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Shortened Title

CRAIG EPPLIN

Mario Bellatin:
Literature and the Data Imaginary
Este ensayo se centra en la serie de estrategias conceptuales que pueblan la obra
del escritor mexicano Mario Bellatin: la construccin de arquitecturas vacas,
el plagio y la proliferacin de textos ya publicados. Se analizan estas estrategias
como intervenciones frente a un imaginario social marcado por la acumulacin
masiva de datos digitales. Tomando como punto de partida el nfasis constante,
en los textos de Bellatin, en las tcnicas de produccin esttica, se propone que
estas estrategias imitan ciertas caractersticas formales tpicas del imaginario de
los datos. Se lee este acto de mimesis como una instancia de lo que Gilles Deleuze
llamaba simulacro, concepto que contrastaba con la idea de la copia. De esta
forma, los textos de Bellatin establecen una relacin crtica con el imaginario
social de los datos digitales: sus textos imitan este imaginario a nivel formal a la
vez que incluyen, frecuentemente, algn elemento heterodoxo que sirve para complicar la mimesis. En ltima instancia, Bellatin seala el desfase entre el mundo
que habitamos y la representacin de este mundo en trminos de datos digitales.

Over the past few decades, Mario Bellatin has carved out a
singular niche in the field of Latin American cultural production. Straddling the line separating writing from other aesthetic practices, he has
cultivated a unique style common to his undertakings. His prose often
seems blank and clinical. His novels and essays are woven together by a
hermetic system of personal referents. His own name stridently appears
in his texts even as he constantly enacts a simultaneous disappearance.
He has run a writing school that prohibits writing, and he has organized
various installations and pseudo-happenings. His clear literary forebears
are few: one critic has mentioned Salvador Elizondo and Julio Cortzar,
attending to the way they both modeled their work on the idea of the
game, while Bellatin has named influences as disparate as Juan Rulfo
and Jacques Lacan, Jos Mara Arguedas and Prince in the era of his
Revista de Estudios Hispnicos 49 (2015)

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name change (Laddaga 146; Bellatin, Prologue 12; Shiki Nagaoka). The
idiosyncrasy of this lineage is equaled by the ambitious nature of Bellatins overall aesthetic program, which obliquely or directly confronts
questions of disease, disability, and social marginality. These thematic
concerns, furthermore, are enclosed within an investigation of the contours of media and their productive capacities. In this inquiry, Bellatin
draws on the tradition of conceptual aesthetics to engage with what I
call the data imaginary: a means of apprehending the world refracted
through the lens of omnipresent data. Concretely, much of Bellatins
work both mimics and subverts key aspects of this imaginary, in the
process providing a model of engagement with the centrality of data in
a global context. As such, his writing marks an important intersection
between aesthetic experimentation and political intervention.
Production
This intersection is signaled by Bellatins consistent emphasis
on techniques and technologies of production. His novels and essays
are populated by fanciful conceptual devices, short descriptions of
textual labor, little machines for making words and images appear on
the page. To name just one example, the opening pages of his brief,
oblique biography of Frida Kahlo catalogue a panoply of techniques
for producing and circulating images. He scans and emails an image of
Kahlo; he takes photos of her home, the Casa Azul, with a pinhole camera; he digs up another camera from his childhood, a 1968 Diana, and
takes it on a road trip in search of the woman portrayed in the original
photographa woman who both is and is not Frida Kahlo, who both
is and is not alive (Figures 1 and 2). Bellatin documents his meandering
path with minimalist paragraphs, which often seem like captions for the
images that appear on each page, all of them rendered in the dreamy,
washed-out style typical of Diana cameras (Las dos 410). These images
document the search for the woman in the photograph, and the text
explicitly details the process through which they appear.

Mario Bellatin: Literature and the Data Imaginary

Figure 1. Mario Bellatin, Las dos Fridas (2009)

Figure 2. Mario Bellatin, Las dos Fridas (2009)

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This emphasis on production demands that we read Bellatins

texts in light of the technological milieu in which they circulate. And
today that means reading them at the threshold where analogue and
digital means of production meet, overlap, and transform one another.
With this threshold in mind, we might see in Bellatins gently blurred
images something other than the product of a plastic meniscus lens, for
they seem, in this context, to allude equally to digital filters, technologies for artificially aging photographs like the ones made famous by
Instagram. That is, it is difficult to avoid the impression that Bellatins
images would feel more at home on the cascading screen of a photosharing social network than in the pages of a paper-bound book. This
initial impression makes us doubt the nature of the images material
provenance, their analogue or digital traces. After all, Bellatin himself
describes the act of photography as a simulacrum that produces a
phantom realitya mirror, he remarks self-consciously, of his search
for the ghostly traces of Frida Kahlo (10). In this sense, the dubious
origin of the photographs contained in this book corresponds to the
uncertain nature of its biographical impulse. These images exemplify
the sort of simulacrum described by Gilles Deleuze in his discussion of
Plato: the image without resemblance that contrasts with the notion
of the relatively faithful copy (Plato 48). This dichotomy matters
because it discloses another onethe distinction between analogue
and digital forms of productionthat is central to Bellatins aesthetics.
These forms intersect constantly in his work. On the one hand,
he romanticizes the typewriter and its sensorial pleasures: hearing
the sound of the keys, struggling with the ribbon, and enduring the
passage of time spent sitting at a desk (Obra 50204). On the other,
he inserts this scene of paper and ink among technologies of digital
productionas, for example, in his collaboration with a street typist as
part of an exhibit centered on the conversion of analogue technologies
into digital machines.1 Critics have noted the preponderance of digital
models in Bellatins writing: Adam Morris has written that Bellatins
works function together like a hypertextual web, while Reinaldo
Laddaga compares them to an electronic database, navigated via la
incierta profundida de una pantalla (Morris 97; Laddaga 142). These
insights can be extended beyond the realm of form. That is, while
Bellatins reader indeed must parse and participate in a network-like
structure, his aesthetic program alludes to production as much as it
conditions reception. Thus he deploys a number of literary strategies

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that model the operations of machines built for the accumulation and
manipulation of data. These strategiesamong them the construction
of empty architectures, the practice of plagiarism, and the repeated
proliferation of earlier published textstypify Bellatins engagement
with our contemporary technological milieu. The nature of this engagement is one of mimicry, akin to Deleuzes concept of the simulacrum:
a tactical, minor engagement, ultimately critical of data as a model of
social life today.
Data
Datas omnipresence is one of the distinguishing characteristics
of contemporary life. Business publications and the popular press, in
particular, triumphantly herald the age of big data.2 A recent post
on the blog of the London School of Economics examines some of
the consequences of the death of the theorist and the emergence of
data and algorithms, among which is the advent of datafied identities (Williamson). More broadly, Lisa Gitelman and Virginia Jackson
mention public health and medicine, investment and finance, cosmology and climate science among the realms of thought transformed by
large expanses of data (1). To this list, we might add other arenas
espionage, sports, and even literary historybut the authors point is
clear: contemporary modes of inquiry into the world are increasingly
modeled quantitatively.3 Digitally encoded data marks the horizon of
contemporary thought.
Thus we inhabit, today, a data imaginary. This means that we
increasingly imagine the world as discrete bundles of analyzable material. To advance this notion is not without precedent. A key early text
identifying the emergence of this imaginary is Lev Manovichs essay
from the late nineties, Database as Symbolic Form, which was later
incorporated into his book The Language of New Media (2002). There
Manovich calls database todays dominant way to structure our experience of ourselves and of the world, distinguishing this experience from
that of narrative (219). We have come to conceive of our existence, he
argues, in terms of bits of information that can be collected and compiled, dispersed and shuffled, and less in terms of narrative development (21819). To be sure, the sharpness of this dichotomy has been
legitimately disputed, most notably by Jerome McGann and Katherine

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Hayles, but even their critiques do not deny the very real rise of digital
data as a way of organizing and understanding the world. That is, even
if narrative is not an endangered species, as McGann and Hayles each
argue convincingly, the data imaginary seems more powerful all the
time.4
Manovich remarks that it would be appropriate, given the rise
of this form, that we would want to develop a poetics, aesthetics, and
ethics corresponding to it (Language 219). Such a development is
currently underwaynot least in the world of experimental literature.
Kenneth Goldsmiths 2011 volume Uncreative Writing is a programmatic statement on the numerous ways that writers and artists engage
with data. Specifically, Goldsmith explicates and advocates for strategies
that imitate and undermine contemporary forms of data processing.
The approaches he profiles are largely conceptual in nature, and they
are consequently somewhat indifferent to self expression. He draws
heavily on the visual arts and music, with Marcel Duchamp and John
Cage casting long shadows. Working in concert with this tradition,
Goldsmiths uncreative writer cruises through the world of digital objects and language, curating and framing them in new situations. The
aim of this literature becomes probing the world of language recast as
data, creating feedback loops and automatic operations that displace
individualityor at least the sort of individuality we associate with
originality. These aesthetic strategies envelop and elide the subject, mirroring the numerical abstractions already performed by large-scale data
production and analysis.5
This elision represents cause for political concern. After all,
just as we manipulate data, data transforms our lives in common and
our practices of governancesomething most famously visible in the
NSAs expansive use of metadata. In this scenario, it remains unclear
how artists should respond. It is not obvious how an artist or writer
might model strategies of engagement and critique of the data-governed
world. Goldsmith is clear in his belief that the depersonalization of data
is best countered by further depersonalization. As such, he promotes
experimental forays into the uncanny world of spam, plagiarism, and
indexationforays that drift through digital language. For Goldsmith,
the virtue of uncreative texts lies precisely in their derivative nature,
which generates legibility and sometimes beauty, but also a sense of
opacity and disconcert. Bellatins texts share this sense and more. They

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also share the premise that mimicry is integral to critique. Typical of his
novels and essays is an eerie formal similarity with various aspects of the
data imaginary and, coupled to it, heterogeneous elements that introduce difference into the shadow puppet show. In his own uncreative
strategies, which operate alongside his more conventionally creative
work, Bellatin models a critical engagement with the data imaginary.
Architectures
The first such strategy entails the task of creating neutral architectures for verbal artifacts. That is, instead of focusing on the individual character of new texts, Bellatin erects the empty walls in which
to house them. This tendency is visible in various of his projects, and
it echoes a parallel development in the digital world built on the circulation of data. Many familiar online formats, for example, comprise
similarly empty containers. In his recent book on internet spam, Finn
Brunton examines the circulation of words from one such container to
another, noting that digital language is free to flow, like water through
pipes, from RSS feeds into strange reservoirs all over the net (159).
Similarly, the discourse of much Internet marketing also employs a
rhetoric of neutral infrastructure.6 Whether we are talking about the
architecture of spam or interfaces for blogging and photo sharing, one
key aspect of the data imaginary is the presence of seemingly empty
structures meant to be filled with more or less interchangeable content.
We find such spaces in Bellatins work in several senses.
Exemplary is a publishing project titled Los cien mil libros de Bellatin
(2011present), which comprises a plan to publish one hundred different books on print runs of a thousand copies each. According to a
description of the project, the volumes will be produced through a combination of mechanical and artisanal means, their length constrained by
the number of characters that will fit on a single folio (Bellatin, Cien
mil 2526). Their subject matter has been predetermined, as Bellatin
systematically lays out the hundred topics that correspond to the books.
Some of these descriptions sketch a plot summary. Others read like
opening-paragraph hooks, or they resemble notes jotted down quickly,
or they propose translations. Some lack verbs, while others already tell

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a skeletal story. In sum, the projects initial impetus hinges on the delineation of the outer bounds, the framework and plan within which
the books will later appear.
In the construction of this framework, Bellatin gestures toward
the conceptual past as well as the architectural present. The projects
name recalls a 1961 text by Raymond Queneau, A Hundred Thousand
Billion Poems, which is based on a similar emphasis on delimitation.
One of the main ideologues of the French school Oulipo, Queneau
wrote ten sonnets and proposed that the reader recombine their verses
according to a simple set of instructions: any of the poems first verses
could be exchanged with one another, and the same rule holds for
each subsequent line. The result is an astronomical number: ten to
the fourteenth power. The text mostly exists in a state of latency and
possibilitya hulking iceberg, whose written portion manifests only
a fraction of its bulk (Motte 4). Much like the conceptual artists who
began writing instructions for the creation of artworks around the same
time that Oulipo emerged, Queneau asks that we experience this work
as a framework for textual emergence. His project understands language
as a mass of interchangeable parts, subject to specific algorithmic rules.
Bellatin invokes this notion in his publishing project, and in doing so,
he reframes the practice of small-scale book publishing as the site of an
experiment. Like Oulipos practitioners, Bellatin implies that the truly
experimental aspect of creation lies in drawing up rules and defining
constraints. The common strand lies in a shared emphasis on generating an architecture within which randomly or indifferently determined
texts can appear.
Bellatins work also includes a more literally architectural version of this emphasis. Thus we read that the books anticipated presence
has already transformed his house, as he has moved walls and excavated
the floor to make room for these largely potential objects: their potentiality becomes actual (Bellatin, Cien mil 26). Furthermore, one of the
descriptions in the publication plan mentions a writing school much
like Bellatins own Escuela Dinmica de Escritores, whose most noteworthy principle is a ban on writing, a prohibition conceived against
the idea of creative writing and its characteristic site: the workshop (30).
The now defunct school replaces the practice typical of this space with
interdisciplinary proceduresexplorations of dance or photography,
for example (Bellatin, Prologue 10). The emphasis, again, falls on the

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framework that makes such an exploration possible, not on the texts it

generates.
Thus the school explicitly theorizes itself in terms of emptiness,
as an escuela vaca (9). It sets up constraints and boundaries to be
populated later. In this way, it dovetails with the aesthetics of the publishing project, which is based on a similar premise. And in both cases,
the constraints laid out serve as formal analogues to a key feature of
todays data imaginary: the need to manage language. Goldsmith is explicit in tying the two tasks together; the subtitle of Uncreative Writing
is managing language in the digital age, and the intervention opens
with the conundrum that todays writer is faced with an unprecedented
amount of available text, noting also that the problem is not needing
to write more of it; instead, we must learn to negotiate the vast quantity
that exists (Introduction). Furthermore, the notion that constraints are
key to this task of management is well established. Goldsmith mentions
Oulipo, with its focus on restraint, in the genealogy he draws, and the
same group is represented in Nick Montfort and Noah Wardrip-Fruins
canonical New Media Reader (2003). Constraints, demarcations, architectures: all these are integral to the data imaginary. By grafting these
figures into his work, Bellatin mimics this broader phenomenon.
Plagiarism
Another example of this mimicry lies in the way Bellatin employs what Goldsmith calls intentional plagiarism (Introduction). In
an autobiographical essay from 2005, Bellatin describes a seemingly
automatic, involuntary act of direct transcription: En ciertas ocasiones me descubr utilizndola para copiar pginas enteras del directorio
telefnico o fragmentos de los libros de mis escritores preferidos (Obra
504). This practice serves as a compositional model, which Bellatin
approaches like an asymptote in other texts, ones in which he turns
writing into a game of textual manipulation. This game is premised on
an idea of text as a mass of words over which to exercise a machine-like,
algorithmic control. Words accumulate, and then they are processed
much like data, which piles up into aggregate sets, as Gitelman and
Jackson put it (8). Bellatin approximates the processing of such sets in
his work.

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A text published in April 2008 is representative. It is a review of

a newly translated novel by Yasunari Kawabata, and it appeared in the
cultural supplement of an Argentine newspaper. The essay, however, is
not a conventional review. It advances haltingly from one paragraph to
another, like beads on a rosary. The reader seems always to be crossing
over an abyss between autonomous textual islands. This impression is
echoed in the review itself, where Bellatin describes Kawabatas own
prrafos aislados and mundos propios, universos cerrados (Kawabata). The structure and feel of the essay mirror its content. And this
parallel can be carried further, for the sort of writing that Bellatin attributes to Kawabata applies equally well to his own poetics. Numerous critics have observed the desire for self-sufficiency characteristic of
Bellatins little textual worlds: Facundo Ruiz notes his mundos aislados
[que] se conciben como autosuficientes, while Morris calls his entire
oeuvre a quarantined rogue state (Ruiz 203; Morris 92). This sort of
characterization resounds throughout Bellatins discussion of Kawabatas
novel. Indeed, much of Bellatins writing coincides with his descriptions of Kawabata: the formers work also reveals un arte diablico de
la construccin; his language is also elegante y anorxico; his novels
also seem to agoniz[ar] hermosa, silenciosamente; he also creates
something more akin to atmsferas than to contextos (Kawabata).
The parallel is precise and striking: the essays content mirrors its form,
which in turn reflects the poetics of Bellatins writing.
This multi-layered coincidence has a simple explanation, which
Bellatin disclosed two days after the reviews publication, contributing
a guest post to Linkillo, a prominent blog kept by Argentine writer
Daniel Link. In some short prefatory remarks, Bellatin alerts Link, and
thus also the reader, to a footnote that had not been reproduced in the
newspaper version of the essay, one that described the tcnica de copypaste with which the review had been constructed. He then explains
the nature of that technique:
hice ese texto juntando una serie de fragmentos que distintos crticos
han hecho sobre mis libros . . . cambi la palabra bellatin y le puse
kawabata, cambi el nombre de algunas obras y yast . . . sali un artculo estupendo sobre kawabata, impecable en su verosimilitud y certeza
. . . (Link)

Noteworthy in this short, glib description is Bellatins use of the verb

hacer instead of escribir. He makes (or does) a text and his critics

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have made (or done) fragments about his work. The implicit substitution of making or doing for writing is not incidental. Rather, it
illustrates a key aspect of Bellatins literary practice: the idea of crafting
or cobbling a text together from materials that already exist, rather than
generating a wholly original, inspired object. This is writing as data
processing.
Bellatin has performed similarly derivative and substitutive acts
elsewhere. For instance, in his recent anti-prologue to a collection
of Links own short novels, he describes his own career in great detail,
though using Links name instead of his own (Prologue). And more
famously, in 2002 he organized a conference in Paris that involved
four well-known Mexican writersnone of whom ended up being
present, as they were rather represented by stand-ins, non-professional
actors who had been trained for months to replace them. In both cases,
Bellatin is clearly playing with the relationship between language and
identity. While for Roland Barthes this relationship takes the form of
the authors necessary dissolution into writing, for Bellatin this scenario
is one to be enacted. That is, what for Barthes was an inevitable consequence of writingNo doubt it has always been that way, he writes
of the effacement of subjectivity (142)becomes a compositional
principle for Bellatin. That is, his experiments in substitution represent, in the first place, an effort to undermine the category of identity,
through a dual action of disappearance and incessant proliferation.7
However, this inquiry into identity fits within a broader engagement, undertaken via copies and plagiarism, with the data imaginary:
identity becomes one more accumulation of data to be organized or
undermined. Morris claims that Bellatins work generates a personal
web of narratives that govern the closed textual network of [his] literary production (93). In this reading, Bellatins constant deployment of a relatively small number of elements generates a closed but
dynamic system. Thus what Morris aptly terms Bellatins incessant
self-referentiality both exceeds and encapsulates his constant play
with identity and difference (97). The system of his work as a whole
resembles a rhizomatic world in which the meaning of any one symbol
is dependent not solely on its usual signifying labor, but also on its
intervallic reappearance elsewhere (99). This compelling reading can be
expanded beyond the frontiers of Bellatins own texts. That is, in the review of Kawabata, Bellatin literally copies already existing texts written

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by other authors and substitutes one name for another, in the process
extending the metanarrative impulse in his work to the diffuse body of
writings about it. Furthermore, in the anti-prologue to Links work as
well as in the more recent work Disecado (2011)texts that reproduce
autobiographical accounts scattered throughout both his oeuvre and
the criticism that accompanies itBellatin performs a similar gesture.
The ethos of writing inherent in these actions reflects an attitude of
indifference, the notion that unique beings are abstract and roughly
interchangeable. Strident anonymity comes to eclipse self-referentiality.
Words, even people, are fluid, which is Hayless word for the consciousness we acquire through our relationships with digital writing machines
(How We Became 26). As an active plagiarist, Bellatin here again mimics
a key aspect of the data imaginary.
Proliferation
Closely related to his use of plagiarism is Bellatins practice of
recycling earlier published texts. He frequently recovers and expands
previous works or textual fragments. This dynamic of reuse exemplifies
an archival impulse in his aesthetics, reflecting the potential for endless
dissemination of contemporary data objects.
We find examples of this phenomenon throughout Bellatins
oeuvre. In the previously cited collaboration with a typist, the text he
dictated expanded on an anecdote from his biography of Kahlo. This
collaboration formed part of an installation by Tania Candiani titled
Cinco variaciones de circunstancias fnicas y una pausa, which took place
between 2012 and 2013 at the Arte Alameda gallery in Mexico City.
Its variations included elaborate material manipulations of an organ,
sonic spaces, player pianos, bells, and an embroidery machine. In all
five cases, analogue devices were set up to run via digital means, eliminating human mediation from the circuit of sound production. The
appendix-like section titled Pausa, however, initially seems somewhat
distinct: a scribe, Jos Edith Gonzlez, listened and took notes as Bellatin told a story, which Gonzlez would later type; the resultant text
thus comprises a highly mediated and thoroughly transformed piece of
literature. The scribe didnt exactly copy, but rather interpreted, producing an original text, somewhat distinct from the one told to him by the
writer (Figure 3).

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Figure 3. Tania Candiani, Cinco variaciones

de circunstancias fnicas y una pausa (2012-13)
This transformation is evident from the outset. The story Bellatin tells is framed, in his own oral performance, plainly: Le quiero
contar una historia de una moto Vespa, he begins, ending on a similar
note: sa era la historia que quera contar. When we watch Gonzlez
reproduce this story, however, an entirely different frame appears. He
gives it a title, La herencia, taken from the end of Bellatins narrative;
he then introduces himself into the text:
Un honor, primero conocer al gran intelectual Mario Bellatn[sic] que
aporta a la cultura mucha sapiencia, (tengo que leer algo en los o el
ao(s) que me quedan de vida).
Y tambin result un honor escuchar una breve narracin familiar.
Cuenta don Mario . . . (Candiani)

Gonzlez thus inscribes his own presence and reverential attitude as a

listener into the story. He then begins to reproduce Bellatins narrative
in painstaking, often hesitant fashion, stopping intermittently to recover some detail or fix some part of his writing machine (Figure 4). He
remains generally faithful to the anecdote, which centers on Bellatins
Italian grandfathers efforts to ride a scooter in spite of his missing
limbs, even if his own presence is perceptible throughout. Gonzlez
writes in the first person (mi abuelo), so as to capture Bellatins own
perspective, though he switches to the third person later, referring to
el narrador. He seemingly uses less lexical repetition than Bellatin, as
if his frequent pauses involved consulting a sort of interior thesaurus,
and the typed text seems at once more technical and more colloquial,
using both specialized vocabulary and the occasional interjection or

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rhetorical question. It appears slowly, as Gonzlez frequently pauses

to think or correct his spelling, change the paper or consult his notes.
Upon finishing, he pulls the second sheet of paper off the roll, staples
it to the first one, and lays his hands over the typewriter, his minimal
performance having ended.

Figure 4. Tania Candiani, Cinco variaciones

de circunstancias fnicas y una pausa (2012-13)
From one perspective, there is little about this scene that recalls
digital production. On the contrary, we might initially say that it reclaims the act of human intervention through analogue means: hands
and typewriters. However, I believe that this first impression disguises a
deeper engagement with digital technologies, representing in turn one
more aspect of Bellatins dialogue with the data imaginary. I think so,
most immediately, because of the way this segment is surrounded by
other similar interventions in Candianis installation. The backdrop for
this intervention includes events like the digital conversion of a player
piano and the likewise digital transformation of an embroidery machine
into a language encoder. Given this context, the Pausa section might
rather fit more neatly into a broader inquiry into the ways that transcription models the sorts of linguistic mutations typical of the world
of data proliferation and digital machines.
This alternate reading becomes more plausible when we consider the relationship between this particular text and Bellatins other
work. The story Bellatin tells is taken from Las dos Fridas (2009), mentioned at the outset. In the earlier text, Bellatin had alluded to this
story, though without developing it at length. Mi abuelo muri cercenado, he writes, later adding a few further details: Mi abuelo vivi

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casi veinte aos mientras iba siendo despojado de sus miembros. He

includes a photograph of the bicycle that his grandfather attempted to
ride during this painful process (24). This sparsely told story serves, in
Las dos Fridas, to establish a parallel between Bellatins family and Kahlo
herself, who had suffered a severe accident. In its transposition to Candianis installation, the narrative undergoes various changes: most obviously, it is expanded, and the bicycle also becomes a scooter. In other
words, the chain of modifications extends farther back in time, going
from Las dos Fridas to Bellatins oral narrative and then to the version
produced by Gonzlez. Each of these is framed in a unique wayfirst
by Bellatins book, then by his own voice, then by the scribes writing,
and then finally by Candianis camera and website. Observing the process unfold, we see a model of the way that words wind their way from
one destination to another, enclosing always new interpretative acts,
open to transformations and augmentations at each stage.
Analogous forms of textual citation abound. The book titled
Pjaro transparente (2006) compiles several preexisting texts alongside
a new epilogue. La clase muerta (2011) functions similarly, as does the
prematurely published Obra reunida (2005). While the existence of
small anthologies is not always remarkable, in Bellatins case it is the
number and rapid appearance of these compilations that stand out. An
unusual happening, perhaps, for a writer of his age, noted one critic
understatedly about the publication of the Obra reunida, when Bellatin
was only forty-five years old (Steinberg 107). However, these volumes
seem less anomalous in the context of data and its proliferative possibilities. That is, just as Bellatin compiles and redeploys the words of others
in new textual environments, he performs a similar action on his own
previously published volumes. These texts appear as new iterations in
new contexts. They are new mutations, to use Morriss term, reflecting not only a rhizomatic form, but also the productive possibilities for
textual dissemination in the era of datas ascendance (10207).
Another way to make this point is to say that Bellatin produces
and subsequently redeploys his own archive. Various observers have
used this term in relation to his work. Most notably, Samuel Steinbergs
reading hinges directly on the application of this concept, as he understands Bellatins political action as one of enduring and waiting through
the Mexican interregnum, this phrase alluding to the age of neoliberalism, which overlaps, significantly, with both Mexicos democratic
opening and the age of the data imaginary (107). Given the absence of

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clear political coordinates in this age, art necessitates patience: we are

enjoined to wait (118). The archive configures this time of waiting.
Steinberg suggests that Bellatins work offers a unique lens
through which to glimpse the relationship between literature and the
state. However, that relationship is itself mediated by new forms of
production and thought that center on the circulation of data. As such,
another way to understand Bellatins politics is through a different sense
of the archive, this time as it pertains to the data imaginary. Here it is
helpful to note Kristin Veels contention that the archive and the database are intimately linked, and that the former has become a central
cultural metaphor in recent decades (308). She connects the centrality
of the archive to the phenomenon of data overflow and its subsequent
management, and she understands archival or database aesthetics as
reflections of the expectations of readers. Yet its current prominence
also corresponds to aesthetic production, in as much as the conditions
of the data imaginary include the simultaneous, multi-layered existence
of many materials, virtual and actual. Put more concretely, the texts
already written by Bellatin or by others, just like the texts whose elaboration is programmed or anticipated, exist simultaneously and are open
to being absorbed, metabolized, and reproduced. When Bellatin employs multiple platforms to disseminate his texts, or when he archives
them and participates in their wide circulationno less than when he
plagiarizes himself or others, or when he creates architectural
frameworks for textual events to happenhe is mimicking the data
imaginary.
Control
Reading isomorphism between aesthetic form and the social
world has a long history. From Fredric Jamesons notion of the political unconscious to Jacques Rancires concept of the distribution
of the sensibleand certainly stretching further in either historical
directionthe desire to decipher ideology in form is common practice
among critics. Bellatins work is no exception. Steinberg makes the case
that Bellatins writings reflect the untimeliness typical of contemporary Mexican aesthetic culture (107). His suggestion partially intersects with Diana Palaversichs contention that Bellatin writes against
the teleology and totalizing impulses of the great proyectos literarios

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81

modernos (12). In another direction, Laddaga places Bellatins writing in relief against, among other things, contemporary pharmaceutical culture (148). Finally, Morris understands Bellatins work within a
framework borrowed from Alexander Galloways theory of protocol and
the distributed network (93). All these approaches share the desire
which my own reading also sharesto understand form in political
terms. Forms are the abstract of social relations: so, formal analysis
is in its own modest way an analysis of power, writes Franco Moretti,
channeling Roberto Schwarz (ch. 2). However, even if every reigning
ideology ciphers itself in every aesthetic object, this cipher is not always
legible. Reading social forms in aesthetic forms involves detective work.
And one clue we find in the case of Bellatins fiction is the central place
occupied by production techniques in his work. These techniques open
the door to reading his literature in terms of the broader conditions of
economic life today.
This is why I read Bellatins work in relation to the data imaginary. What is at stake is not only how we imagine the world and our
place in it. Data also represents a particular mode of producing the
world. There are material consequences for imagining the world in
this manner. The processing of large amounts of data not only allows
us to expand our investigations of reality beyond what was previously
imaginable; it also proves invaluable to contemporary techniques of
social control. My reference point here is Deleuzes essay from 1990,
Postscript on the Societies of Control. There he schematically outlines a shift away from Michel Foucaults disciplinary society toward
a world in which control extends beyond the enclosures of modernity,
colonizing the diffuse, molecular realm of habits and affects. Deleuze
was observing the emergence of a world where behavioral modulation
was constant, a seamless world without thresholds (34). And while he
was prescient about certain aspects of the present, it remains true that
this transition has not portended the absolute erasure of disciplinary
structures. Mass imprisonment, placing bodies in perhaps the most
enclosed space of all, represents a key counter-example, as Jonathan
Crary has astutely pointed out (ch. 3). This means that automatic
mechanisms of control have come to overlay, not replace, traditional
means of discipline.8
Another way to frame this last point, particularly in hindsight,
is to say that data-driven control extends older, analogue disciplinary

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techniques.9 To mention another example from the world of crime, expansive datasets now allow police to foresee criminal activity, but they
coexist with old-fashioned means of bodily deprivation and coercion.
Relatedly, we know that our digital traces, gathered from smartphones
and internet browsers, are potentially the object of governmental surveillance, allowing the state to monitor our physical displacements.
Or, to take one more example, the fleshy body itself is increasingly
deciphered genetically and brought into concert with both computer
code and the requirements of the pharmaceutical industry, as Eugene
Thacker has argued (54). In numerous ways, the analogue world is being augmented and transformed by its representation as data.
Bellatins strategy for engaging the data imaginary involves a
form of mimicry. The form and production of his work reflect techniques borrowed from the world of data processing. Thus Morris
contends that Bellatins work forms part of a new radical aesthetic of
anti-control-society literature that confronts Empire by impersonating
it (114). This is to say that through mimicry, Bellatin symbolically
subverts mechanisms of control from within, forging a rebellion of
the imagination (114). In these terms, the force of mimicry lies in the
way it turns each reader into a rebellious subject who must actively
participate in the task of imagination (109). However, not every sort of
mimicry is the same, and it is worth exploring why some sorts are more
politicized than others. Deleuze differentiates between the copy and the
simulacrum in relation to Platonic forms: the former resembles, while
the latter deceives. The political nature of this distinction lies in the
notion that the distance between ideas and images in Plato serves solely
to guarantee the latent distinction between the two types of images
(Plato 48). It allows us to judge the good from the bad, obedience
from subversion, in other words. All images are degraded, but some still
adhere to the principle of resemblance, while others represent the threat
of deception. Copies seek similarity, while simulacra exult in difference.
Bellatins work tends toward the second sort of mimicry. The
simulacrum, Deleuze continues, is constructed around a disparity, a
difference; it interiorizes a dissimilitude (49). In Bellatins work, this
disparity exists, above all, in the way he mimics data processing in order
to highlight and complicate the act of production itself, underscoring
the uneasy overlap of digital and analogue means of production. That
is, even if the various analogue techniques represented and deployed
in Bellatins scenes of productionfor example, inky pages, artisanal

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83

books, and concrete placesultimately breathe the air of a digital

atmosphere, their slow, brute character still remains. And this remainder
represents a discrepancy. These scenes of production cipher the ultimately ill fit between the world itself and the desire to render it entirely
comprehensible through data. In this sense, Bellatins works mimic the
form of the data imaginary, but they simultaneously reveal its insufficiency, its disparity with itself. Each volume of Los cien mil libros
de Bellatin bears the authors fingerprint. Whereas the impetus behind
the project seems to be a thorough depersonalization of writing, the
creation of an empty architecture to be filled indifferently with words
of any sort, Bellatins own fingerprint reminds his reader of the bodily,
analogue origins of the particular text. But this gesture is complex. Even
as it points to the database nature of all such identifying markers
fingerprints, after all, are one thing that the police have long filed away
in drawers and, now, on hard drives and remote serversit also alludes
to the particularities of the individual body. These impressions are
analogue and digital all at oncesomething inadvertently captured by
the word for fingerprint in Spanish (huella digital). These categories
are not strictly delineated, nor do they collapse into one another. Rather, they comprise a mesh, the complexity of which marks the necessarily
incomplete nature of datas representations.
Politics
These representations touch all corners of the globe. Circling
outward from Bellatins own home base, we would be hard pressed to
avoid the consequences of datas normalization. In his role as consultant
to the Mexico City police force in 2003, former New York City mayor
Rudolph Giuliani recommended, first of all, greater and more precise
data collection and analysis (Reporte).10 In a similar vein, social media
and increasingly expansive databases on migrants are used on both sides
of the US-Mexico border to police populations. Mexican political consultants promise to crunch large amounts of electoral data, with Barack
Obamas campaigns often serving as their model, and in April 2014,
Mexico City hosted a commercial fair called Big Data World: Mexicos
Customer Festival (Asociacin; Big Data World). None of these phenomena exists in isolation. Much to the contrary, each is embedded in
a web of international and transnational relationswith the United

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Craig Epplin

States, above all. The data imaginary is global and, more immediately,
hemispheric, as what holds true for Mexico doubtless reflects the realities, in varying degrees, of many Latin American countries.
The expansive nature of the data imaginary finds its mirror in
the disperse, transnational community that engages it from a literary
perspective. As in Bellatins case, this engagement often takes the form
of conceptual operations. From Argentine writer Pablo Katchadjians
hypnotic alphabetization of the Martn Fierro to American poet Vanessa Places transcription of legal briefs, to name just two examples,
conceptual works are appearing with increasing frequency all over the
Americas: Goldsmiths installation Printing Out the Internet was hosted
by a Mexico City gallery, and a recent film starring Bellatin debuted
in Los Angeles (Goldsmith, Printing; Shiki Nagaoka). Contexts may
vary, but the fact of this simultaneous emergence reveals an urgency
around the transformation of language into data.
A recent study of Latin American visual conceptualism argues
that the relationship between North American conceptual artists and
their Latin American counterparts has often been a missed encounter.
Luis Camnitzer locates an essentially political impulse at the heart of
Latin American conceptualism, one that is less central, he posits, to USbased conceptual artists (12). However, to draw a similar distinction
between conceptual writers from the North and from the South seems
less convincing, for a couple reasons. Most immediately, one of the
factors mentioned by Camnitzerthe economy and efficiency
of conceptual artworksis less determinant within the sphere of
literature (29). While visual art often requires elaborate material supports, writing is cheap, and even cheaper in our own era of instantly
public, web-based formats: in the age of Twitter, conceptualism is no
more economical than other, more traditional sorts of writing. This
holds true for anyone with unhindered access to the web.
More importantly, however, this distinction matters less for
conceptual writers today because the conditions they are engaging
with are generalized and global, rather than specific and local. The data
imaginary touches all of us, with or without our acknowledgment.
To rephrase Trotsky, you may not be interested in data, but data is
interested in you. One of Bellatins compatriots, the celebrated novelist Cristina Rivera Garza, has recently framed conceptual writing as a
response to necropolitics, a term that stands in for the management of
death under neoliberal governance.11 The death of the author and originality, from Mallarm to his conceptualist heirs, is, for Rivera Garza,

Mario Bellatin: Literature and the Data Imaginary

85

in some sense analogous to the many deaths caused by todays global

wars: wars on terror, wars on drugs, wars on labor, wars on dissent,
wars like the one that has raged in Mexico since 2006, claiming tens of
thousands of lives (33). Rivera Garzas claim is audacious, but there is
some truth to it. The literary deaths announced by conceptualism, like
the deaths of open or stealth neoliberal warfare, have at least one thing
in common: both enact the reduction of somethingcoded language
in the first case, biological material in the secondto its least common
denominator, where it trembles in vulnerability.
In her book, Rivera Garza does not mention Bellatin. Yet he
makes a point similar to hers in a 2010 op-ed, published in the New
York Times. It centers on what he calls the Mexican art of renting:
you can rent someone to spend time in jail for you, for example, or to
pose as a family member in a hospital waiting room. Bellatin ties this
practice to drug violence, to the hiring of hitmen to enact violence in
ones own place. Then he connects it to his own work:
Ive often thought of renting another person to write under my name.
Then someone else would have to address the drug-related violence,
like the killing of an American consulate worker and her husband this
month in Ciudad Jurez. Hillary Clinton met with our president, Felipe
Caldern, last week to discuss a new counternarcotics strategy. Perhaps
the writer impersonating me would be able to muster some enthusiasm
about the results. (Human Currency)

Bellatin continues like this, describing in harrowing detail the phenomena that the writer impersonating him might be brave enough to
address. Whats interesting is that such literary doppelgangers already
abound in his work. These rented figures are integral to his engagement with the mutations of the data imaginary: the stand-ins during
the Doubles Conference, the hallucination of two avatars of Frida
Kahlo, the numerous alter egos that replace him in his fiction and essays. Thus what makes his short op-ed so uncanny is the implication
that the task of these doubles is ultimately to address an otherwise inaccessible reality. The experimental operations of his writing here find
an overtly political outlet. His conceptual engagement with the data
imaginary becomes an engagement with the wars whose strategies so
often depend on the technologies underpinning that imaginary.
Portland State University

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Craig Epplin

NOTES
The exhibit in question is Tania Candianis Cinco variaciones de circunstancias fnicas
y una pausa, to which I will return later in this article.

To mention just one particularly hyperbolic formulation, the pamphlet titled Secrets
of the Big Data Revolution (2013) casts the massive accumulation of data as the avatar
of a new dawn, an age that rhymes with the early days of the industrial revolution
(Kolb and Kolb).

3
On the applicability of data for literary history, Franco Morettis Distant Reading
(2013) compiles various essays written on the topic, while Matthew Jockers, his collaborator at the Stanford Literary Lab, has recently published his own volume in this
same vein, Macroanalysis (2013). For a cogent critique of this direction in the humanities, see Tom Eyerss article The Perils of the Digital Humanities.
4
In a more recent text, Manovich comments on the continued expansion of datas reach:
Data comes from a number of separate professional fields with distinct histories:
social statistics, economics, business management, and financial markets. It is only
in the beginning of the twenty-first century that data leaves professional domains to
become of interest to society at large (Software 30).

To be sure, Goldsmith retains a theory of subjectivity, admitting that the suppression

of expression is ultimately impossible: the way one frames or appropriates a text will
necessarily be unique to that person (Introduction).

The popular blogging site Tumblr, for example, explicitly encourages curating and
sharing any sort of content: Tumblr lets you effortlessly share anything; the last
word in this promotional statement refers to any digitally coded objecttext, image,
video, sound (Tumblr). Similarly, in an instructional video for WordPress, we are
enjoined simply to throw down some words within an empty framework that has
been designed previously (WordPress).

7
See ngeles Donoso Macaya for a more nuanced discussion of the question of identity
in Bellatins work.

In his recent annotations of the same essay, Michael Hardt has underscored this
same overlap, albeit in different terms. It is not, he writes, that discipline is no longer
effective, but rather that the walls that used to bound or constrain it have come
downand thus that discipline now spreads over the entire society (Gilles Deleuze).

In his own insightful comments on Deleuzes essay, Richard Dienst highlights the
role that digital technologies play in the administration of control society, even as he
seeks to move the discussion into the difference between the indebted and enclosed
human being (12021).

Mario Bellatin: Literature and the Data Imaginary

87

Recommending the use of Compstat, Giulianis firm highlighted that the NYPDs
management technology reflects not only the importance of informational retrieval
and storage, but involves an entire data-driven worldview: mucho ms que un sistema de informacin, es una filosofa de administracin inteligente donde el principio
fundamental es que siempre se puede mejorar las cosas (3).
10

She borrows this term from Achille Mbembe. I first explored the relationship between this aspect of Rivera Garzas work and Bellatins conceptual experiments in a
blog post. See Epplin.
11

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Palabras clave: Mario Bellatin, literatura conceptual, datos digitales, plagio, escritura
no-creativa, simulacro, copia.

Date of Receipt: February 28, 2014

Date of Acceptance: May 9, 2014