Infrastructure or Support?:Literature, Meaning and Autonomy in Latin America Stephen Buttes This essay will explore the arguments and stakes at the center of recent debates over the question of aesthetic autonomy as it relates to anti-neoliberal politics in Latin America. While many scholars have advocated the concept of "postautonomous literatures" and its focus on the experiences their "presence" creates, a number of scholars have questioned this "postautonomous turn" by articulating the renewed political importance of aesthetic autonomy for the formulation of an anti-neoliberal and anti-capitalist politics. The argument at the center of these discussions is fundamentally concerned with the political consequences of privileging an interest in the reader or beholder's experience of an aesthetic object or, on the contrary, of privileging an interest in the meaning of an artwork, which cannot be reduced to any particular experience of it. Central to many renewed arguments for the political import of aesthetic autonomy is Michael Fried's formulation of the difference between art and objecthood. This is the insistence that a successful work of art defeat its status as "just" an object—which, like any other, can produce infinite encounters and experiences for those who come into contact with it—by compelling the beholder to understand it as an artwork that has a meaning that transcends any particular beholder's experience of it. Artists achieve this by insisting on the meaningful unity of the work of art through the production of antitheatrical fictions, which produce the conviction that a painting was not made to [End Page 546] be beheld. As Fried demonstrates throughout his work, these strategies develop and emerge in relation to particular historical sequences that destabilize and transform the conditions of beholding as well as artistic production itself. However, it is transformations in the production and circulation of art—driven, for example, by changes in politics and economics or by technological developments and their effects—that underscore the turn to postautonomy. For this reason, some of the most recent scholarship on the question of art's autonomy or lack thereof has appealed (mistakenly, as we'll see) to the concept of infrastructure. As Daniel Nemser has noted, adapting Foucault's notion of apparatus, "infrastructure refers to the material conditions of possibility for the circulation of people, things, and knowledge" (16) and is both "the condensation of an ideological project and a participant in the realization of that project" (18). Referring to the ways in which corporate mergers of publishing houses and the "marketization" of literature transformed cultural production in Latin America since the 1990s, Brian Whitener argues, in a more specifically literary vein of the politics of infrastructure, that "contemporary writing-based practices in Mexico" demonstrate the "limitation" of a "politics of literature as autonomous" ("Infrastructure" 265). This is so, he suggests, because in this new context "politics [is] not merely in the form and content of a given work but in the intervention a given project, group, or practice makes into the infrastructure underpinning that work's circulation and production" (265). Or, to put it in the terms that Josefina Ludmer used to develop one of the primary models of postautonomy, the politics of what Whitener calls "writing-based practices" would be in their capacity to "[instalarse] localmente y en una realidad cotidiana para 'fabricar presente'" (Ludmer n.p.). This postautonomous model of writing or images as presences that "produce the present," or, more precisely, that open-endedly produce experiences and encounters in their circulation does re-locate the politics of the work of art from the work itself to the ways it is circulated and their "material conditions of possibility." An artwork would be, as Nemser suggests, nothing more than "the condensation of an ideological project" that "participates" in its own realization by circulating and making others gather or disperse in their interactions with it. In this model, anti-neoliberal or anti-capitalist politics would only be possible by seeing "what disappears from view" (17), by producing an alternative circulation model: a "failed infrastructure," dispersion where power wants concentration and concentration where its wants [End Page 547] dispersion. In this view, invisibilized "subject positions or practices" (17) for whom "infrastructure" is anything...
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Jan 1, 2020
Larisa Vyacheslavovna Koch + 1
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