Theories and Representations of Agency in Neoliberal Argentina, 2001-2010 Jessica Cullen ...

231 Pages·2015·1.26 MB·English

The Consumer Dictator:
Theories and Representations of Agency in Neoliberal Argentina, 2001-2010

Jessica Cullen Dzaman

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
Requirements for the degree 
of
Doctor of Philosophy

in the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

2015
© 2015
Jessica Cullen Dzaman
All rights reserved
ABSTRACT

The Consumer Dictator:
Theories and Representations of Agency in Neoliberal Argentina, 2001-2010

Jessica Cullen Dzaman

This dissertation examines the co-evolution of consumption and production as
competing models of agency in Argentine culture in the era of global consumer capitalism.
Tracing the influence of several key political and intellectual developments in Latin America, the
US, and Europe on the symbolic language of regional politics, I map out how participation in
the global consumer market came to be understood as an expression of power and authority in
the context of Argentina's disastrous experiment with neoliberalism in the last three decades of
the 20th century. Then, using films and literary texts including works by Lisandro Alonso,
Adrián Caetano, and Aníbal Jarkowski together with critical projects by George Yúdice and
Josefina Ludmer, I examine how a model of subjectivity that exaggerates the economic, social,
and cultural agency of consumers has managed to persist in Argentina's cultural imagination
despite growing disillusionment with the neoliberal model and the disenfranchisement of the
nation's consumers. Through close readings that reveal work as the site of a restored order
that is ultimately incomplete, fantastical, and contradictory, I show how the myth of the
consumer dictator perpetuates itself through a system of intellectual values, including abstract,
absolutist visions freedom and tolerance, that isolate the subject and divert communication,
inscribing an extreme version of consumer agency even upon production itself. Together, these
instances of interrupted reform suggest that a model of agency suited to the era of global
consumer capitalism must understand production and consumption not as alternative options,
but as distinct, integral modes of creativity.
CONTENTS

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………….. ii
Introduction……………………………………………..…………………………………………… 1
1. Utopias of Production and Consumption in Latin American Politics and Culture……….. 28
2. Global Citizenship and the Cultural Value of Labor in Lisandro Alonso’s La libertad and
Adrián Caetano’s Bolivia……………………………………………………………... 68
3. Consumer power and social responsibility in Fabián Bielinsky’s Nueve reinas and Aníbal
Jarkowski’s El trabajo.………………………………………………………………… 128
4. The critic as consumer: George Yúdice and Josefina Ludmer………………………..……. 163
Conclusion………………..……………………….…………………………………………………. 206
Works Cited…………………………………………………………………………………………... 214

i
Acknowledgments

I would like to thank my dissertation advisor, Carlos J. Alonso, for generously
contributing his insight and experience at each step in the development of this project. Thank
you also to Professor Graciela Montaldo for directing my first qualifying exam, and for her
helpful bibliographic suggestions. I am very grateful to her and to Professors Orlando
Bentacor, Ronald Briggs, and Karen Benezra for serving on my committee.
I also owe thanks to the many professors, instructors, and informal advisors who offered
encouragement, guidance, and inspiration over the course of my studies: Marta Peixoto, José
Antonio Castellanos-Pazos, Alessandra Russo, Patricia Grieve, Marc Hertzman, Maite Conde,
and of course the original and sin par Antonio Carreño.
A heartfelt thank you as well to Professor Christia Mercer, for extending me the
opportunity to teach in the Core, and for leading me through the first year with wise, kind, and
frank advice. Taking part in "Lit Hum" was a singularly rich experience that helped me to
develop the ideas about literary criticism explored in this thesis--and to recognize the value of
voicing my own perspective.
In that regard, too, I am grateful to Sheryl Kaskowitz for reading parts of this manuscript
and contributing thoughtful suggestions that improved both the text and the sanity of its writer.
Thanks to my New York family: BB, JL, DI, and GS. To Duane, for sustaining me and
challenging me always. It's more fun than I thought possible. And finally, to my first family,
especially Mom, Dad, Matthew, Lindsay, and Grandma. Thank you for all the ways in which
you have shown your support, including but not limited to generously lending your faith,
apartments, counsel, shoulders, ears, tech support, and even on one occasion shoes, so that I
could see this project through. I love you.

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Introduction

The rise of a monolithic global capitalism since the 1980s has made consumption an
increasingly important and influential part of the cultural and political landscape. The
technocratic political culture of global capitalism relocates politics from the public sphere of
debate to the private realm of the subject’s innermost desires, introducing a new kind of utopia
founded on the premise of the moral and intellectual inadequacy of the human subject. The
new consumer utopia reimagines reason, discourse, tradition, and culture not as the building
blocks of progress, but rather as obstacles to the realization of a natural social order.
Eschewing inherently flawed collective endeavors, the subject of that utopia—the
consumer dictator—rules with uncontested authority over his own unique system of social and
cultural values. His power over his own jurisdiction is absolute, but beyond that, he cannot be
sure of his impact on the social order. His duty is to himself alone; in pursuing his own
interests, he rests assured that he is doing his part to contribute indirectly to the rightful order
of things, inputting his own truths into the neutral aggregator of the market, which will
eventually transform his individual desires into social outcomes that are right, natural, and
fair—but whose logic eludes comprehension. The truth contained within his desires is a latent
one; a coded, irreplaceable and authentic message that can only be “read” and translated into
meaningful social outcomes by the market itself.
In other words, there is always hope that what looks like an impending disaster might not
be. This hope was the only kind left in Argentina in December of 2001 as the nation’s
depressed economy careened toward total collapse. Over the past three years, the country’s
productivity had slowed to a halt as foreign investors withdrew from the region and the national
1
unemployment rate crept toward 25 percent. It was with the last remaining scrap of unlikely,
experience-denying hope that the government, under threat of imminent default, made a final
effort to stabilize the shaky financial system by preventing citizens from withdrawing large
sums of money from their personal accounts. While Argentina’s public default—the largest in
world history—did not come until shortly after the banking freeze, the “corralito” itself served
as the symbolic breaking point, marking the economy’s descent into full-scale collapse. It
provoked an outpouring of public anger that threatened the political order as well, stoking
ongoing demonstrations against wage cuts for public employees into an explosion of mass
protests across the country. In the capital, protestors began to clash with police outside the
seat of government, demanding the resignation of President Fernando de la Rúa until the
disgraced leader escaped the outraged crowds with a sensational exit by helicopter.
These dramatic events announced a crisis to the world—but a longer view reveals a more
complicated truth. As the excitement faded, analytical accounts of the “crisis” emphasized
continuity rather than rupture.1 The signs that increased participation in the global free market
was a “bad deal” for Argentina were all around, in plain sight, carved into the changing
cityscape of Buenos Aires. (In the city center, new luxury developments catering to the tastes
of an international elite competed for space with improvised shantytowns known as villas
miserias; in the surrounding suburbs, those lucky enough to have jobs passed abandoned
factories on their commute to the international business district downtown.) Still, with the slow,
painful unraveling of the Soviet Union finally complete and the information revolution in full
swing, integration into the global free market seemed to be the only way forward. Authorities in
the international economic community held that the inequality and austerity Latin America was
suffering were merely growing pains—a kind of a temporary penance for years of protectionist
policies that would pass as soon as the region fully embraced the true path of the free market.
2
In testament to this neoliberal theodicy was Milton Friedman’s “Miracle of Chile,” right next
door.
Thus, despite the demonstrations of outrage that captured the attention of the world
media, most Argentines experienced the crisis less as a shock than as the culmination of
frustrations that had been building up for years. The dominant trope that emerged in popular
and journalistic narratives was that of “waking up” to reality.2 There was some wisdom to this
common-sense view; besides reshuffling power at the top and inspiring a brief flurry of
grassroots efforts,3 the crisis did not bring about significant, lasting economic or political
reforms. Rather, as a political event, the crisis was largely received as a confirmation of
people’s growing disillusionment with the promises of neoliberalism and the new democratic
order implemented in the 1980s. The general mood of cynicism with regard to national politics
only reinforced the basic premise that the current flawed institutional models were the only
ones feasible in the contemporary world order. In spite of the varied experience of local
economies in Latin America and elsewhere with neoliberalism, an apparent consensus among
global authorities on economic policy continued to endorse the idea that the dual system of
political and economic liberalism, structured around twin ideals of political and economic
freedom, was as inevitable and indivisible as it was imperfect.
In this way, the response to the events of 2001 in Argentina reflected a general climate
of chastened humility throughout the developed world with regard to the possibility of
progressive social change. The economic crisis in Argentina coincided, roughly speaking, with
what Andreas Huyssen calls “the crisis of the ideology of progress” throughout the cultural
universe of global capitalism. Compared to the explosion of utopian—or even dystopian—
predictions about the future that had accompanied other fin-de-siècle periods in modern
history, he argues, the arrival of the 21st century was notably devoid of such imagining. With
the wounds of the spectacular failures of 20th-century idealism still fresh, the advent of a new
3
era was an occasion for caution and sobriety. Newly sensitized to the dangers of ambition,
progressive voices across the developed world were tempered with apologies: “I’m not an
economist, but…”; “They did a study…”. Such qualifiers became the norm not out of
pessimism or fatalism, exactly, but rather out of a kind of tentatively optimistic pragmatism. At
least by admitting to our own self-interest and shortsightedness, humanity could hope to live a
reality located a little closer to the truth.
A version of this resignation could be perceived just below the surface of popular
outrage over the corralito, feeding contradictory expressions of guilt, disgust, and frustration
that coexisted in the reactions of many citizens.4 After all, even if the neoliberal policies of
recent administrations had been definitively exposed as disastrous, the bad behavior of de la
Rúa and his predecessor, Carlos Menem (1989-1999)—corruption, greed, laziness, and short-
sightedness—5 also worked on some level to confirm the bleak view of human nature that was
central to mainstream philosophical justifications for the neoliberal approach.
The economic liberalism of what Giovanni Arrighi termed the “long 20th century” arose
in concert with an Enlightenment conception of the rational, self-interested individual subject
as the irreducible unit of the social order. Extrapolating from that understanding of the subject,
early theorists of capitalism portrayed the invisible hand of the market as the most efficient and
fair mechanism for organizing individuals into a social division of labor that would, under a
given set of political circumstances (most importantly, protections for private property, reliable
financial institutions, and free and open access to information), provide the best outcome (the
maximum utility) for society as a whole. However, thanks to the influence of prominent free-
market economists (most notably the enthusiastic popularizer Milton Friedman) and the
political success of “Reaganomics” and “Thatcherism” in the world’s leading economies, the
1980s and 1990s saw the rise of a particular expression of liberalism that downplayed “man-
made” political factors (for example, the active role of governments in shaping and maintaining
4