It is surely a truism that the various nomenclatures ...

Conceptualizing Trauma, but What about Asia? Kenneth Surin

Psychiatry knows traumatophile types. — Walter Benjamin, “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” Trauma

It is surely a truism that the various nomenclatures surrounding the subject of trauma have thoroughly permeated American popular culture. Part of the problem of dealing with this concept (and attendant concepts like that of survivorship) is getting past the idioms that grip popular culture, now that this culture guarantees a seemingly effortless visibility to those projecting themselves as some kind of traumatized subjects.1 How does one escape the banalization of what is after all ostensibly an important concept, psychoanalytically and philosophically? Is “trauma” going to be more than just a part positions 16:1 doi 10.1215/10679847-2007-010 Copyright 2008 by Duke University Press

positions 16:1 Spring 2008

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of our daily repertoire of devices in the game of “impression management” (to use an inimitable Erving Goffman phrase), a culturally sanctioned way for people to present themselves to other people (e.g., “I survived the trauma of attention deficit syndrome, inattentive parents, playground bullies, bad dating experiences, overbearing bosses”)? This is the kind of cultural phenomenon that Slavoj Žižek has dissected so brilliantly and humorously in his many writings. While the analysis of these popular idioms is perhaps best left to Žižek and others appropriately attuned to the spirit of the times, it is nonetheless important for us to deal with the questions of cultural and social wounds, of the relationship between speech and catastrophe, of the social and political place of restitution and forgiveness in the face of tragedy, of the outcomes and possibilities when people are pushed beyond the limits of what they can bear, and so forth.2 At the same time, there can be little doubt that the concept trauma is beset with difficulties, both in terms of its theoretical operation as a concept and as a broader index of certain patterns of expression and agency in our wider culture. The first difficulty faced by the theoretically oriented “traumatophile” is the sheer capaciousness of the semantics or semiotics of the term. A quick search of the catalogue in my college library displayed the following book titles with “trauma” in them that were immediately relevant to this essay: trauma of art, trauma of gender, trauma of Eros, theater of trauma, photography of trauma, cultural trauma, and so on, plus several hundred titles dealing with the more explicitly medical and psychological dimensions of trauma that would nonetheless have been germane to my themes if I had another year or two to do nothing but read the texts in question. This elasticity of the term’s linguistic applications is perhaps symptomatic of the context that enables it to have its varied uses — to state the obvious, statements invoking the notion of trauma have always been the product of a complex process of construction underpinned by historical and social conditions. As a result, medical and psychiatric technologies, cultural practices, and forms of representation have to be mobilized in a specific context by particular sets of interests, and the social and political organizations embodying these interests, before it becomes possible to depict a psychic or physical injury as traumatic, let alone as traumatic in this or that particular way.3 There are a number of ways to demonstrate that there is very little coher-

Surin ❘ Conceptualizing Trauma

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ence to the notion of trauma, in terms of both its semantic range and the unavoidable limits placed on the concept by historical and social circumstances. It is well known, for example, that there are a number of physical and psychopathological conditions that are time bound, in the sense that they were once understood in terms of what were then thought to be viable diagnostic categories but are no longer considered to be scientifically acceptable. Neurasthenia, for instance, was a well-known syndrome in nineteenthcentury western medicine but has since fallen completely into desuetude (though it should be noted that when I looked up the term on Google, several Web sites referred me to chronic fatigue syndrome, which of course is a condition accepted in some present-day medical circles).4 There is also the well-known phenomenon of the culture-bound syndrome. Such conditions as penis disappearance syndrome (koro in Malay or Indonesian, suo yang in Mandarin, shook yong in Cantonese, rok-joo in Thai, and jinjinia bemar in Assam, India) or the Southeast Asian condition known as latah are well-known examples of culture-bound syndromes. In koro or suo yang the sufferer believes himself to be experiencing a retraction of the sexual organ into the abdomen, resulting ultimately in death.5 In the case of latah (mali-mali or silok in the Philippines), the victim, typically a middle-aged woman, is afflicted with a sudden fright, to which the victim responds with trancelike behavior accompanied by repeated and frequent outbursts of obscenities normally forbidden in that society.6 A quick perusal of the accounts of koro or latah will indicate that at least some of the victims of these maladies can justifiably be said to be in a traumatized state. In case there is any doubt, I cite the following case history discussed by Gwee Ah Leng, the Singapore-based physician who has written on koro: H.K.F., a male Chinese, aged 34 . . . was at a cinema show when he felt the need to [go] to the latrine in the foyer, and as he was easing himself, he suddenly felt a loss of feeling in the genital region, and straightaway the thought occurred to him that he was going to get penile retraction. Sure enough, he noticed that the penis was getting shorter. . . . He felt cold in the limbs, and was weak all over, and his legs gave way under him. So he sat on the floor, all this time holding onto his penis. About half an hour later, the attacks abated. He went to see a medical specialist


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and was prescribed some pills. . . . At 24 years of age, he exposed himself to a prostitute, and was infected with gonorrhea, and since then he has abstained himself. He heard of shook yong from his friends and also heard about some fatalities during intercourse previous to the attack.7 The undeniable fact that traumatic episodes and conditions, such as the one described in this passage, have an etiology and a significance for their sufferers that is so palpably delimited by cultural location and historical period implies that the notion of a timeless or ahistorical traumatic condition or diagnosis is highly implausible (not that many of us would have been inclined to this view in this first place, now that the formulas of historical self-reflexivity and cultural variability have so deeply permeated our contemporary episteme). But what does this acknowledgment portend for any study of the thing called “trauma”? One initial response to this question would concede that while the object of trauma is susceptible to the kind of malleability just referred to, the state of being traumatized is less open to the pressures exerted by the variabilities of history and culture. Thus while hardly anyone in Seattle or Peoria would go to the doctor to be treated for latah (which is not to suggest that Americans do not experience dissociative states, only that they would not be treated by an American doctor or hospital for the dissociative state known as latah), American or western culture still has its highly particularized ways of enabling people to come to an understanding of their own kinds of psychic and affective volatility and frailty, as attested by such conditions as attention deficit disorder, social anxiety disorder, Munchausen’s syndrome by proxy, and so on. The west as much as the east has its own distinctive taxonomies of psychic maladies, and a taxonomy “works” to the extent that it enables a group of people to make sense of their experience. In addition, this “making sense,” in the west at any rate, typically takes the form of a narrative of causation linking the subjective experience or condition to some state of affairs in the external world in such a way that the latter accounts for the former in what is taken to be a scientifically compelling way. But this counterargument is not going to work for two reasons. First, any claim to the effect that the causal narratives sanctioned by western science are superior to their alternative or competitor “nonwestern” nar-


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ratives will meet the rejoinder that this claim persuades only those who have already been won over by the disciplines that go under the name western science, and especially by the prestige accorded these disciplines today. Causal narratives work because we are convinced that science works, and science works because . . . because science, it is said, involves the principled separation between truth and falsehood, and moreover it separates truth from falsehood precisely by employing methods that enable the veridicalities associated with science, derived from the predictive power and repeatability of its more workable hypotheses, to be successful over and over again. Science cures people afflicted with malaria not just a few times, but millions of times, over and over again. Or so the textbook story of the success of western science goes. The problem with this panegyric on western science’s behalf is that science has also gotten it wrong numerous times, especially where the so-called mental maladies are concerned. When it comes to connecting the mental with the physical, or the realm of inner experience with the external world, the claims adduced on behalf of the scientific causal narrative do not appear to be as rock solid as those causal stories told on behalf of the cure for malaria or those put in the service of gravitational theory. Here, in the domain of mental causation, the scientific world picture, despite its success in delivering a whole range of persuasive causal narratives, has shown itself to have a great many more shades of gray. Having lived in Malaysia for sixteen years, I have seen with my own eyes people afflicted with latah, and their condition appeared as real to me as the ostensibly afflicted Duke student who showed up during my office hours with a doctor’s letter saying he needed more time for his exams because he had attention deficit disorder — indeed, given that these sixteen years were at the start of my life, my familiarity with latah was not at that point permeated by the intellectual doubts and hesitations that come with moving to another country (in my case, Britain) where latah had no place in the culture. Although I know I have seen people with latah, or rather I was told by those around me in Malaysia (or Malaya as it was then called) that the person behaving in what I took to be a strange manner had latah, there is nonetheless as far as I know no successful causal story to be told about latah, but equally we know pretty well that there are many with good credentials in the medical and scientific communities who would say the same about attention deficit disorder. It


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would therefore be difficult to make a cogent response to someone who insists that latah and attention deficit disorder are in the same ontological boat. If there is a point to be acknowledged here, it may have to do with the need to come to an intellectual reckoning with the effects and implications stemming from one’s standpoint in a particular culture. Hence in the case of latah it was my specific location in Malaya that disposed me to accept certain “facts” about this putative condition. Had I been a western anthropologist visiting Malaysia to study the phenomenon, say, or someone formed in a mores where latah had no cultural currency, then no doubt I would have possessed from the outset an at least minimally skeptical disposition when confronted with the claims of those who professed a belief in latah. The intellectual obverse of insider belief is invariably the possibility of some kind of “outsider suspension-of-belief,” since it is a truism that to share without reserve the beliefs of the purported insider is already to be an insider, at least where that set of beliefs is concerned. Because I was situated in that culture, latah was in a significant sense “all around me” in a way that it could never be for someone not inhabiting Malayan culture. Our situation in a particular culture is thus inextricably bound up with a constituting (and enabling) naïveté about the basal premises of the culture in question. The corollary of this position is that the American belief in attention deficit disorder may have a fundamental relationship to the premises that undergird its culture, in the same way that latah has a decisive relationship to the equivalent premises subtending Malaysian culture. If there is an inbuilt relativism in a proposition of this kind, it is a relativism at once seemingly inevitable and salutary. Second, granted that, phenomenologically, the various culture-bound syndromes may involve such states as terror, surprise, bewilderment, or anxiety that appear to have a considerable degree of cross-cultural and transhistorical commonality between them as a result of the sheer facts of human physiology (most persons menaced by a large and highly dangerous animal would feel a surge of adrenalin, cold sweat, dry mouth, or increased heart rate, all combining to trigger a flight-or-flight response, regardless of whether the person is an unarmed Inuit coming face to face with an adult polar bear in Alaska or an Australian “surfer dude” encountering a great


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white shark while catching a wave), it nevertheless remains the case that no such emotional and psychological state can transcend fully its cultural and social base.8 Terrors, anxieties, and other psychological and affective states exist in a myriad number of forms that can certainly span several quite different cultures, but it cannot be presumed from this that the same meaning or significance is preserved in the movement between one form and another, or between one culture and another. Each anxiety or fear is situated in a web of belief and affect, and it is this web, which also includes feelings, impressions, moods, and so-called unconscious states, that gives the phenomenon in question its particular epistemic content and affective charge. This culturally and socially defined web of belief and affect is segmented into a number of clusters, one superintended by the psychic constitution of the individual and group, as well as other clusters that consist of religious affiliation, family structure, geographic location, demographic positioning within the group (old/young, wealthy/poor, educated/uneducated), and other affiliations defined by race, ethnicity, gender, and so on, where these in fact operate. Each of these has a complex and norm-driven interaction with its surrounding clusters, orchestrated in its own distinctive ways, and the totality of these interactions constitutes the web of agency and belief that enmeshes this or that individual. To state the obvious in terms of an example mentioned earlier: the obscenities yelled out by a middle-aged Malaysian woman that are taken as clear evidence that she is in the state known as latah would be no more than locker-room bonhomie if their anglophone equivalents were uttered by the typical American male sporting type of today (the type that one sees swigging Gatorade or Miller Lite or wolfing down a Burger King triple burger on a commercial during an ESPN-televised basketball or football game). In this American locker-room culture, profanity is just that — profanity — and no one in this society would, in the absence of other compelling evidence to the contrary, for one moment think that your average American Joe Sixpack is in some kind of psychological crisis because of his use of colorful language. If there happen to be commonalities between the webs of belief and agency of individuals belonging to different societies and cultures, then these commonalities must themselves be constructed — they cannot be presumed to exist a priori. But before such processes of construction can occur,


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something just as significant has already taken place — namely, that certain somatic and psychological states have been assembled into a complex that is then taken to constitute a syndrome or condition of a certain specific kind that can be designated or interpreted as a certain kind of causal story (I have a very high fever, have shivering fits during which I feel chilled even though I am running a temperature of 105 degrees, and was bitten a few days ago by an anopheles mosquito; therefore in all probability I have malaria). Here, however, an interesting ontological question has to be broached before the causal narrative can be put together. To take another example, do I run from the tiger because I am afraid, or does my running from the tiger (and having a pounding heart, sweaty hands, trembling knees, a screaming and contorted face) lead me to feel what is called fear and to prompt me and others to say “I am/he is afraid”? I think it was William James who overturned the conventional wisdom of his (and our) time by maintaining that the latter was in fact the case, i.e., that it is our physical states that have causal primacy in bringing us into awareness of our psychological states because they are the basis of the latter, and not vice versa. Where James is concerned, I could hardly be said to be in a state of fear (unless of course I was completely paralyzed with fear) if I was not running away from the tiger, as well as having a wildly beating heart, sweaty hands, quivering knees, a screaming and contorted face. But even if we grant an explanatory primacy to the physical states associated with this or that psychological condition, it is nonetheless the case that physical states themselves also must be interpreted, and they can sometimes be mistakenly interpreted. A case in point is the nineteenth-century condition known as railway spine injury.9 Until the advent of the motor car and the airplane, trains were the fastest conveyances known to humankind, traveling much faster than the horse-drawn carriages of the epoch that preceded them. The speed of the railways was hugely exhilarating for its pioneers, as attested to by many paintings and novels, and was also impressively catastrophic in its effects when the trains crashed. The mangled bodies that were pulled out of a derailed train were far more dramatic to behold than those that emerged from an overturned stagecoach, so it became natural to assume that railway crashes inflicted injuries of a kind that no other accident was capable of doing. Such was the etiological basis of railway spine


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injury: train crashes were held to cause a type of lesion in the nerves of the spinal cord that no other kind of accident could cause because of the sheer speed at which trains traveled. Such medical assessments, coupled with public opinion and the willingness of accident insurers to fork out money to victims of this supposed condition, converged to give railway spine the status enjoyed by some of the present-day traumatic syndromes mentioned earlier in this essay. Over time, of course, the notion of a unique category of railway-induced trauma was to become discredited, and today railway spine injury has gone into the ontological dustbin of history the way that phlogiston, the ether, the bodily humors, Saint Vitus’s dance, the evil eye, and the King’s touch have done. There is an added twist to the causal story of railway spine injury, as Peter Barham points out.10 Emile Kraepelin, the “discoverer” of dementia praecox, the precursor of schizophrenia, set out to challenge the notion that an injury like railway spine had any medical credibility, and Kraepelin’s syndrome, or accident neurosis, became the name of a condition that its discoverer insisted was the true cause of illnesses like railway spine, to wit, the mental weakness, avarice, and fairy tales of the supposed victims.11 So here we have a subsequently declared nonexistent physical trauma, railway spine injury, spawning an also subsequently acknowledged nonexistent psychological condition, Kraepelin’s syndrome, in a kind of mutual symbiosis. In setting out to debunk the existence of something essentially fictional in the name of something purportedly “real,” Kraepelin inevitably conferred the same fate on the very means he used to accomplish his work of theoretical deflation: the nonexistence of the trauma that the injury putatively referred to required that he then had to give an adequate causal account of the holding of this particular set of false beliefs. Instead of doing this (i.e., giving a satisfactory causal account of why sufferers of railway spine injury held their specific kind of false belief), Kraepelin confused moral vituperation with the badly needed properly causal, and ontological, analysis. He merely piled his own set of false beliefs onto another set of false beliefs. The concept trauma, therefore, derives from a particular convergence of psychological states in the mind of an individual, social and cultural interests, scientific theory and analysis, and a requisite crystallization of public opinion. Only when the right kind of causal thread knits together the elements of this convergence


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do we have the possibility, but never the certainty, of an adequate judgment regarding the imputation of the trauma in question. The notion of trauma is therefore always the outcome of a specific kind of cultural production or construction. In this respect, although it sometimes has the appearance of being a term whose semantic properties are based in large part on conceptions and principles currently prevalent in medical science, trauma is not on a par semantically with a concept like water, whose defining physical property (“water consists of two hydrogen molecules linked to an oxygen molecule”) is much less open to political construction than is a concept like trauma. As Barham points out, the notion of shell shock was contested right from the beginning by the medical and governmental establishments in Britain and Germany, which insisted that there really was no such medical condition and that those displaying the symptoms of what was taken to be shell shock were really malingerers or fakers hoping to avoid the more onerous aspects of war service. Ranged against such opinions were the viewpoints of such figures in the world of psychoanalysis as D. W. Winnicott and W. R. Bion (himself a highly decorated soldier in World War I), who argued that all human beings, if brought to the breaking point applicable to them, could collapse psychologically. There was no absolute safeguard, whether it involved the right kind of Englishness or a form of courage and fortitude congruent with a certain image of a wholesome soldierly maleness, that prevented total collapse if a devastating enough situation brought the individual to the point of mental breakdown. As Bion put it, in a manner reminiscent of the view of William James (“You run, and because you run in this particular way, you are afraid”), the difference between courage and cowardice in war was often simply the direction in which you ran.12 The immense challenge for the psychiatric profession World War I was to provide a causal narrative that sanctioned the move from “X ran away from the enemy” to “X displayed a more or less unusual range of symptoms for a soldier involved in combat” to “The symptoms displayed by x were wholly compatible with the situation of someone in a state of shell shock (or who was behaving in a cowardly way).” The problem, of course, was that coming to a decisive judgment with regard to each of these statements involved more than just the invocation of a traumatic condition — the determination “Behavior b in principle constitutes the conduct of someone in a traumatic


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state,” which has to lie at the heart of any viable diagnostic procedure, has to be made before the judgment “Soldier x manifesting behavior b is truly in a state of trauma” can be rendered plausible. There are a number of palpable interpretive gaps between these statements, gaps that must be addressed and resolved before the notion of a trauma can compellingly be invoked where soldier x is concerned. This is why one soldier’s running away from the enemy is cowardice, while the same bodily behavior displayed by another soldier in similar circumstances may be interpreted as a courageous and strategic retreat. That is to say, some fairly complicated behavioral taxonomies and analytical procedures have to be set up before these interpretive gaps can be filled and soldier x can be given a definitive diagnosis. And there is no way that these behavioral taxonomies and analytical procedures can be guaranteed to be free of presumptions saturated with that culture’s prevailing ideologies regarding health, masculinity, patriotism, education, family upbringing, Englishness, Japaneseness, and so on. Before there can be the perception of trauma, there has to be fantasy (in the nonpejorative sense of the term, so perhaps “fantasy” here is better rendered as “phantasy”), and more often than not the functions of these fantasies are not discernible to those caught up in that historical moment. Such are some of the truisms regarding the ascription of trauma. Politicide and Trauma

When I told my colleagues that I was taking part in a symposium on Asia and trauma, several asked whether this was going to be a conference on the Asian tsunami catastrophe. Of course, the blanket media coverage given the tsunami disaster, with its television pictures of dazed survivors, blank expressions on their faces, wandering aimlessly among the flattened ruins of towns and villages, was a particularly vivid depiction of an undeniably traumatic experience. But two concerns are germane at this point. The first is that every expression of trauma, whether it is employed directly by the traumatized individual per se or whether it is used by others to depict the experience of the individual in question, operates on at least two quite distinct levels. One is the purely affective or visceral (as manifested in the glazed expressions, unstoppable sobbing, cries of anguish, and repeti-


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tive bodily movements of the visibly traumatized person), and the other is the intellectual or sense making (as when attempts, no matter how immediate or short term, are made to place the experience or event in some kind of explanatory framework, e.g., by invoking notions of divine retribution or wrath, the work of a hated enemy, or even the acknowledgment that what transpired was the work of purely natural forces).13 Generally speaking, ascriptions of trauma (and this elaborates Bataille’s distinction between a mute sensibility and a rational sensibility in responding to profound suffering), approaching trauma primarily in terms of an intellectual sensibility while more or less deemphasizing an affectivity that exceeds words, lead away from the horror that lies at the heart of the tragedy at issue. It is then almost inevitable that the event in question will be detached from the horrifying immediacies that mark it as the tragedy or abomination it was. The outcome of this is a “taking over” of the event by the system or economy in which it comes to be placed. When this occurs, the significance or impact of an event will then be determined by the manner of its incorporation into the system — it will be noticed to the extent it can be incorporated, or disregarded if it resists or avoids this incorporation. The manner of its being noted will also be determined by the mode of its insertion into the system or economy of knowledge that is used for this purpose. To consider an example, it is now widely accepted that around 500,000, and possibly up to a million, Indonesian communists and their family members were wiped out in 1965 – 66 when General Suharto came to power with the connivance of the U.S. government.14 This politicide, conducted with unsparing brutality, killed at least as many people as died in the recent Asian tsunami catastrophe, but rarely is this slaughter depicted as a trauma for those who survived.15 It could also be noted that the mass killings undertaken by Pol Pot’s regime in Cambodia are presented as a national trauma for that country, as is the more recent genocide in Rwanda, both of which have been the subject of award-winning films. Why the seeming discrepancy between these cases and the Indonesian Great Killings of 1965? Of course media coverage has a great deal to do with it, and it cannot be denied that the Indonesian politicide has been one of the great silences of the last century. This silence has much to do with the politics of knowledge — exposing


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the undeniable brutality of the Pol Pot regime was very much in the interest of the western powers — and although most of the world stood idly by while the Rwandan genocide took place, the events did come to receive wide media exposure because those on the right quickly used Rwanda as a stick with which to beat the United Nations for its incompetence and foot dragging, while those on the left drew attention to the region’s pervasive economic and political instability (due in large part to the abundance of its mineral resources and the catastrophic weakening of its colonially instituted state structures) as the primary source of the tragedy. Systems of knowledge were readily at hand to delineate the contours of the Rwandan disaster. In the case of the Indonesian politicide, there was no readily at hand political epistemology to facilitate grasping the killing of a huge number of people merely for their membership in a political party that was opposed to Suharto. The western powers approved of Suharto’s actions, and the pro-western international media was then focused on Vietnam (and in any case was not generally disposed to dwell on what were inconvenient realities from the perspective of the western powers). Moreover, the Suharto regime did succeed in its initial efforts to conceal the magnitude of what had just transpired. But even in the absence of this political epistemology, the brute realities of the trauma faced by a huge number of people come through in the accounts given by those who survived — the rounding up of whole neighborhoods for mass execution by machine gun, the bloodlettings by military-led gangs wielding parangs (a weapon comparable to the machete), and so on. This was indeed savagery of vast proportions, and there must have been uncountable screams of pain, cries of despair, and of course the symptomatic vacant expressions of those who managed to survive. Yet the Indonesian politicide is hardly noticed, even today, except by the relatively few who have a more than cursory interest in Indonesia. This conclusion is therefore also inescapable: what counts as trauma is always politically constituted, even if other considerations are also germane in such a reckoning. The second concern is the fact that it is sometimes easier to associate trauma with a natural disaster like the Asian tsunami catastrophe than it is to associate it with an explicitly political event. Some commentators on the Asian tsunami noted that the outpouring of sympathy and aid from the advanced industrial countries did not extend to the hundreds of thousands of


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civilians, mainly children, killed in Iraq during the period of U.N.-imposed sanctions on Saddam Hussein’s regime and during the current U.S. occupation. Death by tidal wave evidently moves more human hearts to charity than does death at the hands of American “smart” bombs. But again, although there is massive trauma in parts of Iraq (Fallujah, for instance), as was the case with the Indonesian politicide, it is hardly given a glance by the rest of the world. Where does this leave any consideration of the question of trauma? It goes without saying that pain and suffering will continue to exist and that what we do as intellectuals and academics will not change things in a hugely significant way (which is not to say that the intellectual classes should remain detached from this struggle against misery and affliction). As long as human beings continue to suffer, it will be important to keep a place for the affective or somatic dimension of the notion of trauma. If people suffer, there will continue to be screams of pain, cries of dereliction, empty and dazed-looking faces, and the other more silent manifestations of trauma, such as acting out, nightmares, depression, insomnia, and other psychological ills, and these must be attended to in all their immediacy, by means of medical interventions if these are called for. A more equal and compassionate society will not, after all, be able to eliminate entirely the misery inflicted by a landslide or a volcanic eruption. Inasmuch as the notion trauma refers to these visceral or somatic aspects of human suffering and does not deflect attention from them, then by all means let us retain the notion. But when it comes to its epistemological component, then, given the inescapable realities of the term’s political constitution, I believe we would be better off in most cases if the notion of trauma was supplanted by forms of language employing more explicitly political concepts and principles, such as liberty, equality, and human solidarity, and by descriptors that facilitated such an engagement with the political. These descriptors, while being attuned to the visceral phenomena just described, would not permit the kinds of ambiguity and vagueness that typically permeate the term trauma. Thus, (i) “X was traumatized by the killing of her communist father by soldiers of the Indonesian army in 1965” is inherently less precise as a description than


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(ii) “X had a nervous breakdown immediately after the killing of her communist father by soldiers of the Indonesian army in 1965,” and (ii) in turn is not as precise as (iii) “X committed suicide, before which she was housebound by a severe depression immediately after the killing of her communist father by soldiers of the Indonesian army in 1965,” which in turn is not as precise as (iv) “X hung herself, and for weeks before this could not sleep for more than two hours a night, had no appetite, cried for hours at a time, and would lock herself in a room for most of the day.” As far as one can tell, nothing is lost by substituting (iv) for (iii), or (iii) for (ii) and (i), or even (ii) for (i).16 The concept of trauma clearly accomplishes very little here. The great merit of the type of description embodied in (iv), and to a lesser extent (iii), is that it furnishes a more accurate indication of the consequences of the Indonesian army’s actions under General Suharto; thus, given the putting in place of the appropriate enabling conditions, it allows the greater possibility of rectification. Of course, the mere availability of (iv) as a description cannot on its own ensure a good enough response to any state of affairs calling for remediation — as was pointed out earlier, the main problem with Indonesian politicide has been the huge failure on the part of the general public in the west to recognize that it is not only a momentous historical event but also one of the great moral catastrophes of the last century. In the absence of the requisite degree of public recognition, not even (iv) can have enough purchase on the apparatuses of opinion formation to accomplish much. Before there can be conditions that permit (iv) to be brought to the point of widespread acknowledgement, there has to be an enabling politics. But given this politics, (iv) is more likely in principle than statements like (i) to provide a sense of the scale of the crimes committed by the Suharto dictatorship. When it comes to the possibility of a political and (where necessary) personal remediation, (iv) will work only if the right kind of epistemology can be constructed for disseminating the traumatic event involved. This episte-


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mology will put in place the kind of structure of feeling (to borrow a term from Raymond Williams) needed to ensure a broader appreciation of a catastrophe or disaster whose distinctive features will otherwise be effaced. The combination of this structure of feeling with the appropriate means of registering the somatic and visceral dimensions of physical and psychic injury will very likely do the job of any traumatic theory. It will sometimes take generations to mobilize the collective resources needed to generate the requisite structure of feeling — it is only in the last few decades, for instance, that we have begun to acknowledge in a more complete way the human costs of the Spanish conquest of South America, or of Britain’s involvement in the nineteenth-century Chinese opium trade. Similar claims can be made about the plight of the so-called comfort women from Korea who suffered at the hands of the Japanese army during World War II, and there are Armenians who insist that the genocide perpetrated by the Turks against the Armenian nation in the early part of the twentieth century is still not sufficiently appreciated. If the invocation of “trauma” allows events such as these to be brought to a wider public consciousness and to facilitate the needed restitution for crimes committed and pain inflicted, then the concept has served its purpose. If something else is likely to accomplish this task better — and I believe this to be the case — then by all means let us not get too fixated on trauma theory. Now for some notes regarding the concept that goes by the name Asia, which, just as much as trauma, is the result of a number of theoretical operations that are integrally bound up with its production as a concept. Asia

Where Asia is concerned, the same variability and unevenness that permeates the application of trauma as a concept is also much in evidence. To say this, we have only to notice how the various nomenclatures regarding the term Asia are used by different ideological constituencies. Thus one cannot fail to observe that the U.S. State Department’s spokespersons have for the last several years taken to using the term western Asia to refer to what most of us regard as the Middle East. The unstated reasoning behind this piece of semantic gerrymandering is really not that hard to discern: the term western


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Asia has a clean-slate neutrality behind it that erases the grubby fingerprints of official U.S. policy now sticking to any labeling using the Middle East as its geopolitical point of reference (such as America’s gross partiality toward Israel or its cozying up to oil-rich and undemocratic Arab regimes). Anyone not serving the remit of the U.S. State Department, however, has very little reason to use the label western Asia. If one of us were about to embark on a lecture tour encompassing Beirut, Damascus, Ramallah, and Cairo and told our friends that we were going to western Asia, the response would probably be one of bewilderment. For where does the eastern Mediterranean end and western Asia begin? Is Lebanon in the eastern Mediterranean or in western Asia? Could it be in both at the same time? Is the Red Sea in western Asia or in North Africa? One poses such questions not because an answer to them is absolutely called for but because all the available answers will be arbitrary, and the workings of a cynical political reason are able to be at their most insidious precisely when one answer is presumed to be less arbitrary than the others. More generally, therefore, all answers to the question “What is Asia?” and its cognates (“What is Asian?” “Why Asia?” “How come Asia?” “Which Asia?”) will rely on one or several theoretical operations that enable these answers to be produced in ways that reflect certain interests and deemphasize others. In the end, one would have to produce a conceptual archaeology of Asia to get a comprehensive sense of what these theoretical operations, and their accompanying structures of plausibility, can really accomplish, and this is beyond the scope of a single essay. Fortunately, the past few years have seen a substantial body of work that gives us a good sense of what the lineaments of such a conceptual archaeology should look like, thanks to the writings of Andre Gunder Frank, Arif Dirlik, Benedict Anderson, Prasenjit Duara, Bruce Cumings, Jim Hevea, Ranajit Guha, Judith Farquhar, Chalmers Johnson, and Samir Amin (and this is to mention only those whose writings I am familiar with). Suffice it to say that theoretical operations of the kind just mentioned rely on the use of a political reason, and, to state the obvious, not all forms of political reason are equally geared to serving the requirements of liberty, equality, and human solidarity. The conceptual knowledge of Asia generated by a journal like positions is of a qualitatively different political order from the equivalent knowledge created by the State


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Department or the USIS or the Wall Street Journal, and Arif Dirlik, say, has a very different conception of Asia from the one to be found in the writings of Samuel Huntington or Thomas Friedman. The disappointing but nonetheless salutary thing about stating matters at an ontological level is that in the end, the portentous western philosophical language notwithstanding, one is only assembling a collection of platitudes. This is not an attempt to write an escape clause into the argument of this essay, because anyone capable of dealing with abstract conceptions and with sufficient general information will know that those who produce knowledge designed to be at the disposal of George W. Bush are involved in the creation of something that, say, Nelson Mandela, Mohandas Gandhi, or Ho Chi Minh would never have stood for. It is a platitude that if your standpoint is congruent with the one identified with Edward Said, Frantz Fanon, or Paolo Freire, then it is difficult to imagine how it can be acceptable in principle to George W. Bush and his born-again evangelical Republican supporters, and vice versa. Political knowledge is fundamentally a matter of establishing, or insisting on, demarcations between different alignments of institutions and political subjects when these institutions and subjects happen to occupy and represent incompatible political positions. Otherwise one might as well say that the queen of England is a passionate (but closet) admirer of Ho Chi Minh and what he represented, or that Silvio Berlusconi’s populist vision of Italian politics is one that would somehow have appealed to Antonio Gramsci. An Asian political knowledge, therefore, would be one that for me enabled a resuscitation of the nonaligned Bandung Project of the period between the 1950s and 1970s. This political knowledge or reason would have as its goal the creation of an Asian power bloc, or a network of such blocs, that made possible a principled division between a political order based on the exigent claims of liberty, equality, and human solidarity and one that put greed and naked self-interest (the prevailing raison d’être of the current neoliberal world system) ahead of our collective well-being. The Bandung Project did insist on a fundamental political demarcation that stood for Asian and other nonaligned collective interests, a demarcation that represented, during the brief time it lasted, a bulwark against western expansionism. The project


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sanctioned a vision of third world political alignment that countered the first phases of the current stage of liberal economic globalization, and the revivification of this project, albeit along different lines, will similarly aspire to counteract the current phase of the world system.17 The drift of the preceding remarks is that very little hinges on “getting it right” with regard to the conceptualization of Asia. Far more important, if one is concerned with what the notion of a collective social and cultural trauma encompasses, is the fundamentally polarized nature of the Asian system. Following the lead of Samir Amin and others, Asia today can be said to be divided into the following tiers of economic development: A top tier, consisting of industrially advanced countries (Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, Singapore) A middle tier, consisting of countries fairly well advanced along the path of industrialization (China, India, Malaysia) A lower tier, consisting of countries that have only just crossed a rudimentary threshold of industrial development (Thailand, the Philippines, Vietnam) A bottom tier, consisting of countries still rooted in an outmoded system of production, based overwhelmingly on the extraction of natural resources (Bangladesh, the republics of Central Asia, Mongolia, East Timor) If it is accepted as a premise that the likelihood of collective social and cultural trauma is increased to the extent that the society in question belongs to the lower tiers of this system (collective social trauma is more likely in Bangladesh than in Singapore), then — the conceptual difficulties that exist with regard to this notion notwithstanding — any amelioration of the possibility of trauma is going to entail an overthrowing of this massively polarized system. A hegemonic American twenty-first century will only conduce to the maintenance of this system, so the following conclusion is inescapable: a non-American twenty-first century is the direct or indirect aspiration of those seeking relief from the collective miseries administered by this inequitable world system.


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Notes

1

2

3

4

I am grateful to Tani Barlow for the invitation to the “War Capital Trauma” conference at the University of Washington, Seattle, which provided the occasion for giving a shorter version of this essay. Useful comments from two unnamed referees for this journal also helped in its revision. On the role of the media in disseminating images and other representations of trauma, see Jeffrey C. Alexander, “Toward a Cultural Theory of Trauma,” in Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, ed. Alexander, Ron Eyerman, Neil J. Smesler, Bernard Giesen, and Piotr Stzompka (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2004), 1 – 30. This is why, the many humorous asides notwithstanding, Žižek has a serious point regarding the capturing of such notions as “trauma” by the popular and even entertainment media. In Lacanian terms, this kind of capturing represents a perversion that sets limits on jouissance — by turning trauma into a commonplace of popular culture, an approach to “genuine” trauma is foreclosed. In genuine trauma there is no meta-language available that enables a subject to grasp the traumatic object, so this object is a fundamental and insurmountable obstacle that defeats from the beginning the very ambition to “tell everything.” In the case of a genuine or Lacanian trauma, no limit is set on the potentially terrifying encounter with one’s jouissance, unlike the banalized cases in which the traumatic object is merely another incitement to, or excuse for, endless speechifying (“We all need closure,” “Let me tell this TV audience what happened to me on that horrible evening,” etc.) on television shows like Oprah and Dr. Phil. This is the premise behind the excellent, but still incomplete, genealogy proposed in Ruth Leys, Trauma: a Genealogy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). See also Ian Hacking, “Madness: Biological or Constructed,” in his The Social Construction of What (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). Regarding how I designate trauma in this text, the placing of the term in quotation marks refers to any linguistic usage of the term, trauma refers specifically to the concept or idea, and the term without italics or quotation marks designates the putative realities signified by the term. See, for instance, Marike Gijswijt-Hofstra and Roy Porter, eds., Cultures of Neurasthenia from Beard to the First World War (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2001), especially Michael Neve, “Public Views of Neurasthenia: Britain, 1880 – 1930,” 141 – 59, for British cases. For American cases and treatments, see Tom Lutz, American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1991). The symptoms of this now discredited medical condition included having artistic interests, effeminacy (i.e., perceived homosexuality), lethargy, excitability, premature baldness, asthma, skin rashes, hot flashes, hypochondria, sciatic pain, bodily numbness, anorexia, epileptic seizures, dreaminess, dizziness, failing eyesight, “sexual weakness,” brain exhaustion, and so on. The purported cures were gender specific: bed rest for women and vigorous outdoor exercise and travel for men, though later electric


5

6 7 8

9 10

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shock treatment was prescribed for both genders. Famous neurasthenics include Friedrich Nietzsche, Henry Adams, Leo Tolstoy, William James, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Theodore Roosevelt, Theodore Dreiser, Joseph Conrad, James Joyce, Siegfried Sassoon, Wilfred Owen, T. S. Eliot, and numerous others. In case one is inclined to think that neurasthenia is a culture-bound condition, Arthur Kleinman, Social Origins of Stress and Disease: Depression, Neurasthenia, and Pain in Modern China (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1986), argues that Chinese culture has a version of this illness. Shenjing shuairuo is the term given in Kleinman as the Chinese equivalent of neurasthenia. For accounts of this syndrome, see Gwee Ah Leng, “Koro — a Cultural Disease,” in The Culture-Bound Syndromes: Folk Illnesses of Psychiatric and Anthropological Interest, ed. Ronald C. Simons and Charles C. Hughes (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), 155 – 59; and Robert E. Bartholomew, “The Medicalization of Exotic Deviance: A Sociological Perspective on Epidemic Koro,” Transcultural Psychiatry 35 (1998): 5 – 38. A West African version of this syndrome posits a penis-snatching episode as the cause of the sufferer’s condition. The most informative account I have come across is Robert L. Winzeler, Latah in SouthEast Asia (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995). Gwee Ah Leng, “Koro — a Cultural Disease,” 156. The phenomenon of a culture-bound syndrome possessing features that are seemingly cross-cultural poses a number of interesting issues that cannot be pursued here for reasons of space. At issue is the question of causality: if, say, three or four different cultures share the same religion, and the aetiology of the syndrome appears to be religious, then this could account for what seems like a commonality stretching across cultural boundaries. Other causal factors making for such commonalities could include the presence of immigrant and diasporic communities, the residue of what had once been a common culture prior to the later diverging of the cultures in question, and so forth. It is interesting to note that Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen’s paper at the “War Capital Trauma” conference also dealt with the phenomenon of railway spine injury. Peter Barham, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2004), 6, 142, 146, 158, and 366. I am grateful to this interesting and beautifully researched book for many details concerning railway spine injury. As the title implies, this work is about the aetiology of shell shock, precursor in many ways to today’s posttraumatic stress disorder, but it does contain fascinating information about a whole range of psychological phenomena connected with the various medically accepted traumas, of both today and bygone times. Adam Phillips’s review of this book gave me the idea that the various administrative battles to have shell shock recognized as a war-induced trauma depended on the ability (or inability) of the involved parties to have their views of causation accepted. Thus for the conservative psychiatric and military establishments, shell shock was caused by a cowardly disposition that could not deal with the challenges of war, while for a new kind of psychiatrist attuned to the plight of shell-shocked soldiers, the cause was a psycho-physical


11 12 13

14

15

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collapse brought about by the ferocity of war itself. For one group, those displaying the symptoms of shell shock were slackers; for the other more progressive group, war itself had exceeded the capacities of human beings to come to grips with the devastation that confronted them. See Adam Phillips, “Malingering: Review of Peter Barham, Forgotten Lunatics of the Great War,” London Review of Books 27, no. 5 (2005): 20 – 21. Barham, Forgotten Lunatics, 139 – 44. Mentioned in Phillips, “Malingering,” 21. For a similar distinction between the levels of the purely sensory and the intelligible, see Georges Bataille, “Concerning the Accounts Given by the Residents of Hiroshima,” trans. Alan Keenan, in Trauma: Explorations in Memory, ed. Cathy Caruth (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995), 211 – 35. Bataille’s main point, referring to John Hersey’s Hiroshima, which presents firsthand accounts of the atomic bomb survivors, hinges on the following intellectual cul-de-sac confronting any attempt to make sense of what happened. While the survivors’ attempts to find a credible explanation for what they were going through in their immediate responses to the explosion were nearly all mistaken (though strictly speaking there was no explosion because the atomic bomb became a massive sunbright flare on activation, without the booming sound that typically accompanies the explosion of a conventional bomb), leaving only their terrible pain and suffering to serve as a mute and animal-like depoliticized testimony to what had just happened, for us to flee too quickly into the more easily politicized realm of intellectual representation is, says Bataille, to “cheat, and it is clear that in serving political ends it is no more than a servile, or at least subordinated sensibility” (228). Bataille insists that Hiroshima represents an “impossible horror” that cannot be encompassed linguistically in any kind of “narrow system.” I will take up Bataille’s point shortly. For helpful literature on the Indonesian Great Killings, see Ann Laura Stoller, “On the Uses and Abuses of the Past in Indonesia: Beyond the Mass Killings of 1965,” Asian Survey 42 (2002): 542 – 50; Robert Cribb, “Unresolved Problems in the Indonesian Killings of 1965 – 1966,” Asian Survey 42 (2002): 550 – 63; and John Roosa, “Violence and the Suharto Regime’s Wonderland,” Critical Asian Studies 35 (2003): 315 – 23. For the notion of a politicide, see Baruch Kimmerling, Politicide: Ariel Sharon’s War against the Palestinians (London: Verso, 2003), where the word is used to refer to Sharon’s attempt to destroy any kind of Palestinian political identity by resorting to crimes against humanity. Although there are significant differences between Sharon’s crimes against the Palestinians and Suharto’s crimes against the Indonesian communists, the fact that the latter also was seeking to eliminate any kind of communist political identity in Indonesia justifies the use of the appellation politicide. The Indonesian politicide meets some of the criteria used to define genocide by international law, but this definition does not include mass killing on purely political grounds and encompasses only killing that appeals to ethnic, religious, national, and racial reasons for its supposed justification. If the standard definition of geno-


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cide had included mass killings undertaken for purely political reasons, it could be used to characterize Suharto’s slaughter of the Indonesian communists. As it is, the term politicide is more appropriate, as long as it is acknowledged that the Indonesian politicide involved the wholesale annihilation of a huge number of people. 16 A caveat needs to be entered here, because there are versions of trauma theory that reserve the idea of trauma for a very specific condition, namely, the situation of someone confronted by an event that defeats the subject’s processes of conscious assimilation, so the psychic registers of the event are now lodged entirely in the unconscious, where, having undermined the subject’s extant forms of psychic organization, they return repeatedly in the form of somatic symptoms that express in a displaced acting out the now-repressed initial confrontation with the event in question. On this psychic trauma, see J. Laplance and J.-B. Pontalis, The Language of Psychoanalysis, trans. Donald Nicholson-Smith (New York: Norton, 1973), 465 – 69. For a detailed application of this psychoanalytic approach, see Cathy Caruth, Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative, and History (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996). We should, however, be reluctant to confine the concept’s scope to this psychoanalytic framework, if only because of its complete reliance on a psychoanalytic conceptual architecture — this architecture’s focus on the psyche of the subject makes it more difficult to give an account of the forms of collective trauma, where, unless one is a Jungian, it becomes more difficult to talk of a collective unconscious, at least in connection with psychic injury. 17 The original Bandung Project failed primarily because its focal point was the nation-state headed by native bourgeois elites, and its driving strategy was derived from the failed ideology of economic catching-up. For this assessment of the Bandung Project, see Samir Amin, Obsolescent Capitalism, trans. Patrick Camiller (London: Zed Books, 2003).