Speculative Fictions is a radical, sometimes bleak, reading of Chilean culture during the neoliberal era. In what is a very accessible account of neoliberal economics from within cultural studies, Alessandro Fornazzari reminds us that Chile is a key point of origin for neoliberal capitalism precisely because the 1973 coup d’état in which Salvador Allende was overthrown marks the fusion of ‘authoritarian violence and market freedom’ (p. 6). Fornazzari further argues that 1973 is also the moment when culture and the market become indistinguishable. This premise about the ubiquitous presence of economics within all forms of the social, including culture, means the book speaks to all those studying the relationship between culture and the market across Latin America and beyond, not just in Chile.

The book is built around engaging readings of a select number of works, comprised mainly of literary texts but also including documentary films directed by Patricio Guzmán and Catalina Parra's dolls that draw on the figure of the imbunche, the mythological figure whose orifices have been sewn up with magic. The discussion of the latter in chapter 4, for example, is used to explore how a cultural product originally created to probe dictatorial repression can be re-fashioned to explore the economisation of life post-dictatorship. The choice of Parra's imbunches to remind us of ‘manual labor as the irreducible material stitching that holds together the cultures of abstraction’ (p. 102), a complex artistic intervention that is passed over perhaps a touch too quickly, ties back into chapter 1, which looks at the work of novelist José Donoso, who famously used the figure of the imbunche in his work El obseno pájaro de la noche (1970).

But it is Donoso's 1978 novel Casa de campo that is Fornazzari's key text, read as a reflection on the failure of both realism and allegory to offer an alternative to neoliberalism's rampant dematerialisation and dedifferentiation, the latter defined as ‘a conjuncture when everything including commodity production has become cultural, and culture has become profoundly economic’ (p. 7). The character of Casilda, for example, is taken to represent the nostalgic hoarder, the figure who encapsulates anxiety over ‘the passage from metallic to fiduciary forms of money’ (p. 28). This crisis over the failed realism of metallic currency is neatly presented as symbolic of a semiotic crisis in representation itself. This crisis, it is suggested in chapter 1, means that Donoso's novel asks ‘what kind of writing is possible after the military coup’ (p. 14), a question that Fornazzari's expands to probe the very possibility of critique and intellectual discourse under neoliberalism.

Fornazzari is largely sceptical about what culture has to offer within neoliberal capitalism, not least because he is so insistent on dedifferentiation. Indeed, it is difficult to agree with his own claim that his ‘reading of neoliberalism does not focus on it as a strictly economic field’ (p. 6), precisely because he argues so forcefully that culture and commodity are one and the same. The strongest argument for dedifferentiation is put forward in chapter 2, which starts with a brief but telling point about the affluent Gonzalo in the 2004 film Machuca ‘perform[ing] an act of radical differentiation’ (p. 39) when he turns his Adidas-wearing heels on a violent military intervention in the shantytown. Even though it is not always easy to reconcile the collapse of difference with concurrent professionalisation and specialisation, chapter 2 clearly depicts the rise of ‘the expert, the technician, and the technocrat’ (p. 53), evident in Arturo Fontaine's 1992 novel Oír su voz, in El ladrillo, the famous economic text dating from 1973 that sets out the Chilean neoliberal vision, and in Diamela Eltit's novel Mano de obra (2002), in which a temporary community of survival rather than solidarity is built around the all-pervasive world of the market. Of course, dedifferentiation does not only go one way: the world of economics is increasingly inhabited by the qualities of artistic creativity previously associated with the cultural sphere and it would have been intriguing to see more examples of that trend, perhaps from El ladrillo itself.

In fact, the lack of space given to what is the only obviously non-fiction primary text highlights an odd disparity in the text between Fornazzari's general argument that culture has limited critical potential in the face of dedifferentiation and the fact that culture is still his principal source. The only real moment when Fornazzari suggests culture has a critical function is in chapter 3, where he argues that it can show the past to be ‘irreversible and irretrievable’ (p. 74), a gesture that moves us beyond ‘the now all too-familiar pitfalls of a melancholic angst, negotiated justice, and the politics of repentance in order to confront the implications of the unexchangeable singularity of loss' (p. 64). He uses Silvio Caiozzi's documentary film Fernando ha vuelto (1998) to show how ‘the cultural discourse of closure premised on the allegorised figure of forensics’ (p. 81) is undermined by its restitutional failures. In the rest of the book, however, he argues that ‘invest[ing] in the fragment’ (p. 56), ‘resistance to theory’, the ‘essentializing of the local’ (p. 108), celebrating the power of ‘desires and subjectivities’ (p. 112), and ‘aesthetic retrenchment’ (p. 117) are all redundant cultural forms of resistance to the encroachment of the market.

As forceful as Fornazzari's argument is, however, I am not entirely sure that culture and commodity are quite as interchangeable as he suggests. That neoliberalism has resulted in the expansion of economics over social life is certainly true, but encroachment is not complete subsumption. If there were no difference between a novel and an economic policy document, or if culture were really as devitalised as the book implies, one might wonder what point there would be in studying culture at all. Indeed, one of Fornazzari's achievements, perhaps partly contrary to intentions, is demonstrating that culture still has the potential to be illuminating, disruptive and critical in the face of the market. Either way, the real achievement of Speculative Fictions is the timely way it intervenes, with considerable clarity, into debates over the relationship between culture and the market.