In (Dis)Use of Reason: Abjection Poetics and Macrocephalic Modernity in El Techo de la Ballena

Abstract

Abstract:This article studies the poetry by the Venezuelan neo-avant-garde collective, El Techo de la Ballena (1961-1969). Inspired by the Cuban Revolution and in opposition to local social-political conditions, the balleneros developed a radical aesthetic project meant to transfigure the avant-garde into an actual weapon for revolutionary struggle. While most scholarship focuses on the group's visual arts, the predominant theory linking El Techo's poetics and politics remains Ángel Rama's "el terrorismo en las artes" (1966), which highlights provocation, aggressivity, and reader ambush. In this essay, I offer a new approach to ballenero poetry. In considering two key works, Juan Calzadilla's Dictado por la jauría (1962) and Caupolicán Ovalles's En uso de razón (1963), I examine what I call "abjection poetics"—the deliberate cultivation of slippage between imposed social limits through abject imagery and expression and the resulting political ramifications. I argue that abjection serves as the primary means through which the poets endeavor to destabilize the matrices of power that characterized early 1960s Venezuela, a moment of "macrocephalic" modernity—the physical and rhetorical execution of rapid, uneven modernization and the strategic ordering of the body politic. Calzadilla's and Ovalles's poetry drive the abject into the innerworkings of the developmentalist agenda in order to disrupt its visual, performative, and discursive execution and, in turn, demystify its claims to reason.