“Transmission” is a term used, curiously enough, in both technology and psychology. In the former, it denotes the transfer of messages from one point to another, a view that was principally theorized by Claude Shannon and Warren Weaver. Technologically speaking, transmission names the conveyance of information from sender to receiver through a designated channel by means of symbols or signals. This technical formulation of transmission constitutes the operational basis of numerous media technologies. In psychology, transmission is often used to describe the way behavior and symptoms of traumatized parents are transferred to their children, causing transgenerational trauma. Such transmission can be direct or indirect, overt or covert; indeed, transmission of trauma might be the result of either over-disclosure of knowledge and facts, or of under- disclosure, even of persistent silence, which “can often communicate traumatic messages as powerfully as words.” In both technological and psychological uses, transmission denotes a unilateral handing over across space and/ or time. But clearly psychological transmission implies more than the mere delivery of messages: it involves a delivery that exceeds that of meaning or information proper, a transmission taking place as though beyond words, on the affective rather than on the cognitive level. This book has posited media as linking the two senses of transmission above by virtue of the technological capability of effecting impact in excess of message, and contact in excess of content. And nowhere are the stakes in linking technological and psychological transmissions higher than in the mediation of trauma. In this book I have advanced an argument about the deep association of media and trauma. The media discussed here—radio, videotape, television, digital, and virtual—comprise different instantiations of the mediation of trauma: the ways media technologies sustain and convey the experience of unsettling experience. Media reach to the Real, and in so doing make available a register whose registration is of corporeality itself. Bodies find expression through media in the Real, revealing materiality as a common substratum.
The Politics of Parenting in Nancy Huston's Fault Lines: Transgenerational Trauma Revisited