Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies, Vol. 12, No.

2, 2003

The Modalities of Contact: Cortazar on Exile, Literacy and Video

JAMES R. CISNEROS

Although Socrates says he could be led all over the world should Phaedrus hold a book before him like a carrot before a mule, the philosopher remains alongside the men who teach him within the borders of the city. Only spoken dialogue permits him to obey the Delphic oracle: Know thyself! He rejects the written word, which is like a painting, an image that cannot respond to his questions; at the same moment he chooses the citys agora over the countrys gentle breezes and the shade of its tallest plane-tree. Dialogue privileges an intimate gathering place, whereas written texts distend the boundaries of public discourse that properly belong in the polis, that ideal space which protects the relations necessary to the knowledge of the self. All imagery and ecstasy confusing the speakers identity are therefore exiled from the Republic, Lysiass written lines and the rhapsodists recital relegated to an absolute, outer space. Whatever the historical or parabolic value of these distant dialogues, they reveal the matrix of elements necessary to the formation of any political collective: a form of mediation running between individual identities and social bodies within a determinate zone. These elements consistently resurface in geographically and culturally distinct forms of social organization, while the signifying practice that determines their interface differs wherever the quality of one of the elements shifts. Replacing oral dialogue with the book or the image, for instance, alters the form of (self-)knowledge based on the projected voices spatial limitations, extending social intercourse to distant communities that participate in the same circuit of literacy and interpretation. The new medium displaces the boundaries between inner and outer space on both the scale of the subject and the scale of the city, reshaping the connes that divide the (political) body from the uninhabitable outland. A history of this matrix would show how its variables shift with the advent of new media and new technologies of reproduction and dissemination, changing the nature of readingof deciphering a mediated messageand renegotiating the transit between spaces of individual identity and collective practice. In general terms, this is the framework for todays debates about globalization and new media, from the implications of the transnational ow of images for the decline in literacy rates to the related question of the crises of identities formed since the advent of the modern nation-state.1 Tracing a cultural history that spans from the Renaissance to our contemporary global context, recent Latin American scholarship on literacy has drawn
ISSN 1356-9325 print/ISSN 1469-9575 online/03/02028515 2003 Taylor & Francis Ltd DOI: 10.1080/1356932032000106810

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from this matrix of elements to present strong political interpretations of the mediums role in shaping collective group practices. Angel Rama shows that from the earliest stages of colonization writing imposed uniform linguistic standards on a heterogeneous cultural and ethnic eld, using a specic discursive economy to order space into what he calls the lettered city.2 Demonstrating that graphic markers carry precise conceptions of memory, spatial organization and grammar, Walter Mignolo considers the difference of their function in the media of non-Western reading and writing culturesin the Peruvian quipu, for example, a book that is read by tactile appropriation.3 In his late essays, Julio Cortazar encourages exiled writers to jump from the written page to the great book of Latin American reality by using video images instead of words. In either implicit or explicit fashion, each of these intellectuals raises the question of his own participation in a socially, historically or geographically distant community, and seeks to theorize a counter-practice that permits an intervention into the order imposed by the letter. Their research shows how hegemonic forms of enunciation and knowledge correspond to specic conceptual and material spaces, and how the medium can inform practices of resistance to the social order. It invites us to consider the modern images potential in destructuring the dominance of writing as disseminated by print technologies. (This obviously does not imply that a specic practice of writing cannot be a site of resistance to that order or, conversely, that any use of the image will contest it.) The potential of other media is perhaps best explained in opposition to the modalities of literacy that Rama nds in the lettered city. Following Foucaults The Order of Things, he shows how the lettered city denes itself in dialectic opposition to nature and barbarism, exchanging specic geographies for symbolic representation. With the binary logic of Port Royal the sign becomes detached from what it represents, taking on meaning in relation to the other elements of a signifying system. This gives rise to a literacy of reversible equivalence. Read one way, the signifying relation leads to the representation of previously existing things in a system of signs; read the other, it projects the system of signs as an imaginary construct that may or may not be realized in an indenite and ahistoric future: the Renaissance utopias, Brasilia. The analogical thought that is proper to this order of signs permits us to read society when we read the map of a city (p. 4). Today, this mode of literacy confronts a heterogeneous collection of letters, images and signals emitted from other media, a dense semiotic network that eclipses the utopian citys cohesive representation. Photographic and cinematic images circumvent the lettered citys symbolic projection across time and space, resisting the semiotic equivalence of the map and its referent. Borrowing terms from Peirce, we can say that while the photograph has an iconic reference that remains independent of an existing object, its indexical reference nevertheless binds it historically to a model whose existence in the world precedes it. The lettered citys symbolic organization moulds the image into a conventional system of meaning by emphasizing its iconicity. While of course not immune to this institutionalization, photographys deictic force maintains the trace of a specic locality that resists the imposition of a utopian projection. It retains the memory of this or that place, provoking unpredictable inections on the network of signs. The lettered city has thus unevenly institutionalized photography and video, which, along with other resurgent heterotopias, can be theorized as one

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of many fronts from which to inltrate and challenge its graphic order.4 To use Calvinos evocative gure, the city has become invisible in a texture of images whose precise location obfuscates transparent signication, mutating instead with every traveller who weaves a hermeneutic path along its streets, giving them sense through direction. The photograph and other modern images change the citys extension and depth, shifting the border between its inner and outer space with different modalities of reading. This is especially true for Latin America, where a small lettered community and low levels of literacy greatly restrict the symbolic system Rama evinces in his study. In the pages that follow I outline how the modern images receptive model challenges older forms of literacy, understood in two interrelated ways. Literacy refers, rst of all, to the most general sense of the word: the technical skills we need to decipher the meaning of graphic markers. In a second sense, I use it to refer to the peculiar relations to language that the acquisition of these skills implies, as well as the way these historically specic linguistic relations mediate between individual and collective, subject and state. The modalities of reading proper to the image imply a different conception of space as well as other forms of collective organization and political intervention. In his late texts on exile and political violence, Cortazar explores how the new medias qualitative difference from print introduce a signifying practice that alters the relation between the elements of the matrix we rst nd in the Phaedrus. I Much of Cortazars work as a writer implies a marginal position in relation to the lettered city. His decision to live in Europe, the distance from Latin America and concerns of national interestthe source of his debate with Arguedasled Cortazar to develop a sort of positive thinking about how to write from a decentred location. It led him to consider using media other than writing to launch messages over the lettered citys walls and intervene into the processes of collective organization. In an essay adapted from a conference on liberal democracy entitled El escritor y su quehacer en America Latina, Cortazar asks how the exiled intellectual can think of his or her task in a distant political landscape: Que hacer ademas de lo que hacemos, como incrementar nuestra participacion en el terreno geopoltico desde nuestro particular sector de trabajadores intelectuales, como inventar y aplicar nuevas modali dades de contacto que disminuyan cada vez mas el enorme hiato que separa al escritor de aquellos que todava no pueden ser sus lectores?5 [What else can we do? How can we increase our participation in the geopolitical eld from our particular sector, that of the intellectual worker? How can we invent and apply new modalities of contact that progressively diminish the enormous hiatus that separates the writer from those who cannot yet be his/her readers?] Cortazars description of the plural hiatus, at once social, spatial and temporal, that separates the intellectual from a group of readers pivots on the indeterminate nature of those who cannot yet be his or her interlocutors. The rarefaction

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of intellectual practice and the difference of its workers from those in other sectors has long vexed writers who are critical of the lettered citys insularity. Strategies for political intervention are already difcult to conceive for a writer at home, in internal exile, while the receptive communitys geographic distance greatly exacerbates their limitations. The temporal index marking the two groups eventual reconciliation could indicate either Cortazars faith in liberal education and the spread of literacy or the anticipated end of the geopolitical hiatus imposed by exile and censorship. Both imply an uncertain moment in the future, after the fall of the military regimes, that follows from the historical progress of democratic civilization as conceived under the auspices of literate culture. Towards the conclusion of his talk, however, Cortazar states that his confer ence overcomes the hiatus separating the intellectual from his reader. It is, he hopes, a moment of the task he proposes to the Latin American intellectual, a moment in the construction of the bridge towards sovereignty. This focus on the present, in an oral presentation before a literate audience, suggests that the reference to those who cannot yet read does not refer to future literacy programme or to the eventual eradication of censorship. We should instead interpret the temporal index todava as a mark of differentiation that underscores the impossibility of the writers immediacy to the reader, and of the necessary mediation that constitutes the communicative act. Rather than attempting to send out a message the home community would read within traditional parameters, the intellectual and the community must read each other in a moment of mediation that is eventful rather than eventual. In this sense, todava means sin embargo, nevertheless: we must make contact with the readers, even though they cannot read. Before giving the name of imagination to the discursive act that binds the writer to the reader, Cortazar notes that the intellectuals quehacer consists in developing more efcient modes of communication than the writing that traditionally denes their task. Of these, he favours technologies of the image. He considers television and lm to be the most formidable weapons for revolutionary struggle, and encourages exiled writers to circumvent censorship by making contact with video equipment.6 He also considers the relative effectiveness of comic books, photonovelas, music cassettes and the tango for political intervention into a distant receptive community. As the printed word is the site of legitimate state power, Cortazars efforts to escape the censor also circumvent the question of literacy. Those without access to censored print are confused with the illiterate population and, as we shall see, with readers who have yet to adopt a particular way of reading that corresponds to a new political collective. Cortazar evinces the quehacer as a problem of reading. The image circumvents literacy, conceived both as a technical skill employed to decipher words on a page and as a discursive operation that denes a determinate set of relations to language. Concrete historical circumstances at the dawn of the Renaissance weld together the technical skill and the discursive specicity into what Wlad Godzich calls the culture of literacy. Print technology participates in the advent of literacy, imparting information with the speed and efciency necessary for market growth and state centralization, and instituting a language that is universal within the sphere of the state. Literacy, an operative element in the denition of Modernity, is a shorthand description for the peculiar relations of

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language that institute the (states) subject. For Godzich, this specic relation is at its twilight, eclipsed by the modern images speed and ubiquity. The modern image not only dispatches information with greater efciency than the language of literacy, but has proved itself irreducible to institutional attempts to transform it to a controlled grammatical system (as with visual semiotics) and thus incommensurable to a conception of the medium as an instrument that man uses to act in and upon the world. As I discuss further below, it is an obstinate image of the world afrming itself independently of the instituted subject. The culture of literacy was never consolidated in Latin America, where a clear disparity exists between the modern state and the communities that are marginalized from its economy of reading. Unlike the European and North American states, where the two senses of literacy are cemented indistinguishably, a gap manifests itself in the inadequacy of the political spheres universal language to interpollate individuals as state subjects. Latin American governments have compensated by resorting to personalism, economic populism or, a sad legacy that is only too well known, repressive and authoritarian measures. Alternatively, they have overcome the hiatus of interpollation with mass forms of electronic communication. Charismatic or de facto leaders have offset the absence of institutional legitimacy with an overt appeal to the modern image, whose mass dissemination has given it the same centripetal function that Benedict Anderson nds for print capitalism in his study on nationalism as an imagined community.7 Yet even when pressed into the role reserved for writing and print, the image remains a volatile locus for political intervention. Hence the images privileged place in the Latin American cultural eld. Vasconcelos is a landmark of the states use of the image to expand its hegemony to marginalized, largely illiterate communities. Mexican muralismo and the ideological project he assembles around the cosmic race contain residues of a Hegelian discourse structured upon a linear narrative of historical progress.8 Angel Rama suggests that Vasconcelos took the helm of the university, gem of the lettered city, with the claim that nothing less than Spirit spoke from its racial mouth.9 Mariategui, the counterexample, seeks to uplift the new Indian with a myth he derives from Georges Sorels prescription for political action, through which we hear the distant echo of Bergsons formulation of the world as a universe of images. El Amauta sees the cinematic image as the harbinger of this political potential, a claim he expresses paradoxically in his review of Valcarcels revolutionary Tempestad de los Andes: In the nal stages of this mountain lm, which is how the author denes his own book, we feel a live, real and active Indian. What makes the new Indian distinct is spirit and not instruction (the alphabet offers no redemption to the Indian).10 He again sees the cinemas political potential in the gure of Chaplin, antiburgues por excelencia. Other forms of mediation ll the gap between the two senses of literacy in Latin America, either interpolating the individual into the hegemony of the state or providing an overture to political subversion. If Cortazar believes that images inhabit these ssures in reception, underlining, for example, their efciency in evading state censorship, he also proposes a form of imagination that circumvents the culture of literacy. Imagination is the best weapon for taking power, and intellectuals must articulate their task on the basis of the new medias more efcient techniques. Power, the peoples greater and more efcient partici-

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pation in the ght for its identity and its legitimate destiny,11 implies the formation of a political collective that the state has never fully incorporated into its institutional literacy. The imagination produces images that circumvent representation and, as we shall see, should not be confused with the Romantic imagination tied to a symbolic faculty. Cortazar rejects such disembodied literate ubiquity, positing a form of imagination that is inextricable from the medium or media conveying it. The new modalities of contact change the function of the medium. It is not simply a matter of using the image to disseminate the word, like a latter-day pamphlet, but of engendering a mode of reading that, specic to the image, will invent the community that actively engages with it. Those who cannot yet read are those who have yet to learn how to read the image on its own terms. Cortazar outlines the imaginations modalities of contact with the gure of the bridge. Initially introduced to espouse the need for writers to explore other media, it also serves to mediate the distance between exile and homeland and between intellectual and collective: Como ingenieros de la creacion literaria, como proyectistas y arquitec tos de la palabra, hemos tenido tiempo sobrado para imaginar y calcular el arco de los puentes cada vez mas imprescindibles entre el producto intelectual y sus destinatarios; ahora es ya el momento de construir esos puentes en la realidad y echar a andar sobre ese espacio a n de que se convierta en sendero, en comunicacion tangible . El puente, como imagen y como realidad, es casi tan viejo como el hombre. Un poema ha sido siempre un puente, como una musica, o una novela, o una pintura. Lo que es menos nuevo es la nocion de un puente que partiendo de un lugar habitado por esas novelas, esas pinturas y esas musicas, se tienda hacia otra orilla donde nada de eso ha llegado o llega verdaderamente. (pp. 122123) [As engineers of literary creation, as projectors and architects of the word, we have had spare time to imagine and calculate the arch of the bridges, increasingly indispensable, between the intellectual product and its receptors. It is now time to construct those bridges in reality and to walk on that space with the aim of converting it into a path, into tangible communication . As an image and as reality, the bridge is almost as old as man. A poem has always been a bridge, like a musical tune, a novel or a painting. What is less new is the notion of a bridge that departs from the place inhabited by those novels, paintings and compositions, and extends to the other shore where none of them has ever truly arrived.] Cortazars description of the bridge as an image differs signicantly from a model of representation where a poem or a painting is a symbol linking the artist and the receptor. His is neither the inalterable Albertian perspective that denes both extremes of the bridge prior to any bodily localization nor the aesthetic model that brings together two individuals in the virtual space of the work, spanning the temporal breach between them with the subjects universal position before the object. These models of communication assume a signifying practice that is a priori accessible to those who read the book or view the

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painting, and whose dominant logic effaces the difference between the media and technologies producing those texts. While Cortazar does not reject this proposition explicitly, his concern clearly lies in nding a form of mediation that can transport the signifying space inhabited by a novel or a painting to the other extremity of the bridge. Their communicative value depends on this passage, a process of mediation that must be built through a technical realization of imaginative practice. The work, which has always been a bridge, depends on a greater signifying practice to materialize as a bridge that will make communication tangible. Like the practice itself, the works function is contingent to the transformations wrought by contact. Since the communicative act conditions how contact is established on the opposite shore, the spectatorship is never a purely passive receptor but one that negotiates how its extremity of the bridge will be dened. On the other shore are those who cannot yet read. Yet if neither novel nor painting, word nor image, has ever reached the other shore, it is due less to a dearth of technical reading skills than to a discursive incompatibility between the culture of literacy and the mode of reading that Cortazar calls imagination. The difference between those who cannot read and those who can is a difference of the signifying practices that undergird the processes of cognition by which each group confronts the individual texts. This disjunction implies that each signifying space houses a collective that is heterogeneous to the others, and that the development of a different signifying practice will simultaneously bring a new collective into formation. In this conception of the medium as part of an economy of communication, the bridge and the banks emerge in a discursive correspondence where the communicative act and the ground are mutually determining. Cortazar emphasizes this by closing his presentation with the claim that it is a constitutive moment in the construction of the bridge he has imagined, a creative instance of the discursive community he envisions rather than a description of what it could be. The individual works are similarly drawn into the bridge, as are the intellectuals they metonymically represent and the locations they inhabit. The work becomes text. Unlike the aesthetic model Cortazar mentions in passing, this bridge is not a sign of communication or contact but its realization, the conguration of a signifying practice and a (political) collective. Cortazar, architect of the word, imagines the arches of a bridge that will draw in the inhabited locations of distant sites. This imagining of the discursive bridge is an act, a motion to consolidate structure and banks into a single location where a new collective will come into formation. The bridge is a technology of displacement that unites disparate locations and inhabitable spaces. Space is not the empty space of geometric calculation and distance, it is not symbolic, Cartesian space, but a conception of space that Martin Heidegger posits as a place of dwelling, a building that cannot be reduced to extensio or the measurable distance from a location. Rather than a representational model of contact where only mental representations of distant things run through our minds and heads as substitutes for the things, it is in the nature of our thinking of that bridge that in itself thinking gets through, persists through, the distance to that location.12 Heidegger shows how this dwelling through thought reveals that the Greek conception of techne lies concealed in architecture and building just as it lies concealed in the technology of modern machinery (p. 159). Techne

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extends from the architecture of Cortazars bridge to the video technology he encourages intellectuals to use. The call to make contact with audiovisual equipmenttomen contacto con equipos de videoconverges with the architecture of the word in both qualications of the bridge as image and reality. Tactile interaction with technology overcomes the distance imposed by political exile and circumvents the homogenous empty space that neutralizes thinking as a practice of dwelling. Contact with the medium partially constitutes the imaginary act that builds the bridge, and imaginingwhat Heidegger calls thinkingis the strongest weapon for power and identity. In the signifying system proper to the modalities of contact, the intellectual, the readers and the spaces they inhabit are immanent to the processes of mediation rather than xed, peripheral brackets within which mediation takes place. Discourse, political intervention and geographic distance are contingent to the signifying system, a form of tangible communication that passes through the bodys touch and not the disembodied eye. The role Cortazar gives to the imagination anticipates the more complex problems of agency associated with a non-representational conception of the medium. The question of how the imagination pregures in the construction of the bridge returns us to our intention of exploring the political potential of non-print media. As we have seen, this is a problem that surpasses the narrow denition of literacy as a reading skill, touching instead on the situation of the media within a greater signifying system. The denition of this system threatens to obfuscate the specicity of image-based media such as photography and painting, since each is subjected to the same discursive economy that determines how it will be read. Cortazars ctional texts on photography are instructive here, as they express the particularity of the medium within the system, and, in keeping with the techne found in the bridge and modern technology, highlight the importance of the apparatus in marking the difference on the viewed object, the text and the viewing body.

II Apocalypse of Solentiname explores the difference between photographys derived image and paintings limpid and pristine expression. This short text, originally published in Nicaragua, tan violentamente dulce, raises the same questions of agency, memory and physical displacement that we nd in his political essays. Cortazar writes this short story during the same period he presents the lecture on the bridge and other texts on literature, exile and censorship, problems that have taken on new signicance for the author since the military coup detat in Argentina. An open commentary on Latin American politics, he focuses on the intellectuals task in an autobiographical context. After ying into Costa Rica and travelling over land and water to Solentiname, Cortazar, who writes himself into the narrative as its protagonist, takes several shots of the paintings made by the children of poet Ernesto Cardenals parish. Praising the images, which hold the rst vision of the world, the clean look that describes its surroundings like a song of eulogy, he describes in detail the process of putting them on lm:

The Modalities of Contact Me acorde que tena un rollo de color en la camara y sal a la veranda con una brazada de cuadros; Sergio que llegaba me ayudo a tenerlos parados en la buena luz, y de uno en uno los fui fotograando con cuidado, centrando de manera que cada cuadro ocupara enteramente el visor. Las casualidades son as: me quedaban tantas tomas como cuadros, ninguno se quedo afuera y cuando vino Ernesto a decirnos que la panga estaba lista le conte lo que haba hecho y el se rio, ladron de cuadros, contrabandista de imagenes.13 [I recalled that I had a roll of colour lm in the camera and went onto the veranda with an armful of paintings. Sergio, just arriving, helped me hold them still in good light while I carefully photographed them one by one, centring them so that each canvas entirely lled the frame. By chance, it so happens that my lm had as many shots as there were paintings, so that none was left out, and when Ernesto came to tell us that the vehicle was ready I told him what I had done and he laughed, burglar of paintings, smuggler of images.]

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Cortazar draws an exact symmetry between the cameras frame and each paintings size, the number of shots and the number of canvases, and the colour lm that can capture the brilliant pigments of the painted images. The exact reproduction of colour and framing eliminates any surplus of meaning between the copy and the original that could invite a semiotic or phenomenological analysis of their difference. We must instead turn to the absolute difference between them, the technological apparatus that produces and projects the photographic image. The difference between painting and photography has long been conceived as a problem of agency. Painting offers a human view of the world, an intense expression of the individual subject-genius that dominates every stroke of the brush. Photography presents the world in a manner that escapes human perspectives total control, displacing the subjects xed position before its representation of the world with an image that is virtually indistinguishable from the model. If both artists manipulate the techniques of imaginary production proper to their respective images, the photograph nevertheless records the trace of creative activity that escapes the human hand. Whatever the technologys instrumental value, its relative autonomy leaves scintillae that are alienating to the photographer. Only a painter who had worked in a mystic trance would experience a similar malaise or exhilaration before the nished image. The total mastery that led Alberti to call painting a continuation of life deteriorates before the unknown agency of photographic technology. In the discourse on photography, this strangeness has been represented as a sign of death or the irrational. In 1846, Carlyle describes Emersons photo as a gure from the valley of death, and beseeches his friend to send him a sketch traced by a human hand. The death gure resurfaces in Hawthorne, Hardy and Proust, before becoming the object of critical scrutiny with Walter Benjamin and Andre Bazin. This culminates with Roland Barthes, who places death, the irrational and the viewer into a single receptive matrix that collapses the difference between the image and the subjective gaze. Through each photograph, I inevitably passed beyond the unreality of the thing represented, I irrationally entered into the spectacle, into the image, embracing that which is dead, that which will die.14

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Consistently present in collective myths about photography since its inception, the gures of death and the irrational are an intuition of the world afrming itself independently of the rational mind posited by enlightened humanism. Cortazar claries photographys differences from painting when he recounts his viewing of the parish shots, echoing the problems agency and mortality present in the discourse on the modern image. When loading the projector tray he considers the value of the shots of the paintings, of art, in their relation to the other photos of life: but why place the paintings rst, why the professional deformation, art before life? And why not? asked the other in his eternal and disarming dialogue, brotherly and resentful, why not start with the paintings of Solentiname if they too are life? The storys fantastic moment occurs when Cortazar nds that the paintings have been replaced with random shots of violence and death from different places in the AmericasNicaragua, of course, but also Buenos Aires, Sao Paulo, Bolivia, Guatemala. Like a lm, the images follow one another independently of the viewers will: Nor did my hand obey when I pressed the button I never knew whether or not I continued pressing the button. The montages violent displacements stupefy the viewer, who cannot think in time with the clash of disparate spaces in his recorded memories (recuerdos): thinking whatever one thinks, it always arrives before oneself and leaves him or her so far behind .15 Thought runs behind the recognition of its own belatedness. The receptors contact with the technological apparatus overturns the symmetry between the media. The one-to-one correspondence dissolves and the photographic images of death replace the paintings representations of life. Having described with awe the Polaroid photo that makes people materialize from la nada, Cortazar now nds that la nada, nothingness, death, has found its way back into the frame. He sees the medium produce images in the same instant it projects them, when he watches without being able to think or act in time despite (and because of) the contact he makes with the technology. Cortazars short story shares with other texts on photography the problem of a restricted agency guratively represented as death. He conceives of this problem within the matrix of the modalities of contact, where the technology of tangible communication belongs to an effort to intervene in the distant political scenes unfolding on the screen. Making contact with the technology implies collapsing the distance that lies between political bodies. Instead of a clean gaze or a rst vision of the world, photography presents the world independently of a subjective perspective. The short narratives political content can be read as an allegory of this epistemological problem. If the paintings follow an Albertian code that preserves life, they do so in an aesthetic space of universal human creation that negates the world. In the short narrative, this negation takes the form of an absence of political violence from the vivid canvases. Photography, however, produces a positive image that remains immanent to the world and the enunciative instance it relays. The author clearly distinguishes the beautiful and serene, even utopian, colour paintings from the violent black-and-white photographs of Latin Americas political landscape: life surrounded by death (p. 82). In the story, the images of violence participate in global ows that transcend the nation-states panoptic vision appearing in the world press that Cortazar claims to accurately represent those countries repressive regimes. If the bright colours that inspire him to

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record the painting indicate a bond of intention between his vision and that of the artist, the black-and-white photos escape his instrumental control over the mechanism and, signicantly, present what he cannot see without it. He sees inaccessible places (notably Buenos Aires) as well as the hidden violence that eclipses those who can no longer be seen, the desaparecidos, behind the social apathy and collective denial of a culture of fear.16 The shift from colour to black and white marks the difference between two economies of vision, each of which implies its own truth-value and its own forms of movement and displacement. Photographic technology produces images which circumvent the obstacles that exile and censorship present to the circulation of people and information. These ows qualitatively transform the images from virtual utopia to violent actuality. Their transition between statesshifting from a painted to a photographic image, but also from one political territory to anothersimilarly transforms the smuggler of images, who undergoes a metamorphosis before the image. The evisceration of colour from the frame expresses a difference that passes through the receivers body within the same economy of movement. Many passages describe the protagonists itinerary, the repeated greetings and departures, and underline the continuous displacements that make him capable of recognizing the war-torn Latin American republics in the photomontage. The mode of reception moves him into and through the images of those distant locations. His consequent physical illness, the vomiting so often interpreted as evidence of a guilty conscience,17 is the culmination of the movements converging on the body since the beginning of the short story. The effect of the lm on Cortazars bodyand the slide show, a photomontage unfolding independently of the viewer, is a lmresults from the modalities of contact. It reminds us of the tactile quality that Benjamin attributes to the cinematic image, which he claims to operate according to the same basis of ballistics as the Dadaist image, hitting the spectator like a bullet. Cortazars reading of the photographic image in Apocalypse of Solentiname is in keeping with the modalities of contact he recommends to the exiled intellectual. He repeats a reading practice that conjoins a domestic interior to the space inhabited by the paintings. This practice invents space in a manner that circumvents the abstract model of the Renaissance utopia or the Enlightenment project. Unlike the negative space that the lettered city or the panoptic gaze will dialectically sublate as its borders radiate outwards, the new modalities permit a positive space of exile that bridges the gap between inhabited locations. Falling away from the transcendence of an instituting gaze, the inhabitants occupy the positive space by making contact with image-producing technologies in a form of tangible communication. The tactile appropriation of the techne that lies hidden in the apparatuses and in architecture extends, or distends, the inhabitants bodies beyond its corporal limitations, forcing them into a cyborg network.18 With the photographic image, individual agency can only be assured by the paradoxical gesture of relinquishing it to collective discourse. The modalities of contact attempt to think exile in positive terms, upsetting an economy of knowledge structured on the force of the negative dialectic. The modalities circumvent rather than negate those of a dominant Modernity, seeking a strange positivity that upsets notions of space and exclusion. Cortazar nds an afnity between the new modalities and the photographic images

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afrmation of the world, and seeks to repeat the reality it produces in his writing practice. In a text entitled America Latina: exilio y literatura, Cortazar attempts to think of exile as a positive rather than reactive movement in its relation to the force of the state: Y si los exiliados optaran tambien por considerar como positivo ese exilio? Creo que mas que nunca es necesario convertir la negatividad del exilioque conrma as el triunfo del enemigoen una nueva toma de realidad, una realidad basada en valores y no en disvalores, una realidad que el trabajo especco del escritor puede volver positiva y ecaz, invirtiendo por completo el programa del adversario y salien dose al frente de una manera que este no poda imaginar.19 [And if exiles also opted to think of their exile as positive? I believe it is more necessary than ever to convert exiles negativitywhich conrms the enemys triumphinto a new take on reality, a reality based on values rather than non-values, a reality that the writers specic work can make positive and efcient, completely inverting the adversarys programme and moving ahead in a manner that the opponent could not have imagined.] The nueva toma de realidad, which translates as a new take on or of reality, evokes the tomar contacto of the earlier essay as well as the taking of a photograph. The logic we nd in the discourse on the mechanically produced image corresponds to a positive movement in the political realm. This positivity evades the dialectic that the master uses to consolidate its institutional (and instituting) identity. Accepting the negative position in relation to the states identity conrms the enemys agency in the historical instance that has displaced the exile. However, the new take circumvents the binary orbit that unites the central state to its peripheral subject satellites, and inverts its unilateral agency. The exiles can take a path unimaginable to the state, be more free and more in their land than the Latin American regimes that are exiled from authentic national reality. By assuming a degree of agency with another form of imagination that gives a new take on reality, or takes back realitythat redeems reality20the exiles spin off on a nomadic tangent that destabilizes the identication of the state with the nation. This realignment is a vital experience that surpasses literature, binding reader and writer with a discursive act that makes them surface with the value they give to mediation. The individual preserves agency only to the degree that he or she simultaneously relinquishes it to discourse, a paradoxical process that Cortazar, like Barthes on photography, describes as a step into the self-styled madness of Hamlet, a cultivation of madness (demencia) as method. And undoing the mind, the mens bound historically to memory and anamnesis, is the best method in the ght for the imagination. In Apocalipsis de Solentiname and his various political writings Cortazar places the errant movement of the contrabandista and the exile alongside photography and the use of video technology. Together, these form an array of discursive strategies for the formation of a collective. The photograph brings the view into visceral contact with the political realities of Latin America, making them readable despite the panoptic gaze of the subject-city or the nation-state, creating a legend that can hollow out a ssure in the monument of ofcial history. Cortazars recommendation of a positive movement for the problem of

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exile is part of a strategy towards making a legend by which the collective, on both sides of the Atlantic, will be able to read itself in a discursive act. Gilles Deleuze also sees that the modern image offers great potential for this strategy in the Third World. Its collective conditions of dissemination and reception, unburdened by illiteracy, give it a privileged status for the development of a minor expression in the place of the missing people, le peuple qui manque. He nds this strategy in the cinema of Glauber Rocha and other forms of third cinemaFernando Solanas, Jorge Sanjines and Tomas Gutierrez Alea also come to mindthat focus on the people in a state of becoming, pushed into transition by an enunciative act of fabulation. Deleuze claims that such lms manage to snatch from the unliveable a speech-act that could not be silenced, an act of story-telling [fabulation] that would not be a return to myth but a production of collective utterances capable of raising misery to a strange positivity, the invention of a people.21 This push into transition is a mutation or a passage, a positive movement that circumvents the discursive economy which has institutionalized lm as a narrative medium, like a branch of literature. It sidesteps the lettered citys image of an already existing people, such as those of the national spirit (Volksgeist) and other invented traditions, and reaches for modalities of contact that extend to a people that does not yet exist, un peuple qui manque. Cortazar asks writers in the misery of exile to address those who cannot yet read, to espouse a method that will invent and put a people into movement, and to enter into a nomadism that gathers together the exiled and their readers on a shared discursive bridge. It is a call to make a legend that will allow the shifting people to read itself as both image and reality. Notes
1. On global ows see Arjun Appadurais Modernity at Large; on the implications of the image in the decline of literacy see the introduction to Wlad Godzichs Culture of Literacy and The Language Market under the Hegemony of the Image; on post-national identities see May Josephs Nomadic Identities. 2. See Angel Ramas seminal work on The Lettered City. 3. Walter Mignolo places the amoxtli alongside the quipu as another form of book. 4. Jean Franco explores these fronts in The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. 5. Alguien que anda por ah, p. 122. All translations are my own unless otherwise noted. I have included the original Spanish, either in the text or in the endnotes, wherever the length of the quote or its semantic precision makes it necessary. 6. Por que los escritores que se limitan especcamente a escribir artculos que casi nunca pueden entrar en sus pases no toman contacto con equipos de video, cada vez mas accesibles y numerosos en los sectores militantes latinoamericanos para burlar facilmente las barreras de la censura? (emphasis in the original, p. 130). [Why dont writers who specically limit themselves to publishing articles that are almost never permitted into their countries make contact (tomar contacto) with video equipment, ever more numerable and accessible in Latin American militant sectors to easily outfox barriers of censorship?] 7. In this second qualication I am referring to media considered as instruments that operate in accordance with the dominant parameters established by print, the central focus of Benedict Andersons study on the rise of nineteenth-century nationalism. In particular, I have in mind the television stations and showsand especially the telenovelasthat rule over prime time with unwavering popularity, watched by literate and illiterate viewers alike. 8. On the Hegelian aspects of Muralismo I am following Sabine Mabardi, unpublished monograph. That muralismo is a form of painting sets it apart from other visual media that use technologies of reproduction. It nevertheless shares with these media its orientation towards a mass public

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and the condition of distractedness that Benjamin considers to be part of the mode by which it is appropriated. This derives from its participation in the urban landscape as a work that is inseparable from the architecture upon which it is painted, a quality which gives it the techne that Heidegger also nds hidden in modern technology. Its architectural presence and the practice of its reception make these murals irreducibly distinct from painted works found in museums. La ciudad letrada. por su boca racial hablaba nada menos que el Espritu (p. 80). Lo sentimos viviente, real, activo, en las estancias nales de esta pelcula serrana, que es como el propio autor dene su libro. Lo que distingue al nuevo indio no es la instruccion sino el espritu (El alfabeto no redime al indio). Later in the same article, Mariategui again outlines the negative relationship between literacy and the image: La fe en el resurgimiento indgena no proviene de un proceso de occidentalizacion material de la tierra keswa. No es la civilizacion, no es el alfabeto del blanco, lo que levanta el alma del indio. Es el mito, es la idea de la revolucion socialista. Mariategui Total (Tomo 1), pp. 337341. El escritor y su quehacer en America Latina, in Textos Polticos, p. 130. Si es cierto que la imaginacion es y sera nuestra mejor arma para tomar el poder, entendiendo por poder una participacion mas estrecha y mas ecaz en la lucha del pueblo por su identidad y su legtimo destino, nuestro quehacer tiene que articularse a base de tecnicas mas ecaces que las consuetu dinarias . Building Dwelling Thinking, in Poetry, Language, Thought, pp. 156157. Apocalipsis de Solentiname, Alguien que anda por ah, p. 83. The previous phrase reads: la vision primera del mundo, la mirada limpia del que describe su entorno como un canto de alabanza . Roland Barthes, p. 179, my translation: A travers chacune delles [les photos], infailliblement, je passais outre lirrealite de la chose representee, jentrais follement dans le spectacle, dans limage, entourant de mes bras ce qui est mort, ce qui va mourir. For Andre Bazin photography completes the history of plastic representations of death, embalming time. Roland Barthes claims that the dead return in every photo, Benjamin that the photo gives the moment a posthumous shock. pero por que los cuadritos primero, por que la deformacion profesional, el arte antes que la vida, y por que no, le dijo el otro a este en su eterno indesarmable dialogo fraterno y rencoroso, por que no mirar primero las pinturas de Solentiname si tambien son la vida (p. 84). Tampoco mi mano obedeca cuando apreto el boton y fue un salitral interminable de medioda . Nunca supe si segua apretando o no el boton. Se piensa lo que se piensa, eso llega siempre antes que uno mismo y lo deja tan atras See Juan E. Corradis thesis on the culture of fear. See Cortazars response to this interpretation made by Danubio Torres Fierro, in Obras crticas/3, pp. 151160. See Donna Haraways Cyborg Manifesto. America latina: exilio y literatura, in Obra crtica/3, pp. 167168. Cortazar continues: los verdaderos exiliados son los regmenes fascistas de nuestro continente, exiliados de la autentica realidad nacional, exiliados de la justicia social, exiliados de la alegra, exiliados de la paz. Nosotros somos mas libres y estamos mas en nuestra tierra que ellos. I borrow this phrase from Siegfried Kracauer. Cinema 2. The Time-Image, p. 222 (translation modied, emphasis added). Cinema 2, p. 289: darracher a linvivable un acte de parole quon ne pourrait pas faire taire, un acte de fabulation ` qui ne serait pas un retour au mythe mais une production denonces collectifs capable delever la misere a une etrange positivite, linvention dun peuple. ` `

9. 10.

11.

12. 13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

Works Cited
Arjun Appadurai, Modernity at Large. Cultural Dimensions of Globalization (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1996). Roland Barthes, La chambre claire. Note sur la photographie (Paris: Editions Gallimard, 1980). Italo Calvino. Invisible Cities, trans. by William Weaver (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1974). Juan E. Corradi, The Culture of Fear in Civil Society, in From Military Rule to Liberal Democracy in Argentina, ed. by Monica Peralta-Ramos and Carlos Waisman (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1987).

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Juan E. Corradi, The Fitful Republic. Economics, Society and Culture in Argentina (Boulder: Westview Press, 1985).Julio Cortazar, Textos Polticos (Barcelona: Editorial Plaza y Janes, 1985). Julio Cortazar, Alguien que anda por ah (Barcelona: Bruguera, 1983). Julio Cortazar, Obras crticas/3 (Madrid: Alfaguara, 1994). Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: LImage-temps (Paris: Les Editions de Minuit, 1985). Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2. The Time-Image, trans. by Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (London: Athlone Press, 1989). Jean Franco, The Decline and Fall of the Lettered City. Latin America in the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002). Wlad Godzich, Culture of Literacy (Cambridge MA, and London: Harvard University Press, 1994). Wlad Godzich, The Language Market under the Hegemony of the Image, Eutopas, 29 (1993). Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991). Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought (New York: Harper & Row Publishers, 1971). May Joseph, Nomadic Identities. The Performance of Citizenship (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1999). Siegfried Kracauer, Theory of Film. The Redemption of Physical Reality (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1997). Jose Mariategui, Mariategui Total, Tomo 1 (Lima: Empresa Editora Amauta, S.A., 1994). Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy, Territoriality, and Colonization (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1995). Angel Rama, La ciudad letrada (Hanover: Ediciones del norte, 1984).