Gonzalo Millán’s The City as a Technical Procedure

Abstract

This article offers a reading of Gonzalo Millán’s La ciudad (1979) through the concept of referential intermediality (Rajewsky), arguing that the book should be understood not merely as a testimonial work of exile and dictatorship, but as a technical-medial object. Rather than representing historical violence, the poem transforms it into a regime of verbal inscription based on seriality, fragmentation, and impersonal registration. While previous criticism has emphasized repetition, montage, and fragment as key formal procedures, this study contends that their critical force emerges from the poem’s capacity to invoke and recontextualize protocols from other media—such as journalism, administrative discourse, and cinema—without abandoning its poetic medium. In this sense, La ciudad operates as a poem-machine that appropriates languages of surveillance and bureaucratic control, exposing their violence through formal operations. Methodologically, the article combines referential intermediality with a scalar reading (line, fragment, series, book) and close readings of representative passages, with special attention to “Poem No. 48,” where the cinematic procedure of rewind is translated into a poetic syntax of temporal inversion. The analysis demonstrates that referential intermediality is not an auxiliary feature but a structural dimension of the book’s technical logic, allowing trauma and memory to be read as formal processes rather than narrative representation.