The Image of Sovereignty #10: The Sovereign’s Clothes (end)

Below is the completion of the section “The Sovereign’s Clothes,” which I began in my preceding post.  With this post, I am also completing the draft of the entire chapter, “Trauma and Representation II:  The Image of Sovereignty,” of what I plan eventually to be a book on philosophy and trauma.

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In a note to the third section of the first chapter of Capital, Karl Marx comments that one man is a king only because other men hold themselves to be his subjects, but that, on the contrary, those other men imagine themselves to be subjects because he is a king.  That is, the sovereign is not sovereign by some trait or quality of his being, but only insofar as he is treated as a sovereign, in effect.

To be a sovereign, however, is to be so treated not only by others–namely, by the sovereign’s “subjects,” those over whom the sovereign has been invested with the power to rule—but also, and indeed above all, by one’s own sovereign self.  For a sovereign to think otherwise, for a king to think, for example, that he is somehow a king by nature, and not by symbolic investiture, is to succumb to madness, as Slavoj Žižek puts the point in The Ticklish Subject:  The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London and New York:  Verso, 1999, page 274).   Žižek cites “Lacan’s well-known dictum according to which a madman is not only a beggar who thinks he is a king but also a king who thinks he is a king (i.e. who perceives his symbolic mandate ‘king’ as directly grounded in the real of his being).”

Sovereignty constitutes itself at the point of intersection between two different intersections, as the differentiation of two different differentiations, as it were.  On one hand, there is the de-cision, in the literal sense of the cutting apart, that draws the border or cut between the normal state and the state of exception.  Sovereignty, in that regard, establishes itself at and as the intersection, the border or crossing point, by crossing which one comes under or outside the norm, and the law that shelters that norm.  On the other hand, there is the symbolic investiture whereby sovereignty –the very right and authority to decide the exception (and therewith the norm)—is instituted, and wherein the claim to rule on the part of the one who would be sovereign intersects with the acquiescence to that claim on the part of those who, in that very acquiescence, become that would-be sovereign’s subjects.

The authority to decide the exception is vested in the sovereign by the bestowal of symbols of power, recognized as such by those who, in that very recognition, subject themselves to the very sovereignty that is dependent upon that same recognition in order to exist at all.  In that regard, the distinction between sovereignty itself and the individual person or persons–all the way up to and including even “the people” as a whole, if it is in “the people” that sovereignty is vested (as in that “government of, by, and for the people” touted by Lincoln at Gettysburg)—who hold or carry that sovereignty at any given time, functions in the same way as the distinction between the phallus and the penis as Žižek draws it.  Indeed, the phallus is itself the Lacanian “Master-signifier” the bestowal of which symbolically invests with power the one upon whom it is bestowed.  Fundamentally, all symbols or power are, as such, “phallic symbols” in a strong sense—whoever carries, by investiture, a symbol of power, “has” the phallus.

Žižek discusses the issue in similar passages in a variety of his books.  Thus, in 1999 in The Ticklish Subject he writes (page 383) about what a “crucial point” it is to

distinguish between the penis (the erectile organ itself) and the phallus (the signifier of potency, of symbolic authority, of the—symbolic, not biological—dimension that confers authority and/or potency on me).  [I have moved the closing parenthesis in this line from right after the phrase “and/or potency,” where it occurs in the printed original, to the end of the sentence, where it seems to me to belong.]  Just as ( . . . ) a judge, who may be a worthless individual in himself, exerts authority the moment he puts on the insignia that confer his legal authority on him, the moment he no longer speaks only for himself, since it is the Law itself that speaks through him, the individual male’s potency functions as a sign that another symbolic dimension is active through him:  the ‘phallus’ designates the symbolic support that confers on my penis the dimension of proper potency.

A few years later, in Organs Without Bodies:  Deleuze and Consequences (New York and London:  Routledge, 2004, page 87), Žižek writes, similarly, that “one has to think of the phallus not as the organ that immediately expresses the vital force of my being, my virility, and so forth but, precisely as . . . an insignia [of power], as a mask that I put on in the same way that a king or judge puts on his insignia–phallus is an ‘organ without body’ that I put on, which gets attached to my body, without ever being the ‘organic part’, namely, forever sticking out as its incoherent, excessive supplement.”

Even more recently, in his In Defense of Lost Causes (London and New York:  Verso 2008; paperback edition 2009), Žižek expands upon the same basic idea of the inescapably symbolic nature of power, this time without explicit reference to the distinction between penis and phallus.  In discussing how such a “pathetic figure” as, for example, Kafka’s father (at least as Kafka presents him) could exercise the sort of dictatorial authority and power that he did (again, at least by Kafka’s own account), Žižek writes (pages 86-87):

The answer would then be the socio-symbolic network that invests an empirical person with power . . . . From the traditional rituals of investiture, we know the objects which not only “symbolize” power, but put the subject who acquires them into the position of effectively exercising power—if a king holds in his hands the scepter and wears the crown, his words will be taken as the words of a king.  Such insignia are external, not part of my nature:  I don them:  I wear them in order to exert power.  As such, . . . they introduce a gap between what I immediately am and the function that I exercise (that is, I am never fully at the level of my function). . . .

. . . When the subject is endowed with symbolic authority, he acts as an appendix to his symbolic title, that is, it is [what Lacan calls] the big Other, the symbolic institution, which acts through him:  suffice it to recall a judge, who may be a miserable and corrupted person, but the moment he puts on his robe and other insignia, his words are the words of the Law itself.

In The Psychotheology of Everyday Life:  A Reading of Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 2001) Erik Santner–strongly influenced by Žižek, who is in turn influenced by him–argues that all symbolic investiture, all conferring of authority and power through the bestowal of symbols, requires, precisely because of the “gap” Žižek identifies, the perpetually, recurring “citation” of the formulas of investiture.  Such continual recitation–in the literal sense of re-citation:  citing again—is needed to cover the very lack of foundation of power in the natural properties or qualities of the one who has been vested with power and authority, or in anything at all save the recitation or reiteration of the symbolic formulas themselves.  Such recitation is a reenactment of investiture that can never be finished, demanding ever further reenactment, because the investiture of power is itself never accomplished as a fact:  Žižek’s “gap” is never closed.  In that sense, the investiture of power is never sufficient to secure the claim to power supposed to be authorized by such investiture.

In the perpetual, perpetually insufficient reenactment of investiture in endless reiterations takes place the repeated laying claim to power or authority on the part of those who would have that claim honored.  The claim to power and authority, and the demand that the claim be honored, are reiterated each time those who advance that claim and that demand once again display the symbols of power.   The bestowal of those very symbols in acts of symbolic investiture constitutes the very power and authority they “represent” or “stand for.”  Thus, such symbols function the same way “sacraments” do in Christianity—as “effective signs,” signs the making or bestowing of which effects the very condition or status they stand for.

Nor is that theological connection accidental.  At least it is no accident within what Heidegger calls onto-theology, that tradition wherein to think and speak of beings as such and in totality is also inseparably to speak of the “highest being,” the most in being of beings—God as the supreme being, sovereign over all other beings.  Furthermore, Heidegger likes to cite one of Heraclitus’s fragments, in accordance with which the Lord over the oracle at Delphi (namely, the god Appollo) neither says clearly what he means, nor merely hides his meaning, but gives, instead, a sign or “hint”—in Heidegger’s German, the word Wink.  And indeed, it is of the nature of sovereignty as such, not just of the sovereign divinity of the Delphic oracle, to communicate by hints, most especially, in fact, when it comes to the communication of the claim to sovereignty itself.

In translating Heidegger himself from German into other languages, translators will often leave some terms in the original German.  That is most widely done with the term Dasein, which in everyday German means “existence” but which etymologically means “to be [sein] there [da]” and which Heidegger himself uses to designate the human being.  However, it is also not infrequently done with the term Wink itself in translations of Heidegger’s texts.   So, for example, does contemporary French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy leave it untranslated in his essay “On a Divine Wink”–in Dis-Enclosure:  The Deconstruction of Christianity, translated by Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York:  Fordham University Press, 2008).

In that essay, a critical reading of Heidegger, Nancy gives thought to the connection between:   (1) the concept of the Wink or hint; (2) translation, which winkt or hints when it makes an exception for an “untranslatable” word (such as Wink itself in the title of Nancy’s own essay, of course); and sovereignty, most especially insofar as, following Schmitt, it is defined as the power to declare “exceptions” to the presumed rule of law.  As Nancy writes (pages 106) of those connections:  “The exception of the untranslatable constitutes the law of translation. . . . Where there is exception, there is sovereignty.  What is sovereign is the idiom that declares itself to be untranslatable.”  In the next paragraph (page 107) he continues:  “Sovereign is the translator who decides to suspend the translation, leaving instead the word in the original.”  Then he proceeds to express a double connection between the Wink and sovereignty:

Thus we can establish, on the one hand, that the Wink is sovereign, and on the other, correlatively, that the sovereign winkt. . . . Nothing is more specifically characteristic of sovereign majesty than the frown, the wink, the expression said to be ’imperceptible,’ the reply to which is called a ‘sign of complicity,’ in the sense that, in that complicity, connivance precedes and exceeds understanding, in the sense that complicity has already understood whatever it is that has not been openly offered up to the understanding, but is expected.  The Wink opens an expectation at the same time as an impatience to which the decision to understand without waiting, in the twinkling of an eye, responds.

In his essay on the Wink Nancy connects Heidegger’s notion of “the last  God” as the God who winkt, with Derrida’s différance, the ordinary spelling of which, in French as in English, uses an e where Derrida writes, instead, an a.  Nancy notes that the a in différance is itself a Wink.  The very difference to which it calls attention can only be indicated in writing, since as pronounced in French there is no difference between the sound of the word written with an a and the same word written with an e.  As spoken, the difference between “différence” and “différance” passes by unnoticed–just as Heidegger says his “last god” passes by, and is the last god only in so passing.  In that connection of multiple connections itself, Nancy sees a Wink that opens upon “another sense”–a sense other than that of sovereignty.  Since, as Derrida taught in Speech and Phenomena, there can be no “meaning” without “indication,” which is to say without any winken that opens the space for “signification,” that would also be a sense other than that of the sovereignty of “meaning” itself–of that very sense of sense.

That topic, however, no longer belongs to this chapter on the image of sovereignty.  I will take it up, instead, in the next chapter, which is devoted to an initial exploration of what lies on the far side of sovereignty—and, therefore, the far side of the effort to avoid trauma upon which sovereignty is based.

The Image of Sovereignty #9: The Sovereign’s Clothes (beginning)

Today, I am finally able to resume my work on a draft of “Trauma and Representation II: The Image of Sovereignty,” which I hope will become a chapter in an eventual book on trauma and philosophy. I pick up below with where I had to leave off two months ago, in my last post.

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The Sovereign’s Clothes

“Sovereign is he who declares the exception,” writes Carl Schmitt, the important and influential right-wing legal theorist who eventually used his thought to provide the Nazi state with legal justification.  That is the famous opening line of Political Theology:  Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, first published in Germany in 1922 (English translation by George Schwab, Chicago:  University of Chicago Press, 1985, page 5).  The exception at issue is to the ordinary norm to and in which the defining laws of the society at issue apply.  Sovereign is whomever is vested with the power to declare a “state of exception” in which there is a suspension of the basic legal principles, the fundamental laws, that in all other, non-exceptional, “natural” and “routine” conditions are always in force and never to be abrogated—such laws as are embodied in the Bill of Rights amended to the United States Constitution, including the right of habeas corpus, for example.

In Political Theology, after that opening line defining sovereignty, Schmitt immediately goes on to observe that “[o]nly this definition can do justice to a “borderline concept” as that of sovereignty.  “Contrary to the imprecise terminology that is found in popular literature,” he continues, what makes such a concept a “borderline” one is not that it is somehow “a vague concept.”  Rather, it is a borderline concept because it is a concept “pertaining to the outermost sphere.”  That is, it is a concept that fixes a border.

Because sovereignty is just such a border-setting concept, the “definition of sovereignty must therefore be associated with a borderline case and not with routine.”  That is not at all to say, however, that the border established by the assertion of sovereignty—that is, the exercise of the definitive power to decide on the exception—is itself exceptional, in the sense of only coming into play under special, rare, or exceptional circumstances.  Rather, it is the very decision that establishes the boundary between what is “inside” and what “outside” the community as such and, therefore, protected by the law.  The exception is precisely what defines what is to count as the rule.

Thus, writes Schmitt, the exception, on the power of the decision and declaration of which sovereignty itself must be defined, “is to be understood to refer to a general concept in the theory of the state, and not merely to a construct applied to any emergency degree or state of siege.”  The border that the sovereign decision establishes between routine and extraordinary conditions is what alone determines the limits of very distinction between the inside and the outside of the “nation” or “national community” as such.  As the drawing of the boundary between what is inside the nation and what is outside it, that decision is the establishment of a legal order as such.

“Like every other order,” writes Schmitt a few pages after his opening definition (page 10), “the legal order rests on a decision not on a norm.”  Indeed, in Schmitt’s way of thinking the norm itself can only be established by a decision that cuts the exceptional away from the normal.  The sovereign is whoever makes that decision with regard to any “legal order,” the very decision that establishes the norm in the first place (page 13):  “Every general norm demands a normal, everyday frame of life to which it can be factually applied and which is subjected to its regulations. . . . For a legal order to make sense, a normal situation must exist, and he is sovereign who definitely decides whether this normal situation actually exists.”

Three-fourths of a century after Schmitt, contemporary Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben attempted critically to come to grips with Schmitt’s analysis of the concept of sovereignty, and to combine that analysis with insights from Foucault.   Above all in two books–Homo Sacer:  Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford, CA:  Stanford University Press, 1998, translated by Daniel Heller-Roazen) and its sequel, State of Exception (Chicago and London:  University of Chicago Press, 2005, translated by Kevin Attell)—Agamben combines elements from those two earlier thinkers to develop his own analysis of sovereignty.

From Foucault Agamben takes the notion of “biopower,” power exercised directly over life itself, rather than only indirectly through the power over death, that is, the power to take life, the power to kill.  According to Foucault, the difference between the “classical,” monarchical sovereignty and sovereignty in a distinctively modern sense, lies precisely in the transition form sovereignty as the power over death, the power to take life,  to sovereignty as power exercised directly over life itself, which Foucault calls biopower.   Agamben and others also develop that Foucauldian notion into that of “biopolitics,” which would be the “politics” that corresponds to sovereignty as the exercise of such “biopower.”

With Schmitt, Agamben defines modern sovereignty as the power to draw the line between what falls under the norm–and therefore under the shelter of the law–and what falls outside the norm–and therefore also outside that shelter.  Going beyond Schmitt, however, Agamben argues that, although sovereignty as Schmitt defines it may really come into its own only in the modern period, it grows from a seed planted long before modernity.  That was the seed planted by the ancient Greeks, when they distinguished between bios, or life in the fully human sense–such as can be captured in “biographies”:  literally, “life-writings”–on the one hand, and zoe, or life in the purely “zoological” sense, which Agamben calls “bare life,” on the other.

In ancient Greek thought, most especially as formulated in Aristotle, bios, life in the supposedly fully human sense, is possible only within the polis, the political community of norm and law.  In contrast, zoe is “bare” life, in the sense of a minimum where there is “just” life, life “and no more,” the “mere” life human beings share with animals and even plants.  It is to life in that minimal, less-than-human sense that those denied any place within the polis would be reduced, according to this Greek line of thought.

The sovereign as such, Agamben argues, is vested with the power to pronounce the ban whereby someone is cast out of the community and marked accordingly.  Whoever is placed under such a ban and thus cast out of the community, is also thereby cast over the threshold separating genuinely human life from bare life.  Accordingly, to be vested with sovereignty as Schmitt defines it, namely, the power to decide what will fall under the norm and what will constitute an exception to that norm, is to be vested with the authority to decide who will be granted the right to live a truly human life, and who will be denied any such right, and reduced instead to a condition of no more than bare life–without even any claim to keep that!

To be placed under the ban, that is, to be cast out of the community and deprived of all shelter under the laws of that community, is to be fully exposed to whomever and whatever one chances to encounter.  Those reduced to the status of bare life can thus be counted as barely alive at all any longer, in the sense that even the minimum of life they retain when deprived of all legal status is thoroughly precarious, without human recourse or defense against whatever acts –however arbitrary–others may choose to commit against them.  Their life—the minimum that remains to them of it—can be taken from them at any moment without any possibility of appeal.  No longer even subjects of the sovereign, and so no longer citizens of the state, members of the community the boundaries of which the sovereign alone can decide, they are cast completely at the mercy of those who remain such subjects and citizens, with all the rights that pertain thereto.

The status of such an outcast, Agamben argues, is that of homo sacer, “sacred man.”  That category was used in ancient Roman law to designate someone who, paradoxically, may be killed, but cannot be sacrificed.   It is the status within the law of those who have been placed altogether outside the law.  In effect no longer counting as human, they can also no longer be offered up to the gods.  Such an offer would be a blasphemy, a violation, an affront, like offering the gods excrement or some other “unclean” thing.  Precisely because they have been cast outside the law, those reduced to the status of homo sacer can therefore not be sacrificed.  However, again precisely for the same reason, there is no legal stricture against taking from them the bare life that alone remains to them.  Thus, designated as unholy and therefore not to be sacrificed, they are by the same stroke marked as those who can be killed without legal consequence, but simply at whim and will by anyone who chooses to do so, and has the means to do it.

The power that defines sovereignty is, accordingly, the power to decide who becomes homo sacer, and when.  Furthermore, Agamben argues, the status of homo sacer is exactly that of the prisoner inmates in the Nazi extermination camps.  According to his analysis, the condition of bare life outside any protection of the law finds its ultimate instantiation in the Muselmänner (“Muslims”) of the camps.  The Muselmänner were those inmates who have been so reduced by the abuse to which they had been subjected that they became a sort of living dead.  They were those who had lost all active will to live, and to whom all that remained was passively to receive whatever treatment was dished out to them moment by moment.  They were so traumatized by their ordeal that they were no longer capable of any degree of effective agency in their own lives, including that of trying to avoid the abuse inflicted upon them.  At most, they could merely cower before their abuser, like beaten dogs.

In Homo Sacer (page 181) Agamben sums up his “provisional conclusions” in three theses:

1. The original political relation is the ban (the state of exception as zone of indistinction between outside and inside, exclusion and inclusion).
2. The fundamental activity of sovereign power is the production of bare life as originary political element and as threshold of articulation between nature and culture, zoe and bios.
3. Today it is not the city [that is, what the Greeks called the polis] but rather the camp that is the fundamental biopolitical paradigm of the West.

Thus, by Agamben’s analysis the emergence under the Nazis of the camp system was no anomaly.  Rather, the Nazi camps represent the culmination and flowering of the whole Western concept of sovereignty as such.  What is more, he argues, insofar as everyone today is subject to such sovereignty, everyone today is at least potentially, by virtue of the decisions of whomever has been vested with the power of sovereignty over one—that is, the decisions of whomever has been designated “the decider,” as George W. Bush notoriously identified himself as President of the Unites States after September 11, 2001–a Muselmann.

All reservations about the details of Agamben’s argument aside, his account has the great merit of highlighting just how paradoxically precarious the situation of all who are subject to “modern” sovereignty (however ancient the institution of such sovereignty may prove to be) must always remain.  The precariousness of the subject of sovereignty is paradoxical, precisely because the very claim on which sovereignty founds itself is the claim that sovereignty is necessary in order to avert an otherwise inescapable precariousness or insecurity:  As Hobbes first argued, only the institution of sovereignty—that “leviathan”—can offer those who contract with one another to establish that institution escape from the condition in which “man is a wolf to man,” and in which there is never any security against the “war or all against all.”  What Agamben helps us see is that if, in the very name of security one subjects oneself to a sovereign, one thereby actually exposes oneself to an even more radical insecurity–the constant threat that “the decider” may at any time decide to declare one outside the law, that is, outside the normal state in which the law holds sway, having somehow entered, instead, into a state of exception where, by law, the law itself no longer holds.

Ultimately, however, the decisions of the sovereign, “the decider,” can come into effect only if those to whom they are to apply regard them as so applying.  That is, to have any effect the claim to sovereignty must be acknowledged by those very “subjects” over whom sovereignty is to be exercised.  That acknowledgement may be more or less explicitly made, through some public ceremony of investiture, for example.  But even such explicit investiture itself always remains essentially symbolic and, therefore, dependent upon something implicit that can never, in fact, become fully explicit, without undoing sovereignty itself.

The Image of Sovereignty #7: Making a Myth of Trauma (beginning)

Below is the start of a new section to my draft of a chapter called “Trauma and Representation II:  The Image of Sovereignty,” for what I hope will be an eventual book on trauma and philosophy.

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Making a Myth of Trauma

In her recent book The Shock Doctrine (New York:  Picador, 2007), Naomi Klein traces what she calls “the rise of disaster capitalism”—the subtitle of the book.  As she recounts that rise, disaster capitalism really began to come into its own when the “free market” doctrine of conservative economist Milton Friedman and the entire “Chicago School” of economics that sprang up around him became, under Ronald Reagan’s Presidency, the official, reigning, American economic ideology, a position it has since then not only retained but also expanded into eventual global dominance.  As Klein argues, in that now globalized economic ideology–sometimes also called economic “neo-liberalism,” in the classic sense of “liberalism” defined by such watershed publications as Adam Smith’s The Wealth of Nations–economics is, in effect, liberated from anything approaching the genuinely political.  The supposed laws of the market are elevated to the status of absolutes, no longer subject to question by, or subordination to, any supposedly independent political interests.

Indeed, the securing of the independence of the “free market” economy against the possibly of any genuinely significant external political intervention became the major goal of “the Chicago Boys,” as they came to be called, in the interventions they and their local supporters began to make in Chile in the 1960s, and then proceeded progressively to extend.  It was extended first to other South American nations during the 1970s and, especially, under President Reagan’s seal of approval during the 1980s.  Eventually it was expanded to apply to all “developing nations” around the world.  In a note (on page 257 of The Shock Doctrine) to a chapter on how the model that was first developed in Chile was later applied in South Africa during the transition to majority rule, Klein discusses how the “Chicago Boys” and their accomplices in Chile under the military dictatorship of Pinochet rigged the Chilean constitution and court system “so it was legally next to impossible to reverse their [that is, the Chicago school market ideologists’] revolutionary changes,” thereby, “as Pinochet’s young minister José Piñera put it, ensuring ‘insulation [of the market economy] from politics.’ “

According to what was by then already emerging as the official American economic dogma, any failure to heed the supposedly invariant laws of “free market” economics—the workings, as it were, of Adam Smith’s all-powerful “invisible hand”—by attempting to direct the economy to extra-economic political ends, can lead only to economic collapse.  Correlatively, however, it is precisely such moments of economic collapse or disaster that open the door of opportunity for the imposition of a newly refurbished, pure “market economy” on the heretofore economically foolish nations that have tried to circumvent the inexorable economic “laws” at issue.  As a result, all that remains for any  “politics” that can claim legitimacy in such a market-subservient society—any “politics,” that is, not guaranteed by market “laws” to lead to even worse future economic disasters–is to acquiesce joyfully in the operation of those “laws,” and vigilantly to eradicate, like a good gardener attentively weeding a garden, any recalcitrant weeds that might spring up to obstruct the natural flowering of the “free market.”

Thus, we might say that “disaster capitalism,” as Klein calls it, is the form capitalism takes when it learns to capitalize on disaster.   For example, Hurricane Katrina in 2004, notes Klein near the end of her book (page 518) “was a tragedy, but, as Milton Friedman wrote in his Wall Street Journal op-ed [at the time], it was ‘also an opportunity.’ “  From such an elevated economists’ perspective, the radically de-politicized “free market” economy can be seen to be open to what Friedman himself called “shock” capitalism, whereby “liberal market economies” can be imposed upon a nation after, and purportedly as the only effective response to, the disaster of an economic collapse.  Such “shock” or “disaster” capitalism needs only to wait patiently, as it were, for the forces at work in the global market itself, aided by chance, to engender economic crises and collapses that such agents of disaster capitalism as the “Chicago boys” can then exploit after the fact as golden opportunities to impose “free market” economies on the survivors of the catastrophes at issue.  “Not so long ago,” as Klein goes on to remark a few pages later (page 522), ”disasters were periods of social leveling, rare moments when atomized communities put divisions aside and pulled together.  Increasingly, however, disasters are the opposite:  they provide windows into a cruel and ruthlessly divided future in which money and race buy survival”—as her earlier cited example of Katrina all too clearly demonstrates.

In that most straightforward form, disaster capitalism simply waits for antecedent economic processes, combined with chance good fortune (good for the free market ideologues, that is), to engender disasters, which can then be capitalized upon after the fact.  As Klein notes earlier in her book (on page 174), it was once again Milton Friedman himself who formulated the basic “shock doctrine,” as Klein labels it.  “Only a crisis–actual or perceived–produces real change,” Klein quotes Friedman as saying.  “When that crisis occurs, the actions that are taken depend on the ideas that are lying around.  That, I believe, is our [that is, Chicago School economists'] basic function:  to develop alternatives to existing policies, to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable.”

However, Friedman’s qualification that the opportune crisis may be either “actual or perceived” already points toward the possibility for such free market economists as himself to take a much more active role in the whole process.  As Klein details, beginning in the 1960s the economists and theorists in service to such capitalism often became too impatient just to wait for serendipitously exploitable crises to come along on their own.  No longer content just to sit back and wait for opportune disasters to develop for their after-the-fact exploitation, the “Chicago boys” and their ilk around the globe began intentionally to foster crises for the purpose of creating golden opportunities for capitalization.  Klein (pages 222ff), cites a speech by American economist John Williamson at a by-invitation-only conference on January 13, 1993, in Washington, D. C., as the first time the transition was made from the idea of economic “shock therapy” as a matter of the exploitation of crises when they occurred–exploitation of the “opportunities” crises afforded for imposing otherwise unacceptable and impossible “neoliberal” (that is, “Chicago School”) economic reforms such as privatization, massive spending cuts on social programs, and deregulation—to the idea of actually engendering and/or fostering crises for that purpose.  By the dawn of the new millennium, the principle was already well established.  It had by then proven itself globally through multiple experiments.

What is more, from the perspective of what Klein calls disaster capitalism, what is truly ideal is the sort of thing for which the attacks on the World Trade Center in New York and the Pentagon in Washington, D. C., on September 11, 2001, near the very beginning of the new millennium, provide a perfect example.  In such a case fortuitous chance and deliberate manufacture coalesce all but seamlessly to create an inexhaustible wellspring for ongoing, ever expanding economic exploitation.  All that is needed is a conveniently vaguely definable enemy ready to hand to blame for the disaster—the very vagueness, the final indefiniteness and in-definability, of which is crucial for the purposes at issue.  In the case of the various measures that have been taken by the American government in the wake of 9/11, to stay with that example, Klein observes (page 380):  “Through all its various changes–the War on Terror, the war on radical Islam, the war against Islamofascism, the Third World War, the long war, the generational war–the basic shape of the conflict has remained unchanged.  It is limited by neither time nor space nor target.”  This lack of limit or definition–the impossibility of any clear-cut victory over such a multitudinous, limitless enemy identified with no nation or alliance of nations, but to be found everywhere and, therefore, nowhere in particular–is not a defect, from the point of view of the capitalism that knows how to capitalize on disaster.  Such an amorphous and ill-defined status is, rather, the greatest virtue of such enemies.  “From a military perspective,” as Klein remarks, it is of course the case that such “sprawling and amorphous traits make the War on Terror an unwinnable proposition.”  Nevertheless, as she goes on to observe, “from an economic perspective, they make it an unbeatable one:  not a flash-in-the-pan war that could potentially be won but a new and permanent fixture in the global economic architecture.”

In that way, “terrorists” play the same role for the never-ending “War on terror” and all that goes with it that “the Jews” played for the Nazis in their seizure and holding of power in Germany for the twelve endless years of their rule.  It is not despite the impossibility of clearly indentifying just who belongs to the enemy camp and who does not, but because of it that the struggle against such ubiquitous enemies as “terrorists” or “Jews” is so useful for those seeking to capitalize on trauma.  Claims to power that are based on the purported necessity of defending those in whose name that power is exercised against the threats to security that come from such never eliminable enemies will never go wanting for apparent grounds and justifications.  Even–indeed, especially–if that necessity is, as Friedman hinted, merely perceived and not at all actual, no more than an illusion, a fire fed only by flames of unconscionably manipulated fear, it is all that is needed to provide an inexhaustible source of justification for that sovereignty willing to base itself upon it.  That, finally, means any sovereignty at all, as I shall return to below

At any rate, what is at issue in all such capitalization on disaster, whether in its patient form of waiting for fortune to bring felicitous crises its way for after-the-fact exploitation, its impatient form of actively helping to foment such crises, or its perfected form of the fomenting of the crisis of a perpetual fear of crises to come, is always the exploitation of trauma for profit.  What Klein labels “disaster capitalism” is capitalism built upon such exploitation.  As it unfolds, such capitalism institutionalizes the very trauma it requires to profit from its investment.    The more advanced the process, the less market capitalism must either twiddle its thumbs, patiently waiting for fortune to bring a crisis its way, or find ways actively to hasten the processes of disaster along.  Instead, a sort of permanent state of crisis–actual or only, even better, merely perceived—gets built right into the market itself.  Thus, as Klein points out in toward the end of her book (pages 540-541), “[g]iven the boiling temperatures, both climatic and political,” that prevail today, “future disasters need not be cooked up in dark conspiracies” any longer, if they ever did need to be.   Because they have now been built directly into the economic system itself, crises—at least perceived crises, which are all that is required, as Friedman saw—are always conveniently at hand, readily available for exploitation.  “All indications are that simply staying the current course,” as Klein goes on to observe, crises “will keep coming with ever more ferocious intensity.”  Conspiratorial shenanigans such as once were practiced by Americans in Chile prove no longer necessary today.  “Disaster generation can therefore be left to the market’s invisible hand,” as Klein ironically says:   “This is one area in which it actually delivers.”  Accordingly, she concludes, a “new consensus is emerging.  It is not that the market has become immune to instability, at least not exactly.  It is that a steady flow of disasters is now so expected that the ever-adaptable market has changed to fit this new status quo–instability is the new stability.”

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 #4: War-Profiteering in Trauma

What follows is a new section of the draft of a chapter called “Trauma and Representation II:  The Image of Sovereignty” for a planned book on trauma and philosophy.

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War-Profiteering in Trauma

It has often been noted that nations can, and frequently do, use traumatic events to legitimate their own aggressive actions, and to maintain popular support for them.   In such cases, trauma conveniently serves the nation–after the fact, as it were—for claiming legitimacy and demanding support for aggressive national actions.   Colin Davis captures well the mechanism employed.  First the spokesperson for the national interest casts the traumatic event as an attack on the nation by some national enemy (which it may well be, as in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941), then casts aggressive action against that enemy as the only appropriate response to that attack, and claims ongoing support for whatever further acts are taken to be necessary for securing the nation against future attack.  “By projecting the violence of society onto an identifiable group of criminals [or the equivalent, such as a “rogue” state or, in general, some supposed enemy of the nation, one should add],” as Davis sums the whole process up in his post-9/11 book Haunted Subjects:  Psychoanalysis and the Return of the Dead (New York:  Pallgrave Macmillan, 2007, page 34), “the forces of order can assure the intelligibility of evil, deny their own responsibility for it, and indulge their inclination to violence in eradicating it.”

One example of such a case is how the United States under President Franklin D. Roosevelt used the already mentioned Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941, to justify declaring war on Japan, and then fanned the flames of Americans anger and resentment—and, for that matter, racist prejudice—after the attack to help keep support for the war effort high. The point is not that the attack was somehow fabricated and never really happened.  It certainly did, as has also already been mentioned.  The point, however, is that that attack was immediately de-contextualized in such a way as to obviate any consideration of what part the United States itself may have played in the events leading up to the Japanese action, and any need or desire to pursue any other course of response short of war.  Then recurrent appeal to that “day that will live in infamy,” as President Roosevelt famously called it in his address to Congress requesting a declaration of war against Japan the day after the attack, served to justify the United States in the aggressive prosecution of that war, down to and including dropping nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki to bring Japan to unconditional surrender.

“Such an experience is hardly unusual,” as Robert J. Lifton notes in Super Power Syndrome:  America’s Apocalyptic Confrontation with the World (New York:  Thunder’s Mouth Press/Nation Books, 2003, page 152), “and could be the experience of any national leader” faced with something similar to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941.  “The danger a leader faces,” writes Lifton, “is that of equating a sense of debt to the dead with fierce, amorphous retribution.”  Of course, we should note, from the point of view of such a leader, “fierce amorphous retribution” will rarely if ever appear as a “danger.”  Instead, it will appear as the only appropriate response, and very often even as an important opportunity to consolidate both national and personal power.

At any rate, by Lifton’s analysis the United States, four decades after Pearl Harbor, made just such a use of the attacks of September 11, 2001, to legitimate American invasion first of Afghanistan and then of Iraq, and to try to build support for those actions not only among American citizens themselves, but also among the governments and citizens of its allies and beyond.  As Lifton observes, the Bush administration and its many supporters took the idea that after 9/11 the entire nation owed a “debt to the dead, and to the immediate survivors representing them,” and “instantly transformed [that idea] into a strong impulse toward retaliative action.”  The rush into war against Afghanistan and then against Iraq amply confirms Lifton’s diagnosis.

What is more, such manipulation of trauma for justifying subsequent national decisions and actions often also bolsters itself by analogizing the most recent trauma with earlier ones that had been successfully manipulated for similar purposes in the past.  So, for example, in his editor’s introduction to the collection of essays that make up Memory, Trauma, and World Politics (New York:  Pallgrave Macmillan, 2006) international relations scholar Duncan Bell calls attention to how this occurred after 9/11.  As he writes (page 14):      “In post 9/11 [American] public life memories of both Vietnam and the attack on Pearl Harbor have been invoked repeatedly and for multiple and often contradictory reasons.”  As a demonstration, Bell goes on to cite President George W. Bush in a speech delivered to the cadets at the United States Air Force Academy in Colorado Springs on June 24, 2004, almost three years after the 9/11 attacks.  “Like the Second World War,” said Bush on that occasion in Bell’s citation, “our present conflict began with a ruthless surprise attack on the United States.”   Then he drew an implicit parallel between his administrations response to the 9/11 attacks and the Roosevelt administration’s earlier response to the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor by adding:  “We will not forget that treachery and we will accept nothing less than victory over the enemy.”  He then even proceeded to conflate the 9/11 attacks with state-sponsored violence, such as, for example, the Nazi genocide against Jews:   “Like the murderous ideologies of the 20th century, the ideology of terrorism reaches across borders, and seeks recruits in every country.  So we’re fighting these enemies wherever they hide across the earth.”

Later in Bell’s collection of essays, K. M. Fierke, another scholar of international relations, follows Hannah Arendt’s well-known analysis in Eichman in Jerusalem in arguing that Israeli prime minister and national hero David Ben-Gurion similarly used the Eichman trial in 1961 to reinforce the idea that there was a direct and unbreakable connection between the Holocaust and the founding of the state of Israel.  So, Fierke observes (page 127 in Bell’s book):  “The experience of the Holocaust was woven into Israeli identity, rather than [Ben-Gurion and Israel] distancing it [that is, the Holocaust] in the past.”

Ironically, Ben-Gurion’s use of the Holocaust thereby follows the model of Hitler himself, who, in his manipulation of the widespread “stab in the back” myth popularly subscribed to by many Germans at the time, “called on the trauma of [German] 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.”  As if to confirm again the frequency with which such manipulations of trauma occur, and how they continue to recur all too frequently in recent history, rather than being relegated to earlier epochs, Fierke prefaces her remark about Hitler with one about how Slobodan Milosevic used the very same sort of manipulation of memories of trauma to justify Serbian aggression during the 1990s.

The example of the Nazi exploitation of the myth of the “stab in the back” is worth a bit more reflection.  According to that myth the Germans were supposed to have lost World War I not through any lack on the part of the German military or the leadership of the Wilhelmine Reich in general, but by being subverted from within by the Social Democrats and other leftist forces, those very figures to whom fell the responsibility to declare and then uphold what came to be known as the Weimar Republic after the German collapse and surrender in November 1918.  Unlike the Japanese attack on Pear Harbor twenty-three years later, which actually did take place, no such “stab in the back” ever occurred.  The whole thing was indeed no more than a manufactured “myth,” in the sense of a false story.  That the whole thing was made up, however, proved to be an advantage, not a disadvantage, for the right wing elements in German politics and society, including especially the Nazis.  The idea of such a “stab in the back” was not a claim based on evidence in the first place.  It was, rather, solely a symptomatic expression of the very anguish, resentments, and fears upon which it played.  As with any such delusion, any evidence adduced against it was automatically reinterpreted and converted into yet further confirmation of the pseudo-thesis at issue.  Not based on evidence to begin with, such a delusional idea can never be refuted by any appeal to contrary evidence.  Accordingly, it can be freely exploited by any interest able to adapt it to its own purposes, as the Nazis easily adapted the myth of the stab in the back to gain and hold power.

Furthermore, it is common knowledge that, once in power, Hitler was also not in the least averse to inventing new myths of traumatic attacks upon Germany whenever necessary to justify his aggressions.  The ramp-up to what became World War II was full of examples of such a process, which culminated in the Nazis trumping up the fake border incident of a Polish attack on a German radio installation as a pretense for invading Poland at the beginning of September in 1939.  Thus, traumatic events are so useful to a political leader’s pursuit of national or even personal goals that, if chance does not present one, the leader will have to invent one, as the President in the film Wag the Dog fakes a war to boost his popularity and secure his own reelection.

Even if the traumatic event diverted to serve such extraneous ends “really happened,” as did the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, drafting that event into public service by what presents itself as the national interest has the effect of transforming the event into a myth.  In that sense, even such otherwise egregiously offensive claims as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s that the Holocaust is a “myth,” touch on a truth—the truth, namely, that employing trauma to serve power is itself already a falsifying distortion, a fiction-spinning and myth-making.   By shanghaiing it for service in what they take to be the national interests of the state of Israel, for example, Ben-Gurion and the other Israeli leaders perverted remembrance of the Holocaust into a mere myth even before Ahmadinejad and other Holocaust deniers came along.  Indeed, the already accomplished perversion of the traumatic truth of the Holocaust into a state-justifying myth actually helped to open, and still helps keep open, a door through which those who would deny the reality of the Holocaust can come.

That transformation of the trauma of the Holocaust into no more than another sorry story of the exercise of the power of the state exemplifies the second, and indeed decisive, way in which the nation-state turns a profit on trauma.  The first way, that in which an already established state uses a serendipitous traumatic event—that is, one occurring by a chance that is fortunate at least for the state—to justify state-enacted violence, has been the focus of this section of the current chapter.  The second, decisive way, in which trauma is used not to justify aggression by already constituted states but, rather, to justify the foundation of the state in the first place, will be the topic in the next section.

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.”

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.