Infrastructure or Support?: Literature, Meaning and Autonomy in Latin America

• In Event: Aesthetic Form and the Limits of “Nuestra América”

Abstract

This presentation will explore recent debates over aesthetic autonomy as it relates to anti-neoliberal politics in Latin America. Josefina Ludmer developed her concept of “postautonomous literatures” between 2006 and 2010 to analyze texts that, she argued, were indifferent to their literary status and their fundamental difference from commodities or other objects. Carlos Alonso (2011) similarly argued for understanding neoliberalism’s “de-autonomized” literary sphere. In subsequent years, a series of scholars have continued to critique in various ways the notion of aesthetic autonomy while others have defended its political importance. These discussions explore the political consequences of analyzing a reader/beholder’s experience of an aesthetic object or, on the contrary, arguing for the meaning of an artwork. These dynamics are clear in one of the most recent interventions into this debate, Brian Whitener’s “The Politics of Infrastructure in Contemporary Mexican Writing” (2018). Here, Whitener argues for a shift away from discussions of aesthetic autonomy and the artwork’s commodity status to focus instead on “infrastructure” as an escape from the insoluble question of commodification. By locating Whitener’s intervention in the context of the above debates, I will demonstrate the ways that a focus on “infrastructure” fails to evade the fundamental categories of meaning or experience, artwork or commodity. I will suggest that a “politics of infrastructure” (and postautonomous positions that parallel it) would benefit from visual art’s engagement with the relationship between a representation and its support. Rather than evade autonomy, a focus on infrastructure cannot become intelligible without insisting on it.

Author

• Stephen M Buttes, Purdue University Fort Wayne