Notes on Readings
I read Cathy Caruth’s interpretation of Fraud as a critique of both representation, and cause and effect, that encourages us to create new languages, sensibilities and narrative forms that are capable of ‘listening as departure’ in order to provide ‘the very link between cultures’ and ‘make possible survival’.
Cathy Caruth points to the categorisation of PTSD as the point trauma necessarily had to become ‘all inclusive’ of the field’s psychoanalysis, psychiatry, sociology, and literature. I appreciate that they state in the introduction that they are not attempting to understand traumas ‘surprising impact’ but to ‘examine how trauma unsettles and forces us to rethink our notions of experience’.
Post-traumatic stress is defined as a response to an overwhelming event or events. It is stated a person becomes ‘possessed’ by the image of this event. It is noted that flash backs or nightmares tend to be very literal.
A temporality is introduced to the concept of trauma by the collapsing of the witness ‘as the victim was never fully conscious during the accident’. ‘Since the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in connection with another place, and another time’. Leading to the ‘inaccessibility of its occurrence’.
There is a push in the text to reread Fraud not as attempting to place trauma inside as a neurotic distortion or outside the psyche but allowing it to live outside of boundaries of any singular place or time. This reading stops historical psychiatry depoliticizing of trauma.
The impossibility of direct access opens a new space of lessoning, ‘listening as departure’. ‘Trauma itself may provide the very link between cultures: not as a simple understanding of the past of other but rather, within the traumas of contemporary history, as our ability to listen through departures we have all taken from ourselves.
This proposed ‘listening as departure’ is carved out to have a necessary collective dimension ‘traumatic history, then, is also the project of listening beyond the pathology of individual suffering, to the reality of a history that in its crises can only be perceived in unassimilable forms. Writing, then, isn’t about documenting either helpless damage or heroic recovery from trauma—it’s an experimentation with, and building of, a strange and unpredictable world. Trauma is a world, and it comes into being as it is sensed.
The history of Art and the history of medicine have distinct histories, medicine is clinical, prescriptive and aims to dictate truths towards passive subjects, art embraces complexity and multiplicity, and offers up agency, nuance and subjectivity to the person interpreting it. Caruth makes a compelling argument to read trauma through both disciplines.
Art I am interested in that could be explored with these ideas include
1. We, the Heartbroken by Gargi Bhattacharyya. Reflective essays on revolutionary brokenheartedness.
2. Madlove: A Designer Asylum, by James Leadbitter. James designs a Utopian Asylum with people who have experience in them that allows for people to be loved rather than punished. Creating less punishing environments to experience mental distress, the artist says going mad is a thing humans need to do.
3. The exhibition – Reflections from a damaged life at Ravens Row in London, curated by Lars Bang Larsen. ‘It seeks to redefine the psychedelic in terms of an art that deals with events and effects: events in social space as well as in the nervous system, and effects that spread as a kind of unconditional exchange between free subjects in a new sensorial community.’