In addition to affect studies, there have been a number of influential texts
associated with trauma and/or memory studies that have also theorized various approaches to the ‘transmission’ (or circulation) of traumatic memory. I have also found this literature significant in helping me explore how memory and trauma might intersect with intergenerational transmission and their links to particular histories. As I continued to reflect on Cho’s understanding of trauma, in light of Abraham and Torok’s (1994) concepts of hauntings, I found that other scholars also conceptualized transmissions of trauma across generational time. However, these theories both resonated with and differed from the notion of
‘transgenerational hauntings’. I will spend time here reviewing some of these debates that have further aided my thesis arguments and research questions concerning history and memory vis-‐à-‐vis the intergenerational transmission of trauma. Significantly, what is the role of history? What kinds of ‘memories’ pass? In light of this, what are other perspectives of transmission in addition to what I have discussed thus far? How might they further shed insight into the possibilities of how hauntings affectively pass across generations, time and space?
I begin by reviewing key texts often associated with this scholarship of trauma and memory. Theories on their transmission are then briefly accounted for, as the literature has also helped my own intellectual formation and development of my research questions/arguments. These debates, however, do not necessarily incorporate the language or concept of ‘hauntings’ that I adopt in this thesis.39 In
39 As I have made clear so far in this thesis chapter, I have chosen to subscribe to Cho’s (2008) and Abraham and Torok’s (1994) language of ‘ghosts’ and ‘hauntings’ to articulate my arguments of traumatic memory and their (affective) transmission. This language has helped me engage the otherwise impossible task of seeking new ways to ‘see’ ‘traumas’ that are lost and unseeable (see Gordon 2008, Cho 2008). For instance, Avery Gordon (2008) also uses the concept of ghosts to discuss the disavowal and silencing of traumatic histories. The ‘ghosts’ of history can be
understood as ‘the sign, or the empirical evidence…that tell you a haunting is taking place’ (see also Cho 2008: 29; Gordon 2008: 8). My more detailed discussion of Gordon (2008) can be found in Chapter 2, particularly concerning how her concepts of hauntings have helped me develop my
fact, many do not neatly ‘fit’ nor easily complement the theory of transgenerational haunting subscribed to by Cho (2008) and Abraham and Torok (1994). However, I reflexively ‘work-‐through’ ways of engaging tensions and integrations between hauntings and various perspective of transmission (e.g. Walkerdine 2012, Davoine and Gaudillière 2004, Volkan 1997), in order to develop my own questions and arguments.
Cathy Caruth’s (1995) own interpretation of trauma resonates with notions of transgenerational haunting as Caruth perceives the power of trauma as
contingent on its very forgetting, where it is not so much experienced in the moment of the traumatic event (the shock is too much to register).40 Caruth (1995) says:
the historical power of the trauma is not that the experience is repeated after its forgetting, but that is only in and through its inherent forgetting that it is first experienced at all. And it is this inherent latency of the event that paradoxically explains the peculiar, temporal structure, the belatedness, of historical experience: since the traumatic event is not experienced as it occurs, it is fully evident only in connection with another place, and in another time. (p. 8)
Thus, the importance of time and the belated return of the past into the present, reflects, for Caruth (1995:58), a dual reading of both Freud and the recurrent flashbacks typical of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), as part of the problem and potential of human survival.
This intersection of generational trauma, memory and survival is linked to the horror of incomprehensible histories. These themes reflect the
interconnectedness of memory that privileges the familial unit across trauma, diaspora and exile (see Hirsch 2012; Assmann, J. 2011; Assmann, A. 2010). Furthermore, Aleida Assmann (2010: 40-‐41) begins from conceptualizations of ‘individual memory’ and extends ‘outwards’, articulating the importance of family and larger society as a key means of transmitting remembrances or forgettings. In a topological sketch of interconnectedness, Assmann articulates different forms of
‘diasporic montage’ (see also Chapter 7).
40I found that Caruth’s (1995) own analysis of Freudian (and to some extent Lacanian)
perspectives of trauma shared both similarities and differences to Abraham and Torok’s (1994) perspectives. However, while Abraham and Torok are clearly psychoanalytic, Caruth (1995) is somewhat more agnostic about psychoanalysis in general.
memory. These include what is termed ‘communicative remembrance’ (individual memory to social memory), and ‘cultural remembrance (e.g. political and cultural memory) (Hirsch 2012: 32; Assmann, A. 2010: 40-‐44).41 These discussions, in turn, further connect with the importance of the social links of microhistories to larger traumatic histories from the perspective of Davoine and Gaudillière (2004), whom I will discuss more in a later section. Furthermore, this power of traumatic memory or memory of trauma, therefore, as echoed by Kai Erikson (1995: 184), involves how ‘our memory repeats to us what we haven’t yet come to terms with, what still haunts us’.
Similar to Abraham and Torok (1994), Hirsch’s concept of postmemory is drawn from the next generation, or what Hirsch (2012) calls ‘postgeneration’ children of Holocaust survivors. Specifically, Hirsch’s (2008) work with postmemory and photographs echoes historical groundings with Abraham and Torok (based on generational work as a result of the Holocaust) and shares concerns of second-‐generation trauma with Cho (2008) (specifically in second generation trauma of survivors from historical atrocity), citing the significance of maternal loss and mother-‐child separation. Hirsch does not define postmemory as ‘movement, method, or idea’. Instead Hirsch (2008) theorizes postmemory as:
a structure of inter-‐and trans-‐generational transmission of traumatic knowledge and experience. It is a consequence of traumatic recall but (unlike posttraumatic stress disorder) at a generational remove…Postmemory describes the relationship that the generation after those who witnessed cultural or collective trauma bears to the experiences of those who came before, experiences that they ‘remember’ only by means of the stories, images, and behaviours among which they grew up. But these experiences were transmitted to them so deeply and affectively as to seem to constitute memories in their own right. Postmemory’s connection to the past is thus not actually mediated by recall but by imaginative investment, projection, and creation. (p. 106)
41 Assmann (2010) clarifies how ‘collective memory’ has been descriptively too vague amidst the research literature. She replaces its definitions into three terms instead—social, cultural, and political memory. ‘Social’ memory refers to the ‘memory of a society’, or a given society’s localized experiencing of remembered or forgotten past. It can be divided into various generational
memories as articulated within families, as well as shared experiences (Assmann 2010: 41). While Assmann makes a distinction on the basis of her topology between inter-‐generational
communication (structures individual and social memory) and trans-‐generational communication (structures political and cultural memory), my distinctions will assume Abraham and Torok’s (1994) assumptions of ‘transgenerational’, which confusingly refers more to familial forms. In this thesis, I will use the terms, ‘transgenerational’ and ‘intergenerational’ interchangeably and pari passu.
These points echo Abraham and Torok (1994) concerning the generational passing of trauma through affective memory. Specifically, Hirsch (2012: 31) suggests that ‘memory signals an affective link to the past,’ and how postmemory ‘approximates the affective force of memory’. For instance, Hirsch (2008: 109) follows van Alphen's (2006) argument that trauma, in fact, cannot truly and literally be
transmitted between generations (as if memory's trajectory must be a continuous, formed result from being an actor to the original event), where the children of Holocaust survivors could not possibly have truly formed or acquired the actual memories of their parents. ‘Nothing could be truer or more accurate,’ agrees Hirsch (2008),
of course we do not have literal ‘memories’ of others’ experiences, of course different semiotic principles are at work, of course no degree of monumentality can transform one person’s lived memories into another’s. Postmemory is not identical to memory: it is ‘post,’ but at the same time, it approximates memory in its affective force’. (p. 109)
Hirsch’s descriptions of ‘affective force’ recall comparisons with Massumi’s (see 2002; 1995) considerations of affect theory as intensities and forces (though Hirsch, there, does not directly make this link to Massumi herself). Likewise, similarities are echoed with Abraham and Torok’s (1994) conceptualizations of transgenerational haunting, even though the role of the unconscious is not of particular interest to Hirsch.
Further complementing the contributions of Abraham and Torok (1994) and Hirsch (2008, 2012), are perspectives that further assert the importance of
historical traumas or haunted histories, and their intergenerational transmission. Psychoanalytic work that concerns the transmission of trauma within psychic unconscious relations between parents and their children can be seen in Vamik Volkan's (1987) concept of deposited representation. While the emphasis of the parent-‐child relationship is similar to Abraham and Torok (2004), Klein’s object-‐ relations, or even Freud’s concepts of libidinal drives, instinct and wishes, Volkan’s conceptualizations, too, must be considered from a ‘different’ psychoanalytic stream in comparison to the other psychoanalysts I have described. He states that a ‘deposited representation emphasizes the role of the objects who
aspects of their own internalized object-‐images, into the self-‐representations of children’. In other words, the children become akin to ‘reservoirs’ of entangled (un)conscious material. Volkan, Ast and Greer suggest (2002):
By depositing images and representations into the child's developing (or a regressed adult's) self-‐representation, the object influence the child's sense of identity and gives the child certain specific tasks to perform. In fact...other people can pass their images, with associated affects, to children even before children achieve an intrapsychic separation between their own psychic boundaries and those that belong to the object. In the process of deposited representation, the active partner is the other person, not the child (or regressed adult) whose self-‐representation functions as a reservoir. (p. 36)
Thus, Volkan et al. (2002: 6) privileges a language and concept of the mental ‘image’, or mental representation (a mosaic of ‘images’) within the unconscious psyche that ‘[initiates] unconscious fantasies and thus influence individual
members’ psychopathology, adaptations, or both’. Thus, ‘depositing’ occurs when words, entangled images, (unfulfilled) wishes, desires, and aspects of selves (perhaps collective selves), from the generation traumatized via survival, war, poverty, ‘deposit’ into the child's identity formation. However, ‘the experiences that created these mental images in the adult are not ‘accessible’ to the child, but instead, are deposited or pushed into the child, but without the
experiential/contextual framework that created them’ (Volkan and Greer 2007: no pagination). Thus, in Chapter 3, I offer examples from my analysis of subject-‐peer interviews to articulate how Volkan’s concepts are helpful for exploring affective intergenerational hauntings, and ‘glimpsing’ how the traumas from stories told (and untold) transmit to the next generation unconsciously.
Significantly, Volkan, Ast, and Greer (2002) have also conceived the striking and powerful notion of ‘large group’ or ‘chosen traumas’. Quite incredibly, this concept describes how some historical traumas can be collectively transmitted intergenerationally as ‘large group’ traumas (e.g. within a particular area or
region) or as ‘chosen traumas’ (e.g. quite literally unconsciously ‘chosen’ across the global diaspora of a particular peoples). Such traumatic transmissions act on the concept of ‘deposited representation’ through both the individual and collective unconscious. In Chapters 4 and 6, I interrogate these concepts by analyzing the intersection of historical atrocities and memory production within the ethnic
Chinese diaspora in Canada, and also, in reference to the global ethnic Chinese diasporas. Significantly, the value of Volkan’s concepts is deeply entangled in a political project in pursuit of justice, challenging injustice and articulating bridges of reconciliation. This emphasis on the political-‐historical connections to the unconscious are also helpful as I discuss the relations of power in producing national memories and collective identifications in Chapters 4 and 6.
Volkan’s research and theorizations attend to, like Davoine and Gaudillière (2004), the links of large (macro) histories to personal and familial traumas. However, in contrast to Volkan, psychoanalysts Davoine and Gaudillière’s (2004) view of intergenerational transmission is situated from a (post)Lacanian
perspective that articulates the importance of social narratives in their articulations of the importance of ‘social links’ to histories beyond trauma. Specifically, what is privileged is ‘the actual social history’ that is thus ‘crucial to the patient’s emergence from madness’ (xii). Thus, trauma is understood in terms of the ‘social link’ between microhistories (e.g. manifestations of madness in patients) and macrohistories (e.g. Walkerdine and Jimenez 2012: 157). The ‘breakage’ or ‘cut-‐out’ ness of such social links occurs when trauma (e.g. of war) is embodied (as opposed to the concept of the ‘repressed’), and ‘known by the body but unable to be brought to thought’ (ibid.: 158). Forming a link also requires immediacy, which opposes causalist models (e.g. focused on problem-‐solving the issue of ‘madness’ and finding a solution) and argues that ‘[it] is better to conceive of all crises of madness as beginnings’ (Davoine and Gaudillière: 2004: 168). This does not mean to disregard the past, but to allow the patient to recover the
urgency of the crisis itself and help them ‘formulate the intersection and
coordinates of histories that go beyond both of them’ (ibid.: 169). Recovering the ‘links’ also involves an expectancy that trusts the other and ‘expresses the actual hope for life when life has been banished from the horizon’ (ibid.: 209).
This centrality of history is further brought out in Walkerdine's own work with steelworkers. In their research, Walkerdine and Jimenez (2012) describe three key periods in the history of Steeltown and its community that link to the
generational collective trauma produced. These involve a period of turbulence and insecurity (first 200 years when steelworks were open and the centre of town); second involved a catastrophe in 2002 that resulted in the closing of steelworks
forever; third is the post-‐catastrophe period (Walkerdine and Jimenez 2012: 79). These three eras assert that ‘it is the centrality of how Steeltown had managed to engage creatively with the threat of annihilation and chronic insecurity that is at the heart of a history spanning 200 years’ (ibid.: 85). These histories, according to Walkerdine and Jimenez, created ‘[ruptures] in the flows of time and space’ that either produced annihilation anxiety, a chronic insecurity, or creative capacity to survive (ibid: 78-‐79). Furthermore, such histories produced intergenerational transmissions of trauma. For example, Walkerdine and Jimenez describe how the perpetuations of a particular masculinity (through the history of the town and steelworking men) circulated through the community. For next generations of young men, their inability to participate in such work (due to catastrophes closing the steelworking factory), and necessity to work in ‘feminine’ jobs, not only
challenged ‘male ‘pride (linked to the Steelworks history and production of
masculinity), but also led to their experiences of shame and embarrassment (ibid.: 133). Thus, the entanglement of affects, histories, and production of memory (concerning such histories as well as gender expectations) articulates an intergenerational transmission linking micro and macrohistories. What I have found helpful in Walkerdine and Jimenez’s work is their discussion of individuals and communities in relation to the persistence of trauma across centuries of chronological time. Their discussion of the social links broken and recovered intergenerationally due to the legacy and trauma of history (e.g. loss of
steelworking factory) has aided my own intellectual formation and how I am (continually) developing my understandings of trauma and the transgenerational transmission of affect.
1.6 Mediated Visions of Hauntings: Potentials and Problematics
Grace Cho’s (2008) diasporic vision begins my discussion here as a foundational model of ‘mediated perception’ (or ‘seeing’) of invisible, silenced trauma.
Additionally, this section discusses texts that intersect mediations with relation to power and the memory production of national identities. The literature in this section has helped me formulate questions that intersect hauntings with media, and also helped me intellectually develop the arguments I make in later chapters