[Commlist] New Book: Transmitted Wounds: Media and the mediation of trauma

New book announcement: TRANSMITTED WOUNDS: MEDIA AND THE MEDIATION OF 
TRAUMA by Amit Pinchevski (Oxford University Press, 2019)
https://global.oup.com/academic/product/transmitted-wounds-9780190625580


In /Transmitted Wounds/, Amit Pinchevski explores the ways media 
technology and logic shape the social life of trauma both clinically and 
culturally. Bringing media theory to bear on trauma theory, Pinchevski 
reveals the technical operations that inform the conception and 
experience of traumatic impact and memory. He offers a bold thesis about 
the deep association of media and trauma: media bear witness to the 
human failure to bear witness, making the traumatic technologically 
transmissible and reproducible.

Taking up a number of case studies--the radio broadcasts of the Eichmann 
trial; the videotaping of Holocaust testimonies; recent psychiatric 
debates about trauma through media following the 9/11 attacks; current 
controversy surrounding drone operators' post-trauma; and digital 
platforms of algorithmic-holographic witnessing and virtual reality 
exposure therapy for PTSD--Pinchevski demonstrates how the technological 
mediation of trauma feeds into the traumatic condition itself. The 
result is a novel understanding of media as constituting the material 
conditions for trauma to appear as something that cannot be fully 
approached and yet somehow must be.

While drawing on contemporary materialist media theory, especially the 
work of Friedrich Kittler and his followers, Pinchevski goes beyond the 
anti-humanistic tendency characterizing the materialist approach, 
discovering media as bearing out the human vulnerability epitomized in 
trauma, and finding therein a basis for moral concern in the face of 
violence and atrocity. /Transmitted//Wounds/ unfolds the ethical and 
political stakes involved in the technological transmission of mental 
wounds across clinical, literary, and cultural contexts.


Reviews

"This book delves into the combustible mixture of mind and media. Amit 
Pinchevski follows the hint in recent media theory that media are not 
just cultural artifacts to be interpreted but fundamental 
infrastructures that constitute and provide access to whatever it is we 
think of as mind. His media formulation of trauma as the mediation of 
failed mediation may well become, once its full resonances are absorbed, 
field-defining. The book is a fascinating study for thoroughly tying 
together media and trauma, but it achieves much more by asking key moral 
questions about the meaning of immediacy, presence, and telepresence in 
the face of some of the major catastrophes of our time." --John Durham 
Peters, Maria Rosa Menocal Professor of English and of Film & Media 
Studies, Yale University

"This thought-provoking book gives us new ways to understand the 
mediation of trauma and collective memory and the relationship between 
technology and human suffering. Eloquent and wise, Pinchevski's book 
raises urgent moral and political questions we all need to keep asking." 
--Katie Trumpener, Emily Sanford Professor of Comparative Literature and 
English, Yale University

"A highly original intervention into trauma theory. Pinchevksi's deft 
and erudite analyses shine a light on how the digital is shaping 
memories of traumatic pasts in new ways. Tackling an exciting range of 
material from videography and testimony to the uses of virtual reality 
for therapy, this is an outstanding research book which every student of 
memory should read."--Anna Reading, Professor of Culture and Creative 
Industries, King's College, University of London, and Western Sydney 
University, Australia, and author of /Gender and Memory in the Globital Age/






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