trauma/theory

Music: Spiritualized: Smile/Sway EP (1991)

I wanted to use this morning to rethink my lecture from yesterday and rework it in this space.

For the haunting seminar this week we read Cathy Caruth's edited collection, Trauma, and her follow up book of essays, Unclaimed Experience. Now a (school)household name, Caruth was somewhat unwittingly the central figure of the beginning of the first end of trauma studies in the mid 1990s. After a guest editing stint for an issue of American Imago on trauma studies (which became the edited book) Caruth found herself being cited an attacked for her elaborations of trauma: that's what you get when you pioneer (or simply help to frame) new movements in "theory." Trauma studies in the latter half of the twentieth is marked by the institutionalization of Holocaust Studies, signaled no doubt by the opening of the U.S. Holocaust museum in 1991, the arrival of Caruth's work (1995-1996), the feverish apex of trauma theory in the late 1990s, and, presumably, it's death at the turn of the century (declared by a special issue of Cultural Critique in 2000).

The appeal of the concept of trauma is unquestionably the centrality of traumatic experiences to our daily lives and the horrific, catastrophic events of the past century. Trauma began to fall out of theoretical favor in the late twentieth century because, as John Mowitt has suggested, it "fell into industry." That is, we scholars fetishized trauma. Mowitt holds out the "Traumatic Colonel"---that is, Slavoj Zizek---as the poster fetishizer of trauma, for example (hocking his "traumatic kernels," "voids," Das Dings, and so forth). However much we might find the prophetic that seems so closely associated with trauma as an outmoded, twentieth century cliché, Nine-eleven is now the most commoditized and fetishized traumatic event of the Real. Period. Nine-eleven was both the death-knell and resurrection of trauma studies. It was a death knell because the term "trauma" fails to capture the experience of the "accident" and the consequent "awakening," because something like the "theory of the event" seems to have eclipsed it (and "event" is---how else to say this?"---more masculine" in connotation, with nods to Badiou and Deleuze). Trauma, as "a gaping wound," is simply not phallic enough. That said, I think that there is no better term for explaining the new, imagocentric economy of violence that was established muffle and silence the "voices from the wound" (many of which are those of slain slaves and Native Americans). The past five years has been a traumarama, a strange combine of astonishment, terror, and kitsch. In short: trauma remains a useful concept precisely because of the arrival of the Trauma Industries.

Let us more closely examine the fetishization of theory itself, because after Nine-eleven, I think we might literally collapse them into each other. Trauma/theory is perhaps a working concept that only makes sense in the context of war, however. First, we could say that theory in my line of work is about ending human suffering "in the last instance," and that suffering is usually set in relation to some conflict. Second, trauma is always associated with suffering and, in the last century, has been theorized in relation to war: first in terms of "shell shock," then after the world wars in terms of PTSD and the horrible disaster that was Vietnam, and finally in the 1990s in the war against pedophiles and also in terms of "false memory syndrome." Third, trauma/theory references the culture wars, especially when we take the intellectual "fashionability" charges from Mowitt and others into account.

At the end of Unclaimed Experience, through an extended reading of the burning child dream in Freud's The Interpretation of Dreams, Caruth underscores a de Manian realization in a Lacanian moment. She argues that in dreams, there is no meaning when we wrestle with trauma:

“The transmission of the psychoanalytic theory of trauma, the story of dreams and of dying children, cannot be reduced, that is, to a simple mastery of facts and cannot be located in a simple knowledge or cognition, a knowledge that can see and situate precisely where trauma lies." (111)

What Caruth is yoking here is trauma and Lacan's notion of "the Real," or better put, trauma as a Real event. Caruth argues that trauma leads to "awakening," which is not to be understood as the after-effect of sleep, but rather, the traversal of the gap between waking and sleeping, a movement that is meaningful only in retrospect (that is, a meaningless traversal or "boundary crossing" if you like). Trauma is another way to get at this "gap" in the Symbolic, the real, the in-betweenness, the locus of differeance, the sensorial, Deleuzian "event" that cannot support structure or analysis, Badiou's undecideable that we are compelled to name. It is this gap or absence that has been fetishized in theory, the space between waking life and the horror of a dream just before the father answers the burning child's question: "can't you see that I am burning?" Now [in my best Zizek voice], is this not the very same condition of signifier of "theory" itself?

The condition of the signifier of theory is trauma. We can reckon with this statement in two ways, contextually and experientially. Contextually, what gets left out of Caruth's work (and especially the many critiques of it, such as Ruth Ley's Trauma: A Genealogy) is the medium of her enterprise, which has become code for warring tribes. Which tribe has been branded "theory?" The academics who wield "jargon" of course. Confronting Caruth confronting the trauma of the accident, we are also made to confront, in a subtextual sense, Alan Sokal’s traumatic prank in Social Text some years back. Confronting Caruth confronting the trauma of the accident, we are also made to confront the so-called culture wars in the terrain of the academic imaginary. For example, in English students are forced to make a choice between, say, close textual reading and “Litcrit,” between presumably anti-theoretical readings and horrors of deconstructive nihilism. In Performance Studies, we find the fissure between theatre and communication studies, and even there, between the just do-it crowd or, as it often said, the “performance practitioner” and the NYU critical theory of sell outs, the tribe who blocks stages and the tribe who reads Peggy Phelan. And in Rhetorical Studies, the trauma that divides is the aphoria between text and context, marshaled in terms of “close textual reading” and public address on the one hand, and high-theory criticism and the turn-coats of "cultural studies" on the other. Culture war traumae are us.

Experientially, aside from what de Man has said (and, well, to some extent Derrida . . . now that I think of it, most people on the deconstructive tip play with this), trauma theory does not take into account the traumatic function of theory as such. Since I made a parenthetical doubting, I should restate this to say that while acknowledged, it is often forgotten in the classroom and in the pages of so-called "theoretical" work that the signifier of theory has come to represent a certain “shock effect,” as Benjamin once wrote; theory threatens to blast the reader/thinker outside of the ossified modes of thinking, perhaps even in its failures. Of course, difficult language is often deployed for this task. Yet what is dismissed as simply “bad writing” by some is, to others, a cognitive assault that is only made meaningful or sensible in retrospect. I testify this was my experience, when I first started graduate school: I was traumatized by the recalcitrant texts of "theory." Gradually I came to accept trauma as a condition of reading, to embrace the notion that mastery is not the end-game; I came to understand what Caruth describes as the real event of trauma: theory " cannot be reduced . . . to a simple mastery of facts and cannot be located in a simple knowledge or cognition, a knowledge that can see and situate precisely where" it lies. I took some heavily theoretical courses that only began to make sense perhaps as much as a year from when I sat in the seminar room. I have countless books on my shelf that have took me years to "understand"---if I can claim to have done that at all (Lacan's seminars till continue to baffle).

Unquestionably, I have been traumatized by "theory." And unquestionably, "theory" has fallen into industry. Whence trauma/theory? The answer is the truth of the meaningless ineffability of human experience and the inevitability of the law (and instantly, after Moses, something called "economy").

Oh, and you can get your Favorite Theorist's T-shirt here.