Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research

Vol. 16, No. 2, December 2010, 101–116

Rock Ritual and Literature: Youth Culture and the Transition to

Democracy in the Southern Cone
Claudia Ferman*

University of Richmond, USA

The paper proposes a reflection on pogo dance, and its aesthetic and political
significance in the context of youth cultures in the Southern Cone. I propose a reading
of ‘pogo’ as part of the rock event, looking into the performative aspects of this cultural
form, and discussing how the ceremonial and the ritual in the rock event constitute and
reveal the cultural; how the political inscribes the global and redefines it; and how the
rock conglomerate becomes an aesthetics that feeds and is fed by the literary in
the Southern Cone. The focus of my study falls on the less studied side of rock
communication: audience participation, specifically pogo dance. The approach I am
proposing identifies a recurring connectedness along the rock recital, and what is
involved in it, and the theatrical. The paper focuses on a group of texts by Uruguayan
authors, which have been referred to as the ‘Aesthetic of Cruelty’.
Keywords: pogo; Southern Cone; aesthetic of cruelty; rock event; resistance to
dictatorship; youth culture; performance

Y yo no hice nada, ¿viste? Yo estaba viviendo mi vida,

y no pretendı́a pertenecer a ninguna generación de nada.
Y no hacı́a nada para nadie, sino hacı́a algo por mı́,
como lo estoy haciendo ahora. Si dentro de diez años
viene alguien a hablarme sobre lo que hice en el año 98,
lo voy a mandar a cagar. Si uno se pone a estudiar las cosas
como trascendentes y a darles una forma,
llega un momento en que es absurdo.
Pepi Gonçalvez

More than a decade ago, a freshman showed a notebook, in which he had been frantically
writing for several days, to his writing instructor. Impressed, the instructor gave this
student a contact for a publisher. The book, Pogo,1 was published in 1997, in Montevideo,
Uruguay. The book could easily have been forgotten—it was too experimental, the
protagonist rapes the corpse of his mother, and there are too many international, non-
canonical references—but a year later, under a different name, the young author Daniel
Mella published a second book, Derretimiento,2 that sold out its first edition and was then
published in Spain, attracting enormous attention. I will return to the significance of
Mella’s writing later in this paper.
The title of Mella’s first novel, Pogo, comes from the hispanicisation of
the homophonous English word ‘pogo’. Even though pogo is a word that belongs to

*Email: cferman@richmond.edu

ISSN 1326-0219 print/ISSN 2151-9668 online

q 2010 Association of Iberian and Latin American Studies of Australasia (AILASA)
DOI: 10.1080/13260219.2010.527283
http://www.informaworld.com
102 C. Ferman

contemporary youth language, it can also be understood beyond the boundaries of this
subculture. The term describes a dance that originated in the English punk movement and
that travelled rapidly to various urban locales throughout the world. What follows is a
reflection on pogo and its aesthetic and political significance in the context of youth cultures
in the Southern Cone: it looks into the performative aspects of this cultural form (how it is
directly entrenched in the rock spectacle event); interprets it within a historically-charged
context; and reflects on the fluid relationships that globalised and electronic culture
maintains with a new literature in the Southern Cone. The object I propose to study comes
from the broad area of the intersection of youth, poetics, music, electronic communication,
and urban cultures. This is the intersection that we call rock. The focus of the study falls
on the less studied side of rock communication: audience participation, specifically pogo
dance.

The Rock Event: Pogo Dance

The following quotes are testimonies from the film The Decline of Western Civilization, a
documentary by Penelope Spheeris (1985)3 in which pogo is discussed as a feature of the
underground rock scene in Los Angeles. In these testimonies, both a definition and an
explanation of pogo are presented:
The pogo dance is just exactly what the name implies: people gyrating up and down in a
vertical position, as if they were riding a pogo stick. (Mac Neely)
[The speed of the music] is way above the normal rhythm of a dance [ . . . ] Disco time
[rhythm] is 126 to 132 beats a minute, while the kind of music of the Germs or the Black Flag
is played at 250 to 300 beats a minute, which is not comfortable or normal to dance to.
(Brendan Mullen)
A more detailed definition can be found in Hebdige’s classic study of the punk scene in
England:
Of course, punk did more than upset the wardrobe. It undermined every relevant discourse.
Thus dancing, usually an involving and expressive medium in British rock and mainstream
pop cultures, was turned into a dumb show of blank robotics. [ . . . ] Indeed, overt displays of
heterosexual interest were generally regarded with contempt and suspicion [ . . . ] and
conventional courtship patterns found no place on the floor in dances like the pogo, the pose
and the robot. [ . . . ] The pogo forbade even this much interaction, though admittedly there was
always a good deal of masculine jostling in front of the stage. In fact the pogo was a
caricature – a reductio ad absurdum of all the solo dance styles associated with rock music.
[ . . . ] The same abbreviated gestures – leaping into the air, hands clenched to the sides, to
head an imaginary ball – were repeated without variation in time to the strict mechanical
rhythms of the music. In contrast to the hippies’ languid, free-form dancing, and the ‘idiot
dancing’ of the heavy metal rockers [ . . . ] the pogo made improvisation redundant: the only
variations were imposed by changes in the tempo of the music – fast numbers being
‘interpreted’ with manic abandon in the form of frantic on-the-spots, while the slower ones
were pogoed with a detachment bordering on the catatonic.4
Another important characteristic of this ritual is the conventionalised use of the space:
outside of the central area, close to the stage, where the ‘mosh-pit’ develops, pogo would
simply be impossible, and the intent would be a challenge to the entire rock spectacle. The
stage and the mosh-pit are well connected through the music, the movement of the
audience and in the audience, and the activity of the musicians on stage. Pogo also defines
itself along some gender boundaries that, though not entirely fixed, are nonetheless
relevant: pogo is basically male.5 In The Decline of Western Civilization, Jennifer, one of
the interviewed fans, comments: ‘It seems like little crowds, you know, they’ll be dancing,
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 103

then they start punching, and then they’ll just like move over to the side, you know, it’ll
just go back and forth, and back [ . . . ] and you can’t, you can’t dance.’ This and other
testimonies in the film delineate various degrees of anxiety regarding the confusing
relationship between pogo dance and violence: ‘There is a fine line between pogo dancing
and fighting. The only performance that ever makes it, and is a success, is a performance
that causes total madness’ (Gary Hirstius, TDOWC).
In Uruguay, Argentina and Chile, pogo dance became ‘el pogo’ and ‘poguear’. In all
three countries, pogo became popular around the same time (early to mid-1980s), and it
can still be found today in concerts in this region, despite some important transformations
in the ritual.6 In this rock scene, the semi-violent nature of pogo was clearly tamed. For
Daniel Mella pogo is ‘a violent children’s game’, a ritual for the initiated that develops
within the solidarity of its participants, that is, it is devoid of aggressive intention.7 Ana
Solari, a Uruguayan writer and a communication specialist who has strong ties with the
new generation of writers, characterises pogo violence as ‘una violencia de aproximación
y no de rechazo’, and she distinguishes it from the violence ‘que pueden sufrir las mujeres
a manos de sus maridos o los niños abusados’.8 J. F. Serrano9 affirms that ‘[s]egún los
jóvenes pogo termina en tropel cuando se mete alguien que no es del grupo, que no conoce
el pogo o que malinterpreta el golpe de alguien como incitación a pelear’.10 Gustavo
Escanlar, a journalist and a writer who was one of the clear representatives of the ‘movida’
in the nineties in Uruguay, says:
La primera vez que yo vi bailar pogo fue acá en Villa Biarritz, en un recital de Los Estómagos.
No sabı́a yo que existı́a eso acá. Fue en el ‘85, [el concierto] fue organizado por la intendencia
[de Montevideo], el primer concierto de la democracia. Y uno veı́a a tipos con las ‘crestas’,
tipos dándose, golpeándose mientras bailaban, y yo no entendı́a nada, y me preguntaba: dónde
estuve hasta ahora que no habı́a visto esto.11
As stated above, the form just described became significant in its particular articulation in
the Southern Cone as a local expression of the post-dictatorship youth culture. However, it
has attracted no critical consideration from scholars who have discussed youth culture and
rock in the Southern Cone or in Latin America in general. For example, in the well-
documented book Rockin’ Las Américas (2004),12 which extensively discusses various
rock expressions throughout the Americas since their beginning to contemporary times,
there is not a single comment on pogo, or any of the dance rituals associated with rock
performance. This absence should not come as a surprise when considering that rock
studies have focused on two aspects of the form: music and poetry.
The rock recital is an event in which messages are exchanged under a multiplicity of
codes; in which a ‘situational amplification of the field of consciousness’ occurs13 and in
which resistance may be enacted.14 Music and lyrics are constitutive elements of rock, but
they cannot fully define or account for this complex social and participatory, meaning-
driven expression. A lettered approach would reduce messages and meanings to the many
times poor lyric combinations that accompany the music, but such an approach could not
account for the social and cultural impacts of the expression. The rock event should be
read as ceremony, performed within clearly demarcated historical coordinates in which
social, psychological, aesthetic, and political forces belonging to both the individual and
the collective meet and are uttered. In this sense, it is preferable to talk about rock as a
‘cultural conglomerate’, a dense network of cultural references and performance that is
produced and re-produced in close connection with the new electronic languages.15 This
reproduction occurs both within and beyond the strict realm of its articulation—it travels
to other modalities of expression within the culture, such as literature. Through such travel
104 C. Ferman

and permutations, it re-circulates its contents and integrates its ways beyond the music or
lyrics:
Not only is rock music (much more than jazz used to be) an integral part of the life of many
people, but it is a cultural initiator: to like rock, to like a certain kind of rock rather than
another, is also a way of life, a manner of reacting; it is a whole set of tastes and attitudes.
Rock offers the possibility of a relation which is intense, strong, alive, ‘dramatic’ (in that rock
represents itself as a spectacle, that listening to it is an event and that it produces itself on
stage), with a music that is itself impoverished, but through which the listener affirms
himself.16
As one of the expressions of popular culture, rock and its by-products have been perceived
in Latin America in the past as an alienating practice, simultaneously both a colonised and
colonising production that should not be interpreted outside the forces of colonialism and
even imperialism. More than the progress of the debate itself, the continuity, incessant
renovation and continuous appeal of rock to four generations within the continent, and the
profound cultural impact that this expression has had in countries such as Argentina, Chile,
Uruguay, and Mexico have progressively softened and neutralised the criticism.17
During the nineties, the processes of globalisation experienced by Latin America have
brought new relevance and meaning to this discussion. The new media environments have
elicited what Gage Averill calls ‘prophetic criticism’, a criticism that seeks to identify and
analyse those manifestations by which the models of the nineteenth century postcolonial
nation-state become de-emphasised while the global modalities become reinforced.18 But
recent studies on contemporary popular culture in Latin America, pioneered by authors
such as Jesús Martı́n-Barbero and his work on communications, stress the need to analyse
the complex processes of appropriation that take place within the very act of reception. The
questions posed by such theorists have radically changed—they no longer ask ‘who are the
senders and economic beneficiaries of this production?’ or ‘what is the content?’ The new
questions seek to clarify how these cultural productions are interpreted, mediated and
recreated. They also assess the revolutionary potential the new media may have in the re-
democratisation of the vertical postcolonial society and thus respond to its hegemonic
cultural inscription—what Carlos Jáuregui describes as the ‘utopian discourse’ in media
theory.19 In order to find answers to those questions, a close consideration of the particular
local articulation in the community, as well as an analysis of its trajectory, should be at the
centre of its critical inquiry.20
Any consideration of the spectacular condition of rock opens up to the examination of
a multiplicity of codes and meanings with which this transnational expression operates in a
given culture (or cultures). Eva Giberti defines this spectacular condition as ‘estética del
resplandor’ when she refers to the extremely high emotional temperature generated by
rock recitals.21 The glare (resplandor) describes the experience of transcendence that takes
place inside the rock event—a jouissance that extends over, in Lacanian terms, from
enjoyment to suffering. The subject feels transported by the performance into a realm
alternative to the quotidian or the ordinary. This transportation is a phase that enables
him/her to experience ‘different forms of the being’:22
La asistencia a recitales de rock se asemeja a un entrenamiento de zapping respecto de la
cotidianeidad, que funcionarı́a como apagado de situaciones conflictivas y traslado de canal,
de lo doméstico a lo público, para encender las pantallas monumentales del estadio, los
escenarios y las vecindades de pares (conjuntos) que se suscitan en cada encuentro rockero.23
Listening to rock in isolation (with an I-pod, for instance) may produce similar effects
through the evocative ability characteristic of music. Still, it is the spectacular condition of
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 105

the rock stage that plays out this form thoroughly and enables it to intervene culturally
and socially in a very large spectrum, making rock ‘a system of symbolic action’,24
and enabling its participants to be part of a movement, as discussed by Pablo Vila
in connection with rock nacional.25
In Serrano’s definition, rock is ‘la espectacularización ritual de las emociones que viven
sus consumidores, expresión evidente y puesta en escena de sus imaginarios’.26 The term
‘consumidores’ does not completely resolve the complexity that rock exhibited as a cultural
conglomerate in the context we seek to describe, since it alludes only to the fact that rock
may constitute merchandise and thus it reduces the audience’s behaviour to the economic
relations produced in its jouissance. In this context, it would be more accurate to refer to the
rock audience as ‘participants’. This term implies that the roles of musicians and audience
are equidistant in the staging of the imaginaries at play; otherwise the communication would
not be effective. Even though the rock spectacle in general is bound to reproduction as
discussed by Philip Auslander and, as he states, ‘“live” has always been defined as that
which can be recorded’,27 the momentous nature of the rock events we are considering make
them ‘historically-charged’ and thus political.
In the introduction to The Politics of Pleasure, Stephen Regan points to the need for the
cultural studies agenda to move beyond its current preoccupation with ‘signification’ and
reconsider the role of the ‘senses’. The essays included in the collection discuss ‘what
relevance, if any, might still be attached to “pleasure”, “emotion” and “sensation” in
modern cultural theory’.28 In what follows I propose a reading of the rock event that seeks to
elucidate why the ceremonial and the ritual in it constitute and reveal the cultural; how the
political inscribes the global and redefines it; and how the rock conglomerate becomes an
aesthetics that feeds and is fed by the literary in the Southern Cone. An approach such as the
one I am proposing should identify a recurring connectedness along the rock recital and
what is involved in it and the theatrical. That interpretation would require an alternative
theory to the neo-Aristotelian theatre of catharsis as well as the Brechtian ostranenie (the
detachment of the audience that prevents identification and through which political
enlightenment may take place).29 A ‘theater without walls’ enacts the metaphor of a
permeable, continuous, interacting relationship between arts and politics. In such an
understanding, theatre ‘does not depend on any specific institution, but can take place
anywhere, and in society at large’:30
The first embryonic appearance of genuine socialness happens the moment those participating
in the theater cease to be a mere group of people and become a community. It is that special
moment when their mutual presence becomes mutual participation; when their encounter in a
single space and time becomes an existential encounter; when their common existence in this
world is suddenly enveloped by a very specific and unrepeatable atmosphere; when a shared
experience, mutually understood, evokes the wonderful elation that makes all the sacrifice
worthwhile. It is a moment when a common participation in a particular adventure of the
mind, the imagination and the sense of humor, and a common experience of truth or a flash of
insight into the ‘life of truth’ suddenly establishes new relationships between the participants.
[ . . . ] This electrifying atmosphere of ‘alliance’ and ‘fellowship’ is a central aspect of the
‘socialness’ of the theater I am talking about.31
The rock recital, rooted in the Western dramatic culture, shares essential features with the
play-theatre insofar as the same type of communication links stage and audience. There
are, of course, many differences, and it is important to describe them to understand better
the nature of the rock recital. To Jury Veltruski, in the ‘play-theatre’ the ‘stage figure’ is
the product of the complex processes of mediation between the individual (actor) and the
character (dramatis persona). As the mediator between the spectator and the event, the
actor signals the direction of the reaction sought in the spectator.32 In the rock event, these
106 C. Ferman

various levels are flattened: the stage figure gets closer to the individual/performer
asymptotically. The place of the character coded by the authorial text or by a tradition
(‘role’ in Ubersfeld’s conceptualisation)33 is reinvented by a new flattening of levels:
author and character become one, a characteristic that has been studied as typical in
popular theatricality, and defined as ‘non-matrixed representation’ in performance and
film studies.34 In the rock concert, many factors contribute to the deactivation of ‘the
lettered character’ as the constitutive pillar of the event: the different nature of the codified
text within the rock spectacle; its highly improvisational content; the concurrent meanings
between the stage figure and the performer; the way in which the stage figure transcends
and copies itself in public appearances outside and beyond the stage, and so forth. The
deactivation of the ‘lettered’ character on behalf of the ‘performer’ is central to the
understanding of the rock event as a theatrical activity, and it substantiates the relationship
of this theatricality to Antonin Artaud’s theorising of theatre as a ‘unique language
halfway between gesture and thought.’35 I will return to Artaud’s conceptualisation later.
To Ervin Goffman, the constitutive feature of performance is the distinction between
two roles: ‘A performance [ . . . ] is that arrangement which transforms an individual into a
stage performer, the latter, in turn, being an object that can be looked at in the round and at
length without offense, and looked to for engaging behavior, by persons in an “audience”
role.’36 Goffman observes that the audience does not have the right or the obligation to
participate directly in the dramatic action that takes place on stage.37 The audience may
express a response to the dramatic action, but this response may be interpreted as non-
existent to the characters presented by the performers. On the other hand, it is precisely this
attribute—the audience’s behavioural response—that defines the rock event. In the rock
event, some places in the audience sector demonstrate a profound dynamic to which the
stage responds promptly, even engaging at times in direct contact—for example, ‘stage
diving’ in the United States and ‘slam’ in Argentina. A simple test for this assertion is to
compare the ways in which this response is depicted in film, rock theatricality and ‘play-
theatre’. While a play-theatre event may include a couple of shots of the audience
(beginning, applause, laughter), other occurrences in the audience are considered
interruptions. On the other hand, the recording of a rock event will normally include as
many shots of the audience as of the stage.38
It is important to emphasise that the audience in this rock event knows, sometimes with
great detail, critical components of the ‘discourse’ that will take place on stage. The vitality
of an event that depends so heavily on the interaction with the audience, as well as on its
ability to replicate itself in other similar events, emphasises its ceremonial condition. Pogo,
as one of the constituents of the rock cultural conglomerate, may be interpreted as a non-
discursive language, a code through which cultural experiences are shared and identity
processes displayed. In that sense, pogo can be read in all of the dimensions in which it
communicates. There is, no doubt, a psychological dimension which may be discussed in
conjunction with anthropological and sociological considerations: youth identity building
in the context of the postmodern and global city, the ‘new-tribe passion’, as it has been
called, and the strategies for survival and identification that can be read inside of these
manifestations,39 which will be discussed after proposing a theoretical framework for the
consideration of pogo.

The Aesthetic of Cruelty

More than seventy years ago, and in the context of European avant-garde movements,
Antonin Artaud (1896 – 1948) proposed a profound criticism of the condition and handling
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 107

of European theatre at that time. For Artaud, the idea of theatre lies ‘in its excruciating,
magical connection with reality and danger’. In his First Manifesto, Artaud proposes ‘to put
an end to the subjugation of the theater to the text’ and to develop ‘its potential for expansion
beyond words, for development in space, for dissociative and vibratory effect on our
sensibilities.’40 Artaud’s ideas had a profound impact on European and Latin American
theatre, and many of the twentieth century experimentations in theatre owe a debt to his
theorising of the ‘total spectacle’ that involves the audience in a transcendent, ‘sacred’
practice, throwing the spectator in ‘magical trances’. He calls this experience ‘The Theater
of Cruelty’: ‘Without an element of cruelty at the foundation of every spectacle, the theater
is not possible. In the state of degeneracy, in which we live, it is through the skin that
metaphysics will be made to re-enter our minds.’41
The ceremonial rock event, with its rituals of pogo, stage diving, and crowd surfing,
can be interpreted as a pointed realisation of Artaud’s theatre of cruelty. In his essay
‘Violence in Modern Drama’, Martin Esslin identifies five types of violence that can
materialise in modern drama:42
1. violence between the characters
2. violence from the author (or director) towards the characters
3. violence from the stage to the audience
4. violence from the audience to the stage
5. violence from the author to the audience
The theatricality of the rock event includes a new coupling in this theatre of cruelty:
violence from the audience to the audience, which may be equated to from the body to the
body. With such violence, the body becomes publicly invested in its reception, processing
and response; it absorbs the energy of the spectacle and re-circulates it, spontaneously and
intention-free: ‘Theater, far from copying life, enters into communication, if it can, with
pure forces’, says Artaud, who also adds: ‘And whether one accepts or denies them, it is
still permissible to speak of forces when referring to whatever it is that engenders energizing
images in the unconscious, and gratuitous crime in the outside world.’43 The body in action
participates in a ritual and exercises a language through which encounter, identification,
celebration, and political standpoint are articulated. As a language, the body should be read
as a vehicle and not purely as meaning. The spectacle literally ‘mobilises’ the participants,
but this insubordination is not imprisoned in an intellectual, textual construct. The
celebratory aspects of the event come into play to enable this de-hierarchical, action-
oriented ritual to occur.
Rock recitals are spaces for communal celebration in which ‘things happen’ in the
context of the ‘glare aesthetics’ and where the body is heavily implicated in ways that need
to be interpreted historically. The reciprocal violence in this ad hoc, self-contained space in
which one is surrounded by peers, distributes violence among interchangeable victims. The
violence is arbitrary as in the ritual sacrifice described by Rene Girard, but it does not have
one selected victim.44 The real question of ‘who will kill whom?’ is answered originally: a
few self-selected, those who dare (a triumph in itself) will give the blows and may receive
the blows in what Girard describes as the ‘insubstantial presence’ in exorcism. As ritualised,
reciprocal violence, pogo makes the encounter, the rock event, ceremonial
and transcendent; it re-enacts the sacrifice and calms the social and political wound.
During the mid eighties, new cultural trends emerged in Uruguay, which found
articulation trough underground publications, performances, rock poetry and graffiti. This
radical alteration of the cultural scene has been interpreted as a reaction not only to the
neoliberal authoritarian and military regimes, but also to the discourses of the ‘Generación
108 C. Ferman

crı́tica’45—that is, the dense and extended discourse as well as the important political
activism that spanned a half-century of Uruguayan culture in the twentieth century.46 Youth
expressions of the 80s in Montevideo (from rock to graffiti to ‘underground tribal
magazines’ to performance to literature) are traversed by a prejudicial discontent against
the political manifestations that permeated the preceding two decades and tainted all
expressions of life in Uruguay.47 While my purpose here is not to analyse the nature and
extent of this discontent, it can be summarised as a radical resistance to political
apparatuses, be they the authoritarian state imposed by the past dictatorship or the utopian
models of the leftists. These magazines do not constitute a coherent collection, but along
with the popular graffiti expression and the Uruguayan rock of those years, they share a
desire to find alternative sources and cultural models to those liberal traditions that provided
the foundation for the institutions and the national imaginaries of Uruguay. Peveroni
describes the movement as follows:
La movida de los 80 era más ingenua. Ingenua por varios motivos, porque no tenı́a una
historia detrás, porque se hizo todo desde cero: el rock se hizo desde cero, la literatura
underground se hizo desde cero, la subcultura rock se hizo desde cero, porque la dictadura la
habı́a borrado de un plumazo. Habı́a existido en los ‘60 un foco, pero la dictadura lo borró
todo porque mucha de esa gente se fue exiliada. Aparte que ya habı́a habido desde los ‘60 una
represión desde la izquierda y desde la derecha que habı́a hecho [al movimiento] muy débil,
porque eran mal vistos desde los dos lados. [ . . . ] Era muy sesentista la movida de los ‘80 acá,
muchas revistas de libre expresión (yo participé de algunas), grupos de teatro callejero que
podrı́an haber estado en el año 69. Como no habı́a historia, hubo de todo; mucha cosa al aire
libre: los recitales al aire libre, las revistas se vendı́an al aire libre, no existı́a tanto la noche
para un arte joven. Habı́a algunos pubs y habı́a mucha demencia en los grupos principales de
rock, los grupos punk, que a mı́ me gustaban mucho. [ . . . ] Fue una cosa que explotó y que
después se deshizo.48
Abril Trigo calls the protagonists of this ‘movida cultural’ (the 80s scene) the ‘dionysiac
generation’,49 and Gabriel Peveroni, a member of this group and author of La cura (1997),50
observes that if one surveys the underground publications from the 80s one can find all the
novelists who started publishing in Uruguay in the 90s.51 It is in this new literature of the 90s
that youth discontent and rock found a literary expression. As mentioned in the beginning of
this essay, the publication in Uruguay of Derretimiento by Mella in 1998 made its young
author (Mella was twenty-two at the time of the publication) almost instantaneously
famous.52 The book sold out, and its repercussion enabled the definition of a common space
for the consideration of a literary production that was developing in the River Plate area
during the decade, but had not attracted much critical examination. Ana Inés Larre Borges, a
well-established literary critic based in Uruguay and herself a protagonist in the Uruguayan
cultural milieu, in an article published in Brecha,53 proposed to call this segment of
Uruguayan literature ‘Aesthetic of Cruelty’, and included Mella’s novel as part of this
production. It is quite possible that Mella’s novel helped to define the category as no
other text from the period, because it displays a unique angelical violence. Larre Borges
coincides with Carina Blixen54 in identifying a group of texts that share the characteristics
of the Aesthetic of Cruelty, all of them published after 1990, and interviews Mella and
Ricardo Henry to talk about this production. Larre Borges finds that these texts express ‘a
drive that Uruguayan culture tries to hide or negate’, and points out to the fact that these
expressions do not necessarily resonate with local literary and cultural traditions.55 She
connects these texts with punk rock, the literature of Bret Easton Ellis,56 and some film
production, such as Quentin Tarantino’s, and observes that this is not a strictly Uruguayan
phenomenon, since a production of similar characteristics can be found in other countries in
Latin America.
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 109

One year after the publication of Derretimiento, a novel by Uruguayan author Gustavo
Escanlar, Estokolmo was published in Spain in the Reservoir Books collection
(Mondadori).57 This collection was designed to publish authors whose work
entails ‘expressive or aesthetic trends of transgression’ from any ‘zone of the planet’.58
Alvaro Risso points out to the same type of influences indicated in connection with the
authors discussed by Larre Borges: the language of multimedia, Tarantino’s filmography,
and Bret Easton Ellis, but he also adds the connection with Alberto Fuguet, who had invited
Escanlar to participate in the famous collection co-edited with Sergio Gómez, McOndo,
published by Alfaguara in 1996. Risso points out the lack of ‘mirrors, references, fathers’ in
Uruguayan literature for Escanlar’s writing, and states that his books ‘do not resemble
anything published in Uruguayan literature’, except for his association with Daniel Mella
and Rafael Courtoisie,59 his contemporaries.
Another novel that belongs to this corpus is The Cure (1997), a text in which Peveroni
introduces pogo rituals in the narration. He explains its presence as part of the book’s
landscape, much like the presence of cocaine or a certain dress code. He defines pogo as a
communicative form that his generation adopted as a tribal code that is linked by
communion, and says, ‘It has to do with the novel that I’m always writing and that starts
out from my own experience.’60 In turn, Mella, the author of Pogo, says:
[Titulé Pogo a mi primera novela] porque [ası́] era mi vida de aquel momento: una cuestión de
choque con todo el mundo, de ideas que estaban colisionando en mi cabeza todo el tiempo, y
unas haciéndoles daño a otras, y otras a otras, pero ninguna animándose a prevalecer. En el
pogo nadie prevalece, no se trata del último que queda parado, no es quién lastima a quién, es
choque, choque; es una violencia neutra. No hay competitividad en esa violencia. La sacás y
queda ahı́ girando, contigo y junto a los demás. No hay vencedores en el pogo. En última
instancia ya son vencedores los que entran al pogo.61
As part of the everyday experience of these generations, pogo becomes a component of the
new intricate set of transnational references, heavily marked by local experience, which in
turn can be ‘literaturised’. They become metaphors, props in the new literary scenarios, and
symbols. This new referential system is then external to the literary code of the Hispanic
tradition—it is derived from the Anglo- and Spanish-speaking rock fabric. This referential
system exceeds the ‘dressing’ as one critic has described it;62 it is the constitutive cultural
matter that organises and conceptualises the story. A new complicity with the world of the
reader is inaugurated: all of these elements comprise the foundation for a visual and poetic
transnational erudition. This extra-literary erudition goes hand-in-hand with a general
indifference to canonic literature, thus deepening the crisis of written culture.63 This
épatant indifference seeks out controversy; it strives to consolidate a different world
disassociated from the cultural world of the past, its legacy, and its aesthetic propositions.64
Why did Montevideo, at that time the second safest city in the world after Tokio (at
least by the statistics), prompt a production in which cruelty dominates as a narrative
language and a form? In Alonso Salazar’s words:
Ya no estamos esencialmente frente a una violencia de clase, ni siquiera de retaliación social,
es una violencia que Lipovetsky65 llama dura, sin substancia, en la que los jóvenes destruyen
su propio entorno, su propia generación y los referentes de la identidad perdida.66
In the context of the de-nationalisation of the social landscapes, combined with the search
for a new literary place (virtual, transnational, non-realistic), the massive violence
that dictatorial societies experimented is expressed in new and unexpected aesthetic
formations, which borrow more from global landscapes and imaginaries than from the
twentieth century River Plate aesthetic traditions. Living behind the committed art models,
which had been significant since the 60s, this literature can be associated with what
110 C. Ferman

Martin-Barbero calls ‘political counterculture’: ‘La polı́tica se sale de sus discursos y

escenarios formales para reencontrarse en los de la cultura, desde el graffiti callejero a las
estridencias del rock, particularmente en español’.67 Ricardo Henry, one of the writers
interviewed by Larre Borges for her article on the aesthetic of cruelty, states that violence
is a narrative device (‘the raft, the ship—inside something else travels’), and that it can
constitute a language. After a century described by Henry as ‘the most sadistic in history’,
violence makes a natural means, the connection with the predatory, animal condition.68
These narrators were not interested in reading or talking about testimonial, historic, close-
to-home testimonial violence—it is in the narrative internal logic that violence gets
justified, with no external epic, historical or ideological explanation.69
In the intersecting field of youth poetics, music, electronic communication and urban
contemporary cultures the objects are, by definition, transnational. However, when these
migrant cultural forms attain relevance in particular communities, their origin, implied
voyage, and hybrid nature—that is their migrant condition—become of little or no
significance. The articulation that provides meaning and value is always local; it is
constituted by the series of mediations (practical and symbolic) that take place in the
reception and reproduction of a cultural artefact, as well as in those active instances in
which the practice is re-established. Its efficacy lies in the semantic density that a form
may attain in a propitious context, that is, in a historically-charged environment.70
Throughout its history, rock has continuously vacillated between a contesting, authentic
and original cultural practice, to an illusory, commodified, and mechanically emaciated
form of entertainment.71 The rock conglomerate is also made out of industrial practices, and
the expression is traversed by copious manifestations of its composition. The culture
industry, as stated by Adorno and Horkheimer’s criticism, ‘cheats its consumers of what it
perpetually promises’.72 The pogo dance can be interpreted as the ritual in which a desire for
inclusiveness, transcendent communication, and the sublime are expressed (all of which is
inspired by the rock event), but in which the disillusionment of this encounter is
simultaneously exposed. This ritual is produced inside two movements of opposite
directions that reveal its politics of pleasure: the sublime, attained through the glare
aesthetics and the tribal communion, and, on the other hand, the awareness of the finite,
limited nature of its intensity and thus of the political and aesthetic constraints of the
exchange. Inside a practice that promises what it can but superficially and temporarily
endow, the manifold violence affirms but also energetically counteracts its liberating
message. Pogo generates a centrifugal framework that supports the ascendant ritual energy
and displaces it, deluding the action by its own negation. The rock event may embody a
celebratory ritual of modernity, its culture industries, its pleasure machines, and its
promises of unlimited gifts. But as a historical practice, anchored in location and
succession, it also expresses a vast sense of dissatisfaction, incompleteness, and a vacuum
of signification that make it distinctly postmodern. Punk pogo’s violent potential
simultaneously endows this practice with the very real potential of becoming one of the
expressions of globalism and its politics of deprivation, post-work societies, and political
and economic chaos.
In that sense, Adorno and Horkheimer’s theories of the aesthetic in contrast to the
massive industrial would find a paradoxical endorsement. If, as these critics argue, in
authentic art ‘the real value lies in their very refusal of the possibility of pleasure’, in
expressions such as pogo this impossibility is enacted and displayed in the very context
that is today one of the sources for infinite pleasure. In pogo’s cruelty, one can read the
drives of an ever-expanding desire, for which the body is invested to its limits, conflicting
with the restrictions of what the culture industry promises and its ‘glare aesthetics’. Pogo
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 111

seems to display in descriptive manners what Laura Mulvey has identified as the
alternative: ‘[D]aring to break with normal pleasurable expectations in order to conceive a
new language of desire’.73 These multiple facets are not exclusively signified by the pogo
ritual itself, but they may be frequently encountered in the specific realm of the rock
cultural conglomerate: music, lyrics, dress, vocabulary, imagery, and visual codes which
constituted an important space for resistance in dictatorial and post-dictatorial Southern-
Cone regimes.
The processes of the transnationalisation of culture are not uni-directional: they do not
move from a presumed outside to a presumed inside.74 Any cultural form may become
nomadic—it may be viable for re-localisation. Nomadic forms travel rapidly and can find
many fertile locales simultaneously, and thus achieve a multiplicative effect.75 This
nomadic sensibility, rooted in electronic languages and techno-global processes, is evident
not only in the vast realm of popular culture but also in many highbrow expressions: in the
new referential systems that provide cultural density to many contemporary cultural
productions in Latin America, in the very creation of some the new Latin American fiction,
in the geographies that give a space to these narratives, in their characters, and in the
stories they tell.

Epilogue: Buenos Aires, May 2010

Argentina celebrates its Bicentennial of independence from colonial Spain. The closing act
of the state-programmed festivities, attended by the Argentine president and a group of
Latin American heads of state, is a parade recreating key moments in Argentine history.
Fuerza Bruta, an Argentine theatre troupe, is the creative force behind the complex and
sophisticated spectacle in whose staging 2,000 people participated. Two million people
watched the parade on Nueve de Julio avenue; many millions more did it at home on their
TVs. Fuerza Bruta has a show running in Buenos Aires under the same name, presented at
the theatre space Villa Villa in the City Arts Complex (Centro Cultural Recoleta). The
making of this space was a joint enterprise between the Fuerza Bruta company and the City
of Buenos Aires. It is an unconventional theatre—a large stage, with no divisions between
seating and stage (the entire space is stage), flanked by three wings through which actors and
props move in and out of stage (the fourth wing is the wall with the entrance); the ceiling is
quite high. The space closely responds to the demands of the production bearing the same
name, Fuerza Bruta.
The company originated in the late 80s in another theatre group, La Organización
Negra, which in turn broke up to become De La Guarda in the early 90s, and eventually
evolved to become Fuerza Bruta. Three of the initial members in La Organización Negra
are responsible for the evolution from one organisation to another and for the
conceptualisations which sprung these changes: Diqui James, Gaby Kerpel, and Fabio
D’Aquila. In a recent interview, D’Aquila describes the various stages of their work,
characterising as ‘action theatre’ what they did with La Organización Negra, influenced by
the Catalan troupe La Fura Dels Baus. The creation of La Guarda responded to new artistic
goals: the new group wanted to leave behind the hermetic and confrontational spirit that La
Organización Negra had. The group was interested in incorporating the feelings prompted
in the audience when attending a rock recital; they wanted to work with what happens in a
carnival, with ‘the borderline situations between happiness and violence’; ‘the limit in
which anything can detonate.’76 In the creation of Fuerza Bruta, the new group proposed a
set of hard principles: no written or oral language; understanding is based on the visual and
the sensorial; audience on stage; and utilisation of primordial elements and of the space in
112 C. Ferman

all its dimensions. ‘The audience interacts; at one time, we hand the show over to them; they
make the show, they live it.’77
The show Fuerza Bruta has three clones, which are based in New York, Chicago, and
Mexico City, respectively. The clones travel to other cities to present the show as well. The
show is described in their New York blog as ‘a non-stop collision of dynamic music,
visceral emotion, and kinetic aerial imagery’, and the story is outlined as follows: ‘A man
running full throttle through a series of moving walls, women frolicking in a watery world
suspended just inches above the audience.’78 In Buenos Aires, the show has been selling
out week after week.
I have referred to Fuerza Bruta because it is connected (obviously, I would hope), with
this performance’s affinity with the rock event in its aesthetic ideology and its theatrical
form:
Queremos quebrar el sometimiento intelectual. Usar todos los medios de que se dispone para
operar eficazmente sobre la sensibilidad del espectador [ . . . ] un espacio donde la presión de
los sentidos afecte la mente [ . . . ] Que la emoción llegue antes, siempre antes [ . . . ] Un espacio
donde el espectador se entregue, sabiendo que forma parte de un hecho artı́stico, que está
dentro de una realidad paralela, etéra, bella, delirante y absolutamente más verdadera que la
cotidiana.79
There is a closer connection to this reflection, though, with which I would like to close this
study. The end of the show is marked, as D’Aquila explained, by a change in the structure
of the action. DJ and actors incite the audience to dance and the actors mingle with
members of the audience in a celebratory mood accompanied by the live music. The
rhythm calls for a pogo-like dance, jumping up and down, embracing, colliding, forming
groups and dissolving spontaneously. At the same time, water starts coming down, first a
little water, and a shortly after enough to soak anyone who stays under the confined area
where the water descends onto the audience. There is no anguish, no pain in this pogo.
There is a mood of celebration—times have changed. The youngest in the audience stay
under the rain and jump. It is winter outside, and their clothes are getting wet, but that
matters little. There is freedom to celebrate, but freedom continues to be dangerous, a
daring act of affirmation always carrying consequences. Pogo dance has travelled into the
realm of the theatrical spectacle by means of new experimental forms—the audience
reacts with ease, recognising the presence of a familiar figure with which to communicate.

Acknowledgements
The writing of this essay was supported in part by the Virginia Foundation for the Humanities and the
University of Richmond, to which I am very grateful. I also thank the Center for Interdisciplinary
Studies (CEIL) at the Universidad de la República, Montevideo, Uruguay, and the Rockefeller
Foundation, institutions that made possible the initial research for this work. Special thanks to
Jeffrey Browitt for his editorial contributions and his unremitting support.

Notes
1. Daniel Gorjuh, [Daniel Mella] Pogo, Montevideo, Aymara, 1997. The author, whose complete
name is Daniel González Mella, published this book using his grandmother’s last name, Gorjuh.
2. Daniel Mella, Derretimiento, Montevideo, Ediciones Trilce, 1998, and Madrid, Ediciones
Lengua de Trapo, 1999.
3. Penelope Spheeris, The Decline of Western Civilization, (videorecording), Los Angeles,
1979– 1980.
4. Dick Hebdige, Subcultures: The Meaning of Style, London, New York, Routledge, 2002,
pp. 108– 9.
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 113

5. ‘On the other hand, rock music remains an astonishingly male preserve, and I think the
mythology of subcultural theory fed into that, in some ways more explicitly than others. There
hasn’t been an effective counter-myth, and as Mavis Bayton shows in her work on becoming a
female rock musician, the rock world depends on a whole series of discursive practices which
are, in gender terms, constantly exclusionary’: Simon Frith, ‘The Cultural Study of Popular
Music’, in Cultural Studies, Lawrence Grossberg et al., New York, Routledge, 1992, p. 182.
These exclusionary practices, as I am trying to show, transcend the discursive. However, this
question of gender, and my own interpretation of this problem in the context of the Southern
Cone, is much more complex than this comment may suggest and exceeds the description of
‘constantly exclusionary’.
6. It is believed that Sid Vicious (Sex Pistols) started this dance in 1976, in a recital at the 100 Club,
in London. The following year, a group in Buenos Aires, Argentina, Los Violadores, did it for
the first time in a bar, in which tables and chairs had to be moved, in order to give room to the
movements. Giberti quoting Fernando Garcı́a, ‘Amor y odio a los codazos’, Cları́n, 7 de octubre,
1994. Eva Giberti et al., Hijos del rock, Buenos Aires, Losada, 1996, p. 65.
7. Interview with the author, Montevideo, October 1999.
8. Ana Solari, interview with the author, September 2001.
9. José Fernando Serrano, ‘“Somos el extremo de las cosas” o pistas para comprender culturas
juveniles de hoy’, in ‘Viviendo a toda’. Jóvenes, territorios culturales y nuevas sensibilidades,
Humberto J. Cubides C., Marı́a Cristina Laverde Toscano, and Carlos Eduardo Valderrama H.,
(eds), Bogotá, Fundación Universidad Central, Siglo del Hombre Editores, 1998, p. 250.
10. The following are definitions collected from random people from Chile, more or less outsiders
from this subculture: ‘pogo se llama a ese baile en el que empezamos a empujarnos con los otros
y bailamos, empujando y golpeando a los demás, que te responden haciendo lo mismo. O sea
que es súper entretenido en un concierto de rock sólo si pesas 300 kilos y mides 3 metros’; ‘En
Chile, lo he visto como baile colectivo de los punk que consiste en que todos se dan de
empujones. En ocasiones la violencia del bailecito deriva en más empujones acompañados de
patadas y combos. Un baile similar es el “slam” que también lleva empujones y fuertes
cabeceos. Es muy popular entre los aficionados al heavy metal o el trash’; ‘No hay cosa más rica
que ir a un concierto punk o “harcore” o alternativo y meterse en el mosh pit a hacer algo de slam
dancing con sus buenos docs y de vez en cuando flotar’; ‘El pogo es simplemente el baile
minimalista punk, también en versión sudaca (saltar parriba y pabajo), que a veces deriva en
slamming, y a veces no’.
11. Personal interview, November 1999. Crestas: punk hairsyle.
12. Rockin’ Las Américas. The Global Politics Of Rock In Latin/o America, Debora Pacini
Hernández et al., (eds), Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh UP, 2004.
13. Eva Giberti et al., Hijos del rock, p. 190 refers to it as an ‘ampliacio’n coyuntural del campo de
la conciencia’.
14. To expand on the question of rock as resistance, see Lawrence Grossberg, ‘I’d Rather Feel Bad
than No Feel Anything at All: Rock and Roll, Pleasure and Power’, in Grossberg, Dancing in
Spite of Myself: Essays on Popular Culture, Durham, Duke UP, 1997, pp. 64 – 98. For example:
‘[This framework] approaches the question of the politics of leisure by investigating how the
forms responsible for the production of pleasure can be and are used to articulate resistance.
Rock and roll is seen, neither as an expression of an inner life nor a representation of an outside
world but rather, as an active moment which can be appropriated by youth as forms of resistance
to, transgression of, or at least copying with, the contradictory demands of the hegemonic
culture” (p. 97).
15. The term ‘cultural conglomerate’ seeks to interpret the variety and complexity of expressions
not exclusively musical originated by rock over the last fifty years which involve the production
of meaning inside the culture. Grossberg refers to this protean productivity by defining rock as
‘a set of [ . . . ] practices of strategic empowerment rather than signification’, or as ‘apparatus’:
‘The rock and roll apparatus includes not only musical texts and practices but also economic
determinations, technological possibilities, images (of performers and fans), social relations,
aesthetic conventions, styles of language, movement, appearance and dance, media practices,
ideological commitments, and media representations of the apparatus itself’: Grossberg, ‘I’d
Rather Feel Bad’, pp. 31 and p. 41). I opt for the composite term ‘cultural conglomerate’ because
the word ‘apparatus’ obscures rock’s ability to create in its practices a space for freedom,
recreation, self-determination and continuous regeneration. See the discussion in connection
114 C. Ferman

with rock definition: ‘And given the range of styles and sounds that exist under the rock
umbrella, it is reasonable to question whether “rock” should be used solely to refer to a form of
music, or whether it more accurately refer to a more general complex of cultural practices,
including fashion, hairstyle, dance, and that indefinable quality know as ‘attitude’: ‘Mapping
Rock Music’, p. 5.
16. Michel Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture. Interviews and Other Writings 1977– 1984, L. D.
Kritzman, (ed.), New York, Routledge, 1990, p. 316.
17. For an excellent account of these debates see Débora Pacini Hernández, et al., ‘Mapping Rock
Music Culture across The Américas’, in Rockin’ Las Américas.
18. Quoted in Carlos Jáuregui, ‘Writing Communities on the Internet: Textual Authority and
Territorialization’, in Latin American Literature and Mass Media, Edmundo Paz Soldán y Debra
Castillo (eds), New York, Garland, 2001, p. 292.
19. Jáuregui, ‘Writing Communities’, pp. 294–98.
20. See Frith’s analysis of the relationship between myth and circumstances, between political
inscription of a rock movement and historical context. In discussing this question, he states:
‘Cultural politics are only significant in the circumstances in which they’re being made. [ . . . ] I
was trying to argue that one can’t make a clear separation between the “reality” of how music is
actually made and the “mythical” interpretation on what it means. That mythical interpretation
has its own real effects, and the constant task is to decide whether it is empowering at a particular
moment and under what circumstances it ceases to be helpful’: ‘The Cultural Study’, p. 183.
21. Giberti, Hijos del rock, p. 175.
22. Serrano, ‘Somos el extremo de las cosas’, p. 243.
23. Giberti, Hijos del rock, p. 73.
24. Frith, ‘The Cultural Study’, p. 177.
25. In Pablo Vila’s analysis of rock nacional (Argentine rock) and dictatorship in Argentina, he
concludes: ‘The rock nacional movement has played an extremely important part in the
socialization and re-socialization of broad sectors of Argentine youth during the military period,
restoring truthful communication regarding the real country, salvaging the meaning of life in a
context of lies and terror’. Pablo Vila, ‘Rock nacional and dictatorship in Argentina’, Popular
Music 6:2, May 1987, p. 129.
26. Serrano, ‘Somos el extremo de las cosas’, p. 251.
27. Philip Auslander, ‘Liveness: Performance and the anxiety of simulation’, in Performance and
Cultural Politics, Elin Diamond, (ed.), London and New York, Routledge, 1996, p. 198.
28. Stephen Regan, The Politics of Pleasure: Aesthetics and Cultural Studies, Buckingham,
Philadelphia, Open UP, 1992, p. 4.
29. Jeremy Adler, ‘The Role of the Theater in Czechoslovakia’s “Velvet Revolution”’, Violence in
Drama, New York, Cambridge UP, 1991, pp. 292– 95.
30. Adler, ‘The Role’, p. 295.
31. Vaclav Havel, quoted in Adler, ‘The Role’, p. 293 (my emphasis).
32. Juri Veltrusky, ‘Contribution to the Semiotics of Acting,’ in Sound, Sign and Meaning.
Quinquagenary of the Prague Linguistic Circle, Ladislav Matejka, (ed.), Ann Arbor, Michigan
Slavic Contributions 6, 1976, pp. 553– 607.
33. See her discussion on the differences between ‘actor’ and ‘role’. Anne Ubersfeld, Semiótica
Teatral, Traducción y adaptación Francisco Torres Monreal, Madrid, Cátedra/Universidad de
Murcia, 1989, pp. 77 – 84.
34. Auslander, ‘Performance and the anxiety of simulation’, p. 201.
35. Antonin Artaud. ‘The Theater of Cruelty (First Manifesto)’, in Antonin Artaud. Selected
Writings, Susan Sontag, (ed.), Berkeley, California UP, 1988, p. 242.
36. Ervin Goffman, Frame Analysis. An Essay on the Organizational of Experience, Cambridge,
Harvard UP, 1974, p. 124.
37. ‘During a performance it is only fellow performers who respond to each other in this direct way
as inhabitants of the same realm; the audience respond indirectly, glancingly, following
alongside, as it were cheering on but not intercepting’: Goffman, Frame Analysis, p. 127.
38. See for example, the film made on the 90s version of Woodstock, Woodstock 94,
videorecording, New York, Polygram, Diversified Ventures, 1994.
39. For an overview of this approach see Pere-Oriol Costa, et al., Tribus urbanas. El ansia de
identidad juvenil: entre el culto a la imagen y a la autoafirmación a través de la violencia,
Barcelona, Buenos Aires & México, Paidos, 1997, pp. 27 –58.
 Journal of Iberian and Latin American Research 115

40. Artaud, Selected Writings, p. 243.

41. Artaud, Selected Writings, p. 251.
42. Martin Esslin, Reflections: Essays on Modern Theater, New York, Doubleday, 1971,
pp. 159– 63.
43. Artaud, Selected Writings, p. 258.
44. Rene Girard, Violence and the Sacred, Patrick Gregory (trans.), Baltimore, Johns Hopkins UP,
1977.
45. Martı́n-Barbero calls this instance ‘contracultura polı́tica’ (political counterculture): ‘La polı́tica
se sale de sus discursos y escenarios formales para reencontrarse en los de la cultura, desde el
graffiti callejero a las estridencias del rock, particularmente en español’: Jesús Martı́n-Barbero,
’Jóvenes: des-orden cultural y palimpsestos de identidad’, in ‘Viviendo a toda’, p. 35.
46. See the interesting connections that Adolfo Garcé makes in relation to Ángel Rama’s concept of
the ‘conciencia crı́tica’ movement. Garcé’s conclusion is that ‘[l]a conciencia crı́tica ya no
abarcarı́a [ . . . ] sólo treinta años: sus diversas manifestaciones cubrirı́an alrededor de medio
siglo de cultura uruguaya (en un sentido amplio)’: Adolfo Garcé, ‘La conciencia crı́tica desde
Marcha a Búsqueda’, in Gustavo de Armas and Adolfo Garcé, Uruguay y su conciencia crı́tica:
intelectuales y polı́tica en el siglo XX, Montevideo: Ediciones Trilce, 1997, pp. 35 – 63, esp. p. 60.
47. For an interesting collection of texts from the period, see Héctor Bardanca, Polaroid. Crı́tica de
la cabeza uruguaya, Montevideo, YOEA, 1994, especially the following chapters: ‘El paı́s y los
jóvenes’, ‘De cómo se entabló la resistencia cultural’, ‘Los punks no muerden’, ‘Instrucciones
para matar a papá’, ‘Sobre rock’, ‘Montevideo Rock: A favor’, ‘La reacción dionisı́aca frente al
pasado maquillado que quiere volver’, ‘Entre el atraso y la sociedad amortiguada’, ‘Good bye,
rock (¿sólo por tres añitos?)’, ‘Epı́logo minimalista a la polı́tica de fusión cultural con surtidos
de antropofagia sobre el imperio de la razón’.
48. Interview with Gabriel Peveroni, Montevideo, September 1999.
49. Abril Trigo, ‘Poesı́a uruguaya actual (los más jóvenes)’, Hispamérica 22:64/65, 1993,
pp. 121– 47.
50. Gabriel Peveroni, La cura, Montevideo, Santillana, 1997. Peveroni has also published poetry,
and theatre: Sarajevo esquina Montevideo (2003), El hueco (2004), Groenlandia (2005), y Luna
Roja (2006). His fiction also includes El exilio según Nicolás (Montevideo, COMM, 2005).
51. Personal Interview.
52. Mella also published Noviembre (2000), and afterwards decided not to continue writing.
53. ‘Tiempos violentos. Estética de la crueldad en la literatura uruguaya’, 19 de junio, 1998,
pp. 12 – 15.
54. See ‘Introduction’, La cara oculta de la luna. Narradores jóvenes del Uruguay. Diccionario y
antologı́a 1957– 1995, Alvaro Risso, (ed.), Montevideo, Linardi y Risso, 1996.
55. The corpus discussed by Larre Borges includes: Felipe Polleri, Carnaval (1990); some stories in
Eduardo Alvariza, Rojo del cielo y otros cuentos (1994); Alvaro Buela, Alkaseltzer (1994); some
stories in Rafael Courtoisie, Cadáveres exquisitos (1995); and Ana Solari, Zac (1993) and Tarde
de compras (1997).
56. Cecilia Otero compares Mella’s Pogo with Bret Easton Ellis’s Less Than Zero: Review, El Paı́s
Cultural 459, p. 14.
57. Gustavo Escanlar has published Oda al niño prostituto (1993), No es falta de cariño (1997),
Crónica roja (2001), Dos o tres cosas que sé de gala, prologued by Gabriel Peveroni (2005),
Disco duro (2008), and La Alemana (2009). He is a radio and TV journalist who has attracted
much controversy in Uruguay.
58. In the original version of Alvaro Risso’s review of Estokolmo. The review published by El
observador was censured due to ‘language reasons’.
59. He has continued publishing poetry and fiction. His novels are: Vida de perro (1997), Tajos
(1999), Caras Extrañas (2001), Santo Remedio (2006).
60. Gabriel Peveroni, interview with the author, October 1999.
61. Daniel Mella, interview with the author, October 1999.
62. See Toni Dorca’s analysis of recent Spanish fiction: ‘Joven narrativa de los noventa: la
generación X’. Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 31:2, May 1997.
63. Edmundo Paz-Soldán and Debra Castillo, Latin American Literature and Mass Media, Hispanic
Issues, Vol. 22, New York, Garland, 2001. The volume edited by Edmundo Paz-Soldán and
Debra Castillo addresses the crisis of written culture in Latin America. Pertinent to the reflection
I am proposing here are the contributions by Ana Marı́a Amar Sánchez, Alfonsina Lorenzi,
116 C. Ferman

Debra A. Castillo, Shirin Shenassa and Carlos Jáuregui. Also, see Dorca, ‘Joven narrativa’,
p. 316.
64. Dorca, ‘Joven narrativa’, p. 320.
65. Gilles Lipovetsky, La era del vacı́o, Anagrama, 1986.
66. Alonso Salazar, ‘Violencias juveniles: ¿contraculturas o hegemonı́a de la cultura emergente?’,
in Cubides et al., (eds), Viviendo a toda’, p. 111.
67. Martı́n-Barbero, ‘Jóvenes’, p. 35.
68. Ricardo Henry, interview with the author. October 1999.
69. On the other bank of the River, Rodolfo Enrique Fogwill (1941) elaborated a fiction in
connection with the parameters described here. His titles include: Mis muertos punk (1980),
Muchacha punk (1992), and Vivir Afuera (1998). Another young Argentine author worth
mentioning is Mariana Enrı́quez, with Bajar es lo peor (1995), and Cómo desaparecer
completamente (2004). In Buenos Aires, a new generation of writers is creating a popular
literature today that is attracting much attention. These authors cannot be understood without the
discussion outlined here. I am referring to Fabián Casas (1965), Gabriela Cabezón Cámara
(1968), Paula Oloixarac (1977), and Mariano Dorr (1977), among others.
70. I cannot address this question here, but I would like to point out important differences in the
various mediations through which pogo became a ritual in the Southern Cone. Pogo can be
found as an expression of a sector of middle class youth in Montevideo in the 80s, current in
clubs like Juntacadáveres or Amarillo. In that very protected environment, pogo could include
women. Pogo can also be found, at the same time, as an expression of the emerging out-classed
or working class suburban youth culture in the big cities in Argentina, Buenos Aires, Córdoba,
Rosario. In this context, few daring women would participate. Lastly, pogo could also be found
as a trans-class male expression in mega concerts, in stadiums. An is the Mano Negra recital in
the Obras Stadium (1993), for which two ramps to the stage were built to give the audience a
safe way to move up to the stage for ‘stage diving’.
71. For a thorough account of the development of various rock trends in Latin America throughout
its history, see Rockin’ in The Américas.
72. Theodor Adorno, and Max Horkheimer, Dialectic of Enlightenment, John Cumming, (trans.),
London, Verso, 1986, p. 139.
73. Laura Mulvey, ‘Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema’, Screen 16.
74. For a fascinating account on how scientific concepts of the body have influenced the
understanding and the theorizing of communication, see Linda Birke, Feminism and the
Biological Body. Edinburgh, Edinburgh UP, 1999, Chapter 8. This understanding is rooted in the
preeminence of the visual gaze and built into the history of optics and visual physiology. This
interpretation ‘spills over into sociocultural accounts of the body’ and ‘helps to perpetuate
notions of the body as fixed, itself passively receiving’ (p. 166).
75. I am using the concept of ‘articulation’ as described by A. Appadurai: ‘Thus the “work of the
imagination” through which local subjectivity is produced and nurtured is a bewildering
palimpsest of highly local and highly translocal considerations. The three factors that most
directly affect the production of locality in the world of the present—the nation-state, diasporic
flows and electronic/virtual communities—are themselves articulated in variable, puzzling,
sometimes contradictory ways. Their conjuncture is highly variable, depending on the cultural,
class, historical and ecological setting within which they come together. How they are
articulated in Port Moresby is different from their articulation in Peshawar, and this in turn from
Berlin or Los Angeles. But these are all places where the battle between the imaginaries of the
nation-state, of unsettled communities and of global electronic media is in full progress’: Arjun
Appadurai, ‘The Production of Locality’, Paper presented at the IV Decennial Conference of the
Association of Social Anthropologists, Oxford, July 26 – 30, 1993, p. 20.
76. Angel Berlanga, ‘Que la fuerza te acompañe’, Radar, Página 12, 20 June 2010, pp. 4 – 7.
77. D’Aquila in cited interview.
78. http://fuerzabrutanyc.com/wordpress/special-offer-4/.
79. http://www.fuerzabruta.net/website/fuerza.html.