The schizo-city on Museo de la Novela de la Eterna

The body as a way of city-making in the Utopian Socialism of Macedonio Fernández

Abstract

Set in the context of the technological revolution at the end of the 19th century in Buenos Aires, Museo de la Novela de la Eterna (1967) by Macedonio Fernández traces back to utopian socialism (Owen, Fourier, 1800) to center the social as a way of producing city. Taking his conservative modernism as a premise (Armstrong, 1998), this article argues that Fernández’s novel dismantles the divergence between ideology and technique that since 1848 have repurposed the practices of urban planning and architecture as a mere technological problem (Frago Clols y Martínez-Rigol, 2016)., Fernández equates the body (the social) and urbanism (city) as a literary device to propose a new relationship between evolution and technology towards self-government and the politicization of bodies with functional diversity as a form of anarchy (Garland-Thomson, 1997). The body in Museo de la Novela de la Eterna produces a non-normative city that could be normativized as a “schizophrenic city” and that, in turn, becomes an articulating element of society.