Abstract
Media and trauma are technologically intertwined and even interdependent, this is one of the central arguments of Amit Pinchevski's wide-ranging and important book Transmitted Wounds (2019). The book advances debates in trauma theory and psychoanalytic media studies in a highly original and clear manner. It will be of interest to students, academics and clinicians alike. Drawing on psychoanalytic trauma studies and media theory, a number of fascinating case studies are presented that in different ways make the case for the need to consider the technicity and structure of mediated trauma. Defining trauma in this context as ‘mediation of failed mediation’ (p. 1), Pinchevski considers different periods and mediums in and through which trauma and traumatic events were circulated, negotiated or represented. Depending on its mediating technology, trauma has and gives rise to a different ‘technological unconscious’ (p. 44) whereby the very conditions of trauma are tied to its form and technological dimensions. The book can also be regarded as a historical survey of technological developments since the radio became a mass medium in the early 20th century up to more contemporary phenomena such as virtual reality. In this combination, it is a skillful tour-de-force of how trauma, both in conceptual and more practical terms, is intrinsically shaped by the technology through which it is mediated. Pinchevski innovatively contributes to media theory and the wider infrastructural turn in media studies and related disciplines.
Following the Introduction, the book consists of different case studies on the broadcasting of the Eichmann trial (Chapter 1), videotape and Holocaust testimony (Chapter 2), screen trauma and mediated exposure to traumatic events (Chapter 3), virtual ‘interactive’ Holocaust testimony (Chapter 4), and VR-based therapy (Chapter 5). Shifting away from the many studies that have analysed the representation of traumatic events, the book grants agency to media technologies which partake ‘in the very construction of the traumatic itself.’ (p. 3). Media technology, as Friedrich Kittler argued, is to an extent traumatic in itself. Pinchevski, who draws on Kittler, argues that media condition trauma through their non-discursive and non-symbolic mechanisms. ‘Media (re)produce the traumatic by effecting its ungraspability affectively, by imparting impact in excess of content, sensation in excess of sense.’ (p. 11). In that sense, media (fail to) or perhaps somewhat aspire to embody a logic of the (Lacanian) real.
Pinchevski demonstrates how trauma is and was enacted, intensified, even brought into being through media. For instance, in the case of the radio broadcasts of the Eichmann trial, it was the radio that was responsible for ‘relaying the process whereby the Holocaust became a collectively shared trauma in Israel.’ (p. 28).
Through the medium of radio, the very ontological conditions of trauma itself were re-enacted: ‘the severance between the somatic and the phonetic, between the corporeal container and its expressive signs.’ (p. 39). Pinchevski continues his discussion in Chapter 2 on the Yale Holocaust survivors’ video archive. In clear and elegant writing, he unpacks how the videocamera and the recording of the footage on videotape enabled the testimony of Holocaust survivors: ‘Testimony is the search for a missing record, on record.’ (p. 49). Rather than regarding film or television as a completely ‘new’ or different medium than radio, it figured as a technology that amplified the voice of the survivor by ‘making the image an extension of the voice’ (p. 50). Through failed attempts at mediating the traumatic, not only what is said but how something is said and what is left out, come into focus, literally through the focus of the camera and metaphorically through analyses. In the chapter on screen trauma, Pinchevski turns from analyses and theorizations of mediation of trauma to the question of trauma occurring as a result of exposure to or consumption of media content. The fact that the potential to be traumatized or fundamentally shocked by media content was recognized but also contested by clinicians, policymakers and courts from the ca. 1980s onwards, further strengthens the book's argument that today trauma itself and specific conditions such as PTSD are understood in audio-visual terms and through the usage of metaphors taken from media. While, as Pinchevski shows, such understandings and deployments of metaphors have a much longer history, they acquire particular salience in the second half of the 20th century. Numerous traumatic events, such as the 9/11 attacks, that were broadcast have been discussed as having post-traumatic effects on audiences. This also extends to the operators of US drones who kill others in countries far away. This is problematized by him as there is a danger of technological determinism that automatically renders technology highly powerful, while at the same time reducing such processes to an individual condition (trauma) that is simply scaled up. Instead, the human subject is intertwined in a complex relationality with technology and, as I see it, it is only that relationality that can give rise to ‘the implicit traumatic potential of visual media’ (p. 86).
Chapter 4 on virtual, interactive Holocaust testimony is particularly fascinating and I discuss it in more detail in this book review. Pinchevski examines the New Dimensions in Testimony (NDT) project (from the University of South California). The project exhibits video testimonies of Holocaust survivors in museums, but what is unique about it is the ability of viewers to ‘interact’ with them. They can ask questions and an algorithm will process and select the most suitable answer from the recording. Pinchevski argues that the project is responsible for ‘the uncoupling of traumatic memory from the testimonial narrative as its carrier.’ (p. 91). This type of testimony fully disconnects witnessing from the person who is giving the testimony. It is rendered pain-free and comes to reproduce a database logic (Manovich, 2001; Rambatan & Johanssen, 2021) we find so common in contemporary networked environments. Following this logic, in which everything can be datafied, i.e. taken apart, categorized, and collected, several hundred questions were posed to Holocaust survivors and the most appropriate one is selected by an algorithm upon a question being uttered by a visitor in a museum, for instance. A response to ‘off-topic’ or incomprehensible questions is also recorded in each session. The technology is envisioned to be as realistic as possible in producing a Hologram of a Holocaust survivor. The project has been met with mixed responses and many have critiqued it for making testimonies less real instead of ‘future proof’ and sustainable. When I watched a short video about the project on the USC website, I was touched and affected by the ability of ‘interacting’ with a Holocaust survivor and to ask questions that could be answered. The project suggests perhaps a ‘warmer’ or more relational encounter with testimony than video- and film-based ones were able to provide to viewers. Yet, like Pinchevski, I feel uneasy about its technological underpinnings. Its use of the logic of big data limits and reduces the potential of testimony by ‘firing’ hundreds of questions at someone rather than enabling a free flowing, associative account of traditional testimony. As a German citizen, who has a particular relationship to the Holocaust, I was even more troubled by this. I regard it as essential to ‘future proof’ such testimonies, given that we are witnessing a growth of fascism and right-wing populism across the world today. However, the approach seems problematic. ‘What is revealed is not the alternative temporality of traumatic memory but the alternative temporality of computational operation.’ (p. 98), as Pinchevski writes. The NDT project simulates a smooth interaction but thereby glosses over the fact that the responses are being selected by a machine rather than the person themself. Like most contemporary AI and robots, its simulation of humanness is at best uncanny. This may not be problematic in my view, but I am more troubled by the binary logic in which one answer is selected as the most appropriate one to a given question. It is helpful to quote Pinchevski at length here: When the system receives a question, it first converts the utterance into a textual representation. Next, the system uses a statistical algorithm trained on a pull of questions and associated answers to build a model that predicts the most likely words to appear in an answer. It then ranks stored responses according to their closeness to the prediction and selects the most appropriate. Thus the system must have a representation of the answer’s main variables before proceeding to locate the best match. Pinchevski, 2019, p. 93
In its interactive and dynamic framing, the hologram is positioned ‘as a battle against the transience of the witness herself’ (p. 100) and, I would add, it is implicitly suggested by its creators that the witness can answer any questions and that the algorithm knows which answer is the best one. It deprives the witness account of agency and grants it to automated systems instead. As Pinchevski also notes, the logic of big data as shown in NDT promises a level of immersion that actually does away with the Real of mediated trauma: the gaps, inconsistencies, non-sensical sounds, the unsayable.
This idea of immersion is similar to wider cultural moments that aim to sanitise communication on and via digital networks (Rambatan & Johanssen, 2021), where everything can be classified, tracked, analysed and, ultimately, understood. Such dynamics operate with the belief that the analogue can be neatly and correctly transferred into the digital, or ‘a complete relocation of trauma from the Real to the Symbolic.’ (p. 108). This remains a fantasy that glosses over the degree of misrecognition and incomprehension that is inherent to trauma in particular and (digital) communication in general.
Chapter 5 discusses VR-based therapy that is used to treat war-related PTSD in the United States. Subjects are re-immersed in scenarios that originally led to PTSD, for instance a traumatic experience in the Iraq or Afghanistan wars. This initiative, like many others, regards mental health conditions as curable through a focus on the future and technology-based treatment. It is in direct contradiction with psychoanalytic understandings of trauma, the unconscious and subjectivity. Pinchevski argues that the VR treatment reorganizes traumatic memory into distinct mnemonic elements. Similarly to the logic of big data drawn on in Chapter 4, individual memory and traumatic experience is phased out in favor of generic yet modular scenarios.’ (p. 131).
In his discussion of the Real and trauma, Pinchevski quotes Kittler: ‘in the real everything begins with coldness, dizziness and shortness of breath.’ (Kittler, 1999, p. 15, quoted in Pinchevski, 2019, p. 15). At a time where the world remains in the Real traumatic grip of the Covid-19 pandemic, work such as this book on the structures of mediated trauma is more relevant than ever.
