Inventing Autonomies

Meditations on Julio Cortzar and the Politics of Our Time

SANTIAGO COLS
University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

Our possible truth must be INVENTION (Cortzar 1966, 384). So declares the narrator near one of the possible beginnings of Julio Cortzars novel Hopscotch. In this essay I will argue, essentially, that our possible truth, today, must be invention as well. Or, at least, that in reexamining Cortzars notion of invention we would add a valuable tool to those we already have with which to think the possibilities of transformation in our time. In the pages that follow, I will develop this argument by rst, elaborating Cortzars notion of invention, especially as it functions in a few of his literary works; second, examining its operation in his own political discourse; and nally, reecting a bit on how the notion and practice of invention might engage not only the politics of our time, but some of the other conceptual tools we have to think about that politics.

I The poet, Cortzar once wrote, if she cannot connect them by intrinsic features, does what everyone does when looking at the stars: she invents the
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constellation, the lines linking the solitary stars (Cortzar 1996, 300). He wrote this around 1950 in a long study of the British Romantic poet John Keats that would not be published until after Cortzars death. Cortzar was around 35 at the time, had yet to publish the rst of his eight volumes of short stories or any of the novels that would secure his fame as a writer. But invention and its derivatives run like a subterranean vein throughout his works, never central to any of them but never absent. Thus, at the end of his life, in a chronicle of a road trip he had made with his wife Carol Dunlop, Cortzar expressed his hopes that the work will have opened for you some doors too, and that in you germinates already the project of some parallel freeway of your own invention (Cortzar and Dunlop 1996, 44; my translation). In that rst passage, Cortzar identies invention with the creative activity of the poet. The poet-inventor connects, and in connecting constitutes new relationships among otherwise solitary elements of the given. Prior to the creative activity of the poet, the stars simply are. There may well be an intrinsic relationship among them, and perhaps that is available to human understanding. But failing that availabilityand its failure is the emphasized premise of the poet-inventors creative activitythe poet must constitute new relations in a given eld of elements. Here appear already the basic elements of Cortzars notion of invention. Invention, throughout Cortzars writing, comes to mean the process by which we can make something newa word, an experience, a world, a selfby rearranging the elements and the relationships that constitute a particular, received situation: the night sky, for example. This may be illustrated with another example. If we think of a word as a situation, like the night sky, then we might see that this situation is made up of elementslike the solitary starscalled letters, congured in a given way according to certain rules. There would be, of course, many different ways of making a new word from that given word. We could subtract letters or add new letters. We could, at least for certain given words, reverse the order of the letters, as in a palindrome. But in Cortzars ction, the privileged way of making a new word is always the anagram, whereby the given letters are shufed into new relationships, with nothing added and nothing subtracted in order to make something new. The problem with

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palindromes, says Lozano, the protagonist of Cortzars story Tara, is that you are left the way you started (Cortzar 1995, 32). A palindrome, which offers you only the mirror image of the given, has no strength because it doesnt teach you anything new. But anagrams are a different story. The young girl protagonist of The Distances makes an anagram of her name (Alina Reyes es la reina y . . .) and notes in her diary that it is beautiful because it opens a path (Cortzar 1968, 16). As in the example of the stargazing poet-inventor, the makers of anagrams create something new by constituting a new set of relations among given elements. In both of these examples, another critical facet of Cortzars notion of invention comes to light: it works immanently. By this I mean simply that it does not depend upon the belief that something exists outside the given. If it is possible to transcend the given, it is not because of the secret existence of some element beyond the given that will alter it or redeem it. Rather, the given can only be transcended by the constitution of new relationships within the situation, and this practice, in Cortzars view, is always a creative, inventive practice. In both these examples, we may also glimpse the emergence of another facet of Cortzars invention: potency (Lozano referred to strength; Alina Reyes to the opening of a new path). This aspect of invention will be more apparent by taking a look at two brief examples from elsewhere in Cortzars ction. The young narrator of Los venenos (The Poisons) has dreams of ying; but of course, he cannot really y. He has dreams, that is to say, of possessing a power, a capacity, he does not, in his waking life, possess. So what can he do? I ran down the alley with the cry of Sitting Bull, running in a way I had invented at that time and that was running without bending my knees, like kicking a ball. It didnt tire you and it was like ying (Cortzar 1994c, 300; my translation). It might appear at rst that this invention contradicts my previous examples since he runs without bending his knees, so that his invention seems to entail a subtraction. But I would argue that, upon further reection, this without bending really just points to a reconguration of relationships. All the substantive elements of his running are still there: hips, femur, tibia, and a surface. But the situation called running usually involves femur and tibia in a specic

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relation: bent. The narrator has invented a new relation within the given (and still present elements): without bending or, as he might have easily said, straightening. And this gives him not the power to y, which of course is impossible, but the feelingthe joyof ying, which might, in this case anyway, really be the point of those dreams anyway. Perhaps this is what Henry Miller meant when he evoked, in Sexus, the art of dreaming when wide-awake (1965, 20). This potency of invention appears also in Cortzars story Silvia. In the story, the narrator recalls a series of outdoor dinners among a group of friends: himself and two couples, each with two children. The children, we are told, have invented Silvia. The parents explain this to the narrator to dismiss her, to ward her off. But Silvia works, like the narrator straightening his legs, to produce real effects: Silvia lifted him up to the sink, washed his bottom, and changed his clothes; Silvia washed off the bump; She plays with us; She takes care of Renaud; she played a little game to console him; Silvia emerged from the darkness and leaned between Graciela and Alvaro as if to help them cut their meat or take a bite (Cortzar 1986c, 187, 190, 189, 191). Silvia enhances the powers of the children. She does for them, and hence they do not need their parents or other adults. They have invented Silvia and, in so doing, have invented autonomy, ones capacity to do for oneself, freely to direct oneself. Silvia herself, invention though she may be, does what she wants, the same as us, the children explain (191). As with the young boy in Los venenos, the children desire a power or a capacity, but the world as it is cannot or will not allow for it. Cortzar calls invention the process by which one may immanently recongure relations among the elements of the world as it is, so as to produce the same effects as if one had that powerlike hot-wiring a car to make it run as though you had the keys. Lastly, in the story Silvia we see a nal important facet of invention: it is communicative. By this I mean that it is infectious or contagious. It does not communicate by representing itself or any power it might release. Rather, like a virus or a radio signal, it simply establishes a connection and passes itself on. In Silvia, Alvaro has invented Silvia, but soon all the children have caught the fever, and we learn that she only comes when

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they are all four together. Alvaros father calls his sons penchant for invention mythomania and thus diagnoses Alvaro, warning that he contaminates everyone [todo el mundo, or literally, all the world] (Cortzar 1986c, 190). Even the adult narrator of the story falls victim, seeing and desiring Silviawriting, in fact, as he admits, with an absurd hope of conjuration, a sweet golem of words (186). Thus, from this brief survey of invention in Cortzars early critical writing and short ction, we can come up with something like the following provisional denition of the practice: the potent and infectious process of generating something new, of transforming a received situation by immanently reconstituting the given relationships among the given elements so as to produce real effects. I want to turn now to look, through the lens of this working denition of invention, at Cortzars most famous work, the 1963 novel Hopscotch, and within that novel, at its protagonist and sometimes narrator, Horacio Oliveira. In particular, I want to look at the way in which invention appears as a way of immanently generating potent, ultimately ethical transformations from within a eld of given dichotomous abstractions that feel sterile or constrictive.1 Horacio has a dreamthe dream of a child, his friend calls itin which a loaf of bread he has cut cries out in pain. But the worst, he complains to his friend, is not the dream. The worst is what they call waking up. He wonders: Hasnt it ever happened to you that youve awakened sometimes with the exact feeling that at that moment a terrible mistake is beginning? (Cortzar 1966, 45052). Horacio is aware that there is something troubling about the transition from dreaming to waking, that there is some truth in the dream that slips away as you wake up and call what you were just thinking about a dream. But, I would argue, he is not yet inventing. He is simply, at this point, proposing a reversal of the terms dream and reality, and valorizing the dream in a way that leaves the boundary between them fully intact. If we were to think of the boundary between dreaming and waking as the space between letters in a word, then Horacio has created a palindrome, reversing the terms, which leaves him, as Lozano told us, with what he started. But a bit later he will come up with something that looks more like an anagram: The real dream was located

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in an imprecise zone, next to waking but without his really being awake; he would have had to make use of other references to speak about it, eliminate rotund terms like dreaming and awake that didnt mean a thing, locate himself rather in that zone where once more his childhood house would be suggested (490). Here, Horacio establishes an inventive relationship to the given elements dream and waking. Horacios struggles with his dreams are instructive because they are an instance of more general problems that dog him, problems for which invention could also serve as a solution. He wants to get to an other side of a reality that feels supercial, conventional, false, and limiting. So Horacio spends his time looking for passages, openings to a preexistent state he imagines as another side. But his real problem, I would argue, stems from his perception of two distinct zoneslike dreaming and being awakewith a rigid, wall-like boundary between them. When he imagines the wall as permeable, it still only permits a passage for himself. Only rarely and eetingly can he actually imagine inventing: shufing the stuff on either side of the wall back and forth so as to create a zone that could be called inbetween, except that wall and thus the terms on either side of it have dissolved, and with them the paralyzing dualities in which Horacio is trapped. Horacio himself poses this problem, and invention as a solution, when we rst meet him. There, in chapter 73, he is searching for the other side of habit, but wonders whether even such a search is not itself a clichd literary commonplace, simply the obverse of the coin of stiing habit. He glumly concludes that yes, everything is merely writing, merely a fable, before suddenly glimpsing the possibilityin the passage with which I began my essaythat maybe in that case, Our possible truth must be invention, that is to say, scripture, literature, picture, sculpture, agriculture, pisciculture, all the tures in this world (Cortzar 1966, 384). And what follows is precisely writing, a fable, now borrowed from a book by Morelli, his favorite author,
about a Neapolitan who spent years sitting in the doorway of his house looking at a screw on the ground. At night he would gather it up and put it under his mattress. The screw was at rst a laugh, a jest, communal irritation, a

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neighborhood council, a mark of civic duties unfullled, nally a shrugging of shoulders, peace, the screw was peace, no one could go along the street without looking out of the corner of his eye at the screw and feeling that it was peace. The fellow dropped dead one day of a stroke and the screw disappeared as soon as the neighbors got there. One of them has it; perhaps he takes it out secretly and looks at it, puts it away again and goes off to the factory feeling something that he does not understand, an obscure reproach. He only calms down when he takes out the screw and looks at it, stays looking at it until he hears footsteps and has to put it away quickly. Morelli thought that the screw must have been something else, a god or something like that. Too easy a solution. Perhaps the error was in accepting the fact that the object was a screw simply because it was shaped like a screw. Picasso takes a toy car and turns it into the chin of a baboon. The Neapolitan was most likely an idiot, but he also might have been the inventor of a world. (Cortzar 1966, 384)

The Neapolitan is an inventor because he rearranges the elements of a given situationin this case, himself and the screw. By looking at it in a way that one would not if the screw were merely a piece of hardware, or of junk, he can make it act as though it is something more. It begins to provoke effects quite unusual in an ordinary screw. It is as though, through his invention, he has released other possibilities, manifested other dispositions and propensities in the screw. Horacio himself concludes, from this fable, that there can be no freedomno choiceoutside of (no other side beyond) the process of invention. For this process insinuates itself within the xed, category-creating boundaries, and works therein to blur them and create possible spaces of autonomy. This is why Morelli offers an alternative to what he sees as a twentiethcentury obsession with transcendent millenary kingdoms, Edens, nostalgias, and other worlds. He proposes, instead, invention as the activity of immanently transforming this disenchanted world into a magical place.
Maybe there is another world inside this one, but we will not nd it cutting out its silhouette from the fabulous tumult of days and lives, we will not nd

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it in either atrophy or hypertrophy. That world does not exist, one has to create it like a phoenix. The world exists in this one, but the way water exists in oxygen and hydrogen, or how pages 78, 457, 3, 271, 688, 75, 456 of the dictionary of the Spanish Academy have all that is needed for the writing of a hendecasyllable by Garcilaso. Let us say that the world is a gure, it has to be read. By read let us understand generated. Who cares about a dictionary as dictionary? If from delicate alchemies, osmoses, and mixtures of simples there nally does arise a Beatrice on the riverbank, why not have a marvelous hint of what could be born of her in turn? (Cortzar 1966, 379)

At another point, Horacio reads a page that Morelli has covered with the unpunctuated words underneath it all he knew that one cannot go beyond because there isnt any. Horacio spies, however, a place where the word any is missing. Reading this page, Horacio knows that the words echo their meaning, forming a wall behind which there is nothing. But he also feels that a sensitive eye can discover the hole among the bricks, the light that shows through (Cortzar 1966, 307). There is no saying for sure, but it is hard not to feel that the eye is hypersensitive, that Horacio has made too much of a typographical error, imbuing sheer contingency with a burdensome charge of secretly coded meaning. At the very least, we might argue that if there is a way to go beyond, to change things, to connect, then the lesson of the passage abovethe lesson, in fact, of Cortzars inventionis that such a possibility lies in an alternative arrangement of the given, and not in the opening of a hole through to a transcendent space. In other words, if Horacio perceives a light on the page, it is not shining through a hole. Rather, it is a light generated immanently by the page itself. Or, more precisely, generated from the productive energy that Morelli contains with his steadfast refusal of any beyond. It is true that Morelli has created a surface, but not every surface is a wall. It could be a wall. We cannot really say with certainty that it is not. But we might ask Horacio what he gets by calling it a wall. Seeing a wall leads him, according to his tendency, to look for and nd a hole in the wall. Even so, there is nothing wrong with this, except that not much ts through the holes that Horacio nds in the walls he perceives. Not his lover, not his

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friends, not even all of him, which helps to explain why he so often is plagued by a feeling of solitude. And that may be why Cortzar always preferred (and so thus constructed the laws of his universe) the more modest, sustainable process of continual changes gured by the kaleidoscope. Morelli rejects any idea of another world, another existence, outside of or beyondthis one. For this common view leaves one with the task of conjuring, like Horacio, magical passageways or transportational devices by which to move from one side to the other. Morelli instead offers the reconguring activity of inventionwhich he equates with reading, noticeas the only means of generating, immanently, autonomy. Invention is the only solution to the dilemma because it takes as its point of departure not the problem of how to get from this side to the other, or vice versa, but of how to generate multiple spaces from the space in which you nd yourself. Now, the divide that most persistently nags at Horacio is the one he believes separates him from his fellow human beings. A divide, we might say in other words, between subject and object. In the prevailing trends of Western culture, the constructed gap between subject and object is taken as premise, and from this fabricated conceptual gap ow many of the epistemological, ontological, and ethical dilemmas that characterize the Western philosophical tradition. To span this divide of our own making, we extend the two divergent bridges of rationality (philosophy or science) and anti-rationality (art, religion, madness). Horacio approaches the edge of this perceived chasm between his self and the world outside it, but spends all his time contemplating which bridge to take across. And though he seems aware that there is something wrong with this way of looking at it, he disdainfully (but secretly fearfully) dismisses the one facultycompassionwhich might lead him to invent an alternative arrangement of the terms self and other. All invention entails the risk of experimentation, of shattering certainty in the interests of something new, which might also be something better. And inventing with the self in this way may pose the biggest risk of all. Of course it may also carry, at least in ethical terms, the biggest payoff. Horacio sees this, for a moment, when he suspects that true otherness might be made up of delicate contacts, marvelous adjustments with the world, and that it could not be attained from just one point, but

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would require instead joining together in partnership of some kind, or community (Cortzar 1966, 99). It might be worth seeing the events that unfold near the end of Horacios story as a tentative experiment with invention of the self. Having physically closed himself off from others behind an elaborate web of threads, washbasins, and rulemans (ball bearings), Horacios childhood friend Traveler comes to visit him in his room, as the staff of the asylum where they both work gathers in the courtyard beneath Horacios open window and outside his bedroom door. Unsuccessful in convincing Horacio that he means him no harm, Traveler, leaving the room with tears in his eyes, advises Horacio to bolt the door behind him. By relinquishing his control over the events in the situation, even to the point of safeguarding Horacios freedom to kill himself, Traveler offers his friend an example of genuine ethical compassion. A few moments later, as Horacio looks down at Traveler and his wife Talita, standing arm-in-arm on the hopscotch board in the courtyard, he regains a glimpse of Morellis truth that the other world exists immanently in this one and can be realized, materialized, only through the act of invention. And so, with Cortzars famous ambiguityHoracios thoughts, at least, seem to hurl him out the windowhe will take the leap that gures, as dramatically as possible, the invention of the self in a nonbounded form. As if to conrm the value of this risky practice of invention, the next seven chapters show Horacioinjuredsurrounded by friends caring for him with a simple, unspectacular love. And then, as if to emphasize the indenite nature of invention, the altogether different time scale one enters when one enters the zone of experimentation, the novel drifts back and forth between chapters 58 and 131, until you get tired or frustrated, or maybe until you realize that there is no end to invention, and that the next step is to close the book and continue to invent a different relation between writing and reading and living. Ultimately, in Hopscotch, one may discover an extended parable of the kinds of autonomy that invention can yield. But Cortzar does more than unfold such a parable before his readers passive eyes. He also provokes his reader into an inventive reading. For Cortzar, writing already involves an inventive reading of what has already been said. And this, in turn, implies an inventive writing that blurs the

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boundaries between writing and living. In Hopscotch, Cortzar tries explicitly to draw readers into this process, believing, like the narrator of Silvia, that invention, like a contagious illness, can be communicated. Thus, readers are invited to read the chapters comprised by Hopscotch in more than one sequence, to treat the chapters of the novel like the letters of a word. In the process of doing so, we follow Horacio in shufing stuff (the chapters of the novel) across divides (the three partsFrom the Other Side, From this Side, and From Diverse Sidesthat make up the novel). In the process, also, we risk losing the satisfaction of a linear narrative, or the security of conclusive meaning, or of resolved tensions, scratched itches. In return, we gain the effect of softening a bit the wall separating our subject from the object of Cortzar and his novel. This is not about an ideal of absolutely free participation on the part of a reader. Such an ideal, like the absolutes and beyonds to which Horacio mistakenly directs his vision, can never be realized. As Morelli cautions Horacio, Youve got to be careful, were all chasing after purity. . . . But watch out, my friends, what we call purity is probably . . . (Cortzar 1966, 556). And invention is never pure. It always works with some given, with some restrictions, like the rules of a game. Effective Willie Stark explains this about goodness to the principled but impotent Dr. Adam Stanton: You got to make it, Doc. If you want it. And you got to make it out of badness. Badness. . . . Because there isnt anything else to make it out of (Warren 1974, 257). In Hopscotch, we are invited, like Horaciowhom the ailing Morelli asks to arrange his loose-leaf papers for publicationto arrange the simples with which Cortzar provides us into our own novel; or rather, into a novel that a new entity of our inventionthat combines in some way Cortzar and ourselveshas composed. Horacio might be afraid of messing things up in the process, but we need not be, as Morelli reassuringly reminds us: Who cares, you can read my book any way you want to. Liber Fulguralis, mantic pages, and thats how it goes. The most I do is set it up the way I would like to reread it. And in the worst of cases, if they do make a mistake, it might just turn out perfect (Cortzar 1966, 56). Cortzar consistently manifested an interest in the possibilities for human beings to change, afrmatively, their ways of life, both as individuals

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and as societies. He knew that individuals could be more free; less afraid; more adventurous, playful, and humorous; and more cooperative. He knew that societies could thus become more peaceful, less rigid in separating work and play, less violent, without the perceived need to enforce social hierarchies. It was evident enough to Cortzar that any changes in society that were sustainable would have to be comprised of changes in individuals communicating with each other. That is to say, I am suggesting, Cortzar conceived of social transformation as an essentially poetic act in which any one (or all) of us become stargazing poet-inventors creating new constellations, new groupings, from the apparently solitary stars that so much in our world encourages us to see ourselves as being. But Cortzar conceived this desirable change as possible only on two conditions. First, change should not come at the price of rejecting ones past. As John Dewey knew, Only when the past ceases to trouble and anticipations of the future are not perturbing is a being wholly united with his environment and therefore alive (Dewey 1980, 18). For Cortzar believes rmly in the tenacity and persistence of the past in the present, all the more so when the individual would deny or disavow that past. No durable change can depend upon a denitive transcendence of the past. The past, or elements of it at least, must come into the future with us as we change. Second, Cortzar will not allow change coming from outside: no saviors, no knights on white horses, no charismatic party leaders. The only stuff we have to work with as our raw materials for transformation is the stuff we already have. Hence the kaleidoscope over the hole in the wall. Hence, for Cortzar, the supreme importance of invention, the art of making something new just by rearranging the relationships among the things you already have. That is why any change has to be understood, and if gured, gured in images of process, not rupture.

II I would like, as I said at the outset, to argue that we might usefully plug the notion of invention, as I have drawn it forth from Cortzars literary work, into the thinking we do today, to try to come to grips with the politics of our

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time. But in order to do so, I think it will be useful to look at how Cortzar deployed the notion and the practice of invention to come to grips with the politics of his own time. His times were dominated by three interrelated questions: the question of Third World revolution in the context of the Cold War, the question of counterrevolutionary dictatorship and of exile, and the question of the responsibility of the intellectual in these settings. Cortzar spoke to all of these questions at one time or another. And I think that the way he spoke of them, if we can allow ourselves to invent his sometimes dated-seeming vocabulary, can teach us, in turn, something about how to invent, as Cortzar might put it, the politics of our time. Let us invent, instead of accepting, the labels they stick on us (Cortzar 1994a, 170). Cortzar was speaking on the subject of literature and exile. It was the late 1970s, a dark time indeed for Latin Americans and their writers. The youthful enthusiasm expressed in and sparked by the Cuban Revolution of 1959 had given way to an awesome display of counterrevolutionary force, backed by the might of the U.S. government, and fueled by the fearful and fearsome quiescence of many Latin Americans caught in the headlights of inconceivable brutalities. It would be easy, Cortzar said, to point ngers of blame at the generals, at the U.S. government, at its corporate heads: too easy and hypocritical, actually, are his exact words. Instead, Cortzar marshaled the only weapon he ever had: invention. He did not make light of exile or trivialize its attendant emotional traumas; he did not make a silly game of it. But he did challenge his audience to make something new out of it, the way poets have always made something new of the elements at hand, the way life makes something by combining what is lying around, the way the stargazer makes something out of a group of gleaming pins stuck in the cool cushion of the night sky. The rst step, as always for Cortzar in any process of invention, is to let your self go. In this case, speaking to his fellow exiled writers, it meant let go of the self you have identied as innocent victim: it would be possible to invent in exile, out of the stuff of exile, he cautioned, only if the writers rst took a step backwards to see themselves newly, to see themselves new. Only then could a writer slip off the garment of names imposed upon her by the dictatorship and invent new names for herself. Only then could

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the exiled writer transform the imposed distance of exile into the adopted distance of balanced perspective and say, This banned or burned book wasnt altogether good: let us write now another, better one (Cortzar 1994a, 172). What, Cortzar asks, if we then were able to see exile as positive, as an opportunity, refusing thus the exiles view that he had been victim of a grave trauma? How do we free ourselves, Cortzar asks, from the fact (read: given situation) that they have expelled us from our countries? This is not precisely the world of Silvia. It is not, of course, a ctional tale, and the exiled writers of the 1970s are not children faced with the benevolent dismissals of their parents. But the strategy Cortzar recommends is, nonetheless, remarkably similar. What emerges as the crucial theme in his speech is that the writers should not fall into the trap of thinking that the dictatorships have the power. Or rather, and more precisely, the writers should not fall into the trap of desiring the power that the dictatorships have, because doing so can only lead them to ignore the power they have, a power that exceeds the rigid power of the dictators.
Because our true efcacy lies in extracting the maximum advantage from exile. . . . The Latin American dictatorships do not have writers, but rather scribes: let us not convert ourselves into the scribes of bitterness, of resentment, or of melancholy. Let us be truly free, and to begin with let us free ourselves of the commiserating and tearful label that tends to show itself too frequently. Against self-pity it is better to hold up, as crazy as it might sound, that the true exiles are the fascist regimes of our continent, exiled from the authentic national reality, exiled from social justice, exiled from joy, exiled from peace. We are more free and we are more in our land than they. Ive spoken of madness: it also, like humor, is one of the ways to break the molds and open a positive path that we will never nd if we keep folding beneath the cold and sensible rules of the enemies game. (Cortzar 1994a, 169; my translation)

So Cortzar calls for invention, beginning with the invention of the self that has been exiled, and proceeding to an invention of the condition of

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exile. Notice that invention empowers, as it did the children in Silvia, and that it does so, rst of all, by putting a choice back in the hands of his audience, exactly when they identify themselves by the lack of a choice. Now, Cortzar reminds them that they have a choice: the choice of how, as writers, to write the story of their exile. From there, in choosing an afrmative route, they will be writing also the future story of the pastwhich is to say, writing the story of their present. And to write the story of ones present is already to begin to author ones own history, to compose ones own life. A dictator, who requires an obedient scribe, cannot bear to have a writer invent her own words, cannot bear to have anyone else write the story of the present. Some years before, in December 1969, Cortzar wrote an essay for the Uruguayan cultural periodical Marcha that pregures the inventive strategy he would recommend to writers in exile a few years later. In this essay, he was invited to respond to Oscar Collazos, who in an earlier issue published his view that the authors of the Latin American so-called new novel (Cortzar and Mario Vargas Llosa, plus Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel Garca Mrquez, and Jos Donoso) had a neurotic, dependent relationship with European literature. And, moreover, that this relationship prompted them to imitate the technical innovations of their European heroes and thus kept them from responding to their own Latin American realityan assertion that would become an unquestioned commonplace in leftist criticism of the so-called Booms (as if the authors collected in this name were identical) liberal imagination (Franco 1997). Cortzar replies that no novelist he knows worries about European writers. On the contrary, the very fact that they do not compare themselves with European writers (favorably or not) makes the Latin American novelist capable of inventing, taking advantage of, or perfecting the most varied techniques totally naturally and authentically (Cortzar 1977, 40). Cortzars compatriot Jorge Luis Borges had already taken a similar stance, some 40 years earlier, faced with critics who felt he was neglecting what they called his reality. In that essay, El escritor argentino y la tradicin, Borges argued that the ease of appropriation of so-called foreign techniques (to which Cortzar also refers) derives from Argentinas eccentricity in

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relation to the European tradition, and that this ease is common to any eccentric position (Borges 1974). Thus the Irish, or the Jews, Borges wrote, are able to approach traditional canons with inventive ease because those traditional canons (mainly the English and German in these cases) have never really belonged to them, at least not in the sense that these canons have rewarded an investment in them with any kind of cultural, let alone political power. Gilles Deleuze makes of this eccentricity (he calls it becoming minor) the very essence of style. A style is managing to stammer in ones own language. It is difcult, because there has to be a need for such stammering. . . . Being like a foreigner in ones own language (Deleuze and Parnet 1987, 4). He is talking, like Borges, of writing within your language, but from the sidelines or from undergroundas if it were foreign, as if you were an alien, or alienated from the benets of the native. Cortzar here evokes the more general conditions from which emerges the constituent power of the writer-as-inventor. In fact, his remarks upon the potential of exile simply describe a specic subset of these more general conditions of apparent eccentricity. The good writer, he explains, is that person who partially modies a language. It is the case of Joyce modifying a certain way of writing in English (Cortzar 1978a, 21; 1979, 66). Invention is at work, I would argue, in that the language is made new not because you actually go out and learn a new language, but simply by adjusting the relationships among elements (you, native tongue, native land). Indeed, invention (employing whatever elements) always requires one to see the endless possible congurations and recongurations, the innite set of possible relations, in a given array. And this always runs counter to the temptationso common on the leftrst, to reduce power, in any given situation, to the status quo of those-in-power-over, and second, either to cling ercely to that power if they have it or, if they do not, to desire it. Invention troubles this conventional relationship to power. Invention, in other words, might be seen as little more than one name for the process of seeing and acting in accordance with the truth that those-in-power-over always rest in an uneasy relationship to those-with-power-toto a force upon which they depend but which, nally, they know they cannot control. Invention begins to rearrange the given relations in the received situation so

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as to free up the creative potency of those-with-power-to, even from the those-in-power-over within each of us. This no doubt is why Cortzar also felt obliged to exclaim in 1981, How little revolutionary the language of revolutionaries tends to be! (Cortzar 1994b, 310). He addressed this to a group of revolutionaries gathered at the Casa de Las Americas publishing house in Havana, Cuba. It is part of a speech fundamentally supportive of socialism and of revolutionary aims. But as always, Cortzar seeks to go beyond shared ideals. He prefers his allies strong. The group he addressed was gathered to elaborate upon a brief statement that had been released (and signed by, among others, Julio Cortzar), calling for sovereign and democratic rights for the people of our Americas. He certainly supported the call; but equally he sought to pull the rug out from under certain assumptions that he felt would actually block the achievement of the aim. Cortzar questioned, to begin with, the Manichaean distinctions implied by the invocation of the pueblos de nuestras Americas. To him, reality was too complex and potentially treacherous to treat with such blunt instruments as our and their or the people. To suggest that the rights of Latin Americans, en masse, were constrained only by nonLatin Americans was not only too simple; it was dangerously impractical in overlooking the obvious fact that our most oppressed peoples are so largely for fratricidal reasons (Cortzar 1994b, 308). Cortzar was not looking to rene the picture for the sake of social-scientic accuracy or the advance of knowledge. Nor, of course, was he interested in letting the U.S. government and multinational interests off the hook for their activities in Latin America. Rather, he aimed to improve the practical efcacy of the language used by revolutionaries. Cortzar was interested in generating, from a deep and sober contact with realities, the language necessary to move suffering people, to infect them with an awareness of their own power to shed the burdens which oppress them, whether those burdens have come from the United States, their own government, their putatively revolutionary parties, or their own psyches. As Cortzar reminds his comrades, revolutions have to be made in individuals so that, when the day arrives, the people can make them

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(Cortzar 1994b, 310). And he does not mean other individuals. He directs this to his fellow intellectuals. He invites them to join him in the examination of the microfascisms within, and on a journey of self-invention that would necessarily involve invention in language. It is in this spirit that Cortzar agreed absolutely with Ernesto Gonzlez Bermejos characterization during an interview for Manual for Manuel as an attempt to demystify a monastic conception of revolution; to say that political events occur in human beings that do not cease to be such because they belong to such and such an organization and that they must, they should and it is inevitable that they combine political action with making love, with eating spaghetti or taking a walk on the Champs Elyses (Cortzar 1979, 127). Understanding this can help us to better make something of some of Cortzars earlier political writings. Thus, for example, in that same 1969 response to Oscar Collazos, entitled Literature in the Revolution and Revolution in Literature, Cortzar attempted to distinguish between the task of the writer in bourgeois societiesto which, he writes, the good writer is almost invariably in oppositionand that of the writer in revolutionary society, within which the writer must situate himself constructively, criticizing to edify and not to lay low (Cortzar 1977, 53). But already in that essay, already in 1969, Cortzar confessed that this differentiation of the writers tasks had caused, and would probably continue to cause him no few conicts. If so, maybe that was in part because those terms, plugged into that essay and following the prevailing vocabulary of the time, were already too neat and rotund, too abstracted from the particulars of daily life as experienced by human beings around the worldwhether the nation states of which they are citizens or residents call themselves socialist or bourgeois, free, democratic, capitalist, or communist. In 1973, when the original Spanish edition of his most explicitly political novel, A Manual for Manuel, was published, Cortzar wrote:
I believe more than ever that the struggle for socialism in Latin America should confront the daily horror with the only attitude that can bring it victory one day: a precious, careful watch over the capacity to live life as we want it to be for that future, with everything it presupposes of love, play and

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joy. . . . What counts, and what I have tried to recount is the afrmative sign that stands face to face with the rising steps of disdain and fear, that afrmation must be the most solar, the most vital part of man: his playful and erotic thirst, his freedom from taboos, his demand for a dignity shared by everybody in a land free at last of that daily horizon of fangs and dollars. (Cortzar 1978b, 45)

A ringing afrmation of socialism may well sound dated to our ears today. And indeed, it might well be dated had Cortzar not invented, in the sense that I have been elaborating, the word socialism. In that case, the dynamic and vital forces of freedom which Cortzar designated with this word will seem dated only if we stop listening to him the moment we read that word. For is it really dated to call for an attitude of vigilance over the capacity to live life as we want it to be? Do we live now in a world where it is no longer necessary to afrm, in the face of fear and disdain, the most vital part of man: his playful and erotic thirst, his freedom from taboos, his demand for a dignity shared by everyone? Has this new century opened upon a planet in which all human beings can feel their lives driven by these vital forces, or even by simple dignity? Is this true even of those of us lucky enough not to worry over our next meal? What about for those three billion peoplehalf the humans on the planetwho live on less than two dollars a day? In a little book written in 1958, one year before the Cuban Revolution, the Trinidadian writer C. L. R. James, at the time living in Detroit, Michigan, was able to write the following: In one department of a certain plant in the U.S. there is a worker who is physically incapable of carrying out his duties. . . . The workers in that department have organized their work so that for nearly ten years he has had practically nothing to do. . . . this is the socialist society (James 1958, 33). Taking a brief detour from Cortzars texts in order to look more closely at what James is here doing can serve to elaborate the political effects of invention, in the very sense that Cortzar tried to advance them. And it can also help to suggest an important continuity between Cortzar and his times, places, and vocabularies, and those of our present.

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See what James does to the term socialist society. First, he lls the term up with an ongoing process that pushes all the static thingness out of it. Then, he sticks that process into the middle of the nation-state, which perhaps epitomizes the anti-socialist society and thus drains socialist society of its connotations of all or nothing Manichaeism. Perhaps the names and concepts Cortzar used obscure the actual facts of daily life that might contradict, or at least complicate, those names. If so, this would be a problem of thought and discourse and vision. Yet as such, it parallels closely the problem of politics that C. L. R. James describes so plainly in Facing Reality. There, too, abstract representations (unions claiming to represent worker desire, political parties claiming to represent popular will, states claiming to represent people), like the abstract representations bourgeois and socialist used by Cortzar, prevail over complex, dynamic processes far too rich in detail and variation to lend themselves to representation, at least by any of the representational devices available at that time. Of course, James can still see that there are, by and large, two different kinds of society, two different ways of organizing the activities necessary for the production and reproduction of life. But he prefers narrative to theory, verbs to nouns. So, one way of organizing is characterized by authoritarian, top-down decision-making structures, and by manipulation and deceit, where brute force is necessary to ensure submission to the regimes dictated by those in power. This way of organizing is found, James points out, in the national governments of the world (however they may style themselves), in trade unions, and in ofcial party organizations. The leaders or representatives in this regime, from shop foreman to U.S. president, operate by abstracting themselves from the material processes of daily life, instead dictating to others upon whose freedom and autonomy they thereby encroach, and the results of whose living labor they thereby poach. The other manner of organizing, that event that James calls socialist society, is present wherever we see cooperation and self-organization in the production of goods for use. It is present whenever we hear dialogue and witness experimentation. It is present in every afrmation of autonomy from abstract programs and dogmas.

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In other words, for C. L. R. James, wherever you open your eyes, look deeply at a particular situation, and see these values and forces operating, there you have what ought to be called socialist society. This event or process called socialist society bursts through the abstracting, regimenting forces of bourgeois society. In socialist society, representational relationships are eluded in favor of more direct and immediateto say nothing of practicalforms of organization, expression, and activity. In the same way, Jamess vision, his thought, and his discourse elude the abstractions that briey snared Cortzar, preferring instead the narration of particulars, Cortzars usual realm. Cortzar always said he knew nothing of politics. In this sense, he was right (though not in the sense usually intended by those observers who think that Cortzars leftist sympathies are evidence that he knew nothing, and so, that he should have restricted himself to writing fantastic ction). For James, this was the new society: the future in the present, as he called itevoking Morellis image of the immanent generation of another world from the elements given within this onethe struggle for happiness, as he elsewhere named this process. It was constant and in constant motion. You could not see it if you were looking through the lens of large, blocky, static, and abstract concepts like nation-states, or the revolution. Theories, Jane Jacobs advises, are powerful tools only in the limited sense that the Greek mythological giant Antaeus was powerful. When Antaeus was not in intimate contact with the earth, his strength rapidly ebbed (Jacobs 2000, ix). Jamess socialist society resembles the roiling surface of boiling water: bubbles surface here, vanish, and reappear elsewhere, but there is always a bubble somewhere. It is hard to say with much certainty, even with an intimate knowledge of the depth and surface conditions, where or when the next bubble will appear. So the most we can do, James thought, was rst, to be sure to notice and report the fact of the bubbles and their attendant conditions, in all their complex, dynamic particularity, and second, to nourish the conditions for their proliferation in any given instant. Keep up the heat. Maybe Jamess vision of a constant and eeting and darting revolutionary process makes it easier to understand what Cortzar tried to express to

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Collazos (and elsewhere) about the politics of his writing, about what he tried to afrm in his writing. Cortzars time and place and his own experiences did not furnish him with a political vocabulary of sufcient subtlety. But he also was not satised, as many other writers of his generation would be, with simply turning his back on the situations that this vocabulary sought to understand and transform. So often in this period, Cortzar seems (especially to the acionados of his rich, dynamic prose and of the complex ambiguities of the thought deposited there) like a clumsy, lumbering-if-well-meaning, cloddish childor worse, like an adolescent puppet stridently channeling the extremist voices of his time. But I suspect that Cortzar sensed, somewhat inarticulately, that the socialist society he committed himself to was exactly what C. L. R. James described. Maybe the difculty of situating his life and writing in political terms stems, thus, from the untimeliness of his understanding relative to the available positions and vocabularies of his situation. (James, too, for that matter, was deemed eccentric by the Left his entire life). If you doubt that Cortzars vision of socialist society meshes with what James describes, then consider, as you read and reread his ction, the ways in which the values put forth in Jamess vision come through and suffuse Cortzars invented world. This world includes, of course, many kinds of processes, many kinds of characters, many attitudes. But I believe one can see that, as a writer, he almost invariably afrms autonomy, experimentation, and selfrealization, creativity (James 1958), and rejects (sometimes by satirizing and sometimes by dramatizing the violence, or sadness, or futility of ) egotism, competition, authority, and conformity to external powers. Cortzar turned up the heat on that pot of simmering water by practicing and encouraging others to practice invention that is born, as the fabulous animals were born, from the faculty of creating new relations between elements that are dissociated in daily life (Cortzar 1977, 55). Thus, Cortzar describes the task of the revolutionary writer in relation to his or her reality in a way very similar to C. L. R. James. Both believed that task to be extending the socialist society by forging connections (in language and via other media) between otherwise isolated instances. Cortzars term for this revolutionary rearrangement of the elements of the given, here and in

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many other places, was invention. In two other little texts on the subject Broken Doll and Glass with RoseCortzar describes this idea of revolutionary invention as the genesis of 62: A Model Kit, the very novel that Collazos and other politically oriented critics lamented as an escapist, formalist turning point in Cortzars work (Cortzar 1986a, 1986b). Cortzars political positionI mean the public stances he took on the political issues of his timewere always rooted in a basic afrmation of this sort. He wrote in 1967 to Roberto Fernndez Retamar, cultural eminence of the revolutionary government in Cuba, that the triumph of the Cuban Revolution in 1959 and its rst few years in power were to him an incarnation of the cause of man as I had nally come to understand it and yearn for it . . . based on the essential facts of human existence, on the fundamental ethosthe simple yet inconceivably difcult principle that humanity will begin to be worthy of its name on the day in which the exploitation of man by man comes to an end (Cortzar 1989, 78). Elsewhere in the letter, Cortzar made clear that he was afrming these values not as a Latin American, nor as an intellectual, nor even as a Marxist. He accepted this political stance as the only one that was consonant, given the present, with a deeper vision of the world and of the human beings place in it, and in turn this deeper vision was the one that also drove Cortzar to live his personal life as he lived it, to write his words down as he wrote them. This is not to make of Cortzar some implausible ideal of perfect integrity. To be humanparticularly to be a human being as Cortzar wasmeans to be in such sensitive contact with the world that I know that change, on one scale or another, is constant and inevitable. It is to know, consequently, that my vision can only ever be partial, and always in relation to this or that contingent, local situation or eventand this, of course, would entail change and growth, contradiction and revision. I am holding only that his political positions were more consistent than not with the underlying way of seeing and being in the world that shaped his writing, and that these still have something useful to say to us today. Cortzar pushed the work of imagination to the limit, and found that its paths do not lead away from the worldfrom the life of the world and the

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people in itbut directly to the heart of the world, to a heart of the world still throbbing beneath the crust of party banners and platforms. He could say, and have earned the assertion in an honest engagement with his many and varied impulses, In the most gratuitous thing I might write, there will always appear a will to make contact with the historical present of man, to share in his long march toward excellence as a collectivity and as humanity (Cortzar 1989, 83).

III This is the poem Slaba viva, or Living Syllable(Cortzar 1969):

I do not know how to translate this poem because it is literally about the sound che that appears in a number of words that might otherwise not be found together in the same piece of language: night (noche), milk (leche), car (coche), pothole (bache), brawl (boche), hunt (acechen), pell-mell (a troche y moche), ghts (luche), speechies (espiche), leans (repeche), goddamn it (me cachendi). All these words, in Spanish, have the syllable che in them. Cortzar tells us that this syllable is everywhere, even if you do not want it; even if you try to hunt it down, it will be there, in all these words. Che is also a kind of ller phrase common to Argentine Spanishso common, in fact, that Argentines are sometimes known as ches. Now Argentines have a famously vexed relationship with other Latin Americans, who feel, perhaps rightly, that Argentines consider themselves superior, more European than other Latin Americans. Maybe this poem is a little joke,

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by an Argentine, that says to other Spanish speakers: no matter how much you would like to get rid of us, we will be everywhere. Maybe it is also just nonsense, or, in the specialized vocabulary of literary studies, pure formalism: not about anything other than the language, the sound of the words themselves. Words usually work like paths to get you somewhere. Maybe to an intended idea, or an object in the world, or to an understanding with another person. You might consider the sensual qualities of the path only insofar as these help you get somewhere else, or keep you from getting somewhere elsewherever you think you want to go. With this little poem, Cortzar offers you an opportunity to notice the sensual qualities of the path for their own sake, for the sake of the pleasure or irritation they provoke when they pop up in relief alongside and against the ordinary meanings of words. Maybe, then, it is a living syllable (slaba viva) because it appears to have a life of its own, dancing in and out of the words we discover. And it is also a living syllable because it is free not only to participate in the conveying of meaning but also to exist for its own sake, for the sake of the sound that it is and the sensate experience it delivers to you. In short, perhaps the syllable is living because, for it, work (meaning) and play (sound) are one. It is a poem that suggests all this just by being about a syllable, che. But by being about that particular syllable, the poem opens itself back out again into the world of things and people that are named by words. For the syllable che also names an individual, Che Guevara, the asthmatic Argentine physician who fought alongside Fidel Castro in the Cuban Revolution before resigning his position in Fidels new government to take the revolution elsewhere. Che was killed in Bolivia in October 1967. Cortzar wrote this poem not long after that: Slaba vivaLiving Syllable. And now I will translate:
Whatcha gonna do about it, hes there even if you dont want him, he is in the night, he is in the milk, in every car and every pothole and every brawl he is, you will send the dogs after him and all the same he will be though you hunt him, you search for him haphazardly

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and he will be with whoever ghts and makes speeches and in everything that grows and leans he will be, god damn it.

Cortzar certainly believed that Che Guevara fought and died to allow people to live, in just the sense that the syllable che was living. In paying homage to Guevaras effort, and in making che a living syllable, Cortzar also reveals the ways in which Che, the person, remains alive. Now this poem stuns me because it contains and resolves perhaps the central tension that marked Cortzars life as a writer. People who study Cortzar, even people who loved him, seem to fall into one of two parties: the party of literature and the party of politics. The party of literature says Cortzar was a great writer until around 1968, roughly the time he wrote this poem, because he respected the intrinsic power of literature and never mobilized it for extrinsic purposes like a political cause. The party of politics says Cortzar was a good, playful writer until around 1968, roughly the time he wrote this poem, when he began to accept his responsibility as a writer and stopped goong around to mobilize his skill for political purposes. I exaggerate only slightly. In this little poem, Cortzar, like the syllable and person he writes about, eludes those who would hunt him down and dismiss him with labels and judgmentsand remember that eluding, however deadly serious a game it might have been for Che, always bears the marks of its origins in the Latin word (ludere) that means to play. But Cortzars poem notwithstanding, Che is, in fact, dead. The Latin American literary Boom that Cortzar helped in 1963 to inaugurate with Hopscotch is dead. The utopian aspirations of the 1960s and early 1970s that swept Latin America and much of the world, and with which Cortzar and a number of other Boom authors identied their works, are dead. And Julio Cortzar himself, of course, is dead. So it is fair to wonder whether all that I have elaborated in this essay is of purely historical interest, useful for understanding only the ways in which one writer tried to live, think, and write his time and place. It might seem reasonable to conclude rst, that his time and place are simply too different from ours, so that second, his ways of thinking that time and place, and particularly his notion of invention,

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simply have no point of contact with our own time and place. I will conclude here, however, by arguing that this is not the case for two principal reasons: rst, because Cortzar, as we have seen, was never quite as at home in the vocabularies of his time and place as the collective, retrospective image of him among literary critics would have; and second, because his time and place might just as easily be seen as the beginning of our time and place, rather than the last gasp of a misguided utopianism. This last point, at least, echoes the way that Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri read the last 35 or so years of history (Hardt and Negri 1994, 2000, 2004). The usual rationale for seeing the upheavals of the late 1960s and early 1970s as the end of something is that around 1973 and in the years following, capital undertook a series of transformations in its own operations and in relation to the state and to labor. Late capitalism, post-fordism, exible accumulation are some of the terms that are given to this new conguration of capitalism in our time. And it is held, therefore, that a range of older vocabularies for thinking critically about capitalist societies and cultures no longer engage this new realitywith its global ows of virtual money, its disarticulation and globalization of the labor process to avoid the demands of organized labor, and its weakening of the social functions of the state. But Hardt and Negri see things differently. They view the new initiatives of capital and its states (whether nominally capitalist or communist) as a response dictated by the political forces unleashed during the 1960s and early 1970s. This certainly helps us understand the history of Latin America from Cortzars time to the present. Most observers of recent Latin American history agree that the region has undergone major and probably irreversible transformations over the past few decades (Williams 2002, 28). The counterrevolutionary dictatorships that took power in much of the region in the 1970s cleared the social and political ground of the region for the implementation of neoliberal reforms that occurred on the watch of the formally democratic regimes that followed in the 1980s and that remain in place in most of the region. In the process, many of the social and economic responsibilities previously assumed by Latin American states have now been reassigned to the private sector; that is, to the global market. This process, now

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three decades in the making, began, in the most immediate terms, as a response to the growing threat of revolutionary socialism, initiated in 1959 with the victory of Fidel Castro in Cuba and spread in myriad forms throughout the 1960s to Nicaragua, Peru, Colombia, Argentina, Bolivia, Chile, Uruguay, and El Salvador, to name just the best-known instances. In short, the period of widespread, utopian hopes of transformation whether social or psychologicalthat marked the Latin American sixties, as they marked the sixties in so many parts of the world, provoked rst, an astonishingly brutal backlash, and then, the endless horizon of freemarket reforms under the auspices of globalization and what one observer has termed low intensity democracy. And certainly, in the process, the period of the sixties and early seventies has come to appear as either a bestforgotten period of subversive danger (from the extreme right), a bestforgotten period of idealistic but misplaced energies (among liberals), or a best-forgotten period of inspiring but now irredeemably outdated political and social visions and strategies (among those on the left). The critical transformation, for those who feel that neoliberal globalization has rendered obsolete the political vocabularies and visions of Cortzars time, is that the current conguration of capital seems both so extensive and so intensive that it no longer permits the credible assumption of any position outside of its operation. And, since so many of the political strategies of the 1960s inherited and reproduced a belief in the necessity of such a positionthe vanguard faction in politics or in culture, the rural or urban guerrilla cellthen they can no longer be of use to us today. Dreams of a radically pure point outside of capitals operation, from which an equally radically pure and total transformation of capitalist society into a utopian alternative might be leveraged simply do not hold up under the conditions of contemporary capitalism. In effect, what is argued is that the immanent surface of contemporary capital has disabled the transcendent revolutionary rhetoric and strategy of the sixties. Stated in these terms, that argument seems reasonable enough. However, it rests on two assumptions that Negri, in my opinion, convincingly debunks. The rst assumption concerns what we might call, simply, the priority of capitalist initiative. In the argument above, capital sets the

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terms and the Left can only respond. Within what Harry Cleaver has called workerist Marxismof which C. L. R. James forms a major moment, as do Negri and the Italian political movement of Autonomiathe development of capital is dictated always by the initiatives of labor or, as Negri has termed it more recently, multitude (Cleaver 1977, 4366). The second assumption entails a homogenization of the sixties as a period of exclusively transcendental political rhetoric of total revolution. It may well be that this, in fact, is the retrospective, collective perception we have of that period. But a closer look at the cultural and political initiatives of the period might reveal a more complex situation wherein, if indeed many political and cultural movements sought to leverage a total transformation of Western society from a privileged transcendent space immune to the effects of that society, other political and cultural movements conceived of transformation as a more immanent (and sometimes transitory) process of creating temporary autonomous zones out of the heterogeneous spaces and elements given in Western capitalist societiessomething along the lines of what we have seen in C. L. R. James and Cortzar. With these alternative assumptions in mind, we might construct a different version of the decades that have passed since the heyday of Cortzars interventions. For example, in Hardt and Negris version of events, to summarize briey, capitalwhich he recasts as Empire in order to better take into account the essentially super- and extra-national nature of its dynamicsresponded to the signicant worldwide insurrection of the 1960s and 1970s by diffusing itselfin a sense, by disassembling itself as an obvious target for (and so eluding) a political strategy that placed itself outside the terrain of capitalist operation (Hardt and Negri 2000, 26079; Negri 2004, 5972). But in doing so, capital (and for that matter, most of the Left) mistook the critical dimension of that insurrection. What really threatened capital in the movements of the 1960s and 1970s was not the oppositional purity of the militants nor the total and transcendental scope of their aspirations for change, but precisely the opposite: the degree to which these movements mixed heterogeneous elements together (the classroom, the home, the factory, the bedroom, the rock concert, the lm) and identied all of them as sites for the release of creative energies they

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saw as deadened by the effects of capitalsites whose transformative value they steadfastly refused to gauge by their potential to revolutionize all of capitalist space, for once and for all. Capital, then, was already a step behind the multitude when it undertook its neoliberal recongurations. And in this sense, for Hardt and Negri, the response that the 1960s and early 1970s provoked in capital, and in its states and cultures, did little more than underline the reality already perceived by the militants of that time, and so fuel the re and augment the sheer numbers of those feeling the weight of capitalist power upon their lives. If Negri, for his part, is sensitive to this possibility and capable of producing best-selling descriptions of it, then that is probably because the Italian Autonomia movement of the 1960s and 1970s, of which he was an integral part, already was living that time and place in that way (Virno and Hardt 1996; Cleaver 1977, 5166; Negri 1984, 1930). The great strengths and some on the Left would say weaknessesof Autonomia lay in the fact that it did not prioritize spaces of revolutionary activity, that it refused to grant transcendent power to any single vision of what the outcome of revolutionary activity should be, and that it rejected any model of revolutionary activity that located transformative power anywhere other than in the self-valorizing activities of a heterogeneous group of individuals (housewives, students, professors, factory workers, etc.) engaged in the process of reconguring the relations that made up their daily livesfrom the bedroom to the classroom, from the demonstration to the factory oorso as to realize their creative potential (Agamben 1993; Negri 1999, 2004). This, in turn, gives us a way to get a handle on Cortzars own vexed relationship to the political vocabularies of his own time, and indeed to the curious reception (or lack thereof ) that his writing has received of late (see Alonso 1998, 13; Larsen 1998, 5758). For we can now see that many of Cortzars political interventions were made precisely to remind fellow travelers rst, to be sensitive to and appreciative of the vital, transformative value of mixing heterogeneous elements, and second, of where they were ceding power, even if only to their own idealsrevolution, socialism, engagementconverted into transcendent norms that wound up disabling

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the inventive, constituent powers they had been exercising. In his book on Spinoza, Negri elaborates the difference between Power (the centralized, mediating, transcendental force of commandpotestas) and power (the local, immediate, actual force of constitutionpotentia) (Negri 1991, xiii). In the later work Insurgencies, Negri offers a history of the antagonism between these two forces, now renamed constituted and constituent power (Negri 1999, 30313). It would not be too much to say that Cortzar mobilized inventionboth the word and the activityalways in the service of constituent power (what I earlier called those-with-power-to). This is why Cortzar would at times precisely antagonize his comrades on the left whenever he believed that they were losing what we might call the internal battle with constituted power. Thus, in his own time, Cortzar was received as either too rightist or too leftist, not because he was in the middle, but rather because he was always moving with the current of constituent power. And thus also, with the homogenizing retrospective view that we have today of his times as containing a utopian, transcendental, revolutionary energy, we cast away the baby of a constituent power that remains active and relevant today with the bathwater of the occasional overreaching of that power into constitution. Hardt and Negri encourage us, in Empire and its companion volume, Multitude, as in all of Negris earlier, more systematic, and difcult writings in political philosophy, to recognize that we have power, and indeed, that nothing could be a more obvious sign of that power than the responses of capitalism and its states and cultures to our last great exercise of that power. All of the concepts and practices of Autonomia (for Negri might best be seen simply as the participant in Autonomia who, for various reasons, has gained a voice in the United States) suggest that what was most signicant for our time in the struggles of the 1960s and early 1970s was the emphasis on revolutionary activity as the immanent, creative reconguration of the relations making up the fabric of our lives and our society in such a way as would free up the true potency of the human subject. It is in this sense that I began by suggesting that our possible truth, like Cortzars, must be invention. And it is in this sense that I believe further understanding invention

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and its possible relevance to our time could supply us with yet another critical tool with which to thinkand inventanother possible present from among the elements of the one we have. In this light, Cortzars Slaba viva, the poem that so playfully animated Che, brings to mind a name, at once more contemporary and much older than Ches: multitude, Negris more recent termdrawn, however, from Spinozafor the agent of constituent power. Multitude, in this sense, need not designate any actual population. Rather, it is the name that points to and connects together any manifestation of the afrmative, constitutive force that strains or even blows through the forces that would command, would name, would narrow our being to any particular facet or function. Che, or the multitude, works whenever we assert that we are more than any name Power would impose upon us, more than any categorized social function it would command us to fulll. In this sense, we constitute Che, we constitute the multitude wherever and whenever we insist we are more than . . .: more than foreign, more than exiles, more than socialist, more than citizens, more than intellectuals, more than artists, more than organisms mining coal for prot, more than hungry, more than productive, more than critical, more than rich, more than resisting, more than human.

I
NOTES
Thanks to Ana Ros, Gareth Williams, and Cristina Moreiras for useful comments on drafts of this essay. 1. See Levinson (2004) and Moreiras (1998) for readings of Cortzars short stories, House Taken Over and Apocalypse in Solentiname, respectively, that show a similar dynamic at work there.

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