Crises of Money

In their 2000 academic blockbuster, Empire, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri made the polemical argument that postcolonial theory leads to a dead end because it remains obsessed with the modern form of domination associated with colonialism that is no longer the primary mode of power operating in contemporary globalization.¹ There is some truth to this claim, regardless of the relative merits and weaknesses of their own account of the postmodern sovereignty they call "empire." The origins of postcolonial theory and cultural critique in the discipline of literary studies has meant that their analyses of oppression, domination, and exploitation have taken as their fundamental paradigm the experience of nineteenth-century European territorial imperialism and colonialism. Hence, if we consider the critique of Orientalist discourse or representational systems (Edward Said), the racist stereotypes of colonial discourse, or even the epistemic violence of colonial subject formation through the civilizing processes of colonial law and education (Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak), these different variations of postcolonial cultural critique are bound by a common understanding of power that emphasizes its "mentalist" or "imagistic"/"imaginative" character, whether this is understood in terms of the role of myth, ideology, or discursive norms that are imposed on the colonized subject at the moment of its constitution.

The psychoanalytical concept of trauma has the benefit of extending this analytical grid to cover forms of injury and suffering beyond the processes of consciousness or, as we now say too glibly, "the subject." It can give intelligibility to forms of hurt that are registered or encrypted through psychical processes outside the order of conscious experience, perception, and representation. Nevertheless, the question that remains to be explored is whether forms of power in contemporary globalization can be adequately understood as primarily psychical in their functioning. This article attempts to provide a preliminary answer to this question. In the first section, I outline some of the central presuppositions of the application of the concept of trauma to the critique of colonialism by considering the exemplary work of Frantz Fanon. The second section then tests these presuppositions by examining a series of events in Asia that on the surface seem to lend themselves perfectly to the vocabulary of trauma: the financial crises that afflicted East and Southeast Asia that were triggered by the assault on the Thai baht by currency speculators almost eleven years ago, on May 14–15, 1997. I conclude with a brief indication of some future directions for postcolonial cultural critique.

Let me place two caveats at the threshold. First, I am not questioning the usefulness of trauma as a category of clinical practice or meta-psychological theory. I am concerned only with the limits of that concept as it has been taken up in postcolonial cultural critique for understanding the operations of power in the contemporary global conjuncture. I will therefore not engage with the growing body of interesting writing in critical theory on the concept of trauma because this body of work is not directly concerned with the impact of globalization. Second, a comprehensive discussion of the causes and devastating consequences of the Asian financial crisis is beyond the scope of this article and, indeed, beyond my abilities. When we practice cultural critique, the best we can do is to offer a grid of intelligibility for understanding a concrete situation in a certain political interest. There is an enormous body of political-economic analysis concerned with the financial crisis. I have no disciplinary expertise in political economy, but I can learn from this literature and use it to reevaluate and tinker with the basic presuppositions of postcolonial theory so that it can be less hubristic and stay in touch with postindustrial global capitalism.

Trauma in Postcolonial Cultural Critique: Freud with Fanon

The concept of trauma originates from the etiology of neurosis. In its earliest formulation by Freud in his collaborative work with Josef Breuer, trauma originates in the affect of fright that accompanies an accidental event or a physical injury. When such a distressing affect is not adequately processed by the affected subject by means of responsive action, representation, or verbalization (abreaction), it is converted into a repressed...