Conflict and Post-conflict Cultures as Erosion: Post-dictatorship Spain and Chile

The chapter investigates how conflict and its aftermath, as cultural phenomena are, in the first place, a way in which the organised act of violence that is a war, along with its management, are expressed as a border condition, as the paradoxical state of possible change in a system, its reconfiguration. This is particularly true in the case of civil wars, and post-dictatorship situations, where the conflict disrupts the cultural continuity and therefore the identity of a community, laying bare the normative mechanisms of a cultural system and the vulnerable, incomplete, and provisional character of that normativity. This is why post-conflict and post-dictatorship situations are interesting cases for testing the dynamics of change and transformation within a semiosphere. According to Lotman, transformations can be gradual, or they can take place through explosion, which forces the process of translation and re-assesses the hierarchy of values and the “information” defining a culture and its memory. However, when conflicts follow phases of dictatorship and civil war within one same country, its aftermath may be characterized by a third, different mode of transformation, that here we call “erosion”, whereby the “old” system of values is not completely reconfigured, undermining the change towards a democratic system. Collective memories are not, in these cases, unifying ones, but often divisive and competing. The demanded changes may, indeed, remain latent, silenced or “narcotised” and take place over a long period of time. We aim to analyse two case studies – post-dictatorship Spain and Chile – where changes seem to have occurred not as a consequence of a moment of explosion but rather through erosion, and two different systems of values and memories coexisted in an unstable balance for decades.