Semiotics and Its Masters by Kristian Bankov Paul Cobley

Author:Kristian Bankov,Paul Cobley
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2017-03-15T00:00:00+00:00

3For a semiotics of trauma

In the last 20 years there has been an increasing growth of interest in the notion of trauma and its relationship with memory: trauma appeared to be an almost universal clue to reading many different dimensions of our contemporary world.18 However, without entering into this debate, I will start my discussion from what is one of the most basic epistemological tenets of a semiotic perspective, i.e. the above-mentioned constructivist approach.

It might seem problematic, at first sight, to say that a trauma is not given but is socially and semiotically constructed, since trauma appears in the light of common sense assumptions to constitute a ‘naturally’ evident phenomenon in itself. I believe, however, that one of the most challenging aspects of semiotics is its capacity to overcome common sense opinions, forcing us to question the very notion of the ‘natural’. According to common sense, trauma is an event that is independent of us, something that just happens, that affects us, and that we can immediately recognize as such.

Interestingly enough, very similar assumptions can be found in the theorizations of Trauma Studies, although they might appear to be highly sophisticated. Indeed, they all share what could be described as a naturalistic-essentialist theory of trauma. Simplifying a much more complex debate, we could say that according to such a position, a trauma is an event that produces a laceration in our normal psychic life, a sudden and violent break in our temporal continuity that we cannot face and repair. Trauma exceeds our possibility of representing it and voicing it, and, as a consequence, trauma implies a crisis of representation and an impossibility of witnessing it. Thus, in Trauma Theory, trauma is seen as an unrecoverable fracture that is the direct consequence of some external event. Attempts have even been made to find a neurobiological basis in our brain as a basis for a theory of this kind: some neuroscientists have claimed that a traumatic experience leaves a direct imprint in the brain (Kolk 1996). What appears problematic in a position of this kind is not the potential material grounding of traumatic phenomena, so much as its reductionist appeal: in this way traumatic experience is endowed with an ontological essence, totally independent of any form of symbolic elaboration and semiotic mediation.

We are facing here a species of naturalization of the trauma: the trauma is an external event that produces as a direct consequence a traumatic effect, objectivised even in the brain. Moving from individual psyches to societies and larger communities, the very same schema is applied: communities, too, appear to be affected in a direct way by an objective external event.

How might semiotics help in suggesting an alternative view of traumatic experience?

The first important move is a separation of the event itself from the sense of the event. An event does not coincide with its sense: the sense can emerge much later, changing over time and becoming historically transformed, and always open and subject to re-interpretation. Events and their sense are

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