Climate Trauma

E. Ann Kaplan

• Publisher: Rutgers University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780813573564
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Film History & Criticism

Each month brings new scientific findings that demonstrate the ways in which human activities, from resource extraction to carbon emissions, are doing unprecedented, perhaps irreparable damage to our world. As we hear these climate change reports and their predictions for the future of Earth, many of us feel a sickening sense of déjà vu, as though we have already seen the sad outcome to this story.
 
Drawing from recent scholarship that analyzes climate change as a form of “slow violence” that humans are inflicting on the environment, Climate Trauma theorizes that such violence is accompanied by its own psychological condition, what its author terms “Pretraumatic Stress Disorder.” Examining a variety of films that imagine a dystopian future, renowned media scholar E. Ann Kaplan considers how the increasing ubiquity of these works has exacerbated our sense of impending dread. But she also explores ways these films might help us productively engage with our anxieties, giving us a seemingly prophetic glimpse of the terrifying future selves we might still work to avoid becoming. 
 
Examining dystopian classics like Soylent Green alongside more recent examples like The Book of Eli, Climate Trauma also stretches the limits of the genre to include features such as Blindness, The Happening, Take Shelter, and a number of documentaries on climate change. These eclectic texts allow Kaplan to outline the typical blind-spots of the genre, which rarely depicts climate catastrophe from the vantage point of women or minorities. Lucidly synthesizing cutting-edge research in media studies, psychoanalytic theory, and environmental science, Climate Trauma provides us with the tools we need to extract something useful from our nightmares of a catastrophic future.    

1

Trauma Studies Moving Forward

Genre and Pretrauma Cinema

“Narratives and images are indexes to the still unfolding traumas of a history—the history of modernity—that has become synonymous with trauma and shocks.”

—E. Ann Kaplan and Ban Wang, Trauma and Cinema

As should be clear by now, trauma studies as a discipline is alive and well today, and its reach is expanding as scholars in more fields find its lens illuminating for understanding art about catastrophe. Partly because global disasters dominate our mediated worlds as never before, such art is more visible than in the past. And along with such art, scholars continue to analyze not only its impact on audiences but also the ethical imperative to create witnesses to disaster through art. Years ago, Dori Laub insisted on the importance of bearing witness to catastrophe, where before there was no witness. In recent years, artists have responded by making works about global disasters.1

Which kind of art best offers the position of the ethical witness is central to my project and will be addressed in due course.2 I am first interested in the interdisciplinary debates regarding theories dealing with collective or cultural trauma incited by sociologists such as Wulf Kansteiner and Jeffrey Alexander, themselves sometimes inspired by reading humanities trauma studies.3 I will then address my new concern to move trauma studies forward—that is, into the future—by defining the genre of pretrauma cinema as it relates to a specific kind of witnessing. In this genre, viewers witness probable futurist dystopian worlds as they are imagined on film before they happen in reality. Media images proliferating through a society create what I have called “cultural trauma,” when people live in fear of imminent disaster and fears of future threat dominate consciousness.4 But other films offer a position of being witness avant la lettre to the challenges that face humans worldwide in regard to disastrous human impact on the planet and the collapse of infrastructure.

Witnessing in the ethical sense has to address not just the individual but the social collectivity as well. Such witnessing involves taking responsibility for injustices in the past and preventing future human-based catastrophe. It is a position in which one acts as a member of a collectivity or culture. Understanding this kind of cultural witnessing and its implications requires theorizing how cultural trauma functions and how we can generalize for a collectivity. Humanists have had trouble defining collective trauma. From a Freudian and specifically clinical point of view, trauma can only be known by its belated return in symptoms such as nightmares, phobias, hallucinations, panic attacks. No event, then, is inherently traumatic; it only becomes so in its later symptomatic return. Yet we talk of events themselves as being traumatic. Focusing heavily on a specific event as the origin of trauma phenomena runs the danger of rejecting the psychoanalytic understanding of memory “as the outcome of a complex process of revision”—as Susannah Radstone puts it, following Freud—in favor of a linear registration of events as they happen.5

Nevertheless, to abandon trauma is to lose the resonance and aura, if you like, that the word carries. We know we are talking about something atrocious, almost beyond understanding, if we call an event “traumatic.” When I use the term trauma culture, I mean a culture in which discourses, and especially images, about catastrophic events proliferate, often managed by government. These discourses overtake public discussion of other things, dominating the social atmosphere. Like Jeffrey Alexander, a sociologist, I understand that trauma “is not something naturally existing; it is something constructed by society”—and, I would add, especially constructed through the media.6 When I refer to people being “vicariously traumatized” by the proliferation of catastrophe discourse, I mean that people suffer effects similar to those from trauma, caused by watching or experiencing the trauma of others. So I use the term trauma culture loosely but (I’d argue) effectively. Other words do not communicate as much as the term trauma does.

However, the leap from describing traumatic symptoms—clarified in clinical research with individual subjects in therapy—to applying such symptoms to national discourse has long plagued humanists. While we may be intuitively right about nations “forgetting” for generations events that were too traumatic to confront directly, making a viable argument (or at least one that scholars in other disciplines will accept) has not been easy. Ross Poole, a sociologist, reminds us, “Memory requires a bearer: If there are social or cultural memories . . . there must be groups, that is collective subjects, to which the memories belong.”7 Here Freud, whose trauma theories appear to work against moving from the individual to the collective, might paradoxically be an ally. Freud starts his 1922 volume Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego by noting that, “while Individual Psychology is concerned with the individual man [sic] and explores the paths by which he seeks to find satisfaction for his instincts . . . only rarely . . . is Individual Psychology in a position to disregard the relations of individuals to others.”8 However, Freud’s focus on the self-contained individual leads him to focus less on a cultural unconscious than on a critique of individuals losing their distinctiveness.9 Michael Roth’s extensive study of Freud provides more support from Interpretation of Dreams for the phenomenon of a “group mind,” including a cultural unconscious.10 He finds the concept of group repression of ideas too uncomfortable to confront. These ideas include ethnic genocide and other historical events in which a population is complicit. Carl Jung argued that myths and folktales, as well as the frequency of similar dreams that come up in psychoanalysis, provide data that suggest a group unconscious. He noted that “the collective unconscious . . . appears to consist of mythological motifs or primordial images, for which reason the myths of all nations are its real exponents.”11 But Freud went further in theorizing a motivated unconscious.

Building out from Freud, then, I suggest that, just as dreams reflect unconscious thoughts the dreamer perhaps cannot face, so group practices may be based on similar unconscious memories that a society cannot address because they are too shameful or morally unacceptable within that society’s norms. More recently, cognitive psychologists offer support from experiments to test theories of a “group mind.” In their studies Alin Coman, Adam D. Brown, Jonathan Koppel and William Hirst conclude that, “just as social contagion shapes individual and group attitudes and behavior by providing individuals and groups with new memories, we posit that induced forgetting shapes individual and group attitudes and behavior through the opposite means.”12

Teresa Brennan, heavily influenced by Freud and psychoanalytic theory, offers a related but somewhat different hypothesis regarding groups. Her theory builds out from her interesting work on what she calls “the transmission of affect.” Brennan argues, “To understand how the transmission of affect takes place, metapsychology has to begin again, and from the standpoint that individuals are not self-contained.” What she calls “the foundational fantasy” fosters the illusion of self-containment, that is, the mother is situated as the “passive repository of the child’s unwanted raging affects” while the infant is “the true fountain of energy and life.”13 For Brennan, affects are social and predate the individual. The subject is born into a world of affects that then become his or her own. This readiness to receive the affects of the other as well as of the culture and be changed by them—a kind of emotional contagion that Hirst and Koppel also theorized—explains in part the impact on viewers of dystopian fantasies in the films I study. Transmission of affect takes place as readily between viewer and cinematic emotions as between individuals in life.

Humanists can benefit from Freud, especially as Roth interprets him, as well as from Brennan and cognitive psychology. But there remains a need to better clarify the difference between a national public discourse, creating a “group mind” through pronouncements by prominent officials (the president, governors, elected officials) and circulated broadly via various media, and minority discourses produced by small collectives whose knowledge does not get widely disseminated.14 Humanists need to better differentiate between perpetrators and victims. Criminal acts performed in the name of the nation-state are often the ones that elected officials work to render absent, forgotten in public discourse. This is an effort that the majority of the people (those not affected by the crimes) might concede to, either because they are partly implicated in those crimes or, as humanities scholars might argue, because they themselves are vicariously traumatized by what the nation has done.15

Traumatic memory, in its belatedness, involves a kind of forgetting. Victim collectives may also forget, through the same process of traumatic amnesia experienced by the perpetrators. Meanwhile, the discourse of those who do remember is stifled, until the time arrives when the nation-state can no longer suppress its crimes. As Poole notes, when rediscovered knowledge of organized brutality is addressed to us as citizens of the state, this knowledge falls within “the ‘horizon’ of our collective memory and it places the events described on our moral agenda.”16 Poole’s comments capture what humanities scholars have in mind when they talk about nations’ also showing effects similar to traumatic symptoms in individuals.

In examining the impact of imaginary worlds and the humanities’ critical work on society, let me suggest the following: works enter the cultural sphere, where they are shown and reviewed and discussed in widely circulating blogs, Internet sites, television entertainment channels, journals, and newspapers. In these ways, these works seep into public consciousness. We may turn to the popularity of films and literature about trauma as partial evidence for impact. As Alexander has argued, certain events get circulated in symbolic form and thus come into public consciousness. He gives the example of the Holocaust and pervasive emotionally moving literature, such as Anne Frank’s diary, or the increasing Holocaust cinema in the last decade or so.17

In a work on the global impact of catastrophic memories, Michael Rothberg discusses one result of such public consciousness. A group that has suffered a traumatic event might come to recognize the event’s meanings when, through visual media or written texts, it learns about another catastrophe. As people come to view their particular tragedy through the lens of, say, the Holocaust, they may initiate less a competitive memory and more solidarity and understanding across cultures in regard to trauma.18 Further, new neuroscience research demonstrates not only that fictions stimulate the brain but also that, as Annie Murphy Paul puts it, they may “even change how we act in life.” Paul notes that “the brain, it seems, does not make much of a distinction between reading about an experience and encountering it in real life.” This is obviously debatable, but it seems that humanists may not be so far out of line. We can show that humanists contribute to knowledge using their aesthetic (literary, film) data and draw on social processes linked to that data.19

But we do more than that, because we also use frameworks such as psychoanalysis that is not typically very visible in sociological studies. Alexander, for example, argues that the failure to recognize collective traumas results not from the intrinsic nature of the original suffering (which humanists usually focus on) but from the failure to carry through on the gap between the event and its representation, what he calls “the trauma process.”20 This process has several stages, but at each stage—from defining painful injury to the collectivity to distributing ideal and material consequences—the signifying chains of language, sound, and images (that is, representation) are the medium, and this not only in the aesthetic realm but also in the legal, scientific, mass media, and state bureaucratic worlds.

Humanists’ objects of study differ from those of sociologists to the extent that our specific data is at one remove from lived reality, namely, the worlds of literature, film or digital media, and other arts. We come close to the sociological object, however, because they emerge from the society and culture that are studied by sociologists, such imaginary worlds are closely linked to it. Humanists’ focus on the cultural role of genre, and its importance is often overlooked by sociologists. Through genres, literature and the arts showcase symptoms of social processes, cultural energies, and cultural change. They provide us with a barometer of what’s going on in any particular society. In the case of trauma studies, humanist scholars produce new knowledge concerning trauma and its cultural ramifications by studying the contribution of art about atrocity in the processes of memory (past, present, and future), and by witnessing, healing, and the working through of both national and international catastrophes.

However, such approaches in trauma studies now need complementing by exploring the trauma of the future—what I call pretrauma. The genre of pretrauma cinema, like others, offers “a powerful dynamic of repetition and expectation” that is the ground, as Christine Gledhill puts it, of “all our imaginings and thinkings.”21 Thinking about the role of society and trauma, one can conclude that genre analysis tells us not just about kinds of films but also about the cultural work of producing and knowing them.22 By definition, genres change as the social context changes. In this case, part of the critic’s job is to lay bare such dual contexts of society and genre. The pretrauma genre emerges as Eurocentric cultures become newly aware of the uncertainty of human futurity. Genres shape how we think about our lived worlds by establishing certain kinds of story, certain repeated narratives and situations, that lead to well-defined expectations. It is just such work of genres that I hope to show—first, by further defining the new pretraumatic film and then, in the chapters that follow, by presenting analyses of films in the genre.

The pretrauma dystopian genre addressed in this book is a subset of the familiar science-fiction film, itself notoriously difficult to define.23 The worlds in the future-tense subset function both to further a culture of fear about social collapse and to work against the exploitation of catastrophe through subtle critique (for example, by offering a position for the viewer as witness to the damage being done). I began to study such futurist fictions as partly displacements from the past and present, but I have come to see them also as construc...