Tonalities of Literature in Transition: The World of the End of the World, or Marcelo Cohen’s El oído absoluto

Abstract

In a well-known formulation, Fredric Jameson characterizes postmodernity as an epochal shift coinciding with the tendential colonization of the planet by transnational capital. The postmodern is what ensues when even those territories previously considered to lie beyond the reach of market forces—that is, especially, nature and the unconscious—are found to have been assimilated into the calculating rationale of exchange and use. Such a world-historical transformation poses considerable difficulties for critical thinking in its endeavor to think the contingency of the present-day dominant regime of signification. One of the attendant effects of the hegemonic ascent of neoliberalism around the globe is that resistance to capital becomes difficult or impossible to define. In its relentless colonization of peripheral zones, capital appears to have succeeded in divesting itself of any identifiable—and hence finite—point of origin. Its agency is everywhere in general, and thus it emanates from nowhere in particular. Working in sync with the seeming defeat or exhaustion of all existing alternatives to free-market capitalism, the logic of the market also works to ensure that any conceivable alternative to the market could only come into view at the expense of its own legibility.