Benjamin, Trauma and the Virtual

Abstract

Trauma has become central to debates about history and memory in an era in which digital information has apparently freed itself of any past located in place or material objects.  Has trauma become the model for deep memory in a culture of pure simulation?  While Benjamin developed his widely influential cultural analysis in the 1920s and 30s, new media today support a virtual culture that claims to have moved beyond these earlier technological revolutions. This paper, however, argues that Benjamin’s reading of Freud with Bergson enables us to think trauma with the virtual in ways that remain provocative today.  By arguing that Bergson’s philosophy of time unintentionally described what cinema would become, Deleuze potentially collapses all human experiences into technologically-mediated forms.  In Benjamin the virtual describes a transformative potential that includes, but is never completely assimilated into, mediated experience. Mediated images, carrying the traces of traumatic events in the past, become the site of a critical intervention in history.