The Image of Sovereignty #1: Founding Trauma and the Birth of the Nation

Today’s post begins the draft of the next chapter of what I eventually plan to be a book on philosophy and trauma.  I am calling the chapter begun below “Trauma and Repesentation II:  The Image of Sovereignty.”  It is meant to form a pair with the preceding chapter, called “Trauma and Representation I:  The Sovereignty of the Image.”

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Trauma and Representation II:  The Image of Sovereignty

Modern political theory—whether in the form of the “social contract” theories in the tradition of classic liberalism from Thomas Hobbes and Jean Jacques Rousseau in the seventeenth century to John Rawls in the twentieth, or in the form of reactions against liberalism, especially in such decisionistic theories as, emblematically, that of right-wing twentieth century legal theorist Carl Schmitt –consistently grounds sovereignty in trauma.  Like the great, ancient myths of cosmic creation, in both its social-contract its decisionistic forms, modern political theory tells a story in accordance with which evil is older than good.  Evil is there at the very beginning.  Or, rather, it is there even before the beginning, at least if the beginning is taken to mean the point at which the story of modern sovereignty starts to be told.

In turn, the story of the emergence, expansion, and eventual crisis of sovereignty in the modern form, the very sovereignty for which both social contract and decisionistic theorists attempt to provide rational grounds, is inseparable from the story of the nation-state in its rise, development, and eventual decline, or at least apparent decline, in the face of the spread of global capitalism.  Trauma is no less there at the very beginning of the nation-state than it is at the beginning of modern sovereignty.  It is to the former, the inaugural, inaugurating relationship between trauma and the idea of the nation that I will turn first in this chapter.

Founding Trauma and the Birth of the Nation

In “Notes on the Memory Boom:  War, Remembrance and the Uses of the Past,” one of the essays in the collection Memory, Trauma, and World Politics, edited by Duncan Bell (New York:  Pallgrave Macmillan, 2006, pages 58-59), historian Jay Winter quotes Ernst Renan, from a series of lectures Renan gave in Paris in 1882, entitled “What is a nation?”  Renan answers his own question as follows:

A nation is a soul, a spiritual principle.  Two things, which, in truth, are really one, constitute this soul, this spiritual principle.  One is in the past, the other in the present.  One is the possessing in common of a rich legacy of memories, the other is the present-day consent, the desire to live together, the will to continue to value the individual heritage one has received . . . To have the glory of the past in common, a shared will in the present; to have done great deeds together, and want to do more of them, are the essential conditions for the constitution of a people . . . One loves the house which one has built and passes on.

“Such ideas and images were commonplace in late nineteenth century Europe,” comments Winter on that passage from Renan.  “What was much newer,” he continues, “were powerful means to disseminate them.”  According to Winter, in the 19^th century “[w]riters on memory reached a much wider audience than ever before,”  precisely because “[t]he expansion of the print trade, the art market, the leisure industry, and the mass circulation press allied to developments first in photography and then in cinematography, created powerful conduits for the dissemination of texts, images and narratives of the past in every part of Europe and beyond.”

At any rate, at least when they relate to what Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar calls “founding traumas,” an idea which I will discuss in more detail shortly, the sorts of “collective” or “community” memories at issue in Renan’s original remarks and in Winter’s reflections on those remarks become falsifying memories in a special sense that sets them apart from the sort of “screen memories” discussed in the preceding chapter, and most especially from the sorts of memories that come under attack by the proponents of so called “false memory syndrome.”   Unlike screen memories or those at issue in the controversy around “false memory syndrome,” the sorts of “memories” Renan spoke about in 1882 are based on and involve the manipulation of memories of trauma and of the emotions those memories can trigger—a manipulation for some purpose formulated by the manipulator, however “collective” that manipulator may be, and irrespective of whether the manipulation is deliberate or not.

For ease of reference, I will call the sorts of memories—or at least the sorts of images that give themselves out as memories—with which Renan was concerned “national” memories, because of the role Renan and others attribute to them, the role of being midwives to the births of nations.  In contrast to such national memories, screen memories, properly so called, issue from trauma itself, as part of the mechanism of repression.  As I discussed in the preceding chapter, such memories “screen” in the double sense of  (1) hiding or covering- over, while at the same time (2) providing a surface, as it were, upon which trauma may project and thereby reveal itself.

Sometimes, paradoxically, and as was also touched upon in the preceding chapter, the very phenomenon of a sort of hyper-real image of a traumatic occurrence compulsively recurs to those who have been traumatized.  Such recurrence of such images is, in fact, a common sign of the “dissociation” so often reported as accompanying traumatic experiences.  Such hyper-real images, however, do not constitute a counter-example to screen memories.  Rather, as compulsively recurring yet in all their recurrence remaining inseparable from dissociation, they continue, precisely as hyper-real, to fulfill the double role of screen memories, by both masking and indicating, at one and the same time, the underlying trauma, serving the overall process of the  “repression” of the trauma at issue.  What gets effectively masked by the hyper-reality of the images is the very traumatic—the disturbing, emotion-ladened—character of the traumatic event they present themselves as imaging.  The very vividness of the images, their being so real and more than real, fosters the dissociation whereby one remains blinded and numbed in the face of what otherwise would be, or is at least feared to be, altogether overwhelming.

The key distinction that needs to be drawn here is that between repressing the trauma and manipulating it.  Therein lies the difference between screen memories, on the one side, and national memories on the other.  To be precise, the differentiation at issue need not involve two different sets of images.  Rather, one and the same image can come to serve both masters.  That is, one and the same image—let it be an image of two people holding hands and jumping to their deaths from the Twin Towers on the morning of Septmeber 11, 2001, after the attacks took place—can serve as a screen memory when it vividly and compulsively recurs to someone who was traumatized by the attacks on the Towers; but it can also serve at the same time as something to be directly and even cynically manipulated, say by a politician with a vested interest in using it to justify pursuing a “war on terror.”

Trauma memories that are supposedly “false”, in the sense at issue in so called “false memory syndrome,” are more properly viewed as a form of “screen” memory in the double sense of simultaneously hiding a traumatic event yet providing a surface upon which what is so hidden can project and thereby reveal itself.  So, too, are the supposedly “accurate,” hyper-real memory images that recur, for example, in nightmares or “flashbacks” experienced by those who have been traumatized.

The sort of collective memory—or collective use of memory, if one is dealing with such an example of one and the same image functioning in two different yet interconnected ways, only one of which ways is that of “collective memory”–Renan describes, however, is not any such “screen.”  Rather, it is manufactured as a supposedly collective memory, through a process of production involving the manipulation of trauma and the images of it for external ends of the manipulator.

It should come as no surprise to anyone who has read to this point that I consider the use of the images of 9/11 for the sake of justifying the American invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq to be examples of just such manufacturing and manipulation of supposedly collective images.  However, for my purposes here it does not matter whether I am right in that judgment or not.  All that matters is that the conceptual distinction between the two very different possible ways of deploying a memory image, or at least of what presents itself or is presented as a memory image, in relation to trauma be granted.  That is, all I ask here is that one understand the difference between a memory image (or even pseudo-memory image, if one likes) that functions both to conceal and to reveal, at one and the same time, a trauma undergone by the person to whom that image occurs, on the one hand, and, on the other, the manipulation, consciously or unconsciously, of an image of trauma and of the fear and insecurity engendered by it, to achieve goals of the manipulator external to the processes of traumatization itself.

The latter, the at least unconscious manipulative use of images of trauma and the emotions those images trigger for the sake of creating, sustaining, and heightening collective identity, is central to what Sudhir Kakar calls “founding traumas” in The Colors of Violence:  Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1996), an insightful and influential analysis of Hindu-Muslim violence in his native India.  Especially important for my purposes here is Kakar’s idea of how such “founding traumas” function in establishing religion-based cultural identities in conflict with other such identities based on the very same “founding trauma,” only vastly differently interpreted.  To give another example to add to his own Indian one, I would argue that it is easy to discern just such a shared “founding trauma” differently interpreted at work in the way “September 11, 2001,” functions in the conflictual genesis of both Arab “Jihadist” and American “anti-terrorist” extremist identities.  At any rate, what Kakar has to say about Hindu-Muslim violence in India clearly has relevance for the analysis of other cases elsewhere as well.

From my perspective–which considerably overlaps Kakar’s own, in my judgment—it is important to make explicit that the (no doubt largely “unconscious”) use of trauma to serve as the foundation for such religious/cultural identity formation as Kakar addresses is actually a matter of the manipulative avoidance of trauma, as opposed both to the dissociative repression of trauma and to the potentially healing overcoming of that repression in subsequent processing.  It is, in short, a coercive move to block trauma from traumatizing–and, therefore, a reactionary effort at forestalling the transformative and healing action that can occur only through letting such traumatization work itself through.

“Cultural identity, like its individual counterpart,” writes Kakar (page 150), “is an unconscious human acquirement which becomes consciously salient only when there is a perceived threat to its integrity.  Identity, both individual and collective, lives itself for the most part, unfettered and unworried by obsessive and excessive scrutiny.”  Yet what if identity, either cultural or individual, is itself something that must, so to speak, be struck in the first place–in the same sense as one “strikes” (that is, mints) a coin–by the trauma at issue, such that the appearance of identity having already been there all along (but only “unconsciously,” as “lived”) becomes visible as a fiction:  a fiction founding identity, a founding fiction that itself forms identity in the first place?

Kakar himself, it seems to me, touches on something of the sort when, after making the remark cited above, he immediately continues as follows:  “Everyday living incorporates a zone of indifference with regard to one’s culture, including one’s language, ethnic origin, or religion.”  What is such indifference, if it is not indifference toward one’s “cultural identity”?  And if it is that, then it would be an indifference toward, precisely, an “identity” not one’s own, which is to say an identity that is, paradoxically, not one’s identity at all.  Then only in and as reaction to trauma would any “cultural identity,” any self-identification, any identifying of one’s self with one’s “culture,” form–get cast or created:  fictioned in the original sense of that term–at all.  Then “cultural identity”–or, for that matter, even “individual identity”–would be a reactive formation designed to ward off the “founding” trauma at issue.  And then, too, only the collapse of that reaction, that reactive formation or fiction, would at last let the trauma traumatize:  let the truth that flashes there “materialize.”

The Sovereignty of the Image–Conclusion: From the Sovereignty of the Image to the Image of Sovereignty

What follows is the concluding section to my chapter-draft “Trauma and Representation I:  The Sovereignty of the Image.”

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Conclusion:  From the Sovereignty of the Image to the Image of Sovereignty

In her recent book Trauma and Grace:  Theology in a Ruptured World (Louisville, KY:  Westminster John Knox Press, 2009), theologian Serene Jones writes of John Calvin (pages 45-46):  “When he approached the Bible, he did not see before him a set of simplistic propositional claims from which he could extract doctrinal truths about God.  Rather, he called the Bible ‘a lens which we put on’ and through which we look at the world.  For Calvin, sacred Scripture was, in effect, a pair of eyeglasses that Christians wear to view reality.”

Thus, at least by Jones’s portrait, which runs counter to the popular image of him, Calvin was anything but a “literalist” in his own reading of the Bible.  In effect, to return to the language I have been using throughout this chapter, Calvin, as Jones presents him, did not grant sovereignty to the representational content of Biblical images, but instead strove to grasp what, following William Gass, we might call the set of crossed contexts that gives those images sense as figures of the sacred.

We need to approach testimonies and other narratives of trauma the same way that Calvin, by Jones’s account, approached the Bible.  Nor is that accidental, if Jones is right.  She argues—along with Calvin, by her interpretation, but in different terms, since Calvin, of course, never used the language of “trauma”—that at least one of the things the Bible is, is a library of tales of trauma, all bound together as a single book telling one overarching tale of trauma, the tale, namely, of God’s traumatic entry into history, at least as it is told to have taken place with and through the self-experience of Jews and, later, Christians.

At any rate, as I read it the history of the concept of trauma itself is a story of struggle to overcome the same temptation to which those who read the Bible “literally” succumb.  That is, in short, the temptation to grant sovereignty to the image, specifically taken as a representation of some supposed “actual”—or at least “potentially” so—occurrence, object, or state-of-affairs.   Toward the end of explaining and justifying that claim, I will consider two examples that are themselves “representative,” as it were, in a different but essentially related sense of that term—representative, namely, of the countless cases, in the history of the concept of trauma, where succumbing to the claim to sovereignty of the representational image unfortunately did occur.

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My first example is the notorious wave of court cases involving alleged child abuse in the United States during the 1990s, the reaction to which also engendered, among other things, the movement that formed around the idea of a supposed “false memory syndrome.”  The problem with the “guilty” verdicts that came out of many of those cases—all too many, as it turned out (though I am more than sympathetic to the thesis that even one single such instance would already be all too many)–was not what the proponents of “false memory syndrome” claim.  Indeed, the underling problem involved was one to which the “false memory” movement also fell, and continues to fall, prey.

The problem was not that the courts rendering “guilty” verdicts in the cases at issue made the mistake, in effect, of heeding the bumper-sticker advice to “believe the children.”   The problem was, rather, that those courts misunderstood what “the children”—who were often adults by the time they testified—were telling them.  However, just so, too, did “the children” themselves misunderstand their own testimony, and the ultimate sense of their own memories.

To put the point briefly, the problem was not that the memories at issue were false, as the accused and their advocates among the “false memory syndrome” crowd claimed.  Rather, the problem was that the interpretations all three parties to the cases—in effect, the accusers, the accused, and the courts, each along with their sympathizers and proponents—gave to those memories or memory images turned them into falsehoods.

That distortion of truths into falsehoods occurred whenever the memories of abuse were taken more or less, to borrow and adapt a phrase from Walter Benjamin, as “mechanical reproductions” of past event—taken, that is, as though they were like photographic images, to be assessed in terms of their accuracy of reproduction of datable, “actual” past occurrences.  But by taking them that way  to support “guilty” verdicts, the courts, as well as their opponents among the advocates of “false memory syndrome,” were being “discornered dunces,” to borrow again William Gass’s playful phrase.   That is, those who took such images that way had not “grasped the set of crossed contexts which establishes the figure,” as Gass puts it (The World Within the Word, page 288)—establishes, that is, the images at issue themselves, as the very images they in truth are, in that very context.

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That is my first example, then, from the history of the concept of trauma, of the mistake of submitting to the claim to sovereignty of the image as representation.  My second example is from Freud himself, the very father of the modern concept of trauma.

At a relatively early stage of his career, in his famous/infamous “seduction theory,” Freud interpreted the memories, dreams, and other symptomatic images of sexual abuse recounted by many of his female patients as representations of earlier “actual” episodes in which their fathers or other male father-figures had molested them sexually.  On the basis of that interpretation he went on to assert that there had to be an alarmingly high rate of incidence of such abuse in the middle-class European (or at least Viennese) families of his day.

Freud eventually recanted that specific claim, and the specific interpretation of the reported memories of his patients on which it was based.  After that, instead of interpreting such memories of abuse as more or less accurate representations of prior datable occurrences wherein fathers “actually” molested their daughters, he began to interpret them as “wish-fulfillments” of the repressed sexual desires those daughters had for those fathers—cases, in effect, of his female patients wishing, in an unacknowledgeable and therefore repressed wish, that sex acts with their fathers had been “actual.”  By that later interpretation, rather than fulfilling directly and “in reality” the all too blatant incestuous desires of abusive fathers for their daughters, the supposedly “recalled” images fulfilled indirectly and symbolically the repressed sexual desires of those daughters for their “actually” blameless fathers.

However, both before and after recanting his “seduction theory,” Freud continued, in effect, to wander, sans identifying dunce-cap, outside his corner.  That was so insofar as both the earlier “seduction” theory and the later “wish-fulfillment” theory granted sovereignty to the images themselves, taken precisely as representations of at least potentially “real” occurrences.  Either those images were taken to be accurate reproductions of sexual contacts that “really did” occur (Freud’s original seduction theory) or they were taken to be unconscious projections, driven by repressed desires, of such images as though they were “real.”  In either case, the images at issue were taken to be representations, in the sense of quasi-photographic “likenesses,” of at least possibly (that is, imaginably) actual occurrences.  It is just that in the first case, that of the seduction theory, the represented occurrences were taken to have “actually” happened, whereas in the second case, that of the wish-fulfillment theory, they were taken not to have “actually” happened, but only to have been repressed as “wished for.”  Nevertheless, and as a necessary presupposition, the representational content of the images remained the same in both theories.

Even more crucially, both theories continued to focus on that very content as such, rather than attending to the context, the set of crossed connections, as Gass puts it, that let that content make sense.  Thus, in both stages of his career Freud failed to make exactly the sort of shift that Michael Pollack, whose way of putting the point I have just borrowed, saw needed to be made in dealing with recounted memories of trauma survivors (in Pollack’s case, testimonies from Auschwitz survivors):  the shift of focus from the representational content of the images at issue, and to the sense of that very content in the context of the “memory” or “testimony” wherein it occurred.   In my own terms, what Freud did in both cases was to submit to the claim to sovereignty of the representational image.

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What somehow especially both dunces and discorners, so to speak, not just Freud and the various parties to the debate about “false memory syndrome,” but also most if not all of our first reflections on the images whereby and wherein trauma survivors spontaneously, once given a chance, articulate their own traumatic experiences, is trauma itself.  As theologian Serene Jones, whom I cited to open this chapter-concluding section, which I will now close by citing her again, observes more than once in Trauma and Grace, by way of her own twice-repeated citation (first on page 20, then again on page 30—with an acknowledgement in a note that she is taking her citation from yet another, earlier one by another contemporary scholar) from the dissertation of the seventeenth century physician Johannes Hofer, trauma is “a disease that is essentially due to a disordered imagination.”

I would amend that slightly, but still, I think, in accord with both how both Jones and Hofer understand things, to say that trauma does the very disordering.  That is, I think it is better to say that the disordering of the imagination is due to trauma, rather than that trauma is due to such disordering.  Put either way, however, what remains is that trauma and the disordering of the imagination are inseparable:  Whatever else it may involve, trauma involves a disordered imagination.

Above all, the traumatic disordering of the imagination distorts how the imagination imagines itself, as it were.  It distorts the self-understanding of the imagination, leading the imagination to imagine itself as no more than a sort of mechanical recording device, a place for the storing of representations.   Thus, the traumatized imagination imagines itself as subject to what I have been calling the sovereignty of the image.

In that very process wherein the traumatized imagination subjects itself to the sovereignty of the image, however, the imagination projects a distorting image not only of itself, but also of sovereignty.  Or, rather, the disordered imagination projects sovereignty itself as such a distorted image.  What I mean is that it projects the pure image–now in the sense of being “no more than” an image, of being a “mere” image, an “illusion”—that there is such a thing as sovereignty at all.  The sovereignty of the image, which is to say the reign of the representation, becomes inextricably intertwined with the image of sovereignty, which is now to say the illusion that there is any such thing as sovereignty—and that includes, most especially, any sovereignty supposedly vested in what is called, revealingly, “representative” government.

Thus, the sovereignty of the image opens out into the image of sovereignty.  In this chapter I have focused on the former.  It the next chapter, the second I am devoting to the exploration of the general topic of “Trauma and Representation,” I will turn to the latter.

The Sovereignty of the Image #11: Scanning the Screen (conclusion)

Below is the conclusion of the section “Scanning the Screen,” in my draft of a chapter called “Trauma and Representation I:  The Sovereignty of the Image,” for a book I am writing on trauma and philosophy.

Regular readers, please note:  My other responsibilities and needs have forced me to cut back even further on how often I am able to make new posts to this blog.  When I resumed posting to the blog at the beginning of January, after a weeks-long end-of-year break, I wrote that I was cutting  back from three posts each week, to two.  Now, I find I must cut back to a single new post weekly.

What follows is the conclusion to my chapter-section on “Scanning the Screen”–the screen, namely, of so called “screen memories.”

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The issue that confronts us in assessing testimonies of trauma is finally the same as that which confronts the psychoanalyst in addressing the symptoms of neurosis in verbal slips, physical tics, and dreams—the same issue as that to which Lacan points when he says that the unconscious is structured “like a language.”  One way we might make the point required here is to say that all such phenomena as “Freudian slips,” neurotic tics, or dream-images—or trauma testimonies—function as symbols, in the sense that, for example, Paul Ricoeur captures in The Symbolism of Evil (Boston: Beacon Press, 1969, translated by Emerson Buchanan).

As Ricoeur uses the term, a “symbol” is not a “conventional sign,” as it is in C. S. Peirce’s threefold division of signs into “icon, index, and symbol.”  Rather, as Ricoeur uses the term, “symbols” are (page 18), “analogical meanings which are spontaneously formed and immediately significant, such as defilement, analogue of stain; sin, analogue of deviation; guilt, analogue of accusation.”  Ricoeur’s examples (defilement, sin, guilt) are drawn from the domain with which his book is concerned, the domain, as the book’s title indicates, of the symbols wherein humanity expresses its experience of evil, or “fault,” as Ricoeur often prefers to put it.  With regard to evil or fault, a few pages before the definition of symbol just cited Ricouer makes an observation that, as his own subsequent remark indicates he realizes, applies in general to the “spontaneously formed and immediately significant” symbols with which human beings articulate their own self-experience.  “In short,” he writes (page 9), “the preferred language of fault appears to be indirect and based on imagery.”  Then, in the very next sentence he broadens his focus to include all symbols, so defined, and not just symbols of evil:  “There is something quite astonishing in this:  the consciousness of self seems to constitute itself at its lowest level by means of symbolism and to work out an abstract language only subsequently, by means of a spontaneous hermeneutics of its primary symbols.”

The images in which trauma fixes itself, those same images that trauma survivors then recall and recount in their testimonies, are just such “primary symbols.”  Embedded in the testimonies of trauma, however, those traumatic images, are subject to a double distortion, as my earlier discussion of two sets of remarks, one from Mark Taylor and the other from Michael Pollak, already suggests.  First, as Mark Taylor observes, at the very heart of figuration itself there is a sort of distortion or disfiguring.  That is perhaps most clearly evident precisely in the symbols—that is, remembering Ricoeur’s definition, the “spontaneously formed and immediately significant” images or representations, including purely verbal ones, wherein those struck by trauma articulate their own self-experience, as so struck—of trauma.   Following Ricoeur, we might call this level of distortion of the images that emerge in trauma testimony primary distortion, since it occurs at the level of what Ricoeur calls “primary symbols.”

In turn, to this first or primary distortion is added a second one.  That is the secondary distortion, we might call it, introduced by the play of the conditions under which the later testimony is called forth, and in which the primary symbols of trauma, already subject to a primary distortion, are integrated into narratives of trauma. Since, as Ricoeur himself insists, “primary symbols” themselves never occur in a vacuum, but are, instead, only encountered within more or less explicit narratives that are finally no less “spontaneously formed and immediately significant” than the primary symbols they contain and contextualize, these narratives, too, are themselves symbolic.  Therefore, they too can only be “read”—and thereby understood—by a scanning that focuses, as we can put it, combining insights from Pollack and William Gass, not on the degree of some sort of quasi-photographic “accuracy” of the images taken at the level of their “contents,” but, rather, on restoring the set of crisscrossing connections that alone allow us to “locate [their] sense” (Pollack).

To “read” the doubly distorting symbols of trauma requires us, accordingly, to scan them alert for the distortions they introduce, and then to follow, in effect, the “drift” of those very distortions.  To come to understand the testimonies of trauma, then, we must let ourselves, as it were, be carried away by and in the drift of the very distortions, both “primary” and “secondary,” that those testimonies themselves effect.  Those distortions are not to be thought of as needing or even being subject to any possible “correction” that would, even if only “in theory” and not “in fact,” somehow eliminate those distortions to yield some no longer distorted, “accurate” image or representation.

With regard to what I have called primary distortion, that is, the disfiguration at the heart of all figuration, all fixing–all bringing-to-stand-and-putting-into-play–in a figure, to “eliminate” the distortion would to abandon representation, figuration, as such.  Or, if figures and figurations are still to remain somehow, it would be tantamount to giving up the whole attempt to understand the remaining figures or representations at all.  To paraphrase closely Ricoeur’s closing remark in his introduction to Part I of The Symbolism of Evil (page 24), anyone who wished to escape such primary distortion and to stand apart from the game in the name of some non-distorting “objectivity” would “at the most know everything but understand nothing.”  Indeed, as Ricoeur adds:  ”In truth, he would seek nothing, not being motivated by concern about any question.”

Similarly, to attempt to “correct” the secondary distortion that occurs with the embedding of the primary symbols of trauma in testimony-narratives is to miss altogether what is most distinctive about such narratives—their own status as “second-order” symbols themselves.  Once again, any gain in supposed clarity that one might thereby gain would be purchased at the price of all possibility of discerning the very meaning of what is so clarified.  What one would have left might be clear, but it would no longer have any meaning.

Ricoeur writes at one pivotal point (page 235) in the second part of The Symbolism of Evil, the part devoted to reflection on the narrative myths in which, at the level of second-order symbolism, the primary symbols of evil are put in play, to understand such myths “it must be well understood from the outset that, for the modern man who has learned the distinction between myth and history,” the events narrated in such myths “can no longer be co-ordinated with the time of history and the space of geography as these have been irreversibly constituted by critical awareness.”  That remark harkens back to something Ricoeur discusses earlier, in the introduction to Part I, where he characterizes “the modern man” as having “reached the point where history and myth become separate.”  He then writes (pages 161-162):  “This ‘crisis,’ this decision, after which myth and history are dissociated, may signify the loss of the mythical dimension:  because mythical time can no longer be co-ordinated with the time of events that are ‘historical’ in the sense required by historical method and historical criticism, because mythical space can no longer be co-ordinated with the places of our geography, we are tempted to give ourselves up to a radical demythization of all our thinking.”  However, he continues, “another possibility offers itself to us:  precisely because we are living and thinking after the separation of myth and history, the demythization of our history can become the other side of an understanding of myth as myth, and the conquest, for the first time in the history of culture, of the mythical dimension.”  Thus, if anything is lost in abandoning the pretense in accordance with which myths are taken to be attempts to “explain” how present actuality actually came about—the pretense that myth has any “etiological” value, to use the term Ricoeur often uses here—then what is lost is at most “the pseudo-knowledge, the false logos of the myth.”  What we gain, however, “when we lose the myth as immediate logos,” is the possibility for the first time truly to “rediscover it as myth.”

All of that can be carried over without change to apply to the narrative testimonies wherein the memory images of trauma occur:  We must lose those testimonies as pseudo-transcriptions of past processes, and the memories of trauma as pseudo-photographic reproductions of some datable event that once happened but is now over and done with, precisely in order to rediscover them as the self-articulations of the experience of trauma itself.  Only so can they be genuinely “understood” as trauma recollections and trauma narratives at all, in fact, rather than being flattened out and stripped of all relation to trauma in the very endeavor to understand them.

The Sovereignty of the Image #10: Scanning the Screen (beginning)

Below is the continuation of my draft for a book-chapter tentatively entitled “Trauma and Representation I:  The Sovereignty of the Image.”

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Scanning the Screen

In Writing History, Writing Trauma Dominick LaCapra follows up his remark, cited earlier in this chapter, about what he calls “structural” trauma not being curable—and thereby also suggesting that for him what he calls “historical trauma” is somehow “curable”—by commenting (on page 83) on a view he sees as common to various other contemporary American historians.  According to LaCapra, the other historians at issue seem to take it for granted that “once there was a single narrative that most Americans accepted as part of their heritage,” but which has more recently been shattered into a multiplicity of diverse stories (one story for white Americans, another for black; one for men, another for women; one for straights, one for gays; etc.).  LaCapra critiques such an idea as being “close to reductive contextualism . . . in which the proverbial past-we-have-lost becomes the  metanarrative we have lost.”  Against such an idea, LaCapra expresses doubt that any such common American metanarrative ever really existed.  Rather, “one might argue,” he writes, “that there never was a single narrative and that most Americans never accepted only one story about the past.”

But, pace LaCapra, one might also argue that the other historians at issue could be taken to be sharing, with one another and with unspecified “others,” what amounts to a screen memory in the sense I have been trying to articulate.  In that case, one would not be dealing in the first place with any simple “empirical” claim that a grand American metanarrative once existed, a claim that then others might then deny (as LaCapra denies it).  One would be dealing, instead, with a truth the “truth” of which was itself traumatic, in effect.  The issue of determining the “truth” of the screen memory at issue would then no longer consist of checking for correspondences between the claim that there once was such a common American metanarrative, on the one hand, and “what really happened,” on the other.  Rather, determining the “truth” of the widespread assumption that there once was such a metanarrative would consist of carefully unknotting the various interconnections of disclosure and concealment at play in that very notion.  Accordingly, what would be required would be to treat that idea as symptomatic, in effect, of the very traumatic “structural” fissures that have indeed fractured and fragmented American society throughout its history—those very divisions that the notion of a common metanarrative both hides and reveals at one and the same time.  To “understand” the idea of such a common American metanarrative would require that we “read” it in terms of that traumatic subtext, just as a Freudian analyst would “read” a slip of the tongue, for example.  To remain fixated on the question of the degree of photographic “accuracy” of the idea of a common American metanarrative, and to think that one could dispel that idea by pointing out its “inaccuracy,” as LaCapra tries to do, would then be to fall prey to the same sort of ontological confusion as Gass’s “discornered dunce” who fails to grasp the context that establishes a carrot as a snowman’s nose.

To cite another important example that raises the same underlying issues, in the 1990s verbal battles in the media and culture in general, as well as legal ones in the courts, broke out in the United States over a series of sensational, highly publicized cases in which criminal charges were brought against various defendants on the basis of purported victims’  “recovered memories” of theretofore supposedly “repressed” experiences of childhood sexual abuse.  The focus of nearly all public debate at the time and since has been on whether the supposedly “recovered” memories at issue were “true” memories—that is, accurate memory images of something that “ really happened”–or whether they were, instead, “false” memories—images presenting themselves as memories but that had been somehow unintentionally  (or at least presumably so) “implanted” in the minds of those who eventually leveled the charges of abuse, to which, however, no actual past occasion of abuse “really” corresponded.

Both sides to the debate—those, for example, who called upon everyone to “believe the [at least erstwhile] children” who claimed to “remember” having been abused, on the one side, and those who developed the concept of “false memory syndrome” and promoted the idea that most if not all of the charges in the most highly publicized cases of the time were made by persons who suffered from such a syndrome, on the other side—continued to operate with an understanding of memory in accordance with which the “truth” or “falsity” of a memory image is taken to be a matter of the image more or less photographically corresponding, or failing to correspond, to “reality,” to “what really happened.”  For the most part, what was and has continued to be lacking in the entire debate has been any consideration of what I have been trying to articulate here as the “screen” nature of all memories of trauma, regardless of how photographically “accurate” or “inaccurate” they may be.  However, it is just that screening relationship between trauma and the images in which trauma figures or represents itself that must be fully considered in any final assessment of what is at issue in all cases such as those infamous childhood sexual abuse ones of the 1990s.

What is needed for such an assessment is an analysis of the “memories” at issue in terms that proceeds along the same lines as Michael Pollack follows in a different but closely related context—that of assessing the testimonies of Auschwitz survivors–in his L’expérience concentrationnaire, which I have already cited before in this chapter (for the story of Ruth, the Jewish Auschwitz survivor from Berlin).   In a lucid discussion of his own methodology in the introduction to the second part of his book, Pollack reflects upon the methods adopted by many other researches addressing the same material, namely, testimonies from Holocaust survivors.

Knowing that every testimony is subject to doubt with regard to its “accuracy,” many researchers conclude that any testimony must therefore be treated with suspicion to arrive at an “objective” assessment of its veracity and value.  Accordingly, it is standard for such researchers to follow procedures to eliminate the supposedly “subjective” aspects of the testimonies with which they are concerned.

As a good example of someone who adopts that approach, Pollack cites fellow Holocaust researcher Miriam Novitch, from her book Les Passages des Barbares (Nice:  Presses du Temps présent, no date), a study on the deportation and resistance of Greek Jews during the Second World War.  Novitch writes (page 5 of her book, as cited in Pollack, page 181):  “Knowing that all testimony is subject to caution, we strove to interrogate several people on the same subject and to verify the facts recounted by means of other sources.”

“In so proceeding,” Pollack comments, after citing Novitch’s line, “one eliminates what cannot be confirmed by a multiplicity of sources, toward the end of reconstructing the hard core of what really happened.  But one risks by the same token occluding the tension, constitutive of testimony on the deportations, between what can be spoken, and what is unspeakable [entre dicible et indicible].”  He then contrasts such a procedure with what he and his colleagues adopted as the methodology for their own work.  Contrary to the approach such researchers as Novitch adopt, Pollack writes, the “problematic” for him and his fellow interviewers in their own work was based on the supposition “that every document has a sense, on condition of restoring the system for locating this sense.”  That is, in their own procedure he and his colleagues were not focused on the supposed  “historical accuracy” of the accounts their interviewees gave, but, rather, on coming to an understanding of the sense or meaning of what they recounted or recalled as it functioned in the context of their own ongoing endeavor to “maintain their social identity,” to put it in terms of the subtitle Pollack gives his book (“an essay on the maintenance of social identity”).

Pollack’s own approach, then, is basically the same as that of Dori Laub when, in a passage I have already cited and discussed in an earlier chapter, he responds to a group of historians who want to discount an Auschwitz survivor’s recollection of multiple Auschwitz crematoria smokestacks being destroyed during the Sondercommando inmate rebellion at Auschwitz.  The historians Laub was addressing wanted to dismiss that survivor’s testimony because “in reality” only one crematorium smokestack was destroyed during the incident in question.  However, Laub responds that what he calls the genuine “historical truth” of the testimony is expressed by the very supposed “mistake,” insofar as, in the circumstances of Auschwitz, any act of rebellion among the inmates there was as such—independent of its “success” by ordinary ways of measuring such things—a complete success in terms of revealing the total vacuity of the Nazi claims of superiority and domination upon which the whole camp system was based.  The genuinely historical truth of the supposedly “inaccurate” memory was that it altogether “accurately” reflected what the mere fact of there being a rebellion at all at Auschwitz demonstrated beyond doubt—namely, in effect, to use the relevant line from the fairytales of Hans Christian Anderson, that “the emperor had no clothes.”

What is necessary, to grasp “historical truth” itself, in Laub’s sense of that term—which is in fact the only sense that makes any sense, if we are to let history itself happen, rather than flattening it down to the level of some idiotic story of “one damned thing after another”—is to follow the procedure that Pollack recommends.  “Rather than concentrating attention on the content of what is said,” he writes, we need to attend to the various conditions that shape the given content of a given testimony, in order to recreate the set of crisscrossing connections that allow us to discern the sense of that content.

That does not at all mean that independent verification, comparison of accounts from diverse sources, and, in general, efforts carefully to sort out “what really happened” at the level of surface information that might have been registered by cameras, tape-recorders, or other such archiving devices, is not relevant.  What it means, however, is that all such information, however accurate and exhaustive it may be in its own terms, is never more than raw data, as it were, that must be interpreted properly, if it is ever to yield genuine insight into what really did “happen,” in the strong sense of that term—what really “made history” rather than just being one more link in the endless chain of “one damned thing after another.”

The Sovereignty of the Image #9: Screen Memory (concluded)

A lesson from Heidegger that we can profitably apply is that the very distinction between what, following him and Gass, I have been calling “ontic” and “ontological” is one to which the masking of that very distinction, the confusing of the two, a confusion wherein the ontic and the ontological keep getting mixed up with one another, is itself essential to the very distinction—in the active or verbal sense of actually distinguishing, of drawing or accomplishing the task of differentiating between the one and the other—itself.  That is, the only way in which the distinction–now in the nominal sense–between the two can get drawn is in setting underway the ongoing struggle to sort the one out from the other, a struggle that can never end, without simply eradicating all distinction whatever.

That, in turn, allows me to return to the passage from Mark Taylor that I cited before (from page 119 of his book After God):   “The present, understood both temporally and spatially, is always gift or present pre-sent by (the) nothing that is (not) present.”  Significantly, a few lines later Taylor draws the connection between this idea of a unique absence that alone makes presence itself possible, but only in such a way that such absence continues always to disrupt the presence of any present, with the idea of representation and the unrepresentable.  Observing that what can never be present, as that absence definitive of presence can never be, also cannot, for that very reason, be represented (that is, literally, re-presented—what cannot ever be present in the first place can hardly be presented again), Taylor concludes that representation itself “includes, as a condition of its possibility, ‘something’ that remains irreducibly urepresentable.”  Then he draws a connection that is especially important for my present purposes:  “Expressed in terms of figuration:  inasmuch as figuring can never be figured, every figure is always disfigured as if from within.”

“Figuring,” in the sense at issue in Taylor’s remark, is the sketching or projecting of something in a figure.  It means, then, in that sense, representing in an image, a “representation” in the nominative sense.  We can thus rephrase Taylor to say that, since representing as such can never be represented, every representation (that is, every image) is always mis-represented “as if from within.”

This disfiguration in every figure, which is to say the misrepresentation in every representation, “as if from within,” points to the key relationship between trauma and figure–that is, representation, or image.  In brief, the relationship between the two is such that every trauma, every traumatic event, as such, projects itself into and as some representation, some figure or image, that, precisely as such a projection, simultaneously both discloses and hides the very event so projected.   To take place at all, a traumatic event must project itself in a representation, a figure or image.  Yet that representation, that figure or image, cannot but cover over and conceal the very same event, denying it any place to take.

Riven by the Freudian belatedness definitive of it, trauma never “presents” itself.  Instead of ever “presenting” itself, trauma can only “re-present itself,”  in a sense related to, but different from, Taylor’s use of that term.  It can only present itself “again,” yet without every having presented itself for a “first time.”  To be trauma, it can never present itself “in person,” but, rather, can only present itself through a “representation,” in the sense of an image or figure, that functions as a “representative” in the sense of a “stand in,” someone or something that “stands for” some other one or thing in some aspect or relation, to borrow Charles Sanders Peirce’s definition of a “sign.”

Furthermore, any such representation functions as an archive in which what has figured, sketched, or traced itself there—left a trace of itself there—is preserved, and from which it can be recalled by activating that archive, that trace.   Any representation or figure in which trauma projects itself is just such a trace.  As such, it is a memory of the trauma that traces itself in and into that image or figure.

However, insofar as any such representation or figure always necessarily misrepresents or disfigures what it represents or figures, it is always a covering over and hiding of what it represents or figures.   Consequently, every such memory image wherein trauma projects itself is of necessity simultaneously a “cover-memory.”   In short every such memory of trauma is a “screen memory.”

Any representational image or figure in which trauma so projects and traces itself serves that same archiving function.  The photographic accuracy of the representation does not matter.  That is, whether the memory is “true” or “false” is unimportant.  Indeed, if anything, the more photographically accurate the memory of a trauma may be, the greater becomes its potential to keep attention focused on itself, and to confuse trauma with its own figure or image—a sort of idolatry of the sign.

The Sovereignty of the Image #8: Screen Memory (second continuation)

It is exactly by making a sort of second-order mistake, that is, a mistaking of the difference between two very different ways of making mistakes—namely, in this case, “ontically” and “ontologically,” to use the terminology of Gass and Heidegger (at least the early Heidegger)–that is at issue when contemporary American historian and trauma theorist Dominick LaCapra warns against confusing what he calls “historical trauma” with what he calls “structural trauma.”  By the former, LaCapra means a trauma that can be traced back to a datable occurrence, such as a train wreck, to use Freud’s example, or such as the attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001.  In contrast, what LaCapra calls structural trauma is trauma that cannot be reduced to the effects of any single datable occurrence or, in fact, even any series of such occurrences, but that, as the name implies, somehow belongs to the very structure of human experience as such, either universally or in some more limited frame of consideration.

According to LaCapra, it is important not to confuse one of those two sorts of trauma, historical or structural, with the other.  To reduce the one to the other is, as he puts it in Writing History, Writing Trauma (Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001, page 82), to commit one of two possible errors.   On the one hand, one can fall into error by coming “to generalize structural trauma so that it absorbs or subordinates the significance of historical trauma.”  On the other hand, instead of reducing historical trauma to structural trauma, one can commit an opposite and equal error by trying, “on the contrary, to explain all post-traumatic, extreme, uncanny phenomena and responses as exclusively caused by particular events or contexts.”   “When structural trauma is reduced to, or figured as, an event,” he writes, “one has the genesis of myth [in the negative sense of that term whereby a myth is a sort of “false story”] wherein trauma is enacted in a story from which later traumas seem to derive (as in Freud’s primal crime or in the case of original sin attendant upon the Fall from Eden).”   LaCapra adds that this second error, that of reducing structural trauma to something historical, involves “what one might term reductive contextualism,” of which he uses as an example “deriving anxiety in Heidegger’s thought [where it plays a major role, at least in Being and Time and other early works] exclusively from conditions in interwar Germany.”

LaCapra prefaces his discussion of these two equal but opposite errors, both of which involve confusing structural with historical trauma, by remarking that  “[t]he belated temporality of trauma and the elusive nature of the shattering experience related to it render the distinction between structural and historical trauma problematic,” although, he adds, they “but do not make it irrelevant.”  Yet, so far as I can see, LaCapra himself nowhere specifies clearly just how–and where–the distinction must be problematized, in order adequately to accommodate the two factors he mentions (the “belatedness” of trauma and its “shattering” quality).

In my judgment, fellow American trauma theorist Paul Eisenstein, a literary scholar who specializes in modern German literature, is more helpful than LaCapra on that score.  In his excellent book Traumatic Encounters: Holocaust Representation and the Hegelian Subject (SUNY, 2003), Eisenstein insists–correctly, I am convinced–that what LaCapra calls “historical” trauma presupposes what LaCapra calls “structural” trauma.  In effect, to put Eisenstein in my own words, what makes any datable occurrence traumatic in the first place is that it focuses, both revealing and concealing at once, a structural fault or gap that pervades and disrupts experience itself “from within,” as it were, to use the way Taylor puts the point in the passage I cited above, about how every figure is always disfigured.

We might also profitably put the point by using Freud’s well-known notion of the “screen memory,” though introducing an ambiguity into that term that is not present, or at least not obviously so, in Freud’s own usage.  That is, we might well say that any datable occurrence can come to be traumatic precisely and only insofar as it functions as a “screen” for the underlying structural trauma, in a double sense of “screening.”  By the fist of the two senses at issue, a “screen” would be something that masks, dissembles, or covers-over whatever it provides a screen for, screening it off from view.  But by the second sense of the term, a “screen” would be, rather, something that served as a sort of projection surface, as a movie screen provides such a surface for projecting filmed images.

Putting all the pieces together, I would argue that, to paraphrase Spinoza, nothing is ever traumatic, save screening make it so.  Precisely because of its in-dissociable “belated” and “shattering” qualities, to use LaCapra’s own terms, what he calls “structural” trauma must and can take place—literally:  make and hold a place for itself–only by screening (i.e., maskingly projecting) itself as a specific image–screening itself, in short, as “historical” trauma.  In turn, “historical” trauma is not a kind of trauma distinct from “structural” trauma as another kind.  Rather, historical trauma is the taking place of structural trauma itself.  Only insofar as some datable occurrence has the features that make it suitable for being so employed, that is, for serving as such a screen in the double sense at issue, can such an occurrence, when “taken over” by a structural fault for so screening itself, be traumatic.

After all, what is traumatic for one person may not be so for another.  For example, sometimes the break-up of a marriage or other long-term relationship will leave one or both parties no more affected, at least visibly, that a scraped knee, whereas for another couple it is more like a heat attack or a stroke.  The difference is no more a matter of the ontic properties of one occurrence compared to another, than it is a matter of such ontic properties that differentiates a carrot ready for eating from one already in use as a snowman’s nose.  Just as what makes the carrot into a nose is a matter of ontological, as opposed to ontic, transformation, to use Gass’s way of putting it, so is what makes an occurrence traumatic the same sort of transformation.  In both cases, carrot-nose and occurrence-trauma, what is at issue is establishing a new set of crossed contexts and significations, as Gass puts it.

Of course, it is only thanks to its ontic properties that a given datable event will offer itself to serve as such as place for structural fault to take its own place.  In the same way, it is only thanks to its ontic properties that a carrot is suited to become a snowman’s nose, but a cabbage or a leaf of lettuce is not.  Not every surface is suitable to become a screen.

LaCapra writes (Writing History, Writing Trauma, page 84), that structural trauma “may not be cured but only lived with in various ways.  Nor,” he then adds, “may it be reduced to a dated historical event or derived from one.”  But, to speak paradoxically, neither can an “historical” trauma be “cured,” nor can it “be reduced to a dated historical event.”  To put the paradox most sharply, we can say that a dated historical event is as such no longer an historical event at all!  History is not, in that sense, a series of datable events.  It is never just “one damned thing after another.”  If it were, then it would altogether lose its event-ful-ness, the very quality whereby not everything that happens is as such an “historical” event, but only those things the happening of which is genuinely  “an event.”  Becoming “historical” is itself a matter of ontological, not onltic, transformation.

The Sovereignty of the Image #7: Screen Memory (first continuation)

Below is a continuation of what I posted two days ago, on Monday, January 5.

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Trauma distorts and displaces, both spatially and temporally, and in the process it disconnects, disorients, dissociates, and, in general, dis-appropriates.   Yet it is solely such radical dis-appropriation that makes anything either appropriable or even appropriate, in all senses of that term, possible in the first place.  We might try to approach the point–or, more properly speaking, to respect the point in its always unbridgeable distance, its never more than asymptotic (un)approachability –by saying that all temperance as well as all tempering, whether of our metals or our emotions, as well, for that matter, as all taking of any temperature, depends upon an originary, though never itself original, distemper.

In just that sense, indeed, time and space themselves are traumatic.

So, for example, in After God (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2007) American “postmodern” theologian Mark Taylor writes of the dislocation that defines time.   At issue is not only the dislocation between past, present, and future, the self-division of time into its three dimensions.  Rather, the dislocation at issue is also, and even more crucially, within each of those three temporal dimensions.  It is an inescapable dislocation or dis-juncture or Heideggerian ex-stasis within each of time’s three so called dimensions, which dislocation is what alone first of all makes possible the division into three temporal dimensions in their mutual interrelation, that interrelation constitutive of time itself as such.  Of these three never crossing yet always interrelating dimensions themselves, Taylor writes (page 118):  “This past that was never present eternally recurs as the future that never arrives to disrupt the present that never is.  In this way, the originary absence of the past is the condition of the inescapable openness of the future.  Since the past is never accessible, the present is never present, and the future is never closed.”

Then, on the very next page (119) Taylor goes on to address the absence that defines presence itself not only in the temporal sense of being now, but also in the spatial sense of being here:  “The present, understood both temporally and spatially, is always gift or present [that is, always a “present” in the sense of a gift] pre-sent [that is, literally sent in advance] by (the) nothing that is (not) present.”  Thus, the very condition of the present’s possibility lies in what itself is always “absent,” always somewhere else some other time, never here and now—what itself can never be present at all and is, for that very reason, really no “something,” no “what,” at all, but, rather, a “nothing” in relation to whatever is or ever could be given or presented.

In “Carrots, Noses, Snow, Rose, Roses,” a delightful essay in his collection The World Within the Word (Boston:  Nonpareil Books, 1979, page 288), philosopher and avant-garde novelist William H. Gass imagines a “discornered dunce” who comes across a snowman only “persistently to wonder what a carrot [is] doing in this mound of snow:  pointing at it, laughing, and then growing suspicious when we told him he was looking at a nose (not a snownose, naturally, yet the nose of a snowman).”  Gass remarks that, were we to come across such a discornered dunce, “we should have to conclude that he hadn’t grasped the set of crossed contexts which establishes the figure, and therefore that he couldn’t understand the carrot’s ontological transformation.”

What Gass means by that term “ontological transformation” can be grasped easily from the example of the snowman.  To stick a carrot in a properly shaped mound of snow and thereby finish building a snowman does not change anything in the carrot itself.  It does not alter, add, or delete any characteristics from the carrot:  its color, shape, size, texture, weight, etc., all remain the same.  Thus, to become a snowman’s nose the carrot does not undergo any “ontic” modification whatever, as Gass (or Heidegger) would say.  Yet by being placed in a new context of connections and significations, in understanding which we also come to understand—and literally to see and experience—the carrot in an altogether new way, the carrot has undergone a complete transformation in its “being,” rather than its characteristics or properties:  a thoroughgoing “ontological” transformation, as opposed to any “ontic” one.

Indeed, to undergo such total ontological change even requires that the carrot remain ontically altogether un-changed.  Gass puts it well by noting that it is only “[b]ecause of its natural shape,” to take the feature of the carrot that is key for making a snowman’s nose out of it, that, thanks to the “new relations it has entered” when we place it in the mound of snow, the carrot can undergo such a profound ontological transformation that “the carrot does not simply stand for or resemble a nose, it literally is a nose now—the nose of a specific snowman.”

Before leaving Gass and his snowman, it is also important for my present purposes to note that making what we can call, following his usage, an ontological mistake is very different from making any mistake of an ontic sort.  For example, as I wrote years ago when discussing Gass’s remarks in a different context (in my The Stream of Thought, New York:  Philosophical Library, 1984, pages 7-8):

Failing to see that a carrot is a snowman’s nose (ontological) is not like confusing one thing with another—mistaking cherries for grapes, for example (ontic).    In the second case, the mistake can be corrected through closer observation or, in general, through obtaining new information.  In the first case, however, no new information about carrots and snow can possibly correct the error.  It can only be corrected by learning a new context for the evaluation of the available information.

The sort of “mistake” that allows Ruth to be an inmate in Auschwitz for six full months before finally coming to see and understand just what Auschwitz is, or the “mistake” Speer makes by the account of Hety S., Primo Levi’s German correspondent, which lets Speer go about his business without ever letting himself know just what sort of a murderous business he is really about, is an ontological, not an ontic, mistake.

What is more, it is the very mistaking of just what sort of mistake is at issue in such cases—it is the making a sort of second-order mistake in which one mistakes the difference between an ontological mistake and an ontic one—that itself first makes such ontological mistakes not merely possible, but even, at least within certain limits, inevitable, which is to say necessary.  It is not just sometimes and in some places that we can become “discornered dunces.”  Rather, in time—taking that phrase at full face value, so that it means, “insofar as we are ‘temporal’ at all”–we are all always and everywhere such dunces.  And we can and must everywhere always come to the truth only through recovery from our ontological mistakes.

To Resume–The Sovereignty of the Image #6: Screen Memory

After a seven week break, I am now resuming posts to this blog site on trauma and philosophy.  However, because of other commitments and responsibilities, from now on I will only be posting twice weekly, most often on Mondays and Fridays, rather than three times a week, as was my habit before I took my break.

In the posting below I am continuing with the draft of what I hope will eventually be a book chapter.  Interested readers may want to review what I posted of this chapter before my vacation from this blog, but, as usual, the post is also meant to be able to stand on its own.  However, please be advised that what follows is merely an opening of a section of the planned chapter, a section dealing with the notion of “screen memory.”

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Screen Memory

“Ruth” is a Jewish Berliner who survived Auschwitz.  She is one of three such survivors the accounts of which make up the first part of French sociologist Michael Pollack’s book L’experience concentritionaire:  Essai sur le maintien de l’identité sociale (Paris:  Éditions Métailié, 2000).  According to her own testimony, she was an inmate in the camp at Auschwitz for a full six months before the reality of everything happening around her finally broke through into her consciousness.  Here is her own description of that moment:

The selections in the camp (as opposed to the [camp] “infirmary”  [where Ruth was assigned regular duties]) were perfectly unforeseeable and arbitrary, like the lottery.  I lived through six.  One day, everyone standing and lined up [for a roll call] had to count off, from 1 to 514.  And then they [the camp guards] said:  from 501 to 514, one step forward.  I was among the 14.  Up to 500, all were led to the gas.  Another time, we were made to count off, one-two.  And the women numbered one disappeared.  I began to comprehend.  The next time, the same game:  there, I was a one.  But that time, it was the number twos who disappeared.  I felt anguish, the fear of death.  I broke out in a sweat, I went in my pants.  But that time, it was the number twos who disappeared.  .  . [ellipsis in original]  One more time I escaped.  Six times in all.  But the third time, I was already completely apathetic.  One day, I was working in the commando sorting clothes.  It was a cellblock where we gathered all the clothes of the newly arrived, and we had to sort them according to their nature and their quality:  shirts, pants, coats. . .  And another commando had to unstitch the hems of the coats and the pants to search for currency the deportees might have hidden there.  Actually, one found many things there.  And it was the things of people being led straight to the gas!  One day,  I was sitting there and, among all the items, I came across a little baby bib on which “her mama’s darling” was embroidered.  At that, suddenly, my eyes were opened:  but these are the things of those being killed!  And look at you, in the middle of all that, and even you sometimes accept it. . .  For me that was the grand revelation and a great shudder of horror.  Do you understand?  All at once, I said to myself that I could just as easily come across the blouse of my mother, being killed at the same moment.  There, suddenly I understood what game was being played in the camp.  It was a rational system the purpose of which was to exploit people and kill them.  It was, so to speak, just simply an enterprise, a factory for killing people after having exploited their resources for work and after having used different parts of their body:  hair, bones, etc.  And those clothes, those mountains of glasses, of gold dental crowns, of little valises, all those goods were sent to Berlin.  During at least six months, I stayed under my glass jar [namely, of her denial, her incomprehension].  I hear everything, I saw everything, but nothing came through to me.  It was too incomprehensible, too unimaginable.  The dead, the people beaten, the hung in front of whom one passed by.  All that, I saw and heard it all fine, but I didn’t realize.  At the end of six months, I admitted to myself where I was:  in a factory the sole function of which was murder.

Such an incredible ability to blind oneself to what one is seeing all too clearly–an ability to stay asleep, as it were, in the face of such horror—was not only a strange gift given to such Holocaust survivors as Ruth.  The same capacity for not knowing what one knows, not seeing what all one’s senses clearly record, was also displayed by some of the perpetrators of the Holocaust.  So, for example, even such a figure among the survivors as Primo Levi can come to write, in The Drowned and the Saved, his last work before he own death by apparent suicide, with a certain sympathy for Albert Speer.

Once Speer was finally released from Spandau and his memoirs had been published, Hety S., one of Levi’s German correspondents–”among all my German readers,” writes Levi (page 197), “she was the only one ‘with clean credentials’ and therefore not  entangled in guilt”–visited him.  Levi cites (page 196) Hety’s remark, in one of her letters to him, that she believes Speer when that latter says that for him, too, “the Auschwitz slaughter is a trauma.”  Hety goes on to observe that in the postwar years Speer became “obsessed by the question of how he could ‘not want to see or know,’ in short, [how he could] block everything out.”  Hety adds that she does not think Speer is just “trying to find justification,” that is, some rationalization of his own criminal behavior.  Rather, she thinks, Speer is genuinely at a loss to account for his own strange blindness to what was so obvious:  “he would like to understand what, for him, too, it is impossible to understand.”

In his introduction to his translation of The Shell and the Kernel (Chicago:  The University of Chicago Press, 1994), an influential collection of writings by the psychoanalysts Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok, Nicolas T. Rand writes that Abraham’s and Torok’s “most radical contribution to psychoanalytic theory” is “the claim that the patient may be the bearer of someone else’s trauma.”  Yet the examples of both Ruth, the Holocaust survivor, and Speer, one of the main architects of the very camp system, suggest for them, too, the trauma is experienced, as it were, as “someone else’s.”  They lived in the midst of the trauma of the Holocaust itself as though nothing unusual was happening at all.  As Ruth puts it, none of what was really occurring succeeded in “getting through” to them at the time.  No more, for that matter, does the railroad accident in Freud’s original example of trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle get through “at the time” of the imagined accident to Freud’s imagined victim.  Indeed, the very “belatedness” that Freud uses that example to capture—a belatedness definitive of trauma as such, according to him—assures that trauma will always belong to “someone else,” at least until the period of “latency” comes to completion.

The Sovereignty of the Image #5: The Fiction of Trauma (End)

Below is the conclusion to the draft of the chapter section I began in my immediately preceding post.

NOTE TO READERS:  For the next month and one-half, other priorities will be taking me away from blogging at this site.  Accordingly this will be my last post until early next year.  I hope to put up my next post on January 4, 2010.

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There is something voyeuristic about the fascination with which those who occupy a position of spectator with regard to the traumas of others look upon photographs of the suffering involved.  Susan Sontag reflects on that voyeurism in Regarding the Pain of Others (New York:  Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2003), her return after a quarter-century to the concerns she first addressed in On Photography, originally published in 1977 (by the same publisher).  It is worth noting that in Regarding the Pain of Others she raises the issue of voyeurism in relation to photographs of trauma by first contrasting such photographic images to other visual images that, no matter how graphic and “realistic,” involve imaginary, and in that sense fictional or “invented,” events.  Thus, on page 42 she writes:

An invented horror can be quite overwhelming.  (I, for one, find it difficult to look at Titian’s great painting of the flaying of Marsyas, or indeed at any picture of this subject.)  But there is shame as well as shock in looking at the close-up of a real horror.  Perhaps the only people with the right to look at images of suffering of this extreme order are those who could do something to alleviate it—say, the surgeons at the military hospital where the photograph was taken [as in an example she has earlier discussed]—or those who could learn from it.  The rest of us are voyeurs, whether or not we mean to be.

Near the end of her book, Sontag returns to the same issue of the moral inappropriateness and illegitimacy of trafficking in photographic images of trauma, adding another dimension to her critique.  In addition to opening the door to voyeuristic abuses, the proliferation of such images serves, even aside from the intentions of those involved in its production, the powers at work in the perpetration and perpetuation of trauma inflicted by some upon others.  Thus, against the not uncommon idea that the dissemination of such images on television and in other mass media brings spectators to greater understanding and sympathy for the victims of traumatic abuse, Sontag writes (pages 102-103):

The imaginary priority to the suffering inflicted on others that is granted by images suggests a link between the far-away sufferers—seen close up on the television screen—and the privileged viewer that is simply untrue, that is yet one more mystification of our real relations to power.  So far as we feel sympathy, we feel that we are not accomplices to what caused the suffering.  Our sympathy proclaims our innocence as well as our impotence.  To that extent, it can be (for all our good intentions) an impertinent—if not at inappropriate response.  To set aside the sympathy we extend to others beset by war and murderous politics for a reflection on how our privileges are located on the same map as their suffering, and may—in ways we might prefer not to imagine—be linked to their suffering, as the wealth of some may imply the destitution of others, is a task for which the painful, stirring images supply only an initial spark.

However, Sontag is not some sort of Luddite, calling for dismantling the engines that proliferate the images of others’ sufferings.  Her view in Regarding the Pain of Others is a carefully crafted, nuanced one in which she even takes issue with her own earlier views, as expressed in On Photography.  It is not simply a matter of replacing the idea that the proliferation of such images creates sympathy with the idea that it deadens sympathy, as she had thought at the time she wrote that earlier book.  Rather, it is a matter of reframing the entire discussion.  Thus, just two pages after the passage cited immediately above, she writes in Regarding the Pain of Others (pages 105-106):  “As much as they create sympathy, I wrote [in On Photography], photographs shrivel sympathy.  Is this true?  I thought it was when I wrote it.  I’m not so sure now.”  Then she reframes the whole issue as follows:

The question turns on a view of the principal medium of the news, television.  An image is drained of its force by the way it is used, where and how often it is seen.  Images shown on television are by definition images of which, sooner or later, one tires.  What looks like callousness has its origins in the instability of attention that television is organized to arouse and to satiate by its surfeit of images.  Image-glut keeps attention light, mobile, relatively indifferent to content.  Image-flow precludes a privileged image.  The whole point of television is that one can switch channels, that it is normal to switch channels, to become restless, bored.  Consumers droop.  They need to be stimulated, jump-started, again and again.  Content is no more than one of these stimulants.  A more reflective engagement with content would require a certain intensity of awareness—just what is weakened by the expectations brought to images disseminated by the media, whose leaching out of content contributes most to the deadening of feeling.

Two pages later, on page 108, she adds:

Since On Photography, many critics have suggested that the excruciations of war—thanks to television—have devolved into a nightly banality.  Flooded with images of the sort that once used to shock and arouse indignation, we are losing the capacity to react.  Compassion, stretched to its limits, is going numb.  So runs the familiar diagnosis.  But what is really being asked for here?  That images of carnage be cut back to, say, once a week?  More generally, that we work toward what I called for in On Photography:  an “ecology of images”?  There isn’t going to be an ecology of images.  No Committee of Guardians is going to ration horror, to keep fresh its ability to shock.  And the horrors themselves are not going to abate.

“Images,” Sontag later (on page 117) recapitulates the view that even she had once espoused, “have been reproached for being a way of watching suffering at a distance, as if,” she importantly and ironically concludes, “there were some other way of watching.”   Then on the next page she continues:

It is felt that there is something morally wrong with the abstract of reality offered by photography; that one has no right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its raw power; that we pay too high a human (or moral) price for those hitherto admired qualities of vision [those that once caused the ancient Greeks to heap praise upon vision above all the other senses]—the standing back from the aggressiveness of the world which frees up for observation and for elective attention.

“But,” Sontag replies against such contemporary disparagement of vision, in contrast to the original praise of it by Plato and the other ancient Greeks, “this is only to describe the function of the mind itself.”  Thus, she continues:  “There is nothing wrong with standing back and thinking.  To paraphrase several sages:  ‘Nobody can think and hurt someone at the same time.’”

Sontag knows, of course, that there is a perfectly ordinary sense of “thinking” in accordance with which it is all too easy to do just that, “think and hurt someone at the same time.”  In that sense, torture is always a very thoughtful activity:  the torturer must plan ahead and be attentive to what he is doing, to cause the torture victim the maximum of pain, at maximal duration.  In making her remark, however, Sontag is, as it were, thinking of “thinking” in the most highly morally responsive, contemplative sense—the very sense, I might add, that is supposedly at issue in “philosophy.”

In that high sense, a truly thoughtful– “philosophical”—response to “the pain of others” requires precisely the sort of distance that a photograph introduces between the viewer and what is in view in the photographic image.  It is because of the power of photographs to create such necessary distance that, as Judith Butler has recently put it in Frames of War:  When Is Life Grievable? (London and New York:  Verso, 2009, page 96):  “In the last chapter of Regarding the Pain of Others [on page 115], Sontag seeks to counter her earlier critique of photography.  In an emotional, almost exasperated outcry, one that seems quite different from her usual measured rationalism, Sontag remarks:  ‘Let the atrocious images haunt us.’ ”

On the next page, Butler again quotes the same line, calling it “Sontag’s imperative.”   And, in fact, both Sontag’s original discussion and Butler’s later reflections on it serve to show that there is indeed a sort of moral obligation upon those who occupy the position of spectators in relation to the trauma of others–an obligation not to turn away from others’ pain but, instead, precisely to look and see what they have suffered.  Those who, voluntarily or involuntarily, find themselves in such a spectator’s position are ordered, as it were, by the very spectacle they are given to see in such photographs of the pain of others, to continue to “regard” that very pain in those images.  They are obligated, that is, to hold the pain of others so imaged “in a firm, fixed gaze,” a steady gaze in which, in the etymologically original sense of regard, they “keep guard” over that pain, letting themselves be “haunted” by it, as Sontag insists they should do.

However, Sontag’s own remark, cited above, on page 42 of Regarding the Pain of Others, about her own difficulty in viewing such images as Titian’s painting of the flaying of Marsyas, suggests that, paradoxically, it may well often be in just such “invented” images—such fictions or imaginative constructions—that the imperative to continue to look and see others’ pain speaks most clearly, most imperatively.  That is not only because, as Sontag herself observes in the same passage, beholding the fictional or invented representation can engender in the spectator a pure horror, unadulterated by the shame at one’s potential or actual voyeurism with which “real” or photographic representations tend to mix the horror.  It is also because, as fictions—literally, things made or created—“invented” images carry the message of their own having been made or created as part of their very representational content.  As I argued years ago (in my book The Stream of Thought, New York:  The Philosophical Library, 1984), following Heidegger’s remarks along the same lines in “On the Origin of the Work of Art,” that is one of the crucial ways in which what Sontag calls “invented” images differ from photographs, especially those that count as what we call “snap-shots.”

Significantly, to use Butler’s own prime example for her discussion in “Torture and the Ethics of Photography:  Thinking with Sontag,” the second chapter in Frames of War, the notorious photographs of American torture of Muslim prisoners during the war in Iraq in the prison at Abu Ghraib were just such “snap-shots.”  As Butler’s discussion makes clear, it is only insofar as those photographs have been taken up by others–that is, by those who are other than the original producers and consumers of the photographs (the American guards at Abu Ghraib themselves)–and disemminated “outside the scene of [their] production,” as Butler writes at the end of her chapter on Sontag (page 100), that their “circulation . . . has broken up the mechanism of disavowal, scattering grief and outrage in its wake.”

That is, she argues that it was only when such “outside” circulation occurred that the photographs of torture came to have the power to let us see the very “frame” that otherwise “blinds us to what we see.”  According to Butler, “if there is a critical role for visual culture during times of war it is precisely to thematize the forcible frame, the one that conducts the dehumanizing norm, that restricts what is perceivable and, indeed, what can be.”

That means, however, that considered in the scene of their production and in terms of their representational content–what is actually photographically visible within that same scene—the photographs from Abu Ghraib just do not problematize that “forcible frame” itself.  They presuppose it, rather than calling attention to it, and thereby leave it “out of the picture” altogether.  Only when the photographs are, as it were, forced out of that “forcible frame,” does the fact, manner, and significance of their own production, their own having been made, come “into the picture.”

In contrast, it is in the “invented” visual image—or in the “fiction” in general—of torture and abuse that what is so brought into the image is itself revealed in its own having been made, its own having been invented.  In the fiction, the fictive nature—which is to say the non-“natural”-ness, the artificiality, the “forc-ed”-ness—of what is represented, in the scene of its own production, its own making or invention, is brought to attention.

In sum:  In the face of the fictional representation of trauma inflicted upon others, the spectator is brought face to face with the fic-tion, the pro-duction, of such trauma itself.  The fictional trauma lets us see the fully fictional status of what purports to be an “act of God” in the sense that insurance companies use that expression to get themselves off the hook of liability for a disaster:  The fiction of trauma in the “objective” sense (that is, the fiction “of” trauma in the sense of the fictive, as opposed to photographic, imaging of trauma) lets us see the fiction of trauma in the “subjective” sense (the sense in which trauma itself creates fictions, makes up stories, about itself).

That holds, at least, for trauma perpetrated by some upon others, as the American guards perpetrated trauma upon the prisoners they tortured at Abu Ghraib, or the Nazis perpetrated it upon the Jews.  However, I will begin the next section of this chapter with some reflections suggesting that it holds for all trauma, not just for that in which we can distinguish perpetrators from victims.  I will argue that the internal structure of trauma is such that trauma makes a fiction of itself.

The Sovereignty of the Image #4: The Fiction of Trauma (Beginning)

Today, once again, I am able to post only the beginning of a new section to the draft of a chapter called “Representation and Trauma I:  The Sovereignty of the Image,” for a book I am planing on topics pertaining to trauma and philosophy.  In my next post, scheduled for Monday, November 16, I hope to finish this chapter section, which I am calling “The Fiction of Trauma.”

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Coincidentally, in the same January 9, 2009, Sunday New York Times that contained Jacob Heilbrunn’s criticism of recent films depicting the Holocaust, discussed earlier this chapter, there also appeared a book review by Richard Lourie of H. G. Adler’s novel The Journey, the English translation of which, by Peter Filkins, appeared only the year before (New York:  Random House, 2008).  As one learns from Lourie’s review, as well as from Filkins’s introduction to his translation of the book itself, Adler was born in Prague in 1910 into a secularized Jewish family, and was himself a survivor of both Theresienstadt and Auschwitz.  Adler survived eighteen other members of his family who died in the Nazi camps, including his wife, her mother, and his own parents.  After liberation, Adler eventually settled in London, where he wrote, among other things, The Journey, detailing in fictionalized form his own journey during the Nazi era.

Both Lourie’s review and Filkins’s introduction, as well as Adler’s son Jeremy Adler’s afterword, to The Journey also acquaint the reader with the journey of its own that Adler’s book–written in German during 1950-1951, we are told in the son’s afterword–itself had to take before it was finally published in Germany in 1962.  In all three places–Richard Lourie’s review, Peter Filkins’s introduction, and Jeremy Adler’s afterword—we are told that the influential German publisher Peter Suhrkamp vowed that the book would never be published in Germany, so long as he lived.  And it wasn’t.  Even after publication, the book languished, little known and little read, until only recently, as is indicated by an English language translation not appearing until 2008.

Both Lourie and Filkins connect Suhrkamp’s insistent stance against publishing the book at all, with the dominance at the time of the aesthetics of Theodor Adorno, who famously declared that literature was no longer possible after Auschwitz.  Adorno argued that the very idea of transforming the horror of the Holocaust into fiction or poetry was morally unacceptable.  It was blasphemous and obscene, to use the same terms I already used myself, in an earlier part of this chapter, to characterize any “exploitation,” as Heilbrunn appropriately names it in his review of recent films focused on the Holocaust, of “Auschwitz”—any exploitation, that is, of all that that name has come to stand for–even and especially for the sake of telling any tale of redemption that would give the Holocaust meaning after the fact.

Interestingly, H. G. Adler himself refuses to tell any such redemption tale in The Journey.  Nevertheless, the background story about his novel’s own journey helps to focus the issue with which Adorno and many since him, including Heilbrun and historian Dominick LaCapra, whom I also have already  mentioned earlier in this chapter.  As we might put it, against the background of the history of Adler’s novel, that is the issue of the morality of fictionalized representations of such shared, historically significant, intentionally perpetrated traumas as the Holocaust or, to give a later example, 9/11.  Especially in such cases, does fictional representation of trauma and its victims cross over into perpetuation of the traumatic abuse at issue?

The broader, framing question to which that of the morality of creating and disseminating fictional images of trauma belongs is the question of just where representation in images as such begins to cross over into morally treacherous territory.  At just what point does such representation begin to risk falling into blasphemy and obscenity?

With regard to that general question, I want to maintain the following thesis: All other things being equal (note that important qualification), the less “fictional,” which is to say the more “realistic,” the representation or image, the greater the risk of such blasphemy and obscenity.  To put the point hyperbolically, I might say that, with regard to such traumatic events as “Auschwitz,” the more photo-graphic, the more porno-graphic.  That is, the more closely the representing of such traumas comes to what Walter Benjamin called “mechanical reproduction,” in his often-cited article “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” as it does in photographic images, the more morally questionable it becomes:  The closer representation comes to reproduction in and as such an image, the greater the risk of blasphemy and obscenity becomes.