From the Past Imperfect: Towards a Critical Trauma Theory by Maurice Stevens

THE SEMIANNUAL NEWSLETTER OF THE ROBERT PENN WARREN CENTER FOR THE HUMANITIES VOL. 17, NO. 2 • SPRING 2009 • VANDERBILT UNIVERSITY From the Past Imperfect: Towards a Critical Trauma Theory by Maurice Stevens “no one wishes to be plunged head first into the rose, as they often do, buoyed on the thermals things one does not remember and does not wish of emergent technologies. to remember.”—James Baldwin Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), the y current manuscript project From diagnostic category used to describe sympto- the Past Imperfect: Towards a Criti- matic responses to trauma in relation to men- cal Trauma Theory examines insti- tal health, and the clinical object that ascribed M evidentiary value to the idea that an event tutional and discursive practices that depend upon and reproduce concepts of trauma criti- actually took place, has itself existed as a dis- cally restricted by classifications based on race, tinct clinical disorder for more than 40 years class, gender, sexuality and religion. It con- and has seen the development of an extensive tributes to both humanities and social sci- body of research and multiple clusters of ences scholarship as it takes shape in the investigation grow up around it. There are tension between trauma studies, medical multiple professional societies and journals anthropology, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, committed to the exploration and under- critical legal studies, critical race theory, and standing of PTSD, for example. Literally performance studies. thousands of scholarly and professional arti- cles have been written on the topic and hun- Why Critical Trauma Theory? dreds of symposia dedicated to discussing As a concept, trauma has been around in one trauma and PTSD in disciplinary contexts Maurice Stevens form or another since the late nineteenth cen- from literature to social work and ethnic stud- chically overwhelming, or from merely physi- tury and from the start, its meanings, subject ies to psychiatry. I am interested in how this cally trying to life-threatening. This is to say to ideological and fiduciary struggle, have research has both provided frameworks that that while, in some ways, these terms appear shifted and transformed. As one might expect, allow us to operate with very specific defini- to have become generally evacuated of their trauma has also been racialized, sexualized, tions of trauma, and has simultaneously specific meanings, most of us believe, at base gendered and classed from its inception. In presented a universal notion of trauma pur- and instantly, that we know exactly what to fact, from its first applications in the explana- porting to describe a very broad range of tion of symptoms deriving from railway acci- experiences. dents, trauma has really never functioned Like many ideas having their roots in psy- transparently or equitably and has never been chology and medicine that have made their an unencumbered descriptive term. For as way into popular exchange, we find ourselves Inside soon as victims began making claims on their using the language of trauma easily; and often From the Past Imperfect: injuries, as soon, that is, as the harm attend- with a very powerful and felt sense that we Towards a Critical Trauma Theory ...............1-5 ing this particular form of industrial move- know what we mean when we do so. The use Lecture Series Explores Election ..........................5 ment had its place in the lexicon of litigation, of this nomenclature also performs cultural Putting It Together: Creative Humanities...........6 insurance agents working in the service of work by identifying those of us who use it as New Directions in Trauma Studies ..................7-8 railway companies, and the physicians and psychologically savvy, as empathetic and as The State of the Humanities..........................9-11 psychiatric specialists in their employ, began modern sentimental subjects. Surrounded as Graduate Student Research Symposium ...........11 defining who could and who could not be we are by mediated uses of signifiers like What We Are Writing........................................12 understood as having been traumatized. These “trauma,” “traumatic,” “traumatizing” and External Grants and Fellowships .......................13 were scientific determinations that fell then, “PTSD,” we have come to learn that they 2008-2009 Faculty Fellows................................14 as they do now, along axes marked by cultural relate to experiences that traverse the spec- 2008-2009 Graduate Fellows ............................14 categories of social differentiation; and that trum from simply anxiety-provoking to psy- Letters • Spring 2009 • 1 Letters • Spring 2009 • 2 look for when cued by these troubling signs. nize traumatogenic institutions like enslave- nates (necessarily past and completed) makes Neither indexical nor symbolic signifiers, ment, genocidal cultural contact, or the sim- it particularly powerful in the clinical or diag- trauma has taken on the logics of the icon. ple ubiquity of non-spectacular racial violence nostic setting. The traumatic event possesses When we imagine we are “seeing” trauma or and micro-aggressions; or transnational critics specificity, there is an agent and victim of the signs of its passage, we know immediately might decry the European and American injury, a place and time of occurrence, and a that something spectacular and catastrophic impulse to force diverse peoples into the cul- blooming narrative of accountability or inno- has transpired and we fear, also with a sense of turally specific rubric of trauma, casting aside cence. On the other hand, its unknowability, immediacy, that normal systems for under- the authority of local knowledges. These are that is, the degree to which trauma exceeds standing the event and any of its survivors will all important and truly useful critiques, to signification or eludes description, makes it be overwhelmed and rendered incapable of which any serious consideration of trauma particularly susceptible to becoming some- adequately capturing its immensity or the sub- theory must respond. However, they stop thing else as well. The event is also enigmatic. tlety of its sublime pervasiveness. short of interrogating the concept of trauma This presents us with a kind of dilemma: However, the simultaneous sense of “know- itself, from submitting it to the analysis we trauma is both specific and enigmatic, both ing” something has transpired, and the utter might apply to other cultural objects. discursive and material. Similarly, the broad frustration of having our understanding over- set of neurobiological responses to traumatic come by trauma—of not being able to render Trauma: From What it “Describes” to events (the psycho-physiological threat that experience legible through representa- What it “Makes” responses that seem, again, universally evi- tion—has made its clinical and theoretical Like most examples of “socially constructed” dent), and the multiple variations in the phe- application particularly vulnerable to the objects of knowledge, trauma’s force can be nomenological or expressive response to forces of social emplotment imbedded in the measured in the material effects it produces in trauma across groups defined in terms of gen- concept of “trauma” itself. Trauma, as a kind social relations, institutional practices, and der, race, ethnicity, class and even sexuality, of situated knowledge that emerges from the public policy. Here From the Past Imperfect also obtain a tension. While we may all specificities of the moment in which it is extends current theorizing. While critics have develop “startle” responses in the aftermath of invoked as an appropriate or obvious label, called attention to the limitations of trauma trauma, for example, the intensity of those bears, in rather remarkable ways, traces that theory, they have not closely examined responses can be shown to vary dramatically reveal its cultural work. This level of vulnera- how these limitations prove problematic in in correspondence to differences in one’s cul- bility and its ramifications poses the central specific institutional locations that build tural or social positioning. The fact that point of departure in From the Past Imperfect specialized sets of practice around troubling trauma has been a highly racialized and sexu- as it considers how racialization, sexualization ideas of trauma. alized concept dependent on visual metaphors and the tyranny of the visual shape what As a concept formed out of injury related to for its description and models of the spectacu- trauma can be, which subjects its signification railway accidents, wartime wounding, or over- lar for its rendering, strains claims on its uni- hails, and which institutional practices it whelming natural catastrophe, notions of versal applicability. As a result, various underwrites because they are understood as class, race, gender and sex have all been cen- traumatic experiences are not adequately adequate to its amelioration. Indeed, my pro- tral to the formation of popular ideas about addressed in clinical settings working with a ject does this by tracing how notions of whose sensibilities can be disturbed by near- PTSD model. trauma emerge as often very complex “sets of death experiences, whose civility can be upset The basically arbitrary and, in some ways, practice” in several cultural institutions: the by the horrific, and who can be overwhelmed theoretically counterintuitive requirement that clinic, academe, legal discourse, cyberspace

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