Presenting the (Dictatorial) Past in Contemporary Argentina
| Date | 01 October 2018 |
| Author | Vikki Bell,Mario Di Paolantonio |
| Published date | 01 October 2018 |
| DOI | 10.1177/0964663917722597 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
Social & Legal Studies
2018, Vol. 27(5) 572–595
Presenting the (Dictatorial)
ª The Author(s) 2017
Past in Contemporary
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Argentina: Truth Forums
DOI: 10.1177/0964663917722597
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and Arts of Dramatization
Vikki Bell
Goldsmiths, University of London, UK
Mario Di Paolantonio
York University, Toronto, Canada
Abstract
Drawing upon Isabelle Stengers’ notion of an ‘ecology of practices’ this article explores
some of the divergent ways in which truths about the violence of Argentina’s last dic-
tatorship period emerge in different forums. We consider how these forums deploy ‘arts
of dramatization’, which is to say, the ways they stage questions about the violence of the
last dictatorship period in order to propose, explore, confirm and sometimes refute
‘candidates for truth’. Following Stengers’ provocations, we argue that the various
modes of staging the past conjure up its violence in distinct ways, placing different
constraints on how it can appear, using different material apparatus and probing it
according to different values under different obligations. Based on interviews and
observational research with key personnel – including lawyers, artists, forensic
anthropologists and psychologists – we suggest that while each of the forums within this
ecology is concerned with truth, how and what emerges as truth necessarily differs.
What counts as evidence, what is understood as ‘successful’, what is dismissed as
irrelevant are all dependent upon the concerns of the forum, such that truths about
Argentina’s dictatorship are not only ‘situated’ but also necessarily ‘partial’ forms of
world-making. In an attempt to propose a shift from over-determined and usually binary
lines of debate, we suggest that these truths exist within an ‘ecology of practices’, to use
Stengers’ term, insofar as these forums are not closed off from each other, but are
Corresponding author:
Vikki Bell, Professor of Sociology, Goldsmiths, University of London, New Cross, London, London SE14 6NW,
United Kingdom.
Email: v.bell@gold.ac.uk
Bell and Paolantonio
573
becoming a web of often highly interdependent connections, wherein personnel, prac-
tices, audiences and resultant ‘truths’ travel.
Keywords
Argentina, art, dictatorship, ecology of practices, memorial museums, Stengers, trials,
violence
I would call civilized practice a practice able to exhibit its own, never innocent, divergence,
the pragmatic space it creates, the specific way its practitioners world and word their world
as Haraway would say. The way a practice diverges does not characterize its difference
from others but the way it has its own world mattering, the values which commit its
practitioners, what they take into account and how (Stengers, The Challenge of Ontological
Politics: 96).
Introduction: Theoretical Principles/Provocations
Let us begin from the premise that establishing truths about the past, making them accepted
as such, requires situated practices with more or less elaborate arts of dramatization, technics
of persuasion, and gatherings open to being so persuaded. This is not to repeat the thesis that
truths are ‘merely’ constructed and multiple, entwined with the power relations that sustain
them. Nor is the argument here that truth telling is difficult because of the clandestine nature
of the violence perpetrated during the last military dictatorship in Argentina and the various
ways in which the perpetrators attempted to cover up their actions, governments have
attempted to halt prosecutions, and political actors have challenged historical accounts of
what occurred during the 1970s and 1980s (e.g., the challenge to the simplicity of the ‘two
devils’ thesis). Rather than be drawn into these protracted polemics, the focus here is on the
procedures and particularities of the multiple sites within which accounts of the past are
presented and scrutinized before becoming accepted and established as truth. We mean to
suggest that there are a diversity of sites in which truths emerge that may be understood as
forums, as performative spaces that operate under specific rules or principles that pertain to
and constitute their milieus. As Stengers puts it in her discussion of William James’ prag-
matism, each forum affirms that there is something to think and that there is a way to think it
(2009: 12); but how ‘the past’ is made to offer itself up for consideration is constrained by the
specificities of where it appears. Constraint is not necessarily to be given a negative con-
notation; rather, it is through their specific constraints that different sites are able to put
propositions ‘to the test’ as it were. The forums allow certain truths to emerge only insofar as
their veracity can be proven and sustained by the mechanisms appropriate to the site of their
appearance. By attending to different forums, the point is not simply that multiple truths
arise, but, in the sense that our epigraph from Stengers suggests, that there are multiple
modes of participation, constitutive of how worlds come to matter through the practice of
values and commitments.
We draw upon Stengers’ arguments here not least because her work allows us to
consider the production of truth in contemporary post-dictatorship Argentina beyond the
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Social & Legal Studies 27(5)
binary terms in which they are usually situated – whether this binary is constituted along
party political lines, or the binary that posits ‘civil society’ against ‘the State’ – and
instead to attend to how the production of truth in various forums happens via distinct
forms of telling, procedure and presentation, deploying the ‘arts of dramatization’ appro-
priate to and constitutive of their specific gathering. This shifts the discussion, usefully in
our view, away from the suspicions of ‘motives’ and ideas of political gain, onto a more
attentive analysis of the distinctive modes of demonstration in the different forums
where the violent past is addressed.
The presentation of proposals or ‘candidates for truth’ within these forums often
requires artifice, as do the presentation of scientific facts, as Stengers (2005) has argued,
whereby a technical apparatus or device of some sort is asked to ‘testify’ to the existence
of a phenomenon. This artifice does not make the truths artificial, just as, similarly, truths
may take the form of fiction, be conjured up and passed along through storytelling,
without being fictive in the sense of being made-up.1 Indeed, because truths are con-
strained in their particular ways, produced according to certain procedures and in front of
certain audiences, not all propositions can be made acceptable. To be verified, proposi-
tions about the past must be made to strongly advocate on their own behalf in some
sense. It is crucial that this independence, which is achieved differently in the different
spheres that are the topic of our investigations here, is met.
Drawing on her own background, Stengers offers the example of the chemist, whose
art of dramatization is achieved through the staging of the experiment. That is, the
chemist must create the apparatus and type of circumstances in which the chemical
actants display their capabilities, producing the results the chemist seeks, while simul-
taneously demonstrating that the effect is independent, that she herself has no part
in causing the result to be so (2005: 1000–1001). ‘Candidates for truth’ need to be
presented, and they need to be presented ‘modestly’2; they must be drawn out, demon-
strated, coaxed or charmed into revealing themselves as independent truths. Otherwise,
audiences remain unconvinced or suspicious. Thus, establishing the truth about the past
requires not only the theatrical animation of evidence, as implied by the description of
the perpetrator trial as a ‘theatre of justice’, as Felman (2002) famously put it (and as
Carlos (1996) and Osiel (1997) explored in relation to Argentina’s 1985 trial of the
junta3), but also someone who presents, reflects and performs before the forum in order
to facilitate that animation. This facilitator will draw out the ‘propensity of things’
(Jullien, 1999), that is, their ability to account, attest or affect, such that the truth that
emerges carries weight within and potentially beyond this forum.
These arguments are integral to Stengers’ arguments for thinking via ‘ecologies’ of
truth. Forums are constituted so as to gather and enable the requisite expertise, apparatus
and procedures to test whether certain propositions succeed before concerned, relevant
and interested audiences. This latter point is, of course, crucial; if audiences lose interest,
are frightened and turn away, or are more concerned about other objects, their role in
witnessing, attesting and sustaining the truths is lost. They must be gathered and must
engage in the art of ‘testing’ suggestions that are presented before them.
In relation to the truths at stake here – those concerning the history and legacy of the
dictatorship period in Argentina – the arts of dramatization are staged within a wide
variety of forums, each with their attendant specialists. A non-exhaustive list would
Bell and Paolantonio
575
include those we spoke to in our research: lawyers, psychologists, forensic anthropolo-
gists, architects, archivists, academics, curators and artists. Obviously, these ‘practi-
tioners’ work differently, operating within their distinct milieus whose attentions
diverge. Indeed by these divergent practices, they constitute their own...
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