Review: Amit Pinchevski, ‘Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma’
Review of Amit Pinchevski’s Transmitted Wounds: Media and the Mediation of Trauma (Oxford University Press, 2019), 200 pages.
Abstract
What is the relationship between trauma and media? What can we learn from the mediation of trauma about its nature, and what can trauma teach us about media? Amit Pinchevski's powerful book engages with these questions, presenting an eye-opening genealogy of how the understanding of trauma changed alongside technological changes and how new technologies generate new understandings of trauma.
Reviewed by Norma Musih
What is the relationship between trauma and media? What can we learn from the mediation of trauma about its nature, and what can trauma teach us about media? Amit Pinchevski's powerful book engages with these questions, presenting an eye-opening genealogy of how the understanding of trauma changed alongside technological changes. The book draws from a variety of theoretical conversations ranging from literature, media, memory studies, and psychoanalysis, elegantly pulling them together to show how new technologies generate new understandings about trauma. The media at stake are radio, videotape, television, films, holograms, and virtual reality devices. In their analysis, the book illustrates how different technologies mediate, transfer, and perform trauma showing how media technologies bear witness to unbearable human experiences while exposing the very human failure to bear witness to these very traumas. As the paradigm of the last century's collective trauma, the Holocaust plays a central role in this book that presents a chronology of trauma-media relations.
Throughout a detailed introduction and six chapters, Pinchevski outlines a methodology for exploring the close relationship between media and trauma, foregrounding the importance of understanding the structure of media for understanding the structure of trauma. The way we talk about trauma is intimately related to the technology available to us. Thus, the history of trauma discourse, at least in the 20th century, cannot be written without a history of the available and employed media technologies. Therefore, words like (victims' plural) voices, flashbacks, exposure, and trigger cut across technological and trauma therapeutic discourse.
These understandings lead to the first chapter of the book that analyzes the radio broadcasting of the Eichmann trial in Israel, scrutinizing the status of trauma between the private and the public sphere, between individual trauma and a socially shared trauma. The chapter follows the radio transmissions of the Eichmann trial in Israel: the live broadcasts and the daily recap from the courtroom. Because the live broadcast was not a daily occurrence, the narrated recap on the radio station became central to the memory of the event. This recap was edited by Kol Israel radio station, a subdivision in the prime minister's office, and the only broadcasting medium in Israel at that time.
Holocaust survivors- who were the witnesses and the audience in the trial- constituted a noticeable percentage of Israeli population during the 1950s, but their voices were not part of Israeli public sphere. The Eichmann trial and its widespread radio transmission gave these voices a new public recognition. The survivors' speechless bodies, which were part of the Israeli landscape, transformed into "disembodied speech" through the radio transmission, gaining the recognition in the 1960s they had been missing during the 1950s in Israel. It is, Pinchevski writes, "as if the logic of radio dictated a necessary trade-off: for trauma to gain voice, the body— the locus of trauma— had to be discarded. By removing survivors' voices from their bodies, radio effectively redefined the conditions by which trauma could find public articulation. The radiophonic separation between body and voice invited the return of the socially repressed" (35). Put differently, the radio transmission allowed for the public transmission of the trauma.
If radio provided speech, video, and audiovisual technology of recording, processing, and transmission, added an image to the construction of the unconscious traumatic memory. At the center of the second chapter, then, are the audiovisual testimonies of Holocaust survivors archived at Yale University (the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies). They are analyzed according to three parameters corresponding with the specificity of this media: recording, processing, and transmission. The "video testimonies" re-embody the survivor's testimonies, thus making their inadvertently tape-recorded bodily gestures, expressions, nonverbal cues, and silences part of their testimony. In other words, the videos function as a register of the trauma performativity that bears witness to the gap between the spoken and the unspoken.
At the same time, video recording of Holocaust atrocities can produce – as Dori Laub's pioneering research indicated- a platform for treating this trauma. During his work with Holocaust survivors hospitalized in mental institutions in Israel, Dori Laub introduced cameras to the therapeutic process itself. Laub hypothesized that had survivors been allowed to share their traumatic experiences, many could have been spared extended hospitalization. Videotaping their experiences was one way to do this. The survivor's video testimonies, he showed, achieved a double emancipating function: restoring survivors' lost personal records and instituting historical records for future generations (47).
Following Laub's hypothesis, Pinchevski demonstrates that media is not only therapeutic but has the potential to traumatize. This argument is further developed in the third chapter, which focuses on television screens. For Pinchevski television screens bridge between the horrors taking place far away and the viewer's environment, thereby creating the possibility to disturb the viewer's psychological well-being. Rather than a new occurrence, Pinchevski argues, screen trauma is, in a way, already implicit within the current clinical understanding of PTSD. (68) If, as Pinchevski entertains, "the seeing of suffering becomes the suffering of seeing, then the viewer becomes a (vicarious) victim of on-screen violence" (p. 68). This move opens up a range of new ethical and political questions regarding screens and their use in cultural and political settings that still need to be explored.
The appearance of digital technology marks a shift in the relationship between media and trauma. Holocaust survivor holograms are a case in point here, serving as a counter-mapping mechanism of the trauma offered by the Holocaust survivor's videotapes. Recently, American Holocaust museums (and now – British, Argentinian, and German ones as well) have begun producing filmed holograms of survivor-witnesses, with interactive conversations generated by algorithms. In his analysis, Pinchevski shows how survivor's holograms erase the traumatic memory inscribed in video testimonies by the confinement of witnessing to algorithms. Answers are generated by algorithms and omit silences, bodily cues, and moments of performative trauma in the testimony. Algorithms, which reproduce survivors' testimonies in conversation with a public, adapt their answers accordingly to the questions, shifting the testimony's weight from witness to witnessee- from the one who experienced the trauma to the one who is hearing about it. Moreover, recent developments on AI natural language generation by AI21labs have produced a language model that inserts “synthetic text between human written beginning and ending.”[1] The system called HAIM has the ability to create text, that is, to tell (by now only a part) of a story. But imagine, if this technology would be linked to a Holocaust survivor hologram filling in the gaps of the testimony, re narrating it, maybe changing it?
The closing chapter of the book centers on the relationship between virtual reality (VR) media and traumatic memory. It argues, "that the recursive channeling of mind through media and of media through mind gives rise to a changed understanding of traumatic memory, one that is consistent with the logic of digitization" (114). One particular use of virtual reality in therapy sessions for patients with PTSD illuminates the relationship between psychological processes, technological mediation, and the logic of digitization. This relationship further speaks to the potential of VR therapy as technologically-enabled applied psychology to cure trauma. The trauma that is mostly at the center of these efforts is: American soldier's trauma. Not surprisingly, VR technology is also used to train American soldiers. VR therapy was not developed to treat sexual assault victims, genocide victims, or natural disaster victims but to treat American soldiers. In this case, it seems the state apparatus- through VR technologies- monopolized the trauma and its cure.
The visual aspects of memory and trauma is a through-line of the book. The vocabulary used both to describe trauma and memory is visual. It includes words like: "snapshots," "images," and "flashes," "burnt- in," "engraved," "encoded," and "registered". These metaphors, Pinchevski writes, "are more than just figures of speech; they are epistemological scaffoldings. As Hans Blumenberg argued, metaphors are precursors of thought insofar as they fashion in advance, the basis from which concepts and theories are to emerge" (7). Metaphors are indeed one kind of images, but the book hosts more, in fact it is full of images. Arguably, memories are mental images, descriptions are verbal images, video testimonies and VR games are graphical images, and holograms are optical images. These are different kinds of images that developed in relation to distinctive institutional discourses which as W. J. T. Mitchell showed are related in a kind of family genealogy. And still, graphical images and mental images are difficult to compare. A verbal image- a traumatic memory of an event which we can only know about through language- is different from a pictorial image- a photograph of the same event we can see. Psychoanalysis, represents a verbal image tradition. Whether the image appears in dreams or in everyday life, psychoanalysis offers a technique for unlocking hidden verbal messages from the misleading pictorial surface, as for example through the unpacking of traumatic memories or dreams. But, as W. J. T. Mitchell asserts there is “a countertradition which conceives of interpretation as going in just the opposite direction, from a verbal surface to the "vision" that lies behind it, from the proposition to the "picture in logical space" that gives it sense, from the linear recitation of the text to the "structures" or "forms" that control its order.” [2] This countertradition of understanding images would complement the analysis in the book.
Memory and trauma are not only recorded as images but also transmitted as images, and as Pinchevski notes: "the transmitting power of photography does not stop at conditioning postmemory but further encompasses the conditioning of the traumatic quality attributed to that memory" (10) and can shed light in how post-traumatic processes work (74). This relationship is recognized in the DSM- V (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) which acknowledges trauma as a process induced through media as, televisual trauma following the 9/11 attacks and the traumatic symptoms developed by drone operators who were safely seated in an operation room miles away from the atrocities they commanded. The VR therapeutic games used to treat PTSD patients use images that are not reproduced images (as in imagery from photography or film) but generated by digital engines. If photography and video, as chapter two shows- reveal an optical unconscious of memory and trauma, the question is what kind of (digital) unconscious will holograms and VR technologies disclose? Since trauma represents itself in images, and disturbing memories are stored, as Max North noted, by a linked "picture recognition, affect, and physical sensation" (119) it makes sense also that a cure to the trauma will come in a visual form "unlocking" other affective responses. This theoretical link needs to be further elaborated as visual digital media evolves, and trauma becomes a worldwide condition of humanity.
Nevertheless, Transmitted Wounds will likely be one of the most influential books to foreground thinking about the widespread relationship between media and trauma. It will be of interest to media scholars as well as scholars working on memory, trauma, and digital technologies. Transmitted Wounds offers a fresh understanding of the ways media not only shows trauma but takes part in its very construction and potentially in its healing.
[2] Mitchell, W. J. T. “What Is an Image?” New Literary History 15, no. 3 (1984): 503–37.
Norma Musih is a researcher of visual culture and digital media. Musih holds a PhD from Indiana University and is currently a post-doctoral researcher in the department of Sociology and Anthropology at Ben-Gurion University of the Negev. Drawing from her curatorial work and activist engagement, in her research she traces a link between images and imagination through the analysis of archival photographs, photographs produced by activists and digital images in order to suggest practices for training a political imagination.
