Surviving Forced Disappearance in Argentina and Uruguay

Identity and Meaning

G. Gatti

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN:
  9781137394149
• eBook ISBN:
  9781137394156
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: Civil Rights in Law
• Index: Politics & International Relations

Based on extensive fieldwork that began in Argentina, this book asks how detained and disappeared persons inhabit the categories that international law has constructed to mark, judge, understand, and repair the horror.

Chapter 1

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A Catastrophe for Identity and Meaning: Forced Disappearance, Modernity, and Civilization

This chapter works on what is the skeleton of this book, on its hypothesis, namely, that forced disappearance of persons constitutes a catastrophe for identity and meaning. It does so by situating the concept of catastrophe in the coordinates of a civilized and lettered Latin America—a Latin America pregnant with culture and rational individuals. That was the Latin America that harbored forced disappearance in its most devastating form. That is where the machinery of disappearance, set in motion by the state, attacked its dearest and most finished product—the citizen—destroying it and causing tidal waves of absence-of-meaning.

Let us start by defining catastrophe.¹ There are facts that always mean the same and there are others that mean nothing. The former are facts associated with meanings and the latter are facts disassociated from meaning. I am interested in this disassociation: when for that something, someone, or fact—even if it that loss of meaning does occur, and I am aware it does, even if it falls within the universe of the factual and it matters to me—I lack the interpretative frameworks, the structural frameworks, the schemes, or thought systems . . . from which to grasp and understand it, classify or order it. This rupturing of facts from meanings can be momentary or lasting. If the latter, then the concept we must work with is that of catastrophe.

It is not a trauma that interrupts normality, not a lasting trauma that harms the normal but can be overcome because there are institutions for it; neither is it a disruptive, intense, and tremendous but brief event, like an earthquake or a tsunami. These all have in common the separation of meaning from fact, but in a catastrophe that separation is neither overcome—because there is nothing to overcome it with—nor does it end—because it is permanent. It is the disarticulation of words from things, of meanings from facts, a disarticulation turned into structure. It is distinguished from trauma in that it is impossible to fix; it is different from an event in its duration. And like trauma and events, even if it seems impossible, it is characterized because in it life and meaning are created and contained.

Indeed, not only does the cause of catastrophe remain, but no agreement for a new order emerges to replace that which was subjected to destruction. It is, ultimately, anomie turned into norm, permanent exception, perpetual mourning, an eternal event. “This time,” Lewkowicz says, “the flood is here to stay” (2004, 154).

The disappeared, and disappearance itself, are a catastrophe. And a catastrophe of the most intense kind: words fight with things, the speaker stutters, the body splits from what names it, nothing can be expressed with the words that formerly expressed it, nor does it seem possible to find substitute words. Meaning cracks. And yet, I will say it now, in that black hole there is life, one lives, one is. A strange destructive force, that of this phenomenon, a perfect bomb that razes everything but nonetheless enables the construction of a dense world of life. It is my place for thinking and living. Or, that is how I conceive it.

The language, the identity, the meaning that forced disappearance shatters are the language, identity, and meaning of modernity, of those beauties of rationality and order that we around here, in the Americas, project ourselves as being: individuals, citizens, lettered people. . . . In that shattering and in the paradoxes that pierce it from then on is where, in spite of everything, a world of survivals is built.

The Catastrophe of Forced Disappearance: Civilization, Modernity, and Biopolitics

In modernity, the world is continuously subjected to purifying efforts that tear it apart (Serres 1991, 107). The world is fragmented, the continuous is disaggregated, things are separated and classified, they come apart and regroup. The modern drive to visualize, classify, order, name, label. It is not innocent. I can tell you right off: I think those efforts underpin all the guides that steered the historical processes leading to forced disappearance of persons.

They also underpin many more things, because the number of practices operating with that logic is extensive, huge, infinite: sciences, hospitals, parks, university buildings, gardens, censuses, urbanizing utopias, nursery schools, museums, timetables, concentration camps, TV programming. . . . They all have a common denominator: the power to do what they represent. Reality is built according to the models representing it: the city, the society, the world itself . . . respond to a preexisting map. A plowed universe: to each thing, person, action, or phenomenon there is a name, a moment, a place. A space of taxonomies opens up, an analytical space, a space of classifications that is imposed onto the continuous, onto the promiscuity of limits, and onto the mobility of confusion. The classifying grid is imposed on indistinctiveness, making identities and differences fit.

The city is ordered by dispositifs: truth-producing dispositifs, knowledge dispositifs, power dispositifs. Powerful articulators of order. Mediators of sense, conductors of meanings: maps, plans, clerks, landscapes, tables, graves, machines, regular prisoners and political prisoners, towers, folios, compasses, instruments, buildings. . . . Artifacts of representation that have since been growing unchecked, both in number and strength. The world is seized by modern representation. Analysis falls under its aegis. It is my territory, the territory of sociology. It is also the territory of forced disappearance of persons, but we will come to that later. I am not saying that we are accomplices; what I am saying is that all of us, everyone who has lived in and for the modern, share a certain familiar air. And that we must reflect on that connection.

Among the products of those efforts are Argentina and Uruguay. They, like other similar places, are the epitome of those efforts, the ideal product of the modern dream: places fashioned from a mold. There, the colonizers’ “motivations . . . to found new cities in the territory they had just conquered and to destroy the ancient indigenous cities they had found in their path were a response to a new design, that of inventing a new Europe” (Blengino 2005, 19). Places imagined as emerging from nothing, from a vacuum: like molding work applied to a desert populated to the insistent beat of a project. Society forged by modern utopia.²

In the America I am referring to, conquered territories are imagined as a desert that is filled through a meticulous work of gardening (Bauman 1987) making it possible for (1) a population to emerge in them (Foucault 2007); (2) a Lettered City to be built in them (Rama 1996); and (3) a subject to be formed for that population, an inhabitant for that Lettered City, a citizen-individual. In this area, that is the civilizing project. It is still open.

The Shaping of the Population: Foucault Wanders the Pampas

Since the eighteenth century, government has been exercised not over a territory but over a population. This is what Michael Foucault termed biopolitics: “the endeavor . . . to rationalize the problems presented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, race” (1997, 73). In other words, the way in which government is exercised as design, control, domination . . . of bodies, collective bodies and individual bodies. Roberto Esposito explains this eloquently: biopolitics is a form of government in which the sphere of politics or law and the sphere of life overlap, and that overlap has only occurred in modernity, when the individual and the preservation of the individual become the premise and goal of all other political and legal categories (2007).

This government of populations has its genealogy and it has its protagonists.

The genealogy of the government of populations will be easily found upon coming across the genealogy of the idea of society, a way of social life that, it should be noted, is of recent invention (Donzelot 1984; Kaufmann and Guilhaumou 2003). Indeed, the idea of society appears in the imaginary of its many predecessors—from republicanism to anarchism, from liberalism to socialism, from sociology to social work—as a territory for corrective action (the place of policies and rights) and for observatory action (the place of sociologies and anthropologies). They are powerful writings, those of the predecessors—and of others—who in their social work succeeded in realizing what they had dreamt: society, which is thus a “strategic notion” (Donzelot 1984, 77) and also a technology of government. I could go on, but I think this is enough to put forward a powerful idea, that of the making of society, an idea—a project almost—that has shaped and shapes several centuries of political and scientific thinking, that has guided and guides the molding and modeling work of social life in the eighteenth, nineteenth, and twentieth centuries (de Marinis 1999, 90), that has created and creates efficient action fields, both for things and for people. And even more, that has created and creates things and persons . . .

. . . things and persons shaped and fashioned after the logic of the nation-state and the citizen-individual, the protagonists of this tangle. I will not elaborate on this further (Gatti 2007). It is enough to recall here that the metaphors that shape our subjectivities are a direct legacy of the nation-state at the collective level, and of the citizen-individual at the personal level. They are both siblings—one older, the other younger—and as such they are alike even though they may give the impression that they fight and compete against one another. But, whether they like it or not, they will always have the same parents (modernity and rationality) and the same logic: they are both figures that are organized, coherent, and stable—like the state—and indivisible—like the individual. Always uncontaminated, always in their place; neither dirty nor in disorder. With a clear and visible name, territory, and history. Both are the models of modern life and they are also its product, so much so that they have become our producers of solidness (Lewkowicz, Cantarelli, and Grupo Doce 2003, 171). I am not just talking about empirical references—although there is that—or administrative realities—although there is that too. I am talking about “meaning-conferring pan-institutions,” about the “general principles of consistency” of subjectivity (ibid., 31, 65), that which for us moderns constitutes our basic geometry, no less (Moya 1984). They are our metaphor.

Let us retain, then, a motto, which is easy to articulate: that the ideas of society, nation-state, and citizen-individual are modern—and only modern—products and projects, and that the search for them organizes and colonizes our subjectivity.

The Construction of the Lettered City: Beautiful, Unsoiled Gardens . . .

But not everything works equally well everywhere: the modern form of government, that which since the eighteenth century finds in the population its object and its product, that has in the nation-state and the citizen-individual its most cherished creatures . . . extends everywhere, but in different ways. This work of colonization of reality thus has its historicity and its territoriality. Or in other words: the history of the invention of society in Europe is not the same—even though it might be similar—as the history of that process in Latin America. The first involved combating the feudal state and its policy of gamekeepers (Bauman 1987), who managed their dominions with careless unhurriedness: they carefully took care of basic pruning, but let wildlife flourish unchecked; they protected the elementary principles of exclusion and inclusion from suffering major alterations but interfered only occasionally with what was included, and then only very leniently. It is in response to that gamekeeping policy that the government of the knowledgeable and knowledge as a leading force is established in old Europe (ibid.)—the modern government that organizes, enlightens, educates, that transforms the world and adapts it to the Plan, implementing the art of rational social life.

But this was not the case in the Americas: the state did not concern itself there (here) with replacing old gamekeepers; rather it imagined that its task required introducing gardeners to first plant civilizations, and then tend and cultivate them. These gardeners worked on a previous nothingness, filling it, enlightening it: “Modern culture is a garden culture. It defines itself as the design for an ideal life and a perfect arrangement of human conditions” (Bauman 1989, 92). Ángel Rama worked with the idea that the Latin American city was born from the execution of a plan that was not only enlightened but also literary. That city is a thing that results from the execution of a word in an age in which word and thing begin to get along, or at least to function together according to modern pacts. Latin America, an empty continent in the imaginary of the colonizer, was the ideal site for that recently formed coupling of words and things to start their life together off on the right foot: “Latin American cities have ever been creations of the human mind” (Rama 1996, 1). Virgin land, vast continent, tabula rasa, ex nihilo construction, perfect world, tamed by representation. A world begotten by reason; nothing can be more beautiful and clean: New Spain, New Helvetia, the Athens of the Plata, New León, New Berlin, the Switzerland of America, New Granada, New Paris. . . . The same but this time without errors. The modern order of representation in a state of paroxysm.

A prototype that is transferred onto reality. Design and plan (“ordering principle,” in Rama’s words), which governed that translation of the model onto the field; a script in the form of guidelines that are also the written word. Even today the results of that work of representation—because it is, indeed, representation that goes all out with the vacuum to be colonized—are strikingly efficient: cities are born, states are conceived, lots are neatly traced and well-plotted, what we call imaginaries are envisioned, pregnant with utopia, marked by the plan from which they were drawn and by the clauses that adorned it, including a certain obligation for the gardener to keep the lot free of weeds. This is relevant to the issue I am dealing with here—forced disappearance of persons in the 1970s—as it will condition a future that will continue to think of civilizing, maintaining, and cleaning. After all, that future, our present, is not that far from the origins.

Field Notebook: 5/10/2008, Viloria (Navarra). Inocuating [sic] Evil from Uruguayan Society

In Las Fuerzas Armadas al Pueblo Oriental (Vol. 1, La subversión), a book issued by the Junta of Commanders-in-Chief in June 1976, the series of (seven) objectives that formed the “strategy of the Joint Forces” are listed under the epigraph “Military Defeat.” Before attempting the last objective, the supreme attainment of order (in their jargon: “providing security for national development, co-participating in the drafting and implementation of the National Plan of Economic and Social Development and its sector programs”), there was another one that had to be fulfilled, which was key to the work of reorganizing, cleaning, and hygienic prevention. That is how it’s explained (“neutralizing the political apparatus of subversion and action in mass fronts”) and it is articulated around the peculiar—perhaps made-up—verb inocuate: (1) “inocuation of the political front”; (2) “inocuation of the labor front”; (3) “inocuation of the student front”; (4) “final inocuation of the political front, outlawing the Communist Party, the Socialist Party and all other Marxist groups.” Clean up? Inculcate? Civilize? Annihilate? All of the above?

Gardening work as hard at the core as any other effort of sociological engineering; powerful like them, and probably—why not?—in the minds of those who devised it even well-intentioned. And perhaps beautiful. Or at least routine. In any case, certainly not necessarily sinister but necessarily tidy: the gardener, as we all know, is in charge not only of designing the garden, but also of clearing out the weeds, of tending it patiently and with admirable persistence to keep what is inside its fences immaculate. That demands eliminating; but for a good cause.

Modernity in a state of paroxysm, society under the gaze of the engineer/gardener. Whose dream was that? Rama speaks of lettered men and that includes auditors, property registrars, economists, architects, geographers, journalists, lawyers, notaries, clerks, bureaucrats of the administration. . . . The list does not end there, i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction: Sociology from the Gut
• 1   A Catastrophe for Identity and Meaning: Forced Disappearance, Modernity, and Civilization
• 2   Activists of Meaning: Bringing Order to Ruins, Remaking Archives, and Undoing Traumas
• 3   Moral Techniques: Recovering Disappeared Identities through Forensic Anthropology
• 4   The Meaning-Preserving Machinery of the Grandmothers of Plaza de Mayo
• 5   Art and Science Struggling with the Absence of Meaning
• 6   Noisy Silences: The Testimonial Work of the Former Detained-Disappeared
• 7   Serious Parodies: “Children of” Inhabiting (More or Less Joyfully) the Absence
• 8   Transnationalization of the Detained-Disappeared, Social Creativity, and Other Unintended Consequences of Forced Disappearance
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Annex: List of Interviews Conducted
• Index