This Product Made from Postconsumer Content: Narrative Recycling and New Novelistic Economies

Abstract

If Metropolis is already transforming its inhabitants, why not take process into our own hands? Only in this way can we invent plots for disinherited, scriptless urban masses, drifting castaways of 2 Oth century.-Rem Koolhaas, The Future's Past (1979)1There is nothing less natural than subjectivity.-Nicolas Bourriaud, Relational Aesthetics (2002)2It's age of posteverything and an era when consumerism, in words of Susan Buck-Morss, has arguably become the first global ideological form.3 And yet can such a thing as a postconsumer really exist? No matter one's outlook on late capitalism, this suggestion seems impossible. But there have always been resisters of consumerist capitalism, and information age has enabled those of twenty-first century to cooperate and coordinate their opposition like never before. One need not look any further than dumpster-diving New York City Freegans, who exchange information about where to find discarded articles and useful trash on their website, Freegan.info, on a related MeetUp group page, and in online swap meets like Freecycle.org and CraigsList, which hosts a forum listing free items.4 Like other disobedient subjects of consum- erist regime, Freegans' interest in usable, discarded materials stems from their objections to global capitalism's general disregard for environmental costs of a perpetually expanding world market. Yet, while their twin goals-resistance to a consumerist lifestyle and protection of environment-are two that logically go hand in hand, combination is still rare, and strict adherents are viewed as unruly, irrational radicals: kind that get arrested in droves at world trade summits.5Naturally, situation is different when it comes to cultural pro- duction. Installation, collage, and sculpture have pillaged junkyard for inspiration since early days of modernism, and a growing cadre of other visual artists are stimulated by refuse of global capi- talism and oversaturation of cultural circuits. Observing rise of artworks since 1990s that interpret, reproduce, re-exhibit, or use works made by others or available cultural products,0 Nicolas Bourriaud interprets this art of postproduction as an attempt to grapple with the proliferating chaos of global culture in information age.7 These artworks, he claims, are characterized by inven- tion of paths through culture.8Indeed, experiments in recycling are also being undertaken in lit- erary field, especially by writers who hail from one of great junkyards of global capitalism: Latin America.9 As neoliberal trade agreements proliferate, so does volume of pollution, waste, and second-rate con- sumer products exported south. Likewise, facade of democratization put up by increasingly connective cultural and data circuits only thinly veils that these networks are dominated by politics and protocols that concentrate power and wealth in north. In Latin America, writers have responded to these interrelated trends by engaging in practices of literary recycling. Take, for example, MixLit, an online project developed by Brazilian writer Leonardo Villa-Forte, who creates texts by weaving together sentences lifted from other previously published works. Calling itself DJ of Literature, Villa-Forte's project is a ludic experience in literary research that seeks to give bastard life to cribbed passages in its quest for a creation without limits.10My concern in following analysis, however, is radical rethink- ing, refashioning, and recycling of a literary form that has often been accused as an accomplice of bourgeois capitalism: novel. Two writers in particular interest me here: Cesar Aira (Argentina) and Mario Bella tin (Mexico). By developing formal and aesthetic practices that strike at heart of ideologies that underwrite globalized capitalism, Aira and Bella tin describe new a novelistic economy-one based on obsessive self-referentiality and persistent reuse of their own novelistic material. …