Jameson, Buena Vista Social Club and Other Exercises in the Restoration of the Real

Resumen

One of the purposes of this paper is to develop an analogy between the production of otherness in certain theoretical texts and the mass media. If the other becomes an internal necessity for the market and as such its exteriority is conceived and produced within it, perhaps something similar happens to the other as object of study. Sometimes the discontinuity, the difference between the authorized gaze and its object seems conceivable in terms of an internal need. Our general hypothesis is that the production of a very particular kind of other is the result of a theoretical (and affective) necessity of certain academic discourses. And, to go one step further, that these “theoretical” needs are analogous to a certain marketing strategy of the global market. What those two spaces have in common is the use of the other as a locus of nostalgia, as the place where the monument can come back to life. Both the intellectual and the consumer turn a loss in the space of the self into a recovery and a hope in the space of the other. Paradoxically then, the hope of the self, its future, depends on the other but only as long as that otherness is scripted by the self.