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 dictatorship 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 becoming a web of often highly interdependent connections, wherein personnel, practices, audiences and resultant ‘truths’ travel.
Highlights
Theoretical Principles/ProvocationsLet 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
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
What we have attempted to describe in this article are some of the divergent ways in which forums deploy ‘arts of dramatization’, which is to say, the ways they stage questions about the violence of the last dictatorship period in Argentina in order to propose, display, explore, preserve, confirm and sometimes refute, ‘candidates for truth’
Summary
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. While not disagreeing with such sentiments exactly, what we mean to suggest is that one might adopt a less implicitly deferential tone and understand such spaces less as supplements or alternatives to the legal and position their role more boldly, as alternative forums deploying their own arts of dramatization and thereby offering their own ‘candidates for truth’ It is important, in other words, to draw out the specificities of the forums they create in order to give full appreciation of the role they play and will continue to play, probably long after the trials have ceased, in how the past is made relevant to the present. This must remain a speculative proposition insofar as the archive necessarily declines to articulate the parameters of the intervention that value might provoke
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