In the last month, we’ve been living through the haze from fires in Sumatra and Kalimantan, clearing at times and then returning. Whenever I go to our study room to write, I can measure the haze. Our HDB flats are built on a hill, and they’re taller than the rest of the Bukit Gombak estate flats. I can see the MRT, then some small 1970s slab blocks sandwiched between newer, higher towers. If I look up further, I see the green trees of a park, and then more blocks behind, jutting up like teeth from a very messy green gum. These blocks are my markers. When the air is totally clear I can see all the way to what might be Jurong Island, with two red-and white hooped chimneys, like the candy canes you see in North America at Christmas. As the smoke thickens, they vanish. First the chimneys, then blocks, one by one, until all that is left is the shadow of the trees a few hundred metres away.

For this month’s post, I’ll focus my energies on a single book. Whether through age or exposure to social media, I often now fall into a less attentive reading mode, skimming a text for information without going deep. Earlier this year, I discovered the joys of reading fiction slowly. Now I want to turn my attention to an account of a slow read — abbreviated, of course, by the length of my monthly posts — of an academic text that I’d been eagerly awaiting: Catherine Liu’s Traumatized: The New Politics of Public Suffering. Liu’s slim book promised to elaborate on two developments that have troubled me in progressive academia and in some social activism outside the academy in North America, and also to a degree in Singapore. The first is what Nancy Fraser, in the 1990s, identified as the liberal left’s concern with recognition rather than redistribution: a focus on claiming an identity and speaking from a subject position associated with it, rather than alliance-building in search of social justice. This development is often signalled by the popularity of the phrases “lived experience” and “living experience.” The second has been the increasing use of psych languages, even by scholars and progressive actors who would repudiate medicalisation. This second tendency is often signalled by the word “trauma.” The Right, of course, has no trouble criticizing both of these modes of relation as symptomatic of hypocritical “woke” or “identity politics,”pushing back not just at the vehicle but at the substance of what is transmitted. I was thus curious about how Liu would critique them from the Left, especially from a politics like my own, more socialist than liberal, and driven by an ongoing commitment to social equality and social justice. 

 Liu’s slim volume is divided into four chapters. A powerfully written introduction begins with Liu’s witnessing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s February 2021 livestream discussion of her harrowing experience of hiding from rioters at the Capitol a month earlier, and her offering, instead of the political analysis Liu had hoped for, a connection to memories of a sexual assault that she’d experienced as a young woman. Liu doesn’t pull her punches: for her AOC’s account is an example of an increasing public commodification of the confession of private trauma that promises liberation, but does not in fact achieve it:

“The socialization of the most private forms of violation as consumable narratives has not liberated us from repression or oppression, as the most radical second-wave feminists promised. Trauma culture has, however, promoted a politics of stasis and narcissistic fixation on subjectivity as “lived experience” that has eviscerated the foundations of liberalism.” (7)

If the trauma narrative was at one time the province of the Left and progressive politics, Liu further notes that that the Right is increasingly making use of it to place restrictions on protest and speech in the public domain. A mode of self-fashioning that might have seemed emancipatory in fact led to a dead end in terms of political action, and has now be turned against the very causes it sought to advance.

Liu is more US-focused than I’d hoped, but she does historicize. Her first body chapter, indeed, is devoted to a largely American history of child welfare institutions, and how liberal institutions often focused on abuse outside a social context. The second looks at how what Liu calls “the trauma script,” which personalises and excludes economic contexts, was popularized through second-wave feminism from the 1960s onwards, especially in Judith Herman’s writing. Liu’s third chapter gives an etiology of the emergence of PTSD as an example of something larger: the reification of later versions of the DSM, and its symptom-based classifications of mental illness. Again Liu feels that the use of PTSD often separates us from economic contexts, and through encouraging trauma-based identities promotes recognition over redistribution. The final body chapter looks at the figure and media career of Oprah Winfrey as an example of “emotional capitalism,” in which “suffering is decontextualized, medicalized, pathologized, and commodified.” Such trauma culture works in favour of a Professional Managerial Class (PMC), producing a “oppressive managerial concern for creating emotional environments free of offense and friction” that disempowers workers in relating to employers by repressing class analysis. In her conclusion, Liu, gives an intellectual history of trauma culture in the US academy, which she locates in the rise and then fall of Paul de Man when his pro-Nazi wartime journalism was discovered, and attempts by his students and those influenced by poststructuralism to confront “the flaws and sins of an idolized mentor.” Moving rather too quickly to fully substantiate her case, Liu notes that the rise of trauma studies allowed the cultural critics to “become the midwife of recovery for traumatic readings” and, by extension, for “citizens of liberal democracies” to claim, through an identification with victims, to adopt “a transcendental morality, stripped of historical, social, and economic context.”

Reading and summarizing Liu’s work has made me realise how far I am from the intellectual world I inhabited twenty years ago, when I would know many of the scholarly references made in the text, and also have time to follow up others. As I mentioned above, I was a little disappointed by the narrowness of the book’s focus only on the US. Liu finishes the book with a call to renounce trauma culture and “accept nothing less than solidarity with reason and objectivity in our most subjective, private experiences as in our work, culture, and politics.” Yet I wonder who “we” are here. For me, there are two kinds of narratives that intersect, but are different. The first is a private narrative of the self, often elaborated and re-storied in therapy: it’s not for public consumption, and it’s ephemeral, in the sense that it is internalised but not preserved in written and spoken form. It would be wrong to demand from the outset that private, subjective experiences as recalled should be bound by “solidarity with reason and objectivity.” It’s only when they are made public, and when they become a second kind of narrative that aims not at self-knowledge but at dialoguing with others, that I think Liu has a point. There are legitimate places where one might demand recognition and representation in the public sphere, for instance in sharing experiences of struggle, and the demands of disability rights or mental health activists for a space at the table as a way of checking the epistemic privilege of healthcare and other professionals. Yet there’s also surely a need to move beyond and arms race of subject positions in which a single person’s lived experience is brought in as a means of closing further discussion: in more narrow sense this sense Liu’s appeal to “reason and objectivity” feels right.

As I write now, I have a feeling of exercising intellectual muscles that I haven’t used for a time, and which begin to ache. I’ve spent much more of my time in the past decade in private, rather than public conversations, conversations in which care matters. And my own lived experience of living with differences which are either hidden, or which partially privilege me even though I am minoritized, has made me skeptical, perhaps at times unfairly, of the personal politics of some claims for recognition. Liu’s book asks a series of questions, but doesn’t provide me with easy answers, even at this urgent time, when the world is burning up, the horizon vanishes, and we all go about our daily business as though nothing much is happening.