| Summary: | The Chilean Commission for Truth and Reconciliation noted that, "it is
absolutely essential that we understand the crisis of 1973...in order to
understand how the subsequent human rights violations we were charged to
investigate came about."1 This thesis is one attempt to take that admonition
seriously. The human body's role in the creation and maintenance of modern
social reality is a complex issue; however, the careful examination of a society in
crisis will illuminate some of the body's elemental connections with the broader
social sphere. To trace these connections, I examine the manner in which open
political conflict dismantles, on material and representational planes, the overt
manifestations of civil society, in essence making it subjectively unreal. As civil
strife intensifies, there is less shared representational and material space. The
absence of a broad consensus about the constituent elements of social reality
is, in fact, the absence of social reality itself.
It is my contention that the erosion of the multiple material and
ideological elements that constituted Chilean social reality that occurred during
President Salvador Allende's government was not halted by the Junta that
seized power on September 11, 1973. The civil conflict that was literally
deconstructing Chilean's lived realities was reconfigured on a mythic plane by
the Junta and the resulting social reality was then militarily imposed on the
subject population. The Junta's version of reality, was radically different from the experienced reality of the subject population. The Junta used excessive
violence as a means to bring external reality into correspondence with its
precepts. The Junta's violence generated further discourses that doubled back
in defence of their initial premises.
The late 1960s and early 70s was a period of intense civil unrest in Chile.
Public manifestations social strife were brought to an abrupt end by a violent
military coup. The Chilean military Junta used torture and disappearance as a
means of maintaining political control of the country and its citizenry. Political
violence is an intriguing phenomena because it usually involves behaviour that
is unrelated to the actor's espoused ideological goals. The physical human body
serves to bridge the disparity between act and purpose. There are innumerable,
trans-cultural instances where actual human bodies, rather than their
representations, are mobilised as a means of attesting to the veracity of nonmaterial
ideas. The literal physicality of the human body is used as an
analogical device in order to imbue ideas with a material form.
In order to install its version of reality, the military creates two
geographically contiguous but radically different landscapes. The first presents
an experiential image of social peace while the second is filled with bestial
violence. Both of which are dependent upon and defined by the other. The
National Stadium functions as an icon and a manifestation of the Junta's
mythological construction of reality, while for the subject population it is the
clearest symbol of the repressive nature of the military regime and the fearful
and disconcerting social reality they are forced to endure. The Stadium was a means by which the Junta brought into material reality their vision of social
reality, for example it served to make visible the presumed, but unseen,
terrorists that threatened the nation. By literally making materially real, through
the application of violence, what was, in fact, wholly imaginary, the Stadium
served to demetaphorise the Junta's discourse. It is through that
demetaphorisation that the subject population glimpsed the covert apparatus of
repression that became generalised throughout the Junta's reign.
[Footnote reads] 1 Report of the National Commission on Truth and Human Rights Volume 1. Trans Phillip E. Berryman. (Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press, 1993), 47. === Arts, Faculty of === Geography, Department of === Graduate
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