Science Fiction and Digital Technologies in Argentine and Brazilian Culture

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?)

A particularly striking dimension of the novels referred to by de Sousa Causo and Ginway as Tupinipunk, is their blend of neoliberal fantasies of disembodiment with concepts of immaterial, spiritual bodies proposed by the espiritista sciences during the late nineteenth century in Brazil. The description of the cyborg bodies in the novels and short stories evokes the imagery of the electromagnetic body, the body understood in terms of electromagnetic flows. In one respect, this is a return to a tradition within science fiction (or, the fictional writing that critics such as de Sousa Causo and Haywood Ferreira have “retro-labeled” science fiction) that is as old as the history and prehistory of the genre in Brazil. Some of the first novels that can be usefully viewed in terms of early science fiction, including Brazil 2000 (1869) by Joaquim Felício dos Santos and O doutor Benignus (1875) by Augusto Emílio Zaluar, discuss ideas from magnetism and spiritism. De Sousa Causo, borrowing Roberto Schwarz’s formulation, argues that the strong presence of espiritismo in these texts, although heavily influenced by the writings of the French spiritist and science fiction author Camille Flammarion, points to the fact that the scientific ideas that drive the genre were “out of place” in Brazil at the end of the nineteenth century and that science and technology had little relevance for authors such as Zaluar.¹

One of the most striking features of Fawcett and Sirkis’s cyberpunk narratives is their emphasis on race. On a superficial reading, the role of race in the novels would seem to be another repetition of a central trope from the US cyberpunk novels. As a number of critics have pointed out, racial distinctions play an important part in Gibson’s fiction. In her analysis of racial politics in the representation of cyberspace in US mass culture, Lisa Nakamura argues that cyberpunk fiction works to reaffirm “nostalgic and familiar” identity positions, including racial identities, at a time when these identities are being “reconfigured and re-envisioned.”¹ Nakamura argues that although the increasing technological mediation of everyday communication seems to render identity more “fluid,” undermining the solidity of racial and gender stereotypes by making them seem contingent and manipulable, these stereotypes are more often than not reproduced and reaffirmed in the digital world. “Cybertypes” is the term she uses for the reaffirmation of racial and gender stereotypes as a way of “stabilizing a sense of the white self and identity that is threatened by the radical fluidity and disconnect between mind and body” that was celebrated by so much early cyberculture.² We see this process of “shoring up nostalgic and familiar” identity positions most clearly in Gibson’s Sprawl Trilogy in which Rastafarian communities (Neuromancer) and voodoo practitioners (Count Zero) represent a resistant force of essentialized embodiment against the disembodying forces of cyberspace.

The return to the preoccupations and discourses of Romanticism that was implicit in the cyberfiction texts from Brazil is an explicit, dominant dimension of the texts produced in Argentina. This can partly be explained by the differences between the status of science fiction in Brazil and Argentina. The Brazilian cyberpunk texts revisit tropes and narrative conventions of popular genres ranging from the literatura de sensação of the end of the nineteenth century to the pornochanchada of the 1970s and 1980s, through a literary equivalent of the “garbage aesthetic.” The two Argentine texts that I discuss in the following two chapters, meanwhile, insert themselves firmly into the tradition of postmodern literary science fiction, the model of which was provided by Piglia through Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares. By the time that Eduardo Blaustein and Marcelo Cohen sat down to write their novels, the use of science fiction narratives to make political points was a tried and tested strategy, employed through different media from the comic book, in El Eternauta (1957–1959) by Héctor Germán Oesterheld with artwork by Francisco Solano López, to film, in Hugo Santiago’s Invasión (1969) and Eliseo Subiela’s Hombre mirando al sudeste (1986). This is not to say that a tradition of politicized science fiction writing was absent in Brazil (as evidenced by Ignácio de Loyola Brandão’s 1981 novel Não verás país nenhum) but that it was much more firmly rooted in Argentina.

In her article on postpolitics in Latin America, Beatriz Sarlo describes Marcelo Cohen’s best-known novel El oído absoluto (1989) as offering a critique of the neoliberal present coded in the form of a science fiction dystopia. Through the classic science fictional procedures of exaggeration and displacement, Cohen’s novel stages the regime of simulacra that Sarlo describes in her now classic account of neoliberal consumer culture in Argentina, Escenas de la vida posmoderna (1994). The rampant consumerism captured by Cohen’s novel perfectly complements Sarlo’s account of the paradox of “programmed individualism” at the heart of neoliberal consumerism. This aspect of Cohen’s fiction is clearest in his narratives set in the fantastical world of the Delta Panorámico, which spans three texts from the 2001 short story collection Los acuáticos through the 2007 novel Donde yo no estaba to his 2011 novel Casa de Ottro. The islands of the Delta are home to a fantastical phenomenon known as the “Panconciencia,” which manifests itself as an intersubjective network that allows inhabitants of the Delta to inhabit briefly the minds of the other inhabitants. The discovery sparks a frenzy of technological innovation in which the inhabitants of the island set out to harness or control these interneural connections.

The processes of affective automation, particularly the process that Stiegler terms “mnemotechnological control,” are a constant underlying theme in the work of the Brazilian comic book artist and novelist Lourenço Mutarelli. No comic book artist or script writer has explored, to the same degree as Mutarelli, the intermedial nature of the comic form both as a technology of affective control and as a tool to examine and contest this control. Mutarelli’s career as a comic book writer and artist spans the period of the postdictatorship. He started creating comics during the late 1980s in independently distributed Fanzines and saw his first critical success in 1991 with the album Transubstanciação [Transubstantiation]. In 2005, he declared his comic A caixa de areia [The Sand Box] to be his last venture in the medium only to return in 2011 with Quando o meu pai se encontrou com o ET fazia um dia quente [When my dad met ET the weather was fine]. His work provides a register of the urban anxieties of the age: predominant among them is the increasing exteriorization of memory into technological supports and the role this plays in what Shaviro refers to as the “generation and capitalization” of affect.

The main uniting feature of the texts discussed in this book is their view of technology not as the embodiment of rigid systems of power but in terms of the potential that they open up. It is for this reason that the role of technology in Deleuze’s philosophy has provided such a useful lens through which to examine these technological fantasies. Colebrook has drawn out two conceptions of technology that are set in tension in Deleuze’s writing. On the one hand, technology is “any repeatable or regular practice that maximizes the efficiency of life” or “an already established set of relations allowing for the ongoing maximization of energy.”¹ In other words, technology is the manifestation of habit and, as such, has the force of the normative. In this sense humanity itself is technology, a set of habitualized routines. But technology is also a moment of transformation, a moment when the human opens itself up to change and the inhuman. This is the potentiality that Deleuze saw in the technology of the cinema. As Colebrook puts it: “Cinema bears the potential to free thought and perception from technology through technology; the very machines that extend life allowing for the reduction of effort can also open up new problems and new creations.”² But cinema is only “truly or essentially cinema,” in other words only fulfills the potentiality of its technology, when it is “pushed to exhaustion.”³