Technologies of Trauma: Flesh Witnessing to Livestreaming Online

Abstract

AbstractThis paper examines the trajectory of witnessing and testimony through modernity, utilizing the notion of ‘technologies of trauma’. Such a notion acknowledges humanity’s reliance on technologies to transmute history, trauma, or memory, transforming technologies from medium and machine into artefacts for circulation and exchange. The transcendence of medium into artefacts as sites of trauma equally highlights the socio-political frames within which testimony is extracted and witnessing is enacted, unleashing trauma as a cultural form and a resonant genre of popular consumption. This paper, in tracing the trajectory of these technologies of trauma and its cultural turn from the sensorial to mass witnessing to the aesthetic regimes of immediacy in the digital age, comes to term with our machinic bind in releasing trauma and its aestheticization as a cultural artefact and the unethical challenges, which unfold in such a proposition. The development of print, photography, television, and digital platforms as technologies of trauma reiterates the popularization of trauma, witnessing and testimony as cultural forms reiterating how these are intimately implicated in our emergence as active consuming communities of trauma and in tandem how these remake us as vulnerable subjects through the circulation of trauma as a cultural form.