In the Shadow of Mao by Bruno Bosteels

All of us, those who write and sign our names, do it to make ends meet. Nothing else. And to make ends meet we do not hesitate in affirming that white is black and vice-versa. People are looking for the truth and we give them counterfeit money. - Ricardo Piglia, "Homenaje a Roberto Arlt"

The most effective articulation, within the text, of the literary and the political depends upon a critique of the political economy of art. As contributions to such a critique we can read not only the notes attributed to Arlt on money, beauty, and revolution in the final story of Assumed Name, but also Piglia's own studies published in Los Libros and Hispamérica on the economy of literature, once again with special emphasis on Arlt. In both cases, the main object of attack is beauty itself as a supposedly pure aesthetic value, separate from the circuits of supply and demand and independent of the crude assigning of prices according to the abstract measure of money as the form of general equivalence: "As always, what is at stake is the-forbidden, guilty-access to beauty, and in this case language serves as the support for desire and for property. "23 Against this idealist interpretation of art as a free, disinterested activity, a materialist reading has been developing over the last century and a half, in practice as much as in theory, whose basic elements can also be found in the conflicting proposals of Borges and Arlt-or, at least, such is Piglia's deliberately provocative hypothesis. According to this reading, only the principles of political economy can provide an account of the aesthetic or literary act: "Changed into the commodity, the law of supply and demand seems to be the only thing that enables one, from the point of consumption, to give 'reasons' for literary production. "24 As we will see, however, this is a lesson that many intellectuals, even in the 1970s, have continued to reject-particularly when they have aspired to speak in the name of the New Left.