Washington Cucurto, or the Plebeian Neoliberalism of the Baroque Entrepreneur

Abstract

Two years after the crisis of 2001, in Buenos Aires, the poet Santiago Vega, more widely known as Washington Cucurto, founded the publishing house Eloísa Cartonera. The project launched a “business model” that emphasized the needs that the books satisfy, disrupting the capitalist equation of generating value to continue generating value. On an aesthetic level, he did a similar operation. He relegated the transcendental nature of the metaphor to focus on the objects his verses portray, objects that stand out for their singularity and for the need they fulfill or could eventually fulfill. Cucurto’s actions coincide with what Bolivar Echeverría defines as the Baroque ethos, a way of doing and being that subverts the capitalist premises, exploits its contradictions, and reveals another possible world. I propose that Cucurto, unable to escape from neoliberalism, which has penetrated all aspects of life, disrupts the principles that make it work. I approach his project through the figure of the Baroque entrepreneur—someone who takes charge of the neoliberal demands of becoming an entrepreneur inserting a plebeian gesture in his response; a gesture whose efficiency seems not to exceed the crisis, that is, the specific moment in which it is performed.