The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis

(review)
Patrick Dove

Nepantla: Views from South, Volume 3, Issue 3, 2002, pp. 585-600 (Article)

Published by Duke University Press

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http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nep/summary/v003/3.3dove.html

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 BOOK REVIEW

Francine Masiello
The Art of Transition: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis
Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2002. 352 pp.

Review by Patrick Dove

F
rancine Masiello’s The Art of Transi-
tion: Latin American Culture and Neoliberal Crisis offers a broad reflection
on contemporary cultural production in Argentina and Chile, with particu-
lar attention to ways in which literature confronts problems associated with
these two countries’ recent transitions from dictatorships to free market–
based democracies. Masiello’s discussion presupposes that the transitions
of the 1980s perpetuated—and in some respects deepened—the traumatic
wounds suffered by Southern Cone societies in the 1970s under military
dictatorship. Transition is experienced as crisis on at least two counts. On
the one hand, these postdictatorship democracies have failed to pursue
justice for the crimes committed under dictatorship, opting instead for the
pragmatic mode of reconciliation evoked by Chilean president Patricio Ayl-
win’s axiomatic phrase, “justicia en la medida de lo posible.” Memories of
repression and terror thus exist in an antagonistic relation with de facto
and de jure impunity for military criminals. On the other hand, the total
identification of democracy with a neoliberal model during the transition
is seen by many as the ultimate political legitimation of a project initiated
a decade earlier at gunpoint. The enforcement of free-market structural
adjustments during the transition has been viewed as a principle cause of
increasing social fragmentation, as well as the confirmation that previous
generations’ dreams of social justice have been destroyed. For many, the
transition is associated with a profound and sweeping loss of sense, a loss
that casts its shadow on the very possibility of shared meaning.
Masiello’s book should also be read in the context of recent aca-
demic debates about the status of “literature” today. In recent years there
has been an increasing sentiment in Latin Americanist circles that literature

N e p a n t l a : V i e w s f r o m S o u t h 3.3
Copyright 2002 by Duke University Press

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no longer occupies the privileged position it held for previous generations.

The decline of literature as a cultural exemplar corresponds in large part
with recent and dramatic transformations of the world system. I propose
that two related hypotheses can help to clarify what is at stake in this trans-
formation of literature’s social role. First, beginning with the end of colonial
rule in Latin America, literature has always constituted a privileged form
of cultural production operating, whether knowingly or not, under the par-
adigm of the modern nation-state. A certain understanding of “literature”
provides the cultural medium through which interpellation, or the forma-
tion of national subjects who identify their lot with the state, is carried out.
And so, with the tendential eclipse of the nation-state as first principle of
sociopolitical organization, “literature” finds itself stripped of its former
necessity.1 Second and likewise, the aesthetic framework within which lit-
erature has traditionally been placed—as presentation of the beautiful to
the faculty of judgment, and as picking up where the imagination can go
no further—is felt to be inadequate for confronting the social and political
realities facing Latin American societies in recent decades. Not only does
the refined medium of literary language fail to correspond with the lived
experience of the majority of Latin Americans but, what is even worse,
literary aesthetics is suspected of participating in processes of exploitation
and domination by converting structures of violence into aesthetic experi-
ences available for the touristic enjoyment of consumers.2 The “crisis” to
which Masiello refers is thus a rupture that implicates both sociopolitical
and aesthetico-epistemological continuity during the transition.
As an intervention in both the sociopolitical and the academic
context just described, The Art of Transition attempts to revitalize literary
studies in Latin Americanist academic circles by arguing that the aesthetic
can provide the ethical and political orientation for the formation of more
inclusive, more reflective, and more just democratic societies in the South-
ern Cone. In this sense, Masiello’s project should not be identified too hastily
with other attempts to “save” literature through appeals to universal val-
ues (e.g., Sarlo 1994). Her argument is not a merely reactive response to
the tectonic shifts threatening literature’s traditional, privileged position.
Rather, her thesis seeks its justification in the claim that literary aesthet-
ics can “redeem” the transition by precisely reforming its own voice and
its subject matter so as to better reflect or coincide with the necessities of
contemporary Argentine and Chilean societies.
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Book Review

The book is divided into three parts, each of which includes two
chapters. Much of the argumentation is interwoven with glosses on contem-
porary novels, poetry, film, and pop art. In the first part, “Masks,” Masiello
discusses the fate of traditional alliances between intellectuals and popu-
lar sectors during the transition period. Her argument begins, in chapter
1, with a treatment of Argentine artist Guillermo Kuitca, then turns to
contemporary cultural debates in the Southern Cone (focusing principally
on Beatriz Sarlo, Néstor Perlongher, and Nelly Richard). In chapter 2,
she discusses the “performative” basis of individual and collective identity,
while suggesting that cultural production plays an ambiguous role in repre-
senting perspectives marginalized during and following dictatorship. The
authors discussed here include César Aira, Diana Bellessi, Diamela Eltit,
Perlongher, and Manuel Puig.
In the second part, “Maps,” Masiello assesses contemporary femi-
nist efforts to form alliances between “North” (principally academics work-
ing in the United States) and “South” (intellectuals and writers working in
Argentina and Chile). Chapter 3 includes discussions of artistic work by
Liliana Porter and Susana Thénon, and of cultural criticism by Norma
Alarcón, Ruth Behar, Lea Fletcher (editor of the journal Feminaria), and
Nelly Richard (editor of Revista de crítica cultural). In chapter 4, Masiello
turns the traditional North/South axis on its side, arguing that a West/East
(or Southern Cone/Asian) link offers new insights into questions of cul-
tural difference and sexuality. The focus of this chapter moves from the
representation of Buenos Aires in a recent Chinese-language film (Happy
Together, 1997) to “Asia” as a topos in contemporary Argentine prose and
poetry.
In the third part, “Markets,” Masiello examines what she calls “the
return of the popular” in contemporary Argentine and Chilean literature, in
contrast to her earlier account of the withering of “the popular” in Southern
Cone academic and political institutions. The principle literary reference
points in chapter 5 are novels by Eltit and Ricardo Piglia. The sixth and final
chapter examines a number of Argentine and Chilean poets (too many, in
fact, to name here) whose work challenges the predominance of use-value
and transparency as cultural signifiers.
Though by no means encyclopedic, Masiello’s book addresses a
broad range of recent cultural production and criticism. The discussion is
free-flowing and tends to emphasize breadth over in-depth investigation
of any particular text. At times a closer attention to textual analysis and
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the subtleties of key theoretical debates might seem to be warranted, espe-

cially in a book intent on reviving the value of literary studies, somewhat
depreciated in academia today.
Masiello begins with a dual premise: that what she calls the “pop-
ular subject” has suffered a considerable loss of cultural and political capital
in the Southern Cone during the transition; and that this decline in sym-
bolic value itself signals a much deeper societal crisis whose ramifications
have perhaps not yet been mapped in full. In the decades prior to dictator-
ship, the popular represented a seemingly indispensable topos for contes-
tatory or revolutionary political projects in Chile and Argentina. Similarly,
for the Unidad Popular in Chile and, mutatis mutandis, for Peronism
in Argentina, the symbolic integration of popular practices and interests
provided important ideological support for the state’s claim to having suc-
cessfully resolved the old antagonisms between the masses and the elite.
But the symbolic place of “the popular” is exposed to a new threat with the
transition from dictatorship to neoliberal democracies. Its antagonistic and
contestatory resonances are felt to be incompatible with how the new order
outwardly defines the political: as state of consensus and as bureaucratic
navigation, and decidedly not as the dissent, strife, and disorder associ-
ated with the “rabble” or “multitude.” The disappearance of the popular
from postdictatorship democracy can be seen as another confirmation of
Pierre Bourdieu’s description of neoliberalism as “a [political] program for
the methodological destruction of collectives” (Bourdieu 1998; as quoted
in Moreiras 2001, 268). At the same time, Masiello notes, the topos of the
popular—together with the vindication of particularity it promised—has
receded from the horizons of certain Southern Cone intellectuals. The in-
roads made by the populist tradition in academia have been diverted by one
or another species of universalism: by celebrations of global fragmentation
as “hybridity,” by attempts to restore a lost faith in the “universal values”
of the Enlightenment tradition, and so on.
For Masiello, the retreat of the popular coincides both chrono-
logically and symptomatically with the expulsion of all utopian thinking
from intellectual discourse in the Southern Cone. In this respect, contem-
porary thought faces a grave diagnosis: critical thinking would seem to
have renounced its attempt to think historicity, exchanging the possibility
of a praxis of interpretation and (self-)transformation for assimilation in
the market. Masiello’s suggestion that the popular has been effectively ren-
dered invisible through the workings of myriad institutional pressures—of
which “consensus” might well be the most prevalent—may strike those
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Book Review

working in Anglo-American academic circles as a surprising claim. In the

North, cultural studies has achieved a highly visible and relatively domi-
nant position—at least in name, for it could be argued that what is meant
by “cultural studies” remains very much to be decided.3 Masiello, how-
ever, points to a discrepancy between intellectual work being done in the
North and in the Southern Cone, and criticizes those in the North who
in recent decades have staked out fertile academic ground by adopting
cultural-studies and/or subaltern-studies perspectives.
On the one hand, Masiello’s complaint echoes charges of academic
neocolonialism lodged against U.S. Latin Americanists by Hugo Achugar
(1997) and Beatriz Sarlo (1999). She suggests that such epistemological
moves, while often cloaking themselves in a certain tradition of emancipa-
tory thinking, in fact risk perpetuating a long history of Eurocentrism in
which Latin America is represented as a site of abjection and/or exoticism:
in other words, as an object waiting to be studied or saved. The postulated
restitution of a Latin American “other,” were this is in fact what cultural
studies and/or subaltern studies set out to accomplish, would in truth only
serve to legitimate an autorestitutive project undertaken by Northern in-
tellectuals themselves at a time when literary studies is facing increasing
doubts as to its own sustainability. On the other hand, this critique might
also point out that, in displacing literature and inserting testimonio—or
any other form of cultural production—into the position of cultural exem-
plar, postliterary Latin Americanism remains caught up in a profoundly
“literary” aesthetic ideology.
The premise that the popular in the Southern Cone has withered
lays the groundwork for Masiello’s claims about the complementary roles
that literature and gender-based identity politics could play in the time
of transition. A certain juxtaposition of aesthetics and political activity,
Masiello asserts, can unsettle or “subvert” the new hegemony organized
by the market, while also filling the sociopolitical void left behind by the
retreat of the popular and utopian thinking. Let us first examine some of
the specific claims made in this argument. We can then turn to some of the
questions raised—and potential problems posed—by Masiello’s thesis.
Masiello prefaces her discussion of a gender-based identity poli-
tics by noting that, by itself, strategic recourse to identity cannot provide
an effective antidote to recent and dramatic transformations of the world
system. A calculated affirmation or performance of identity, no matter
how marginal or radical, cannot hope to dislodge the prevailing view of
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the market as a “spontaneous order” that replaces rationally calculated—

and hence merely technical and artificial—sociopolitical orders such as the
nation-state.4 After all, nothing buttresses the claim that the market offers
more “inclusiveness,” “diversity,” and “freedom” quite like the free pro-
liferation of purchasable identities under the auspices of multiculturalism.
But while cautioning against overestimating the political force of identity,
Masiello also offers a counterargument to those who would doubt the polit-
ical potential of so-called new social movements, or alliances not based on
traditional organizing principles such as party, leader, revolution, and so on.
Borrowing from a number of theoretical sources, including the works of
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Homi Bhabha, and Ernesto Laclau and
Chantal Mouffe, she maintains that reflection on “gendered” difference in
contemporary artistic production could provide an impetus for the forma-
tion of new (counter)hegemonic practices and coalitions, while at the same
time dissuading such alliances from viewing themselves as self-sufficient
and homogeneous totalities.
Masiello’s claims concerning the political force of gender are seem-
ingly based on a juxtaposition of two distinct theoretical perspectives.
The most obvious basis is the association of feminism with nontradi-
tional coalition-building and solidarity, as exemplified by the Madres de la
Plaza de Mayo. The other perspective, I would maintain, is a sentiment—
shared up to a certain point by feminist, poststructuralist, and psychoan-
alytic thought—that “difference” as such is always already “sexed”: that
is, that there is no such thing as a neutral or indifferent difference, and
that the silent determination of difference proceeds by way of hierarchical
constructs (such as active/passive, reason/emotion, culture/nature, etc.) that
have their basis in the metaphysical tradition. As a necessarily minoritar-
ian affair, gender-based identity politics would assume what we could call
a supplementary relation to any constituted social totality. It would both
articulate and mark the limits of totality. And it would thus—at least in
principle—open totality to the radical contingency of its origin, as well as
to the alterity of its future, to what it is not (yet). Referring to the writings
of the Argentine poet and essayist Néstor Perlongher, Masiello argues that

the “minor” both alters and gives strength to collective al-

ternatives to power. It is precisely from the often invisible
margin—the site of the unincorporated, the irreducible, the
constantly shifting and mobile—that a theory of democratic
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Book Review

practice emerges to fill the blank horizon. Perlongher refers to

this as a “devenir mujer”—becoming woman in opposition to
the masculinity claimed by the authoritarian state, a feminine
presence that is not necessarily fixed by one’s biological identity
or sexual preference, but which constantly asserts itself in terms
of staging alternatives and, therefore, never forecloses possibil-
ities of meanings that erupt in politics or discourse. (39–40)

As Masiello is aware, however, a residual ambiguity continues to

cast doubt on the emancipatory potential to be found in representations of
the marginal. Why would a discursive and political strategy that lays claim
to the name “woman,” in explicit contradistinction to the modern state’s
grounding in patriarchal tradition, necessarily constitute a subversion—
rather than a recognition—of the state as ultimate arbiter of value?5 It is
uncertain whether this “staging [of] alternatives” could forge a true exte-
riority to the prevailing regime of signification, or whether it would on
the contrary precisely reproduce and extend that logos. Any distinction
between strategic and normative essentialisms notwithstanding, this per-
formance is necessarily a politics of naming and hence of domesticating
difference: even if it is not “biology” or “sex,” something (some other sig-
nifier) must be claimed in order to fix or universalize this difference qua
identity. Does going public and demanding recognition in the name of
what the state suppresses or rules out necessarily undermine the logic of
the statist system? Or, in setting its sights on the authoritarian practices of
the state, would such a strategy in fact inadvertently serve to bolster the
law? (That is, the law of the market, of expanding the array of available
identities and thus effectively producing new coalitions of consumers.)
My reservations concerning the instrumental use of this concept
of minoritarian aesthetics can be further expanded by recalling Fredric
Jameson’s assessment of postmodernity as the tendential total colonization
of the real by capital. If postmodernity coincides with the recognition that
those realms previously considered to be beyond the reach of capitalism
(such as nature) have in fact been secretly assimilated into the logic of
the market, then it is also the case that capital will not only tolerate but
actually encourage signs of resistance so as to parasitically reproduce itself
in its unwitting host. The market would have always already neutralized
resistance wherever resistance makes itself visible; it would strengthen its
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own hold on the real by converting all of its others into brand names
available for purchase.
While noting the risks involved in any project that calls for the
institutional recognition of difference, Masiello chooses to emphasize the
affirmative or emancipatory potential of such a practice. Gender-based iden-
tity politics, she suggests, promises more than an affirmation of identities
previously negated by the dominant political order. It intervenes in what
are ostensibly consolidated discursive fields (for example, the apparently
seamless state of political consensus in Chile and—until very recently—
Argentina concerning what constitutes “democracy”) and seeks to jar and
shake loose previously calcified signifiers. In this specific sense, Masiello’s
argument is not far removed from subaltern-studies projects from which
she seeks to distance herself. Her gender-based identity politics does not
simply provide a catchall for myriad negated identities; it also seeks to
appropriate negation itself in order to mark the limits of “identity” in its
essentialist and reifying mode. In order to expose the ideological basis of the
view of the market as a “spontaneous” or “natural” order—or to call atten-
tion to the fact that, contrary to neoliberal dogma, a state of “adjustment”
must always be carried out in order for the market to function as such—it
is not sufficient to muster alternative identities previously subjected to ex-
clusion. That which presents itself in “synchronic” terms as antithesis to
the market will only strengthen the market in the long run. What must
finally be exposed to critique, then, is the difference itself between the mar-
ket and the state, between brand name and identity. While Masiello does
not specifically say as much, I would maintain that her argument neces-
sarily points in this direction. As I suggested earlier, her intervention in
contemporary cultural debates is based on the claim that literary aesthetics
can in a certain sense bring about a redemption of the transition. Liter-
ature would restitute the loss of sense suffered by a social totality that has
increasingly been reduced to the calculative terms of its individual parts. It
would reveal its ethical content by leading us from absolute particularity
(including asphyxiating experiences of domination, alienation, self-interest,
etc.) to the threshold of community. Accordingly, postmodern theoretical
celebrations of “the fragment”—and there are in fact multiple senses of
“fragmentation” to be dealt with here—must be paralleled by a renewed
drive toward totalization, consistent with what Masiello calls a “constant
longing for completion” (13).6 The aesthetic would thus participate in two
complementary movements: first, it would effect a disintegration of the
dominant image of the whole, which has become a rigid, calcified edifice
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Book Review

devoid of any space in which to think and experience historically; second, it

would open onto a new form of historicity, a more democratic “totalizing”
sense. Here Masiello must and does draw a distinction between aesthetics
and the political project she is anticipating: aesthetics would not do the
work that is proper to politics (as traditional aestheticism would claim),
but would rather recall us to that liminal region from which the political
becomes a possibility, that always unprecedented point at which there is a
decision to be made.
However, as I have already suggested, Masiello’s attempt to recu-
perate the political potential of the aesthetic leaves a number of questions
unanswered. Due to spatial considerations, I will address only one of these
instances. It occurs in her discussion (163–68) of translation as a motif of
contestation or “subversion” in Ricardo Piglia’s novel La ciudad ausente.
And while this is only one instance, her argument does in fact presuppose
that “translation” functions as an exemplary manifestation of the “subver-
sive” potential of literature.

Deleuze and Guattari in A Thousand Plateaus (1987, 223) speak

of the state machine that overcodes and compartmentalizes,
of the binary structures that organize thought to the point of
rigidity; against this state-defined apparatus, notably present
in Argentina, Piglia—perhaps like Deleuze and Guattari—
supplies another instrument, propelled by imitation and inven-
tion. . . . from this kind of invention, multiple “desiring ma-
chines” emerge that establish the possibility of dialogue and
communal redemption. And insofar as the machines always
translate from language to language, they facilitate a subver-
sive communication that eludes the market-run state. Within
this context, translation works to ponder aesthetic value and
the relationships of individuals to community. (165)

Here Masiello exploits the myriad references to la máquina in Piglia’s novel:

they are literary allusions that together offer something like a metonymy of
Argentine cultural production. It is unclear, however, how the “subversive”
potential of translation could be secured and put to work for a contesta-
tory project. To begin with, as a figure for national cultural production,
Piglia’s “translation machine” has always operated under the paradigm of
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the nation-state, whether that paradigm is the utopian form of nineteenth-

century liberalism, the popular-authoritarian models of nationalism and
Peronism, or the totalitarian national security state. For Piglia, the “sup-
plementary” role of translation illustrates the way in which culture, acting
as a force of interpellation and reconciliation, performs a crucial function of
the state. The crisis stage of national cultural production comes about not
because these cultural codifications oversimplify or miss the truth of lived
experience (though this may indeed happen), but rather because the very
ontological determination of this production of cultural forms—the nation-
state as calculable totality—has now reached its point of exhaustion. It is
difficult, then, to see how the idea of “translation” could be appropriated
for its disruptive force without also reintroducing—for better or for worse,
but in either case anachronistically—the institutional violence of the state
as a producer of social narratives. What is more, the way the novel thinks
translation would in fact pose considerable problems for any attempt to re-
duce literary aesthetics to the instrumentality of a concept: “Al principio la
máquina se equivoca. El error es el primer principio. La máquina disgrega
‘espontáneamente’ los elementos del cuento de Poe y los transforma en los
núcleos potenciales de la ficción. Así había surgido la trama inicial. El mito
de origen. Todas las historias venían de ahí. El sentido futuro de lo que es-
taba pasando dependía de ese relato sobre el otro y el porvenir” (Piglia 1992,
98). I would thus put forward a reservation concerning Masiello’s use of the
terms translation, communication, and subversion as concepts, when it may
well be the limit of the concept that Piglia is attempting to think under the
term translation. In her attempt to identify a “subversive” component that
would make itself available in or through translation, Masiello appears to
ignore the ways in which writing itself (and this includes translation) marks
or reveals the limit of intentionality and calculability in Piglia’s work. For
instance, let us recall the quasi-parodic pretext of La ciudad ausente: that
national cultural production in Argentina has been secretly based on a
series of translations of Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “William Wilson.”
As Piglia’s protagonist discovers, these translations are at once imitations,
grafts, and creative misreadings or transformations that together inscribe
the act of translation with a kind of incalculability a priori. The fact that a
work makes itself available for translation means not only that its original
meaning must already have been exposed to the risk of loss, alteration, and
misunderstanding, but also that “the original” (or the work or the whole)
as such cannot be thought apart from these limits. Not even a seemingly
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Book Review

negative concept such as “subversion” could save itself from the abyssal
(non)ground of translation.
Translation thus points to the possibility of failure that haunts any
institutional project, whether statist or revolutionary, conservative or radi-
cal. Indeed, for Piglia, it is from a condition of originary “incompleteness”
(which is not a lack of some normative or determinate quality that could
later be added), illuminated by translation, that the idea of totality takes
shape.7 The irreducible incalculability that accompanies translation, and
which cannot itself be determined or accounted for in advance, is precisely
of the structure of reading and its remainder, or what is necessarily left over
in any act of interpretation. This remainder is the future of reading itself:
without interpretive excess and the possibility of equivocation it enforces,
there could be no reading and no interpretation, only rote memorization
and recitation (a similar aporia could easily be detailed for “communica-
tion”).
This limit, which Piglia’s text calls the “errancy” of translation,
would present problems for Masiello’s claim that literary aesthetics can “re-
deem” the transition by providing a bridge to community and democratic
politics. While there can be no subversion in literature prior to a particu-
lar act of reading, reading cannot itself become the ground of subversion.
Masiello wants translation to exemplify the subvertible kernel in all in-
stitutional and dominant discourses: that is, to mark this limit in a way
that could be repeated, learned, and hence guaranteed. Like redemption,
however, subversion may well be of the order of this “errant” futurity that
cannot be programmed in advance. Similarly, my objection to Masiello’s
use of the aesthetic as counterhegemonic and alliance-building concept is
not simply that societies or coalitions inevitably fall apart, but rather that
the origin of any such configuration is necessarily incommensurable with
and unpresentable within the totality it produces. And thus the sense of any
totality, the “glue” that holds the group together, cannot be extracted from
its finite condition, from the group’s inability to fully become One. There
can be no experience of community without the concurrent experience of
its limit, the impossibility of communion.
Such an aporetic thought of the constitutive impossibility of total-
ity sets the tone for Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s (1985) notion of
hegemony, in which one particular discourse or perspective is able to present
itself as the universal signifier that confers significance on all other perspec-
tives or signifiers, converting them from isolated particularities, locked in
antagonistic battles with the dominant discourse, into a unified signifying
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chain. For example, let us imagine the contemporary academic and cultural
field described by Masiello. To begin with, various critical perspectives or
discourses, including analyses based on “class,” “race,” “sexuality,” and so
on, today find themselves condemned to fighting losing battles with the
dominant structure of the market. In order to ensure its academic survival,
a particular discourse (for instance, a Marxist perspective) must present it-
self as one “choice” or “brand name” among many, and hence relinquish
any hope of gaining a truly critical distance from the market. In the midst
of these particular antagonisms, let us imagine that one discourse, “gender
studies,” emerges with the promise to emancipate all other particularities
from these fatal dependencies. “Gender” appears as the new ascendent uni-
versal with whose imminent triumph all other mere particulars will now
cast their lots. The novelty of Laclau and Mouffe’s model is twofold. First,
the universalizing operation known as hegemony is experienced by these
myriad particular discourses not as the domination of the one over the
many, but rather as a product of true consensus: each particular must be
able to find itself and its potential freedom in the universal (through analy-
sis of gender difference, the class struggle will once again become apparent,
etc.). But at the same time, this movement from particular to universal is
necessarily marked by radical contingency. There is nothing essential about
“gender” that would justify the universal role it plays in such a scheme,
and there is likewise no necessary reason why some other signifier could
not come to occupy this position at some point in the future. And thus, like
any other signifier, “gender” must necessarily fail to suture and account
for the social field in its entirety. Some excess or remainder will always
emerge to disrupt the seamless appearance of universality. Thus, to de-
scribe hegemony as a development whereby we “momentarily reach pure
presence [and] a communitarian fullness is achieved” (92) is only to tell half
the story. But the inability or failure of the universal to accomplish pure
self-presence or communion is not simply an isolated, negative feature of
the hegemonic process: on the contrary, this always excessive failure is its
condition of possibility and its only chance. In the absence of some possible
gap, some excess or remainder of the suturing process, there could be no
wiggle room through which a particular could constitute itself—however
contingently—as a universal. Without the excess that the universal inscribes
on the present, there could be no hegemonic process and hence no politics
at all.
What relation does literature assume to this signifying limit? Does
it turn away from the limit? Does it seek to repair its fissures? Or does it
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on the contrary seek in this limit what may in fact be its greatest resource?
How we approach these questions may be of vital importance, especially
if we wish to avoid living out Jameson’s account of postmodernity as total
colonization of the real. I mentioned earlier that the notion of the frag-
mentary in fact creates an unstable juxtaposition of multiple contexts and
connotations in Masiello’s argument. For instance, in addition to the social
fragmentation that neoliberal policies are seen to intensify, there is also a
long-standing aesthetic tradition of the fragment with which writers such
as Puig, Eltit, and Piglia are engaged. But what if the conjunction of these
two discrete manifestations of the fragmentary today itself gives birth to
another form of fragmentation, which we could call the fragmentation of
the aesthetic? It is perhaps this third form of fragmentation that emerges
most decisively in the work of Eltit, Piglia, and Marcelo Cohen (to name
three authors mentioned by Masiello), as a counterfoundational language
or tone that destroys its own literary illusion of presence and plenitude.
This thought of fragmentation would signal a rupture within the history
of modernity, following which it is no longer possible to reconstitute a so-
cial totality under the guidance of the aesthetic. But this event would not
allow us to think that we have finished with and surpassed the aesthetic
as such. Instead, it would call for persisting amid the ruins of the grand
narratives of modernity—even if literature is never entirely free from the
specter of the Whole, even if it must always be prepared to kill this phan-
tasm once again. I would suggest that Piglia’s notion of “errancy” contains
or invites the thought of just such a fragmentation. If literature can help
us to ask after the limit of the colonization of the real by capital, it is not
necessarily because literature offers a counternarrative or presents itself as
an instrument of calculated subversion: indeed, it is possible that neither
of these strategies could sufficiently separate itself from the logic it would
combat. If literature offers any hope of withstanding the totalizing logic
of Jameson’s formula, it is perhaps because literature “presents” something
that is properly of the order of the unpresentable. As a signifying machine,
literature confronts reading with its inexhaustible excess: with a “pure
potens,” an “unconscious,” a “plus ultra” that is both the chance and the
impossibility of presentation. But in this “presentation” of the impossibility
of presentation, literature also destroys its own illusion of being a whole.
Masiello’s apt warning against blind celebrations of the fragment would be
equally relevant for this third kind of fragmentation. But while literature’s
participation in the shattering of the aesthetic whole does not give cause
for rejoicing and should not fool us into thinking that we have now freed
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ourselves from a kind of tyranny, neither should this counterfoundational

tendency be automatically opposed. Rather, it should be read—and heard—
as provoking what Marcelo Cohen terms “la anticuada audacia del vértigo”:
an invitation to look beyond the axiomatic truth of the self-evident and to
experience the origin of our world as emerging enigma.

Notes
1. David Lloyd and Paul Thomas (1996) offer an incisive discussion of the relation
between literature and the nation-state (and while their study examines this
relation in France, England, and Germany, the structure of their argument
is also helpful for thinking about Latin American nation building). For an
exploration of this paradigm in Latin America, see Moreiras 2001.
2. See Ludmer 1988 and Beverley 1993 for two distinct approaches to the question
of the limits of “literature” as exemplar of national culture. For a sampling
of responses to the perceived decline of “literature” in Latin Americanist
discourse, see the collection of essays on testimonio in Gugelberg 1996.
3. Masiello does not address the fact that no consensus currently exists regarding ei-
ther the epistemological or the political stakes of cultural studies. This silence
would not constitute an omission if Masiello’s attempt to recuperate the value
of the aesthetic did not present itself as an alternative to cultural studies–based
critiques of aestheticism. However, the serious theoretical and methodolog-
ical divisions revealing themselves within the field today would no doubt
require her to modify her somewhat sweeping identification of all attempts
to link cultural studies and/or subaltern studies to Latin Americanist critical
work. For two considerations of the problems attending the relation between
cultural studies and Latin Americanism, see Beverley 1999 and Moreiras
2001. For an example of how “the popular” has suffered a depreciation in
Southern Cone intellectual circles, see the recent work of Beatriz Sarlo.
4. For a discussion of the differences and similarities between state and market in terms
of calculability, see Moreiras 2001, 268–77.
5. On the risks involved in identity politics as a pursuit of recognition by the state, see
Appiah 1994; and Brown 1995.
6. I should distinguish here between at least two different events of fragmentation, or at
least between two distinct manifestations of the same thing. On the one hand,
there is the phenomenon of social fragmentation that is arguably specific to (or
at least realized to an unprecedented degree in) contemporary, “postmodern”
societies. On the other, there is an aesthetics of the fragment which, while
not unrelated to the contemporary theoretical tendencies to which Masiello
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alludes, in fact has a history that extends back to the Romantic theory of the
fragment developed by Friedrich and August Wilhelm von Schlegel.
7. Both Piglia’s and Masiello’s reflections on translation recall Walter Benjamin’s essay
“The Task of the Translator.” In particular, both are influenced by the idea
that translation, rather than aspiring to produce a perfect copy of the origin, in
fact measures itself by what the original is unable to say (or, what amounts to
the same thing, by what it is unable to stop saying). For Benjamin, translation
responds not only to what is said, but more originally to a strange silence that
persists in the original, to a “suffering” that the original undergoes in relation
to its native tongue (“die Wehen des eigenen”: the suffering of one’s own, of
the language one had thought most familiar and proper, but which suddenly
reveals itself to be utterly strange).

References
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de la memoria y del conocimiento.” Revista iberoamericana 180: 49–71.
Appiah, Kwame Anthony. 1994. “Identity, Authenticity, Survival: Multicultural
Societies and Social Reproduction.” In Multiculturalism: Examining the
Politics of Recognition, edited by Amy Gutmann. Princeton, NJ: Princeton
University Press.
Beverley, John. 1993. Against Literature. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
. 1999. Subalternity and Representation: Arguments in Cultural Theory. Durham,
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Bourdieu, Pierre. 1998. “L’essence du néoliberalisme.” Le monde diplomatique,
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Brown, Wendy. 1995. States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Gugelberg, Georg. 1996. The Real Thing: Testimonial Discourse in Latin America.
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Laclau, Ernesto, and Chantal Mouffe. 1985. Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
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Lloyd, David, and Paul Thomas. 1998. Culture and the State. New York: Routledge.
Ludmer, Josefina. 1988. El género gauchesco: Un tratado sobre la patria. Buenos Aires:
Sudamericano.
Moreiras, Alberto. 2001. The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American
Cultural Studies. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.
Piglia, Ricardo. 1992. La ciudad ausente. Buenos Aires: Seix Barral.
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Sarlo, Beatriz. 1994. Escenas de la vida posmoderna: Intelectuales, arte y videocultura en la

Argentina. Buenos Aires: Ariel.
. 1999. “Cultural Studies and Literary Criticism at the Crossroads of Values.”
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