The Image of Sovereignty #5: The Myth of the State, The State of the Myth (beginning)

Below is the opening of the next section–a section I am calling “The Myth of the State, The State of the Myth”–of my draft of a chapter called “Trauma and Representation II:  The Image of Sovereignty,” for a planned book.

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The Myth of the State, the State of the Myth

Some of the examples of state profiteering in trauma mentioned earlier can serve to introduce what is now at stake in this new section of the current chapter.  One such example is Hitler’s recurrent use of the myth of the “stab in the back” to justify the Nazi Machtergreifung (“seizure of power”) in the 1930s. Another is Ben-Gurion’s and other Israeli leaders’ recurrent use of the recollection of the Holocaust to justify Israeli national policy after World War II. The third is Slobodan Milosevic’s recurrent citation of old, remembered traumas to justify Serbian aggression in the 1990s.  In all three cases trauma is made to serve a founding role exceeding that of legitimating decisions and actions taken by already constituted nations falling prey to the temptation Robert J. Lifton mentions, that of transforming trauma “into a strong impulse toward retaliative action” against national enemies made to bear the blame for the trauma.

Beyond that reactive way of forcing trauma to serve the purpose of the nation-state, the three cases at issue involve the even more radical use of trauma to justify the very formation of a state or regime in the first place.  Thus, Hitler and the Nazis used the German defeat in World War I to justify the very foundation of the “Third Reich.”  Ben-Gurion and other Israeli leaders used the Holocaust to defend the very creation of the modern state of Israel.   And Milosevic uses the recollection of long-past violence perpetrated by Moslems against Christians in the Balkans to legitimate the breaking away of Serbia from the former Yugoslavia to constitute Serbia as an independent state of its own.  In all three instances trauma serves the nation not only by providing a foundation for specific acts or ranges of action, but also by providing one for the very formation of the nation in the first place.

Above all, the idea of “founding trauma,” as I have formulated it following Sudhir Kakar, means trauma used in this second way, to legitimate not just actions taken by already formed nation-states, but the very formation of those nation-states to begin with.  In such cases, the nation-state has a vested interest in trauma not just to justify even the widest range of its actions.  Rather, the interest the nation-state invests in trauma is for the very sake of establishing itself as a nation in the first place, or at least of providing justification after the fact for its establishment.  It is not merely the decisions and acts of or by a sovereign nation that are at issue.  At issue is, instead, the very constitution of the sovereign nation in the first place.

At first glance, such cases of the exploitation of trauma for founding a nation-state would appear to contrast with others in which such a state seems to found itself on what appears to be the very opposite—namely, the repression and avoidance of any explicit reference to a trauma without which the state at issue would nevertheless, in fact, never have emerged.  The paradigmatic example of what I have in mind is the creation, out of the ruins of the German catastrophe at the end of World War II, of the Federal Republic of Germany –“West” Germany as opposed to “East” Germany, the German Democratic Republic (the dynamics of the founding of which embodied an at least superficially different relation to the devastation of Germany by allied bombs and armies than that embodied in the foundation of the Federal Republic).

In 1997 German novelist and literary scholar W. G. Sebald delivered a series of lectures in Zurich about the strange silence in almost all postwar German literature about the overwhelming devastation visited upon Germany by the allied policy of heavy aerial bombing of civilian centers of German population such as Berlin, Hamburg, Munich, Cologne, Nuremberg, and, no doubt most famously, Dresden.  Sebald later revised his Zurich lectures for publication, along with a related, shorter piece of literary criticism, under the title Luftkrieg und Literature (Germany:  Hansen, 1999). The lectures appear under that title of “Air War and Literature” as the first and longest part of the English translation, by Anthea Bell, of the original German publication, along with two other of Sebald’s related literary studies, the whole collection published in English (New York: Random House, 2003) under the title On the Natural History of Destruction.

In time, I will have more to say about Sebald’s lectures, but for now what I want to take from them is a single insight—just one of many, but a crucially important one.  The insight at issue is into the relation between, on the one hand, the state which eventually emerged from the German devastation–to become, in 1949, under the leadership of Konrad Adenauer, who became its first Chancellor, the Federal Republic of Germany—and, on the other hand, the trauma of that devastation itself.  Referring to what came to be known as the West German “Wirtschaftswunder,” or “economic miracle,” for which the government of the Federal Republic served simultaneously in various roles, including those of architect, overseer, and heir, Sebald notes early in his first lecture (page 7 of the English translation):

From the outset, the now legendary and in some respects genuinely admirable reconstruction of the country after the devastation wrought by Germany’s wartime enemies, a reconstruction tantamount to a second liquidation in successive phases of the nations own past history, prohibited any look backward.  It did so through the sheer amount of labor required and the creation of a new, faceless reality, pointing the population exclusively towards the future and enjoining on it silence about the past.

A few pages later (pages 11-12) Sebald follows up with this observation:

The almost entire absence of profound disturbance to the inner life of the nation suggests that the new Federal German society relegated the experiences of its own prehistory to the back of its mind and developed and almost perfectly functioning mechanism of repression, one which allowed it to recognize the fact of its own rise from total degradation while disengaging entirely from its stock of emotions, if not actually chalking up as another item to its credit its success in overcoming all tribulations without showing any sign of weakness.

The German self-image Sebald depicts in those two early passages is of a sustained forward march of German–at least West German—history after World War II, a collective march “eyes front,” in effect, in which the devastated German society as a whole is so focused on the future that it cannot take time even to acknowledge its own past, the very past the utterly devastating nature of which requires just such single-minded devotion to the building of a supposedly new future, to rise over the very ruins of that past.

Such a picture of a resolutely forward-looking historical progression contrasts poignantly with the very different picture that emerges from the passage with which Sebald ends his Zurich lectures, at least in their published version, before he goes on to write a postscript to them.  In that closing passage to his second lecture, Sebald first asks whether the destruction of Germany does not finally constitute (page 66) “irrefutable proof that the catastrophes which develop, so to speak, in our hands”–that is, the hands of humanity in general, culminating in the humanity at whose hands the horrendous events of 2oth century history took place, including both the German genocide against the Jews and the devastation wrought by the Allied air war against Germany in World War II—“and seem to break out suddenly are a kind of experiment, anticipating the point at which we shall drop out of what we have thought for so long to be our autonomous history and back into the history of nature.”

A few lines later (on page 67), Sebald goes on to suggest that among postwar German authors “even the most enlightened of writers” can look back at the scenes of the destruction of the writer’s home country by the Allied bombers only “with the horrified fixity of Walter Benjamin’s ‘angel of history,’ whose ‘face is turned toward the past.’”  Sebald then closes his somber reflections by citing the rest of the passage containing that famous image from Benjamin’s “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations, the collection of some of Benjamin’s best-known essays (translated by Harry Zohn–New York:  Schocken Books, 1969, pages 257-258):

Where we perceive a chain of events, he [“the angel of history”] sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet.  The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, make whole what has been smashed.  But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such violence that the angel can no longer close them.  This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.  This storm is what we call progress.

The Image of Sovereignty #2: Founding Trauma and the Birth of the Nation (continued)

This week I have time for only a brief post, one in which I continue the discussion, begun in last week’s post, of the work of Indian psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar.  That discussion, which I hope to finish next week, will constitute the opening section of the draft of a new chapter of my planned book on trauma and philosophy, the second of two chapters on “Trauma and Representation,” this one devoted to the topic of “The Image of Sovereignty.”

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In The Colors of Violence (pages 191-192) Kakar draws a useful distinction between “community” and “communalism.”  What is crucial to what Kakar calls communalism is the explicit assertion of belonging to some community.   Communalism is, in effect, a matter of yoking one’s own sense of personal identity with membership in a given community.  It is irreducible to simply belonging to a given community, being a member of it.  Instead, it is the elevation of such membership to the status of what defines one for oneself as the individual one is.  Communalism is literally self-identification—that is, the locating of one’s own personal identity or “selfhood”–in terms of belonging to a given community.   As Kakar nicely puts it, in communalism “[t]he ‘We-ness’ of the community is . . . replaced by the ‘We are‘ of communalism.”  As such, communalism is a sort of identity with a chip on its shoulder, always asserting itself and ever alert to the smallest perceived slight to the community to which one belongs, which gets taken as a personal insult.

Kakar himself uses a model developed by his colleague Oscar Peterson of the stages through which someone “identifying with his or her ethnic group” in such a way must go.  According to that model, the first stage of a “change from community to communalism” is to  “declare to all who share the crisis with me that I am one of them–a Hindu, a Muslim [or whatever].”  Thus, for Kakar, the explicit assertion of membership in such communities is itself preceded and grounded on an antecedently explicit awareness of that very membership.  That awareness of belonging to such a community is itself, by the model he is using, triggered by the occurrence of some traumatic event that is antecedently shared with other members of that same community.  In effect, the fact that the trauma is already shared with other members of the community to which one has belonged all along, but without express awareness of such membership or any felt need to assert it–that antecedent sharing of the trauma is what allows the explicit awareness of group membership to surface, which in turn grounds the experience of a need explicitly to assert that membership—and, of course, to defend the group itself against perceived threats originating from “outside” the group, in one sense or another of “outside.”   First comes membership in some group, then comes a trauma that galvanizes group members into becoming aware of their membership, then comes the assertion of solidarity with the group in the face of ongoing threat of one sort or another.

But what if the process actually occurs in a very different way, with a very different order of stages?  What if the very awareness of being a member of the community at issue—what if one’s very cultural or communal self-identification in terms of membership in the community–does not in fact precede the assertion thereof, as Kakar maintains, but results from it, by a certain, far from universal or “natural” process?  What if the whole idea of an antecedent awareness of a supposedly still earlier condition of belonging to the community is itself a retrospectively cast myth or fiction of the origin of the community, membership in which is being asserted?  What if the very constitution of the ethnic group itself as a distinct “we” is just another retrospective projection—in this case, the retrospective projection of group- identity as already having been there all along, when in fact it is first constituted only in a defensive response to trauma?

Kakar mentions the “individual who, as a consequence of a shared threat, is in process of self-consciously identifying with his or her ethnic group” (page 191, emphasis added).  But what if the very constituting of a threat as a “shared” one in the first place does not precede the trauma, but first comes about only through it, insofar as the trauma is communicated, in the very sense of being shared with others.  It is worth noting, in that connection, the German term for “communication.”  That term is Mitteilung, from mit, with, and teilen, to share or apportion, that is, to break into parts or portions–“shares”—and to give each of a group a part:  To share the shares, we could say.   That is the sense of “communication” at issue in, for example, the Christian Eucharistic ceremony, wherein bread is broken into parts and each “communicant” is given a piece.  In such cases, it is only the act of communication itself, the act of sharing, that first establishes something as shared.  What is more, the community of those who have shared the same thing is established by the very act of sharing, rather than preceding that act.  The sharing of what is shared gives rise to the community of the sharers, rather than that community already being there and then, as a community, having something happen to it, either collectively as something that happens to the community as such, or distributively as something that happens to each of the individual community members.

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 and 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 unconsciously 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 Indian psychoanalyst 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.”

Trauma and Group Identity

3/30/09

What follows is three day’s worth of entries from my philosophical journal, first written on the dates indicated, occasioned by my reading of Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, by sociologists Jeffrey C. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Bernhard Giesen, Neil J. Smelser, and Piotr Sytompka (University of California Press, 2004).

Readers interested in the topic of trauma and group identity might also want to compare what I say below to what I  say in entries posted earlier concerning the notion of what sociologist Sudhir Kakar calls “founding traumas.”  (See the index and tags for this blogsite.) 

With regard to the whole endeavor to differentiate between “individual,” “social,” and “cultural” trauma, as Alexander and the other authors of Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity try to do, my own sense is that all trauma is mediated by all  three dimensions, individual, social, and cultural, at once.  As Alexander and his colleagues themselves insist, no event is traumatic solely by virtue of its objective properties or characteristics.  Only insofar as an event is “symbolically mediated,” as we might put it at least provisionally, can it have traumatic impact.  Such symbolic mediation, however, is itself always a matter of an inextricable overlapping of individual, social, and cultural factors.   

 

Thursday, July 31, 2008

The introduction, “Toward a Theory of Cultural Trauma,” is by Alexander, who starts off this  way (p. 1):  “Cultural trauma occurs when members of a collectivity feel they have been subjected to a horrendous event that leaves indelible marks upon their group consciousness, marking their memories forever and changing their future identity in fundamental and irrevocable ways.”

He talks about “lay trauma theory”–and the academic versions of it he takes to be psychoanalytic and other accounts–committing “the naturalistic fallacy” of thinking that events, “in and of themselves, create collective trauma.”  He and his collegues base their approach on the rejection of this “fallacy” and the counter-assertion (p. 8), “Events are not inherently traumatic. Trauma is a socially mediated attribution.”  [Note from 3/30/09:  The point I  am making here in my journal is not that being traumatic is  some  sort of "natural" characteristic that certain events have and other lack.  As already mentioned above in my introductory remarks to today's post, I agree with Alexander and his coauthors in rejecting that idea completely.  My point, rather, is that he is perhaps setting up a straw-man here, since I am inclined to think that no reasonable reading of what in he calls "lay trauma theory," in either its common or its academic manifestation, can attribute such a "naturalistic" construction to that "theory."] 

In the same paragraph he does manage to say one thing good, though I reject his contextualization of it [for reasons indicated in my parenthetical remark below, after the quotation]:  “Sometimes, in fact, events that are deeply traumatizing may not actually have occurred at all; such imagined events, however, can be as traumatizing as events that have actually occurred.”  (Who’s being fallaciously “naturalistic” now?)

Though he doesn’t do so, one could unfold such an insight into an account of the truth of “false” memories!

 

P. 10:  “For traumas to emerge at the level  of the  collectivity, social crises must become cultural crises.  Events are one thing, representations of these events quite another.  Trauma is not the result of a group experiencing pain.  It is the  result of this acute discomfort entering into the core of the collectivity’s sense of its own identity.”  Although he does not seem to realize how naive and reductionistic is the very rigidity of the distinction that he is trying to draw between “event” and “representation,” what he says here can be salvaged.  But then he adds this, which his use of quotes around “decides” shows he himself already at least dimly perceives to be a very questionable formulation:  “Collective actors ‘decide’ to represent social pain as a fundamental threat to their sense of who they are, where they came from, and where they want to go.”

 

Friday, August 1, 2008

In Cultural Trauma, Neil J. Smelser, “Psychological and Cultural Trauma” (ch. 2 of the book), p. 34, cites Freud from a work originally of 1896 ([by the reference given,] “Further Remarks on the Neuro-psychoses of Defense,”  pp. 162-185 in 3rd vol. of Standard Edition [of Freud's works], p. 148 (which pagination would actually fit within what the authors of Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity give in their bibliography as an earlier piece in that same third volume of Freud, namely, ”Heredity and Aetiology of the Neuroses”) concerning how hysteria, though at that time Freud thought it was grounded in an original trauma of sexual incest abuse, can be triggered by “emotional disturbances, physical, exhaustion, acute illness, intoxications, traumatic accidents, intellectual overwork, etc..”  Freud says these are not the cause, but are just “agents provocateurs,” but that–and here’s what I find of interest, really–”practical interest attaches to them, for a consideration of these stock causes may offer lines of approach to which a therapy which does not aim at a radical cure and is content with repressing the illness to a former state of latency” [might fruitfully attend] (my italics). 

Just so were “war neuroses” treated in WW I and WW II:  Get them back to the front to be cannon fodder ASAP.

Glossing this and similar passages, Smelser writes:  “. . . even in Freud’s preliminary formulations, the idea of trauma is not to be conceived so much as a discrete causal event as a part of  a process-in-system.  To put the conclusion in its briefest form, trauma entails some conception of system.”

Among the conditions for something to be a “cultural trauma,” Smelser says (p. 36): 

It must be remembered, or made to be remembered.  Furthermore, the memory must be made culturally relevant, that is, represented as obligating, damaging, or rendering problematic something sacred  –usually a value or outlook felt to be essential for the integrity of the affected society.  Finally, the memory must be associated with a strong negative affect, usually disgust, shame, or guilt.

Leaving aside how he (and his coauthors) [may] themselves [be to some extent] caught in a sort of “lay trauma theory” (as Alexander labels it), in accordance with which the traumatic is always seen as negative–and leaving aside, in general, the question of the adequacy and accuracy of his criteria–his next remark, which attempts to give clarifying examples, shows at least one crucial  problem with how all these sociologists are proceeding in this volume:  the problem of who is to be taken as the “subject” or “victim” of the “cultural” trauma, in effect–and how one must work to keep the identification of that “subject” (the “culture” at issue) free from racial, sexual, class, or other bias.  Thus, he writes: 

Looking at the sweep  of American history, the memory of  the  institution of  slavery appears to qualify most unequivocally as a cultural trauma [Only if the "culture" is white, given what he  goes on to use as a counter-example, as I'll get to in a minute!], because it comes close to meeting those three conditions.  The seizure of Native Americans’ lands and the partial [!  No more and no less than the Nazi extermination of the Jews was "partial"!] extermination of their populations is another example, but at the present time its status as trauma is not as secured as it is for slavery. 

Oh?  It is surely no less “secured” as a trauma for “Native Americans” than slavery is for African-Americans!  Again, it’s only if one assumes that “American” culture is white culture that his examples work–at least in the way he lays them out.

 

P. 36:  As opposed to a society (and there can be “social” trauma, as well as “cultural” trauma [according to this author]), “a culture can be defined as a grouping of elements–values, norms, outlooks, beliefs, ideologies, knowledge and empirical assertions (not always verified), linked to one another to some degree as a meaning-system.”

 

P. 40:  Concerning the sort of “vicarous traumatization” that can come from hearing the stories of others’ traumas (as is common among therapists and, by the way, exemplified by Rivers in Pat Barker’s [Regeneration] Trilogy), he writes:

This principle also explains why individuals who are passively watching or reading thrilling, gripping, or frightening movies or books can be temporarily “traumatized” by them even though they are completely fictional.  They attach the affects that would have been excited by actual events to fictional situations.  This implies further that trauma can be experienced by attaching appropriate affects to imagined situations.

This whole approach has concealed presuppositions I find very questionable (even if not questioned, they should be acknowledged).  At the root, for one thing, if all trauma is  ultimately the precipitation, in effect, of structural “faulting,” then the whole distinction between “real” and “fictitious” events becomes insignificant, and the very idea of “vicarous” trauma is undercut:  that traumatization, as the surfacing of structural fault–Lacan’s”bone in the throat”–is infectious, does not say the same as that it can be acquired or experienced “vicarously.”

 

Monday, August 4, 2008

Ch. 4 of Cultural Trauma, Bernhard Giesen, “the Trauma of Perpetrators:  the Holocaust as the Traumatic Reference of German National Identity,” P. 534: 

In contrast to the [Willy] Brant [then Chancellor of West Germany] gesture in 1970 [when he spontaneously knelt in silence at the memorial at the Warsaw ghetto], [later West German Chancellor Helmut] Kohl [at Bitburg with Reagan in 1985 at the German war cemetery] did not take on collective guilt, but tried to disperse it in the intractable space of history or to change it to demons, thereby reviving the postwar narrative of the seduced [German] nation.  But remembrance and repentance cannot be separated if the collective identity of perpetrators is  involved  [my italics].  Representing the nation in a ritual of repentance in a believable way is fostered by the innocence of the representative as a person.  Kohl failed to see the opportunity in what he presented as an excuse.

Reflections on Memory, Trauma, and Politics, #4

2/9/09

The following is the sixth in the series of seven entries, made earlier in my philosophical journal, that pertain to Duncan Bell’s edition of essays by various contributors in Memory, Trauma, and World Politics (Pallgrave Macmillan, 2006).  The entry posted below concerns two different articles in Bell’s collection, both by European professors of international relations.  I address the first, by Jens Bartleson, only briefly, then the second, by K. M. Fierke, at greater length.  

 

Sunday, May 5, 2008

Jens Bartleson (Professor of International Relations in the Department of Political Science at the University of Copenhagen), “We Could Remember for You Wholesale:  Myths, Monuments and the Constitution of National Memories” (in Bell,pp. 33-53), from the last paragraph of the article (p. 53): 

“[What happened to us with the rise and fall of the nation state has left us] as traumatized by the experience of nationhood as we are by the expectations of its demise.  As long as we rely on collective memories as a source of personal identity, we will inevitably face a certain loss of self whenever those collective memories are strategically rearranged to cater to  new political concerns.  The prospective loss of national identity looks scary indeed, yet our sense of personal identity will inevitably remain fragile so long as we seek to derive it from belonging to a community thus constituted.  There is neither a past nor a future that can provide the anchor points for individual or collective identity anymore, since what has been fractured in the present is any connection between memory and identity.  To some, this will pave the  way for a brave new world of individualized memories. . . If this is  the  case, we would then cease to be what we remember and start to remember who we are.”

And then, indeed, we may start to remember the political,  as opposed to politics, and enter into that “coming community”–that community of the always not yet future–wherein the only thing we have in common is the fact that we all die:  the genuinely open community of we who are alone together in the face of death.

 

K. M. Fierke (she is Professor of International Relations at the University of St. Andrews in Great Britain), “Bewitched by the Past:  Social Memory, Trauma and International Relations” (pp. 116-134 in Bell), first page (116)of her essay, mentions (as do others in Bell) “Maurice Halbwacks, who, through a concept of collective memory explores how present concerns determine what past we remember and how we remember it.  In this theory [which is actually that of Peter Novick, she says, in The Holocaust and Collective Memory--London: Bloomsbury, 1999], collective memory is ahistorical in so far as it simplifies and is impatient with any kind of ambiguity, reducing events to  mythic archetypes.  Memory in this conception denies the ‘pastness’ of its objects and insists on their continuing presence.  [My emphasis.]  A memory once established defines an eternal truth and identity for members of a group.”

I  would read the italicized line at least partly against the grain of her own apparent reading [by interpreting it as follows]:  The manipulation of the traumatic past (A pleonasm?) to form “collective memory” reduces the past, which, as [William] Faulkner says, “isn’t over, it isn’t even past,” to a past present–reduces time to an “image of eternity” [Plato's line]–and, therewith, reduces the present to that vanishing point between what “was” but “is no longer” and what “will be” but “is not yet.”

A page later (124), she comes back to this (mistaken, I’m saying) idea, after citing a case I’ll come back to in a moment.  She treats the repetition [involved in] that case as follows:  “The victim in the one world [in the case at issue, a father who survived the Holocaust, "in" the world of which he was victim] later does to himself and to others what was done to  him [as this father ends up doing to his daughter], as a way of staying involved with a (now absent) perpetrator [which notion of victim identification with perpetrator I would also reject] or reproducing a (now absent) abusive terrain.”

Against [such a] reading:  The distinction between “historical” and “structural” trauma [e.g., in LaCapra]–[or,] as I’d recast it:  between triggering/signifying/activating occurrence and the underlying traumatism it triggers/signifies/activates–lets us realize that neither “perpetrator” nor “abuse” are “now absent” at all!  It is precisely the reduction of the “perpetration” of the “abuse” to a datable, and now dated, now “past,” event/occurrence that locks the “victim” into a sort of endless “eternal now.”  It is precisely because the underlying abusiveness of the situation remains ignored and silenced that it–that very abusive situation [itself]–can only perpetuate itself endlessly.

The case she cites is this (p. 123), from psychiatrist James Glass (Private Terror/Public Life:  Psychosis and the Politics of Community–Ithaca:  Cornell University Press, 1989):  A case in which “a Holocaust survivor passed on a set of meanings and relational patterns, acquired in the concentration camp [Acquired there?  Or already aquired long before, by birth into the sort of riven, non-communal community that was/is what passed/passes for community in that/this day?], to his  daughter Ruth.  As Ruth was growing up, she was never allowed to express suffering or pain.  If she did, she was told that her suffering could never compare to that in the camps and was thus of little consequence.  The father also replicated the communicative patterns of his Nazi tormentors [Indeed he did!  But not via "identifying" with them!  Rather, because such replication/reproduction of abuse is/was the very structure of the situation in which he continued/continues to find himself] in relating to his daughter, ordering her to ‘perform this, do that, be obedient, stay invisible, don’t get in the way’.  As a result, she never experienced home as place of  safety or security.  She dealt with this acquired worthlessness [one into which, I'd insist, she was born!] by dissociating the ideal public self she presented to the world from the miserable human being she felt herself to be.  The two selves are not distinguished by conscous and unconscious.  [Granted!]  Instead, they are two conflicting self-representations [Yet one of the two "selves"is not represented at all!  That's the difference!] in which the public self is dissociated from the private self. By the time she was hospitalized for psychosis, she had entered into the world of 1943, without ever having been there physically.  [But that's just where she's been "physically," given the abuse she's received from her father!  The whole idea Fierke has here, of "the world" of a given date as itself "past" "in reality," needs to be overturned!]  The beds of hospital became barracks, the staff were SS guards and Kapos.  Her therapist was Josef Mengele, waiting for  the right moment to do experiments on her brain.”  Indeed, that was just who these folks were, in the world Ruth inhabited!  It would be worthwhile to compare this case with that of Artie and his father in Maus.  The two cases have the same structure.

Then Fierke gives a longish citation from “Ruth’s narrative while in hospital” (Bell, pages 123-124), the last lines of which are:  “Is it 1983, 1943?  Does it make any difference?  Is anyone around here human?” 

Ruth may be psychotic, but she’s not stupid!  Does it make any difference?  Isn’t it still “1943″?  Just as 1984 is 1948 [when Orwell's novel 1984 first appeared] is “now”?

After her remark about the “now absent” perpetrator and abuse, Fierke writes:  “that the daughter could enter into her father’s trauma [She is born into it!], as if [!!  Hardly a mere "as if"!  She is there!] she were reliving the pattern of interaction he had passed on to her [here, Fierke is quite right]. . . . The father did not narrate the story of his experience in the camps as past [and it is not past:  those who do so narrate it, as a past over and done with--just what Jean Améry refused to countenance!--are those who, in a certain sense, suffer from "false memory syndrome"--false and falsifying memory!]; rather he continued to live [unlike those of false and falsifying memory who continue to be dead!] within the linguistic [and far more than merely linguistic!] boundaries of that world.”

In traumatic repetition, says Fierke (P. 125):  “Far from being forgotten, the past is  continually relived in the present.  At the same time, as this past world becomes habitual, there is a forgetting of the uniqueness of the original event. [But there is no "original event" of trauma, insofar as trauma is always structural; and, thus, the very equation of trauma with "an original  event" that has "uniqueness"--i.e., is just an occurrence the occurring of which consigns what occurs to a date--is what forgets the trauma!]  This contrasts with the narrative memory where the self stands outside the past in the present and provides a representation of events gone by.”  I’d say against her, reduces events to what merely “passes by“!  The end of the next paragraph, same page:  “Political trauma can be understood as the state in which fear and hypervigilance become habitual.”  No!  When fear and hypervigilance become habitual, political trauma–that is, the opening  of  a gap wherein the genuinely political can at last emerge, restructuring the entire situation–is not allowed.

 

Fierke, p. 127, on Ben Gurion around and in connection with the Eichmann trial, creating the connection of Israel to the Holocaust:  “The experience of the Holocaust was woven into Israeli identity, rather than distancing it in the  past.”

Given her discussion to this point, what she is doing  here–no doubt unknowingly enough–is conflating such Holocaust victims as Ruth’s father repeating the trauma [on one hand] with someone manipulating and exploiting the Holocaust to construct collective memory [on the other].  It would be the same as equating Bush with one of the survivor victims of 9/11.

She herself goes on to  note, in fact:  “Hitler himself called on the trauma of defeat in the first World War and the humiliation  of the Versailles treaty, in mobilizing an existential threat to German society, to the end of making Germany great once again.”  She prefaces that with a remark of how Milosevic used the same sort of manipulation of memories to justify Serbian aggression in the 1990s.  She goes on, after the remark about Hitler, as follows [pp. 127-128]:

“The United States Bush administration post-11 September 2001 and leading up to the invasion of Iraq in 2003, made a discursive link between Iran and  the terrorist attacks, a link which lacked evidence in fact.  This was part of articulating an existential threat to America itself, despite, as was later revealed, the absence of any weapons of mass destruction capability on the part of Sadam Hussein.  While these very different contexts are by no  means equivalent [Why not, exactly?], they all relied on similar semantic and logical connections that were retained and repeated and became the container of past memory.  [So at least in that regard they are equivalent!]“

As she correctly goes on to note, “While distorted, the salience of the discursive move [in such cases] is dependent on a context of past experience. . . . [C]ollective anxiety is never purely a product of elite intervention or manipulation, although there is an element of this. The discursive moves are only effective if they respond to deep and genuine social concerns in a time of general malaise, that is, a population has to be receptive to  manipulation.”

Her qualifications are uncalled for here, and just weaken the point of the very observation she is making–which point is no more an no less than that there must first be a trauma before trauma can be manipulatively exploited in the construction of collective memory. 

P. 130 she uses the expression “a politics of trauma,” which is an apt name for the sort of manipulative exploitation of trauma she’s just been discussing.  A politics of trauma is the forgetting of the trauma of the political–a forgetting in the service of the perpetuation of abuse (oppression).

 

P. 131:  “In the political world, denial, rather than a function of unconscious repression [as it is in Freud], can be understood as a political act for the  purpose of creating a unity of interpretation . . . which require[s] the suppression of alternative memories.”

Indeed!  And such suppression is then not comparable at all to repression and denial in Freud’s sense.  They are two very different things.  The suppression directly intended by such a “political act” of the forced universalization of a single interpretation is, in fact, a manipulative exploitation of the very repression and denial that are an inseparable part of trauma. That’s why, for example, Bush is already calling for a moment of silence to memorialize the victims of 9/11 even before the towers have fallen and the planes have crashed in Pennsylvania and at the Pentagon.

She continues:  “While this process involved an element of repression, it did not require psychological denial.  What is repressed is difference, debate or alternative narratives of the past.”  But this is not re-pression at all!  It is simply sup-pression, as she just said in what I’ve already cited above.

She ends this paragraph so:  “Individuals may be inclined, in a repressive situation [she means op-pressive and sup-pressive], to adopt an interpretation akin to that of the authorities, in order to  survive or avoid conflict, but this  is not the same as repression an in unconscious.”  It most certainly is not.  But the sort of situation she describes should also be carefully distinguished from cases in which those who are oppressed are not even granted the possibility of articulating their oppression clearly–in cases where they are denied any language in which to speak their oppression, as occurs when the “common,” shared language is hijacked as has so largely happened today, when public discourse can only be  formulated in terms that implant an unacknowledgeable prejudgment in favor of the  right wing (e.g., “color blind,” “reverse discrimination,” “illegal aliens,” “special rights,” etc.).

Insofar as the powers that be control even the means and media of communication, suppression and oppression reach the zone of such a maximum–the maximum of the closure of the trauma of the political, the gap granting place for the political, as opposed  to politics, to take place.

Reflections on Memory, Trauma, and Politics, #3

2/6/09

Below are two more entries I first made in my philosophical journal on the dates indicated.  They are the fourth and fifth of a series of seven consecutive entries addressing some of the articles in the collection Memory, Trauma, and World Politics, edited by Duncan Bell (Pallgrave Macmillan, 2006). 

 

Thursday, May 1, 2008

In Bell, pp. 74-95, by Jeffrey K. Olick and Charles Demetriou, “From Theodicy to Ressentiment:  Trauma and the  Ages of Compensation.”  [I seriously question] their reading of Nietzsche’s Genealogy.  [They seem to me to do an equally questionable] discussion of Scheler, and even worse of Arendt.  Only on [author and Holocaust survivor Jean] Améry are they good.  Overall, [I think] the article is a botched attempt at revalorizing the notion of ressentiment–which should, in fact, be left its stench.

 

Friday, May 2, 2008

In Bell (pp. 54-73), historian  Jay Winter, “Notes on the Memory Boom:  War, Remembrance and the Uses of the Past,” pp. 58-59, quoting Ernst Renan’s “series of lectures in Paris in 1882–entitled ‘What is a nation?’”: 

“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  constituion  of a people . . . One loves the house which one has built and  passes on.”

Winter comments:  “Such ideas and images were commonplace in late nineteenth century Europe.  What was much newer were powerful means to disseminate them.  Writers on memory reached a much wider audience thatn  ever before.  The 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.”

The passage from Renan points to this:  such “collective”or “community” memories are false memories–[but not] in the same sense at issue in [so called] “false memory syndrome”:  They are both manufactured  images, [but the first sort of "memory," the sort Renan writes about, are] based on and utilize the manipulation of memory and of trauma itself for  some  purpose arrived at by the manipulator, ["collective" as that manipulator may be,] whether conscious or not.

In contrast, “screen memories,” properly so called, issue from the trauma itself, as part of the mechanism  of repression.  Thus, they “screen” in the double sense of hiding or covering over, and of providing a “surface” upon which trauma may project itself.

Sometimes, paradoxically, the very phenomenon of a sort of hyper-real image [of a traumatic occurrence] compulsively recurs and is a common sign of “dissociation,” thereby masking and indicating (at one and the same time) the underlying trauma, serving the very same “repression” of trauma that  is served by “screen memories.”  So such hyper-real images are functionally still “screen memories” [themselves].

The key distinction is between the job of repressing and [that of] manipulating a trauma and the like.

Supposedly “false memories,” in the sense [at issue in so called] “false memory syndrome,” are a form of “screen” memory in the double sense (hide, and give a surface upon which what is hidden projects itself0, as are, too, the hyper-real memories of, for instance, recurrent nightmares or “flashbacks.”

The sort of collective memory Renan describes, however, is not a “screen,” but is manufactured, a product of the manipulation of trauma for the ends of the manipulator.

Trauma and Identity (“Cultural” and “Individual”): Reflections on Sudhir Kakar’s Work

1/23/09

Both the journal entry below and the one I will post next concern psychoanalyst Sudhir Kakar’s The Colors of Violence, his important and influential analysis of Hindu-Muslim violence in his native India.  Especially important for me is his idea of how “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.  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.  

From my perspective, which considerably overlaps Kakar’s own, in my judgment, and which finds its first articulation in the pages of my journal in the entry below, the (no doubt largely “unconscious”) use of trauma to serve as the foundation for such religious/cultural identity formation is actually a matter of the manipulative avoidance of trauma, as opposed both to the dissociative repression and the healing processing of trauma .  It is, as I first try to formulate it below, 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.  Other entries I  will eventually post on this site in the coming weeks will explore that idea much more fully.    

Here is the first of two entries, then, on Kakar’s The Colors of Violence:

 

Sunday, April 13, 2008

Sudhir Kakar, The Colors of Violence:  Cultural Identities, Religion, and Conflict (University of Chicago Press, 1996), p. 150:  “Cultural identity, like its individual counterpart, 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 itself is one struck in the first place–as one “strikes” (= 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 a fiction founding (= a founding fiction [of]) identity formation?  Doesn’t Kakar himself touch on something of the sort when 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 that, if not indifference toward one’s “cultural identity”?  So it would be an indifference toward, precisely, and “identity” not one’s own, which is to say [an identity that] is not one’s identity at all.  Or:  Only in reaction/as reaction to trauma does any “cultural identity,” any self-identification (= identifying of one’s self) with one’s “culture,” form/get cast or created or fictioned at all.  then “cultural identity”–or, for that matter, even “individual identity”–would be a reactive formation designed to ward off the trauma at issue.  And then, too, only the collapse of that reaction/reactive formation would at last let the trauma traumatize:  let the truth that flashes there “materialize” (Badiou’s corps).