Nadia Hannan Midterm Response – Email: nh923@nyu.edu

In her talk, Leda Martins introduced us to her idea of Spiral Time, a theory, which to my understanding, links together the past, present, and future, through embodied practices and performances. This idea of collapsing, bending, extending, and reconfiguring time and space seems integral in thinking through the concepts of performance, memory, and trauma. Beginning with Freud and extended through to more contemporary work by Bessel van der Kolk, the importance of the experience of time is apparent.

In “Remember, Repeating, and Working Through,” Freud proposes transference in the therapeutic process as a space in which the patient begins the process of moving away from action and repetition (performing) and towards remembering (154). In the way that transference is defined here, it becomes a sort of liminal space, created in the present while simultaneously existing somewhat outside of it by the act of recalling and bringing into consciousness memories from the past. Transference becomes a space in which “illness and real life,” come together and some form of transition occurs (154). In many ways this betweenness of the therapeutic space/time, in which traumatic memory is transformed into narrative memory, and the past is revealed in the present with the intention of shifting one’s future trajectory, occupies a similar spatial temporal position as performance.

For van der Kolk, the mailability of time becomes clear in symptoms of post-traumatic stress disorder as described in The Body Keeps the Score. “Dissociation,” van der Kolk writes, “is the essence of trauma…the sensory fragments of memory intrude into the present, where they are literally relived,” (66) resulting in an experience, and performance, of the past in and outside of the present. Using the case of Stan and Ute, van der Kolk emphasizes the way in which flashbacks place the person back in the past at the moment of trauma, as in the case of Stan, or outside of time in a sense through the processes of depersonalization, as with the case of Ute, while at the same time having a very real effect on the physiological processes of each person in the present (68-73). Through van der Kolk’s writing, we can see the way trauma acts on memory in a way that directly impacts ones lived experience.

Both Freud and van der Kolk seem to understand traumatic memory as a kind of performance, an embodied experience, however, Freud, seems to suggest that as memory moves out of the “trauma space” it also moves out of the performance space and into a cohesive narrative. The goal of the therapeutic process seems to be for the patient to stop acting out or repeating gestures, and instead get to a place of conscious remembering. While van der Kolk also sees healing from trauma as a move away from a fragmented, episodic, or fixed memory and towards an integrated narrative, he also argues that this process requires a certain amount of embodied reprograming (195-6) – actions such as yoga and touch – to regulate traumatic stress (63-4). In this way, van der Kolk remains with the body, whereas Freud can be seen as shifting away.

Moving from psychoanalytic thinking into the field of anthropology, the notion of, and necessity of valuing embodied memory carries on. In How Societies Remember, Connerton shows the ways that incorporating practices hold and transmit embodied memories and bring together the multiple dimensions of time. “Our bodies,” Connerton writes, “which in commemorations stylistically re-enact an image of the past, keep the past also in an entirely effective form in their continuing ability to perform certain skilled actions.” (72). In this way, performance becomes a way of time traveling and remembering.

In writing about incorporating practices and the development of habit memory, Connerton also touches on the notion of improvisation, specifically “failed improvisations” or “attempted improvisations,” (92). I am intrigued by this idea of improvisation as it relates to habit, particularly in what if might offer about the idea of choice (freedom) and how trauma may affect the idea of a performance of freedom. Here, I am thinking about Daniel Goldman’s book I Want to Be Ready: Improvised Dance as a Practice of Freedom and improvisation as a kind of choice which elicits a sort of power. “I have come to believe,” Goldman writes, “that improvised dance involves literally giving shape to oneself by deciding how to move in relation to an unsteady landscape” (5). Goldman also emphasis the importance of understanding improvisation as stemming from a set of learned practices (habit) and rooted in embodied history and memory. Throughout the book, she also points to instances in which improvisation is used as a tool against forms of oppressions.

I bring Goldman’s work into conversation with Connerton and the other authors we have read because there is a way in which these authors have written about the performance of embodied memory and/or traumatic memory as a kind of compulsion or unconscious act. How does Goldman’s idea of improvisation complicate this idea and show the way in which embodied history can be chosen to be performed?

This question also led me to consider the relationship between freedom and the concept of justice as proposed by Herman in Truth and Repair and the ways in which individual histories and social structures are put in conversation, and sometimes conflict, with each other. Herman clearly states that trauma is a “social problem,” (9) and can therefore be racialized, gendered, influenced by class and other inhabited identities. While I agree with Herman that there is a relationship between trauma and the social, I also question how and if the focus on the social can possibly erase or minimize the memory or trauma of the individual.

I go here to the story of Aisha and her mother, Gwendolyn Simmons’, and the minimizing of her experience with sexual assault when compared to the broader goals of the Black Power movement (56-7). Here, Simmons’ individual trauma comes into conflict with a larger social movement which results in not only the silencing of her own voice and memory, but future enactments or performances of a similar power structure when it comes to her daughter Aisha’s experiences of assault. I do not believe that Herman is in anyway arguing for some sort of hierarchy between social and individual trauma, however, I find this tension to hold some question around the space(s) occupied by memory, trauma, and performance that I am interested in exploring further.

While there are many lens through which to define and study memory, trauma, and performance, I have chosen to grapple with these concepts through the lens of temporality, in part because I find the way that each one complicates the notion of linear time to be the richest site of exploration for my own work. As touched upon earlier, I am also interested in further exploring the question of choice in memory/remembering, how trauma effects our understanding of choice, and performance as a space for exercising choice.