Magazine making in Latin America has always been an almost absurd heroic enterprise, continuity is a rarity and independence an euphemism. Somehow, like almost anywhere else. Even so, the region seems to be facing a shift of paradigm in magazine making. Despite the difficult conditions of circulation – it is much easier to access underground North American or European publications than even the most mainstream journals from neighboring countries–, a few magazines managed decades of continuity as a result of relentless personal drive and engagement, and through irreverent, even autocratic, insistence on autonomy. While newer editorial ventures are confronting problems of distribution through projects developed exclusively within the net -often in ways that confess a secret print nostalgia-; veteran magazines from the seventies are using electronic culture as a network space and forum for regional circulation, but increasingly also as a virtual archive and resource library especially relevant for those who have recently decided for closure.

Many of the most relevant long lasting editorial projects were born in the context of the authoritarian regimes of the seventies as enterprises of self-education. Domestic get-togethers and dinners became the only possible sites for critical thinking, eventually turning into small homemade academies. Here translation became an important tool of resistance and intellectual dissidence. Usually -but not always- far from the desire to »keep up« with intellectual fads, the importation of specific theoreticians beyond the grasp of the military censors was more than just a way of revitalizing the reflective space the dictatorships sought to eliminate. Translations were incorporated as a part of significant editorial practices that functioned as public thinking machines: magazines were –and still are– translating according to their needs, in their own terms, and in intertextual conflict with the local context. These autonomous editorial enterprises became infrastructures for mobile and independent agencies of thought1.

Authors were not imported neutrally, and the gesture of bringing certain names into circulation is not always what it appears to be. The use of Gramsci in many Latin American academic political-science and sociology publications of the seventies and eighties, for example, was more a convenient way to shake off Marxism, after the violent defeat of political leftist intelligencia, more a proto-incursion into the »third way« than a theoretical restructuring of a neomarxist platform2. Meanwhile, the translations of queer theory in the Cuban journal Criterios in the late nineties, was a political statement on obsolete unofficial government policy, and not an uncritical following of the American Cultural Studies academic boom. As a frequent writer of the Argentinean Punto de Vista stated about the magazine, since its founding it has always used translation of a way of »thinking out loud«3.

These magazines are not local because they are condemned to locality, but because they choose to voice a position that defined their editorial autonomy, and at the same time allowed them to perform their restlessness with precision and versatility. This positioning is the source of their independence, allowing innovative and irreverent use of all available structures: from funding sources, media and technology, to social contacts. As all lonely enterprises, their reason for existence is solely the urgency the makers of magazines have for doing what they do. As Beatriz Sarlo, founding editor and last director of Punto de Vista, explains in her statement regarding the decision to end the journals thirty years practice of brilliant and irrevocable editorial agency: »a magazine is only worthwhile if absolutely irreplaceable4. For Latin American publications the sporadic funding –coming from state related culture-institution or international NGOs???– is not the main factor of continuity, although it may make the difference between months or a few years between issues. In fact, funding sources differ yearly and sometimes even per issue. Any editorial venture that persists in this context does so due to the personal drive of one, two or maybe three exceptional individuals who insist on investing relentless energy in the making of a magazine. In this sense an autocratic practice, which does not necessarily mean authorial in its editorial line.
A magazine is an isolated and life consuming task, no matter how many willing new participants its past production transforms into collaborating enthusiasts.

Punto de Vista (1978-2008) was born, against all probabilities, in Buenos Aires during the harshest years of the military dictatorship as a journal on literature and critical theory. It’s necessarily marginal and underground beginnings gave the publication a strong sense of contingency where its autonomous and politically outspoken profile was always accompanied by a profound ethic of intellectual responsibility. Throughout its history and to the present day Punto de Vista’s only commitment was its fierce stance of independence against any kind of accommodation, including editorial formulism, maintaining an alternative stance and simultaneously steering clear of any self-victimizing discourse of the periphery. In the eighties the journal showed just how capable is was to transform its »secretly belligerent condition of resistance«5, into an attentive and aware vigilante of contemporary Argentinean culture and politics. The most prominent local and regional intellectuals, at some point in their career, were submitted into Punto de Vista’s arduous apparatus of critical thinking. The combative history of the magazine, including many difficult moments of conflictive unease, reaffirmed its ability to constantly reinvent itself against the current of fashionable theoretical trends. Punto de Vista’s restlessness was always incisive: the journal’s permeability was invested continuously in a concise and demanding interpellation of the present.

The Chilean Revista de Crítica Cultural (1990-2008) is a similar story6. The magazine sums up two decades of rigorous and autodidact exercise of cultural critique as conceptual emancipation, also confronting in this way the anti-intellectual obtuseness of the military dictatorship. Theoretically articulated by Nelly Richard, central motor and director of the publication, the genealogy of the magazine begins in the mid seventies in what could be considered a small autodidact academy in the constantly mutating shape of informal conversations, meetings and seminars, the foundation of an art gallery, plus various self-made fanzine type editions on contemporary art and feminism. All these practices were continuously displacing, readjusting and discussing contemporary Chilean culture. The magazine was founded by Richard during the re-democratization process and gathered many of the »critical voices« that participated in these experiments during the eighties. The magazine shared with Punto de Vista the unorthodox independent stance gained from the experience of having created a marginal but sustainable site for critical thinking, enabling the individuals surrounding both magazines to confront their own intellectual institutionalization with epistemic vigilance.

In the post-dictatorship era, Latin American magazines are confronted with the loss of the epic possibilities of political opposition. Both Punto de Vista and Revista de Crítica Cultural were impervious to comfortably easing into the stance of the victimized left, as many others did, even retroactively. Both form part of a paradigm of magazines made to be read, relying on the quality of their texts, with formats almost leaf-through resistant. Maybe even more significant is the way they were able to articulate acute viewpoints that were formative of their respective intellectual fields, working as flexible platforms, virtual meeting places and discussion satellites for autonomous thinking and critical practice. Many newer magazines try to follow the model by replicating the essay format and desperately seeking stylish intellectuals to donate a piece of writing. Although a few of the more outstanding recent editorial ventures homage the paradigm in a different way: proclaiming a low-tech »anachronic« stance, demanding a close, attentive readership willing to participate and use their magazine as a small autodidact school for thought, turning the model into a political stance on format.

Still. We will miss the long essays, the effort demanding tiny print on proportionally large paper, and especially the unique way of being critical, curious, interested and passionately engaged in untangling the present and its various potential futures.

 

 

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