The Memory of the National and the National as Memory

The Memory of the Social and the Chilean Coup

My hypothesis implies a relative and perhaps paradoxical displacement of two of the main objects of what could be considered the intersecting fields of political research and memory studies on the Chilean process of the past 40 years. In this view, Chilean culture was seen as insistently remembering the 1973 Pinochet coup and the dictatorial violence that followed it, on the one hand, and then living and analyzing a long transition toward democracy. If my hypothesis is correct, however, what was being remembered or memorialized was, at least from a global perspective, less that political trauma and transition (now turned into symptoms of a broader configuration) than a violent, global, and no less decisive transformation. Before I go on to develop this idea, and in order to understand how it differs from and is linked to memory studies, I will use the work of Elizabeth Jelin, Steve Stern, and Nelly Richard as points of reference.

Steve Stern’s trilogy The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile uses the idea of a memory box—both the holder of multiple, often contradictory and partial accounts of the past and the object of struggles aiming at closing or opening such consideration of the past—to explain the emergence of a memory impasse in Chile. Such an impasse was beyond the simple binary of memory/forgetting and included active efforts to forget as well as the obstinate presence of the memory of horror and rupture on both the political left and the right. In addition to Stern’s useful postulation of a link between individual and social memories through the positing of “emblematic memories,” memories capable of shaping the meaning and value of other narratives, and beyond his insightful description of four memory frameworks in Chile (“salvation, rupture, persecution, and awakening” [2006: 145]), what I would like to rescue from his work here is his highlighting of one of the results of the Chilean memory impasse: “not so much a culture of forgetting as a culture that oscillated—as if caught in moral schizophrenia—between prudence and convulsion” in its efforts to overcome and deal with the legacy of the Pinochet years (xxix).

Steve Stern’s trilogy The Memory Box of Pinochet’s Chile uses the idea of a memory box—both the holder of multiple, often contradictory and partial accounts of the past and the object of struggles aiming at closing or opening such consideration of the past—to explain the emergence of a memory impasse in Chile. Such an impasse was beyond the simple binary of memory/forgetting and included active efforts to forget as well as the obstinate presence of the memory of horror and rupture on both the political left and the right. In addition to Stern’s useful postulation of a link between individual and social memories through the positing of “emblematic memories,” memories capable of shaping the meaning and value of other narratives, and beyond his insightful description of four memory frameworks in Chile (“salvation, rupture, persecution, and awakening” [2006: 145]), what I would like to rescue from his work here is his highlighting of one of the results of the Chilean memory impasse: “not so much a culture of forgetting as a culture that oscillated—as if caught in moral schizophrenia—between prudence and convulsion” in its efforts to overcome and deal with the legacy of the Pinochet years (xxix).

Elizabeth Jelin’s (2002) Los trabajos de la memoria, the first volume of a series of edited books entitled Las memorias de la represión, provides an excellent panoramic view of memory studies in connection with political violence. In addition to an emphasis on the active nature of the memory processes associated with political violence—through concepts such as the work of memory, the need to learn to remember, and the struggles between dominant, official, and suppressed or unofficial memories—and the multiplicity of agents, critical points in time (commemorations), and loci of memory, Jelin distinguishes between operative narrative memories, capable of endowing the past with a functional meaning, and traumatic or wounded memories, which cannot find a narrative meaning and manifest themselves as symptoms in a never-ending process of mourning. In a similar vein, Patricio Marchant has referred to the 1973 military coup that frames the periodization of contemporary Chile (before, during, and after) as a “coup against representation,” a radical perturbation of ways of thinking and speaking about the social. This break in signification, Idelber Avelar (1999), Alberto Moreiras (1993), and Nelly Richard (2006) have insisted, defines the space of the postdictatorship and poses the challenge of finding an alternative to the responses already offered: the expert and accommodating answers of the social sciences, the communist efforts to refurbish epic past languages, and the indifference of consumers in the market.

For Richard that language is provided by the artistic and literary Chilean avant-gardes who respond to the categorical disaster of the coup and the loss of meaning of the social with an insistence on not losing sight of the meaning of the loss itself. Following the work of Moreiras on postdictatorial thought, Richard (2004 [1998]: 22) characterizes the cultural horizon of the Chilean postdictatorship thus:

The postdictatorial condition is expressed as a “loss of object” in a definite situation of “mourning.” . . . The melancholic dilemma between “assimilating” (remembering) and “expelling” (forgetting) traverses the postdictatorial horizon, producing narratives divided between a muteness—the lack of speech linked to the stupor of a series of changes that, given their velocity and magnitude, cannot be assimilated to the continuity of a subject’s experience—and overstimulation: compulsive gestures that artificially exaggerate the rhythm and signs to combat depressive tendencies with their artificial mobility.

Faced with this situation, the hegemonic Chilean culture of the postdictatorship has, in its effort to push for consensus, simultaneously exaggerated its novelty and its degree of rupture with the authoritarian past and hidden the non-new—the significant degrees of continuity of the legal structures created by the dictatorship and the postdictatorial governments’ policies. The political present is thus defined as a perverse mix of continuity and rupture.

In this quick review of a few important writers working on memory studies and political violence, there are a few crucial points that will interest me here: first, the oscillation between past and present in the definition of political life and its capacity to limit the imagination of the political horizon of the possible; secondly, the emphasis on narrative and social frameworks as determining the nature of memory; and, finally, the coexistence in the historical present of operative and traumatic narratives, sense making and interruption.

More generally, however, within memory studies the Chilean coup and its aftermath have traditionally been thought of as both exceptions to the rules and predictable brutal Southern Cone processes exclusively associated with right-wing military dictatorships and their human rights violations and excesses. This has generated very productive concepts and dynamics—such as the emergence of human rights as a global and national political issue, the cultures of transition to democracy and their manifold searches for the right combination of truth determination and political feasibility, and an acknowledgment of new political and social actors such as social movements, nongovernmental organizations, and women. Those memory studies, however, may have ended up obscuring another potential framework for an understanding of such political developments and human rights violations. I am proposing that the latter were only the most visible part of a much wider and all encompassing global process. Naomi Klein (2007: 7) has referred to the Chilean coup as “the first test” or the “birth pangs” of what she deems the shock doctrine of disaster capitalism, whereby in the guise of a crisis that requires extraordinary measures and taking advantage of the public’s disorientation and shock (in this case from violence and hyperinflation) a “rapid-fire transformation of the economy—tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation”—is imposed. Reading the history of global neoliberalism and referring to the paradigmatic influence of the Chilean case, David Harvey (2005: 9) concludes that it “provided helpful evidence to support the subsequent turn to neoliberalism in both Britain (under Thatcher) and the US (under Reagan) in the 1980s. Not for the first time a brutal experiment carried out in the periphery became a model for the formulation of policies in the centre.”

My hypothesis on the memory of the national and the national as memory adds a temporal dimension to such a consideration of the exemplarity of the Chilean case. This temporal dimension explains the tension between the present, the past, and the future and the cultural and political productivity of that tension.

If states, including the Chilean military dictatorship, use the “breakdown” of the political system and the figure of the “clean slate” as a founding narrative for a national memory capable of creating the foundational basis of their often authoritarian projects, then the postsocial is less a degree of rupture or a break than a form of permanent dialectic between the social past and the postsocial present. This in turn defines the future as an uncertain mix of loss, inevitability, and potential.

The Argument

At this point a restatement of my hypothesis may be in order. By “the social,” following Jacques Donzelot (1991), I understand simply the sphere of governmental intervention in society that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century—first in France and later more broadly—as a way of dealing with the tensions between right- and left-wing understandings of republicanism, stressing individual and collective rights, respectively. The social is a specific sphere of state intervention in the creation of solidarities that do not threaten the ultimate sovereignty of the voting people. Through the carving out of social solidarities as a specific sphere of governmental intervention, the state becomes an actor relatively separate from social relations and more of an arbiter or a “guarantor of social progress” (Donzelot, 1991: 173). By increasingly extending the realms of the social, the state became the welfare state, a social democratic compromise between liberal democracy and socialism, both a way of increasing opportunity for the actual exercise of individual freedoms and a way of reducing social risk and market irrationality by promoting social security. The welfare state administered the social for close to a century, but it is now clearly under attack. The steady neoliberal creation of a new political and social “common sense” has taken full advantage of the tensions between the claims of the welfare state and its impacted capacity to continue delivering the social goods it promised to all its citizens. Instead, the neoliberal new normal has imposed what, from a critical viewpoint, I am calling “the postsocial.” Thus by “post-social” I understand a social configuration that results from the transformation of the welfare state, with the end of its ethos of the social as a solidarity-based commitment administered by the state and its replacement by a competitive state whose rationality derives from the neoliberal version of the economy and whose ethos, instead of socializing and distributing risk in solidarity, individualizes and privatizes it. Obviously, the postsocial does not imply the disappearance of society, but it does involve its radical restructuring.

In the vast field of relations between the economy and culture, we have moved historically from a situation in which the economy was at the service of a certain social transformation defined by noneconomic (political, social, and cultural) values to a new scenario in which society is transformed at the pace signaled by economic values. From societies endowed with certain economies and markets we have transitioned to market societies. This transition and transformation have involved a form of memory practice present in both larger political and everyday life. A certain form of organizing society that we called the social becomes, in the postsocial, the object of national memory. The social is nostalgically or achingly remembered in an insistent counterpoint with a new postsocial way of structuring experience, political horizons, and memory.

My hypothesis, then, is that if under conditions of neoliberal globalization the economy has seemingly phagocytized society—if it has transformed its values in the fusion of society and economy in so-called market societies—this process can and perhaps must be described as the shift from the social to the postsocial. This transition, the deeper and global transition of which the Chilean one was only one example, is defined by two complementary transformations: first, the new legitimation of zones of inequality, with their attendant internalized border zones, and the stabilization of zones of exception, and, secondly, the privatization of the memory of the social and its replacement by the form of forgetfulness and presentism produced by consumption. The first transformation refers to the organization and ends of the social, while the second is connected to the forms of organization of memory in postindustrial societies.

My thesis on the memory of the national (the history of the properly national moment for a given national society) and the national as memory (the extent to which the national itself is a link and an experience formed in and through memory) is therefore an attempt at seeing memory dynamics in the context of the permanent haunting of the postsocial (national as memory now) by the half-gone, half-present evocation of the social (memory of the national in the past). It is also an effort to insist that the postsocial is not an irreversible state but instead a condition open to powerful challenges by the reemergence of forms of social protest and organization of which the Chilean student movement of the past couple of years has been an inspiring example—an eruption and disruption stemming from a past capable of interrupting the totalizing nature of the present.

The Working of Memory in the Transition from the Social to the Postsocial

During the first 70 years of the twentieth century, the state found in the conjunction of industrial capitalism and the welfare state its main form of legitimation. It was the Keynesian compromise that gave workers salaries that allowed their consumption of goods in the economy, because it understood production and consumption as processes integrated within a spatial dynamics of coexis-tence in a particular national market and society. While the state at the time tended toward the universalizing expansion of social rights and social welfare, the same state searches now—in the context of a relative separation between power and politics—for a different form of legitimation. It finds it not in the provision of a modicum of security in the form of welfare for all its citizens but in the need to cut, for budgetary reasons, those services and often in the provision of police security and the exploitation of the fear of some citizens (the so-called taxpaying ones) of others, excluded or semiexcluded (the “tax-eating” ones).

This reterritorialization of the social, the political, and the cultural defines globally the social geography of the postsocial. Among its constitutive factors one could mention a privatization of social risk and its administration (in which pensions, social security, education, and many other social services once solidly established depend on each individual’s contributions and the vagaries of the financial market, with the ensuing increase in instability and anxiety); a change from an economy in which many of the good jobs were in manufacturing with high labor intensity to a postindustrial economy of services of less labor intensity; and thus a radical flexibilization of the labor force and with it a much higher tolerance for or even legitimation of inequality in the distribution and concentration of wealth. ¹

Instead of socializing and distributing risk in solidarity, the new dominant ethos individualizes and privatizes it, resulting in dynamics of both relative inclusion and exclusion affecting sizable sectors of the population and the stabilization of zones of exception concerning, most crucially, the young and poor. These zones of exception can be used to mobilize fear and distrust among the citizenry and confirm its spatial stratification in a territory crisscrossed by internal borders, dividing the social into subterritories in need of high surveillance (Poblete, 2012; Sánchez, 2006).

In this new postsocial condition, everyday life and its experience are constituted to a significant degree by the memory of a different form of the national and the social and by their constant contrast with their occlusion in the present. In the postsocial the sites of memory and the dynamics of evocation and loss are multiplied in such everyday occurrences as the visit to the doctor or the configuration of the workplace, the call to a customer service hotline or a stop at a government office. What we experience in each case is not a clear form of political violence or a blatant violation of our human rights but a diffuse discomfort that has slowly become more distinct. We collectively live—although this is surely different for those under and over 40—within the constant contrast between a sense of the way things used to be (and its memory) and the way things are now.

The second process that the transition from the social to the postsocial presupposes is the privatization of the memory of the social and its unsatisfactory replacement by forgetfulness in consumption. According to Bernard Stiegler (2010), to the extent that the industrial capitalism of production became the postindustrial capitalism of consumption that has now entered into the crisis of financial capitalism, that capitalism ended up phagocytizing the state and the economy itself. Whereas the state had been throughout the first two-thirds of the twentieth century the single agent in charge of adjusting the fit between the apparatus of economic production and the social system, toward the end of the century that state was sidelined by transnational and speculative capitalism bent on blaming the state for limiting its creative capacities—a predatory capitalism whose only horizon is the short-term and whose results are the proliferation of so-called externalities (from human to ecological consequences) and the incapacity to think an intergenerational horizon, with the attendant reduction of the economic to immediate speculation and the destruction of credit—of faith and trust in social investment in the social.

Whereas every true economy presupposes among the participants a commerce of savoir faire (knowledge of how to do) and savoir vivre (knowledge of how to live)—an exchange of life and creative materialized ideas—Stiegler sees contemporary capitalism as not properly an economy but an antieconomy, reduced as it is to monetary exchanges. This antieconomy leads to the destruction of savoir faire and savoir vivre, a mutation of the nature of work, and a functionalization of production, consumption, and social relations, now inseparable from the technological apparatus. For Stiegler, Plato was the first critic of proletarianization to the extent that he opposed the transfer of live forms of memory and experience to written discourse, a technology that, for him, alienated such memory. The process that leads us to transfer more and more of our human memory to machines (as manifested in everyday situations such as the autocorrection of spelling in the machine on which I am writing) is the last result of a broader process of proletarianization (a term that for Stiegler is not synonymous with economic impoverishment) that has at least three modern moments.

It began in the nineteenth century with the destruction of the savoir faire of workers (of their physical working gestures) by its transfer to machines, which made possible the creation of a proletarian labor force. It continued in the twentieth century with the destruction of the savoir vivre of workers qua consumers and has gone on now with the crisis of such forms of production and consumption in a generalized process of cognitive and affective proletarianization. In this process what is alienated to machines—what is externalized—is, in addition to savoir faire and savoir vivre, savoir theorizer, the capacity to think about our experiences and produce knowledge (Stiegler, 2010: 30). The proletarians of the muscular system, produced by the machine appropriation of their savoir faire, are now joined by the proletarians of the nervous system, who produce cognitive labor without controlling the knowledge thus produced. “Grammaticalization” is the name Stiegler gives to this externalization of memory in its various forms: bodily and muscular, nervous, cerebral, and biogenetic. Once grammaticalized, these different forms of memory can be manipulated by systems of biopolitical and sociopolitical control that regulate, in a “general organology,” the articulation of bodily organs (muscles, brain, eyes, genitals), artificial organs (tools and machines), and social organs (from the family to the nation as forms of organization of the social and its reproduction). From this viewpoint, proletarianization is, literally, a short circuit, an interruption and short-termism, a separation of the worker as producer (but also of the consumer as producer) from the control of the conditions of production and the products thus generated, and an interruption of what Stiegler calls transsubjective individuation, which is the goal of all real knowledge and experience.

I have thus identified a second distinctive dynamic of the experience of the postsocial national within my framework for an understanding of the national as memory today and the memory of the national in the past. While the first dynamic is the constant counterpoint between the postsocial present and the memory of a previous configuration of the social, the second is the articulation of a political economy with a libidinal economy that regulates both production and consumption, generating a series of negative externalities (from the destruction of nature to the disarticulation of the social environment, both the basic conditions of forms of individuation and sociality that are truly productive and sustainable) and what Nelly Richard (2006: 10) calls “technologies of dismemory.” At the national level the result of this double process—of re‑articulation of the social and alienation of memory, dominated by the short circuit and short-termism—is an incapacity for projecting the national (the memory of its savoir faire, vivre, and theorizer) as a long-term collective future. This, I think, is how the memory of the social national is activated and how the postsocial national is lived as counterpunctual memory.

Articulating Political and Libidinal Economies

Like the social—described by what Bruce Curtis (2002: 85) calls its “artefactual” character, “that it is a product of projects, practices, and techniques which equate and unify empirically disparate objects and relations”—the neoliberal postsocial is the result of active efforts at shaping the lives and souls of its citizens, multiple techniques and practices that help produce it and objectify it. Maurizio Lazzarato (2009: 109), analyzing what he calls “neoliberalism in action,” refers to some of the techniques that have helped transform society into “an ‘enterprise-society’, based on the market, competition, inequality, and the privileging of the individual.” They include the apparatus of financialization of the economy and society and strategies such as “individualization, insecuritization, and depoliticization used as part of neoliberal social policy to undermine the principles of mutualization and redistribution that the Welfare State and Fordism had promoted.”

I have elsewhere (Poblete, 2015a) analyzed two Chilean films of the past decade—Taxi para tres (2001) by Orlando Lübbert and Super: Todo Chile adentro (2009) by Fernanda Aljaro and Felipe del Rio—in order to highlight, first, that the invitation to consume and buy on credit in a context of significant social inequality produces subjects in debt, individuals whose “conduct, capacities, needs, aspirations and desires” (Schild, 2007: 179) are thus normalized; and, secondly, that the humanist critique of such a social configuration becomes internalized by that system’s ability to commodify everything, including dissent. I would like to conclude by analyzing two additional recent Chilean films that help explain the consequences and costs of such neoliberal techniques for the restructuring of the social and the production of the postsocial and its memory dynamics: Tony Manero by Pablo Larraín (2008) and Nostalgia de la luz by Patricio Guzmán (2010). The first will help us understand the psychic mechanisms behind the original neoliberal violence and its present aftereffects, while the second will be read as a reflection on the artifactualness of the production of memory in the contrasting contexts of the social and the postsocial in Chile. Both films vividly index the double process of rearticulation of the social and the attendant memory (and erasure of memory) dynamics implied by the neoliberal regime.

Tony Manero is one of the most radical Latin American film explorations of the deep social violence involved in the continental implantation of neoliberalism. While seemingly inscribed as yet another Third World reflection on the world of fandom, media consumption, and creative spectatorship in the midst of mass-mediated communication and social relations along the lines of Strictly Ballroom or Slumdog Millionaire, Tony Manero ends up offering a trenchant critique of neoliberalism as represented by the arrival in Chile of both a new model of society and a form of mass-mediated modernity that found in global Hollywood one of its main vehicles of reproduction.

Set in 1979, at the end of one of the most violent periods of repression of the Pinochet dictatorship and at the beginning of its institutionalization and attempted legitimization through both the drafting of a new constitution and the imposition of a new model of (market) society, a society for which competition and consumption will become the fundamental pillars and paradigms of all social relationships, Tony Manero is an extraordinary and disconcerting film experience. On the one hand, we as spectators cannot but identify, at least partially, with the main character and his underdog effort to perform as well as Tony Manero in Saturday Night Fever and win a TV contest of John Travolta look-and-dance-alikes. On the other, our repulsion over the multiple murders and crimes that this Chilean Manero feels obliged to commit in order to bankroll his artistic and creative endeavors forces us to see the much less glittering underside of the spectacle, its political and psychic unconscious. This is accomplished through an uncomfortable and disconcerting juxtaposition of the shiny world of fandom and creative emulation with the much grimmer, darker, and grainier world of poverty and brutal physical and social violence. The film, however, ends up not simply representing an external violent social and political reality but redefining its mode of filmic incorporation. Eventually, the violence for the spectator resides less in the crimes coldly perpetrated by this sociopath than in the psychic contrast or alternation between radically different genres that the film viewer is forced to activate and experience simultaneously. The result of this enactment of symbolic struggle and violence in the mind of the spectator is as close to an effective representation of the long-term and long-lasting historical violence inflicted by the dictatorship on Chilean society as any of the many films that have more realistically attempted to depict it. The reason is simple: rather than exploring a world out there, a historical experience preexisting its film representation, Tony Manero seeks to represent it through one of the psychic mechanisms that allowed for the simultaneous imposition of a market society predicated on the radical freedom of the uncoerced consuming individual and a brutal form of collective outward and inward violence, a reproduction of a call to live in the permanently glittering world of consumption in the here and now at the expense of any sense of historical memory or justice. Moreover, the film seeks to do so using a form of filmic cognitive dissonance that reinscribes the Hollywood encyclopedia of topics, genres, and styles into its real political economy in an attempt to represent in film the subordinated memories of Latin American experiences (Poblete, 2015b).

Nostalgia de la luz is the latest of a long and illustrious series of documentaries by Patricio Guzmán that explore the national memory process around the Chilean road to democratic socialism, its tragic end in September of 1973, the violent dictatorial aftermath, and the protracted postdictatorship period. This series has included La batalla de Chile, Salvador Allende, Chile la memoria obstinada, and El caso Pinochet. Guzmán’s latest film is a particularly honest and beautiful reflection on both documentary film as a practice, capable of rendering historical experience visible, and the technologies of memory and forgetting under neoliberal conditions that tend to obscure such experience or render it partial and inoperative.

The film is structured around the contrast between three forms of the here (spaces) and now (times) of the nation. There is, first, an almost mythical present in the past, when Guzmán was young and in Chile “Life was provincial. Nothing ever happened and the presidents of the Republic walked the streets without bodyguards. The present time was the only one that existed.” Then there is, by contrast, the almost unbearable present of the current neoliberal moment, a present defined by its incapacity to produce a coherent narrative of the historical memory of the nation and haunted by the never-ending search of those who seek to recover the bones of their disappeared relatives. As the documentary comes to a close, Guzmán concludes with a third form of the present: “I believe that memory has a force of gravity. It always attracts us. Those who have a memory are capable of living in the fragile present time. Those who don’t have one cannot live anywhere.” This third, fragile form of the present is paradoxically defined by its unique capacity to enable social action by effectively remembering the history of the nation, thus providing its subjects with a solid grounding for future action. Time as memory becomes the condition of any acceptable location or national spatiality.

The two dimensions, temporal and spatial, historical and geopolitical, are fully intertwined. Whereas Chile was once “an oasis of peace, insulated from the world,” history happened twice, via a revolutionary and a counterrevolutionary process. Both meant a displacement of the relevant spatialities and temporalities of the nation: “This quiet life came to an end one day. A revolutionary wind threw us in the middle of the world. . . . Later, a coup d’état swept democracy, dreams, and science away.” While, as Guzmán says right before the closing credits, “Every night, slowly, impassively, the center of the galaxy flies over Santiago,” the challenge of Nostalgia de la luz is how to comprehend the scales and coordinates of the nation, the scales of the times and places that allow a proper understanding of its global and cosmic history and location.

In order to do that, Guzmán turns his attention inward and outward: inward, on his own past and his desire to reconstruct the memory of the nation and on the affective life of those who search in the desert for their disappeared relatives or live with the legacy of those disappearances; outward, on the documentary genre itself and the many artifacts, instruments, knowledges, and strategies that allow human beings to both apprehend the connections between the past, the present, and the future and find their place in the world. In this exploration of both the documentary technologies for rendering the social visible and the transcendental categories of time and space that make possible the conceptualization of the experience of the nation, the Atacama Desert becomes a cypher figure of that nation. The desert is the location of multiple forms of life and their traces, from prehistoric times to contemporary human rights violations and scientific archaeological and astronomical explorations, including nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century commercial exploitation of saltpeter. It is also the scene of affective and political searches into and for the memory of the nation.

Turned into a text and a scene (“The transparent and thin air allows us to read this great open book of memory, page by page”), the desert functions as a memory box, holding both the record of the distant, mid-range, and recent past and the possibility and grounding of a future for the nation. The key connector is the fragile present, revealed now as always already penetrated by the past, a time/space construct produced as much by the instruments and knowledges that let us apprehend it as by the structure of our perceptual apparatus. In both cases, light mediates and allows the perception and understanding of the present time/space of Chile as always already a reflection and manifestation of the past, a present that exists only as memory.

The documentarist’s work—itself one more in a long line of knowledges and practices that produce the social national, including archaeology (the distant prenational past), history (the republican and postsocial past), and astronomy (the cosmic and global location of the nation)—must reveal the natural and social constructedness of all national times (past, present, and future) and their reliance on a “manipulation” of the data that always come from the past. From this viewpoint, all knowledges of the nation are memory practices. Like astronomers—who know that for their current perception of the universe through telescopes “the past is the great tool,” as the film states (to the extent that they analyze light that has taken a long time to reach us)—the documentary filmmaker must be able to learn from the professional knowledges of the archaeologist, the historian, and the astronomer on and for the manipulation and interpretation of the past. He must also combine the affective knowledges of those who suffered imprisonment in the desert but learned to survive by looking up at the sky or by preserving in memory the spatial dimensions of their concentration camp with the affective and memory practices of the relatives who search for their lost ones like astronomers of the land or archaeologists of the present and the future. Connecting these processes of memory and interpretation is necessary if the documentary filmmaker is to reveal the secret of the nation: that the present and thus the future are always already haunted and constituted by the past, always already memory processes.

Those instruments and knowledges reveal that, as much as the desert, the nation is a layered time/space for which memory processes are fundamental and constitutive, even in the midst of the neoliberal postsocial tabula rasa.

Conclusion

In a well-known essay on what he calls “irruptions of memory” and “expressive politics” in the Chilean transition to democracy, Alexander Wilde (1999: 475) defines the former as “public events that break in upon Chile’s national consciousness, unbidden and often suddenly, to evoke associations with symbols, figures, causes, ways of life, . . . associated with a political past that is still present in the lived experience of a major part of the population.” These irruptions, including political violence and the discovery of mass graves but also shows of force by the military and the Pinochet trial in London, were part of and challenges to the expressive politics of postdictatorship democratic governments. In rekindling the political struggles and forms of violence of the past and their memories, they reminded people of the limitations of actually existing democracy in Chile. They extended the duration of the transition by questioning the depth of the democratic regime and its moral authority, given the existence of “unreconciled memories of a divided past” (Wilde, 1999: 496) The student movements I mentioned before are another form of irruption of the past in the present, this time not of the dictatorial past but of the predictatorial epoch of the social, a time when accessible public education, proper political representation, and equality for all were seen not only as worth fighting for but as feasible political goals. Disrupting the hegemony of the possible under the postdictatorial transition, all three goals have now been centrally embraced by the current and significantly more radical second Michelle Bachelet presidential administration.

What my hypothesis about the postsocial has attempted to explain is another long-term transition of which the Chilean transition has turned out to be only a part, a form of “lived experience” based both on memories of the national qua social and on their contrast with the national as impacted memory under neoliberal postsocial regimes with their attending memory-administration machines. Consequently, I have attempted to highlight not the forms of past violence (military force and human rights violations) that we have come to identify with memory and political violence studies but the ever-present neoliberal violence and its self-articulation as an apparatus for the production and administration of social and individual memory. As a memory apparatus neoliberalism depended on a dual evacuation of historical time. Individuals in constant pursuit of personal satisfaction in a market society were pushed to shed the past so that the present could persist unchanged (the developed future being just a radical and massive extension through consumption of the trickling-down successes of the present as currently enjoyed by a few). But the historical social past was also recreated as simultaneously irrelevant and dangerous for such an extension. By definition any idea stemming from the social past (especially the socialist past) was deemed irrelevant for the present and future at the same time that it was conceived as threatening them (at best as a negative counterexample). A future-as-extended-present that could so decisively dispose of the past was then affirmed precisely on such radical erasure, always dependent on its radical newness.

What Tony Manero and Nostalgia de la luz allow us to see and experience anew is first the symbolic violence involved in the implantation of a present-oriented society of profit-maximizing individuals (what I have called here the post-social) and then that if this totalizing and dehistoricizing “now” has involved significant political, social, and cultural work invested in forgetting, its overcoming will require substantial countermemory work recalling the languages, practices, and cultural meanings of the social past. Those memories of multiple pasts and their daily counterpoint with the fabric of the present are both the source of Chile’s comfort and discomfort with its own form of modernity and the spring from which true challenges to the status quo may emerge.