Trauma and Performance: Maps, narratives and folds more

This article was downloaded by: [Duggan, Patrick] On: 26 April 2011 Access details: Access Details: [subscription number 935028012] Publisher Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 3741 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Performance Research Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.informaworld.com/smpp/title~content=t716100720 Trauma and Performance: Maps, narratives and folds Patrick Duggan; Mick Wallis Online publication date: 16 March 2011 To cite this Article Duggan, Patrick and Wallis, Mick(2011) 'Trauma and Performance: Maps, narratives and folds', Performance Research, 16: 1, 4 — 17 To link to this Article: DOI: 10.1080/13528165.2011.562674 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13528165.2011.562674 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.informaworld.com/terms-and-conditions-of-access.pdf This article may be used for research, teaching and private study purposes. 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But this is also to say that we live in a moment when society feels bound to its traumatic experiences. Just as Raymond Williams explored the possibility of modern tragedy in a dramatized society, we might ask about the figuring in performance of trauma in a traumatized culture. It might be argued that, since Modern Tragedy (1966), the mass communications systems Williams explored elsewhere have themselves traumatized the global subject – by a paradoxical combination of overload and evacuation. We consider this later. Meanwhile, notwithstanding the effects of postmodern mediations, trauma remains ordinary: He kept fainting at junior school assembly. If Sartre was right, it was Gordon’s way of opting out. The boy didn’t want to grow up. Five years earlier, when he was five, his mum Agnes told him a story about a tall dark stranger – a man she was very fond of – who had seen Gordon in his pram. By the time he was 15, Gordon fantasized about how Lionel must in fact be his real dad. Cycles of depression, suicide attempts and finally ‘schizophrenia’ set in before he was 20. When he was 39, Gordon hung himself from the trapdoor to the loft. He didn’t want to grow into another version of his dad. He despised Ray, just like Agnes did. In his early twenties Gordon had learned more about Lionel from Agnes. Just before Ray was posted to Persia during the War, he and Agnes had got engaged. While Ray was overseas, Agnes met Lionel, they fell in love – and she fell pregnant. Without meeting, the two men entered into a contest over Agnes, she carrying messages between them. It was like being in the chalk circle: being pulled by two claims that threatened to pull her apart. The final judgement was that she had two choices – break the engagement vow or marry Ray and lose the baby. Lionel’s wealthy father paid for the abortion. This wasn’t her first trauma. When Agnes was six, her abusive alcoholic dad had walked out on her, her mother and infant twins. Soon the twins contracted scarlet fever and died. And within the year her mum was dead from TB. Agnes was moved out of London to be brought up by a fierce aunt in the country, where the air was safer. And there she met Ray and they became childhood sweethearts. That’s one version. Periodically, Gordon’s younger brother Malc tells the possible narratives over – some more positive about Ray – as if bearing witness. Sometimes a shape like the Oresteia emerges: a cycle of traumatic schisms, each engendering the next – the war, the abortion, the suicide. (And what trauma was Agnes’s dad projecting?) Or, maybe the triple childhood trauma founded a perpetual interior circulation between the shadow of an inexpressible loss and a never-graspable answer to it. And perhaps Gordon somehow became the bearer of that insistent return of the trauma memory (but which? the childhood scene? the abortion? are they separable? and how separable is that from her experience of patriarchy?) that trauma theorists identify as definitional. 4 Pe rf o r m a n c e R e s e a r c h 1 6 ( 1 ) , p p . 4 - 1 7 © Ta y l o r & F ra n c i s L td 2 01 1 D O I : 1 0 . 1 0 8 0 / 1 3 5 2 8 1 6 5 . 2 01 1 . 5 6 2 67 4 Cathy Caruth provides one of the most succinct and widely adopted definitions of trauma: an overwhelming experience of sudden or catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena. (Caruth 1996: 11) consciously remember / relive / restage it in order to move beyond (fig. 1): Trauma and Performance So we can map traumatic experience in terms of two occurrences, psychically bound together: trauma-event and trauma-symptom. Individually or collectively, survivor-sufferers may become trapped in a pattern of cyclical and incomprehensible reiteration until such time as (hopefully) they negotiate a process of ‘healthy analytic … “working through”’ (Luckhurst 2008: 9). Trauma can be seen to rehearse, repeat, and re-present itself in performed ‘ghosts’ that haunt the sufferer, and to require ‘acting out’ in order to ‘work through’.1 Also at the core of contemporary trauma theory is the idea, following Caruth, that the original event is only accessible through such delayed psychic returns. LaCapra suggests that traumatic events numb the senses at the moment of impact; the body is only concerned to deal with the immediacy. Only after a period of latency is the impact felt, at which time ‘it is immediately repressed, split off or disavowed’ (LaCapra 1996: 174). The survivor-suffer experiences trauma as a historical phenomenon; the trauma-symptom is a post hoc reliving of the trauma-event. Trauma theorist Judith Herman identifies the ‘central dialectic’ of trauma as the desire to banish to history the events responsible for the hallucinatory intrusions, in opposition to the overwhelming need to speak about (testify) and in some way ‘relive’ these events in order to comprehend them, and so attempt to heal the wounds (Herman 2001: 1). However, the hallucinatory intrusions themselves might usefully be mapped as a third term in a triangulation between the desire to forget the original event, the repetitive and uninvited intrusions of fragmented memories and reenactments of that event, and the necessity to 5 • Fig. 1. Triangulated tensions in trauma.2 Downloaded By: [Duggan, Patrick] At: 15:42 26 April 2011 It is within these oppositions that traumatic memory operates. Without recourse to settling in/on any one pole, the survivor-sufferer is perpetually caught in a violently schismatic circulation between them – creating a shudder of uncertainty in their understanding of the world and their place in it. The double and repeating wound of event-and-symptom (Caruth 1996: 1–7) instigates and perpetuates a collapse of narrative time: the survivor-sufferer is unable to live in either past or present: traumatic events destroy the victim’s fundamental assumptions about the safety of the world, the positive value of self and the meaningful order of creation. (Herman 2001: 51) 1 See also pp. 7–8 . Adequate working-through is seen as giving access to successful mourning. 2 The triangulation model is taken from Duggan (2009: 38). We suggest that the survivor-sufferer is caught in a structure cognate with performance insofar as it is a mise-en-abyme in which the symptom is a representation or rehearsal of the original event but at the same time itself a traumatic event – and that this may give performance a particular purchase on trauma. Historian and trauma theorist Dominic LaCapra implicitly identifies a performative element: trauma sufferers have a tendency to ‘relive the past, to be haunted by ghosts or even to exist in the present as if one were still in the past, with no distance from it.’ (LaCapra 2001: 142–3). We might identify two complementary aspects. First, in the trauma-symptom, the trauma-event 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. performs itself as what we might term, following Schechner (1985: 35–9), a ‘restored phenomenon’. Second, the survivor-sufferer performs the symptoms of their suffering, repeatedly and compulsively ‘acting out’ words, situations and action from the trauma-event. This repetitive performance is central to contemporary understandings of trauma. Van der Kolk and van der Hart summarize a recent model from neurobiology and cognitive science, which distinguishes between two kinds of memory. Implicit memory is the ‘automatic integration of new information’ into an existing mental schema, itself derived from previous experience and identifiable with specific neural networks. Once processed, experience is available to consciousness. Narrative memory draws upon implicit memory to construct a sense of coherence in time and space. Trauma occurs when an experience is so extreme as to be inassimilable to existing schemes and is thus unavailable to symbolic manipulation, including narrative. These ‘unassimilated scraps of overwhelming experience’ are consigned instead to other (somatosensory or iconic) neural networks, from which they trigger the re-enactments and flashbacks of the traumasymptom (Kolk and Hart 1995: 160–75). The model provides a reconciliation3 with the equally hydraulic presumptions of clinical psychoanalysis, which privileges narrative memory as that which allows subjects to integrate memories into a ‘totality of experience’: narrating the event unlocks the narration of self. But van der Kolk and van der Hart also note that therapists have helped traumatized subjects escape their symptoms by suggesting alternative images and scenarios for the event: flowers, empowerment or that the corpses were clothed (1995: 175–8). The act of re-visioning the experience affords it access to implicit memory and thereby to symbolization and narration. Here, then, is a further aspect in which theatre and performance – this time as a place and space of iterative re-revisioning as well as active narration – might have a particular purchase on trauma. 2. testimony and witness Duggan & Wallis Much of this basic shape of trauma is mapped out in the oldest surviving Western drama, The Persians (Aeschylus, 472 BCE). Hearing that the massive army her son Xerxes has pitched against Athens has been annihilated, the Queen reels and then insists that the Messenger tell her the whole story: I have listened senseless, witless, struck silent with horror at this catastrophe. The news is too terrible for questions, but question we must … / Unfold our pain, unfurl this disaster in its entirety and we will bear it. (O’Reilly 2010: 289–94)4 Once told, she insists on hearing it again, but in more detail. Enfolding this dialogue, the Chorus ritualistically echoes back the disastrous news. There are three traumas here. The Messenger is driven to testify to the traumaevent that engulfed him. The Queen cannot grasp Xerxes’s death. And the elders meet the sudden loss of lives and order with ritualized speech. While Aeschylus’s rhetorical purpose might be debated – human sympathy with an enemy or assertion of Athenian measure against Persian profligacy – the scene is, we suggest, more than dramatic event: the poeticized keening embodies the drive to narrate incommensurable, unbearable and inexpressible loss. Similarly, when Xerxes returns, his lines enact a selfannihilation, as if to erase his presence in the trauma-event and it in him, by compulsive reiteration.5 Schism is, of course, a principal foundation of dramatic narrative, and Turner (1992: 74–5) provides a model that suggests both a circulation between aesthetic drama and social drama, and a restorative role for aesthetic drama in relation to social breach. The example of The Persians quickly leads us to the observation that a play might have restorative efficacy either by rehearsing the trauma-event or by figuring such a need – perhaps to prepare us for trauma. Major elements of the play remain available as a rehearsal of and for traumatic loss. Testifying – bearing witness to one’s own 6 Downloaded By: [Duggan, Patrick] At: 15:42 26 April 2011 trauma – is an Austinian performative: to be felicitous it must be heard, and in a way that feels guaranteed. So others bear the responsibility to hear, and to do this patently. Psychoanalyst Dori Laub (1995: 65) suggests that, beyond this immediately curative responsibility, we are ethically required to participate in the cultural circulation of ‘the truth of what happens during an event’. In its bringing together of scripted bodies with an audience – itself a convention of persons expressly for that occasion – the theatrical apparatus6 has particular potency with respect to the responsibilities of bearing witness to trauma. A logic of witnessing inheres in its fundamental bicamerality. That said, witnessing in the context of performance is typically second-order: we bear witness to on-stage witnessing. This, we argue, holds not only for theatrical performance but also for direct theatre (Schechner 1992: 89–106), trauma heritage sites and performance art based on personal experience. The testimony is re-framed, the testifier re-personated. Adapting Schechner (1988: 69–71), we might call the efficacy of the performance event to address trauma – its deep social action - the ‘script’. The chain of witnessing evidently makes the event’s cultural situation (Schechner’s ‘performance’ frame) as crucial to this as the dramatic/ theatrical means deployed. Anthropologist John MacAloon (1984) specifies theatre as bicameral when mapping it as one component in ‘ramified performance’ – varying combinations of and relationships between game/play, theatre, ritual, spectacle and festival in any one performance event: any one term might dominate, complement, contradict or embrace another. It might be appropriate to consider performances addressing trauma within MacAloon’s frame of cultural performance, since they rehearse a culture’s key values and beliefs – and map the ways in which various performance genres are ramified to generate the script of testimony, witness and change. A particularly poignant instance of trauma’s continued cultural circulation is what Marianne 7 Hirsch calls ‘postmemory’. It typically occurs in the generation after those who directly experience trauma. ‘(S)haped by traumatic events they can neither understand nor re-create’, their ‘own belated stories are displaced by the stories of the previous generation’ (Hirsch cited by Undrill 2000: 136). Bearing close witness to a perpetually unresolved trauma can install second-hand memories that are so powerful as to become traumatic in their own right. Moreover, such ‘collective traumatic memory’ can become installed across a culture. Such is the case, for instance, with the Holocaust. Shoshana Felman observes that testimony communicates the trauma-event as ‘impact’ rather than knowledge. Laub argues that uttering these ‘bits and pieces of a memory … that have not settled into understanding or remembrance’ situates ‘one’s own speech as material evidence for truth’. Thus, Laub advises, ‘To witness implies simply being with the other in his or her disarray’ (Undrill 2000: 135–6 citing Felman, paraphrasing Laub). Disarray, then, is not confined to the irruptions of the traumasymptom. It also inhabits ‘traumatic memory’ – those narrations of the trauma-event that LaCapra names ‘working through’. To illustrate, he extends Laub’s discussion of the testimony of an Auschwitz survivor, who very likely mis-remembered a prisoners’ uprising – that four chimneys were destroyed, not one. Laub justifies this as ‘the reality of an unimaginable occurrence’; the unintentional hyperbole metaphorically delivers the fact that the event broke an ‘all compelling frame’. LaCapra observes that the woman’s testimony comprises ‘analytically distinguishable but existentially intertwined processes of acting out, working over and working through’ (LaCapra 1996: 89, citing Laub). LaCapra derives these terms from Freud to consider the writing and telling of history. While severely traumatized individuals might find it ‘impossible to fully transcend acting out the past’ to attain ‘critical distance’ by working through, trying ‘to bring about Trauma and Performance 6 We subsume both ‘performance’ and ‘theatre’ under this phrase: the essence here is bicamerality. Downloaded By: [Duggan, Patrick] At: 15:42 26 April 2011 7 We here ‘bracket off’ arguments about nationalist exploitations of the Shoah. processes of working through that are not simply therapeutic for the individual but have political and ethical solutions’ is essential if we ‘believe in anything like a viable democratic politics’ (LaCapra 2001: 143; 152). Working through, then, is a key responsibility for theatre/ performance practitioners as much as historians, since both re-voice testimony. And, while writers or performers as well as interviewers, commentators or observers might repeat the trauma where ‘identification proceeds in an uncritical manner or is valorized’ (LaCapra 2001: 143), we argue that theatre/performance might legitimately stage acting out and working over within the ultimate frame of working through – which must perforce take the action beyond the theatrical frame. Laub writes that testimony for survivors where others have died is ‘a ceaseless struggle’, both an ‘imperative’ but also ‘impossible’. The struggle is to realize both that ‘the loved ones are not coming back’ and that life is precisely about ‘living with an unfulfilled hope’. And this ‘exploration and reconciliation of two worlds’ of past and present can only succeed if ‘someone can be there as your companion’ (Laub 1995: 61–4, 73–4). Among the challenges for theatre/ performance in its cultural and political articulation is authentically to draw in second witnesses as companions to the traumatized. Laub co-founded the Fortunoff Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale; LaCapra is a historian of the Holocaust. Each addresses the established understanding that the Nazi Jewish genocide (there were other Nazi genocides) was an event not only of immense magnitude but also of extraordinary kind. Laub writes that its ‘radical otherness to all known frames of reference’ made it seem that witnessing was impossible: ‘There was no longer an other to whom one might say “Thou” in the hope of being heard’ and hence no ‘internal witness’ – without the possibility of an interlocutor, even one’s witness to oneself was annihilated. And this has created a ‘historical gap’ in collective witnessing (Laub 1995: 66–9). That gap, as well as the scale and nature of the genocide itself, has been a key factor in creating the ’postmemory’ of the Holocaust. Not only direct survivors but the next generation and wider communities fear breaking faith with those that did not survive – ‘one of the greatest impediments to working through’7 (LaCapra 2001: 143). The Holocaust also thereby figures in critical discourse as a limit or watershed. Fuss writes that Freud’s work on identification strove ‘to negotiate a traumatic perception installed at the very heart of modernity: the fear of a fundamental and irreversible loss of connection to the Other’; that this ‘death-defying feat’ is ‘impossible to sustain … after World War 2 and the Holocaust’; and that theories of identification ‘survive in modernism and postmodernism but only as painful and poignant meditations on the possibility of identification’s own impossibility’ (1995: 39). Queering Freud, Lacan and the Anti-Oedipus of Deleuze and Guattari, Fuss helps us join LaCapra (2001: 152) in resisting the ‘interminable melancholy’ installed by theories of ‘impossible mourning’. How, then, can performance furnish a space to break free from melancholy without breaking faith with the dead? Levinas dedicated Otherwise than Being (1981) to the victims of the Holocaust. And in ‘ethics as first philosophy’ he moved beyond the ‘egology’ (Hand 1989: 4) of the phenomenologies of both Husserl and Heidegger, in which wisdom ‘is reduced to self-consciousness’, to call attention (as elsewhere) to the face-to-face encounter. Here, ‘the invisible death that must be faced by the Other’ summons us, as ‘(our) business’. This challenges Heidegger’s suggestion that the fundamental affirmation of our being follows from consciousness of our own mortality (Levinas 1989: 82–3 and passim). As others have written, Levinas’s philosophy of ethical responsibility as the foundation of being is of profound significance with respect to trauma in that it identifies us fundamentally as witnesses. Duggan & Wallis Downloaded By: [Duggan, Patrick] At: 15:42 26 April 2011 8 3. s e lv e s , i d e n t i t y a n d r e l at i o n a l i t y We shall benefit from exploring the relationship between trauma(tic witness) and performance spectatorship on the ground of consciousness. Levinas provides one candidate reference point for the former, arguing that being can only justify itself through its ‘fear for the Other’, by reference to ‘the intimacy of the non-intentional8 within what is known as prereflective consciousness … and which is duration itself’ (1989: 80–2). At another level, Althusser’s groundbreaking discussion provides one for the latter – ‘the play itself is the spectator’s consciousness’; that which ‘unites him [sic] to the play in advance’ makes it the ‘image and presence’ of the spectator’s ‘self-recognition’ and so gives it the affordance to produce a ‘new result’ (1969: 150–1, emphasis original).9 We might, then, explore other thinking to expand upon these basic topologies – and indeed to ask, what – who – is it that is so radically unanchored by the trauma-event? That ontological schism is fundamental to at least Western subjectivity is well-rehearsed. For Lacan, the ego is constituted by separation from the mother – a split rehearsed in the fort/ da game. He follows Freud to theorize the repeated game as an attempt to overcome the trauma of separation from the mother by actively reproducing it (e.g., Lacan 1994: 60–4). The child comes to constitute its ‘self’ as autonomous being via a performance that we can specify as a ritualized performative iteration of trauma.10 While Freudian presence-to-self is based on a foundational traumatic absence, all subsequent traumata can similarly be figured as a play between presence and absence. We cannot be consciously present in the moment of the trauma-event, when our body/mind is concerned only with survival. And neither are we fully present to ourselves at the moment of the trauma-symptom. Psychiatrist Felicity de Zulueta likens the traumatic flashback to ‘a foreign body permanently at work in the unconscious’ (Zulueta 1993: 100). The original event is a 9 historical absence but the survivor-sufferer lives under the force of its continual but alien presence through re-performance. Trauma-event and trauma-symptom constitute a single entity, internally structured by an economy of mutual presence and absence. If we then argued that historical traumata reopened a fundamental schism, this would not be to suggest that one is either diminished by or mistaken for the other. Rather, it would specify the site at which the trauma-symptom has purchase: it assaults, as we rehearsed above with Herman, our constructed sense of self, our assumptions about safety and continuity in the world, and our belief in purpose. Lacan proposes another mechanism that establishes ‘an always alienated ego’ – in the mirror stage. The ‘fantasy of a totalized and mastered body’ derives from the infant’s prioritization of ‘visual perception’ over ‘tactile and kinaesthetic information’, the latter of which ‘yields the fragmented image of the bodyin-bits and pieces’ (Grosz 1995: 86). Yet even when established, this fantasy of coherence is subject to fracture, according to Lacan’s model of the split subject, perpetually caught in a circulation between itself as subject and object of its own speech. This has been a cornerstone of poststructuralist theory. Meanwhile Garner, drawing on Merleau-Ponty in his exploration of the relationship between ‘the “embodiedness” of consciousness’ and the theatrical apparatus, develops a phenomenological perspective on ‘the body as ambiguous site of subjectivity’ that is ‘complementary’ to the ‘linguistic/ textual problematics of poststructuralism’. The theatrical apparatus is a privileged site for exploration of the phenomenology of subjectivity (Garner 1994: 25). Theatrical circulations between presence and absence – for instance between the persons of performer and character – are well rehearsed. Meanwhile, Derrida’s ventriloquistic deconstruction of Artaud’s drive for presence proposes that tragedy is proper to the Western stage, ‘not as the representation of fate but of Trauma and Performance Downloaded By: [Duggan, Patrick] At: 15:42 26 April 2011 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 Downloaded By: [Duggan, Patrick] At: 15:42 26 April 2011 one sense. the fate of representation’. While Artaud sought to banish repetition to achieve pure presence, Derrida insists that presence itself is subject to an interior fold, an ‘original repetition’ which marks the ‘absence of a simple origin’ (Derrida 1978: 245–50). Thus, for our immediate purpose here, we might regard both theatre and that postmodern performance that strives to escape the ‘theological’ imperatives it discerns in theatre, as caught in a drama of presence through repetition and displacement. It is this texture of presencing in the theatrical/ performance apparatus, that provides a further purchase on the experience of trauma – it articulates both with our arguably necessary misperceptions of self-identity; and with the structures of trauma that both underpin and assault it. Other psychoanalysts have taken a different route than Lacan from Freud’s theorization of the ego as ‘a mental projection of the surface of the body’. Lafrance explores two. Esther Bick argued that ‘regular and reliable’ contact allows the early infant to introject the experience of a caregiver’s skin ‘as container’ and that this ‘primal object … binds the personality together’. Others since have argued that this provides not only an enduring sense of both bodily and psychic ‘continuity and containment’ but also ‘a lasting template for unintegrated states’: what has been done in infancy can be undone through trauma – especially psychic and sexual trauma (Lafrance 2009: 8–11, emphasis added). Thomas Ogden supplemented Klein’s developmental model of object-oriented and subject-oriented positions with a senseoriented ‘autistic-contiguous’ position. Here, the infant’s ‘fleeting and sporadic awareness of its separateness from the world … is gradually expanded through (its) ongoing sense of sensory contiguity’. Ogden does not confine this ‘most fundamental sense of self’ to infancy. Rather, all three positions persist in ‘complex and dynamic interplay’ as ‘an enduring ensemble of mutually constitutive states’ in all human experience (Lafrance 2009: 12–14). Rejecting the linear progressional models of much psychoanalysis and developmental psychology, Ogden conceives of the self as an evolving assemblage of different organizational orders. Trauma, then, disrupts – and performance engages – the assembly as such. But there is further to go. Drawing on William James, Deleuze and Guattari, and especially Daniel Stern, Erin Manning proposes we shift emphasis from economies of ‘self-self interaction’ where skin divides inside from outside, to ‘relation as key to experience’. Stern figures the pre-verbal infant as existing in ‘preconscious pure experiential awareness’ where the repetition of ‘vitality affect’ – the doubling of amodal11 experience as a virtual event – progressively territorializes as an immanent individuation. This co-constitution of being and worlding precedes self. Moreover, this ‘active topology of spacetimes of experience’ is also part of adult life, though most adults deny it. Stern identifies ‘emergent, core, subjective and verbal selves’, all of which persist fully and interactively into adulthood. Manning writes, ‘There is no self that is not also emergent, pre-verbal, affectively oriented toward individuation’: in place of a ‘stable self’ we must conceive of a series of discrete moments of ‘cohesiveness’ (2009: 34–8). Thus from developmental models we have moved via a notion of persisting and evolving assemblages to one of fields of relationality. There is a further level of relation to consider with respect to both subjectivity and trauma: that between identity and identification. Freud proposed in Mourning and Melancholia that identification is a ‘habitual compensation for the everyday loss of our love-objects’, installed by that first maternal separation. And Fuss observes the poststructuralist conclusion that identity is thereby ontologically split: ‘every identity claim (“I am not another”) is based on an identification (“I am another”)’ (Fuss 1995: 1, 10). Fuss herself draws on queer perspectives to explore how for instance ‘to identify as must always include multiple processes of identification with’ (1995: 6, citing Eve Sedgwick). Trauma, then – and especially political trauma – might be 10 Duggan & Wallis figured as a severe disruption of this dynamic assemblage of provisional identifications; and theatre and performance in turn as sites where identifications can intensively be rehearsed. This becomes all the more suggestive in the context of Fuss’s proposition that ‘Identification is the point where the psychical/social distinction becomes impossibly confused and finally untenable’ – identification is ‘both voluntary and involuntary’ and no neat separation can be made between the two (1995: 10, emphasis added). Lafrance writes that selfhood is ‘completely psychic, utterly somatic, essentially intercorporeal and intersubjective, constantly changing … and fundamentally located in space and time’ (2007: 276 cited in Lafrance 2009). But Elizabeth Grosz earlier begged the question, ‘what the space-time framework appropriate to women, or to the two sexes, may be’: a reformulation of the body ‘in specifically sexed terms’ is needed. Hitherto, the conceptions of principally male subjects have been ‘projected onto the world as its objective features’ (Grosz 1995: 84–101 and passim).12 and these notions internalized so as to ‘quite literally constitute bodies and help to produce them as such’ (Grosz 1994: x). And not only women, of course. Engaging with Fanon, Fuss refers to Deleuze’s and Guattari’s critique in Anti-Oedipus of the ‘double ideological operation’ whereby oedipalization and colonization ‘conceal the political function and purpose’ of one another: modern white-male-defined Europe declines to mark the understandings of being-in-theworld of its others with value (Fuss 1995: 158; Phelan 1993: 5 and passim). Yet the repressive hypothesis itself works perversely to conceal other vectors than the Western of ‘space-specific subject-production’ (Gayatri Spivak’s phrase, cited in Soja 1996: 151). This could perhaps lead us back to Levinas. For him, full and proper surrender to the other – ‘proximity’ – is necessarily surrender to the ‘absolute difference’ of the infinite, which he calls God: his philosophy finds the ethical imperative he seeks, and that imperative is 11 declaredly religious (Hand 1989: 4–6). But it certainly does lead us to the role of the theatrical apparatus in a politics of resistance to the suppression of difference – including of conceptions of space, time and self – in the name of the ‘human’. This is essential to any dramaturgy addressing trauma. As we have suggested, ideas of performativity and theatricality figure in trauma theory itself. To conclude this section, we consider the first of two instances from its early development, as both foil and extension to the contemporary understandings rehearsed above. During the late 1800s, the definition of trauma started shifting from physical blow towards a shocking event that impacts on the nerves and mind of the survivor. That shift is inseparable from the foundations of modern psychoanalysis, psychotherapy, psychology and psychiatry – and in particular studies on hysteria and neuroses led by Pierre Janet, Hermann Oppenheim and Jean-Martin Charcot. Charcot built a reputation as both clinician and showman at the Salpêtrière Hospital in Paris, which became a centre for the diagnosis and study of névrose traumatique. Key to Charcot’s theorization on the cause of ‘hysterotraumatism’ was that the original trauma-event, perhaps a train wreck or mugging, was not the principal cause of ‘hysteria’ but instead triggered a hereditary predisposition to nervous and/ or neurological malady. Charcot’s infamous theatrics at his leçons du Mardi are welldocumented. Our purpose here is to draw out one element in a theatrical history and performative genealogy of trauma. Charcot’s use of hypnosis was central to his ‘therapy’. He would put typically female patients into a trance and induce hysterical episodes through various theatrical and ‘far from innocent’ manipulations – from exploding packages of gun-cotton under patients’ noses to ‘masturbating them … until they could take no more’ (Didi-Huberman 2003: 176; 208). While the expressed purpose was to investigate, understand and cure les névrose traumatique, no clinical value was evident (210). Downloaded By: [Duggan, Patrick] At: 15:42 26 April 2011 Trauma and Performance 12 Grosz posits a succession of KantianNewtonian, FreudianEinsteinian 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. Charcot’s hypnotic practices might owe as much to the popularity of hypnosis in fairgrounds and theatres around Europe in the period (cf. Pintar and Lynn 2008: 46–54) as to any clinical purpose.13 With invited audience and defined stage, Charcot presided as writer, director, dramaturg and performer. Each lecture was meticulously scripted, evidently drafted and re-drafted to ensure that the theatrics went perfectly and with maximum impact: ‘just like plays [the lectures had] lines, soliloquies, stage direction, asides by the hero and so on’ (DidiHuberman 2003: 243). In producing ‘hysterical’ outbursts in perfectly composed tableaux for the delight of a largely non-medical audience, Charcot seems more like a torturer-rapist than pioneering psychotherapist. Indeed, these staged ‘repetitions’ of a hysterotraumatic ‘primal scene’, as Freud would later coin it, can be construed as original traumas themselves. There is an ‘acting out’ here, but it is inverted – the analyst, not the analysand, is author of the drama. And, of course, part of the enactment is the performative utterance of hysteria itself: the women are doubly assaulted – both directly and in being confirmed as emotionally labile and disorderly by virtue of their sex (See Beizer 1994: 3–9 and passim). Taking another angle on the Salpêtrière, Kirby focuses on the hysteric as ‘consummate mimic’ and specifically ‘dermographism’ – the ‘autobiographic capacity of the skin’ – whereby individuals manifest lesions of, say, smallpox in response to a verbal suggestion that they will do so. She describes the phenomenon as productively ‘troubling’ – it suggests that ‘mind and body, subject and object, even Charcot and his patient … are none of them either autonomous notions or simply separable as subjects’ – ‘the identity of each is produced within a complicated intertext, a “writing” as Jacques Derrida calls it, that is all-encompassing’ (Kirby 1997: 56–60). This, then, takes us further into relationality. In similar territory, Grosz picks up on Lacan’s reference to Caillois’s work on mimicry in insects. This appears not to enhance survival – predators still eat them, and sometimes their own species devour them as, for instance, real leaves. Caillois likens insect mimicry to Janet’s ‘legendary psychasthenia’, in which ‘the psychotic is unable to locate him- or herself in space’, and theorizes a ‘lure posed by space for the subject’s identity’ (Grosz 1995: 88–90). We might, then, think of both language and theatre/performance as technologies that may have been used in an attempt to master, but can also help us lean into, the complexity of our being-in-the-world. And this may help us negotiate trauma. 4. mimesis, simulacra and Duggan & Wallis Downloaded By: [Duggan, Patrick] At: 15:42 26 April 2011 structures of feeling Leys observes that contemporary trauma theory is ‘simultaneously attracted to and repelled by’ the idea of mimesis in trauma-symptoms: it might help ‘explain the victim’s suggestibility and abjection’; or undermine ‘individual autonomy and responsibility’ to the trauma-event and memory of it (2000: 9). This suspicion of the mimetic has its own history. Luckhurst aligns the conceptualization of trauma with modernity and the increasing mechanization of society. Drawing on Benjamin’s Illuminations, he characterizes modern city life as comprising ‘shocks and collisions’ or ‘traumatic encounters’ which spawned a new ‘urban self’ – and observes that Benjamin drew on Freud’s idea of a shock that ‘overwhelms psychic defences’ (Luckhurst 2008: 19–21, citing Benjamin). Nascent theories of trauma were generated by railway expansion in the 1860s and principally focused on train-wreck survivors, whose symptoms became known as ‘railway spine’. Surgeon Herbert W. Page’s Injuries of the Spine and Spinal Cord and Nervous Shock was published in 1883. Page argued that railway spine was the result not of physical injury but of shock. Fear aroused in the face of imminent danger, and recognition that escape was impossible, caused a disturbance of the ‘whole nervous balance’ – which he 12 aligned with hysteria (Page 1883: 143–8). Page’s formulation of ‘nervous shock’ aligns with current conceptions of trauma: Trauma and Performance Warded off in the first place by the excitement of the scene, the shock gather[s], in the very delay itself, new force from the fact that the sources of alarm are continuous, and for the time all prevalent in the patient’s mind. (Page 1883: 148) Downloaded By: [Duggan, Patrick] At: 15:42 26 April 2011 However, its objectives may not have been wholly innocent. In the nine years Page had been working for the London and North Western Railway Company, a huge rise in accidents, and thereby compensation claims, had resulted from expansion. As Luckhurst observes, ‘an organic origin for railway spine nearly always resulted in huge payments … and this was being worryingly extended to those without any visible physical injury’. Page did his employer the courtesy of equating railway spine with ‘a shameful, effeminate disorder, often dismissed as a form of disease imitation (what was called “neuromimesis”) or malingering’ (Luckhurst 2008: 23). Page posits what might be thought of as a neuromimetic performance: playing the role of hysteric for financial gain – or, literally, acting (it) out. He asserts that: the knowledge that compensation is a certainty for the injuries received, tends, almost from the first moment of illness, to colour the course and aspect of the case, with each succeeding day to become part and parcel of the injury in the patient’s mind. (Page 1883: 255) response to pundits who claimed both that genuine tragedy could no longer be written, and that the word itself had been evacuated by mass circulation headlines that mistook domestic fatalities for tragedies (Williams 1966: 13–15; 45–61). Where Williams in response identified a contrast between evacuation by headline and the intensities of loss in everyday life, we might now find a coupling – as did Fredric Jameson in relating the evacuations of postmodern culture to subjective death and universal anomie. Perry Anderson’s powerful review of Jameson’s work on postmodernity summarises his suggestion that hysteria - prominent in trauma theory’s trajectory and, in Jameson genderneutral: a ‘new depthlessness of the subject’ – is ‘a general condition of the postmodern experience’: psychic life becomes unnervingly accidented and spasmodic, marked by sudden dips of level or lurches of mood, that recall something of the fragmentation of schizophrenia. (Anderson 1998: 57) Let us close as we started – by invoking Raymond Williams. Luckhurst’s account of Page identifies him with what Williams might nominate a ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1987: 17) associated with rapid urbanization. So: where are we – and trauma – in terms of structures of feeling in the post-industrial West? We have suggested that trauma is now a major cultural and sociological reference-point; we are, it seems, bound to the traumatic – but in what way? Williams framed Modern Tragedy as a 13 Recent technological development has participated in the denigration of the subject, a ‘metastasis of the psyche’ characterized by a ‘loss of any active sense of history, either as hope or memory’ and a sense instead of a ‘perpetual present’ (Anderson 1998: 56). We are left devoid of a sense of place, time and context, the result of which is a desire to experience cathexis. Jameson here develops arguments by, among several others, Marshal McLuhan, who extensively identified sociological ‘numbness’ and ‘mental breakdown’ with a media-dominated world (McLuhan 2001: 7–23). Both employ rhetoric close to the language of trauma theory, evoking a sense of dislocation and schism in both society and the individual.14 In The Society of the Spectacle (2004 [1967]), Debord gets at the root of this schism: [t]he spectacle presents itself simultaneously as society itself, as a part of society and as a means of unification. As a part of society, it is the focal point 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). of all vision and all consciousness. But due to the very fact that this sector is separate, it is in reality the domain of delusion and false consciousness: the unification it achieves is nothing but an official language of universal separation. (Debord 2004 [1967]: 7–8) Downloaded By: [Duggan, Patrick] At: 15:42 26 April 2011 Bracketing off for now our direct experience of conflict, disaster and injustice as primary traumas, let us consider a second triangulation, linking psychic disjunction to trauma in postmodernity in two ways. The first is the traumatizing effect of the burden of witnessing wrought by the perpetual mediation of primary world traumas in broadcast news and graphic imagery. The second is the simultaneous evacuation of our subjective world by the flattening of experience in that same sphere of the simulacrum – arguably a primary traumaevent in itself (fig. 2). • Fig. 2. Double traumatic symptom in postmodern conditions. Where is artistic production in this problematic? Echoing Jameson – and something of Derrida on Artaud – Žižek argues that a central desire in late-Capitalist society has become to grasp the ungraspable – the Lacanian Real (Žižek 2002). Elsewhere he extends this argument, suggesting that while audiences are ‘supposed to enjoy traditional art … modern art, by definition, hurts’ (Žižek 2006: 147). While the artwork might ‘hurt’, it is paradoxically precisely this that the audience seeks out for (pleasure) fulfilment through cathected experience. We might read that desire to be fully present in the Real through pain as a trauma-symptom, and – insofar as we agree with Žižek – the readiness of contemporary art to furnish that experience as affirmation of a structure feeling. In Modern Tragedy, Williams suggests that tragedy is a perpetually-changing artistic form that is braided with and so helps identify its contemporary structure of feeling. The argument or proposition of the artwork is not as important as its structure and form, and the feelings evoked by its rhythms. This focus on structure and rhythm enables us to read the contemporary structure of feeling as being bound to trauma. Much contemporary performance, from live art through the so-called ‘in-yer-face’ theatre of the 1990s to popular theatre, might be seen to operate within a mode Duggan terms, through Williams, trauma-tragedy. Using specific dramaturgical and scenographic structures, the phenomenology of bodies, and / or ‘uncanny echoes’ between the diegetic action (or levels of textual meaning that are natural to the shape of the play) and ritualized layers of coincidence, performances in the trauma-tragic mode generate the sensation of being present in the trauma through its structural embodiment in performance – ‘presence-in-trauma effects’ (Duggan 2009: 201, cf. 156–201). A large and diverse range of contemporary performances, or specific moments in them, function in this mode, not to offer resolution or explanation of trauma but to highlight and precisely to be about the trauma/tic. The works present trauma in ways that reflect the structures of trauma itself. Trauma-tragedy does not imply a performance of violence or shocking imagery, although this may be part of it, but rather is intended to suggest a mode of performance that attends to trauma through one or several of its key rhythms, for example: cyclical/repetitious, paradoxical, dichotomous, polysemic, uncomfortable, visceral, emotional, kinaesthetic, uncanny, ‘real’. On the one hand, then, trauma-tragedy can be thought of as a model of contemporary performance as cultural symptom of a decathected, individualized and flattened Western society at the start of the twenty-first century, as 14 Duggan & Wallis Downloaded By: [Duggan, Patrick] At: 15:42 26 April 2011 explicated above through Jameson, McLuhan and Žižek. More recently, Bernard Stiegler (cf. 2009: 41) has argued that contemporary consumer society has annihilated individualization to create a flattened world order in which there is a de-cathected gap between event, its dissemination and consumption, and experience: experience is now, to varying degrees, wholly mediated. We might think, in Raymond Williams’s terms, of trauma-tragedy as participating in the dominant cultural mode simply as one further form of mediation – or simulacrum (cf. Williams 1977: 121–7). On the other hand, it also suggests an emergent tool with which to approach the task of addressing that de-cathected experience, and thereby to attend to trauma in renewed authentic ways. Not only in theory but also in the frame of the theatre/performance event itself, trauma-tragedy is available as a means of contextualizing and conceptualizing the ubiquitous theatricalization of trauma in the early twenty-first century. We might even (again) think in terms of a defamiliarization. 5. conclusion The centrality of personal narrative to trauma must be acknowledged. But narratives organize space as well as time; and our exploration of the selfhood disrupted by trauma led us to porous boundaries and fields of relationality. If revisioning traumatic experience helps survivors work through, our own re-visioning of the work of narrative might afford greater purchase on the ways in which the theatrical apparatus – a space/ time to rehearse space/time and personhood – can address trauma. Foucault’s call for a ‘spatio-temporal interpretation of the power-knowledge relation’ (Soja 1996: 170) might point us in three specific directions. First is the field of political trauma and the politics of post-traumatic closure – as in Rwanda or Argentina – where healing the nation often abuses traumatized individuals: a refurbished national narrative traduces that of 15 its subjects, dis-locating one from the other. Second, just as trauma surely disrupts several abstractable levels of self, it also inhabits the mundanities of human genre – as in the constructs ‘sex’ and ‘race’. Thus, freed of her psychosis, Anna O., the ‘original and defining case’ of Freud’s work on hysteria, regained a body still traumatically alienated from itself: Phelan remarks that ‘the body is always a disciplined entity’ – the psychoanalytic talking cure is a performative speech act that intervenes in the ‘temporal-linguistic’ aspect of this disciplinary structure, to bring order to the disorderly ‘temporal-physical’ body of psychosis (1997: 63, 59). Grosz insists that, due to their ‘organic openness to cultural completion, bodies must take the social order as their productive nucleus’ (1994: xi). Levinas’s ‘duration’ is a ‘proximity’ before narrative and before separation – but necessarily caught up in culture from the moment of that first human touch. Third, the theatron suggested by the idea of trauma-tragedy – a dialectical braiding of the structures, paradoxes and nuances of trauma with the repetitious, paradoxical rotations of performance – may be a tool with which we can read, contemplate and reflect on a structure of feeling and potentially thus progress from it, as well as rehearse for or work through our own traumata. Williams’s own notion of structure of feeling folds space with time, from individual consciousness through convention to cultural organization. Folding into this for us, Jameson’s foundational work on postmodern subjectivity began with an arguably performative critique of hotel architecture.15 As Freud moved away from Charcot’s hypnosis to the talking cure, he also substituted ’a factual for a figural logic’ – which nevertheless very properly retained a ‘direct acknowledgement of the figurative nature of scientific discourse’ (Fuss 1995: 5). Since then, we have learned much about brain structure, history and function but nowhere near enough to achieve a ‘biological’ understanding of consciousness – which anyway would be severely reductive. We exist enfolded Trauma and Performance 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. Downloaded By: [Duggan, Patrick] At: 15:42 26 April 2011 with our technologies, including language. We also – not nearly enough – develop and deploy them to improve our lives. If the talking cure ministered to Anna O. or the drug interventions to Gordon are such, then theatre/performance constitutes another technical apparatus by which we aim to live beyond trauma. We might end by reflecting on what some proponents of biotechnology currently propose. Variously described as an ‘Abolitionist Project’ and ‘paradise engineering’, the prospect of a posthuman future in which the capacity for traumatic memory has been engineered out of us has been scoped (Humanity+ 2010). Precisely what that might do to creativity or to joy – and whether we would notice – will remain to be seen. Meanwhile, we must ask: what to do with trauma in and through performance now? a note on the cover images First, the photographic and case-note record of their psychological and behavioural symptoms could be categorised into putative disorders. And second, those disorders could be mapped post mortem against brain lesions as patients died. (2003: 20-22) Charcot and his colleagues valued Augustine – who entered the Salpêtrière at fifteen-and-a-half – for her regularity. Each hysterical attack possessed a similar timesignature across the four phases they had defined; and Augustine’s attitudes passionelles (phase three) were very consistent. Augustine’s ‘attitude’ here they define as ‘Ecstasy’. (Didi-Huberman, 2003: 115-7). Duggan & Wallis references Althusser, L. (1969) For Marx, trans. B. Brewster, Harmondsworth: Penguin. Anderson, P. (1998) ‘Five moves’, in The Origins of Postmodernity, London: Verso. Beizer, J. (1994) Ventriloquized Bodies: Narratives of hysteria in nineteenth-century France, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Caruth, C. (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, narrative and history, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Debord, G. (2004 [1967]) The Society of the Spectacle, trans. K. Knabb, London: Rebel Press. Derrida, J. (1978) Writing and Difference, trans. A. Bass, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Didi-Huberman, G. (2003) Invention of Hysteria: Charcot and the photographic iconography of the Salpêtrière, trans. A. Hartz, London: MIT Press. Duggan, P. (2009) ‘Trauma-tragedy: Towards an understanding of trauma in contemporary performance’, PhD thesis, University of Leeds (October). Fuss, D. (1995) Identification Papers, London: Routledge. Garner, S. B. (1994) Bodied Spaces: Phenomenology and performance in contemporary drama, Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Grosz, E. (1994) Volatile Bodies. Toward a Corporeal Feminism, Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Grosz, E. (1995) Space, Time and Perversion: Essays on the politics of bodies, London: Routledge. Hand, S. (1989) ‘Introduction’ in E. Levinas The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, Oxford: Blackwell pp. 1-8. 16 Front cover: André Brouillet’s painting Une leçon clinique à la Salpêtrière (1887) is so widely reproduced as to be iconic. Jean-Martin Charcot uses hypnosis to provoke a pseudo-hysterical episode, to demonstrate that the symptoms of ‘hysteria’ are cognate with those of an organic disorder. His patient ‘Blanche’ (Marie) Wittman (1859-1913) is supported by Charcot’s protégé Joseph Babinski. We have selected one portion of the whole painting. To the left is Charcot’s audience - rows of medics and others, all men. The one other woman present prepares to support Blanche as she swoons. Famous in her lifetime as ‘Queen of the Hysterics’ at the Salpêtrière, Wittman later assisted Marie Curie in her work on radium, and lost three limbs and eventually her life to radiation sickness. Rolef Ben-Shahar (2010) argues that, while Freud’s progressive abandonment of both trance and touch in his own practice was necessary at the time to support the claim of scientific rigour, what was lost was the full potential and indeed mutuality of transferential dynamics. Back cover. ‘Augustine’, one of Charcot’s subjects at the Salpêtrière, photographed by Paul Regnard (1850 -1927) for the Iconographie. Didi-Huberman argues that Charcot’s own scientific imperative to demonstrate that mental pathology can be linked to physiological lesions required both a large cohort of patients and the intervention of photography. Herman, J. L. (1992) Trauma and Recovery: The aftermath of violence – from domestic abuse to political terror, New York: Basic Books.. Phelan, P. (1993) Unmarked: The politics of performance, London: Routledge. Phelan, P. (1997) Mourning Sex: Performing Public Memories, London: Routledge. Pintar, J. and Lynn, S. J. (2008) Hypnosis: A Brief History, Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell. Schechner, R. (1985) Between Theater and Anthropology, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Schechner, R. (1988) Performance Theory, London: Routledge. Schechner, R. (1992) ‘Invasions Friendly and Unfriendly: The Dramaturgy of Direct Theatre’, in Janelle G. Reinelt and Joseph R. Roach (eds) Critical Theory and Performance, Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press. Rolef Ben-Shaar, A. (2010) ‘Blanche Wittman’s breasts: The aetiology of the split between body, trance, and psychoanalysis’, Psychotherapy and Politics International 8(3); 213-226. Soja, E. W. (1996) Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places, Oxford: Blackwell. Stiegler, B. (2009) Acting Out, Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Turner, V. (1992) The Anthropology of Performance, New York: PAJ Publications. Undrill, G. (2000) Book review, Performance Research 5(3): 133–7. Williams, R. (1966) Modern Tragedy, London: Chatto and Windus. Williams, R. (1987) Drama From Ibsen to Brecht, London: Hogarth Press. Winnicott, D. W. (2001) Playing and Reality, London: Routledge. Žižek, S. (2002) Welcome to the Desert of the Real, London: Verso. Žižek, S. (2006) The Parallax View, London: MIT Press. Zulueta, F. de (1993) From Pain to Violence: The traumatic roots of destructiveness, London: Whurr. Trauma and Performance 17 Humanity+ (2010) http://www.hplusmagazine.com (accessed 15 September 2010). Kirby, V. (1997) Telling Flesh: The substance of the corporeal, London: Routledge. Kolk, B. A. van der and Hart, O. van der (1995) ‘The intrusive past: The flexibility of memory and the engraving of trauma’, in C. Caruth (ed.) Trauma: Explorations in memory, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, pp. 158–82. Lacan, J. (1994) The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, London: Penguin Books. LaCapra, D. (1996) Representing the Holocaust: History, theory, trauma, New York: Cornell University Press. LaCapra, D. (2001) Writing History, Writing Trauma, Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Lafrance, M. (2007) ‘Embodying the Subject: Feminist Theory Meets Contemporary Clinical Psychoanalysis’, Feminist Theory 8(3): 263–78. Lafrance, M. (2009) ‘Skin and the self: Cultural theory and Anglo-American psychoanalysis’, Body and Society 15(3): 3–24. Laub, D. (1995) ‘Truth and testimony: The process and the struggle’, in C. Caruth ( ed.) Trauma: Explorations in memory, Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press. Levinas, E. (1989) ‘Ethics as First Philosophy’, in E. Levinas The Levinas Reader, ed. Seán Hand, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 75–87. Leys, R. (2000) Trauma: A genealogy, Chicago: Chicago University Press. Luckhurst, R. (2008) The Trauma Question, London: Routledge. MacAloon, J. J. (1984) ‘Olympic games and the theory of spectacle in modern societies’, in J. J. MacAloon (ed.) Rite, Drama, Festival: Rehearsals towards a theory of cultural performance, Philadelphia: Institute for the Study of Human Issues, pp. 241–80. McLuhan, M. (2001) Understanding Media, London: Routledge Classics. O’Reilly, K. (2010) The Persians, from the play by Aeschylus, commissioned by National Theatre Wales. Page, H. W. (1883) Injuries of the Spine and Spinal Cord and Nervous Shock, London: J. and A. Churchill. 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