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Spatial juxtaposition and temporal imagery in postdictatorship culture

2009; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 18; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/13569320902819752

1469-9575

Susana Draper,

Latin American Literature Studies

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1 As David Harvey says, this ‘new freedom’ gained through de-regulation sets up the conditions of a market ‘free’, that is, ‘liberated’ from the pressures of workers unionism, labor laws, social protests, etc. (2006: 12). 2 Alexandra Barahona de Brito Brito, Alexandra Barahona de. 1997. Human rights and democratization in Latin America: Uruguay and Chile. Oxford studies in democratization, Oxford: Oxford University Press. [Google Scholar] carries out a careful analysis of the processes of transition in Chile and Uruguay and proposes that there is a certain similitude between them. She argues that in both cases (and different from Argentina, for example), the transition is negotiated without mediating the certain failure of the dictatorship, something that allows the repressors to actively participate in (or, one may say determine) the re-democratization process. In this sense, they still have a certain ‘legitimacy’ that will mark the impunity of the State crimes beforehand. However, we also need to invoke the multiple differences with respect to the measures that were taken later concerning the juridical decisions over the past (e.g., the referendum and plebiscite in Uruguay that could not take place within the frame of the Chilean ‘protected democracy’). At the same time, an analysis of the proximities and differences between the Chilean ‘protected democracy’ and the still controversial and nearly ‘secret’ pact that took place at the Club Naval in the Uruguayn case (a pact in which an impunity to the perpetrators was agreed) is still to come. For a very complete analysis of the ‘transactions’ between Sanguinetti and the military, see Gabriel Pereira's Pereira, Marcelo. 1985. 1980–1984, Operación Sanguinetti, Montevideo: Centro Uruguay Independiente. [Google Scholar] Operación Sanguinetti. 3 Gruen came to America to escape the Nazis and considered the city in close relation to an ideal of democracy that America had to fulfill. Although he is considered to be the founder of the concept of the mall, he returned to Europe, disenchanted by the way his ideal was converted into enclaves of consumerism and the corporate takeover of small-scale retail. For a detailed analysis of Gruen's invention, see Jeffrey Hardwick Hardwick, Jeffrey M. 2003. Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream, Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania Press. [Google Scholar], Mall Maker: Victor Gruen, Architect of an American Dream (2004); for an analysis of Gruen's utopian ideas within the Cold War context, see Timothy Mennel's Mennel, Timothy. 2004. Victor Gruen and the Construction of Cold War Utopias. Journal of Planning History, 3: 116–50. [Google Scholar] ‘Victor Gruen and the Construction of Cold War Utopias’ (2004). 4 The military aspect of the mall has yet to be emphasized. Hardwick mentions it as part of the idealism of the invention, but remarks that it was a civil defence failure. Mennel analyses in depth the process of thinking about the mall in relation to the constitution of what he calls the ‘cold war utopia’, as well as to the problems and threats brought about by the wars and the fear of an air attack. Based on Gruen's documents, Mennel traces the double fantasy that constituted the mall as being both the site for ‘magical consumption’ in an ‘administered heaven’ and the peaceful ‘shelter’ where communities would be protected in the event of a foreign attack. 5 An article on the set of paradoxes that pervade Gruen's ‘ideas’ around the process of malling has yet to be written. For the moment, let us just point out that although Gruen charged malls with many dreams of control, he then complained, as the mall became a familiar structure on the metropolitan landscape, about the disappearance of the city and the machine-like life that the new urban configuration was producing. 6 Temperature controls would become associated with a whole imaginary of the mall as the site for ‘endless’ consumption, as if the end of contingency (rain, snow, cold, etc.) were also the end of the ‘passing’ of time. It is interesting to remember how much attention Benjamin paid to temperature in his Arcades, where the gallery was a refuge from an outside (something essential, for instance, in Cortázar's play with the gallery in ‘The Other Heaven’). However, in the mall the key is not only to provide refuge but also to generate an ideal atmosphere in which, as the ads promoting this form said, the mall was ‘the promise of an eternal spring’. Many advertisements for the grand opening of Southdale express the idea that linked temperature to eternal consumption: ‘New Shopping Center to Make its Own Weather!’ or ‘Every day will be perfect shopping day’ (in Mennel 129). 7 Besides his work on housing plans, this ideal may have contributed to his receiving the Presidential Medal of Freedom from President Bill Clinton in 1995. Rouse worked for the Eisenhower and Reagan administrations. 8 The process of malling in Montevideo is an exemplary instance of this temporalization: the first shopping mall was inaugurated with the city's own name (Montevideo Shopping) and it opened its doors in 1985, a month after the inauguration of the first presidency after the dictatorship. However, as Sandino Núñez Núñez, Sandino. 1993. Introducción ácida a la ciudad posletrada. La República, Montevideo, 29 Oct. 1993: La República de Platón: 4–5. [Google Scholar] stated, Montevideo Shopping was camouflaged by the Sanguinetti administration, as if its existence could not yet be celebrated as the new symbol of a future (2). It was after the decision to forgive the military crimes that the ‘boom’ of malls began to operate as the celebration of the ‘país del futuro’. At this moment, shopping malls became the symbol of a new era that had come to terms with the past and was ready to face the future. This was expressed by the urban transformation: in 1989 Montevideo Shopping was expanded, and in 1994 three new shopping centers opened their doors, one of them being Punta Carretas. 9 Moulian distinguishes between the failure of the ‘caracol’ form, the preferred shopping mall design of the late seventies, and the absolute success of the shopping malls endowed with ‘style’ and kitsch. I read this difference in terms of the imminent role of fantasy and utopianism that is at the genesis of the mall. 10 ‘Lifting’ is used here in the sense of a face-lift, the aesthetic surgery in which the wrinkles of the skin are lifted to hide one's age and the passing of time. 11 I have in mind the projects carried out by the firm Juan Carlos López & Associates, a group of specialists in malling that won many prizes for specializing in this kind of project, and for designing a site's new structure that was temporally juxtaposed in a sequence between its former and present state. Thus, the city was ‘restored’ through the recycling of old buildings to create new malls. The company is internationally renowned, having won many awards for its designs from the International Council of Shopping Centers. Most of the firm's awards have been given for refunctionalizing (or malling) old buildings. The first ‘design award’ was given to Patio Bullrich Shopping Center, one of the first two malls in Buenos Aires, opened in 1988 and awarded in 1990. The second was given to Alto Palermo in 1992, and the third to Galerías Pacífico, another juxtaposition of the mall's structure to a very old building that had various functions. The next two awards were given in the same year to Punta Carretas Shopping Center in Montevideo (the prison-mall) and Patio Olmos Shopping Centers in Córdoba (the school-mall) in 1996. One year later, a certificate of merit was given for the Shopping del Sol in Asunción. This record of awards demonstrates the scope of the company's involvement in the malling process in the Southern Cone. Interestingly, most of the prizes are for designs created in order to ‘mall’ former structures that, in many cases, were symbols of the modern State. 12 Punta Carretas's walls have survived several dictatorships, from which to read fascism, in the 1930s and 1970s. Although its history is one of closure and death, it is also relevant to notice that there is another communal history that has been erased from the past of the place: in 1931, a group of anarchists under the supervision of Miguel Angel Rosigna, a key figure of the anarchism of action (then known as the first political disappeared in Argentina, in the fascism of the 1930s), escaped from its walls through a tunnel built from outside. In 1971, political prisoners who belonged to the MLN-Tupamaros escaped from Punta Carretas's walls through a tunnel dug from within the prison, and then, in 1972, through a tunnel built from the outside. After the escapes, the authorities built the Penal de Libertad, that is, the Penitentiary of Freedom, a high-security prison for political prisoners that was named, cynically, ‘freedom’ (even though its name refers to the city in which it was situated). Most of the male political prisoners were transferred there, where they were held captive for a decade until ‘amnesty’ was granted. After the last prisoners' release, the site was closed as a symbol of massive, prolonged physical and psychological torture. The Penal de Libertad has been known by doctors as a site of experimentation for new methods of psychological torture, something that enables us to read the closure of the place during the transition as a way of bringing closure to these memories and the people involved in them. Interestingly enough, when Punta Carretas was a prison in 1986, it was closed and the prisoners there were transferred to the Penal de Libertad, which was especially re-opened to take them in after the common prisoners in Punta Carretas had staged a revolt. So, contrary to what happened in other places such as Argentina or Chile (‘ESMA’ or ‘Villa Grimaldi’), where the most horrendous sites of torture were closed and transformed (although problematically) into ‘sites for the memory’, this monument has been re-opened as a prison, while Punta Carretas was transformed into a shopping mall. As the members of SERPAJ (Service of Peace and Justice) said, the re-opening of Libertad was part of the process of impunity that took place during these years because the place was a symbol of torture and human rights violations. The same can be said about the conversion of Punta Carretas, which was bought by a corporation, some of whose members were key figures in the transition (the Minister of Interior, then Julio María Sanguinetti's juridical partner, the president of the transition, and the Minister of Culture during the dictatorship). 13 For an analysis of how the past operates as a reminder and threat, without which the ‘task’ of the dictatorship would not be accomplished, see Levinson (2001a Levinson, Brett. 2001a. “Pos-transición y poética: el futuro de Chile Actual”. In Pensar en/la posdictadura, Edited by: Richard, Nelly and Moreiras, Alberto. Santiago: Cuarto Propio. [Google Scholar]; 2001b Levinson, Brett. 2001b. The Ends of Literature. The Latin American ‘Boom’ in the Noeliberal Marketplace, Stanford: Stanford UP. [Google Scholar]). 14 I do not have space here to emphasize the role of the unheimlich – in Freud's account, a quintessentially urban experience – in the literature of Punta Carretas mall that I explore elsewhere also in relation to Anthony Vidler's classic Architectural Uncanny. 15 The transformation of Punta Carretas was carried out in different stages. First, the mall was officially inaugurated in July, 1994. After this, a Hotel Sheraton was built and a tunnel was created to connect the mall with the hotel. As part of the subsequent expansion, a twelve-theatre cineplex was incorporated into the mall. 16 Quoted in http://www.reduruguaya.com/departamentos/montevideo/puntacarretas.asp. 17 Quoted in http://www.reduruguaya.com/departamentos/montevideo/puntacarretas.asp. 18 The slogan ‘En Punta Carretas… ¡te vas a enamorar!’ was placarded throughout the city as the date of the opening of the mall drew near. At the same time, a television ad used a bolero to depict the new space as a site in which all the contingencies and problems of life were to be resolved; interestingly, the weather was one problem that was primarily targeted: ‘Where do people go when it rains? To Punta Carretas shopping!’ 19 At the same time, as Andrew Benjamin states in his Architectural Philosophy, the role of repetition becomes the central problem at stake in the development of a critical architecture that aims at suspending the habitual repetitions made possible by space. 20 Townley's house is also discussed in Pedro Lemebel's De perlas y cicatrices. 21 To put it in Deleuzian terms, the problem of the image has to do with a critique of certain images of thought that correspond to systems of representation based on resemblance, identity and subjects of representation. Indeed, the problem faced in section N of the Arcades dramatizes a battle against the reading of history that does not pay attention to the ‘differentials of time’ as a manner of thinking that would question the very process of its ‘actualization’. 22 In this sense, instead of memory, images pose before us the problem of how to think through multiple and dislocated temporalities that problematize the very sense of a subject and the subject's memory. Following this, I think that an insistence on how to think of and bring forth the problem of time implies a problematization of the narrative unities that the transition of power produced through the normalization of violence. The antithesis to the way the politics of memory does not call into question the unities that the residual problematizes would be the possibility of reaching what Alberto Moreiras Moreiras, Alberto. 1999. Tercer espacio. Literatura y duelo en América Latina, Santiago: Arcis-LOM. [Google Scholar] posed as a ‘third space’, meaning that very instance opened up by the residue of a practice of reading whereby ‘the texts “react” against an understanding because they ponder about a punctum, a scar, a laceration’ (45; my translation). When thought about in relation to the problem of finitude and loss, the path of the ‘third space’ points to a possible re-thinking of history that would reject the frame of reference in which ‘objects’ of memory operate as such because this path problematizes the way in which history is linked to presence being ‘present’ before a ‘subject’. 23 In her analysis of the role of the image in Adorno (historical image) and Benjamin (dialectical image), Susan Buck-Morss Buck-Morss, Susan. 1977. The Origin of Negative Dialectics. Theodor W. Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and the Frankfurt Institute, New York: Free Press. [Google Scholar] shows how these constellations tried to problematize contradiction and tension among different elements instead of resolving them through a sublation (1977: 102).