LAS PARTES: CAPACIDAD, LEGITIMACIÓN Y REPRESENTACIÓN 1 Dualidad de partes

‘how should even local, regional, or national memories be secured, structured, and represented?’ Andreas Huyssen

‘if war is to be opposed, we have to understand how popular consent to war is cultivated and maintained’ Judith Butler

Speaking at an academic conference in Buenos Aires in March 2014 the director of a museum in Córdoba spoke of the difficulties of getting ordinary Argentines to engage with the memory of the political violence of the 1970s and 80s. Asked what she did to address this lack of interest, Ludmila da Silva Catela replied that she took the memory of the violence into the street. Every Tuesday, da Silva Catela and her colleagues would line the walkways, alleyways and boulevards of Argentina’s second city with images and narratives of the desaparecidos. ‘If you are not going to come to the museum,’ she said, ‘then the museum will have to come to you!’

The notion of collective memory emerged in Sociology within a Durkheimian milieu. As a result, it was tied at its inception to the notion of social solidarity, and conceived as an organic and holistic phenomenon. Central to Maurice Halbwachs’ ([1925]) formulation was the idea that we remember within the frameworks of social groups, such as religion, class or the family (see chapter two). These frameworks provide definition to our memories and cohesiveness to such groups and society as a whole. This idea is no longer tenable. As da Silva Catela’s remarks make clear, collective memory does not function in this way in many societies today. There is something else going on here as well. Da Silva Catela’s comments reveal not only the pluralism of interpretations about the shared but contested recent violent past. They attest to the difficulties some human rights groups experience as ‘memory entrepreneurs’ (Jelin 2003:33) in getting others to reckon with this past. For many of these ordinary Argentines, such

interpellations may be unbidden and reach them unwelcome. This aspect has yet to be properly worked through. Recent scholarship in memory studies has problematised many of the early assumptions that underpinned collective memory (see chapter two). Yet, there remains conceptual space for the critical engagement of the relationships between memory, mourning and politics. We lack a conceptual architecture with which to analyse and

understand how the potential for a violent recent past to be taken up and remembered by a wider society is linked, and even regulated, by the way this memory is framed.

In this chapter, I wish to outline the theoretical framework that underpins this thesis. My aim is to work towards a theory of collective memory as operating within an expanded field of representability. To do so, I propose to select from the existing scholarship on the politics of memory and to read this alongside the work of a critical social theorist whose ideas are seldom broached in this field. Borrowing from Judith Butler’s work on the Frames of War (2006 [2004]) and reading this in conversation with Andreas Huyssen’s (2003) and Jenny Edkins’ (2003) scholarship on expanded discursive fields and the politics of the missing respectively, I want to suggest that the notion of collective memory as an expanded field in which the frames of the memory of violence operate alongside norms of recognition towards particular logics of memory provides us with a new and penetrative vocabulary for thinking through the memory of the disappeared in Argentina. In particular, I want to suggest that it offers me a way to think again and more critically about what happens in a post-conflict society when groups compete to represent and regulate the memory of the recent violence in such a way as to secure wider support and legitimacy for their chosen interpretation of the past as a means of delineating the parameters of the political future.

In this chapter, I introduce the concept of the political logic of memory. This idea will become central to the broader thesis as I go on to navigate the construction of collective memory of the forced disappearances of the 1970s and 80s among Argentinians today, using the Parque de la Memoria as a prism to guide me. By political logic of memory, I take to mean the set of internal organising principles that govern the set of representations, discourses and practices through which meaning is attributed to the recent violent past and a project for a future politics is delineated. The concept of a logic, and a political logic, calls attention to the way that the collective memory of a society, although dynamic, contested and plural, is not a random constellation. Rather, beginning in this chapter and throughout this thesis, I hope to show how the construction and re-construction, configuration and re-configuration of collective memory in Argentina is organised according to two political logics that inform and underpin what are often exhilaratingly novel and innovative cultural, social and political interventions among human rights actors operating within this field as to how the past might be read, re-read, written, re-written, represented and thus remembered. The central claim that I shall want to make is that Argentine collective memory has a cultural biography in which it operates according to two political logics of memory. And that these logics can be understood as regulating the memory of the disappeared not in accordance with the logic of the human rights actors but that of society.

I proceed in four stages. Firstly, I introduce the work of Judith Butler on Frames of War (2006, 2010) as frames that operate in a symbiotic relationship with what she calls ‘norms of

recognition’ within an overall ‘field of representability’. Critically appraising Butler’s theory on the grievability of lives, I show how the idea of the frames of the memory of violence provides a penetrative vocabulary for thinking through the complex relationship(s) between memory, mourning and politics in a post-conflict society such as Argentina. I deepen the notion of memory as situating within a visual and discursive field by turning to Andreas Huyssen’s (2003) work in part two. In part three, I consider Jenny Edkins’ (2011) argument that there are two ways of doing politics when persons go missing, and use this as the basis to tease out the importance of the concept of the political logic of memory. I conclude by trying to bring the field, frames and political logics of memory back together.