Microsoft Word Narrative Exploits docx

Trauma in the Age of Biopolitics

Narrative Exploits is concerned with exploring the effects of institutional trauma on the individual. How do individuals cope with the sense of powerlessness associated with participation in a system of globalization, a system
that is dispersed, faceless, and therefore impossible to grasp in its entirety? Andreas Huyssen locates the contemporary experience of trauma as a consequence of rapid cultural change. He writes, “our discontents flow from informational and perceptual overload combined with a cultural acceleration neither our psyche nor our senses are well-equipped to handle” (24). Like Freud’s writings on trauma in Beyond the Pleasure Principle, which locate trauma as the result of sudden moments of “fright” or “shock” that the psyche is unprepared to process (Beyond the Pleasure Principle 9), Jill Bennett suggests that the contemporary environment of media and technology generates unexpected psychological encounters that we are unable to confront directly. Mediated narratives, she explains, require us to confront trauma outside of the traditional paradigms emerging from Holocaust studies and studies on PTSD in Vietnam veterans.
Unlike these zones of inquiry, which identify trauma as the result of distinct moments of violence perpetrated on individuals, political trauma occurs in more subtle ways, when networked and distributed institutional power becomes temporarily visible, revealing the increasing lack of political distance between the individual and systems of government.² Hardt and Negri’s analysis of dispersed capitalism and biopolitics provides the best point of entry to this conversation. No longer confronted by a hierarchy of political power in which the state serves as




² Majia Holmer Nadesan makes the important distinction between government and the state. She writes, “Government is not synonymous with the state because it includes regularities of conduct, security apparatuses, and strategies of control that are dispersed across all domains of life” (9).
the source of political authority, individuals, Hardt and Negri argue, are increasingly absorbed into a system where the boundaries between economics and politics have dissolved. Power, here, is dispersed and faceless, as individuals (i.e. laborers) serve as instruments of a globalized state. Thomas Lemke writes, “This form of capitalism is distinguished by an informatized, automated, networked, and globalized production process and leads to a decisive transformation in the working subject” (67). Internalizing the politics of the state, then, results in what Foucault calls “technologies of the self,” in which “individuals act upon themselves, rendering themselves subjects of liberal/neoliberal government evolving out of liberal government” (Nadesan 9). Disciplining one’s self according to the laws and moral codes of the state, then, involves “a sacrifice of the self, of the subject’s own will” (Foucault, “Technologies of the Self” 45). The point of these observations is to demonstrate that political power—what Foucault calls “biopower”—is deeply embedded in the practice of everyday life, to the extent that individuals can no longer separate themselves from the political infrastructure of the state. During moments of national trauma—such as in the weeks following 9/11 and in the days following Hurricane Katrina—the relationship between the individual and the state is temporarily destabilized and rendered visible. The experience, as the literature in this study demonstrates, can be both jarring and productive.
This process is further complicated by notions of American exceptionalism, which often require Americans—as biopolitical instruments of
the state—to accept, bolster, and perpetuate national narratives of American political innocence. Donald Pease writes:
The state’s policies get internalized through state fantasy work. State fantasies lay down the scenarios through which the state’s rules and norms can be experienced as internal to the citizens’ desire. Fantasy endows the state’s rules and laws with the authority of the people’s desire for them. Fantasy does so by investing the state’s rules with the desire through which the state’s subjects imagine themselves to be the authors of these rules and laws as well as their recipients. (4)
In this way, Hardt and Negri’s suggestion that individuals comprise the connective fabric of globalized capitalist power and are dislocated from top-down processes of power is only partly true. Although Americans very much participate within the global arena, we are nonetheless deeply psychologically and emotionally connected to the nation as a home largely “written,” I argue in my second chapter, through narratives of domesticity. Pease’s analysis correctly identifies the ways that national narratives—which are intensely political—are internalized and perpetuated by Americans who consequently serve as biopolitical agents of the state, unable to distance themselves from the discourses of institutional power.
The negotiation of biopolitical power—following the theories of Hardt and Negri—is complicated when considered in the context of America’s position
within a system of global capitalism. Thomas Friedman’s writings on globalization help to parse out the complex, and often uncomfortable, psychological effects of individuals positioning themselves within vast networks of power (336). In this spirit, David Harvey explains, “what is most interesting about the current situation is the way in which capitalism is becoming ever more tightly organized through dispersal, geographical mobility, and flexible responses in labour markets, labour processes, and consumer markets” (The Condition of Postmodernity 159). Harvey argues that this movement toward a system of “flexible accumulation” entails dramatic shifts in the way we understand the politics of space and power, and, specifically, how individuals may use space to position themselves against systems of power, i.e., global capitalism.³ It is important to note in these analyses of globalization the tension existing between the institution and the individual within this system; despite theories that might locate networked power as inherently more democratic, these critics demonstrate that the dispersal of biopower in no way diminishes its potential to govern and discipline private lives.
The individual’s participation in this system ultimately results in feelings of profound dislocation, alienation, and, consequently, political apathy. The novels and films of interest to this study address these very issues. Drawing from Alain Badiou’s commentary on Americans’ latent desire for authenticity in the




³ Harvey’s argument on space largely pulls from Henri Lefebvre’s work in The Production of Space. Lefebvre argues that space is a fundamentally political medium, which individuals must produce through social relations that react against the dominant economic order of capitalism.
twentieth century, the characters in these texts demonstrate a “passion for the real” (48) in their traumatic responses to institutional authority. They recognize in the traumatic event both the possibility of psychological injury and the potential for political awareness and mobility. If this century’s underlying impulse is the passion for the real, then the century is equally invested in the passion for the traumatic encounter. Ana Douglass and Thomas Vogler explain, “Driven underground in the poststructuralist moment, the ‘real’ has returned to mainstream discourse like the Freudian repressed, this time as the traumatic event. ‘History is what hurts,’ Fredric Jameson wrote in 1982, and the traumatic event, now the paradigm for the historical event, is what hurts by definition” (5). The simultaneous fear of and desire for the traumatic encounter with the real perhaps explains the boom in memory studies that began in the 1980s and continues today. The memorial industry—most recently spearheaded by the 9/11 Memorial and the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, two projects, combined, costing billions of dollars—has seen unprecedented growth in the last three decades.
However, memorial culture, as Marita Sturken explains, often downplays or renders invisible the political machinations that lead to moments of national disaster; memorials tend to function “as a form of depoliticization and as a means to comfort loss, grief, and fear through processes that disavow politics” (6). Here lies a fundamental problem with memorial culture: how can the traumatic event— one which is political by nature—be stripped of its political vitality and still effectively convey the encounter with the Real? My position holds that, although
tourists flock to memorials for the encounter with the real, the experience— lacking its political vitality—invariably ends in a state of psychological vacancy. To compensate for this lack of fulfillment, visitors—in line once again with Sturken’s analysis—seek comfort in consumer culture by purchasing kitsch— teddy bears, snow globes, etc.—that commemorate the event.
While memorial culture may fail to produce the encounter with the Real, it fulfills its promise to “remember” history through musealization and other memorial strategies. The problem, of course, is that history, especially in instances of national trauma, becomes a project of writing nationhood and, specifically, of inscribing America’s position of political innocence into the historical archive. Its political task, then, is to erase the traumatic moment and produce stable narratives that affirm America’s exceptional position in history and global politics.⁴ Trauma works against this practice, and this, perhaps, is why memorials generally tend to shirk the issue of engaging political trauma in favor of more neutral practices of “remembering,” “honoring,” “rebuilding,” etc.
Duncan Bell writes, “if political trauma is defined as a moment that through its catastrophic impact ruptures settled narratives and frames of meaning, and for which…there can exist no adequate language, discourses of state authority and legitimacy are called into question, exposed as ‘social fantasies’, and a window


⁴ For a more detailed discussion on America’s exceptional position in global politics, see Giorgio Agamben’s State of Exception. Agamben offers a detailed analysis of the relationship between politics and law and, more specifically, how the suspension of law in nation-states produces and, in fact, justifies political and juridical exceptionalism. For Agamben, America’s global political agenda of the last several decades—in its repeated transgressions of international law—clearly
establishes it as a state of exception.
14
for re-inscribing new understandings of the world emerges, albeit briefly” (10). Trauma, then, both through its initial occurrence and its psychological residue, provides potentially productive discursive opportunities that run counter to the forces of the state. In exposing the machinery of the political Real, trauma gives us perspective beyond the hyperreal narratives created and sustained by the state and the global economic community.
Jenny Edkins’ work on political trauma, like Bell’s, confronts trauma as a consequence of political oppression and specifically designates political violence as an intrinsic component of the nation-state. For Edkins, trauma always involves a betrayal.⁵ She writes, “What we call trauma takes place when the very powers that we are convinced will protect us and give us security become our tormentors: when the community of which we considered ourselves members turns against us or when our family is no longer a source of refuge but a site of danger” (Trauma 4). Later, she explains, “in the west both state and subject pretend to a security, a wholeness and a closure that is not possible. From this point of view, an event can be described as traumatic if it reveals this pretence. It is experienced as a betrayal” (11). Political trauma therefore involves a betrayal of trust, a moment when what was perceived to be a system of security and “wholeness” shatters and our institutional fabric, in its ostensible political neutrality, is revealed to be an


⁵ This move signals a departure from Freud’s writings on trauma. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Freud uses the example of a survivor of a train-wreck, who, in a state of shock, represses the near-death experience. Only weeks later does he begin to develop a “traumatic neurosis,” which he cannot connect to the traumatic event. For Edkins, trauma is the result of the dramatic reversal of politics of power and community. Thus, the Freudian “shock” is replaced by the less tangible “betrayal” perpetrated by the State.
apparatus of political control. The intangible political presence at the heart of Edkins’ analysis and at the heart of this study escapes definition partly due to its repression by the popular imagination. In Beyond the Pleasure Principle Freud claims that the trauma patient is rarely able to recall or locate the traumatic event underlying his neuroses. The same logic operates in the context of political trauma. Part of the difficulty we have locating the causes of political trauma owes itself to the ways we have repressed the political and subsequently embraced the modes of production that support the spectacle: consumerism, nationalism, and the belief in American exceptionalism.
Before continuing further, it might be useful to clarify our terms, specifically, politics and the political. Again, I turn to Edkins:
Politics is the regular operation of state institutions, elections, and such like within the framework of the status quo. In other words it does not challenge existing ways of doing things. The political on the other hand is the moment where established ways of carrying on do not tell us what to do, or where they are challenged and ruptured: in traumatic moments, for example. (“Remembering Relationality” 108)
For Slavoj Zizek, we have entered a state of political paralysis in which it is exceedingly difficult to separate politics from the political, thus resulting in political apathy and, ultimately, the desire for the perpetuation of “the very fundamental fantasy that sustains our being” (97). In the traumatic encounter with
our hyperreal political landscape, we repress the political real and, subsequently, subscribe to the fantasy of the spectacle. This study is continually aware of the distinction and tension between politics and the political; trauma functions paradoxically both as a dangerous disruption of stability—psychological and institutional—and as an opportunity for political engagement.