Abstract
The insertion of technological implements and transmitters directly into the body has played a significant role in postdictatorship culture in Argentina. Technological implants connect machines, brains, bodies, and texts in a potent and unstable metaphor for shifts in the configurations of power during a period of rapid change. The implant, the direct technological intervention into the body, has worked its way into debates about neoliberalism, connecting critical and fictional texts as a metaphor for the contested shifts in the relationship between the individual, the state, and the market. It has a cameo role, for instance, in Beatriz Sarlo’s Escenas de la vida posmoderna in a section that discusses how, under the conditions of neoliberal consumer culture, identities and cultural differences are regulated by the market. The technological penetration of the body is invoked by way of a warning of where this dominance of market logic over self-identity is leading us:
prótesis, sustancias sintéticas, soportes artificiales, que entran en el cuerpo durante intervenciones que lo modifican según las pautas de un design que cambia cada quinquenio (¿quién quiere los pechos chatos que se usaron hace diez años o la delgadez de la década del sesenta?).1
Prostheses, synthetic substances, artificial memory banks, which enter the body during operations and modify it according to designs that change every five years (who wants the same flat chest from ten years ago or a slim-line figure that was fashionable in the sixties?)
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Notes
Beatriz Sarlo, Escenas de la vida posmoderna: Intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la Argentina (Buenos Aires: Ariel, 1994), 33. Unless stated otherwise, all translations are my own.
Sarlo, “Aesthetics and Post-Politics: From Fujimori to the Gulf War,” Boundary 2 20:3 (1993), 185.
Ricardo Piglia, Formas breves (Buenos Aires: Anagrama, 2005), 63.
Alison Landsberg, “Prosthetic Memory: Total Recall and Blade Runner,” in The Cybercultures Reader ed. David Bell and Barbara M. Kennedy (London: Routledge, 2000), 287.
Idelber Avelar, “Como respiran los ausentes: La narrativa de Ricardo Piglia,” MLN 110:2 (1995), 425.
Todd S. Garth, The Self of the City: Macedonio Fernández, the Argentine Avant-Garde, and Modernity in Buenos Aires (Lewisburg, PA: Bucknell University Press, 2005), 64.
Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison trans. Allan Sheridan (London: Penguin, 1991 [1975]), 148.
Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Society of Control,” in Negotiations: 1972–1990 trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 178.
Gilles Deleuze and Claire Parnet, Dialogues II trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (London: Continuum, 2006), 52.
Gareth Williams, The Other Side of the Popular: Neoliberalism and Subalternity in Latin America (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 105. Without direct reference to Deleuze’s essay, but indirectly evoking the logic of control, Francine Masiello describes how identity politics in the postdictatorship era become subsumed under the simulacral logic of the neoliberal mass media: “Under dictatorship, when the state posited a need for fixed subjectivities and stable positions of meaning as a way to control citizens’ movements, writers and artists turned to the mask [contingent identity positions] as part of a contestatory practice, a proposal for anti-authoritarian action. Nevertheless, with redemocratization, as configured under a neoliberal agenda, these tropes of identity now acquire another value, linking the experience of spectacle to commerce”; The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 59. Redemocratization, for Masiello, brings with it a shift of focus from the national political scene, in which the performance of marginalized identities was a threat to the military regime’s ability to control the population, to transnational consumer culture, in which this same performance becomes a “spectacle to commerce.”
Jon Beasley-Murray, Posthegemony: Political Theory and Latin America (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 112.
Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American Cultural Studies (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2001), 32.
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Quoted in Patricia T. Clough, Autoaffection: Unconscious Thought in the Age of Teletechnology (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 11. In an article on the affective turn in cultural studies generated by Massumi’s populatization of affect, Clare Hemmings summarizes the position: “Deleuze proposes affect as distinct from emotion, as bodily meaning that pierces social interpretation, confounding its logic, and scrambling its expectations.… Deleuze understands affect as describing the passage from one state to another, as an intensity characterized by an increase or decrease of power”; “Invoking Affect: Cultural Theory and the Ontological Turn,” Cultural Studies 19:5 (2005), 552.
Massumi, Parables of the Virtual: Movement, Affect, Sensation (Durham, NC, and London: Duke University Press, 2002), 27.
Steven Shaviro, Post-Cinematic Affect (Winchester: Zero Books, 2010), 2–3.
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Chantal Mouffe, On the Political (London and New York: Routledge, 2005), 6.
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Emily Apter, Continental Drift: From National Characters to Virtual Subjects (Chicago, IL: The University of Chicago Press, 1999), 215. In this she echoes the critique of Carl Freedman who argues that, despite its “imaginative estrangement” of late capitalist society, cyberpunk is essentially a conservative genre that “colludes with reification even while exposing it”; Critical Theory and Science Fiction (Hanover and London: Wesleyan University Press, 2000), 198.
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Alessandra El Far, Páginas de sensação: Literatura popular e pornigráfica no Rio de Janeiro (1870–1924) (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2004), 114–116.
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© 2013 Edward King
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King, E. (2013). Introduction. In: Science Fiction and Digital Technologies in Argentine and Brazilian Culture. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137338761_1
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