Unsettling Accounts: Neither Truth nor Reconciliation in Confessions of State Violence

Abstract

Leigh Payne’s monograph Unsettling Accounts is important in two ways. First of all, it analyzes publications and documents of agents of state violence from four societies that are icons of extreme repression and violation of human rights (and in at least the first two cases, of an explicitly neofascist apparatus): Argentina, Chile, Brazil, and South Africa. These four cases diverge fundamentally in the institutional circumstances and structure of state violence — particularly the rhetoric and discourse strategies used to defend it to the citizenry and in international forums — and the analysis, accommodation, and consequences of it in a subsequent democratic institutionalization and public accounting (especially the relationship of state violence to far-reaching sociohistorical circumstances that turn on the issue of circumstantial exceptionalism). Yet in all four cases there has been enormous international interest. Payne’s discussion of the phenomenon of state violence (or state terrorism, to use Eduardo Luis Duhalde’s important trope) is a significant record of convergences and divergences vis-à-vis the accounts of agents who have told the story of their own involvement in repression, providing important insights into the conduct of repression in their respective societies.Payne’s descriptive account is, however, displaced by the more far-reaching theoretical contribution of his study. The unquestioned premise of truth commissions, judicial proceedings, and confessions (whether motivated by redemption, exculpation, legitimation, implication, or revenge) is that, finally, the facts are made known; areas of doubt, ambiguity, or obfuscation are resolved; and significant progress is made toward the complete understanding of a hitherto only partially or vaguely perceived social narrative. It is good for the commonweal that the contemptible actors of the social narrative come clean. The report of the Argentine truth commission, Nunca más: Informe de la Comisión Nacional sobre la Desaparición de Personas (1984), was a best seller in Argentina, and it is the key text in a vast assortment of works that include the sort of personal confessions Payne discusses. Whether the continued successes of such documents in Argentina contribute to a measurable social good is quite another proposition.Payne’s point is that such confessions do not settle accounts. This is quite evident from the structural ambiguity of his title, as “unsettling accounts” means both the process of undoing accounts which have been settled and accounts that are unsettling in the sense of disturbing or deleterious. Confessions such as the ones that Payne describes in detail — which means the specific points of their narrative, connections with other accounts and ongoing debates (including judicial proceedings), and the public debate that they are inevitably going to engender — can never close the books on a particular segment of repression. Rather, to put it simply, they raise more questions than they answer. While they may reopen a social debate that is for the moment suspended or sidelined, more than anything else they serve not to complement or to supplement an already settled account, but to reset the account, so to speak, such that major themes are revisited, rehashed, possibly reinterpreted, all with the effect of leaving the social narrative as inconclusive and unresolved as it had ever been. This does not mean that such confessions are reprehensible, but only that they cannot be received with the naive belief that they will finally settle accounts.Reading Payne’s study as a cultural studies scholar, I inevitably wanted to engage the texts he examines as narratives and to analyze their rhetorical and discursive strategies, their semiotic aporias, and the contours of the implied reader they construct. And, too, I could not help but recall significant examples of Latin American cultural production that are pertinent to the issues raised. Such cultural production is customarily unwilling to accept settled accounts and, indeed, constitutes complex examples of unsettling accounts. One has only to recall the controversies surrounding Luis Puenzo’s 1985 Oscar-winning film La historia oficial as regards exactly whose official story and why. Moreover, Michel Foucault’s influential propositions on the nature of confession are important here, to the extent that confession, rather than transmitting a preexisting truth, serves to construct an ad hoc truth that serves a host of ideological purposes. I wouldn’t propose to read any of Payne’s primary bibliography as artistically motivated narratives, but the principle of a dissembling nontransparency is what makes them in the end perhaps as much cultural artifacts as historical documents.