Abstract

This article surfaces the constitutive contradictions of Environmentality in theoretical and historical terms. The aim is to provide insight into the ways that dissonance courses through its enabling conditions, institutions, and apparatuses. To do so, the article first develops a critique of Environmentality via conceptions of combined and uneven development. That framework foregrounds the capitalist dynamics that internally rupture such a mode of governance. This theoretical position provides a basis for historicizing the emergence of Environmentality during the early 1970s in Argentina. During that period, artistic and critical practices variously mobilized and contested the cybernetic dimensions of control that would become integral to the theorization of Environmentality. This is not to suggest, by any means, that Argentina alone registered the effects of combined and uneven development. Rather, analysis attuned to its conditions starkly illuminates how the capitalist world-system shaped the burgeoning processes of Environmentalization. These concerns were particularly pressing for certain artists gathered around the Centro de Arte y Comunicación (Center for Art and Communication) or CAyC. Founded in 1968, CAyC served as an important vehicle for artistic debates over the much-heralded systems turn from the perspective of the Southern Cone. Close examination of the materialities of the work of art both intervenes in media theoretical debates and establishes the wider import of artistic positions that were formulated in Buenos Aires.