Emotional intensity and polar oppositions are well-known characteristics of Argentine political culture. Alejandro Grimson (2007) pointed out that Argentine is indeed framed by a ‘dichotomy matrix’ of several oppositions (Buenos Aires/Provinces, Whites/Blacks, Boca/River, Civilization/Barbarism). For sure, hitherto, all these oppositions crossed the country, especially the capital, Buenos Aires. Those born around 1990 were impinged upon by some of these oppositions in a particular temporal form: firstly, as a critical ‘before and after’ when remembering the economic crisis of 2001 (the nineties becoming polluted); then through the opposition between perpetrators and sacral/heroic victims of the last dictatorship via the new process of collective remembering in Nestor Kirchner’s government; and later through the renewal of the Peronist-anti-Peronist opposition, thereby framing
their repertories of evaluation and dividing their young organizations into adherents or opponents.
Those divisions might be mitigated in the future when new events unleash new narrative plots. Indeed, as I recounted in previous chapters, the eighties illusion concerning ‘true’ democracy was recounted later as disillusionment in an ironic plot.
Nonetheless, when I asked my young respondents about the future, the last division continues along two different projective lines: on the one hand, it appears as a hope of continuing to be committed to social justice. Here an intergenerational connection is fostered by linking political projects from the forties (classical Peronism), seventies (youth militancy) or eighties (the recovery of democracy) with their own civil or political engagement. On the other hand, it reveals itself either as a fear of being affected by a new crisis or being involved in a precarious and unstable economy (the ghost of a new crisis or hyperinflation). In the latter case, the symbolic weight of the ‘economic memory’ which circulates mainly in family conversations and the mass media is evident.
As a result, a cyclical sense of time was predominating by the time of my fieldwork, either as the eternal promise of a return to social justice or as the incessant burden of old nightmares. The cyclical emplotment (the eternal return of past divisions) might be considered the central evaluative clause of their narratives. The neoliberal project of the nineties was linked to the last dictatorship, the economic crisis brought back parents’ stories of hyperinflation, the first years of the Kirchners’ government brought back the canonical heroic tragedy of the seventies generation, and with the farm crisis, the country was marked by classical Peronist divisions and their emblematic figures (Figure 6). Not surprisingly, the ‘we’ of this generational narrative barely emerged since they better understood themselves as connected to past or social divisions (for instance, Luna, Luisa, and Natalia generally said: we middle-class young people). As I will show in the next chapter, this situation contrasts sharply with the widespread use of ‘we, our generation’ in the Chilean young generational site.
Figure 6 Cyclical plot-line
Every new event not only revived and linked some past circumstances, but also modified the image of past events. In this sense, the nineties became more evil after Kirchner’s hyperbolic narrative, and the hyperinflation more crucial, since it anticipated a repetitive nightmare; the seventies generation more heroic and exemplar for present political struggles, and the emergence of Peronism in the forties more central to understanding Argentina’s current political divisions. Last but not least, a popular market-oriented historiography has emerged in recent years (creating an extensive young audience) that attempts to recount an ever-lasting Argentine history of decadence as well Argentina’s willingness to overcome difficult constellations.82 The 200th bicentenary of the nation might have invigorated myths of ‘patriotism’ as well as of ‘decadence’ (Grimson 2012a).
Being entangled in a cyclical emplotment may require a special form of performativity: collective rituals. The latter are social performances par excellence where repetition and circularity take place (Alexander 2004, Giesen 1999, Turner 1995). The sequence of commemorations (of the dictatorship, national independence, as well as of 17 October) enhanced such an order of temporality. These commemorations were not only state-official commemorations but attended by thousands of people who occupied the public space. Furthermore, from the
82 See the reaction of official historiography and the emplotment of this ‘popular’ literature in Seman et al. 2007.
Malvinas/Falklands War to the commemoration of the AMIA bombing, different rituals of mourning invaded Buenos Aires’ streets and squares. Ultimately, the economic crises – from the hyperinflation to the meltdown of 2001 – were experienced as a liminal process.
Hence it would be not an overstatement to affirm that Buenos Aires city is an extremely ritualized society in terms of its massive and emotive performances within the public space. Every week groups demonstrate with songs and flags: students, teachers, gays and lesbians, trade unions and so forth at Plaza de Mayo or National Congress Square. Every football event is also experienced as a ritual (Boca Juniors stadium is regarded worldwide as the cathedral of football). Finally, the principal activity of family, friend and college meetings is a ritual of meat sacrifice (the grill).
To sum up: if a cyclical emplotment requires highly collective ritualization, this is a beautiful case in point to prove it within modern societies.
Chapter 6
Santiago de Chile, 1986–1994: Generational disruption and the romantic plot
The present research aims to understand three sociological phenomena: firstly, the generational building of two age-groups in Chile and Argentina by means of their shared stories. My initial interest lies in examining how ordinary individuals connect their life stories by drawing on different public events experienced within their generational site. This synchronic approach is, secondly, complemented with a more diachronic dimension in which these stories are related (i.e. confronted, assimilated, compared) to social memories of older emblematic pasts (in particular right-wing dictatorships). By conducting interviews with people who grew up in post-dictatorial contexts, I have thus examined how these difficult pasts are recovered in order to create links with their respective generational narratives. Finally, both aspects are informed by narrative mechanisms, whereby biographical, generational and public stories are emplotted and evaluated. Contentious processes of meaning attribution and the role of canonical generations have hitherto been crucial for the modes of circulation of these narratives.
In the third and fourth chapters, I examined biographical accounts of people who grew up in Buenos Aires and Santiago de Chile during the eighties. The aim was to introduce the stories circulating about the recovery of democracy in both countries - as defining events of their formative years - and follow sequences of disillusion and disenchantment. In Chapter Five I introduced narratives of young Argentineans in order to show how new political narratives – the canonization of the seventies generation in terms of a heroic tragedy as well as the revival of Peronism as a triumphant memory – invigorate, via collective rituals, the connection between past events and youth politicization.
All the narrative plots visualized (nostalgic, comical, consoling and cyclical) foster continuity between the generations, since ‘canonical generations’ maintain control over historical narratives and symbolical – temporal – boundaries. In Buenos Aires, the weight of the tragic past (either the dictatorship or the ‘nineties’) reinforces the linkage between generations via the widespread mission of collective remembering as well victimization as the main mechanism of intergenerational bonding. Among the older Chilean cohort, the canonical narrative of democratic transition promotes a future-oriented narrative (leave the past behind and look towards the future),
thereby gradually unleashing disenchantment along with past promises of truth and justice. Eventually, a consoling plot predominates. In the three cases there was an absence of the most ascribed characteristics of generations: novelty, breaking and disruption, or in other terms, generations as a mechanism of cultural creativity (Fietze 2009).
The present chapter provides for a counter-case to this trend of ‘generational continuity’ when offering an example of generational disruption. This chapter deals with stories circulating within the generational site of people born in Chile at the end of the eighties and the beginning of the nineties (1986-1992), i.e. people who grew up in a democratic context after 17 years of dictatorship. Two features are very salient here: a strong student movement critical of the educational system which has evolved since 2006, and a subtle reaction to the ‘communicative silence’ concerning the dictatorship. My analysis will show the extent to which both social events are connected.
The linkage of such a ‘bitter past’ with the cycle of student mobilization deserves special attention. If classical generational approaches are nourished by progressive emplotments – in which the ‘horizons of expectation’ are disentangled from older
‘spaces of experience’, to draw on Koselleck’s terms, – the increasing weight of tragic narrativity in contemporary regimes of temporality (Alexander 2002, Eder 2005, Huyssen 2003, Olick 2007) might generate some kind of tension within this progressive sense of disruption. Indeed, I wonder why, in the Argentine context, the tragic narrative stimulates continuity as well as high youth political activism (the cyclical plot), whereas in the Chilean case a more ‘acrimonious’ and conflicting story predominates.
For this chapter I draw on 18 narratives interviews conducted in 2012 and ten autobiographical reports written in the same year. This is the only case for which I could gather written reports (see 2.1.1, footnote 19). The chapter is structured chronologically, from the transmission of the last dictatorship to the great wave of protests in 2011.