Historicism, Nihilism, and the

Chilean Neo–Avant-Garde

Sergio Roberto Villalobos-Ruminott

Introduction

Recent proclamations of the “end of art,” along with a series of

endings that would have transformed the modern world (the end
of politics, history, ideologies, etc.), might correctly be interpreted
as a confirmation of the victory and total preponderance of neolib-
eral globalization and its consequent “parliamentary capitalism,”
to use Alain Badiou’s critical denomination.1 It is as if with the fall
of the Berlin Wall, the transitional processes in Eastern Europe
and in Latin America, the end of the Cold War, and the begin-
ning of the so-called post–Cold War period we were witnessing the
exhaustion of all political and critical traditions related to West-
ern modernity. Modernity itself, as a category and as a historical
period, seems too general to capture the particularities of those
nations—beyond Europe—that claim their own historicity. Post-
modernity, postcoloniality, and post-Marxism are just a few of the
many new names that organize critical thinking in these times and,
of course, the very notion of avant-garde, with its aesthetic and
political connotations, seems a mere archaeological remainder of
the past. The end of the avant-garde, it has been said, marks the

Discourse, 35.3, Fall 2013, pp. 362–383.

Copyright © 2014 Wayne State University Press, Detroit, Michigan 48201-1309. ISSN 1522-5321.
Historicism, Nihilism, and the Chilean Neo–Avant-Garde 363

radical collapse of the political vanguardismo (whether Leninism,

Maoism, Guevarism, or any other “ism”) as well as the revelation of
the overly general and abstract condition of a category intended to
capture the specificities of art practices during the twentieth cen-
tury. More than a general history of art and politics, we seem to
need ethnographic approaches to art and political movements, as
if the alleged universality of art and politics were a mere chimera,
an ideological misunderstanding of another time. In short, the
very notion of the avant-garde seems useless for dealing not only
with the history of art in the twentieth century but also with art
practices and movements today as well as with the always complex
relationship between art, history, and politics.
In the following pages I deal with la avanzada, the specific
name of an artistic and political movement that emerged in Chile
between the late 1970s and the early 1980s as an oppositional prac-
tice against Augusto Pinochet’s dictatorship. I will not deal, how-
ever, with the works grouped under this name, nor will I present a
close reading of a particular artist, performance, or intervention.
My goal is to make some remarks on the so-called debate on la
avanzada, a debate that has been taking place since the very incep-
tion of this movement and that involves positions relevant not only
to the local scene of art and politics but also to the general context
in which contemporary critical thinking could benefit from a gene-
alogical approach. What is at stake in this debate, in fact, is the rela-
tionship between art and politics in general and, more specifically,
the very problematic question of how to write the history of the
neo–avant-garde without falling into either the historicist account
of Chilean exceptionalism or the supplementary fetishism of cultural
practices.

The Constitution of la Avanzada

The first problem regarding the Chilean neo–avant-garde is there-

fore to establish its historical relevance. We need to determine
if la avanzada was merely a late effect of the internationalization
process that began in mid-twentieth-century Latin American
visual arts with international expositions, triennials, and sub-
regional exchanges and if this movement actually differs from
other regional manifestations of oppositional art and politics
in that time. These are no doubt difficult questions, because in
order to answer them it is necessary to deal with the relationship
between art and politics beyond their conventional or disciplin-
ary definitions. What makes art become political? Is it just the
364 Sergio Roberto Villalobos-Ruminott

historical context in general or its inherent configuration? More

cogently, we need to know if the postrepresentational and con-
ceptualist art manifestations in contemporary Latin America were
actually triggered by the historical development of this region or
were due to art’s immanent logic.2
This is one of the problems addressed in Arte y Política, a vol-
ume based on an international seminar held in Chile in 2004 and
focused on current manifestations of art criticism in the so-called
Latin American postdictatorships.3 It would not be an exaggeration
to say that the debate over the Chilean neo–avant-garde is not only
a debate on a particular case of oppositional art under dictatorship
but is itself also a locus of visibility and audibility in which the inter-
twined relationship between art, history, and politics becomes evi-
dent. It is no wonder, then, that one of the many issues presented
at the seminar refers to the uses of categories such as avant-garde,
post–avant-garde, and escena de avanzada. Up to what point do these
categories grasp and express what is specific to the Chilean artistic
situation without being unloyal to it? Which far form being just
a local issue is rather a crucial problem for art history as it refers
to the unstable relationship between events and narration. In this
sense, la avanzada was both a category that made visible different
oppositional artisitic practices under dictatoriship and a name that
could not help but produce an important effect of homogeneiza-
tion of these practices.
The main discussion at the conference, between Nelly Richard
and Willy Thayer, was largely structured around the ways in which
critical discourses should characterize this period and movement.
In other words, the discussion was anything but a mere local conflict,
since what was at stake is the question of how to write the history of
art in Chile, a country that underwent a transition not only from
dictatorship to democracy but also from a precarious republican
tradition to the prevalence of the neoliberal global market in its
economy and culture. If the history of art should not be written as
any other history, it is because it entails a radical problematization
of the relationship between the events (the art actions and works
themselves) and the narrative designed to organize them.4 But the
ensuing problem is then who should write this history? Should it
be the state and its cultural institutions concerned with the pro-
duction of an official version of the past and the present; the art-
ists, who are always willing to fight for greater recognition; or the
critics, who consider themselves a hermeneutical authority able to
decipher the secrets of art works? In any case, if la avanzada was
an intrinsically political art movement, how then should a politi-
cal history of art be written, a history that goes against the grain of
Historicism, Nihilism, and the Chilean Neo–Avant-Garde 365

the official version of the Chilean transition to democracy and its

“peaceful” national reconciliation?
Indeed, la avanzada as well as the exemplary case of Colectivo
de Acciones de Arte (CADA), an art action collective that per-
formed several interventions more related to the political and pub-
lic effects of art as a contestable practice, were names meant to
favor a revival of the critical and emancipatory aspects of an earlier
avant-gardism related to High Modernism and Surrealism along
with the political connotations of what in Latin America has been
called la otra vanguardia, “the political one.” However, the alterna-
tive dimension that these categories were attempting to convene is
the historically specific situation in which this neo–avant-gardism
emerged, not as a simple or marginal repetition of any European
model—as an imitation in which historicity still depends on the
metropolitan “official” history of art—but as a particular confron-
tation with the power relations and institutions that held a monop-
oly and produced the hegemonic discourses in the cultural field.
The formulation of such a name was performed, in other words,
with the explicit intention of differentiating intellectual and aes-
thetic oppositional movements under Pinochet’s dictatorship from
the earlier version of the historical avant-garde, with its correlative
exhaustion, as in Peter Bürger’s canonical interpretation.5
Paradoxically, if this is the case, then there should be something
“new” about the Chilean escena de avanzada, something that gives it
its identity, its difference, its distance from the general avant-garde
and from historical vanguardismo latinoamericano. Yet—and here lies
the paradox—the status of such a notion, the “new,” is rather prob-
lematic, since the appeal to novelty, innovation, and originality is
common to every generation in visual and literary fields through-
out the twentieth century, serving as a kind of identitarian mark for
every avant-gardism that has ever existed. In this case, to think la
avanzada as a rupture with tradition, with the institution of art, and
with political institutions in general, is a risky venture that could
end up as an overstatement of the movement’s originality, authen-
ticity, and novelty—an overstatement typical of the metropolitan
history of art and its epic narration about creativity and rebellious-
ness.6 The conventional history of the avant-gardes oversimplifies
all art movements, failing to differentiate them, reducing their
historicity to a general dialectic between rupture and innovation,
much as the logic of capitalism is itself likewise oriented by innova-
tion and the promise of something “new.”7 In this case, the polemic
at the seminar questioned not only the traditional aspects of avant-
gardism but also the overwhelming appealing to the “new” that la
avanzada—a critical category designed by Nelly Richard, more than
366 Sergio Roberto Villalobos-Ruminott

by the works themselves—requires to justify its very condition as an

art movement that “breaks” with the institutions of art and with the
dictatorship’s repressive order.8 Nonetheless, if there is something
new with the visual arts in Chile, then the problem would be: what
is new about the new?

The Political Relevance of Visual Arts

I contend that the positions in this debate are concerned not only
with the disciplinary dimensions of art criticism or a Latin Amer-
ican history of art but, and more important, also with the very
possibility of rearticulating a reading of the historical catastrophe
and impact of the coup d’état of September 11, 1973. At the same
time, this neo–avant-garde movement enables us to rethink the
complex relationship between art and politics as well as between
the aesthetic production of “eventful thinking” (the very emer-
gence of art practices as a “redistribution of the sensible,” to use
Jacques Rancière’s formulation) and the risky institutionalization
of any artistic manifestation by the historicist discourse of stan-
dard criticism.9 Such an alternative is needed to confront the
hegemonic version of the recent past that became officialized dur-
ing the transitional governments of the 1990s and continues to
the present day, a version that consists of presenting the Chilean
transition to democracy as an exemplary case for the region and
the world, without considering the neoliberal policies still at work
in the country and the problems related to nonofficial accounts
of the past (human rights and the tense relationship between jus-
tice and impunity). In other words, the critical evaluation of visual
art movements in general, under Pinochet’s regime, is a political
and intellectual requisite for articulating a response to the fac-
ticity of globalization, which, according to Willy Thayer, would
have started with the military intervention of 1973.10 The question
that remains, however, is why visual arts are important for such an
endeavor, since it is obvious that the social sciences have played
a more notorious—if not more decisive—role within the country
and in international academia.
Certainly, what the social sciences, and particularly sociology,
have offered with regard to dictatorship and postdictatorship pro-
cesses is not only the production of a reconstructive mechanism to
legitimize official versions of the transition to democracy but also
the correct language, the tone and affective limits of this very tonal-
ity, for narrating history, thinking politics, and understanding cul-
ture at large. Notions such as “late modernity” and “modernization,”
Historicism, Nihilism, and the Chilean Neo–Avant-Garde 367

“cultural heterogeneity” and “social fragmentation,” “hybridism”

and “postpolitical citizenships,” “pacific transition to democracy”
and “national reconciliation” along with “institutional mourning”
(all the reports and initiatives related to the violation of human
rights under Pinochet’s regime), the official call to “forgiveness
and forgetting” (with “impunity”), and standard “historical amne-
sia” and “political anesthesia” (the “spectacular” aestheticization of
politics that pervades every nook and cranny of our world) are com-
mon to the discursive operation of the social sciences and distin-
guish the political rhetoric of today, in both Chile and beyond. So
why does this investment in visual arts exist?
I also contend that there is nothing new in the debate on visual
arts. Nonetheless, these arts remain an exemplary place to deal
with issues that structure critical thinking in the country and in
the region. Visual arts is a highly visible and audible field for intel-
lectual trends in today’s international academia, but more impor-
tant, it is a field in which the very “distribution of the sensible,”
to use another formulation by Rancière, allows us to understand
the inherent relationship between art and politics beyond both
the official historicist version of Chilean “democratization” and
the complementary fetishist account of the neo–avant-garde attrib-
uted, as we will see, to Nelly Richard’s seminal interventions. At
the same time, the discussion between Richard and Thayer enables
a retrieval or “repetition” of a materialist way of thinking about his-
tory, as opposed to the general and all-comprehending historicist
thought that expresses the very ideology of globalization. In other
words, the Chilean debate on visual arts makes possible an inter-
rogation directed against the vulgar understanding of temporal-
ity and politics that reduces the national and regional history to
a linear narrative of permanent progress toward democracy and
economic development (indeed, the optimism related to financial
globalization complements and radicalizes the former agenda of
modernization, crucial to the region’s history since its postcolonial
inception). It is in this context that the following quotation from
Federico Galende gains its full relevance:

Unlike other Latin American countries, in Chile—basically the Chile of

postdictatorship, if we agree in using such a word—it is not the literary
field, and still less the narrative production, but rather the field of visual
arts that serves as the privileged political space to discuss the transition
[to democracy]. Maybe this is due to something so simple as the fact that
since the 1980s there are no editors (Chile is a country without editors);
instead there are curators.11
368 Sergio Roberto Villalobos-Ruminott

La Avanzada between the Coup and Nihilism

The interventions of Richard and Thayer in Arte y Política12 are a

clear example of the ways in which one’s evaluation of the Chilean
neo–avant-garde is always, at the same time, a positioning on the
political field. Curiously enough, both Richard and Thayer argue
against each other from what is called “critical thinking,” and each
accuses the other of “nihilism.” Richard accuses Thayer of a nihilis-
tic attitude that disregards the desires and motivations that moved
la avanzada, conceiving that movement as an effect of the foun-
dational violence of the military intervention of 1973. Indeed, for
Thayer, the antirepresentational inclination of the neo–avant-garde
was merely a case within the radical antirepresentational nature of
the dictatorship, whose inauguration, through the bombing of La
Moneda, marked the very end of the institutional and representa-
tive political order of the country, and this is what Richard would
have overlooked symptomatically. According to Richard, however,
Thayer negates or represses the political connotations of the visual
arts scene of the 1980s insofar as he is trapped in a philosophical-
speculative conception of the market as an invincible transhistorical
reality. Thayer responds by accusing Richard of a nihilistic attitude
of self-assertion that produces a romantic and foundational-histori-
cal reconstruction of la avanzada. But according to Richard, Thayer
negates or represses the politics of art because he is fascinated with
a monumental conception of the new global order.
If we follow Thayer’s argument, the eventful condition of the
coup d’état of September 11, 1973, would work as the hermeneu-
tical principle that demonstrates how everything attempted by
the neo–avant-garde in the field of representation was not only
insufficient but was also subordinated to the logic of the military
closure of representation. The event—the coup—produced the
presentation of the unpresentable in the national history, generat-
ing the exhaustion of any modernist—avant-gardist—understand-
ing of politics, art, and criticism. As Thayer summarizes,

The operations of la avanzada could not be considered under the sign

of avant-gardism in terms of the deconstruction of the historical institution of
representation, because in 1979, when la avanzada emerges, not only the
distribution and production of art apparatuses but all institutional forms
have been suspended in a series of coups. Six years of coups (1973–79),
of shock policies, and military decrees.13

Of course, this is for Richard the “evident conformism that feeds

Thayer’s position.”14 However, we should keep in mind that Thayer,
Historicism, Nihilism, and the Chilean Neo–Avant-Garde 369

in his intervention, is criticizing Richard’s reading of la avanzada

and not the works grouped under that category. In fact, he dif-
ferentiates between the art actions and performances of CADA
and the works of Gonzalo Díaz, Eugenio Dittborn, or Juan Dávila,
among many others. Thus, what matters for Thayer is not the dis-
approval of the avant-garde as a willful radicalization of the bour-
geois spirit—as in Peter Sloterdijk’s characterization of European
surrealism—but the way in which Richard’s canonical reading pro-
duces a fetishistic account of the period, an account that would
be complementary to the official historicist version of the Chil-
ean transition to democracy, missing the specificities of the works
themselves.15 For Richard, la avanzada was an aesthetic and political
movement and a category meant to systematize the heterogeneous
manifestations in the field of arts, visuality, and literature through
the second period of Pinochet’s dictatorship, between 1977 and
1985. As she had written,

La avanzada was not a homogeneous totality. If la avanzada put together

practices that were mutually supportive because of their passion for con-
ceptual exploration and artistic deconstruction, those practices offered
responses that were frequently divergent in the form in which they
assumed the relationship between art, criticism, and society.16

Therefore, la avanzada convened new approaches for art actions,

public performances, and social art understood as a break with the
institutional circumscription of earlier avant-gardism (1950s and
1960s), video testimony, airmail painting, and photography. But la
avanzada, in Richard’s view, also brought together figures as diver-
gent as Fernando Balcells (sociologist), Raúl Zurita and Diamela
Eltit (writers), and Lotty Rosenfeld and Juan Castillo (visual art-
ists)—all of them grouped in CADA—as well as Richard herself (art
and cultural essayist), along with the photography of Paz Errázuriz,
the video performances of Carlos Leppe, the airmail paintings of
Eugenio Dittborn, and the theoretical elaborations of Ronald Kay,
Patricio Marchant, and Pablo Oyarzún, among many others.
For Richard, this particular group of people represented more
than just a sociohistorical category; they were instead a hetero-
geneous, uneven, and multidimensional group whose common
denominator was their oppositional orientation to the prevailing
censorship of the regime and its monolithic logic of representation
(which understood the coup as the nation’s salvation). But as such,
the group was also in conflict with the classical leftist understand-
ing of art as an instrument for political liberation. That is to say,
in Richard’s view, la avanzada disputed the very role of so-called
370 Sergio Roberto Villalobos-Ruminott

political vanguardismo, criticizing the general orthodoxy of those

who, by that time, were rearticulating political opposition to the
regime.17 Richard thus does not conceive this movement as a sim-
ple ahistorical and nonreflexive recuperation of “classical” avant-
gardism; on the contrary, she coined the name la avanzada in order
to emphasize the precursory character of combative works of and
about art that shared the avant-gardist mood of formal experimen-
tation and politicization of aesthetics while, at the same time, dis-
tancing themselves from the Modernist epic of the avant-garde that
was internationalized by metropolitan histories of art, emphasizing
instead the local specificity of a fraught political scenario. Conse-
quently, she insists,

La escena de avanzada disputed the standard understanding of politics in

the years of the dictatorship, the capability of producing a “field” of ten-
sions and problems around the dilemmas of representation, resistant to
the instrumental ideological rhetoric of the content and to the pragmatic
operations inherent to the political program.18

Therefore, from Richard’s viewpoint, Thayer’s nihilistic reading of

the coup d’état as the devastating event that forever ruptured the
nation’s communitarian narrative would play down the importance
of the neo–avant-garde and its political endeavors, as if, in a rather
nihilistic mood, his reading reduced the whole scene of visual arts
to the eventful condition of the military intervention: the bombing
of La Moneda as the closure of historical (artistic and political)
representations. Because of this reading, she would argue, Thayer
remains trapped in the spectacular character of the September 11
bombing of the government palace, and that overwhelming image
would lead him to reduce the political drive of la avanzada to the
logic of neoliberal globalization and its revolutionary foundation-
alism.19 Richard insists that

The event of the coup d’état of September 11, 1973, and the emergence
of la escena de avanzada do not belong to the same series of processes
or facts. . . . To force the structural analogy between the coup and la
avanzada is to dissolve the tension between context (the sociohistori-
cal: dictatorship) and text (the aesthetico-cultural: the neo–avant-garde
experiment). Between, on one hand, the macroreference of the histori-
cal fact and, on the other hand, the event of the text and the work that
translates the fact—vertical, one-dimensional—of the Real (the dictator-
ship as facticity) to a horizontal game of expressive-symbolic folds, whose
multidimensionality displaces the transcendental meaning of the “coup”
in multiple explosions of critical language.20
Historicism, Nihilism, and the Chilean Neo–Avant-Garde 371

Nevertheless, we should make two observations with regard to this

quotation: first, presenting the coup as an event does not mean
reducing it to an empirical occurrence in the sense of a vulgar
understanding of temporality; the coup was not a vulgar fact but
instead was a decisive event that confirmed and, at the same time,
radicalized the long tradition of Chilean exceptionalism (the mili-
tary intervention is by no means new to the history of the country
and the region). Actually, Thayer conceives the coup as a series of
events with different and successive elaborations, leading to a gen-
eral dismantling of the country’s precarious republican “tradition”
and to its current globalization, in which the very date of September
11, 1973, would have been, as stated earlier, its big bang.21 In this
case, to conceive the coup as an “exception” within Chile’s republi-
can history is something that official historiography and the social
sciences have insistently done ever since. In other words, the vulgar
conception of temporality that identified the event of the military
intervention with a short interruption of Chile’s republican his-
tory—as a sort of brief parenthesis—needs to be abandoned. The
eventful condition opened by the coup does not end with the fac-
ticity of the intervention; in fact, Thayer and Richard are both crit-
ics of the Chilean exceptionalism and its ideological understanding
of the country’s history in terms of institutional continuity. Thayer
comments that

The coup makes visible how the continuum of modern national history,
the more than one hundred years of democratic representational culture
supported by the so-called autonomy of spheres is, at the same time, the
continuum of violence: that progress as a historical norm is a euphemistic
version of violence as the real historical norm.22

This Benjaminian understanding of history shows how the state of

exception is actually the rule, denouncing at the same time that
the other side of this so-called democratic exceptionalism is the
juridical exceptionalism that has always prevailed as violence. The
history of Chile is therefore the history of violence as much as it is
violence as history, and this is now more important than ever as a
way to resist the enthusiasm with which every country in the region
is willingly celebrating its exceptional bicentennial.
But our second observation points to how the distinction that
Richard establishes between facticity (the coup) and intellectual
elaboration (la avanzada) is still based on an understanding of art
concerned with its “relative autonomy.” This “relative autonomy”
would oppose the “sovereign notion of dictatorship” that she trans-
fers to Thayer, but the argument is troubling insofar as autonomy
372 Sergio Roberto Villalobos-Ruminott

and sovereignty supplement each other in a perfect fashion accord-

ing to contemporary art criticism.23 If the dictatorship was a
foundational redesign of the economic-juridical structure of the
country—following Carl Schmitt’s conception of modern dictator-
ship—then any form of political thinking that remains in the terri-
tory of sovereignty, without questioning its nihilistic implication in
history as violence—be it as a desiring textuality or even as a mul-
tiplicity of subjective actions—is part of the same horizon opened
by the theological roots of modern sovereignty. In that case, the
eventful condition of the coup consisted in having disclosed for us,
once again, the complicity between sovereignty as political form
and subjectivism as a nihilistic insistence (a militant subjectivism,
desiring and willful, almost neo-Paulinist). Therefore, the so-called
relative autonomy that Richard opposes to Thayer’s version of the
dictatorship rests upon the same understanding of the dictator-
ship and its monumental authoritarian culture. Richard needs to
emphasize this authoritarian culture in order to contrast official
art with la avanzada. Nevertheless, at the same time she emphasizes
the fragmentary character of la avanzada to escape from Thayer’s
accusation that she is engaged in a reconstructive and legitimiz-
ing reading equivalent to the reading of the past performed by
sociological discourses. Paradoxically, in contrast to the alleged
fragmentary character of the movement’s identity, Richard posits a
coherent (if not totalizing) strategy that differentiates it from clas-
sical—predictatorship—avant-gardism and from leftist pragmatism
(the subordination of art’s imperatives to the imperatives of revolu-
tion, at best):

Confronted with the breaks in the logic of representation (with the dis-
articulation of categories and identities) and confronted with the way
in which the culture of the Left was attempting to mask broken symbols
in order to reconfigure a certain image of continuity and historical tra-
dition, la avanzada’s works were concerned with those fragments and
residues (the underrepresented, the diminished) that wandered in the
margins of the grand and heroic narratives of resistance and its monu-
mental epic. In contrast to the art ideologically framed by political par-
ties that resorted to humanist-transcendent metasignifications (People,
Identity, Memory, Revolution, Liberation, etc.), la avanzada recovered
the microbiographic fragments of shattered imaginaries, in order to thus
undermine the perfect representations that leftist ideologies were still
supporting.24

In short, Richard accuses Thayer of nihilism insofar as he disre-

gards the political and critical elements of a movement that was
Historicism, Nihilism, and the Chilean Neo–Avant-Garde 373

not only radical within the institution of national art but was also
breaking with that very institution. In this sense, it is no wonder
that she recuperates so insistently the activities and performances
of CADA, a collective that emerges with a political agenda oriented
to what its adherents called social art.25 All in all, it seems that if
Richard’s reading of the neo–avant-garde is a fetishistic operation
that overstates the real importance of such a movement, Thayer’s
reading would nonetheless still be ensnared by a similar hyperboli-
cal operation, in this case of the current capitalist world order as a
transcendental and invincible historical horizon:

What Thayer calls “the neo-capitalist end of the critique of representa-

tion” is based, precisely, upon an operation that benefits from its refusal
of the political. A refusal implicit in the gesture of making equivalent the
postmodern diagnosis of the crisis of representation and a posthistorical nihilism
related to the end of the battles for signification.26

Historicism as Nihilism

Nelly Richard’s argument could be read as a response to Willy Thay-

er’s entire critical oeuvre.27 Nonetheless, I should clarify that my
aim here is not to argue against Richard’s crucial work, which for
that matter has been the very condition for many critical endeavors
in visual, literary, and critical fields (at least, in Latin America).
Nor do I sympathize in a humanistic fashion with Thayer’s so-called
nihilism (it would be an oxymoron). What powerfully calls atten-
tion here is the series of problems that this debate, and specifically
the conceptions of nihilism and political “desiring” art, discloses.
Coming back to Thayer, in one of his articles he defines la avanzada
as follows:

Escena de avanzada names, above all, the textual production of Nelly Rich-
ard on visual arts in Chile from the late 1970s until 1983, approximately.
Her texts, in those years, configure the original accumulation and the
subsequent labeling of that name. To quote them is to quote the signa-
ture of a series of essays that, as a group, configures the hesitant process
of elaboration of such a concept, which circulates today among us as a
natural category.28

Here, in opposition to Richard, what Thayer designates with the

name la avanzada is not the heterogeneous movement upon
which she profusely comments and that she defends but instead
374 Sergio Roberto Villalobos-Ruminott

the foundational and categorical operation of her texts. This is,

however, an argument already presented in the contributions
of the Chilean philosopher Pablo Oyarzún, who, as the author
of important contributions related to visual arts, was one of the
first to address this problem. Indeed, in his early article “Arte en
Chile, de veinte, treinta años,” Oyarzún had already identified la
avanzada and the particular reading performed by Richard with
a national wave of modernization that the visual arts have been
experiencing since the 1950s. Oyarzún’s main hypothesis points to
the foundational character of Richard’s account of the neo–avant-
garde, which presents that movement as the inaugural elaboration
of a “new” understanding of artistic practices resulting from a tense
relationship between the international avant-garde and the local
scene of reception. Two things are important for Oyarzún. First, in
the reading that la avanzada receives by Richard, we see the transi-
tion from an active art movement to a “chapter of history,” a sort
of monumental referentiality that corrects and determines the his-
tory of art and the history of the relationship between politics and
art in the country. Second, insofar as Richard conceives the dynam-
ics of la avanzada as a rupture with the tradition and with official
institutions of art, she is still ensnared by the historicist account
of the Chilean exceptionalism, opposing to the understanding of
the coup as a rupture another rupture, that of la avanzada.29 As a
complementary observation to this problem, we might add that the
foundational rhetoric informing Richard’s Margins and Institutions
is still fed by a geopolitical understanding of the margin and the
center, one that thinks of the center as an institutional center of
power and therefore thinks of the margin as a place of resistance
to that power.30
Richard’s understanding of the neo–avant-garde’s art activities
is therefore enabled but at the same time limited by this fetishist
logic, and thus the notion of a clear-cut rupture that this move-
ment claimed in relation to the traditional institution of art is noth-
ing else but the effect of a foundational-fiction kind of rhetoric,
which is the counterpart of another fetishist logic, that of the tran-
sitional sociology and its historicist version of the democratization
and consolidation of the current neoliberal order in the country.
Thayer, as we noted, has oriented his criticism to Richard’s canoni-
cal reading and not to the artists or their works, something that still
would be pending:

“The Political and the Critical in Art” [Richard’s text at the 2004 seminar]
makes it possible to perceive that the “condemnation of the past and the
future” of la escena de avanzada that N. Richard transfers to my texts in fact
Historicism, Nihilism, and the Chilean Neo–Avant-Garde 375

constitutes not a condemnation of the practices and works of la avanzada,

but rather a reading of the vanguardist-modernizing code with which N.
Richard produced the canon and the modernizing profile of such a scene
in Margin and Institutions—the only canon we have, in any case. A canon
on which she insists today, it seems, in order to protect la avanzada from
other possible readings that go beyond her codification.31

The earlier accusation of nihilism that Richard employed against

Thayer for diminishing the political and critical dimensions of the
Chilean neo–avant-garde is now inverted by Thayer, who accuses
Richard’s systematic reading on visual and cultural practices
of being unable to question the deep link between moderniza-
tion—as the logic of cultural production—and the reconstruc-
tive-foundational mechanism animating her criticism. What in
Oyarzún was first identified as the transition from art practices
to the historical discourse of criticism appears in Thayer as a
diagnosis of Richard’s general limitations. Thayer himself would
recognize the importance of her texts and interventions, but
what feeds his distrust toward her work is Richard’s investment
in the self-proclaimed potentiality of cultural criticism, a critical
practice with which Richard identifies and, according to her, a
practice that could not be reduced to the transnational setting of
contemporary cultural studies.32 However, we might ask, are the
politically engaged texts of Richard’s a simple and naive repeti-
tion of the modern emancipatory tendencies of vanguardism? Is
the reconstructive-foundational logic of Margins and Institutions
and The Insubordination of Signs just a romantic version of the dis-
sident movements under dictatorship?33 On the other hand, we
might ask again, is it not obvious that Thayer’s farewell to avant-
gardism—even if rescuing the works of la avanzada—reminds us
of Peter Sloterdijk’s bombastic critique of surrealism or Roberto
Bolaño’s irreverent representation of the close affiliation between
art and military violence in his novel Distant Star? To what extent
is it possible today to deal with art practices beyond notions that
have been so relevant in thinking the relationship between art and
politics (avant-garde, Modernity, etc.) and to dismiss any revival of
political avant-gardism as nostalgia or even nihilism, without being
accused of theoretical indulgence? We cannot be conclusive about
this; however, we should keep in main that what was at stake in this
local debate was not only a methodological or historiographical
issue but also the problem of nihilism as a material condition for
contemporary critical thinking. In the final instance, we should
say, to criticize the neo–avant-garde and la avanzada is to suspend
the assumed relevance of certain categories that pertain not to
376 Sergio Roberto Villalobos-Ruminott

visual arts themselves but instead to the critical discourses consti-

tuted around them.

The Interruption of Value as Suspension of Nihilism

Finally, we might observe that the positions in this exchange some-

how repeat another debate that emerged with the publication of
Thayer’s book La crisis no moderna de la universidad moderna. Curi-
ously enough, this work appeared the same year as Bill Readings’s
critical account of contemporary institutions of higher education,
The University in Ruins.34 There are many similarities between these
two books that merit a close analysis. Besides both authors being
“good readers” of Jean-François Lyotard, what is also common to
their analyses is a skeptical approach to the field of cultural pro-
duction and therefore to cultural studies in its standard American
version. We might say that for Thayer, as well as for Readings’s
critique of cultural studies, the logic of cultural production that
characterizes the international intellectual arena is subordinated,
from its very inception, to the logic of capitalist valuation insofar
as what is called cultural production is a field diminished by the
capitalist contemporary logic of global circulation. Thayer is not a
partisan of end-of-history discourses (nor is Readings), and neither
is Thayer just repeating Jameson’s famous analysis of postmodern-
ism as “the cultural logic of late capitalism.”35 Thayer’s problem is
not with the ways in which cultural heterogeneity and diversity, as
matters of fact, are common everywhere; his problem is related
to the way in which the contemporary fetishism of cultural diver-
sity and multiculturalism are symptomatic of a nihilistic strategy
of valuation (recognition) that finally produces indifferentiation (an
infinite accumulation of ethnographic and identitarian criticism
rather than the more necessary critique of the current processes
of accumulation). Thayer reacts to what we might call, drawing on
a concept from Alberto Moreiras, a generalized exhaustion of the
critical potentialities of cultural difference, since difference itself,
once inscribed within the university curriculum, becomes undiffer-
entiated and appears as a soft multiculturalism, a sort of “formal”
and “liberal” humanism.36 Indeed, it is an exhaustion of difference
resulting from the all-pervading logic of global accumulation that
implies, basically, the very indifferentiation between what we used
to call critical thinking and what we understand by production of
knowledge, between theory and facticity. Any critical reformula-
tion that disregards this condition of indifferentiation—that is, criti-
cism’s subordination to the standard of capitalist valuation by the
Historicism, Nihilism, and the Chilean Neo–Avant-Garde 377

international system of production and circulation of knowledge—

is only a complementary effort in the configuration and improve-
ment of a new image of the world. In this sense, Thayer’s mistrust of
cultural criticism might be thought of as a strategy of suspension,
of interruption, of the alleged sovereignty of criticism.37
Let us remember that for Richard, Thayer is a nihilist inso-
far as he is trapped in a sort of exaggerated understanding of the
devastating condition of the coup. Unable to read the micropoli-
tics of desire as well as minority identities and their performative
strategies of politicization, Thayer, as a negative theologian, would
subsume everything under the nihilistic logic of global capital-
ism. Nevertheless, what we might call his “politics of interrup-
tion” would be rather different from this nihilism. Conceptually,
the problem of nihilism has to do with the way in which Thayer
and Richard understand devastation, destruction, and deconstruc-
tion. For Richard, Thayer’s destructive reading is, on the whole,
a devastating operation that negates any value to la avanzada. In
Thayer’s view, Richard produces a romantic foundational fiction
that reconstructs (and for that reason is not a sufficiently destruc-
tive or deconstructive alternative) and recuperates, for the “transi-
tional” present, the politics (her politics) of la avanzada that could
have been relevant in the 1980s but is not revelant today. In this
regard, Thayer argues that

The consideration of nihilism as something equivalent to “inactivity,”

“loneliness,” “passivity” seems to be a conceptual mistake. This weak and
depressed condition of nihilism is related to the idea of Total Mobilization
[Ernst Jünger], to values like efficacy, proficiency, administration, con-
frontation, competition, planetary battles for power, the Cold War and
the end of the Cold War that is worse than the Cold War, etc. Notions such as
“unworking,” “neutrality,” “subtraction,” I insist, are reserved for a kind
of (in)activity that aspires to interrupt nihilism, the activism of “absolute
desire” and things like that. None of this means to defeat nihilism, to progress
beyond it, to stop it significantly, nor does it have anything to do with a new
articulation of presence.38

In this sense, Thayer attempts to interrupt Richard’s reconstructive

emphasis on la avanzada and its history, which is where the core of
the debate most likely resides. If Thayer’s alleged nihilism consists
of forgetting the political desires of a generation that expresses
its oppositional politics against the dictatorship by questioning the
institutions of art and culture, Thayer’s response emphasizes the
intrinsic relationship between subjectivism, sovereignty, and a poli-
tics of “absolute desire.” It is not that Thayer criticizes the desiring
378 Sergio Roberto Villalobos-Ruminott

activities of la avanzada or CADA; it is that Richard still reads with

enthusiasm (as in the Kantian reception of the French Revolution)
this neo–avant-garde, risking a sort of inherent complicity with the
horizon of nihilism.39 Thayer states that

I would read the practices and works of la avanzada against the grain of
the canonization that Margins and Institutions made of them; against their
capture as a field of formal independence, and even more, against the idea of
the modernization of visual arts. I would read them, rather, as a constel-
lation of activities or as a pragmatic of the subtraction, of the unworking,
désoeuvrement, of interruption: as a pragmatic of collage, of Gram or even
allegory, a pragmatics that interrupts the undifferentiating homogeniza-
tion that the noisy cultural plurality of today produces.40

Nonetheless, as Thayer’s use of conditional tenses indicates, it is

obvious that this new reading is still to come and that Richard’s
account of la avanzada and the practices related to it, even if in a
secondary way, find in her formulation one of the few thoughtful
problematizations of the Chilean neo–avant-garde. We still need to
consider further all of the implications of this debate. However, by
way of a preliminary conclusion, we might assert that the debate
between Thayer and Richard engages the following questions: the
status of the coup d’état, the nature of dictatorship and global-
ization; the strategies for articulating and rearticulating political
thinking; the place of criticism; and the valuation or devaluation
of intellectual work. These topics themselves enable an interesting
debate, beyond the picturesque reduction of Latin American reali-
ties to identity politics, new articulations of presence, and magi-
cal realism. In this sense, the dispute between Richard and Thayer
does not require taking sides; it does, however, require a careful
consideration of the potentialities of a thinking that could emanci-
pate itself from the demands of historicism, the demands of what
we might call the principle of reason that is also, very often, the rea-
son of state. To interrupt that principle, to interrupt its sovereignty,
is to suspend the modern dialectic that feeds and absorbs our mod-
ern understanding of the political—precisely because what is at
stake here, in the discussion of the Chilean neo–avant-garde, is the
very relationship between history and event, beyond any subjectiv-
ism that reduces the space of the political to the modern notion
of a sovereign subject that could give reason to/for all. To think
the series of works related to la avanzada is not to reduce them to
the historiographical formulation of such a category, in the very
same sense in which to think the political vanguardia should not
be confused with the reduction of any radical politics to classical
Historicism, Nihilism, and the Chilean Neo–Avant-Garde 379

partisanship. If art movements are more important than aesthet-

ical-historiographical categories, then political interruptions of
what is given as facticity are more important than political philoso-
phy. In such a case, Richard’s modernist mood seems necessary to
antagonize the biopolitical closure of our world, even though it is
precisely this kind of optimism (enthusiasm) that defines the close
alliance between the discourses of standard (technological) criticism
and the practices of power. However it might be, what is clear for
us is that any attempt to underestimate these intellectual confron-
tations in the name of the future, of national reconciliation, of peaceful
and exemplary Chilean democracy, is merely to affirm the same nihil-
ism that disregards how the current globalization of human affairs
is also a chance to make of any genealogical dispute a place for
visibility and dissensus, a chance to interrupt nihilism.

Notes
I want to thank the anonymous reader of Discourse and Samuel Steinberg for their
generous help. Without them, this essay would not have been possible. All translations
in the text are mine unless stated otherwise.
1.
Alain Baidou, “Of an Obscure Disaster: On the End of the Truth of State,”
translated by Barbara P. Fulks, lacanian ink, Vol. 22 (Fall 2003): 58–89.
2.
Although we are discussing la avanzada here, it is worth mentioning the
editions of documents that belong to the Argentinean avant-garde of the 1960s as
examples that might shed some light onto these problems: Ana Longoni, Mariano
Metsman, Andrea Giunta, et al., Listen Here Now! Argentinean Art of the 1960s (New
York: Museum of Modern Art, 2004), and the panoramic volume edited by Claudia
Calirman, Deborah Cullen, et al., Arte no es vida: Actions by Artists of the Americas,
1960–2000 (New York: Museo del Barrio, 2008).
3.
Pablo Oyarzún, Nelly Richard, and Claudia Zaldívar, eds., Arte y política (San-
tiago: ARCIS-Universidad de Chile-Consejo Nacional de la Cultura y las Artes, 2005).
4.
The problematization of historicism and the relationship between narrative
and image is at the center of Georges Didi-Huberman’s work. See, for example,
Georges Didi-Huberman, Ante el tiempo: Historia del arte y anacronismo de las imágenes,
translated by Antonio Oviedo (Buenos Aires: Adriana Hidalgo Editora, 2006).
5.
In Chile, the discussion over the avant-garde, over its exhaustion or potentiality,
has been formulated in different historical moments, particularly in those of the
generations of the 1950s (grupo rectángulo) and the 1960s (grupo Signo) as well as
from about 1977 to 1985 (la escena de avanzada). Even if none of these movements
attempted a mechanical reception translation of international avant-gardism, what
really matters is the way in which all of them differ in their conceptions of art, innova-
tion, and politics. For a panoramic view of the so-called exhaustion of the historical
avant-garde, see Peter Bürger, Theory of the Avant-Garde (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1984). For a recent reevaluation of its critical potential, see Hal
Foster, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century (New York: MIT
380 Sergio Roberto Villalobos-Ruminott

Press, 1996). Somehow, the space configured by these two books could work as a
preliminary frame to place the Chilean debate on visual arts.
6.
But this “metropolitan history of art” is already a hegemonic construction
oriented to homogenize practices that were and are, by their own nature, heteroge-
neous. Boris Groys has problematized the standard version of European avant-gardism
with his reading of the Soviet art movements after the Bolshevik Revolution. See
Boris Groys, The Total Art of Stalinism: Avant-Garde, Aesthetic Dictatorship, and Beyond
(Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1992).
7.
For some critical approaches to this problem, see Raymond Williams’s critique
of modernism, Politics of Modernism: Against the New Conformists (London: Verso, 1989),
and Rosalind Krauss’s seminal book The Originality of the Avant-Garde and Other Mod-
ernist Myths (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1986). See also Boris Groys’s recent essay
Sobre lo Nuevo: Ensayo de una economía cultural (Valencia: Pre-Textos, 2010). Groys has
become a relevant reference for the Chilean art theoreticians and critics insofar as
he deals with the “meaning” of Duchamp’s ready-mades, which have been silently
at the center of the debate.
8.
Richard’s book, published in a Spanish-English edition, Margins and Institutions:
Art in Chile since 1973 (Melbourne: Art and Text, 1986), was not only the first but
also the most relevant, canonical, and decisive intervention related to la avanzada,
a category that she herself coined. According to Richard, this movement should be
placed in a third position, other than the official aesthetic of the state and its cultural
institutions but also other than the traditional aesthetic program of the Left and its
subordination of art to politics.
9.
In rethinking the complexities involved in the relationship between art and
politics as well as between the emergence or irruption of these practices and the
configuration of a discursive device oriented to discipline and domesticate, such
irruptions imply that we are dealing not only with la avanzada as a general name for
the Chilean neo–avant-garde but also with the official version of what would have
been the role of culture, the role of art, under dictatorship, which is always an already
limiting interrogation. See Jacques Rancière’s refreshing intervention The Politics of
Aesthetics, translated by Gabriel Rockhill (London: Continuum, 2006).
10.
To conceive of the coup as the start or ignition of the process of globalization
should not be mistaken as an empirical statement. It is more a figure that allows us
to understand the coup as a series of processes leading to the end of the nation-state
sovereignty and the configuration of a new postnational and corporativist form of
sovereignty. Willy Thayer actually speaks of the coup “as the big bang of globalization”
in this same sense. See Willy Thayer, El Fragmento Repetido: Escritos en estado de excepción
(Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2006), 15.
11.
Galende’s text, “Conferencia Arte y política,” is an unpublished talk given at
Duke University in 2003.
12.
Nelly Richard, “Lo político y lo crítico en el arte: ‘¿Quién teme a la neovan-
guardia?,’” 33–46, and Willy Thayer, “Crítica, nihilismo e interrupción: El porvenir de
la avanzada después de Márgenes e instituciones,” 47–62, both in Arte y política. Thayer’s
title refers to Richard’s previously cited foundational book Margins and Institutions.
13.
William Thayer, “Vanguardia, dictadura, globalización (La serie de las artes
visuales en Chile 1957–2000),” in Pensar en/la postdictadura, edited by Nelly Richard
and Alberto Moreiras (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2001), 251–52.
14.
Richard, “Lo político y lo crítico en el arte,” 33–46.
Historicism, Nihilism, and the Chilean Neo–Avant-Garde 381

15.
Sloterdijk’s critical interpretation of European surrealism is found in Terror
from the Air, translated by Amy Patton and Steve Corcoran (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e),
2009). Roberto Bolaño also refers critically to the Chilean neo–avant-garde in his
Distant Star, translated by Chris Andrew (New York: New Directions, 2004), where
Carlos Wieder, the killer poet who performs sky poetry with his jet and also tortures
victims of the dictatorship, alludes somehow to certain art actions of CADA, if not to
the poems that Raúl Zurita wrote in the sky above New York in the early 1980s. See the
pathetic representation of the literary scene under Pinochet’s dictatorship in Bolaño’s
By Night in Chile, translated by Chris Andrew (New York: New Directions, 2003).
16.
Richard, “Lo político y lo crítico en el arte,” 43.
17.
Very clear in this regard is the famous congress at the Instituto Alejandro
Lipschuz (a cultural institute linked to the Communist Party) in May 1987 in Santiago.
Under the title Hegemonía y Visualidad, this congress attempted to organize the
semantic field of oppositional cultures and democratic tendencies under dictatorship;
however, Richard presented her reading of the situation of art in Chile in a rather
antihegemonic way, questioning the classical humanist reading of the Left and its
so-called art of the resistance. See Nelly Richard, La estratificación de los márgenes
(Santiago: Francisco Zegers Editor, 1989).
18.
Richard, “Lo político y lo crítico en el arte,” 36.
19.
Of course, for Thayer the revolutionary character of the dictatorship does
not refer to the normative understanding of modern emancipatory revolutions but
instead refers to the objective change in the social relations of production: Pinochet’s
dictatorship was a foundational regime able to redesign the economy as well as the
state and the juridical apparatus (the Constitution of 1980). It is a clear case of what
Carl Schmitt called a “sovereign dictatorship” (as opposed to a “commissarial” one)
in that it is a process inaugurated by the state of exception and followed by the total
reconfiguration of the Constitution. Carl Schmitt, La dictadura: Desde los comienzos
del pensamiento moderno de la soberanía hasta la lucha de clases proletaria, translated by
José Díaz García (Madrid: Alianza, 2007). In this sense, if la avanzada, as Richard
claims, inaugurated a new relationship between politics and art, it did so in the very
same sense in which the coup and the subsequent dictatorship also inaugurated a
new social contract.
20.
Richard, “Lo político y lo crítico en el arte,” 37–38.
21.
If the Chilean case could be thought as a revolutionary neoliberalization, as
Thomas Moulian has put it in his Chile actual: Anatomía de un mito (Santiago: ARCIS-
LOM, 1997), then David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2005) could be read as a complementary socioeconomic analysis
of that process.
22.
Thayer, “Crítica, nihilismo e interrupción,” 57.
23.
As an example of this cobelonging and supplementary relationship between
autonomy and sovereignty, see Christoph Menke, The Sovereignty of Art: Aesthetic
Negativity in Adorno and Derrida, translated by Thomas McCarthy (Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 1999).
24.
Richard, “Lo político y lo crítico en el arte,” 41.
25.
In many issues of her journal Revista de crítica cultural, Richard and others
have addressed the importance of CADA (see the issues 18, 22, 28, 29–30) in these
years. On the other hand, Robert Neustadt’s CADA Día: La creación de un arte social
382 Sergio Roberto Villalobos-Ruminott

(Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 2001) is an efficient compilation of documents and public

statements of CADA and its members. For a short English version of his reading, see
Robert Neustadt, “Chilean Art and Action: Subverting Order, Performing Change,”
in Calirman, Cullen, et al., Arte no es vida, 162–79.
26.
Richard, “Lo político y lo crítico en el arte,” 45.
27.
A work disseminated in several articles and later collected in El Fragmento
Repetido. However, Thayer has elaborated even more regarding the current condition
of professional criticism in his last book, Tecnologías de la crítica: Entre Walter Benjamin
y Gilles Deleuze (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2010). Richard, for her part, in addition
to the revised reedition of Márgenes e instituciones: Arte en Chile desde 1973 (Santiago:
Metales Pesados, 2007), has produced a new approach to the limits of the official
version of the past and its commemorative rhetoric in Chile today, Crítica de la memoria
(Santiago: Universidad Diego Portales, 2010).
28.
Thayer, “Vanguardia, dictadura, globalización,” 250.
29.
Oyarzún’s important role in visual arts debates in Chile is due to his thoughtful
contributions, among which we should mention his “Arte en Chile, de veinte, treinta
años,” Georgia Series on Hispanic Thought 22–25 (1989): 291–34, and his reading of
Richard’s book, “Crítica, historia: En torno a Márgenes e instituciones de Nelly Richard,”
in El rabo del ojo (Santiago: Editorial ARCIS, 2003), 229–34 (originally published in
1986). A careful analysis of the Chilean debate requires also considering his influential
book Anaestética del ready-made (Santiago: ARCIS-LOM, 2000), which is the edited
version of his former dissertation dedicated to Marcel Duchamp’s ready-mades.
30.
The problem with this geopolitical criterion (center and periphery, margin
and institutions) is not only that it is insufficient for understanding contemporary
political and aesthetical practices in a global world; in addition, when Richard
identifies the activities grouped under la avanzada with a marginal position, she
enables a rhetoric of victimization (a surplus jouisssance) that capitalizes the margin as
equal to this art movement, reducing that complex cultural space to such a dichotomy.
For a contrasting understanding of parainstitutional art, see Ticio Escobar, El Mito del
arte y el mito del pueblo: Cuestiones sobre arte popular (Santiago: Metales Pesados, 2008).
31.
Thayer, “Crítica, nihilismo e interrupción,” 53.
32.
She actually derives her cultural criticism from French poststructuralism,
Barthesian semiology, contemporary feminism, and the “Birmingham” style of cultural
studies, as different from the “most conventional American version of this studies.”
See Nelly Richard, Cultural Residues: Chile in Transition, translated by Alan West-Durán
and Theodore Quester (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2004).
33.
Nelly Richard, The Insubordination of Signs: Political Change, Cultural Transforma-
tion, and Poetics of the Crisis, translated by Alice A. Nelson and Silvia R. Tandeciarz
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004).
34.
Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1997). Willy Thayer, La crisis no moderna de la Universidad Moderna (epílogo de El
conflicto de las facultades) (Santiago: Cuarto Propio, 1997).
35.
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Dur-
ham, NC: Duke University Press, 1990).
36.
See Alberto Moreiras, The Exhaustion of Difference: The Politics of Latin American
Cultural Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001). Undoubtedly, Richard’s
modernist mood would be opposed to Moreiras’s approach in a similar way.
Historicism, Nihilism, and the Chilean Neo–Avant-Garde 383

37.
In this sense, criticism is conceived as a tool, a technology produced within the
modern university, one that captures historical differences in the undifferentiating
logic of the curriculum. See Thayer, Tecnologías de la crítica. Here, however, is where
Duchamp’s ready-mades, as “montage without intentionality,” reappear as a refer-
ence for a thinking of the suspension or interruption of capitalism’s flexible logic
of accumulation.
38.
Thayer, “Crítica, nihilismo e interrupción,” 56 (my emphasis).
39.
Jean-François Lyotard, Enthusiasm: The Kantian Critique of History, translated
by Georges Van Den Abbeele (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009).
40.
Thayer, “Crítica, nihilismo e interrupción,” 57.
432 Contributors

Destruction of Reality, aims to develop an account of the critical roles

that realism and deception can play in the formation of contempo-
rary aesthetic politics.

Josh Morrison is a PhD student in the Screen Arts & Cultures pro-
gram at the University of Michigan. His research interests include
camp and kitsch studies, queer media studies, feminist and queer
theory, and drag queens onscreen. Morrison holds an MA in gen-
der and women’s studies from the University of Arizona, an MA
in women’s studies and feminist research from the University of
Western Ontario, and a bachelor’s degree in music performance,
also from Western Ontario.

Ana Olenina is an assistant professor of film studies at the Univer-

sity of North Carolina–Wilmington, where she teaches courses on
Russian film history, international silent cinema, and film theory.
Although her main research focus is the Soviet avant-garde, her
broader interests lie at the juncture of early film history and media
theory, with an emphasis on historical configurations of sensory
experience, emotional response, embodiment, and immersive
environments. Olenina is currently preparing a book manuscript,
tentatively titled Psychomotor Aesthetics: Conceptions of Gesture and
Affect in Russian and American Modernity, 1910s–1920s. Together
with Maksim Pozdorovkin, Olenina has cocurated two Flicker Alley
DVD releases of restored Soviet silents: Miss Mend and Early Land-
marks of Soviet Film.

Christopher Peterson is senior lecturer in the School of Humani-

ties and Communication Arts at the University of Western Sydney.
He is the author of Kindred Specters: Death, Mourning, and American
Affinity (University of Minnesota Press, 2007) and Bestial Traces:
Race, Sexuality, Animality (Fordham University Press, 2013).

José Luis Venegas is a Baker Family Fellow and Assistant Professor

of Romance Languages and Interdisciplinary Humanities at Wake
Forest University. Venegas is the author of Decolonizing Modernism:
James Joyce and the Development of Spanish American Fiction (Legenda,
2010) and Transatlantic Correspondence: Modernity, Epistolarity, and
Literature in Spain and Spanish America, 1898–1992 (Ohio State Uni-
versity Press, 2014).

Sergio Roberto Villalobos-Ruminott is an associate professor of

Latin American culture and literature at the University of Arkansas,
Contributors 433

Fayetteville. He works on the relationship between historical and

political imagination and teaches literature, visual arts, cinema,
and aspects of the political processes related to the Southern Cone
of Latin American (dictators and globalization).
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