Paradoxes and Parapraxes: On (the Limits of) Cinematic Representation in Post-Conflict Situations

Post-Conflict Situations, Media, and the Negative Agency of Victimhood

As there is almost too much to say on the topic of "war and media," I hope I will be forgiven if I concentrate on one particular aspect of our topic, namely the media-memory of war and human suffering, as it manifests itself in "post-conflict" communities and cities. I shall focus in particular on some of the films that have emerged in the wake of the Bosnian civil war (1992–1995), which will afford an opportunity to reflect also more broadly on the relation of "cinema and memory." Here, the special affinity of cinema with the temporalities of recall, remembrance, and presence will be highlighted, as well as its obverse: cinema as the site of false memory and mis-remembering, of re-writing and over-writing. This, in turn, establishes the notion of "traumatic memory" as a helpful category, when considering the cinema as not only a reality-effect enfolded into a subject-effect, and thus as an "identity-machine" (to cite the basic tenets of "apparatus theory" from the 1970s). Since then, and under the influence of Gilles Deleuze's philosophy, cinema has emerged as a time-machine, which is to say, as a unique way of joining perception with temporality and memory, charging time—reversible or irreversible, looped, linear or retro-active time—with affect and emotional texture. Deleuze's recourse to Henri Bergson has made us aware of the many ways that moving images carry with them memories and memory traces that are embodied and embedded: in places, in objects. But cinema is also the medium par excellence that can make pain and loss palpable, filling absence with an aching sense of presence, which is why moving images have helped give "trauma" a widely understood cultural meaning. Trauma, it seems, has become one of the states of mind and body, by which we (negatively) assure ourselves of our identity and re-assure ourselves of our existence in time. Note how even Hollywood's superheroes—from Batman to James Bond—are now burdened with trauma, as if to name the core value of what humanizes their superhuman exploits and what remains vulnerable inside their technological accessories and armored carapace. If such action heroes are victims first, i.e., "reaction heroes," and therefore subject to forces that pull them back, or hold their forward trajectory hostage to retracing a pre-ordained course, then we may have a clue as to why trauma and victimhood have become such powerful attractors in our culture, almost suggesting that a post-traumatic situation is the generalized condition of living in the twenty-first century, which seems to have begun around 1990.

How then to distinguish post-conflict situations from the generalized post-traumatic condition? First of all, there is, in the former case, the question of redress and reconciliation, which can be aligned—but should not be confused—with therapy and "working through." Secondly, there is the question of agency: to what extent are both traumatic conditions and post-conflict situations caused by a force external to the victim, or internally generated by the suffering subject? In a post-conflict situation, for instance, it is customary to make a preliminary and crucial but subsequently problematic and controversial distinction: that between victims and perpetrators. Crucial, because the very name and nature of a post-conflict situation suggests a trajectory whose aim it is to bring about an outcome that can apportion guilt and retribution, administer justice and effect reconciliation; controversial, because in a post-conflict situation, all parties involved feel themselves to be victims, each side enumerating grievances, injustices, and telling themselves narratives of victimization or persecution.

Thus, the fact that "victim discourse" and the post-traumatic condition associated with it has become a generalized condition, notably in the wake of the different versions of the so-called "identity-wars," adds a complicating factor to our understanding of post-conflict situations and gives them also a special place within memory studies and trauma theory. Indeed, where groups of whatever size consider themselves minorities, stake...