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Trauma as a Spatial Encounter

This study sees trauma as an inherently spatial phenomenon, where individuals are both brought to moments of trauma through spatial encounters and, often simultaneously, given opportunities for subversive political action

through their psychological and physical interactions with space. To understand how this works, and, more important, to understand how institutional politics may provoke traumatic encounters, we first have to understand space as a political medium. Serious interest in spatial theory began in France during the 1960s, when the Situationists, a radical Leftist group represented most prominently by Guy Debord, articulated theories on space that presented a radical challenge to a developing capitalist superstructure. Like their contemporary, Henri Lefebvre, the Situationists saw the modern urban environment emerging as a product of capitalism, a system that inscribes itself on the space of the city and thereby guides and disciplines the behaviors of individuals participating within that space. Despite the pervasiveness and transparency of this system, individuals could reclaim space by creating “situations,” or temporary spaces of play. Sadie Plant, the preeminent scholar on the Situationists, writes, “It is in the play born of desire that individuals should now be able to recognize themselves, progressing with a new and chosen set of relations no longer dictated by the ethos of labour and struggle but governed by the free and playful construction of situations, of which the revolutionary moment is the first and best” (22). What remained pertinent about this critique throughout the twentieth century—especially to Baudrillard, Foucault, Jameson, and other postmodernist critics—was the insistence on space as a political medium capable of both disciplining and empowering individuals.
Through this lens, city space (and, indeed, any space subject to the forces of capitalism and biopolitics) must be understood as a discursive zone of political
strife in which institutional power is realized and materialized. For instance, the freeway construction in Helena María Viramontes’ Their Dogs Came with Them, which I discuss in chapter four, reveals the enduring institutional presence in urban planning and city development. The politics of space, however, are not always so easily identified. Baudrillard’s writings on the hyperreal here prove useful in discussing our increased dislocation from urban “reality” and the ways that institutional politics infiltrate our everyday lives. Rejecting the Situationists’ belief in the possibility of reclaiming politicized space, Baudrillard argues that we have entered a state of endless simulation in which the Real has been absorbed by simulated reality. He writes:
It is no longer a question of imitation, nor of reduplication, nor even of parody. It is rather a question of substituting signs of the real for the real itself; that is, an operation to deter every real process by its operational double, a metastable, programmatic, perfect descriptive machine which provides all the signs of the real and short-circuits all its vicissitudes. (“Simulacra” 167)
Here, the politics of space—again articulated in Marxist terms—achieve total transparency through simulated reality. This echoes Debord’s concept of the spectacle, which depends on the production and consumption of the image as a means of maintaining social control. He explains, “The spectacle cannot be understood as a mere visual deception produced by mass-media technologies. It is a worldview that has been materialised, a view of the world that has become
objective” (Debord 7). The spectacle has inscribed itself on the experience of modern life in such a way that our experience of reality is tied up in our experience of the spectacle. Using these related models helps to illuminate the ways in which, specifically, capitalism and, more broadly, all systematic, institutional discourses embed themselves in social space and thereby veil their political power.
While spatial politics, I argue, continually prove capable of provoking trauma in the era of globalization, the traumatic encounter, itself, and the way we understand trauma as a psychological phenomenon are intrinsically tied up with space. Beginning with his essay “The Uncanny” and continuing in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud insists that vital connections exist between space, the psyche, and the way we process trauma. Moments of the uncanny, for instance, occur as a familiar, domestic space becomes radically defamiliarized, and this experience, Freud argues, is tied to the traumatic moment of separation from the familiar space of the womb during childbirth. For Freud, the physical encounter with space is capable of provoking psychological responses that disrupt the flow of time and propel the individual into repetitive behavior and other neuroses.¹ These moments of trauma involve temporal ruptures that often produce the sensation of occupying multiple spaces simultaneously, and these ruptures ask us to consider temporality in non-linear terms, a process I explore in chapter one.
This study therefore uses space in two ways: first, to understand trauma and the


¹ See Anthony Vidler’s The Architectural Uncanny for more on the connections between Freud’s concept and the experience of space.
ways that spatial encounters stimulate traumatic memory and, second, to demonstrate how the politics of space prove capable of facilitating a potentially productive confrontation with trauma.
My understanding of space specifically draws from these two models: the Lefebvrian socio-political model and the Bachelardian phenomenological model. Henri Lefebvre and his contemporaries (Debord, Foucault, and later de Certeau) describe space as a discursive medium through which institutional power is enacted and contested. Bachelard, on the other hand, is more interested in the psychological encounter with space and our affective connections to intimate spaces, namely, the house. This study uses these two spatial models—the political and the psychological—as points of entry to discussions on city space, domestic space, and, finally, textual space. By situating space within the physical boundaries of place and discussing how spatial politics and, specifically, trauma inscribe themselves in those spaces, I build my analysis from the ground up; starting from a material position—the city, the home, etc.—we can begin to understand how trauma and politics are inscribed, often in subtle ways, in the spaces most familiar to us and, consequently, are capable of affecting us both materially and psychologically.