Meathead materialisms: César Aira’s ANTsy fictions of a world without conviction

This essay considers several tendencies that have come to define the renewed concern with matter, assemblages, and objects associated with the new materialisms. Drawing on Bruno Latour’s Actor-Network Theory (ANT), postcritics and new formalists link the effort to revitalise and rethink the methods and aims of literary criticism to these concerns, while alerting us to the unique agency of artworks. The result is not just an idiosyncratic view of literature or of its relationship to society, but rather a peculiar vision of the world in which the notion that we can convince others or that we ourselves can be convinced holds no water. Perhaps no living writer provides a clearer picture of what it might mean to fully embrace this postcritical view of the world than César Aira. This is especially true for his novella La villa (Shantytown), which, in telling the story of how Maxi–a ‘meathead’ and ‘brainless hulk’–becomes a ‘legend’ among the poor, presents a world saturated with the networked agency of human and nonhuman actors alike. Drawing our attention to the aesthetic and political limits of such a worldview, Aira’s ANTsy fictions illustrate how the new materialist emphasis on description, immediacy, and the spontaneous not only alters literary criticism’s more foundational concepts–text, reading, interpretation, and critique–but also, and more crucially, entails a disavowal of conviction. This essay explores what this disavowal means for Aira’s entire approach to fiction, and what, in turn, it ought to mean for the future of literary studies itself.