Deus Ex Machina : Contemporary Argentina's Literature of Infrastructure

This article traces the growth of representations of literary infrastructure in Argentinean literature parallel to the rise of global finance capital and the successive price and debt crises it has visited upon the Argentinean economy since the restoration of liberal democracy in 1983. I argue that as Argentina’s robust mid-century literary institution has declined, the concrete organizations that constitute its infrastructure—for example publishing houses, educational institutions, cultural bureaucracies—become fodder for literary fiction. In short, literature represents its own infrastructure when that infrastructure comes to present a problem. My claim rests at once on the logics of the literary institution and literary form as well as the history of Argentina’s political economy and its effect on cultural institutions. This is at once a position paper about methods of cultural analysis and an outline for an institutionalist history of contemporary Argentinean literature culminating in a close reading of two works, César Aira’s El congreso de la literatura (1996) and Pola Oloixarac’s Mona (2018), that are exemplary of what I call Argentina’s literature of infrastructure.