Conclusion: Wounding Transmissions

“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.

Virtual Testimony and the Digital Future of Traumatic Past

At the base of all Holocaust testimony projects lies a common commitment: to record and preserve the stories of those who survived the catastrophe as told in their own voices. When it comes to survivors’ testimonies, the messenger is as important as the message. The first to subscribe to this reasoning was the American psychologist David Boder, who in 1946 set out to interview survivors in refugee camps across Western Europe. Equipped with what was then the state- of- the- art technology—an Armour Model 50 wire recorder—Boder went on to produce what was the first audio testimony of the Holocaust. The wire recorder, developed in the 1940s by Marvin Camras, Boder’s colleague at the Illinois Institute of Technology, for the U.S. military, was a portable and remarkably durable device that utilized thin steel wires rolled into spools to produce an electromagnetic recording (see Fig. 4.1 below). As Boder later commented, the device “offered a unique and exact means of recording the experiences of displaced persons. Through the wire recorder the displaced person could relate in his own language and in his own voice the story of his concentration camp life.” Studying wire- recorded narratives led him to devise a “traumatic index” by means of which “each narrative may be assessed as to the category and number of experiences bound to have a traumatizing effect upon the victim.” Boder’s 1949 monograph, I Did Not Interview the Dead, invites readers to find indications of trauma implicit in selected transcripts of recorded narratives. The premise seems to be that, to the extent that such traumatic impact exists, it should be discoverable textually. Yet the same technology that made Boder’s project ingenious was also the reason for its relative obscurity. Wire recording was soon to give way to tape recording, consequently condemning Boder’s wire spools to obsolescence and the testimonies they held to near oblivion. The short- lived medium precluded access to the recorded material.

Introduction:The Mediation of Failed Mediation

In 1995 Binjamin Wilkomirski published a book that was to become a source of fierce controversy. Fragments: Memories of a Wartime Childhood recounts Wilkomirski’s experiences of surviving alone two concentration camps as a small Jewish child from Poland. Having lived most of his life as Bruno Dössekker, the adopted son of a Swiss couple, Wilkomirski claimed to have discovered his true identity through a long psychoanalytic process, which led to writing his story. The book quickly received popular and critical acclaim and won a number of literary prizes, including the National Jewish Book Award. What happened next is fairly well known: a 1998 newspaper article cast doubt as to the authenticity of Wilkomirski’s account, revealing instead the story of a Bruno Grosjean, the illegitimate son of an unmarried woman who had given him away for adoption in Switzerland. The book’s publisher then commissioned a historian to look into the allegations, which were consequently found to be correct. The book previously described as “achingly beautiful” and “morally important” was now declared as fake and its author a fraud. The Wilkomirski case has since figured in debates on Holocaust memory as a cautionary tale about the facility with which one can pass as a survivor— and convince a worldwide audience. The book was discontinued as memoir only later to be released in tandem with the historical study finding it false. While Wilkomirski’s memories may have been fabricated, the way they were depicted in the book is a fairly accurate description of traumatic memory. Even if the content of these memories is made- up their structure very much conforms to a psychology textbook entry on post- trauma. Evidently Wilkomirski was aware of this fact, as in the afterword to the book, he urges others in a similar situation to “cry out their own traumatic childhood memories.”

Videography and Testimony

Modern technological media and psychoanalysis are historically coextensive, so argues Friedrich Kittler. During the last decades of the nineteenth century, a profound transformation had taken place in the material conditions of communication—what Kittler terms Aufschreibesystem (literally “writing-down system,” translated as “discourse network”). Prior to that transformation, writing, in its various manifestations, was the dominant medium of information storage and transmission. When writing was the prevailing writing-down system, all forms of data had to pass through the “bottleneck of the signifier.” With the technological transformation that followed, the symbolic mediation of writing was supplemented by the non-symbolic writing-down system of sight and sound: the audio channel of the phonograph and the visual channel of the cinematograph. As opposed to writing, these media are unselective inscription devices, capturing the intentional together with the unintentional, data and noise, indiscriminately as they come. It is against this background that psychoanalysis appears as a contemporaneous method of recording both intentional and unintentional expressions: the meanings conveyed by speech together with the halts, parapraxes, and stutters—which are rendered at least as meaningful as the intended meanings. Psychoanalysis has a technological counterpart in the form of late nineteenth-century media: the psychic and the technical constitute two parallel mechanisms for the inscription of traces, with the logic of the latter partially informing the former. Sigmund Freud has an unlikely partner in Thomas Edison: the talking cure and the discovery of the unconscious are concomitant with phonography and the mechanization of nonsense. Yet media and psychoanalysis, argues Kittler, do not only supplement the medium of writing; they also take on various tasks of cultural mediation previously under the monopoly of script. One such task is the writing of the past, historiography understood most literally, which, following Kittler’s reasoning, is also transformed by modern media to include the aural and the visual. That the past is experienced through its media traces was obvious enough to any citizen of the twentieth century.

Virtual Therapy and the Digital Future of Traumatic Past

Post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) presents a puzzling pathology of memory. An event, usually experienced with great fear and distress, is remembered not through typical recollections of past occurrences, upsetting as they may be, but instead as repeated and intrusive re-experiencing of the event as if happening once again. This is more or less the description of a disorder officially recognized by the American Psychiatric Association in 1980, but whose history can be traced back to the middle of the nineteenth century. As critical accounts by Ian Hacking, Ruth Leys, and Allan Young have shown, the very notion of traumatic memory is a distinctively modern development, which introduced new dimensions to the understanding of human memory more generally. In the spirit of modern progress, pathology of memory calls for therapy of memory, and the question of how to treat post-trauma inevitably involves the question of how to penetrate traumatic memory. That this memory is such that resists normal memorization renders any therapy a form of intermediating between past and present. In fact, it might be possible to run through the history of trauma therapies as a story of the challenge of accessing and retrieving traumatic memory. This chapter ventures no such enterprise. But its subject matter might be considered as a most recent episode in that story, in which access and retrieval of traumatic memory are performed by means of digital media technology. Virtual Reality Exposure Therapy (VRET) is a clinical therapy project that employs digital virtual reality platform for treating war-related PTSD. Developed chiefly by psychologist Albert “Skip” Rizzo at the Institute for Creative Technology of the University of South California, the project draws on principles of exposure therapy, a cognitive-behavioral method whereby the patient is exposed to stimuli associated with the fearful event in order to achieve habituation. Its most recent configuration is Virtual Iraq- Afghanistan: an Xbox videogame- based platform currently in use at more than sixty locations, including hospitals, military bases, and university centers.

Screen Trauma

Shortly after the 1989 Hillsborough Stadium disaster in Sheffield, England, sixteen people brought actions claiming to suffer a “nervous shock” as a result of learning from the media about the fatal human crush that occurred during a soccer match. The plaintiffs, most of whom were relatives of the victims, demanded compensations as secondary victims, arguing that their injury was within the “immediate aftermath”—a category recognized by British law as having been involved in the consequences of a tragic event. The court rejected the claim, but not before speculating on the hypothetical possibility of a traumatic live broadcast. Numerous claims for psychiatric injury had been filed prior to this case, yet this is probably one of the first to consider whether media could cause trauma to viewers, and consequently be compensable by law. Were such a case to be heard today, however, it might find support from recent developments in psychiatric research. For there is now a growing acceptance among mental health experts that trauma could transfer, under certain conditions, through visual media. Referring to notions such as “distant trauma,” “traumatic media exposure,” and “vicarious traumatization,” clinicians and researchers are now willing to acknowledge that witnessing disastrous events through the media could cause a reaction that complies with existing PTSD clinical criteria. How did this development come about? How does such mediated trauma manifest itself? What are its social, legal, and moral consequences? And what are the implications for our understanding of both media and trauma? These are the questions this chapter sets out to explore. Psychiatry has long been in the business of understanding how external violence affects mental processes. While operating under various nomenclatures, modern conceptions of trauma have dovetailed with modern developments in technology and warfare. As already noted earlier in this book, trauma is a central theme in the grand narrative of the shock of modernity.

Radiocasting Trauma

Two weeks into the Adolf Eichmann trial, toward the end of April 1961, the poet Haim Gouri, who chronicled the proceedings for a local Israeli newspaper, wrote in his column: “The country carries on as usual, day and night, and this trial accompanies it. The one goes on, the other alongside. Away from the courtroom, there is no outward sign of it. But it is in the air and the water, it is like dust on the trees.” Writing his impressions from Beit Ha’am, the Jerusalem theater venue converted to host the hearings, Gouri captured something of the sensation that paralleled the trial, that feeling of “something in the air,” gripping and haunting the everyday as the proceedings unfolded. What was in the air, or more precisely on the air, remains implicit in Gouri’s prose. As is often the case with media, their operation is likely to remain invisible or to be taken for granted, a tendency that sometimes occludes further understanding of certain historical episodes. Such is the case with the Eichmann trial, an event profoundly marked by what was then the principal mass medium in Israel—the radio. The Eichmann trial has recently received renewed attention from scholars in various fields. Indeed, some mention the role of radio during the time of the trial. To quote a few notable references: “Much of the trial was carried live on the radio; everywhere, people listened—in houses and offices, in cafés and stores and buses and factories.” “The trial, the full sessions of which were broadcast live on national radio, changed the face of Israel, psychologically binding the pastless young Israelis with their recent history and revolutionizing their selfperception.” “Broadcast live over the radio and passionately listened to, the trial was becoming the central event in the country’s life.” “The Eichmann trial was the most important media event in Israel prior to the Six Day War. . . . Young and old could be seen radio in hand everywhere—in constant earshot of the broadcast from Beit Ha’am.”