Reply to Vidal (from Chile)

Abstract

privileging concrete "microexperiences"' over theoretical abstractions. This seems to me a salutary way of reorienting Latin American academic criticism to deal with questions of immediate context, knowledge-in-use, local refunctionings, and differentiated modes of reception elicited by the dynamics of individual cultural settings. I believe, however, that his account of the Revista de Critica Cultural, the journal for which I am responsible in Chile, betrays this concern: the microexperience the Revista is said to represent by him is captured by a hermeneutic macrodeterminism that subordinates texts that have appeared in it to the rigid armature of programs, instead of situating them in an open-ended play of critical discursivity. Vidal's attempt to compose the conceptual logic of these texts by appropriating what he considers an eminently "postmodernist" device-the collage of transcribed passages he offers-contradicts what are usually understood as the principles of collage aesthetics (heterogeneity of tex-