Trauma

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Trauma

• Representation
• (next time trauma management and media
  representation)

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Outline

• Definitions (Review) Definitions and Issues
• Psychological Responses
• Issues in Representation
• Readers Positions
• Examples Lingchi (???) ??? Blue Skies --
  Ann Marie Fleming.
• Next week
• References

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Trauma Definitions Issues

• (1. a bodily wound ??, ??) 2. a 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
• 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)

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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 -- Freuds theories

• (to prepare you for the reading of Changs
  article) pp. 97 100
• 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.
• ? extended to a general phenomenon e.g. Anxiety
  as a protection signal Jewish peoples
  monotheism.

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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
• 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 mothers lack
  of phallus/power) In Changs words, ???? (pp.
  102-103)

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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.
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Issues in Representation (2)

• Beyond complete comprehension and direct
  referentiality -- Caruth p. 56
• The films use of a story from John Herseys
  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.

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

• from psychic screen to photography and TV screen
  (to prepare you for the reading of Changs
  article)
• The 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.
• 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????--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 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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???LingchiEchoes of a Historical Photograph
??? 2002

• ??-- A historical photo from Georges Batailles
  ?????(Les Larmes dEros) , 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.

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???--cameras perspective?
1300--
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???--cameras perspective?
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???--cameras perspective?
1700--
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???--the viewers of Ching Dynasty? Or
Taiwanese workers?
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???--the viewers of Ching Dynasty? Or
Taiwanese workers?
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The Tortured in a trance?

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The Actual Screening Site

• With three screens why?

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The Actual Screening Site
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The Actual Screening Site
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The Actual Screening Site the Sea upside down?
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The Other Historical Images

• (Ref. ?)
• The historical remains(??) of
• The Yuan-ming Garden from Ching Dynasty ?????
• A bio-chemical laboratory(???????) in the
  North-East region of China
• A factory in Taiwan ??
• The prison in Green Island (???????)

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The Other Historical Sites

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The Other Historical Sites (2)

• The lab or a factory?

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???Lingchi -- Interpretations?

• Starting from two holes on a photo punctum (???)
• 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 converginglike the
  sea upside down.

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Blue Skies 2002

• 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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Next week

• Trauma
• Management and Survival, Agency (action)
• Media Photographic Representation

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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.
• ?????,129?,6?,2003?
• ???,lt????????????????????????gt,lthttp//www.ncu.edu
  .tw/eng/csa/journal/journal_park63.htmgt  
• ???,lt?????????????gt
• lt?????????????????????????gt unpublished paper.