Yo el Supremo [I the Supreme], Dictation and Cybernetics

Abstract

Yo el Supremo [I the Supreme] (1974), the monumental novel by Augusto Roa Bastos (1917-2005), can be understood as a dramatization of the medial relationships between power, history, technology, hegemony and subalternity. This article proposes that the novel poses an antinomy in which two impulses intersect: on the one hand, a medial proliferation in which techniques ranging from voice and handwriting to anachronistic or fantastic devices such as the tape recorder or the “souvenir-pen” come into view; on the other hand, there’s the Supreme Dictator as arkhé, whose “dictation” (understood both as speech act and as exercise of dictatorial power itself) is produced simultaneously by means of and against that multiplicity. Within the framework of this antinomy, it is shown that the Dictator holds a conception of media technologies and of the foundation of the state that can be characterized as cybernetic. The question of cybernetics is placed in the context of the interest in this discipline in the 1960s and 70s, for then showing how the Dictator conceives the world in cybernetic and techno-deterministic terms. Roa Bastos wrote a work that is not only about the history of Paraguay, Spanish-American republicanism, and the archetype of the Latin American dictator—it also affords an intuition of what characterizes the modes of global domination that emerge from post-war technological advances.