The New Normal: Trauma, Biopolitics and Visuality after 9/11 9789390077441, 9789390077304

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Acknowledgements This book has been the labour of a long PhD programme at the Department of English, University of Delhi, India. It is the culmination of my research during the programme that led to a dissertation and beyond. This book would have been impossible without the steady encouragement and supervision of Dr Subarno Chattarji. He has not only been the best PhD supervisor I could have asked for but also a constant supporting and mentoring voice for efforts towards the book. An important note of thanks is also due to Professor Udaya Kumar, whose inspiring work on Theory and general personal guidance helped shape the book. Thank you also to Professor Sambudha Sen for being a kind and guiding teacher in a tough time. Many thanks to Dr N.A. Jacob, member of my PhD advisory board, for thorough inquiries and challenges to the central thesis of my dissertation. I would also like to thank Dr Baidik Bhattacharya for painstakingly reading the draft of the dissertation, encouraging me to publish and asking me to ‘not hold back’ when I finally reach the goal. Dr Rochelle Pinto provided valuable comments and feedback during her tenure as a PhD advisory board member, for which I am grateful. Thanks are also due to Dr Soumyabrata Choudhury and the two anonymous examiners of my PhD dissertation. Dr Choudhury conducted the PhD viva in such a manner that it gave me leads for my work on the book. I acknowledge the motivation and guidance provided by Professor Christel Devadawson, Professor Shormishtha Panja, Professor Raj Kumar, Dr Rimli Bhattacharya, Dr Tapan Basu and other faculty members of the Department of English at the University of Delhi. Thanks also to the non-teaching faculty at the department for always being helpful. vii

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Gratitude is further due to conference organisers at the University of Pennsylvania; the University of California, Irvine; the University of Delhi; and the University of California, Riverside, where I presented a draft of my doctoral research. I am also grateful to the Stanford University Library and its helpful staff, where I conducted research for a brief while for the book. I am thankful to my current employers at Lady Shri Ram College for Women, University of Delhi: Principal Dr Suman Sharma, and friends and colleagues at the Department of English. I have truly learnt a lot from them. Colleagues at the Department of English at Jesus and Mary College, University of Delhi, my previous employers, are also to be thanked. I am thankful also to Professor R.K. Agnihotri and Professor Pushpinder Syal for showing me the benefits of getting published. I would also like to humbly thank my publisher at Bloomsbury, Chandra Sekhar, and Shreya Chakraborti, editorial manager. Thanks to Aathira Ajitkumar for editing the book. Heartfelt gratitude is due to my friends, whose constant efforts kept me content and fulfilled despite my work on a depressing topic: Kashish Dua, Ishita Singh, Rashee Mehra, Rohini Deb, Priyankee Saikia, Sahiba Sethi and Aimé. I am thankful for the informal editorial advice from Rubina Malhotra and Anirudh Nair. This book is dedicated to the multiple efforts, known and unknown, of my family. Lots of gratitude is due to my parents, Ravi, Kritika and my dogs Plato and Sappho. This book would not have been possible without them. Despite the efforts of all of the people mentioned earlier, all shortcomings in the book are my own.

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Introduction: After 9/11 The strength of the crisis of 9/11 can perhaps be gauged from the narratives and images it immediately recalls. The very appellation ‘9/11’ brings to mind an entire sea of associations codified by officially sanctioned timelines, reportage, images and aspects of daily life. It also brings to mind not just wars against Iraq and Afghanistan but also invasions and destructions of entire peoples and nations, mass deportation, anti-immigration policies, racial profiling, corporate media aiding or framing government propaganda, the financial meltdown and so on. The term ‘crisis’ implies not only catastrophe, as 9/11 is undoubtedly one, but also aptly refers to the situation, given its second (medical) meaning as a crucial juncture leading to either aggravation or amelioration. With 9/11, it is clear that there occurred a shift on multiple levels, indicating that such a stage had been reached. Even within the realm of popular culture and art, this multiple sense of a crisis is depicted in imaginative ways. For instance, a panel in Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004) offers a look into various discourses that led to and sustained a post-9/11 moment. The graphic novel progresses from representing the author/artist on 9/11 as facing the calamity and searching for his daughter Nadja at school to his traumatic heritage (Spiegelman is the offspring of Holocaust victims) and traumatic past becoming inseparable. One of the earlier panels, titled ‘the new normal’, shows a family of three in the routinised act of watching television in their living room (Spiegelman 1). The date on the calendar reads 10 September. The second image is from the next day, showing the same act with the difference that the family appears to have become electrified zombies. The third panel, unlike the first two, does not offer a date. Instead, it shows the same family and, additionally, the American flag. The lack of a date

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reference indicates the traumatic suspension of all temporality, while the flag becomes a symbol of not just American patriotism but also American-centricity. Nonetheless, what is perceived through popular literature is the reflection of a rearrangement in the wake of a crisis. Power is a reconfigured in tandem with governmentalised rationalities that shape the social fabric in newer forms. This idea, of course, does not entail an argument that has been made about 9/11 as ‘ground zero’, a ‘loss of innocence’ or a ‘tabula rasa’ (Mishra; Stamelman 13). In fact, this very logic of blankness is what is specifically new to this rationality as a method of organisation, of orchestration of the ‘us’ and ‘them’, and of a general reconfiguration of power relations. The argument also does not entail that 9/11 is thus a non-event, one among a long line of atrocities of modernity. Instead, my study states that 9/11 becomes what it is due to both the precipitation of earlier configurations and their crises, leading to a reorganisation of normality. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak states while discussing 9/11 and its aftermath that ‘every rupture is also a repetition’ (‘Globalicities’ 75). Her focus is on a sense of history when attempts are being made to erase and suspend it for purposes of an ostensibly amnesiac show of might. Yet she does not deny the feeling of a break in that very sentence. She means that this rupture bears an uncanny resemblance to the past as it settles on its newness. Thus, the break becomes a new way of ‘sett(l)ing things’ where both past and present are transformed by each other. It is thus a repetition of something old but not quite so. The repetition acts as a Derridean supplement—both replacement and addition to the past. I argue that this ‘new normal’ that we find ourselves in at the dawn of the new millennium is something similar to this notion: a shift in organisation, orchestration, optimisation, management and configuration of power networks, which precipitates with 9/11 and solidifies as both a phenomenon and an event for which there is as yet no name except 9/11.

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In two of his speeches following 11 September 2001, the then President George W. Bush mentioned something similar. First, he said: ‘It is my hope that in the months and years ahead, life will return almost to normal’ (Bush 72). A few months later, he said the following: ‘Americans are returning, as we must, to the normal pursuits of life. Americans are returning, as we must, to the normal pursuits of life. But we know … life will never again be as it was’ (Bush 79, repetition in the original). The sing-song manner of the repetition here to what is ‘normal’ and the notion that there is a shift in this very understanding inform the instances given earlier. It works as both a declaration of a truth claim and a desire to cement that truth claim. In other words, in the commander-in-chief’s assertion lies both the desire and its sedimentation. I argue that there is indeed a shift to a ‘new normal’: a reconfiguration of not just our understanding of power but rather of power as a constitutive element in itself. Thus, we witnessed a newer power hierarchy and configuration with the coming of 9/11. This book looks at the broad phenomena simply referred to with the ‘name-date’ (Redfield 55) 9/11 to understand how the events of a day, 11 September 2001, in the United States of America have impacted within that country the triad of the mind, body and body politic. It thus seeks to answer the question as to why certain forms of ‘vigilant visualities’ (Amoore 215) emerged such that there was a big incentive for investing in a discourse about terrorism that used techniques of visuality to racially/ethnically profile one human body from another. It seeks to find the relationship as it exists after 9/11 between corps and corps d’état, that is, between the human body and the political body of the State. It seeks to contribute to the debate on whether the self-evidentiary status of the body as human is sufficient to enable human rights. The book also, in various ways, seeks to respond to the notion Judith Butler (Precarious Life) has put forth about the precarity and vulnerability of the body considered human. Foremost, however, it questions the language of contagion used by the Bush administration in the wake of the 9/11 atrocity with words

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such as plague, attack and cancer on the human condition (Jackson, ‘Language, Policy’). The book argues that such language works to displace the contagion thought to have occurred on the body politic onto the racialised bodies of those deemed terrorists both within the homeland and outside it. While in medieval times, the body natural that corresponded to the body politic was that of the king (Kantorowicz), after 9/11, it has been transposed to the body of the terrorist. This mechanism is enacted as a purging of the so-called cancer that the body of the State is deemed to have been infested with while seeking to use the terrorist as a scapegoat figure. The terrorist then becomes an inverted mirror of the head of the State. However, the body in general as understood today differs starkly from the understanding of the mind–body dualism in medieval times. Not only is the age of Neoplatonic duality of the mind and body long over but we have also progressed from the Cartesian notion of the Enlightenment thrust on rationality as the basis for existence (‘Cogito ergo sum’). While some forms of postmodern thought do address the issue of the mind–body dualism, they do so in differing ways. This book, however, addresses the question of the mind–body duality in the specific context of atrocity. It seeks to explore why ‘trauma’ as a category is generally invoked in all its clinicalised senses to address the question of human interiority, especially in the context of ‘social suffering’ (Kleinman et al.). Further, the book uses the Foucauldian notion of biopower or the very essence of human biological existence to generate productive answers about the operations of torture after 9/11. It also explores all the concepts given earlier with the assumption that the prism of the visual is the force field through which culture after 9/11 operates. The book seeks to pose the question, how has 9/11 shifted not just an understanding of trauma, biopolitics and visuality but the very manner in which each is constituted within an epistemological framework? It ventures to probe the separateness as well as interrelatedness of each in a new way in the context of 9/11. The book utilises the theoretical

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categories of ‘trauma’, ‘biopolitics’ and ‘visuality’ as toolkits to arrive at an understanding of the individual psyche, the individual body and the shape of the country’s body politic respectively as well as the interconnectedness between these categories. This takes shape, for example, in discussing the traumatic element within the visual at Abu Ghraib or the biopolitical notion behind some torture procedures not allowed to be considered as traumatic. Borrowing the phrase mentioned earlier from Art Spiegelman’s canonical 9/11 graphic novel, the book is titled The New Normal, capturing the sense not only of the newness which the text wishes to argue about but also of the multivalent sense of the term ‘normal’. The State seeks to normalise the situation simultaneously (such as when citizens are asked to ‘get on with their lives as usual’ after a national calamity), to be perceived as the norm, as well as a revision of the norm. This simultaneous normalisation, normativisation and revision of the norm speak volumes about the non-neutrality of language and the multivalence contained in words used to consolidate power regimes. With a similar positionality, the book makes use of 9/11 to refer to both the event of the aeroplanes colliding with the World Trade Center (WTC) and the Pentagon and the phenomenon of widespread media coverage, the mass-level trauma, the massive death and destruction and so on. For this purpose, the words ‘crisis’ and ‘atrocity’ are also used. What the book does not follow, however, is the use of terminology such as ‘WTC attacks’ (with the word attack cohering to the language of biopolitical contagion or a conservative understanding of attacks on the US value system). Yet it is quite selfevident that 9/11 was a watershed moment in US history, culminating in a crisis. When Walter Benjamin stated that ‘the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the exception but the rule’ (‘On the Concept of History’), little would he have realised the relevance and popularity of his oftquoted words at the dawn of the 21st century. The crisis of 9/11 led

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to a process where the exceptionality of the catastrophe culminates in the categories of rule and exception coalescing. Benjamin’s stress on a state of exception refers both to a condition of exception but also to the body politic becoming exceptional in its understanding of how it reads legality and rules. (The reading down of the Geneva conventions to sanction the use of torture against non-state actors is but one example.) Among the intellectuals to take up Benjamin’s reading, Giorgio Agamben is the most famous. Agamben reads Benjamin to argue that the nation-state within modernity has become an exceptional one, in which an emergency has been normalised (State of Exception). Agamben uses the examples of both Nazi Germany and the United States after 9/11 to elucidate his point. He stresses how the state of exception uses the law to undermine the law. Legality for Agamben becomes a space within the state of exception where the extralegal and the illegal coincide. Both the Third Reich and the USA PATRIOT Act are used as foundations to cement his point. This book germinated from Agamben’s work to undertake a comparative study of the Nazi lager with the US war prison. However, with research, it was soon evident that while the Nazi lager underwent its own undermining of the law, the US war prison (such as at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba) was not, in fact, even qualified to be called a prison of war. The Bush administration had ensured that the systemic framework was read not as one of warfare traditionally defined but rather as one that ventured to disregard even internationally ratified treaties and international law. Thus was born the endless ‘war on terror’. The war on terror departs from the Second World War in not just its treatment of prisoners but also in the manner in which one particular nationstate chooses to generate consent for war (in Iraq and subsequently in Afghanistan). Simultaneously, the human beings caught in the crossfire (several often sold for bounties) are declared as not prisoners of war but non-state actors/terrorists and thus only detainees. While the culmination of the Second World War led to the International

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Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 and global bodies such as the United Nations (UN), the manner in which the United States eschewed UN-sanctioned methods to declare war on Iraq nonetheless speaks eloquently about how the former departs tremendously from the latter. The restriction of entry points such as airports to certain sections of the population, racial profiling and increased mass surveillance in the name of national security are all phenomena that ensure the newness of the period studied. This book comments simply on the period after 9/11 and, more specifically, restricts itself by and large to the Bush presidency. The period after 9/11 then gave rise to a visual culture that did not exist before 9/11. The catastrophe itself was visually mediated in the sense that it was watched across the globe on television. But the years after also gave rise not just to surveillance concerns within the United States (with the USA Patriot Act) but also to modern warfare such as in the war with Iraq (the images of which were broadcast for the general public). Judith Butler calls this aspect of newly emergent visual culture ‘frames of war’ (Frames of War). She points towards the newly emergent features of warfare such as embedded reporting, showing the bodies of those dead in the war and images of torture of the war ‘detainees’ as concerted techniques used by the United States ‘to regulate the visual field’ (Butler, Frames of War 64). She elaborates on how the element of the visual is used to give truth to the double sense of the claim: the visual frame as something that not only encapsulates reality but also goes on to create that very reality—the visual frame as framing reality. On the other hand, the New Yorkers who witnessed the actual atrocity insist on it being something to be known through sensory experiences of the body (the insistence, for example, in testimonial accounts on the smoke and sound of the planes) and not on its visuality—the notion of the event as not something to be looked at on television. This insistence also makes a powerful claim (Spiegelman). The event was reorganised for this section of people based on the

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material and bodily component. For the rest of the world, the atrocity was experienced non-visually as well, through the chaos at airports or flight delays or through a generalised suspicion about their social group, to give but a few examples. Yet the New Yorkers who did witness the atrocity first hand or the people who experienced social suspicion would also catch the event on the news. The three categories of the visual, the bodily and the workings of the body politic merge here, unlike earlier. The book works with the triad of the mind, the body and the body politic as categories to argue that these very categories are used to shift the nature of discourse to produce newer forms of power and control. It ascertains that the matrix of the triad only intensifies in the wars. The book also uses the theoretical prisms of trauma, visuality and biopolitics to lay claim to the interconnectedness of the triad. It is divided thus into three sections on trauma, biopolitics and visuality respectively. However, its division is in no way a comment on the separateness of these categories. Instead, it seeks to find relations among the three. For instance, in 2004, only three years after the 9/11 atrocity, another atrocity was unleashed with the Abu Ghraib scandal. The use of the visual played a massive role in the much-discussed scandal. Yet the visible use of biopolitical torture techniques on the body helped disrupt domestic sensibilities and further enhanced the portraiture of the United States’ lack of regard for legality internationally. Within the book, incarceration, more specifically, incarceration during war, is used as a synecdoche to elaborate on the general arguments. The war prisons at Abu Ghraib, Iraq, and Guantanamo Bay Naval Base, Cuba, are used primarily and abundantly as discussion points in the book. The book argues that the new war prison and the illegal-cum-extralegal manner in which it is set up is paramount to the changed mechanism of warfare and normativity after 9/11. In terms of scope, the focus of the book is, by and large, more theoretical rather than a general encyclopaedic survey of the period after 9/11.

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The focus is also primarily on the affairs of the United States, though 9/11 was a world event. Even while discussing popular culture or torturer accounts, I chose to do a close reading of texts such as Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, Eric Fair’s Consequence and Tony Lagouranis and Allen Mikaelian’s Fear Up Harsh. I chose the method of close reading for two different reasons. First, in the case of Spiegelman, the rubric of every aspect of popular culture affected by 9/11 is a broad domain. Even when such studies on 9/11 popular culture have been conducted, they are either edited anthologies focussing on a few chosen texts (Keniston and Quinn) or a single-author work relying on distant mapping of the huge field (Gray), inevitably leaving out some text or the other. Instead, given the popularity of In the Shadow of No Towers in academic and popular circles, I chose to closely read the text for the easy manner in which it fed into the trauma paradigm for these academicians. The close reading is not meant as a survey of popular culture. Instead, it is used to advance my argument about the trauma paradigm and the way the State’s use of such a paradigm has gone uncontested in the academic circles discussing the graphic novel as a trauma text. Second, I chose to closely read Fair’s and Lagouranis and Mikaelian’s memoirs for the exact opposite reason. With a paucity of torturer memoirs from the war on terror, I wished to pay close attention to the literary construction of torture, the identification which the all-American torturer facilitates through the memoir and the depiction of the tortured Other. While these texts and two of the Abu Ghraib photographs have been closely read, the nature of the crisis in the news media and the frenzy it generated has been regarded as common knowledge, and only certain examples are cited to strengthen or highlight the argument I make. Thus, due to the non-traditional, non-surveying nature of this book, the relative contemporaneity of the period and the use of culture as text, some elements merit elaboration. It is but evident that the period

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under discussion is a relatively recent one. It is also evident that the near contemporaneous nature of the Bush presidency and the war on terror, when combined with the logic of State secrecy for security, requires that the very foundation of the epistemological grounds for this book be clarified. Indeed, the nature of classified documents that the general public is not even aware of, which get declassified at a much later stage in portions, is just one of the many hurdles that books such as this one face. There is a constant array of newer texts or sources emerging in the public domain, which at times contradict each other. For instance, the torture that occurred during the Iraq war seemed to have been eclipsed by the 2004 Abu Ghraib scandal, where photographs of torture techniques were depicted. That the torture methods showed in these photographs had official approval could only be gauged by the 2014 official report released by the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence about the interrogation methods sanctioned by the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). The report contrasted with earlier statements made by officials such as Donald Rumsfeld in the Bush administration about the lack of government involvement in torture. The 2014 report also contrasts with torturer accounts released in 2016 (Eric Fair’s Consequence), which claim the lack of systemic State involvement in torture and point more towards mismanagement by private war contractors. Due to the nature of counterterrorist security practices, it becomes extremely difficult for any study on the subject to foster a sense of permanence of theoretical claims made. There is every possibility of a new committee report emerging that topples the previously held views about the nature of State polity and governmentalised practices within the United States, given the governmentally encoded State practice of systemic secrecy. Hence, it becomes difficult to distinguish between propaganda and fact: a fallacy towards which this book will perhaps not be immune. Instead, the logic of the distribution and dissemination of information becomes akin to political gossip or a children’s game of ‘Chinese whispers’ where, by the end of the game, it

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becomes difficult to distinguish between the original and the iteration as it gets transformed into the last person’s statement, which usually hardly mirrors the original. The book, however, does not dwell on the oft-made argument that there is, in fact, a truth effect that is put into motion. It tends to retain the sense of distinction between truth and falsity, between what actually occurred (systemically sanctioned torture, for instance) and several moves through falsehood and systemic propaganda to transform the occurrence of the injustice into how it gets perceived and received by the general public. The notion of gossip, hence, works as a metaphor not only to signal the half-truth that is publicly disseminated but also to alert us towards the affinity between the public sphere and political gossip within the American everyday life. For the book, primary sources were contingently defined as unmediated first-hand accounts of the event or those mediated for editorial purposes only. These were rare and difficult to encounter. However, depositions; memoirs or interviews (written or televised); journalistic accounts; newspaper articles or reports; opinion pieces in newspapers or on the Internet; feature films and documentary films; poetry after 9/11 by amateur and professional poets alike; poetry written by prisoners; reports within independent and, by and large, Internet-based media; and works defined as art were treated as primary sources. Opinionated or survey-based scholarly studies, academic readings of any of the primary sources and reviews of any work of art, among other sources, were defined as secondary. Sometimes, it was difficult to distinguish between the two based on how the process of mediation seems systemically entrenched with the discourse of the period after 9/11. Not only were torturer accounts such as Consequence mediated by redaction of portions up to the length of several chapters by the National Security Agency (NSA), the mediation was also evident in lawyer memoirs about Guantanamo prisoners. In the former, the mediation served to limit and censor, while in the latter, it was the only way to get across a message by

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an otherwise obscure prisoner to produce valuable evidence in the prisoner’s own words about his suffering. What this also makes visible is the uneasy distribution between primary and secondary sources and the exchange of information and level of mediation that such sources undergo in the age of the war on terror. Hence, based on this problematic, the sources used were only contingently divided as primary and secondary, and US popular political culture in the context of 9/11, especially the atrocity or the phenomenon of torture or mass incarceration during the war, was to be studied. However, it is not just accounts of torture in the war on terror but also the poetry of hurt that is discussed. Chapters 2 and 6 analyse the poetry of 9/11 and poetry from Guantanamo Bay, respectively. The point is to create a dialogue between positions of hurt where there are many conflicts and limited possibility of dialogue. The chapter on poetry and 9/11 seeks to uncover the nature of grieving and common tropes in the professional poetry written within a year of 9/11. The chapter on Guantanamo poetry similarly works and comments on a relatively thin collection of mostly amateur poetry that has been declassified and disseminated. The third section on visuality deals with the body politic and representations of atrocity, torture in statist responses to the war on terror and beyond. Chapter 7 is about the Abu Ghraib photographs: Can there be a new way of ‘watching’ the photographs? Chapter 8 extends this aspect to an analysis of the documentaries based on the method of ‘watching’ as an act of actively interpreting the films. This book is to be seen as a collection of essays and remarks on a relatively recent period of American culture. It aims to establish a connection between the various facets of the war on terror and the 9/11 atrocity. The purpose is to see the multiple changes and normalising of newness in everyday life after a difficult and momentous period in American life. The book seeks to establish connections between the State, the subject and the non-subject after 9/11.

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In the Shadow of Traumatisability ‘Traumatisability’ is the ability to be traumatised—the ability of a subject to have their suffering considered valid under the trauma paradigm. Traumatisability lives in the domain of the discourse that accords trauma to be our dominant paradigm to comprehend suffering. It is also the impulse of the State to create or cause trauma, that is, to traumatise and convert suffering into subjectivated personhood. There is a gaze associated with traumatisability that is at once the gaze of political antipathy/apathy and clinicalised despair. With 9/11 and in its wake, trauma as discourse saw a shift in how it configures itself and its empire. This chapter seeks to show some sketches of that shift in trauma as a discursive production that cumulates in ‘traumatisability’. The sketches are those of traumatisability in the realm of the world, the text and the critic. While the three are interrelated, these sketches point to how in their domains, traumatisability works to produce a notion of a subject that is full of despair as seen through the medical gaze. Traumatisability is more than just a concept: it is the discursive and material production of a regime that sees trauma as its dominant signifier. Traumatisability is not just a concept but a discursive regime that allows for certain forms of suffering to count as valid and invalidates certain ‘other’ types of despair as not trauma at all. The production of subjects of trauma in and through traumatisability results in veridical, real and material beings. The effect of traumatisability is to produce and constitute these subjects as subjects of trauma: the ability of these subjects to be traumatised is considered their entry point into the subjectification of their ontological reality. 15

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The realm of traumatisability also creates the realm of the human: to be a subject constitutive of traumatisability is to be a subject who can be traumatised. However, to be considered a subject worthy of having their suffering validated as trauma is also to be a human subject. Humans are traumatised; humans are traumatisable. The category of the ‘human’ necessitates the category of traumatisability. The subject is considered human in and through traumatisability. All humans are traumatisable. But are all subjects human? Traumatisability necessarily implies that only some subjects can be traumatised. If there is the traumatisable subject, then there is also the non-traumatisable. Traumatisability, therefore, informs and differentially produces its subjects. If traumatisability is the ability of the subject to be traumatised and human at the same time, it then assumes the differential production of the norm: some are traumatisable; some are not. Some sufferings are traumatic; some are not. Some are, therefore, human, and some are not. This is different yet similar to grievability. Judith Butler posits the relation between what she terms grievability and humanity in her refreshing and rigorous work on the norms that govern the production of the human (Precarious Life, Frames of War). Human is the norm that is governed by the grievable. The grievable is the differential application of humanity and its induction of some subjects as human. The grievable is in contrast with the non-grievable. It is as human beings that we grieve and as humans that we are considered grievable. Yet, grievability is different from traumatisability, just as grief, as a register and a discursive regime, is different from trauma. Sigmund Freud’s work pre-necessitates the frame of the human as the frame of the traumatic. We have, via Freud’s work on mourning, death drives and the pleasure principle, arrived at an understanding of traumatic as a human quality: trauma informs our ability to be human. This trauma is not uniformly applicable to everyone. Hence, some humans are more equal than others. Some subjects are traumatisable; some others are non-traumatisable.

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Furthermore, the notion that some subjects can be informed by trauma and are traumatisable is related to the notion that they must be traumatisable by some entity. The first section of this chapter, corresponding with the world, looks at this aspect through the culture machine of the United States. The second and third sections offer textual criticism of the 9/11 graphic novel—Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers—to arrive at an understanding of the aspects associated with the trauma-bearing subject. Section four looks at the secondary form of interpretation—the proponents of the trauma industry in literary and cultural theory and their focus on the creation of a solipsistic, politically antipathic and apathetic citizen-subject. While these distinctions are schematic and for elaboration, I would venture to insist on the interrelatedness of the world, the text and the critic.

I At a moment of crisis such as 9/11, the culture machine is both challenged and manoeuvred towards the purposes of the State. At the immediate moment that the event was discovered, the State’s other institutional facilities such as the police and firefighting departments were used. At the same time, the groundwork was laid for the activation of the culture machine towards specific ends. Aided by the widely televised aspect of the atrocity, a particular image was generated that helped the State reshape the 9/11 narrative— the image of the American nation under attack. The image of the wounded State was created through (1) the mobilisation of a certain linguistic discourse to generate certain ideas about the atrocity (Jackson, ‘Language, Policy’, Writing the War), (2) the production of the discourse of danger (Altheide; Anker; Linke and Smith), (3) the production of the discourse of dangerousness (Amoore), (4) the use of historical narratives to familiarise and identify the atrocity (Luban, ‘The Poisoned Chalice’; Zelizer and Allan) and

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(5) the use of a repertoire of already existing fictional images from Hollywood and beyond to further familiarise the atrocity (Earp and Jhally; Londras). While 9/11 is considered the prime televised atrocity in history, it is a fact less stated that it was also an atrocity that was linguistically constructed. This is evident not just through the use of the appellation ‘9/11’. The date, spoken simply as September 11 or nine-eleven, signals not only the emergency number of the United States but also by now a whole series of associations of emergency, panic, security measures and State clampdown. Yet, how this gamut of images was generated within the public imaginary deserves examination, especially the route which led the United States from the status of facing a calamity to one of engaging in an endless war on terror. Richard Jackson (Writing the War) analyses how a particular language was mobilised to produce public consent for the war on terror by deeming the war as inherently necessary and a battle undertaken for the sake of ‘good’. He states how the event itself was remade not just as a national tragedy but also as a ‘wound on the body politic of the nation itself’ (32). The atrocity was thus given a national character, and the image created was that of the nation-state itself under attack. This image was created, according to Jackson, through a sentiment that emphasised the unprecedented nature of the atrocity. Thus, 9/11 was presented as an exceptional circumstance that had never happened before. Even when the event was taking place, most of the live coverage underlined the iconicity and exceptionalism of the catastrophe. Within such a scenario, certain linguistic signifiers were set into motion that highlighted the national wound. President George W. Bush called it famously an ‘act of war’ against America in order to highlight the impact of the wound (66). In his speech immediately following the atrocity, Bush proclaimed America as a ‘country awakened to danger’ where ‘freedom itself [was] under attack’ (65, 66). The Bush administration’s emergency plans were activated, culminating in the sense of an exceptional state of danger and chaos

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that needed to be governmentally managed. This level of mobilisation of emergency plans was activated at the level of language too. The country was interpellated as a national collective through the presidential speeches: Bush called the attacks as those on ‘a country’, ‘a nation’, which then demanded that ‘all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace’ (58). This expression of a collective was also achieved through the simple use of the term ‘we’: ‘Whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done’ (Bush 65). The use of network television and news programming also helped sustain the fiction of the imagined community as a collective (Zelizer and Allan; Dimaggio). The linguistic register was one of threat and danger. The 9/11 event was framed not as an atrocity but as an attack on the WTC and thus on America itself. The discourse of fear was activated on multiple levels for political gains and was enacted by bringing to a halt the normalcy of everyday life and the habituation it accompanied. It was reported how ‘[t]he Sears Tower in Chicago was evacuated, as were colleges and museums. Disney World shut down, and Major League Baseball cancelled its games, and nuclear power plants went to top security status’ (Gibbs). The very mention in that statement of the status of nuclear security plants evokes a sense of an emergency of apocalyptic magnitude. False reporting also actualised the recourse to panic. In the initial reportage, American Broadcasting Company (ABC) News broadcast falsely about an explosion at the Capitol (Zelizer and Allan). There were also rumours circulated in the news about car bomb explosions or a second plane at the Pentagon (Zelizer and Allan). There were also false reports about retaliatory attacks on Kabul (Zelizer and Allan). The media sensationalism, accompanied by the sense that further attacks were also imminent, facilitated the spread of panic and outrage. For instance, Dick Cheney remarked: ‘The attack on our country forced us to come to grips with the possibility that the next time terrorists strike, they may well be armed with more than just plane tickets and box cutters.’

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Thus, the discourse of danger was also intermeshed with that of dangerousness. The terrorists behind the attack were portrayed as ‘evil’ in multiple Bush speeches (Selected Speeches 92, 93, 98, 110–13, 127, 129, 154, 156, 162, 266, 276, 288, 333). They were depicted as cunning, radical and merciless. This construction of the terrorist figure was also accompanied by the country’s right to selfdefence against such inhumane terrorists. ‘There is no question but that any nation on earth has the right of self-defense. And we do,’ stated Donald Rumsfeld. The representation of the terrorists themselves was through the use of subhuman or inhuman metaphors. Colin Powell and Bush presented terrorism and, by extension, the terrorists as ‘a scourge’, a ‘cancer’, ‘parasitic’, and the like (Jackson, ‘Language, Policy’ 11–12). The language itself was used as a call to arms and a trumpet for war against such inhuman or subhuman creatures in various creative ways. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan argue for the lack of a ready-made script through which 9/11 could be framed in television. However, Zelizer and Allan do not take into account the use of certain stock images that were activated by the State’s culture machine. There was recourse made to several moments in American history to come to terms with the tragedy. History, however, was re-narrated to accommodate the atrocity at hand. Thus, it was reported how ‘[t]his was the bloodiest day on American soil since our Civil War, a modern Antietam played out in real time, on fast-forward, and not with soldiers but with secretaries, security guards, lawyers, bankers, janitors’ (Gibbs). Similar allusions were made to other aspects of US military history. The Pearl Harbor incident was the one most referred to in the news. Calling the site of the atrocity—the place where the twin towers stood—as ‘ground zero’ further escalated the use of history for militant ends. Ground zero brought to mind the notion of complete devastation as well as a basic frame of reference. Yet, the use of these historical narratives was undertaken not to refer to the past but rather as a memorialising strategy. Besides, works in art, fiction

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and film that were part of the collective American imagination were also alluded to, to make sense of and to communicate the magnitude of the abomination. Films such as King Kong, Deep Impact and Final Fantasy acted as visual and imaginative repertoires with which to measure the reality of the atrocity (Zizek). Slavoj Zizek brings attention to how Hollywood’s film production of unimaginable horror was translated from screen to real life. Earlier threats such as those of unidentified flying objects (UFOs) and aliens were also used as imaginative archetypes to express political fear and horror. Yet, the effect of this strategy was a culmination of moral panic and an expression of disaster that resulted in a manoeuvre of certain affective points of expression towards political gain. In other words, emotions such as panic, fear and anger were mobilised within the public as the reception of the attack. The loss of human life was translated into the spreading of these states of affect, which in turn were used to harness political opposition against a common enemy. The State machinery thereby brought to the fore the notion of its existence as under threat. This was expressed as a wound, a trauma and a hurt. Bush commented on how ‘[t]he pictures … have filled us with disbelief, terrible sadness, and a quiet, unyielding anger’ (57). The words ‘disbelief, sadness, and anger’ point towards symptoms of post-traumatic stress. Bush’s statement was framed as though the United States was undergoing post-traumatic stress. Anger and outrage were thus expressed through the public sphere through the culture machine to build a wound culture. Mark Seltzer defines wound culture as ‘[t]he convening of the public around scenes of violence— the rushing to the scene of the accident, the milling around the point of impact’ (3). Wound culture is a ‘collective gathering around shock, trauma, and the wound’ (3). With 9/11, such a wound and a public coming together to share a common grief were evident. The New York Times features and public commemoration of the deceased of 9/11 are a few such instances of wound culture in the State’s public sphere (J. Greenberg, Trauma at Home).

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After 9/11, trauma became the dominant signifier. While the 20th century already saw the flourishing of trauma as a transactional reality (Huyssen), the events of 9/11 seemed to have further entrenched the trauma paradigm in public and collective memory in the 21st century. News reports of as many as 10,000 firefighters and civilians exposed to the shock of 9/11 and diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) were circulated (Hartocollis). Over ‘nine thousand mental health specialists, including seven hundred psychiatrists, intervened to offer psychological support to survivors, witnesses and local residents’ (Fassin and Rechtman 1). Several people surveyed showed a high recourse to mental health services and increased substance dependency (1). It became ‘so natural to invoke the notion of trauma’, pointing towards the normalisation of trauma as the conceptual currency with which to view the atrocity (Fassin and Rechtman 3, emphasis added). Zelizer and Allan note how while reporting on 9/11, journalists too could be said to have been traumatised. Trauma was also thus understood to have been both vicariously produced by the television footage and transmitted by traumatised journalists to the shocked viewers.

II Among a canon of works that quickly became associated with this model and with 9/11, in general, is a well-known and commentedupon graphic novel by Art Spiegelman titled In the Shadow of No Towers (2004). The text both complements and supplements trauma in seeking to make the events of 9/11 intelligible. The facile manner in which the graphic novel offers a reading of trauma deserves elaboration. The text becomes representative of both the trauma industries (academic and State). If the theory of trauma proves to be ‘immensely appealing [… and] to provide a logic to the most radically unredeemable, unassimilable and unsymbolisable phenomena’, then In the Shadow of No Towers offers just such a ‘poetics’ of the logic

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of unassimilabilty (Berger, ‘There’s No Backhand’ 52). Published first in Germany in the newspaper Die Zeit (2002–04) and later in several American publications, Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel, or ‘comix’ as he likes to call his works, is about living quite literally and metaphorically in the shadow of no towers after 9/11. A black-on-black cover depicts the shadow of the towers on a black background. The towers are immediately interpellated as the site of traumatic injury in the graphic novel. The black colour points to grief and mourning as well as to an emptiness in the absence of the towers. The emptiness also points more philosophically towards the metaphor of the traumatic negative sublime, in the tradition of Holocaust literature. The second page has the image of the towers on fire, a recurring symbol throughout the work, on a newspaper background with the heading ‘President’s wound reopened’ (Spiegelman 2). The very phrase alerts the readers to the concept of the nation as wounded. It echoes the presidential speeches wherein the nation is assumed as challenged and under attack. The metaphor of the wound signifies a blow, an injury and an oncoming illness. It also refers to the Greek root of the word trauma as wound. Yet the wound is also not just the nation’s but the president’s, and it is with this manoeuvre that the comix seeks to simultaneously undo the official narrative of the traumatic psychic wound to the nation: the wound the text insists is initially the president’s and not that of the populi or the nation. Yet as the graphic novel progresses, its argument, as will be evident later, moves towards the claim of how such a wound is displaced onto the State. The lingering presence of the newspaper behind the image of the towers is also suggestive of the role of the media in connection to this trauma. It alerts us towards the notion that while the wound itself is externally inflicted on the State, its dressing, metaphorically speaking, is internal to the State. A reopening of the injury suggests the connection with the Holocaust, of which Spiegelman’s parents are survivors. The sense of reopening, concomitant with the narrative of

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the State, works to provide a past historical context to the wound from a readily available topos of immense human suffering. It thus harkens back to another site of trauma, conforming to certain branches of trauma theory. The comic progressively, however, moves into a personal, confessional mode of address. Much like Foucault’s notion of pastoral power, this confessional mode inaugurates a mode of address that is at once solipsistic and full of political depression. Though titled ‘The Sky is Falling’, the commencement of a long note begins where ‘World History and Personal History collide’ (Spiegelman 3). The text becomes one such aspect of the collision of personal trauma and collective trauma as it tries to traverse both those realms simultaneously. The use of the word collide alludes to the planes hitting the twin towers and, hence, to the notion of inherent violence. That the superimposition of world history and personal history is violently done points to its artificiality and coercion. This imposition of world events onto the personal aspect is what, for instance, the opening panel on page 6 portrays—Spiegelman with an eagle (in an obvious metaphor) in the position of the proverbial albatross around his neck. While Spiegelman ‘insists the sky is falling’, mirroring the nearapocalyptic political climate after 9/11, the response is to attribute the same to his PTSD (6). The eagle on the neck, moreover, takes on a life of its own by squawking ‘Go out and shop!’ or ‘Be afraid!’ at various moments in the panel (6). These aspects signify the use of economic and political spheres in cultivating a climate of depression and fear. The oft-made Bushism that it was patriotic to indulge in spending to help the economy is presented in the text through the eagle’s command to shop. The condition of trauma is thought to be inflicted by not just the actual events of 9/11 but also by way of US government propaganda after the attacks. ‘Equally terrorised by Al Qaeda and by his own government’, a panel reads, gesturing towards the State manufacture of fear to divert attention from pressing social issues (Spiegelman 6).

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The eagle makes a reappearance (with cartoons of Cheney and Bush on its back) squawking, ‘Why do they hate us?’, a sentiment that seemed to be an echo of much of the traumatised American public after 9/11. The image of the burning towers shadows most of the pages. It becomes a motif of the traumatic obsessive compulsion to repeat. In one such sequence, Spiegelman asks the viewer to leave him to obsessively ‘relive [his] September 11 trauma’, while time itself seems disjointed and traumatised (9). Moreover, the difference in earlier traumatic injuries and the ones made by 9/11 converge, and it becomes difficult for Spiegelman to differentiate between the two. There is a panel that vividly draws out the ‘falling man’ motif by replacing the anonymous man falling from the towers with Spiegelman himself (‘falling through the holes in his head’), with the speech bubble that insists he is no longer sure ‘which holes [in his head] were made by Arab terrorists way back in 2001 and which ones were always there’ (10). Spiegelman here seems to be referring to both his traumatic past as a child of Holocaust survivors and also to his status as a patient of PTSD. Yet it is not just Spiegelman who seems to be traumatised but the whole of New York City and the United States in general. In a scathing critique, while the text comments on the temporariness of people caused by their mysterious ‘disappearances’, the only sign of permanence seemed to be a ‘Crazy Lady’ (Spiegelman 10)—a homeless woman in the writer’s neighbourhood. The ‘Crazy Lady’ seems to provide ironic stability in an otherwise disjointed traumatic realm. Yet, by the end of the panel, the homeless woman too appears to have ‘moved on’, signalling the oncoming centre-less trauma (10). Soon Spiegelman can no longer differentiate between his ‘own neurotic depression’ and ‘well-founded despair’ (12). Importantly, he asserts towards the end of a piece that ‘complaining is the only solace left’ (13). The last few pages become a nostalgic cry for the ‘good old pre-9/11 days’ as Spiegelman draws on different comic strips of the past grounded in a more stable political climate (15–23).

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Yet this does not seem to work as the last page—the back of the book—is a collection of falling bodies, alluding to the dead of 11 September 2001 as well as to the falling man trope that has become synonymous with 9/11. The comix has been read as ‘an essay’ that is not ‘about September 11’ but rather an endeavour to ‘exhibit Spiegelman’s fractured state of mind during the weeks and months he spent unmoored in the catastrophe’s wake’ (Mason). By contrast, it has also been read as a portrayal of fear and terror that is constitutive of not just his selfrepresentation but also the representation of the world around him (Anker). The non-chronological character of the text allows Spiegelman to capture better the trauma aesthetic and move between ‘sacred silence and testimonial speech’ (Versluys 987). Consequently, his ‘political interests ... [become] a direct outcome of his trauma experience’ (992). Similarly, the ‘image of the attacks lies at the core of Spiegelman’s traumatic experience, the sheer vividness and meaning of which—try as he might to incorporate and master […] will always elude him’ (Espiritu 188). The kernel of the traumatic experience becomes, according to these readings that use trauma theory, a multilayered one which is infinitely deferred. Conversely, it has also been shown to have multiple narrative, thematic strands such that each thematic strand splits the text. This is done through the referencing of the past and the present simultaneously (Kuhlman). Just as with Ruth Leys’s reading of trauma theory, the text in question too displays this ambivalent relationship to the traumatic core in that both reverberate in an obsessive-compulsive way and are also found to be an empty kernel. This is typical of ‘a text registering a crisis of witnessing a traumatic world event’ (Chute 231). In this way, the book becomes a ‘material register of trauma’s inability to conform to the logic of linear and temporal progression’ (231). This, therefore, becomes a politics that disorients—both by its disorienting nonsequential character and by its intense representation of trauma. Arin Keeble argues that the politics of the comix erases history and he sees

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the shift as one of rupture and discontinuity. He writes that ‘“the new normal” is […] a state of conflictedness where political discourse and traumatic memory do not sit comfortably together, creating the sense of disorientation that is at the heart of the text’ (Keeble 18). The disorientation, I argue, is because the text seems to register the violence inherent in placing what Keeble refers to as ‘political discourse’ (26) with the notion of a privatised ‘traumatic memory’ (18). The graphic novel seems to both place before the viewer the descriptive state of the political climate of fear after 9/11 and simultaneously critique the imposition of that fear onto the private individual. Given the earlier readings of Spiegelman’s text as well as the position that it enjoys in the post-9/11 literary canon, the following questions prove significant: To what extent does Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers become a cultural artefact painted by trauma theory? Is it something that is informed by Spiegelman’s reading and experience of PTSD? Or is it something found and labelled traumatic by academia and reviewers alike? Is it a cultural symptom as well as a product of trauma theory? Does removing trauma theory from the text offer a pristine view of the trauma-less text? Or does the text inform the trauma? Does the very model of trauma as privilege use a currency which confers canonical status on the comix as well as on its academic and cultural reception? The State, as Spiegelman’s graphic novel depicts, uses an inflicted atrocity that gets framed into the language and conceptual registers of trauma theory. The text itself, by also using its medium as the message, becomes a traumatised one. The imposition of the political onto the personal, in opposition to feminist discourse, becomes a moment of violence. This violence is presented through the very framing of the text and the text’s author/‘I’ as traumatised. What I argue, additionally, is that the traumatic and traumatised text registers a moment of reconfiguration of the Western rational subject. The traumatised text highlights the notion of trauma as currency being responsible for the reconfiguration of the State’s citizen subject.

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Related to the claim is the question as to why trauma theory/ trauma as cultural practice occupies such currency. What are the ideological interests that the rise of the trauma paradigm serves? The question is not about the applicability of the trauma model but about its widespread usage and the mechanisms it aids. Why use the term and model of trauma in the first place? Why not the more politicised and less pathologised notion of ‘fear’? Why not also suffering or agony or grief? Clearly, each has its own register. However, the way in which trauma is used ubiquitously appears to traverse all those different varieties of meaning and, as a supplement, means something traumatic. The issue is not about the efficacy of vocabulary, though it is a related issue. The omnipresence of the model of trauma, the valorisation of texts that incorporate trauma theory, the interpretation in academia and otherwise of such texts as having a traumatic core and the circulation of trauma as cultural capital are something unique to modernity and beyond. However, trauma as a paradigm is not a recent phenomenon. As noted earlier, the word in English is derived from the Greek trõma, meaning ‘to wound’. Indeed, the usage of the term initially implied a physical wound. How did the concept shift from a physical piercing to its common use today as a mental wound? Tracing a brief outline of such a Foucauldian ‘history of the present’ would imply looking at the various shifts in discourses that the concept undertook to arrive at its present-day model. Such a genealogy of trauma is also a genealogy in some ways of modernity. This intersection of the genealogy of both also shows how modernity itself is at a moment of change because it shows how the world of trauma is coming to be an ‘empire’ (Fassin and Rechtman iv). If trauma is ‘our normal way of relating present suffering to past violence’, then its genealogy is an understanding of how such a normalisation occurred (Fassin and Rechtman xi, emphasis added). Roger Luckhurst, in charting out the various discourses that converge to imbue trauma with its meaning, uses the metaphor of

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a ‘knot’. Various discourses—psychiatry, law, the military–industrial complex—come together as ‘hybrid assemblages’ that provide, in multiple convergent and divergent ways, trauma with its force as a signifier (Luckhurst, The Trauma Question 14). These assemblages are ‘imbroglios that mess up our fundamental categories of subject and object, human and non-human, society and nature’ (14). As the historiography of the concept shows, trauma as a category was not always already there (pace Wilbur Scott). It did not just exist waiting to be ‘discovered’ (W. Scott 308). Rather, trauma was bound up in a network of knowledge/power and is a product of its discourse. This is not to say that trauma is an invention and the traumatised merely malingerers. However, the endeavour is to demonstrate that the materiality of the thing in itself—shell shock, PTSD, hysteria and the like—cannot be separated from the conditions that produce it. Before the First World War and the production of heavy-duty artillery, for instance, the concept of shell shock cannot be imagined. Similarly, railway spine cannot be said to have existed or imagined before the invention of the railways. Likewise, PTSD is also a product of the discourses that led to its inclusion as a category in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Michel Foucault frequently used to call this the politics of power/knowledge. Moreover, trauma’s capacity to be a veridical discourse is intermeshed with its dynamic with various players in the field of discourse. Law, medicine, the industrial revolution, warfare and so on are the different ‘assemblages’ that, in their own way, bring ontological and epistemological baggage to the concept of trauma. Related to this, the capacity, efficacy and meaning of trauma and what it entails changes as these discourses (law, psychiatry and industrial warfare) change. For instance, the alteration in warfare from shells to bombing jets/drones where the target population is presented in highly sanitised terms will also necessarily affect how trauma is circulated as a discourse. Further, trauma as discourse and condition is not always out there on which newer rules can be written. Instead,

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both individual and collective experiences shape the discourse and imbue it with meaning. PTSD takes shape not just to explain the experience of the witness but is, in turn, shaped by the experience of the witness. Additionally, the currency that trauma holds is also determined quite literally through capital. The contours of trauma are also outlined by the demands made for compensation and the claims made upon insurance companies for wounds that are not physically tangible but still demand an acknowledgement in some way of injury done. For instance, historically, the Holocaust victim became the Holocaust victim through the circuits of capital. In other words, the person who suffered in the Nazi death camps was deemed as having undergone trauma only on account of the compensation in monetary terms and the publicity (which often led to lucrative publishing deals and so on) that the world bestowed on them in a belated show of guilt. This is not to suggest that the victim/survivor of the Nazi genocide is a power- or money-hungry malingerer but rather that these labels are merely labels accorded to suffering deemed and validated as suffering. Thus, when the conditions suggested so, the Holocaust victim became a survivor. Furthermore, trauma shaped along with it a sense of morality and ethics. The ethical response was determined by how the suffering was viewed. If the suffering was validated, then ethics implied an acknowledgement of an obligation to redeem injury. As was often the way, this was done in capitalist/monetary terms. Thus, malingering, shell shock, physiological wounds, psychological injury, chemical imbalance, PTSD—all carried different registers and necessitated a corresponding ethical response. Additionally, while ostensibly an interior event, trauma was always, as has been evident, linked to the milieu and thus the exterior world at large. The 19th-century debates between proponents of different models of trauma shed light on this: railway timetables sought to manage the railway accident, but accidents still took place.

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These were further managed by insurance, which was deemed obligatory. There was, hence, as Luckhurst notes, management of trauma itself (The Trauma Question). Thus, trauma was linked to a statistical society and, by association, to governmentality. If social relations and the individual’s perceptions of the self and interiority were reorganised around the railways, then the accident became the locus of re-orchestration of such relations. Thus, ‘trauma develops from ... those various forms of calculus that helped to process and begin to control the chaotic explosion of the industrial revolution’ of which the railway accident then becomes a metaphor (Luckhurst, The Trauma Question 25–26). Statistics, or the ‘science of the state’ as Foucault called it, becomes a way of managing the chaos that the industrial boom brings along with it (‘Governmentality’ 212). Trauma then becomes an aspect to be managed or governed, an aspect to be somehow contained within ‘the problematic of government’ (201). Throughout his pursuit of the concept of governmentality, Foucault is careful to link the art of government of oneself with the art of government of the population. The so-called molar and the molecular planes, or the man-as-species and man-as-individual aspects of governmentality, are repeatedly shown in Foucault’s work to be interrelated. Trauma, or rather its management, becomes one such strand linking the two together. Thus, while trauma functions at one level as subjectivating interiority, it also functions by way of its regulation as tapping into this interiority to serve the needs of the governmentalised State apparatus. The inside and outside are thus connected in and through the trauma. This connection is more apparent when the trauma suffered is understood to be collective: the notion that not just individuals but entire communities are traumatised (Erik Erikson qtd. in Caruth, Trauma). Trauma could then serve not only as a regulating mechanism of such communities but also as a factor that binds such communities together. The injury then is seen to be a ‘wounded attachment’, considered irredeemable, persistent

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and generative of identity itself (W. Brown, ‘Wounded Attachments’ 391). This is an aspect that is important for the discursive production and use of trauma in the United States after 9/11. Further, Foucault’s work seemed to shift from aspects of governmentality to biopower in succeeding years, and indeed, the two concepts are closely linked. Biopower was that which operated at the level of life itself and framed the very capacity of what was considered human. This precariousness of life, as Judith Butler comes to see it in Frames of War and Precarious Life, as well as its vulnerability to threat and risk, situates it firmly within the realm of biopower. As Pieter Vermeulen states, ‘Trauma emerged as part of a (biopolitical) vocabulary to map, predict, and regulate “the proliferation of physical accidents and psychological damage that modernity incited’” (147). This was so because trauma was, from its very inception, not just limited to the realm of medicine but belonged to the realm of legality as well. It was always a medico-legal problem and, thus, also had to be regulated optimally. At one level, this meant a reduction of individual trauma. But this was not always the matter as trauma at the collective level also had to be managed. Foucault explains how ‘massacres had become vital’ such that biopower (discussed in the second section of this book), which aimed at sustaining life itself, could be used to turn upon itself and kill, in the name and supposed general interest of the population (History of Sexuality 137). Similarly, in a biopolitical framework, optimally regulating mass trauma would be the preferred way to manage trauma. Hence, ‘what matters is that vital capacities can be mobilised, even if this maximisation of capacities goes at the expense of individual bodies; reduction of trauma counts less than the massifying management of trauma’ (Vermeulen 147). However, this also did not mean that individuals were left outside the realm of biopolitical trauma to fend for themselves. The ‘government of oneself’ meant that individual traumas were regulated through acts of pastoral confession and thus normativised through their very

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abnormality (Foucault, ‘Governmentality’ 201). The relation of the subject ‘to itself and society [was] mediated by trauma through the act of retrieval and confession of traumatic memory’ (Vermeulen 147). Lastly, one person’s trauma becomes another person’s silent suffering. The fact that trauma as a category was extended to a certain group also structurally necessitated the exclusion of a different social group. For instance, trauma or railway spine could be a valid and redeemable injury for those travelling first class but not for those belonging to the working class. Thus, trauma was differentially applied even when assumed to be uniformly produced: ‘[E]ven with an assumption of universal suffering, some were seen to have suffered more than others; politics and prejudice still determined who would be excluded from the big tent of trauma’ (Laqueur). What emerges then is a paradigm that definitionally seems to be an umbrella term to apply to all kinds of suffering, but the inclusion into this heavily regulated group necessitates the exclusion of those deemed Other. Even within the circle of Cathy Caruth, the 1990s proponent of trauma theory, the notion of ‘insidious trauma’ emerges: an experience that is not out of the range of the normal yet ought to be counted as traumatic but is not—such as domestic violence (L. Brown). Thus, ‘trauma—or rather the social process of the recognition of persons as traumatised—effectively chooses its victims’ (Fassin and Rechtman 282). Something similar took place immediately after 9/11. The US Congress passed the James Zadroga 9/11 Health and Compensation Act providing more than $4 billion to people affected by post-9/11 trauma (Hartocollis). However, the notion that trauma as a category could be differentially applied—some traumas were traumas, and others were not—meant that a certain segment of the population was left without the compensation route. The lack of legal protection was justified under the cover that it was impossible to distinguish between trauma inflicted by 9/11 and other traumas. Similarly, though 9/11 was, by and large, a visually mediated event, ‘[US] Congress effectively

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excluded TV watchers from its treatment program by requiring that victims had lived or worked within certain geographic boundaries’ (Hartocollis). Therefore, trauma as a compensable category sought to make fine administrative distinctions between whose trauma counted and whose did not, ultimately regulating the trauma itself. Thus, at the level of the individual, trauma could be managed by the State by differentially applying the category. The most effective way to achieve this applicability was through State financing. A New York Times report makes a note of a long governmentalised list of categories of citizens deemed traumatised and those who were either partially traumatised or those whose trauma was not of a magnitude that warranted compensation. The financing and compensation for treatment of PTSD and insurance for trauma in the United States could be claimed by various first responders, firefighters, police officers, rescue, recovery and clean-up medical officials and the like. The report states: ‘Family members of New York City firefighters who died are covered as a continuation of an existing Fire Department counseling program, but family members of other victims are not’ (Hartocollis). A prominent study elaborates that ‘[t]he fact that all of these realities are today subsumed under the heading of trauma is an important indication of the way in which trauma is understood in contemporary societies … for the simple reason that all of these individuals are thought of in similar terms’ (Fassin and Rechtman 277). This easy positioning of each individual as equally traumatised appears contrary to the actual practice of trauma regulation. If today, trauma has become a ‘floating signifier’ as Fassin and Rechtman claim, then it is so—pace Fassin and Rechtman (276)— precisely in order to erase radical differences in the nature of the suffering while simultaneously guarding entry into the club of suffering. What similarities would the traumas of, for instance, Israelis and Palestinians have in common? To say both are traumatised is to

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eradicate the way that the power hierarchy systematically operates in the occupied territories. This works to eliminate the sense of disempowerment that Palestinians suffer at the hand of Israelis.

III What do the observations of the previous sections imply for post9/11 New York, under the influence of the trauma paradigm and the United States in general? For this, a return to Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers seems necessary. The comix, as he calls it, lends itself to a collision of ‘Personal History’ and ‘World History’ (Spiegelman 3). But, what exactly is the nature of the interaction of the personal and the political in a text that seems symptomatic of the collective trauma haunting 9/11 United States? For starters, the graphic novel seems to be about an intensely personal experience as the ‘I’ of the graphic novel and its author are shown as indistinct entities. It is said that ‘Spiegelman accentuates the personal character of the trauma’ (Gauthier 372) and suffers a ‘disconnection from the community’ (377). That this intensely personal experience occurs during a world-changing event (9/11) seems coincidental. However, the external event also contradictorily appears to have informed the intensely personal experience. When the comix’s Spiegelman says that he feels traumatised equally by the terrorists as much as by his own government, it sheds light on a crucial but ignored aspect of 9/11. This is the aspect whereby trauma is managed, regulated and policed effectively after 9/11, not at the level of the community (as it was in 19th-century Britain) but at a very personal and individuated level. The dictum ‘The personal is the political’ is dissociated from its feminist context and taken to another realm of signification whereby the political becomes the personal and vice versa in a very crippling, rather than in an enabling and feminist, way. In the text, this happens by way of the notion of belonging that Spiegelman feels towards New York, which surprises him as his

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self-fashioning thus far has been cosmopolitan. His self-fashioning as a ‘rootless cosmopolitan equally homeless anywhere’ is declared self-deceit (Spiegelman 8). Besides, the text posits, like the US Congress decision on compensation regulations much later, that the only possible way that 9/11 could have been witnessed was in person, on the streets of New York, and that the trauma one has suffered becomes a function of one’s locale. Through this notion of belonging, Spiegelman thus demonstrates the 9/11 dictum that while all individuals are equally traumatised, some individuals are more traumatised than others. The political thus enters the private realm of interiority and makes the statist manipulation and regulation through trauma evident. This happens, for instance, through the way the community (the United States) is imagined as traumatised. As previously mentioned, the rhetoric used in the immediate aftermath of 9/11 was that of ‘attack’ and ‘contagion’. And thus logic demanded that the immune process whereby such risks were warded off (quite literally through deportation, for instance) and fought against (through industrial warfare against external and internal threats) be brought into operation. The sense of community put forth is one of harmony and continuity that is currently under threat and, hence, in need of preservation. Orly Lubin critiques the way in which trauma has been handled through a fictive notion of a seamless imagined community: ‘[T]he notion of community seems to be a prism through which one can view the trauma, as community becomes the tool of the containment of the trauma’ (Lubin 123). Thus, the hijacking is hijacked, to paraphrase Spiegelman, to manage and regulate trauma at the mass level. This is done by its privatisation and interiorisation at the level of the individual. Further, media and texts such as Spiegelman’s dwell on notions of the family (Spiegelman seeks to find his daughter Nadja who is at school when 9/11 is taking place). This mobilises a whole set of identifications that Marianne Hirsch terms ‘affiliative

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looking’ (‘Surviving Images’ 75). Speaking of the obituaries in the newspapers that are supplemented by visuals and family pictures, she remarks that ‘[t]hese familiar family pictures engage us in “affiliative looking” that characterises ordinary family photographs […] we invest them with a form of looking that is broadly shared across our culture’ (75). The sense of a broadly shared, homogeneous American white culture goes uncontested and is assimilated as such. However, a critical lens provides a clue to the sort of—to borrow a term from Kaja Silverman—‘idiopathic identification’ that takes place (23). This identification with the victims and the dead of 9/11 is self-referential and referential of the so-called shared values and culture that the notion of America imagines into being. This identification is not heteropathic, that is, grounded in a hitherto ‘alien body or experience’ (J. Greenberg, Trauma at Home 134) and therein lies its conservative political valence. Trauma here is orchestrated such that it necessarily relies on the use of familiarity to expunge an experience ‘outside the normal’, rather than come to terms with it. The fact that Hirsch uses family photographs also speaks volumes of the notion mobilised that targets the domestic space as under attack. With Spiegelman, protecting his daughter becomes an emotion that invites sympathetic identification. It is no wonder then that the interpretation of post9/11 literature sees an underlying emphasis on the space of the traditionally domestic (Gray; Rothberg, ‘Decolonizing’; Irom). Through the domestic or the familial space, 9/11 is made familiar while simultaneously generating notions of what that familial is: it is thus ‘familialised’ (Crownshaw 761). Thus, even the outside world is shown as domestic/domesticated. The streets—a symbol of contagion—are purged of unwanted elements and rendered familiar in the text: ‘Though he’d never own an “I