Trauma

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Trauma

• Postcolonial and Postmodern Representations

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Outline

• Definitions Definitions and Issues
• Psychological Responses
• Issues
• Representation
• Readers Positions
• Postmodernism vs. Postcolonialism
• Examples
• Blue Skies -- Ann Marie Fleming
• Day Mark Lee Briccetti
• Next week
• References

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Trauma Definitions Issues

• (1. a bodily wound ??, ??) 2. a psychic wound, a
  breach on the mind ???? --not fully known,
  comprehended or assimilated at the moment.
• Of victims of surviving witness of all of us
  of historys im/possibility of referentiality.
• Issues
• Traumatic Responses symptoms of shock,
  dissociation, fragmentation, guilt and loss
  paralysis or identity re-construction
• Representation delayed appearance doubleness
  and disjunction (between the past/dead the
  present/alive the victims and the reader.
  (Kaplan p. 7)

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Psychological Responses -- Freuds theories

• In the three models in Freuds theory of psyche
  economic, topological and dynamic
• The economic model (????)Repression at the
  moment and return later with its full impact
  known e.g. sexual harassment.
• Topological model (?????) -- trauma breaks the
  protective shield against stimuli, and thus
  denies the usual discharge function following the
  principle of constancy? repetition compulsion.
• Dynamic model ? extended to a general phenomenon
  e.g. Anxiety as a protection signal Jewish
  peoples monotheism.

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Psychological Responses

• Cathy Caruth 1995 The Wound and the Voice
• Uncanny repetitions of the voice of wound.
• p. 4 . . .it is always the story of a wound that
  cries out, that addresses us in the attempt to
  tell us of a reality or truth that is not
  otherwise available.
• Two stories Tancred and Clorinda the return of
  the burning child.

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Psychological Responses -- Freuds theories (2)

• different causes of trauma
• externaltrain accident, war, sexual abuse
• internalOedipal crisis, fear of castration and
  absence of the mother
• Responses mourning (gradual detachment) and
  melancholia (identification and incorporation of
  the lost object)
• Melancholy repetition compulsion,
• Mourning acceptance/sublimation of absence
  thru symbolization in games (e.g. fort-da game
  or peek-a-boo) and arts,
• disavowal denying while admitting in forms of
  fantasies and fetishism (e.g. the mothers lack
  of phallus/power) In Changs words, ???? (pp.
  102-103)

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Names for Different Responses

• PTSD (Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder) vs. PTG
  (Post-Traumatic Growth)
• DENOS ( Disorders of Extreme Stress Not Otherwise
  Specified)
• describe the more subtle and characterologically
  imprinted effects of long-term, chronic trauma,
  and would allow for the recognition of a distinct
  kind of traumatic experience in those for whom
  the experience may not be available as flashbacks
  or simple memories but may be exhibited in more
  subtle kinds of behavior (Caruth 1994 viii).

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Issues in Representation

• Survival and Life The films use of a story from
  John Herseys Hiroshima. --the growth of the
  flowers over the ruins seen by an injured woman.
• Betrayal? What is ethical or possible to tell.
  (betrayal of the past a worry of the woman in
  Hiroshima) ? indirect telling.
• Incorporation into Official History The past can
  be easily effaced in official history, or
  inscribed/translated into an anonymous/general
  narrative of peace, national progress or trauma.
  (e.g. the death of some the victory and
  liberation of others)
• How Through what (documentaries, archive,
  letters) can we understand the past. ?
  impossibility of full representation

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Issues in Representation (2)

• Referentiality Beyond complete comprehension and
  direct referentiality -- Caruth p. 56
• Witness in incomprehension What we see and
  hear, in Hiroshima mon amour, resonates beyond
  what we can know and understand but it is in the
  event of this incomprehension and in our
  departure from sense and understanding that our
  own witnessing may indeed begin to take place.
• Listening The importance and possibility of
  attentive listening across the boundaries of
  cultures, time and life and death (Obasan,
  Hiroshima mon amour) and survival.

With Café Casablanca as a counter-example, so is
the history of the film shooting with a Japanese
actor who cannot speak French at all.
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Issues in Representation (3) Popularity of
Trauma

• from psychic screen to photography and TV screen
• Changs articles question How is the collective
  memory of 921 Earthquake formed (entering our
  consciousness, becoming images or being
  verbalized)? How do we disavow history of the
  earthquake by consuming its images.

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Issues in Representation (3) --from psyche to
representation

• pp.91-92 screen memory the projection of the
  memory traces in the unconscious onto images of
  mass media.
• Screen as Protection Freud and Benjamin screen
  as a protective shield against stimuli (of
  psychic injuries or in a city)
• Screen as Projection and Exposure Mirror and
  image screen pp. 92-93 ? tourism, infotainment
  and the ghostly uncanny.
• mirror image in the Imaginary order (of the three
  orders, the Imaginary, the Symbolic and the
  real????--traces outside the screens in the
  symbolic and the imaginary)
• Punctum p. 89
• Obscenity of Communication with everything
  screened in front of us, and we ourselves, a
  screen to be written on.

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The Viewers/Readers Perspectives

• Four main positions in viewing trauma films
  (Kaplan pp. 9-10)
• the position of being introduced to trauma in a
  film which ends with a comforting cure. (e.g.
  disaster films, Vietnam war films such as In
  Country.)
• The position of being vicariously traumatized
  (e.g. Videodrome, The Fly by David Cronenberg)

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The Viewers/Readers Perspectives (2)

• The position of a voyeur of films and TV
  programs which turn others traumas into
  spectacles.
• The position of a witness. (Being there and not
  there aware of the distance.) This position of
  witness may open up a space of transformation
  of the viewer through the empathic identification
  without vicarious traumatization. . . . It is
  the unusual, anti-narrative process of the
  narration that is itself transformative in
  inviting the viewer to be at once emotionally
  there . . . but also to keep a cognitive distance
  and awareness denied to victim by the traumatic
  process. (e.g. Hiroshima mon amour, Lingchi)

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The Viewers/Readers Perspectives (3)

• Is sympathy/empathy possible?
• Is being a sympathetic witness enough?
• Reading can involve action critical reading is
  critical practice (with a purpose to change)

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Trauma Postmodern/Postcolonial Discourses

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Postmodernism (0) Definitions

• --?????(Postmodernism)?cultures which challenge
  language and the other types of Truth,
  foundation and tradition. (Poststructuralism as
  one example.)
• -- ?????(Poststructuralism)?theories which
  challenge the stable structure of language
  (binaries) and traditional value systems sees
  their meanings as slippery, multiple and
  contingent (?????).
• --?????(Postmodernity)?The socio-economic and
  intellectual conditions which make postmodernism
  possible.

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Postmodernism (1) Definitions Issues

• Definition
• postmodernism -- ?????????????
• Period or style ???????????????
• Postmodernism and postmodernity (postmodern
  conditions ???? ????????????) - the former
  reinforcing or critiquing the latter.
• Interpretation against interpretation, difficult
  wholenss or hybridity
• Postmodern Identity Depthlessness vs.
• History, Memory, Capitalist culture and Identity
• The role of the author authority, originality
  and authenticity
• The boundaries of humanity

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What is Postmodernism? (2)
Negative Positive
Flattening of subjectivity Pastiche Ambiguity Eclecticism Pluralism De-Centering Boundary-crossing
Literature Film Surfiction, metafiction pastiche Parody Ensemble film Sci-fi . . .,etc Historiographical metafiction metafilm
Urban space Society as spectacle overall commofication Plural space Multiple historical signs De-zoning or democratization of urban space re-creation of historical spaces

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PC PM Differences 1) Past the Last Post

• Differences (x-xiii)
• pc more overtly political
• pm exercising a cultural and intellectual
  hegemony
• Different conceptions of the Other (others),
  with pc emphasizing more the local and regional.
  
• Different questions of the national,
  international and transnational of authenticity
  and simulacra or representation and
  referentiality.

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PC PM Similarities Differences 2) Linda
Hutcheon

• Similarities in form (magic realism), theme
  (history and margins) and strategy (irony,
  double-coding)
• Different in the issue of agency and social change

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Diane Brydon against Hutcheon

• Pluralize postcolonialism two kinds of
  ambivalence (p. 192)
• Critique of Hutcheon
• 1. evolutionary model
• 2. Search for Synthesis
• 3. The Cult of Authenticity ? ? contamination as
  a strategies (e.g. White Inuits)

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Trauma Postmodernism Common Concerns (ref.
Radstone 11)

Postmodern theories Trauma
referentiality -- différance in meaning -- language as mediation of reality Laub an event without witness lacking traces
Subjectivity --forgetting and testimony, Analyst and victim Fragmentation Lack of autonomy Depthlessness Mimetic theory psychical dissociation from the self hypnosis Anti-mimetic theory unassimilable event dissociated from memory
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Trauma Postcolonialism

• Traumatization // colonization
• Trauma entails violent intrusion and a sense of
  utter objecti.cation that annihilates the person
  as subject or agent (Lloyd 214).
• Consequences
• will-to-forget or amnesia of the victim in
  relation to the terror of the occasion the
  consequent dissociation and dislocation of the
  person
• ? recovery and anticolonialism??? No.
• -- survival but not recovery of the past

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Postmodern vs. Postcolonial Traumas

• Hiroshima mon amour as World memory?
• the term "world memory" is suggestive as a
  description of how memory moves beyond the
  individual and translates itself across and
  between cultures. (Durrant)
• History as trauma
• "history is precisely the way we are implicated
  in one another's traumas" (Caruth 1995 24)
• ? possible problems in generalization ignoring
  historical specificity, archiving involves
  hierarchization.

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Blue Skies 2002 (source)

• Ritual of surviving trauma and
• Acceptance of difference cultures.

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Blue Skies 2002

• I was blue, just as blue as could be
• Every day is a cloudy day for me.
• Then good luck came knocking at my door
• Skies were grey but they're not grey anymore.
• Blue skies smiling at me
• Nothing but blue skies do I see.
• Bluebirds singing a song
• Nothing but bluebirds all the day long.

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Day Mark During the evacuation I walked up the
thirty-six floors in a darkness so utter the
world no longer existed. Voices, slammed
firedoors, above and below, fear, the smell of
burning fuel. Then, in the dusty air of my
savagely bright apartment I hovered over the body
Id lived in. Fire-glass particles sparkled on
the school roof and the dazzle of charred
steelwork was a kind of blindness. Triage
stations, refrigerator lockers sound
finished. Rescuers and stunned residents under
the dusty trees remembered they were dust.
Day MarkLee Briccetti
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There is a blister on my mind. I agree to
that. Moment as the plane, four blocks
away, turned, angling inand I knew they would be
dead but I would live. And so it is. Time, a
membrane we both slipped through, into the
next moment when I could scream. Personality
swallowed itself to a nerve live. I live above
the pit, the river a gorgeous frame for abundant
new morning light.
Day Mark (contd)Lee Briccetti
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Next week The Year of Magical Thinking

• 2003/7/26 ???(Didion) ??????(Quintana) ???
• 2003/12/25 ????????????????,????
• 2003/12/30????????????????
• 13?????????Life changes fast/Life changes in
  the instant???
• 2004/1/22??????,??????
• 2004/3/23?????????,??????????
• 2004/3/25???????????
• 2004/4/30???????????????,??????????????,??????,??
  ????????
• 2004/5/12 ?1111 ???????????,?????
• 2004/10/4 ???????

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Next week The Year of Magical Thinking

• 2004/10/4 ???????
• 2004/12/31????????
• 2005/8/26 ??????
• 2005/10??????
• 2007 ???????????????????????????????.

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Next week

• The Year of Magical Thinking
• Focus chaps 1-7 12-22
• Initial responses (coolness) and repetitions
• Grief and mourning
• magical thinking as a process of sense-making

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Reference

• Radstone, Susannah. Trauma Theory Contexts,
  Politics, Ethics. Paragraph 301 (2007) 929.
• Lloyd, David. COLONIAL TRAUMA/ POS TCOLONIAL
  RECOVERY? interventions Vol. 2(2) 212228.
• Durrant, Sam. Postcolonializing Trauma Studies.
  Postcolonial Text, Vol 1, No 2 (2005)
• E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang. From Traumatic
  Paralysis to the Force Field of Modernity.
  Trauma and cinema Cross-Cultural Explorations.
  Eds. E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang. Hong Kong UP,
  2004.