To Begin Writing: Bellatin, Reunited

Abstract

This article reads the works of Mario Bellatin, a writer and artist working in Mexico City, as paradigmatic of new artistic and social forms. It examines a number of spheres of production (performance, pedagogy, novels, the plastic arts) but maintains the centrality of the operation of writing. Bellatin's writing, the article suggests–in a way that is notably distinct from many of contemporaries' resentful attachment to the Spanish American narrative boom–toys with but cannot ultimately be made legible through the modes of national-political allegory that so often determine readings of Latin American texts. History's virtual ‘failure’ to appear legibly in Bellatin's work suggests a new way of understanding allegory—of indeed reading Latin American writing—under what the paper calls interregna1 times. That is, the paper argues that today there is no order or sovereign condition—no social formation, no future project or shared history—that would guarantee the legibility of history's inscription in these texts and this illegibility is precisely the trace of the historicity of the present.

Notes

 1 To be sure, this situation is quite different in other regional contexts of Hispanist cultural studies. One need only cite the cases of Spain and the Southern Cone to see a rich and rigorously theoretical engagement with the question of transition – an engagement that tarries fruitfully with the possible adjectives that might ground our reading of transition: post-dictatorial, neoliberal, democratic. I have commented upon these issues elsewhere (Steinberg 2010).

 2 As César Gilabert puts it: ‘For the Mexican leadership, real inequality derived from an unequal distribution of wealth does not contradict the State's generosity and effectiveness regarding the goal of achieving social justice. On the contrary, the distance of the objective confirms the “necessity” of the State itself, with precisely the features that have characterised it until now’ (1993: 23).

 3 While somewhat beyond the scope of the present argument, Jonathan Beller's (2006) work on perception, sensual labour, and attention economy under late capital might delimit a fruitful reading of this aspect of Bellatin's production. Such a reading, it seems, would formulate the question of a ‘relational aesthetics’ not of the encounter, as Bourriaud (1998) would have it, but rather of the factory.

 4 I borrow the term from Santner (2006).

 5 One thinks of, for example, Castro (1961).

 6 More about this transition in the section below.

 7 Perhaps it would be more precise to say that Bellatin's works are intended to thwart reading as such, and perhaps also the scholarly reader who is tempted by reading.

 8 I take this chance to signal a debt to my longstanding dialogue with Epplin's work; his book in preparation, ‘Mario Bellatin: Literature for Nonhumans’, might well suggest a final post-modernity that arrives and becomes visible in Bellatin – as a writing truly of and adequate to our present crisis.

 9 I borrow from Lorenzo Meyer (1995) the year 1985 as a more or less official beginning to the neoliberal era in Mexico.

10 It is also suggestive that this ‘unwriting’ occurs by way of a voyage to, and encounter with, the land to which the original colonial enterprise had wished to arrive. In this sense, the scene is once again taking part in the tradition of ‘founding archival fictions’, remixing, as it were, the original inscription of a missed encounter.

11 My deployment of the phrase ‘squandered energies’ in this context is owed to Cuauhtémoc Medina's reading of the work of artist Francis Alÿs (Medina 2005: 178). This borrowing is owed largely to my sense that various kinds of ‘wasted effort’ are at play in the contemporary Mexican arts' negotiation of and with its contemporary interregnum. The present essay is indeed part of a larger exploration of this present through the key figures of Mario Bellatin (letters), Francis Alÿs (plastic arts), and Carlos Reygadas (cinema).