The Documentary Remains of the Perpetrator: Texts and Images (Call for Papers Thémata 65, june 2022)
The Documentary Remains of the Perpetrator: Texts and Images
(Call for Papers Thémata 65, june 2022)
The figure of the victim has occupied a preeminent place in the memorialization processes developed in those national contexts whose past has been marked by the perpetration of mass crimes. Their testimony has made it possible to articulate narratives about the crimes, their experiences have been a motive for the creation of cultural representations, their memories have structured transitional justice processes and their documents have become historical evidence regardless of whether the violence suffered has been of a warlike, dictatorial, genocidal or terrorist nature. In contrast, the figure of the perpetrator, whether at the level of ideology, architecture, organization or execution of the crimes, has not received similar analytical attention. This is due, on the one hand, to a memorialistic need for the restitution of dignity, identity and humanity of the victims and, on the other hand, to the inapprehensibility and opacity that characterizes the figure of the perpetrator. However, the examination of the perpetrator in its context are fundamental for a more complex understanding of the perpetration of mass violence in which the perpetrator has played a leading role and of the processes of memory that derive from it. Not surprisingly, there has recently been a growing interest in the analysis of this type of figure within the framework of memory studies. The identities, actions, motivations, beliefs, ideological positions, statements, social configurations and cultural representations of the perpetrator have become objects of research capable of illuminating areas of societies marked by a violent past.
Despite the attention the figure of the perpetrator has received in Memory Studies, the perpetrator's documentary material has received limited attention so far. Usually, the perpetration of mass crimes, especially that framed within violent dictatorial regimes, left behind a large number of documents, both textual and audiovisual, on which the machinery of destruction was based. The reasons why the study of these perpetrator documents have been neglected are many and varied: some of those documents, that survived the destruction by the system that created them, were used as legal evidence in the judicial processes following the crimes, others became propaganda artifacts in the subsequent transitional processes. Many of these documents became historiographical sources, several became an integral part of cultural productions, others were transformed into museum objects or formed part of exhibitions and a large number of them were relegated to archival oblivion.
Yet, there were documents did not fulfill any of these functions and found a space in the public sphere by dint of being reproduced. The familiarization with these documents that derived from their reproduction has implied the setting in motion of an apparently paradoxical process of resignification: on the one hand, these documents have been turned into objects anchored in an unmodifiable time-space continuum, but, on the other, both the texts and the images have been, at the same time, dissociated from their original context of production and reception. That is to say, they have been transformed into metonymic and metaphoric artifacts that substitute the violence they represent instead of referring to it. Although the continued presence of these documents allows the connection of different generations in relation to the trauma, it hinders a thorough reading of them.
On a general level, these texts and images should not only be taken into account for what they reveal, but also for how they reveal or how they fail to reveal. Perpetrator documents are not only repositories of historical content, but also instruments capable of reflecting the needs, desires, and motivations of their creator, the purposes of their creation, and the audience toward which they were directed at the time of their production. However, many of these documents have been subjected to processes of resemanticization that have turned them into what they are now, so that, like a palimpsest, they bring together in them various layers of meaning that need to be unraveled.
Perpetrator Texts
The first category proposed for analysis in this monographic issue is that of perpetrator textual documents or perpetrator texts. This category comprises all those documents that contain linguistically structured information and have been written by or on the orders of perpetrators. These can be subdivided into several categories depending on the function performed: 1. Official documents such as orders, instructions, rulebooks, reports, judicial files, bulletins, and prison or medical records, among others. 2. Propagandistic documents such as public speeches, newspapers and other printed media, radio broadcasts, pamphlets or informational brochures, among others. 3. Artistic-scientific documents such as novels, plays, film scripts, short stories, poems, essays, scientific or academic articles, among others. 4. Personal documents such as diaries, war diaries, letters, testimonies or personal dossiers, among others.
Historically and judicially, greater relevance has been given to those documents considered as proofs or evidences, that is, official documents closely linked to the act of perpetration. Although essentially distinct from the act itself, all the perpetrator texts are inextricably linked to the act of violence, to the extent that they may be considered additional or supplementary acts of violence. However, all textual documents in this category, regardless of their original function and potential recipient, reproduce the language of the machinery of destruction and represent a means of access to certain underlying configurations inscribed in a given doctrinal framework. Perpetrator textual documents or perpetrator texts are, in summary, evidence that conceal within themselves a trace of the imagery of a regime of perpetration or particular crime and thus bring us closer to its hic et nunc.
It should be noted that, inevitably, the degree of objectivity – in the case of official documents – or, alternatively, of subjectivity – in the case of personal or artistic documents – will condition the reading and interpretation made of them. The great majority of these documents are intended for the internal reading of the participants in a given crime or, on a more general level, of those who share the same ideology. Hence, they are characterized by a certain hermeticism that makes it difficult to access their logic that constitutes them, but they are all essential to access certain linguistic aspects – such as technical terms, euphemisms or neologisms – which, ultimately, sustain a regime of perpetration at the ideological level.
Perpetrator Images
The second category proposed for analysis in this monograph is that of perpetrator images. It includes all those visual, audiovisual or pictorial documents that have been taken or produced by perpetrators or on their orders. They can be divided into several categories that are neither free of porosity nor self-excluding: 1. Official documents such as newsreels, prison or police photographs, photographic or video negatives. 2. Artistic documents such as photographs, videos or paintings. 3. Propagandistic documents such as films, photographs or posters. 4. Scientific documents such as photographs or videos taken for this purpose. 5. Personal or private documents such as home videos or photographs from the private sphere. A detailed study of these documents can reveal the capacity of the image to show not only a real frame, but also an ideological frame; not only the external –historical– context, but also the internal –what happened at the time it was taken.
Photographic documents have usually been given primacy, since they have been the ones that have been circulating among the population, and they are the ones that represent the act of perpetration in a direct way. Some of the images of perpetration were taken because they were of special importance, hence positioning the perpetrators vis-à-vis the act itself. However, all the perpetrator audio-visual documents mentioned above are evidence of the machinery of horror and destruction, of the perverse logics and the strong ideological component from which they emerged, and which protected and supported this type of atrocities.
The power of viewing these perpetrator images is so powerful because they bring together two prisms united by an unsettling tension: the perspective of the perpetrator – reflected in the frame of the image, in what it shows and what it leaves out – and the gaze of the victim – or their absence. Thus, the image becomes inherent to the act of violence: although different in themselves, the audiovisual documents appear as inseparable from the acts of violence they record. Thus, the analysis of these perpetrator images as traces of the acts of violence will allow to delve into the study of the figure of the perpetrator and the machinery of horror they deployed.
Lines of work
- Synchronic analysis of a perpetrator document: the elements that converge in the creation of such a document at the time of its production.
- Diachronic analysis of a perpetrator document: the different resemanticization processes to which the document has been exposed throughout its history.
- Comparative analysis of perpetrator documents: 1. The features and differences existing between two or more documents of the same category (texts and images) from the same or different contexts. 2. The relationship of continuity between two or more documents of different categories (texts and images) of the same context with respect to a specific crime.
- Analysis of the role played by the perpetrator document in the construction of contemporary memorialistic narratives.
The purpose of this monograph is to contribute to Memory Studies through the analysis of textual and audiovisual documents produced by the perpetrators themselves at all levels of perpetration – ideology, architecture, organization or execution. To this end, articles will be accepted from the different disciplines of the social sciences and humanities. Papers following any of the proposed lines of research will be considered, regardless of whether they focus on textual documents, audio-visual documents or both categories. Thus, the monograph is conceived as an aid to shed light not only on the figure of the perpetrator, but also on the governing logics in contexts and situations of dictatorial regimes.
Submissions will accepted until February 15 2022.
For publication guidelines, see 'Author Guidelines' in 'Submissions'.
Coordinated by Juanjo Monsell and Irene Cárcel. University of Valencia. REPERCRI Research Group. Project 'Contemporary Representations of Perpetrators of Mass Violence: Concepts, Stories and Images' (HAR2017-83519-P), Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities; and Project 'From spaces of perpetration to places of memory. Forms of representation' (PROMETEU / 2020/059).