writer's (B)lock.

Working on my dissertation about the Commission on torture, Chile 2003-2004.

Writer's block seems to send me to new heights of self doubt.

This is an extract from a leeter I wrote a friend.

It's interesting, as Chile really didn’t think torture was that important at all. If you look at the speech Lagos made, re: launching the torture commission, he dedicated about a sentence to the whole thing- blink and you miss it style.

What is difficult about my dissertation is that I'm trying to combine the subjective elements, with writing something that is objectively useful (or subjectively useful at the very least)

Reading the Valech report is so reminiscent of being taught history in Chile... 'this isn't interpretation, rather the facts'. My standard response is this: 'What this essay seeks to analyse is the very narrative created in the ‘balanced’, apolitical, supposedly non-interpretative representation of ‘fact’'

I'm becoming quite the trendy academic, with my references to discourse and the overlaps and incongruence between truth and memory, and the problems inherent in the historicisation of living memory...
It's all quite terrifying.

I feel I am doomed to repeat the same semi-postmodernist analyses about the construction of a dominant historical discourse and the contests between different actors to counter the hegemony of an 'official truth' and (in this analysis at least) a mercurio-santioned official history.

Thus my 'originality' stems from arguing that the ideological hegemony seems to have been some sort of compromise between the concertacion and leading interests (as represented by the mercurio).

My fate seems to be becoming a slightly revisionist historian whose greatest innovation was arguing what commonsense shouts out.