Introduction

The insertion of technological implements and transmitters directly into the body has played a significant role in postdictatorship culture in Argentina. Technological implants connect machines, brains, bodies, and texts in a potent and unstable metaphor for shifts in the configurations of power during a period of rapid change. The implant, the direct technological intervention into the body, has worked its way into debates about neoliberalism, connecting critical and fictional texts as a metaphor for the contested shifts in the relationship between the individual, the state, and the market. It has a cameo role, for instance, in Beatriz Sarlo’s

Escenas de la vida posmoderna

in a section that discusses how, under the conditions of neoliberal consumer culture, identities and cultural differences are regulated by the market. The technological penetration of the body is invoked by way of a warning of where this dominance of market logic over self-identity is leading us:

prótesis, sustancias sintéticas, soportes artificiales, que entran en el cuerpo durante intervenciones que lo modifican según las pautas de un

design

que cambia cada quinquenio (¿quién quiere los pechos chatos que se usaron hace diez años o la delgadez de la década del sesenta?).

1

Prostheses, synthetic substances, artificial memory banks, which enter the body during operations and modify it according to designs that change every five years (who wants the same flat chest from ten years ago or a slim-line figure that was fashionable in the sixties?)