H A L   F O S T E R

It is important to hold these two terms apart: shock and trauma are related, but there are important differences between them. Shock emerges out of a physiological discourse, trauma out of a psychological discourse. Historically, psychoanalysis was, in part, a response to problems in shock discourse that could only be resolved in a psychological register. For many critics, shock was key to the relation between modernism and modernity; it was one way to think the new forces of capitalist modernity in particular - industrial processes, urban developments, military regimes, imperialist campaigns, and so forth. Within this discourse modernity was seen as an assault, as a force that attacks - shocks - the subject from outside. In shock discourse, then, there was a dichotomy of outside and inside: the social lies outside, the subjective inside. And shock was the point of rupture between the two, the breakdown of the "protective shield" of the subject, to use Freud's famous term from Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Given this account, several variants of modernism can be seen as negotiations of shock. This is essentially how Walter Benjamin viewed Baudelaireian modernism, as a mimetic defense against the assault of capitalist modernity. But different modernisms present different ways to negotiate shock. For example, there is a homeopathic strategy in which shock experience is taken in and reworked in art so as to shock subject at one (aesthetic) level but to immunize him or her on another (social) level. This homeopathic strategy is taken to an extreme in German Dada, as its methods of buffoonery and bombast assume the subject to be blown apart by modernity - reified and fragmented beyond repair. These artists and critics - Hugo Ball is the great figure here - practice what Peter Sloterdijk has called "the irony of the bashed ego," an irony that attempts to outstrip the capitalist degradation of the individual through a hyperbolic mimesis of this degradation in art.

An even more extreme version of this strategy might be called the autistic defense, whereby the artist plays dumb or even dead. Think, for example, of the dysfunctional persona "dada-max" assumed by Max Ernst. But Warhol is the obvious instance here: he pushed Dadaist indifference to its nihilistic limit. The question of trauma is different. Although etymologically it means "wound," trauma is not a simple matter of a rupture of the "protective shield." In trauma, the opposition between inside and outside, between subject and world, breaks down, and as it becomes confused, so do other oppositions such as private and public. Thus the assaults of contemporary life seem no longer to come from without or within - they come, ambiguously, from both. This model of trauma is a more productive way to think about contemporary culture, a melancholy culture obsessed with narcissistic wounds. It also proposes a suggestive - nonpunctual - sense of temporality, a temporality of repetition and deferral, of acting out and working through traumatic episodes of the past. Contemporary culture is clearly traumatic in this sense - obsessed with the redoing and undoing of artistic and political events of the century. However, no more than shock is trauma a recent concern. Just as the concern with shock runs from Baudelaire to Dada at least, the concern with trauma runs from Surrealism to object art.