Trauma and Performance: Maps, narratives and folds

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Notes

¹ See also pp. 7–8. Adequate working-through is seen as giving access to successful mourning.

³ The model has ‘(no) thing to do with (the) internal conflict and unacceptable wishes’ of Freud's repression hypothesis of trauma (Kolk and Hart 1995: 171).

⁴ Our thanks to Kaite O'Reilly for permission to quote from the unpublished script.

⁵ In the National Theatre of Wales production, directed by Mike Pearson (2010), the Chorus carry him into the palace as if dead.

⁶ We subsume both ‘performance’ and ‘theatre’ under this phrase: the essence here is bicamerality.

⁷ We here ‘bracket off’ arguments about nationalist exploitations of the Shoah.

⁸ As Levinas (1989) recounts, Husserl argued that consciousness is intentional in that it is always conscious of something. To know is to grasp. While Husserl also theorized an ‘originary, non-theoretical intentionality’, Levinas remarks that this is still reduced to the ‘objectivizing act’ of representation (Levinas 1989: 77 -8).

⁹ The echo of Williams on ‘convention’ in this 1962 essay is striking.

¹⁰ Winnicott (2001: 97) figures the separation as a psychic threat to the infant's already-forming selfhood. In taking Lacan and Winnicott together, we might consider that there might be no identifiable moment of original separation, that traumatic schism and ego-formation are co-constitutive. Meanwhile, LaCapra (1996: 50, n10) figures the ‘pre-oedipal symbiosis’ as ‘a fictive projection from a post-oedipal position, and engagement with its ‘loss’ as ‘deep play’ in Geertz's sense. While psychoanalysis defines the subject as a self that has gained access to language, we are less rigorous in our terminology, in accordance with our sources.

¹¹ Not ascribable to any one sense.

¹² Grosz posits a succession of Kantian-Newtonian, Freudian-Einsteinian and postmodern-cyberspace correlations.

¹³ Simon Shepherd (private communication) notes some parallels with melodrama; which in turn suggest an earlier (very different) structure of feeling than the one we explore below in which trauma figures prominently. We are grateful for his several comments.

¹⁴ We make this argument fully aware of LaCapra's injunction against ‘rash amalgamations or conflations’ that suggest that ‘contemporary culture, or even all history, is traumatic’ and of his emphasis on the distinction between historic and structural trauma (1996: x and passim).

¹⁵ In Megalopolis (1992), Celeste Olalquiaga relates postmodern spatiality to ‘psychasthenia’ – to be understood as a ‘thrust into emptiness’ (the current dominant trend) or as a potential space for productive ‘crossing of boundaries’ (cited in Soja 1996: 198, 203). The latter move would re-fold the relationship between our sections 3 and 4.