trauma

Trauma is a highly discomfiting affect resulting from overpowering events that escape direct representation and memory. Victims of trauma act out their symptoms compulsively and repetitively without fully comprehending the initial event which traumatized them. As Cathy Caruth puts it, “[t]he event is not assimilated or experienced fully at the time, but only belatedly, in its repeated possession of the one who experiences it” (4). In addition to the tendency of the traumatized to continually relive wounding experiences, emotional symptoms of traumatized people may range from irritable discomfort to impassive detachment. Overcome by feelings of helplessness, victims are constantly alert to sensations which may retrigger the affect accompanying the original traumatic event.

The question of where traumatic experience originates, however, remains inconclusive. As Kai Erikson points out, conventional medical definitions ascribe trauma to the “stressor” (cause) rather than the effect it produces, to “the blow” instead of “the injury” (184). A war veteran suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder, according to this usage, is  considered traumatized only by the external stimulus that inaugurated the ‘disorder’. This definition downplays the affective response to a stressor while privileging the stressor itself. It discounts, in other words, the “structural experience” of trauma (Caruth 4). By “structural experience,” Caruth might have in mind what Thomas Pfau calls a “moment of interpretive crisis, which, however local, incidental, or even apocryphal, may be considered as a symptom of deep-seated historical antagonisms” (192).

Early formulations of trauma, especially before the turn of the twenty-first century, borrowed  from psychoanalytic discourse, especially from Lacanian understandings of the subject as lack. For Lacan, humans become subjects by submitting to the symbolic law of the father. Castrated symbolically, the child’s sense of its wholeness proceeds from an imaginary and narcissistic fantasy it encounters once seeing its image in the mirror. The subject hence attempts to compensate for its lack of wholeness, its unsatisfied desire to merge sexually with its parent, by pursuing an endless chain of symbolic signifiers that constitute its unconscious. The ‘Real’, the kernel of experience that escapes symbolic representation, remains inaccessible even as it determines the subject’s entrance into the social. This inaccessible, real kernel is repeatedly described as both traumatic and social, and according to Zizek, the very existence of ideology itself is “to offer us the social reality itself as an escape from some traumatic, real kernel” (45).

More recently, definitions of trauma have shifted focus away from the original event and onto the mind or body on which events impress themselves, thereby enfranchising the affective responses of formerly silenced traumatized victims. In this way, Roger Luckhurst discusses the relationship between individualized traumatic experience and the wider problems posed by modernity, global warming, and post-colonialism (14-15). He calls for an affective criticism that engages with victims whose symptoms bespeak trauma but who have not suffered a single, identifiable, traumatic event. Similarly, Michael Rothberg argues against the psychoanalytic model of trauma for failing to consider large-scale sociological factors, for “its attention to events and not systems; its assumption of privileged, secure subject positions; its investment in fragmented modernist aesthetics” (xii-xiii). In a similar attempt to speak for silenced victims, Ananya Jahanara Kabir, Grace M. Cho, and Hosu Kim have recently attempted to redress a privileging of Euro-American traumatic experiences by discovering unacknowledged narratives conveying such experiences. Kabir’s analysis of the 1947 partitioning of India attends to the affect-clusters infusing this traumatic event while Cho and Kim address the problem of linguistically-alienated Korean-American citizens compulsively reliving the traumatic experiences of their mothers during the Japanese occupation of Korea and the Korean War. As these systemic analyses indicate, trauma proceeds both from discrete events and from persisting conditions (Erikson 84). Yet to be considered traumatic, whether issuing from either prolonged subjugation or temporary shock, the experience must constitute an enduring affective state that extends well beyond the traumatic situations themselves. Hence, it may be instructive to turn to  Pfau’s chapter on Wordworth’s ballad “Michael” in Romantic Moods. Linking the genre of the ballad with a traumatic “moment of interpretive crisis,” Pfau analyzes Michael’s progressive disillusionment with the formal properties of the ballad, a genre more suited to a local and pre-industrial agrarian society. Because the ballad is unable to assimilate the inscrutable complexities of industrial capitalism and urban commerce, Michael painfully realizes his chosen genre has become anachronistic, yet he remains caught in the cycle of systems “that effectively repeat the original meconnaissance” (192-199).

Models of trauma may be characterized in two ways: as either more psychoanalytic or more sociological. Affect theory is more interested in the social. If affect studies aims to subvert liberal fantasies of individual sovereignty and self-containment by addressing cultural—instead of individual—symptoms, then scholars have increasingly come to recognize the ways in which trauma can exceed the boundaries of the self, circulating between bodies in a community. Just as affect studies posits a body operating independently of will, so too has recent trauma theory begun analyzing how the mind fails to recognize the enduring traumas of structural violence and social exploitation.

Benjamin Philippi

Works Cited:

Caruth, Cathy. “Introduction.” Trauma: Explorations in Memory. Ed. Cathy Caruth. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1995. 3-12.

Cho, Grace M. “Voices from the Teum: Synesthetic Trauma and the Ghosts of the Korean Diaspora.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. New York: Routledge, 2014. 151-169.

Erikson, Kai. “Notes on Trauma and Community.” The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Eds. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 183-199.

Kabir, Ananya Jahanara. “Affect, body, place: trauma theory in the world.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. New York: Routledge, 2014.

Kim, Hosu. “The Parched Tongue.” The Affective Turn: Theorizing the Social. Eds. Patricia Ticineto Clough and Jean Halley. Durham: Duke UP, 2007. 34-46.

Pfau, Thomas. Romantic Moods: Paranoia, Trauma, and Melancholy, 1790-1840. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 2005.

Rothberg, Michael. “Preface: beyond Tancred and Clorinda—trauma studies for implicated subjects.” The Future of Trauma Theory: Contemporary Literary and Cultural Criticism. Eds. Gert Buelens, Sam Durrant, and Robert Eaglestone. New York: Routledge, 2014. xi-xviii.

affect/emotions

Most accounts of affect are broad enough to apply across diverse disciplines. In an attempt to further explore the human condition (that is, the ways in which we understand ourselves as well as how we interact with each other, physical objects, and situations), affect studies endeavors to identify the process through which human beings feel. With that said, in The Affect Theory Reader, a book dedicated to the affective body, Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg emphasize the innumerable options of understanding the theory at hand:

“There is no single, generalizable theory of affect: not yet, and (thankfully) there never will be. If anything, it is more tempting to imagine that there can only ever be infinitely multiple iterations of affect and theories of affect: theories as diverse and singularly delineated as their own highly particular encounters with bodies, affects, worlds” (3-4).

As Seigworth and Gregg suggest, affect theory, as an academic approach, continually blurs into several different fields and is still forming as a theoretical lens. Although the conceptualization of affect changes according to the field, the majority of scholars across disciplines agree upon the following details concerning affect theory: 1) Baruch Spinoza coined and framed the term affect; 2) affect is, at its base, a force that operates mainly at the non-conscious level; and 3) the two main views on affect categorize it as either “innate” or “relational,” sometimes both at the same time.

The evolution of affect theory begins in the seventeenth century when Spinoza introduced the term, “affect,” in his most renowned work, Ethics. For Spinoza, affect is both bodily and mental in origin. The study of affect can also be seen as having a pre-history in the concepts of sensibility, sentimentality, and romantic feelings. These phenomena first appear in creative works (usually sentimental, Romantic, and Gothic novels and poetry) and in theories of gender difference. Philosophers such as Adam Smith did not necessarily refer to affect as a specific philosophical theory of understanding, but rather as grounds for the “moral sentiments” of individuals. Smith posited that the emotions of one person could be felt by another, a transmission of emotions called sympathy. Smith fashioned a socially-theoretical foundation for understanding affect. He not only wrote about affective moral education as articulated through sympathy but also how the perception of such sympathy by fellow citizens solidified the individual’s relations with other individuals in the surrounding community. Hence, a subject wronged by another can rouse others in the group to rise against the offender because of the affective atmosphere generated by the social situation. Affect theorists do not necessarily invoke these philosophers but their works might be seen as the origins for theorizing affect’s power to explain human action. More recently, philosophers such as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari have expanded on Spinoza. Deleuze translates Spinoza’s ideas into an approach to the arts. To Deleuze, affect is not only a humanized relational force but also manifests within and as a work of art. One can thus talk about the affect of a single painting or novel. Deleuze even links artistic quality to the work’s capacity to produce new and unique affects.

As indicated above, affect scholars might be categorized according to two major strands, the innate and the relational. The innate approach to affect reads affective forces as stemming from and observed within the individual. This take interprets human affects as derived from a physical body shaped by psychological, biological, and /or physiological forces. For such intrinsic theorists, affect is founded on electrical processes naturally happening in the brain (psychological and/or biological), where individual faculties are genetically or evolutionarily fostered, along with the supposed ability of empathy of an individual. Scholars in the intrinsic school tend to describes such forces as drives, a term serves as an umbrella for psychological processes within the body. Psychoanalytic scholars usually study the intrinsic side of affect while sociological disciplines follow the extrinsic.

The relational approach, by contrast, insists on affect as enacted through the relationships between persons. These forces are understood to be the unseen atmosphere between conceptual bodies that incites physical or mental action. Such bodily interactions bear different forms: human-to-human, human-to-environment, human-to-object, or object-to-object. Affect aims to describe and map out such relations. For example, a relationist study might be interested in explaining a situation why one is able to walk into a room and feel the tension between the people already present. Affective forces are therefore understood to have transmissible qualities, according to the relationists. Especially within fields such as sociology, scholars look at affect as a transference of feelings between human beings in order to explain social phenomena such as crowd dynamics, sympathy, and empathy. Such processes help explain riots or the celebratory atmosphere at a football game. Other scholars may analyze the affective links between different objects (non-human/non-animal), for instance, a perspective along the lines of Feng Shui. No one of these approaches (innate or relational) is reserved for a specific discipline.

Affect, as an intangible force, is often described in terms of its intensity. Levels of strength shape the individual’s subsequent reactions towards that affect or feeling. For instance, the difference between tearing up (slight sniffling, flushed cheeks, along with a few tears) and sobbing (fully running nose, inability to properly breath, along with the choked coughs) as reactions to and expressions of sadness reflect the level of intensity of that sadness. The intensity-to-effects ratio can be analyzed by scholars despite how that individual is experiencing the affective force: intrinsically or relationally.

The distinction between affect and emotion is a major matter of dispute in the field. Some scholars consider affect as the theory of feeling, that is, if we accept the word “feeling” as separate from emotions—in that feeling is the unnamed force either inside or outside the body. In other words, some believe affect to be the cause of emotions in individuals (Massumi and Tomkins). Massumi views emotions as a fixed named form while affect is an immeasurable intensity. This distinction between affect and emotion mean there may be multiple forms of affect that eventually turn into a corresponding emotion or that there may be simply one affect that can potentially flow into different categories of emotions. Affect is often depicted as disconnected from consciousness, a force autonomous to the willed command of body and thought. Scholars are therefore looking at a force that seems to escape the realm of cognitive capture. As a result, affect is almost unanimously separated from the conventional lexicon of “emotions.” The terms “feelings,” “sensation,” and “sentiments,” however, tend to be used by several scholars in tandem with affect, in that they are considered to be unnamed forces.

This unnamed quality of affect proves to be problematic. As Seigworth and Gregg (among many other scholars) point out, affect theory focuses on something that can never be fully pinned down and examined, a constantly moving force. In an attempt to resolve this dilemma, many scholars lean towards describing the effects of affect, as if affects were synonymous with named emotions and their well-known symptoms. And yet in spite of such attempts, as Massumi asserts, “there is no cultural-theoretical vocabulary for affect” (88). Since scholars do not possess the linguistic tools for the theory, they must analyze its effects in hopes to acquire a more thorough look at the underlying causes. Thus, this website presents articles explaining, through the lens of affect, emotional complexes such as shame, anger, fear, joy, excitement, awe, distress, and trauma. The approach to affect has thus adapted to the problem of the unnamable. But can we in fact effectively use words to describe something that is theoretically outside of language?

Jewel Williams

Works Cited:

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. “Percept, Affect and Concept.” What is Philosophy? Trans.
Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell. 163-199.

Massumi, Brian. “The Autonomy of Affect.” Cultural Critique 31 (1995): 83-109.

Seigworth, Gregory & Melissa Gregg. “An Inventory of Shimmers.” The Affect Theory Reader. Ed. Gregory Seigworth and Melissa Gregg. Durham: Duke UP, 2010. 1-28.

Smith, Adam. Theory of Moral Sentiments. New York: Economic Classic, 2013.

Tomkins, Sylvan. Shame and Its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader. Ed. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick and Adam Frank. Durham: Duke UP, 1995.