Visuality as Infrastructure poses the following fundamentally theoretical and speculative question: What if we read visuality as infrastructural, as if there were a series of conduits that interface with our eyes and that subtend and organize economic value, labor, strategies of governmentality, communication, connection and sense-making more generally? To answer this question, I look to the medium of film and argue that it can be read as participating in and responding to a larger ecology in the contemporary moment, in which visual forms multiply, occupy ever more space, and carry ever more weight. In this process, I also consider the differential relation between visual forms and language/speech as carriers of communication and connection in film.

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While the question of the visual in our contemporary moment is an important one

worldwide, the corpus I work through is situated in the boom in Latin American film

production that has marked global cinema in the twenty-first century. More specifically, it is comprised by films of the last two decades from Argentina, Paraguay and Brazil, countries of the Triple Frontier, a submerged region of entangled histories whose most visible point lies in Paraguay. Along with Mexico, Brazil and Argentina were two of the three Latin American countries to establish strong national film industries early in the twentieth century; Paraguay, on the other hand, has only recently begun to build something like a film industry. These extremes of strong and week national articulations is characteristic of archives located in the global south and deeply scored by post and neocolonial configurations of power. Implicit to my project is a conviction that the question of how visual forms are purposed, and made to matter and work, stand out more starkly at the heterogeneous edge of emerging logics of governance and extraction.

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The book is organized in three parts. The first defines what it means to read

infrastructurally. The second develops a governing heuristic for the book in terms of an opposition between films that tend to either a !thick” or a !thin” visibility; if the first

contribute to extending the operative reach of the visual as the principal medium through which value and meaning move, films of a thin visibility back away from the visual as the main channel, or vehicle of connection and sense. Part three of the book draws on the Marxist concept of the “general intellect” to think about how infrastructures of communication and connection, both visual but also linguistic ones, are expropriated and put to work as means of production and not only as forms of mediation.