Introduction

For Michel Serres, discursive consensus, veridiction, scientific facticity, and related ‘transparent’ and evidence-based modes of transmission are contingent upon the phobic elimination of impinging noise or ‘cacography’ from their communicative circuits. Cacography is the noise of graphic form, whether discursive, scopic, or embodied, that can equivocally disrupt or re-entrench hierarchies of credibility and their sanitized channels of transmission. Cacographic verification is a traumatropology of truth. Allan Feldman’s focus lies with the scenic affirmation of sovereign right through the cacographic body as an assemblage of material and immaterial effects and affects. How do counterfeit realisms and a politics of nonlight (aphos) instate a sovereign act of violence as immaterial, insensible, intangible – as political noise or cacography? Empowering traumatropes of sovereignty and death are comparatively mapped via the Red Army Faction photo-paintings of Gerhard Richter and the counterfeit biometrical corpse archive forged by American kill teams in Afghanistan.

Political Anthropologist Allen Feldman is the author of three books, including Archives of the Insensible: Of War, Photopolitics, and Dead Memory (2015); Formations of Violence: The Narrative of the Body and Political Terror in Northern Ireland (1991). He has published numerous articles on visual culture and political violence the political sensorium of the body and on transitional justice. His essay ‘On the Actual Gaze: from Desert Storm to Rodney King’ (1994) pioneered the interface between visual culture and critical race theory. His latest publication ‘War Under Erasure: Contretemps, Disappearance, Anthropophagy, Survivance’ (2019) proposes collateral damage and enforced disappearance as scopic regimes under erasure. He is currently writing a book on omnivoyant war and the desubjectivation of vision. He is Professor of Media, Culture and Communication and teaches the politics of the gaze, media archeology, and the philosophy of media at New York University.

Is there anything beyond trauma, and what does it look like? One of the most ubiquitous and fruitful concepts in contemporary cultural and academic discourse, trauma has been under fire as a Western-centric narrative and representational form that universalizes and decontextualizes violence, often perpetuating or conflating the subject positions of victims, perpetrators, and spectators. Have critical discourses on and artistic and activist thematizations of trauma run out of steam? Have they generated new forms of inquiry? Which alternative models have emerged in the process? The symposium proposes a transregional reassessment of the concept of trauma across a range of academic disciplines and cultural contexts. The future of this paradigm will be discussed primarily through the prism of representation, the arts, and visual culture in relation to forms of political, historical, and structural violence. The symposium explores the relation of trauma and aesthetics in the twenty-first century, and the ways in which it is being reshaped by increasing transnational displacements of people and digital flows of images and stories. At the same time, post-humanism and new materialism have challenged common conceptions of subjectivity and non-human agency, profoundly changing the understanding of traumatic ruptures affecting nature, landscapes, and animals. By implying that extreme experiences may pass down genetically across generations, the contentious field of epigenetics insists that the transmission of trauma has a bodily dimension. Last but not least, current anxieties about technology and the climate crisis seem to have generated a form of ‘pre-trauma’, channeled through narratives of global catastrophe and post-apocalypse. If there is anything beyond ‘trauma’, as these developments suggest, how should it be looked at? What new images, concepts, practices, and ways of seeing should be mobilized toward this task? Taking on the future of trauma studies as a pressing intellectual question of our time, the symposium will reflect on new forms of witnessing, representing, and possibly coping with extreme violence to emerge in the last decade, the variety of cross-cultural aesthetic responses they elicit, and their implications for rethinking the field at large.