1 literature and  41, 63, 66, 121 space and  18–20, 73, 76, 77, 81, 83, 87, 88–90 commodity  14, 47, 66 community  19, 61, 63, 73, 74–5 computer  5, 7, 91, 98, 107 conceptual writing  10, 107 see also avant-garde; Katchadjian, Pablo; uncreative writing Copi  59 Coronel Pringles  21, 30, 51, 76 Cortázar, Julio  6, 11–12, 13, 14, 18, 26, 123n. 13 crisis  10, 75 economic  8, 59–62, 131n. 19

Cucurto, Washington  58–60, 66–8 cult value and exhibition value  14, 27, 59 see also aura; Benjamin, Walter cumbia  67–8 database  5, 10, 106–10, 114–18, 121, 136n. 7 dates  6, 25, 31, 43–4 declamation  77, 83 Deleuze, Gilles  11, 101–2, 112, 124n. 29, 135n. 47–8, 136n. 15 digital media database and  106–7, 114 economy and  64, 65–6 publishing and  4–7, 9–10, 44, 45, 56, 101, 121–2, 123–4n. 18 space and  19–21, 92–5, 97, 104, 135n. 19 writing and  17, 91–2, 99, 107–10 direct-access society  18 draft  9, 97–101, 128n. 47, 129n. 18, 135n. 34 drawing  34–8, 40, 54–5 Duchamp, Marcel  30, 40, 53–4, 80, 106–7 see also avant-garde Eisenstein, Elizabeth  16–17, 126n. 69 Elecciones Afectivas  109–11 electronic media see digital media Eloísa Cartonera  8, 20, 57–70 César Aira and  51–2, 55, 58–9 economic crisis and  59–63, 75 publishing and  63–70, 92, 99, 109, 138n. 4 workshop and  121, 130n. 36 Espasa Calpe  13 Estación Pringles  8–9, 20, 21, 109, 121 books and  75–7, 83–6 performance and  77–83 space and  73–5, 86–90 Eterna Cadencia  7, 15 EUDEBA (Editorial Universitaria de Buenos Aires)  14, 138n. 4 Fernández, Macedonio  30, 50 Fernández de Kirchner, Cristina  105 finance capital  9, 19, 65, 136n. 7

Index

151

flier  44–5, 48 flight forward  45–8 Fourier, Charles  76 fragmentation of knowledge  20, 50, 124n. 31 of media landscape  7, 126n. 58 spatial  18, 100 textual  92, 99, 106–7

Johns, Adrian  11, 17 JSTOR  121

García Espinosa, Julio  68–70 García Márquez, Gabriel  13 genetic criticism  99–101 gesture  38–40, 42, 58, 81, 83 Getino, Octavio  68 Giunta, Andrea  61, 63, 132n. 8 global city  9 see also urban space Goldsmith, Kenneth  53, 107–8, 118 GPS navigation  93 Gramajo, Chiquita  9, 73, 76 Guattari, Félix  11, 112, 124n. 29, 135n. 47 Guevara, Ernesto  40–1

Laddaga, Reinaldo  16, 27, 30, 46, 59, 67 Laguna, Fernanda  58 Lamborghini, Osvaldo  6–9, 20, 21, 68, 127n. 13, 128n. 33 César Aira and  25–6, 45–6, 49, 52, 55, 62, 70, 128n. 56 history and  41–2 José Hernández and  27–32 performance and  34–40, 51 publishing and  30–4, 58, 59, 92, 99, 121 land ownership  86–8 late book culture (definition)  3–4 late capitalism  9, 19–20, 48, 55 lateness  3–4, 120–2 Lear, Edward  54–5 Link, Daniel  79 liquidity  5, 56, 64–6 Literal (magazine)  26, 31 López, Alejandro  7 Losada  13, 138n. 4 Ludmer, Josefina  12, 15–16, 27, 28, 127n. 13

handwriting  8, 9, 36–7, 41, 92, 97 Hayles, Katherine  5–6, 19, 136n. 7 Hegel, G.W.F.  31–2 Hernández, Felisberto  59 Hernández, José  27–9, 32–3, 34, 105–6, 118 hotels  27–8, 30, 41 Ídez, Ariel  25–6, 29, 119–20 imagined community  16, 19 immediacy  3, 18, 33, 52, 98 see also cigarettes imperfect cinema  68–70 import-substitution industrialization  18 improvisation  47, 54–5, 57, 85, 112, 120 information  16, 39, 65–6, 93, 94–5, 114 internet  5–6, 14, 65, 92–5, 107, 118, 130n. 42 internet café  7, 123n. 15 Interzona  7, 138n. 4 IRL fetish  92 Jameson, Fredric  3, 19–20 jazz  85

Katchadjian, Pablo  9, 20, 105–7, 121 Afinidades Electivas and  109–10 database and  106–14 Jorge Luis Borges and  114–18 uncreative writing and  107–8

Mallarmé, Stéphane  77, 83–6, 89 Malvinas War  41 manuscript  9, 44, 91–2, 97–8, 100, 102, 121, 129n. 18 market  12–15, 26, 44–5, 47, 48, 50, 88 Martínez Estrada, Ezequiel  87 Martín Fierro Osvaldo Lamborghini and  27–30, 33, 34, 41 Pablo Katchadjian and  105–6, 110, 118 Marx, Karl  69 Mate  7 memory  43, 94, 133n. 33 performance and  77, 81, 83, 85, 86 see also archive

152

Index

Menem, Carlos  18, 60 Mercado, Tununa  31 mimeograph  44 minor aesthetics  43, 70, 76, 81, 116–17 avant-garde and  53, 61, 62, 120 Osvaldo Lamborghini and  25, 29, 30, 127n. 4 modern book culture  3 print publishing and  8, 10, 12–16, 18, 28–9, 33, 41, 118 public culture and  19, 55, 118, 125n. 37 Montaldo, Graciela  43, 45, 46, 48, 51, 52, 129n. 12, 130n. 25 nation-state  17, 41 neoliberalism  62, 73, 75 literature and  41, 47 space and  18–19, 95–6 news  10, 74, 105–6 newspapers and magazines  18, 26, 29, 56 history  12 material for collage  10, 34, 105–6 see also print media NGO  62–3 notebook  9, 48, 49, 52–3, 97–9, 104 Osvaldo Lamborghini and  30–3, 38, 39, 41 orality  77, 81 paper  45, 55, 64, 110, 118 business and  19, 48 publishing and  7–8, 9, 29, 45, 66, 77, 86, 90, 91, 121–2 see also print media paperback  30, 56, 125n. 43 participation  53, 73–4 particularity  95, 118 César Aira and  5, 55, 56 Eloísa Cartonera and  63–5 Osvaldo Lamborghini and  31–3, 36–8, 45, 95 Pavón, Cecilia  109–10 Pearson  14 Penguin  14 performance  1, 27, 81

book and  10, 29–33, 42, 47, 60, 83–6 poetry and  8–9, 76–9, 81, 83–6, 89 see also improvisation periodicals see newspapers and magazines Perlongher, Néstor  61 Peronism  18, 26, 32, 68, 89, 134n. 66 photocopy  29, 44, 107, 127n. 27 piracy and plagiarism  17, 115 plasticity  114 Plato  6, 69, 82 pornography Osvaldo Lamborghini and  6, 26, 34 ruin and  63 postautonomous literature  16 postcard  102–4 postmodernism  20 Prieto, Adolfo  28 print media  103–4, 123n. 11 books  3, 4–11, 29, 44–5, 64, 77, 83, 92, 100, 103, 115–16, 118, 121–2 newspapers and magazines  12, 53 public culture and  16–18, 44–5, 53, 126n. 69 see also modern book culture; publishers private experience  25, 30–1, 42, 99 literature and  7, 9, 64, 121 space and  19–20, 64, 77, 99 procedure  47–8, 50–5 Proceso de Reorganización Nacional  61 public space  7, 12, 16–20, 64, 77, 123n. 15 publishers  7, 10–16, 60, 125n. 44, 126n. 58 radio  53, 105, 130n. 42 Rama, Ángel  12, 14, 16, 18, 125n. 37 Rancière, Jacques  69, 81–3 Random House Mondadori  14, 49, 50, 138n. 4 readymade  30, 37, 40, 43, 80 relational aesthetics  74 repertoire  81–2 rhythm  43, 68, 73, 84–5, 106, 132n. 40, 135n. 47 ruin porn see pornography rural space  75, 86–90, 95, 135n. 19

Index Sarlo, Beatriz  53, 115 scrawl and scribble  6, 25, 36, 41–2 self-publishing  8, 10, 25, 122 serial novel  49–50 sitcom  49 slums  62, 67, 131n. 19 small press  7, 8, 86, 100, 115, 116–17 César Aira and  45, 50–1, 119, 120 history  29 see also self-publishing softness  102, 108, 114 Solanas, Fernando  68 solidarity  48, 130n. 23 space and place  73–7 Spanish Civil War  13 spectatorship  53, 69, 81–2 Spinoza, Baruch  102, 109, 136n. 15 stencil  8, 44, 57, 64 Sudamericana  11–12, 13, 14, 45, 125n. 45, 138n. 4 surrealism  52–3 Taylor, Charles  18 telenovela  49 Tellas, Vivi  77, 79–83, 134n. 16 termites  103–4

153

theater  29, 30, 32, 51 Estación Pringles and  76–83, 86 of the oppressed  68 see also performance tinkering  52–3 translation  13, 17, 33, 48 Tucumán arde  74–5, 132n. 8, 132n. 10 Twombly, Cy  36–7, 39–40 typewriter  5–6, 44 uncreative writing  53, 107–8, 118 see also avant-garde; Katchadjian, Pablo urban space  9 literature and  12–13, 29 neoliberalism and  62 Sergio Chejfec and  94–5, 103–4, 135n. 19 Vox  7 walking  1, 9, 93–5, 103, 134n. 12 website  65–6, 76, 79 database and  106, 109–10 Eloísa Cartonera  57, 60, 68 workshop  55, 73, 100 Eloísa Cartonera  8, 57–9, 61–2, 66, 121

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