Abstract

"Calculated Intelligence: Navigating the Abstractions of Building and Civil Contracts in Postcolonial Chile"

Pedro Correa Fernández, École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (pedro.correafernandez@epfl.ch)

This paper examines public tenders to gauge the impact of entrepreneurial outlooks in the artisanal world during the conservative regime that took over Chile in 1829, a decade after its independence. While public offices and the privileges associated with them were regularly bought and sold during the colonial period, the republican administration had to find more consensual forms of farming out the task of governing. Public tenders offered a solution. They still auctioned off small branches of government—like the construction of public works—to the highest bidder, yet they did so with a semblance of equanimity. Tenders were advertised in the press and selected on the basis of their economic merits. In stressing competition, however, they imposed pressures on contractors that often translated into new regimes of labor. Similarly, high economic stakes for both the government and private empresarios precipitated the mobilization of alternative networks of prestige that were deemed essential in cementing public-private trust. By analyzing the work of contractor Ramón Rengifo, an important personality in the conservative alliance, this paper reconstructs how the building arts were negotiated in the face of rising economic pressure. Contractual abstractions precipitated forms of numerical reasoning that tended to demote artisans to mere workers—yet artisans resisted these changes. Defiant of top-down imputations of intelligence and skill, artisans turned to the newfound rights granted by civic equality and skillfully negotiated the terms of a fledgling civil contract. Their negotiations, at the same time, allow brief glimpses into the forms of artisanal knowing that they opposed to the letrado knowledge of contractors and surveyors. Joining the political fray by publishing journals, petitions, and leaflets, artisans demanded the same protection for their arts as the government granted to contracts and contractors.