Dimly Enlightening: Constructing Modern Bourgeois Visualization in fin-de-siècle Uruguayan and Argentinian Caras y Caretas

The study I present in these pages seeks to articulate what I will call the visuality of the periodic efficient; that is, a rapid process of making sense of visual information triggered during the fin de siècle not only by specifically constructed images but also by certain type of events selected and/or tailored by both members of the public and illustrated modern media. In order to do this I will describe and explain some specific modes of seeing present in Latin American illustrated magazines, and the backdrop constituted by the consolidation of democratic politics, the formation of modern public opinion, and the emergence of the middle classes, as documented by Caras y Caretas (Uruguay 1890-1897; Argentina 1898-1941) in the Río de la Plata region between 1890 and 1910. The first objective of my essay is to show in the context of Caras y Caretas the way in which the mastery of the visual, of the illustratable, brings together simultaneously and uncomfortably more than one mode of seeing, more than one “visual subculture,” as Martin Jay calls the different scopic regimes that coexist in modernity (1988, 4). I focus in particular on four: firstly, the way of seeing Henry Miller calls “political likeness;” secondly, what I define as “phantasmagorical Enlightening unveiling;” thirdly, what I refer to as “photomechanical representation,” understood as a type of visualization triggered by diverse aspects of the photographic process; and, finally, what I have called above the “periodic efficient,” which I would like to argue constitutes a distinguishable scopic regime triggered by the modern illustrated magazine understood as visual technology. The second objective of my essay is to discuss to what extent the “Popular Illustrated Magazine,” and the levels of graphic complexity of its images in competition and collaboration with verbal language, is the technology of this new way of seeing, or new visual subculture, at the end of the nineteenth century. The third objective of my essay is to discuss the construction through visuality, in Caras y Caretas, of a modern political field, public opinion and a middle-class audience as part of a plan of progressive nationalism. The relevance of Caras y Caretas for the approach I propose lies in the fact that this publication charts the evolution of the popular illustrated magazine into a visual device that, with its regular releases and demands for
individuals’ time and space, came to be an integral component of the “citizenship training” of contemporary citizens, thus becoming an intrinsic part of the contemporary urban experience in Latin America.