Study Without Ends

Calls for aesthetic education to unite cultural practices of radical imagination with everyday practices of care

While Latin America was neoliberalism's laboratory, Argentina and Chile have been crucibles for its cultural logics. In this book, D. Bret Leraul examines the rise of neoliberal culture in the Southern Cone through the educational infrastructures that disseminate and reproduce it. Leraul draws on literature and criticism, the history of higher education, and examples of recent social movements to propose a theory of cultural production for social transformation.

Study Without Ends charts the cultural consequences of introducing a neoliberal rationality into the region's higher education landscape. The university's increasing centrality within the literary institution and the rise of theoretical prose fiction suggest that poetics today is less about crafting literary works than instructing readers. At the same time, despite efforts to reduce education to human capital investment, it remains a process of personal and social transformation, as recent activism by Chilean students and Argentinean unemployed workers shows. In response to the compounding crises of social reproduction represented by the informal work and precarious livelihoods of people rendered surplus populations, and inspired by the decommodified labor of students, artists, women, and the unemployed, Leraul calls for a materialist aesthetic education that unites artistic culture's practices of radical imagination and everyday culture's practices of care.