Modes of production, circulation, and academic recognition of an ‘archive of repression’: the case of the DIPPBA archive in Argentina

Abstract

The article compares the modes of production and primary circulation of materials of the DIPPBA archive – an Argentine ‘archive of repression’ – with their contemporary modes of circulation and recognition after its public opening in 2003, specifically in academic research on Recent History. The approach is multidisciplinary and combines contributions from semiotics, discourse analysis and anthropology. The DIPPBA was an intelligence service that operated between 1956 and 1998. The transfer of this archive to the Provincial Commission for Memory initiated a process that involved changes of a political, legal, functional, spatial and symbolic nature. These included practices of preservation, management, discussion, description, architectural transformation, digitization, writing and dissemination of reports and academic and outreach articles. This process established policies for access to archival materials, defined criteria to deal with the public/private/sensitive nature of its content and enabled specific modes of documentary circulation. Furthermore, it involved a first cycle of discursive production on the archive, which shaped new meanings and appropriations of its materials. Through the description of these transformations and the tracing of regularities in the academic historical discourse, the paper aims to explore the relationship between circulation and discursive recognition from two angles: first, addressing the ways in which changes in the circulation of archival materials are constitutive of their academic effects of recognition, since they define the ways in which researchers can consult and use them; second, analyzing how this academic recognition also becomes constitutive of these changes in circulation, as it provides historical, political and legal intelligibility to the process of opening the archive.