Discursive memory and reported speech on surveillance reports on the theatre

Abstract

The Surveillance Department of the Police of the Province of Buenos Aires (DIPPBA), which was operative between 1956 and 1998, had as one of its control targets the theatre that was created and represented in that province of Argentina. The archive where the files were kept is nowadays under the management of the Provincial Commission for Memory (CPM). Our research focuses on how the information on provincial theatres, produced by the DIPPBA, which we consider a discursive community (Maingueneau, 1987, 1992), is drafted in a constant polyphony which appeals mainly to different modes of reported speech. This article aims to characterize how the DIPPBA discourse on theatre surveillance is reconfigured throughout time. By considering how the discursive memory (Courtine, 1981; Charaudeau, 2004) is in relation with other discourses (Moirand, 2018), we observe some dislocations on the enunciative texture, the iteration and oblivion of topics as well as changes in the ethos of the surveillance agent. We distinguish three moments in the configuration and reconfiguration of the discursive memory on theatre on the DIPPBA reports –the sixties and seventies, the last civic-military dictatorship in Argentina (1976-1983), and the years after 1983, i.e., the postdictatorship–, in its argumentative as well as its polyphonic dimension.