Brief historization of the digital magazines of culture and literature in Argentina: the No Retornable case

Abstract

This article seeks to characterize the appearance and evolution of No Retornable magazine, born in 2005, as a representative case of the collective digital publications dedicated to literature and culture that began to populate the Argentine production field in the first decade of the century. The context of the post 2001 crisis in Argentina marked the disappearance of paradigmatic cultural magazines and, at the same time, the appearance of other digital ones that consolidated those technical and symbolic mutations that are widely discussed nowadays. The hypothesis is that, along with other pioneering magazines and blogs, No Retornable marked the pulse of the digital expansion of periodical publications (which now use the blog as a publication format) operating as a transitional space between the logics of production, edition, and publication of printed magazines and the dynamic forms of production, circulation, and reception brought about by web formats. No Retornable sought a new way to make authors visible and to renew critical production, but it also came to represent the obstacles that digital objects face in resisting time: this work proposes a case analysis that illustrates the tension between the life cycle of magazines and the problem of the archive as a sign of the period.