Recent studies in psychiatry reveal an acceptance of trauma through the media. Traditionally restricted to immediate experience, Post-traumatic Stress Disorder is now expanding to include mediated experience. How did this development come about? How does mediated trauma manifest itself? What are its consequences? This essay addresses these questions through three cases: ‘trauma film paradigm’, an early 1960s research program that employed films to simulate traumatic effects; the psychiatric study into the clinical effects of watching catastrophic events on television, culminating with (...) the September 11 attacks; reports on drone operators who exhibit PTSD symptoms after flying combat missions away from the war zone. The recognition of mediated trauma marks a qualitative change in the understanding of media effects, rendering the impact literal and the consequences clinical. What informs recent speculations about the possibility of trauma through media is a conceptual link between visual media and contemporary conceptions of trauma. (shrink)

Since its establishment in 1979, the Video Archive for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale University has given rise to numerous studies on history, memory and trauma in the wake of the Holocaust. While acknowledging its audiovisual nature, previous accounts have nevertheless failed to consider the significance of this novel archival formation and how it shapes the production and reception of survivors’ testimonies. This article occasions an unlikely encounter between the trauma and testimony discourse as developed by Dori Laub, Shoshana Felman, Lawrence (...) Langer in the context of the Yale archive, and the theory of “technical media” as developed by German media theorist, Friedrich Kittler. It argues that the trauma and testimony discourse has a technological unconscious in the form of videotape technology, which crucially conditions the way trauma is conceived in this discourse. It is only with an audiovisual medium capable of capturing and reproducing evidence of the fleeting unconscious that a discourse concerned with the unarticulated past becomes intelligible. (shrink)

This article explores the way Levinas communicates his ethical message through the media at work in his work: speech, writing, and rare references to modern media. Levinas's ethical message concerns the import of the relation with the other, a relation that interrupts any attempt at its thematization, including Levinas's own philosophy. Levinas's text serves as an exemplary medium for this ethical message in conveying the teaching of ethics along with the interruption it advocates. The article then extends the logic of (...) the ethical message beyond the two key media present in Levinas's work—speech and writing—to speculate on whether the interruption it effects can be carried over to audiovisual media. Running throughout is the question of mediation, which takes the discussion outside the context of the face to face, where Levinas's thought is typically situated, to the context of the third and of justice. Levinas's thought may thus lead toward a radical ethics of media—radical in the sense that it posits the act of mediation itself as the root of such ethics. (shrink)

This article explores the relationship between psychotherapy and sound reproduction technologies from the early 20th century to the present. Subscribing to a media genealogy approach, it traces the changing status of the recorded voice in therapy as set against broader transformations in the field of mental health. Delving into the recorded voice’s diverse applications across psychotherapeutic approaches, it demonstrates how technology worked to unravel the temporal and spatial formations of the therapeutic setting, thereby unsettling established hierarchies, terminologies, and techniques while (...) at the same time supporting the integrity of the therapeutic situation. The article points to sound media’s capacity to bifurcate the voice into somatic and expressive elements and reassemble them in various configurations, thereby producing the ‘psyche’ through alternative access points. The story of the recorded voice in therapy provides a glimpse into the way technological affordances inform therapeutic concepts and practices, which in turn implement technology in study, training, and treatment. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 31.2 (2001) 71-84 [Access article in PDF] Freedom from Speech (or the Silent Demand) Amit Pinchevski Speak, you also, speak as the last, have your say. —Paul Celan, "Speak, You Also" The language of awaiting—perhaps it is silent, but it doesnot separate speaking and silence; it makes of silencealready a kind of speaking; already it says in silence thespeaking that silence is. For mortal silence does not keep (...) still. —Maurice Blanchot, The Writing of the DisasterWhereas ethical questions have challenged concepts of self, identity, and society, the concept of freedom of speech—and its place in recent discussions on pluralism and multiculturalism—has remained largely unproblematized. The challenge I wish to propose here does not touch directly on the positive right to speak, nor on the limitations impeding free speech, but rather on the other side of speaking, on the Other's side of this freedom. Does the concept of freedom of speech carry in itself and as such an ethical significance?Freedom of speech has been an important element in modern social philosophy, occupying the works of traditional liberalists such as John Stuart Mill, progressive thinkers like John Dewey and Walter Lippmann, as well as the critical pragmatist Jurgen Habermas, to name but a few. Such accounts regarded the freedom of speech as a social practice based on the stature of the speaking self, on its innate right to speak and to be heard. It is the right to a "podium"—a space and a time in the public sphere—and the right to declare a priori: "I have something to say important enough for others to hear." Hence, the first word of this speech is an assertion of importance, not only of the speech per se, but also the importance of the speaker: self-importance. Is this kind of speaker interested in something beyond his or her fully legitimate right and ability to perform as speaker? Is there any room for the silent Other? Moreover, doesn't the practice of freedom of speech tacitly presuppose that someone else is already relegated to listening, to the passive side of this action? If this is indeed true, such a way of communicating would be, to use Gemma Corradi Fiumara's thoughtful insight, a reduced-by-half notion of logos—an address by the one who knows how to speak but does not (need to) know how to listen [54-55]. A halved model of speaker and address would thereby constitute only half of an ethical discourse. The remaining half would lie where speech does not eclipse the Other's silence, where the Other's silence has its "say." How can [End Page 71] one speak and still hear the Other's call, whether silent or audible? And even more importantly, what is the Other's silence "saying"?It is my contention that free speech is never carried out in an "Otherless" sphere, that is, untainted by the Other's demand to be responded to. It follows that the moral veneration invested in the concept of free speech implies a certain heedlessness of otherness, and that radically free speech is self-absolved from its fundamental response-ability rather than rightfully free. A responsible speaker (or writer) may then be viewed as the one whose freedom to speak is exposed to the Other's demands, and for whom this freedom is his or her onus to respond to the Other's call. The witness speaks for someone who cannot speak for him- or herself; the witness's freedom of expression is subjected to the responsibility for Others. One remarkable witness was the writer Primo Levi, who devoted his life to responding to the living and to the dead: his greatest burden was his freedom to speak. Perhaps delaying or deferring the emergence of the speaking self might thereby allow the Other's call to emerge and summon witnessing. Beyond Speech Acknowledging the existence of Others in every address depends upon developing a sense of otherness, that is, sensitivity to the Other. It requires an awareness of the fundamental setting in which an... (shrink)