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Trauma

Trauma. & Representation (next time –trauma “management” and media representation). Outline. Definitions (Review): Definitions and Issues Psychological Responses Issues in Representation Reader’s Positions Examples – Lingchi ( 《 凌遲考 》 ) 陳界仁 ; Blue Skies -- Ann Marie Fleming.

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Trauma

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  1. Trauma & Representation (next time –trauma “management” and media representation)

  2. Outline • Definitions (Review): Definitions and Issues • Psychological Responses • Issues in Representation • Reader’s Positions • Examples – Lingchi (《凌遲考》) 陳界仁; Blue Skies -- Ann Marie Fleming. • Next week • References

  3. Trauma – Definitions & Issues • (1. a bodily wound 外傷, 損傷) 2. a wound, a breach on the mind 精神創傷; --not fully known, comprehended or assimilated at the moment. • Of victims; of surviving witness; of all of us; of history’s im/possibility of referentiality. • Issues: • Surviving – 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. (p. 7)

  4. Psychological Responses • Cathy Caruth “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.

  5. Psychological Responses -- Freud’s theories • (to prepare you for the reading of Chang’s article) –pp. 97 – 100 • Three models in Freud’s theory of psyche – economic, topological and dynamic • The economic model (能量流通)—Repression at the moment and return later with its full impact known; e.g. sexual harassment. • Topological model (地形﹔拓僕) -- trauma breaks the protective shieldagainst stimuli, and thus denies the usual discharge function following the principle of constancy repetition compulsion. •  extended to a general phenomenon –e.g. Anxiety as a protection signal; Jewish people’s monotheism.

  6. Psychological Responses -- Freud’s theories (2) • different causes of trauma: • external—train accident, war, sexual abuse; • internal—Oedipal crisis, fear of castration and absence of the mother • Responses – • repetition compulsion, • 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 mother’s lack of phallus/power) In Chang’s words, 視而不見 (pp. 102-103)

  7. Issues in Representation • What is ‘ethical’ or possible to tell. (“betrayal of the past” –a worry of the woman in Hiroshima)  indirect telling. • 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) • Through what (documentaries, archive, letters) can we understand the past.  impossibility of full representation • 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.

  8. Issues in Representation (2) • Beyond complete comprehension and direct referentiality -- Caruth p. 56 • The film’s use of a story from John Hersey’s Hiroshima. --the growth of the flowers over the ruins seen by an injured woman. • “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.”

  9. Issues in Representation (3) --from psyche to representation – • from psychic screen to photography and TV screen(to prepare you for the reading of Chang’s article) • The article’s 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.

  10. 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. • Protection: Freud and Benjamin – screen as a protective shield against stimuli (of psychic injuries or in a city); • 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「真實」--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.

  11. 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)

  12. 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)

  13. The Viewers/Readers’ Perspectives (3) • Is sympathy possible? • Is being a sympathetic witness enough? • Reading can involve action; critical reading is critical practice (with a purpose to change)

  14. 《凌遲考》Lingchi—Echoes of a Historical Photograph 陳界仁 2002 • 《凌遲》-- A historical photo from Georges Bataille’s 《情慾的淚水》(Les Larmes d`Eros) , taken by a French soldier during the period of 1904-1905. •  computer synthesized with footages of dramatization and some other historical images. • Implications of Lingchi: • The interrelations of punishment and discipline. • History –gets ‘tortured and fragmented’ in photos? Gets gazed at by the Western? • History of what? • Pay attention to the images of the gazed and the viewers, and the roles of the camera.

  15. 《凌遲考》--camera’s perspective? 13:00--

  16. 《凌遲考》--camera’s perspective?

  17. 《凌遲考》--camera’s perspective? 17:00--

  18. 《凌遲考》--the viewers of Ching Dynasty? Or Taiwanese workers?

  19. 《凌遲考》--the viewers of Ching Dynasty? Or Taiwanese workers?

  20. The Tortured –in a trance?

  21. The Actual Screening Site • With three screens – why?

  22. The Actual Screening Site

  23. The Actual Screening Site

  24. The Actual Screening Site –the Sea upside down?

  25. The Other Historical Images • (Ref. 孫） • The historical remains(廢墟) of • The Yuan-ming Garden from Ching Dynasty 清朝圓明園 • A bio-chemical laboratory(人體生化實驗室) in the North-East region of China • A factory in Taiwan 工廠 • The prison in Green Island (綠島政治犯監獄)

  26. The Other Historical Sites

  27. The Other Historical Sites (2) • The lab or a factory?

  28. 《凌遲考》Lingchi -- Interpretations? • Starting from two holes on a photo –punctum (穿刺點) • The disciplined and oppressed –the viewers (people in Ching Dynasty as well as Taiwanese workers, the people of bio-chemical tests, etc. ) • Orientalism critiqued: The traumas of colonial/imperial history – turned into spectacles by the Western photographers/travelers. • History -- in fragments and remains; • The traumatized – beyond comprehension; • But the blood is flowing and converging—like the sea upside down.

  29. Blue Skies 2002 • Ritual of surviving trauma and Acceptance of difference cultures.

  30. 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.

  31. Next week Trauma – • “Management” and Survival, Agency (action); • Media & Photographic Representation

  32. Reference • E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang. “From Traumatic Paralysis to the Force Field of Modernity.” Trauma and cinema: Cross-Curltural Explorations. Eds. E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang.Hong Kong UP, 2004. • 《典藏今藝術》，129期，6月，2003。 • 劉紀蕙，〈『現代性』的視覺詮釋︰陳界仁的歷史肢解與死亡鈍感〉，<http://www.ncu.edu.tw/~eng/csa/journal/journal_park63.htm>   • 孫立銓，〈演譯陳界仁的新作影片《凌遲考》〉 • 〈國家歷史意識？後殖民意識？再演繹陳界仁的影片《凌遲考》〉 unpublished paper.

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