On the Chilean "transition" part 3 1/2
Nelly Richard, one of the most prominent and influential critics of the transition in Latin America, suggests too that we cannot identify a clear-cut division between the dictatorship and the transition. In consonance with Moulian, Richard sees the democratic governments as merely the new managers of the inherited political and socioeconomic order, rather than having re-found it. Moulian and Richard agree with Willy Thayer about the true "transition" that operated in the transformation from a state-centered society to a post-state economy, where the state is not the subject but the object of the economy. More broadly, Richard is embarked in the project of criticizing the pretended "transparency" and neutrality of disciplinary language because these have been the tools that have made power, bureaucracy, and technocracy converge. Her work aims then to denounce the theatrical and staged artifices that construct meaning by presenting social reality as mono-referential.
Richard argues that the experience and memory of violence cannot be inscribed in the transitional surfaces of representation or, translated into the clean, coherent official discourse of the post-dictatorship. Transitional politics have managed to subordinate the practices of memory to their official representation in the Rettig and Valech ReportsOn 2003 President Ricardo Lagos created the Commission on Political Prison and Torture under the direction of Monsignor Sergio Valech, which issued a report nicknamed as the "Valech Report." and to its monumentalization in memorials which relegate dictatorial violence as something that happened in a far away past, not something that continues to happen (poverty, discrimination, police repression, the denial of justice, etc.) now, under the legitimation of a democratic system. Thayer coincides with Richard in that the disciplinary languages are complicit in trying to introduce sense there where sense cannot be found, inscribing events that cannot be represented —such as torture— into a representational structure. As Thayer insists, the "post" in post-dictatorship does not mean "what happened in the past", is not the preterit. Torture cannot cease to happen, and "[n]ot to insist on the relationship between the Coup, torture, Dictatorship and contemporary triumphalism would be to become acolyte of the continuum of violence and progress" (39).
Richard indicates that the cultural mechanisms of consensus and the ephemeral pleasures of consumerism have acted as forms of pseudo-integration and gratification of the social body, harmed by the violence of the coup and dictatorship. At a more affective level, Richard notes that the post-dictatorship can be seen as a pathological state of mourning, where the absence of movement is compensated by a the manic exaggeration of the gestures, causing the illusion of dynamism in a paralyzed subjectivity. In the same vein, Thayer attributes the consumerist euphoria of the post-dictatorship as an equivalent to the manic phase of the loss of object. In another analysis that reinforces the idea of the transition as a static state, Moreiras reads post-dictatorship subjectivity as marked by the depression of the social body, the mourn for the loss of historicity, and for the impossibility of constructing sense.
Under the logics of the democracy of the consensus, the so-called transition has transformed political practice —formerly understood as antagonistic— into a series of exchanges and transactions. A forceful unanimity around the need to "tone down" and moderate the discourses, and to be "realistic" (as in Correa's discourse) transformed the political field into a predictable, programmable field of mechanical procedures. Moreiras also claims that the violent processes of "modernization" sustained in Latin America in general, have relied on the refoundation of the symbolic order at the cultural level by insisting on establishing and policing a totalizing single meaning of history. Politics then, have ceased to be the field where historical meanings and sense are constructed and contested. This in turn, has affected the possibilities of resistance, restricting the possible subject positions to one-or-the-other side and to a suffering victimized subjectivity.
Furthering Thayer's interpretation of the transition, Bret Levinson postulates that the 1973 coup not only never ceased to happen, but moreover, it actually stroke with all its horror in the post-dictatorship. Here, the possibilities for articulating different political projects was radically closed as the ideology of the free market was imposed as a consensus, and precisely, presented not as an ideology anymore, but just as what is, or "goes without saying." In this new scenario, to challenge the reality of the market economy means actually not to make any sense. The coup really just hit with all its strength now, when the victims of state violence find that there is no possible discourse available to account for their experiences. When violence does get recognized, is under the paradigm of measurability and trade, the exchange of crimes for compensations in the market of forgiveness and forgetfulness of the transition. In contrast to Moulian, who sustains that forgetfulness is necessary for the transition, Levinson argues that the order of the transition is not based on the complete suppression of the memory of the horrors of the dictatorship, but rather on the accurate remembering that "this" (free market) is better than "that" (state violence). What is radically suppressed is the relationship between the dictatorship and the transition, the continuities.
Also concerned with the more subjective effects of the transition, Gareth Williams notes that Moulian gestures towards a residual affective world that cannot find itself representable in the clean, transparent surfaces of the Chilean post-dictatorship official national narrative. This affective excess unsettles the image of a smooth transition: "an affective world of signification that remains senseless (for democratic hegemony), and ungraspable for the order of disciplinary reason and for institutional knowledge as a whole," "a world of residual affects that has been included into democracy as democracy's zone of (necessary) exclusion." (286, 288).
This affective surplus that cannot be contained in discourse and can be found in cultural expressions such as art and literature, could also be interpreted as what causes different sectors to 'act out.' In September of 1998, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the military coup, commemorations from supporters, and protests, barricades and marches across the country from detractors of Pinochet left behind a toll over two hundred arrested, thirty one wounded, and two dead. A remarkable point, the majority of the arrested in street protests were under twenty-five years old, meaning they had grown up in dictatorship but were not born when the coup itself happened. Were they protesting then for the coup as a present fact, not as something of the past? As these issues continue to irrupt in such violent ways, as this affective excess manifests at the slightest provocation, it is unavoidable to ask what can reconciliation possibly mean in Chile's post-dictatorship? Who are to be forgiven and by whom, if the bodies of the disappeared are still missing and the names of their torturers and assassins still unknown, under the democratic governments legitimation?
Of course, the cases mentioned above that challenge the notion that there is a “transition” or a democratization process in place, and of a national reconciliation, seem to wane in the face of Pinochet's later detention in London in October 1998. Here, performative or expressive politics reached their peak. On the one hand, the event performed on the international stage the idea that the crimes committed under Pinochet's rule were not only against a nation, but against humanity. A Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, was asking extradition to Spain from England, where Pinochet had traveled for medical reasons. Pinochet's supporters immediately took the opportunity to exploit the fact that it was a Spanish judge, invoking the idea that colonial powers were questioning Chile's status as a sovereign state, interfering with domestic issues that had already been dealt with. Frei's administration also went along with this kind of nationalist discourse, adopting a strategy of defending Pinochet's immunity (a central part of the transition 'pact') to bring him back to the country. Frei himself met with top military officers to ease their anxieties and to reassure the economic and corporate elites that the stability of the transitional order was not in danger. At a social level, this event prompted everyday confrontations, and media debates over the interpretation of the Unidad Popular, the military coup, the dictatorship, and the nature of the transition.
On the side of the right, performative politics included Pinochet supporters staging regular demonstrations in the streets, raging upper-class women calling for the British Embassy to be burned down, right-wing leaders paralyzing the congress for two weeks, and Major Labbé refusing to collect the garbage of the Spanish and British Embassy for several weeks. Actors from both sides became polarized and re-adopted the rhetoric characteristic of dictatorial times, in a general scenario of clear social unrest. Anxieties about how to give a definite closure to the "divisive issues" that threaten the transition's discourse of reconciliation and social peace re-emerged in the Concertación circles. Alliances and alignments that had been carefully built were shaken at the base.
If the "renovated socialists" had distanced themselves from Allende a while ago, a "renovated right", represented by political leaders like Joaquín Lavín had also worked hard to clean their image distancing themselves from the figure of Pinochet. And now, here they were again in 1998, vehemently —and some, hysterically— defending him on the grounds of nationalism and also, of the logics of the transition itself, making implicit and explicit threats about democracy's stability, while many detractors of Pinochet within the Concertación could not hide their joy. But for many, it was the image of the democratic government of the Concertación, with many state representatives who had been themselves victimized by the dictatorship, defending Pinochet from International Courts was close to surreal.
Richard argues that the experience and memory of violence cannot be inscribed in the transitional surfaces of representation or, translated into the clean, coherent official discourse of the post-dictatorship. Transitional politics have managed to subordinate the practices of memory to their official representation in the Rettig and Valech ReportsOn 2003 President Ricardo Lagos created the Commission on Political Prison and Torture under the direction of Monsignor Sergio Valech, which issued a report nicknamed as the "Valech Report." and to its monumentalization in memorials which relegate dictatorial violence as something that happened in a far away past, not something that continues to happen (poverty, discrimination, police repression, the denial of justice, etc.) now, under the legitimation of a democratic system. Thayer coincides with Richard in that the disciplinary languages are complicit in trying to introduce sense there where sense cannot be found, inscribing events that cannot be represented —such as torture— into a representational structure. As Thayer insists, the "post" in post-dictatorship does not mean "what happened in the past", is not the preterit. Torture cannot cease to happen, and "[n]ot to insist on the relationship between the Coup, torture, Dictatorship and contemporary triumphalism would be to become acolyte of the continuum of violence and progress" (39).
Richard indicates that the cultural mechanisms of consensus and the ephemeral pleasures of consumerism have acted as forms of pseudo-integration and gratification of the social body, harmed by the violence of the coup and dictatorship. At a more affective level, Richard notes that the post-dictatorship can be seen as a pathological state of mourning, where the absence of movement is compensated by a the manic exaggeration of the gestures, causing the illusion of dynamism in a paralyzed subjectivity. In the same vein, Thayer attributes the consumerist euphoria of the post-dictatorship as an equivalent to the manic phase of the loss of object. In another analysis that reinforces the idea of the transition as a static state, Moreiras reads post-dictatorship subjectivity as marked by the depression of the social body, the mourn for the loss of historicity, and for the impossibility of constructing sense.
Under the logics of the democracy of the consensus, the so-called transition has transformed political practice —formerly understood as antagonistic— into a series of exchanges and transactions. A forceful unanimity around the need to "tone down" and moderate the discourses, and to be "realistic" (as in Correa's discourse) transformed the political field into a predictable, programmable field of mechanical procedures. Moreiras also claims that the violent processes of "modernization" sustained in Latin America in general, have relied on the refoundation of the symbolic order at the cultural level by insisting on establishing and policing a totalizing single meaning of history. Politics then, have ceased to be the field where historical meanings and sense are constructed and contested. This in turn, has affected the possibilities of resistance, restricting the possible subject positions to one-or-the-other side and to a suffering victimized subjectivity.
Furthering Thayer's interpretation of the transition, Bret Levinson postulates that the 1973 coup not only never ceased to happen, but moreover, it actually stroke with all its horror in the post-dictatorship. Here, the possibilities for articulating different political projects was radically closed as the ideology of the free market was imposed as a consensus, and precisely, presented not as an ideology anymore, but just as what is, or "goes without saying." In this new scenario, to challenge the reality of the market economy means actually not to make any sense. The coup really just hit with all its strength now, when the victims of state violence find that there is no possible discourse available to account for their experiences. When violence does get recognized, is under the paradigm of measurability and trade, the exchange of crimes for compensations in the market of forgiveness and forgetfulness of the transition. In contrast to Moulian, who sustains that forgetfulness is necessary for the transition, Levinson argues that the order of the transition is not based on the complete suppression of the memory of the horrors of the dictatorship, but rather on the accurate remembering that "this" (free market) is better than "that" (state violence). What is radically suppressed is the relationship between the dictatorship and the transition, the continuities.
Also concerned with the more subjective effects of the transition, Gareth Williams notes that Moulian gestures towards a residual affective world that cannot find itself representable in the clean, transparent surfaces of the Chilean post-dictatorship official national narrative. This affective excess unsettles the image of a smooth transition: "an affective world of signification that remains senseless (for democratic hegemony), and ungraspable for the order of disciplinary reason and for institutional knowledge as a whole," "a world of residual affects that has been included into democracy as democracy's zone of (necessary) exclusion." (286, 288).
This affective surplus that cannot be contained in discourse and can be found in cultural expressions such as art and literature, could also be interpreted as what causes different sectors to 'act out.' In September of 1998, at the twenty-fifth anniversary of the military coup, commemorations from supporters, and protests, barricades and marches across the country from detractors of Pinochet left behind a toll over two hundred arrested, thirty one wounded, and two dead. A remarkable point, the majority of the arrested in street protests were under twenty-five years old, meaning they had grown up in dictatorship but were not born when the coup itself happened. Were they protesting then for the coup as a present fact, not as something of the past? As these issues continue to irrupt in such violent ways, as this affective excess manifests at the slightest provocation, it is unavoidable to ask what can reconciliation possibly mean in Chile's post-dictatorship? Who are to be forgiven and by whom, if the bodies of the disappeared are still missing and the names of their torturers and assassins still unknown, under the democratic governments legitimation?
Of course, the cases mentioned above that challenge the notion that there is a “transition” or a democratization process in place, and of a national reconciliation, seem to wane in the face of Pinochet's later detention in London in October 1998. Here, performative or expressive politics reached their peak. On the one hand, the event performed on the international stage the idea that the crimes committed under Pinochet's rule were not only against a nation, but against humanity. A Spanish judge, Baltasar Garzón, was asking extradition to Spain from England, where Pinochet had traveled for medical reasons. Pinochet's supporters immediately took the opportunity to exploit the fact that it was a Spanish judge, invoking the idea that colonial powers were questioning Chile's status as a sovereign state, interfering with domestic issues that had already been dealt with. Frei's administration also went along with this kind of nationalist discourse, adopting a strategy of defending Pinochet's immunity (a central part of the transition 'pact') to bring him back to the country. Frei himself met with top military officers to ease their anxieties and to reassure the economic and corporate elites that the stability of the transitional order was not in danger. At a social level, this event prompted everyday confrontations, and media debates over the interpretation of the Unidad Popular, the military coup, the dictatorship, and the nature of the transition.
On the side of the right, performative politics included Pinochet supporters staging regular demonstrations in the streets, raging upper-class women calling for the British Embassy to be burned down, right-wing leaders paralyzing the congress for two weeks, and Major Labbé refusing to collect the garbage of the Spanish and British Embassy for several weeks. Actors from both sides became polarized and re-adopted the rhetoric characteristic of dictatorial times, in a general scenario of clear social unrest. Anxieties about how to give a definite closure to the "divisive issues" that threaten the transition's discourse of reconciliation and social peace re-emerged in the Concertación circles. Alliances and alignments that had been carefully built were shaken at the base.
If the "renovated socialists" had distanced themselves from Allende a while ago, a "renovated right", represented by political leaders like Joaquín Lavín had also worked hard to clean their image distancing themselves from the figure of Pinochet. And now, here they were again in 1998, vehemently —and some, hysterically— defending him on the grounds of nationalism and also, of the logics of the transition itself, making implicit and explicit threats about democracy's stability, while many detractors of Pinochet within the Concertación could not hide their joy. But for many, it was the image of the democratic government of the Concertación, with many state representatives who had been themselves victimized by the dictatorship, defending Pinochet from International Courts was close to surreal.
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