Editorial: On Trauma

Theatre has long engaged with schism and violence. And schism has been figured – from Aristotle to Derrida, Phelan and Turner – as the foundation both of dramatic narrative and of performance as representation. Either might suggest performance as a privileged site for the exploration of trauma. And this prospect sharpens in our present, when throughout Western and global culture, representations of trauma are so legion and so foregrounded as to constitute what has been identified as a cultural trope, characterized by both intensification and evacuation.

Luckhurst nominates British society since 1990 a ‘traumaculture’ (2003: 28), drawing on Seltzer's notion of ‘wound culture’ and his suggestion that ‘the modern subject has become inseparable from the categories of shock and trauma’ (1997: 18). Meanwhile, Wald proposes that the rise of trauma as a popular concept has reduced it to ‘the point of meaninglessness’ while also raising it as a legitimate subject within academic discourses (2007: 3). And while Sontag describes the contemporary subject as compulsively drawn to representations of violence and trauma (2003: 36), McLuhan forcefully suggests that our media-dominated world is characterized by the schisms of social ‘numbness’ and ‘mental breakdown’ (2001: 723). So the ‘traumaculture’ itself might be figured as traumatic.

Meanwhile, Western academic, artistic, journalistic, psychiatric, psychoanalytic and cultural discourses in particular have become increasingly engaged in analysis of traumata. This has in tandem privileged trauma as a route through which to examine cultural issues of experience, memory, the body and representation – especially in the fields of history, literature, cultural studies and fine art. Importantly, especially for our concerns within this issue, the genealogy of modern trauma theory, including the psycho-medical, is rich in instances that might productively be considered under the rubric of performance.

The rise of trauma theory as investigative engine has begun to problematize the term's public circulation. While the theory has hitherto found particular resonance and purchase – beyond the psycho-medical disciplines – in other fields, a number of recent and forthcoming publications attest to a developing anchor in performance and theatre studies.1 The fresh perspectives gathered in this issue of Performance Research explore ways in which performance practice can address trauma, how performance can be a critical frame for considering trauma in culture, and trauma theory and the traumatic as a productive means of thinking about performance and as a potentially potent creative force.

In moving towards the final structure of ‘On trauma’, we played with various ways of organizing the pieces into sections but rejected this on the grounds that each would reduce the dialogic potential of the ensemble. Instead, we have organized them to produce local flows and so that each in some way echoes, develops or problematizes its neighbour. For the purpose of this Editorial, meanwhile, we shall follow the broad shape of our own essay.

First, then, the nature of trauma: While it has historically been associated with physical injury, trauma is today more commonly configured within psychopathology. The wound is conceived as being either or both physical and psychic. Modern trauma theory figures trauma hallucinations as the perpetual return of an event that painfully refuses to be experienced as past. Thus, Caruth characterizes trauma as a ‘double wound’ – both event and enduring symptom (1996: 1–7). The coinage in 1980 of ‘Post Traumatic Stress Disorder’ (PTSD) to specify this continuing symptom, and almost unanimously taken up by psycho-medics since, implies that the originating event is the actual trauma, and the psychological return post hoc – something other than traumatic. The use of ‘post’ in this context denies the very presentness of trauma symptoms as part of the trauma itself. Time collapses for the traumatized.

So trauma theory suggests a performative bent in traumatic suffering itself – the trauma-symptom is a rehearsal, re-presentation, re-performance of the experience of the trauma-event, which irrupts unbidden into the sufferer's daily life. The normative assumption of trauma theory is that the sufferer needs to re-establish their life-narrative – incorporating the event as past – in order to gain closure. In this issue, two artists' pages speak directly to this concern with respect to personal trauma: Victoria Halford's exploration of the performative process of mourning and Gwynneth VanLaven's ironic enactment of gestures of palliation as performative resistance and critique. In the domain of political trauma, James Weaver and Jeanne Colleran explore how Dorfman's Death and the Maiden enacts the struggle between the often competing imperatives of personal and political/cultural closure, and how different international productions variously bore witness to or refused political critique. And Laurie Beth Clark discusses international ‘trauma tourism’ through the frames of closure, disclosure and foreclosure to map the politics and ethics of how trauma memorials variously perform and are used to perform history.

And so second, witnessing and testimony: Trauma studies place great emphasis on efficaciously observing testimony and bearing witness, and in mediating trauma through performance one bears witness to events, often re-enacting the testimony of others. Lisa Fitzpatrick addresses this concern in her exploration of Lehmann's claim that theatre enables a unique ‘politics of perception’. Anna Harpin investigates dramaturgies that generate a ‘responsible openness’ that helps render accessible the ‘shattered experiences’ of trauma And Michael LeVan theorizes the production of ‘singularities’, which ‘negotiate the limits of excess and access’ in Alfredo Jaar's work. Meanwhile, trauma theorists have urged that to witness is to be with the traumatized other in their fractured state. Opening this notion into performance realms, Amanda Stuart Fisher compares the efficacies of verbatim and testimonial theatres towards understanding ‘the different dramaturgical end-points’ they might lead us to. Each instance of performance – traumatic or theatrical – and its witnessing is bound to its given cultural context. Fitzpatrick, for instance, addresses the cultural situation of one theatre in relation to a dominant national culture of denial.

The desire to bear ‘proper’ witness to the trauma-event, lest it be forgotten or banalized, is repeatedly addressed by trauma discourses. But witnessing trauma – especially the continued witnessing of unresolved trauma – can generate second-hand memories, which themselves constitute traumatic events at both individual and cultural levels, and this comes to constitute a block to collective working-through. With this in mind, we point to Antje Diedrich's article exploring the enactment of and negotiation through the Holocaust as aporia in Tabori's Shylock Improvisations. Jules Dorey Richmond's and David Richmond's performative essay maps their particular route towards witnessing such a heritage.

Third, trauma and selfhood: The disruptive and uninvited nature of trauma-symptoms causes breaks in the survivor-sufferer's construction of self and often in their capacity to frame and develop that self in relationship to others. But how impermeable is any self? Branislava Kuburović articulates Kira O'Reilly's skin-based performance work, moving from Anzieu's characterization of the skin as both protective psychic container and interface with the Other to Ettinger's model of ‘trans-subjectivity’. Diego Benegas maps the identitarian politics both of state moves to foreclose trauma and of performative forms to disrupt this in post-dictatorship Argentina. His essay thus highlights the way in which trauma – especially political trauma – disrupts the ever-evolving construction of identity at personal and collective levels, and how performance can both intervene in and act as frame of analysis for both identity-formation and its traumatic undoing.

Embedded in any conception and indeed actuality of self or subject and thereby trauma is the issue of power relations across cultural difference. In an essay that tugs at this thread, Victoria Fortuna explores a dance that critically rehearses the violent production of gendered bodies in the Argentinian nationalist project. And Victor Ukaegbu's enthnographic essay exploring both mourning and retraumatization in Nigerian funeral rites is framed by the African continuity between the personal, social and spiritual.

Fourth, trauma seems particularly resonant of a contemporary structure of feeling. While each article in some way explores the contemporary structure of feeling that is keyed in to trauma and the traumatic in many ways, there are two essays of particular note here: Elvia Rosa Castro situates the work of Adonis Flores as a response to paranoia as cultural trauma, and Anna-Lena Werner teases out the rotations between critique and cynicism in Paul McCarthy's installations.

This issue, then, positions notions of trauma in relation to the contexts and discourses of contemporary culture and aims to expand and open concepts of performance, performance-making and artwork. This Editorial is just one possible mapping of the issue and is not intended to be definitive. We might, for example, have mapped the essays according to geographical foci or by the type of cultural object under analysis. The multiple routes we might have taken to bring these articles together are testimony to their depth and diversity.

Notes

¹ See for instance C. Wald (2007); Performance Paradigm special issue ‘After effects: Performing the ends of memory’ 5(2) (2009); A. Heathfield, ‘End time now’, in A. Heathfield (ed.) Small Acts: Performance, the millennium and the marking of time, London: Black Dog Publishing (2000); W. S. Hesford,‘Staging Terror’, TDR: The Drama Review 50(3) pp. 29–41 (2006); K. Malpede, ‘Teaching witnessing: Aclass wakes to genocide’, Theatre Topics 6(2) pp. 167–79 (1996); K. Solga, ‘Rape's metatheatrical return: Rehearsing sexual violence among the early moderns’, Theatre Journal 58(1) pp. 53–72 (2006); and ‘Blasted's hysteria: Rape, realism and the threshold of the visible’, Modern Drama 50(3) pp. 346–74 (2007). B. Trezise and C. Wake (eds) Performing Trauma: Visions and revisions, Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, is forthcoming, and P. Duggan Trauma-Tragedy: Symptoms of contemporary performance is due from Manchester University Press in 2012.