Dr. Hannah R. Bacon

In this work, I interrogate society’s overwhelming entrenchment in what Hal Foster terms ‘trauma discourse’, in which he claims that trauma becomes the arbiter of the real. In this dynamic, the camera arts occupy an elevated status in their abilities to ‘capture’ the real. Drawing on Judith Butler’s text Frames of War and Susan Sontag’s On Photography, I outline two central planks of my argument. First, I address how photography visually augments shared notions of reality and meaning through photography’s indexical relationship to the real. Second, I address the temporal registers of photography as ‘punctum’ and an ongoing past. Photography, in its temporal and contextual properties, palpably molds dominant discursive mentalities. A noted concern of photographic theory is the effect of images of atrocities becoming banal. If the real is what is traumatic, and the veracity of the real is found in photographic representation, then there is a ratcheting up of the demand for shock, for trauma, as confirmation of the real. This creates a perverse desire to witness the world’s atrocities in order to fetishize the proliferation of ever more horrific images, which it justifies through a disavowal of censorship. The central claim of this article is that society’s current relationship to the explosive production and dissemination of shocking photographic images is indicative of the dialectical movement of trauma-discourse.

In public discourse trauma is predominantly framed as an overwhelming event undergone by the individual. In this article I first provide a brief genealogy to trace the emergence of what is now the dominant temporal framework of psychological catastrophe. I supplement this evental nosology with a durational consideration of trauma by drawing on the works of Henri Bergson and his articulation of duration, memory, and lived experience. Durational trauma accommodates liminal and ongoing experiences of the catastrophic that are equally devastating to the paradigmatic exemplars of PTSD. This alternate account entails different modalities of reparation and responsibility to the systemic traumatization of others. For this I draw on Levinas and his intersubjective ethics drawing out the relevancy his work has for this concept of durational trauma. Levinas’s emphasis on expiation avoids the reification of the trauma of the other as spectacle and draws into focus one’s own participation in the circulation and continuation of ongoing traumatic networks. This contributes to the emergent alchemy of reading Bergson and Levinas together, but likewise, to philosophy of trauma and the ethical responsibility and temporality of ongoing systemic harm.