Mass Media Technics and Post-Politics in César Aira's La villa

Abstract

In recent years Latin Americanist cultural criticism has paid increasing attention to mass media as it affects both inner life (perception, imagination and thought), social relations (ways of representing community, projecting national belonging and envisioning alternative political possibilities) as well as the production, dissemination and archiving of knowledge. The German media theorist Friedrich Kittler characterizes the late nineteenth century and early twentieth century as the age of media differentiation. Differentiation marks a shift from a time dominated by a single media (print) to an era in which the written word must compete with visual and sound media—which in many respects prove more adept than print at capturing the speed and noise of modernity. For Latin America, meanwhile, the work of Néstor García Canclini, Jesús Martín-Barbero, Garlos Monsiváis, Nelly Richard, Beatriz Sarlo and others has contributed in important ways to broadening our understanding of how the proliferation of visual and auditory media (photography, film, television and radio in particular) has displaced or reshaped old notions about sociality that had evolved in societies dominated by print media.