Two types of shock in modernity

Armstrong, Tim

doi:10.1111/1467-8705.00272

Cited by 38 publications

(6 citation statements)

References 3 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Unclassified

Order By: Relevance

“…Although historians have published widely on the function of memory in relation to regimes of historicity and memorial culture in Europe as a result of the two world wars (Assmann, 1999; Bann, 1995; Gross, 1992; Hartog, 2003), these studies tend to situate memory within a culture of time implicitly tied to a model of modernity characterized by the experience of ‘trauma’ or ‘shock’ from a sociopolitical perspective, and thus an ‘anxiety-producing entity that must be thought in relation to management, regulation, storage, and representation’ (Armstrong, 2003; Doane, 1996: 314). My analysis does not engage directly with memory in the fin de siecle, which is a vast and well-established topic in its own right (Le Goff, 1992; Nora, 1984–92; Terdiman, 1993).…”

Section: The ‘Time-sense’ and Temporal Malfunction In Early Psychiatrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychopathologies of time: Defining mental illness in early 20th-century psychiatry

Fryxell

2019

History of the Human Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article examines the role of time as a methodological tool and pathological focus of clinical psychiatry and psychology in the first half of the 20th century. Contextualizing ‘psychopathologies of time’ developed by practitioners in Europe and North America with reference to the temporal theories implicit in Freudian psychoanalysis and Henri Bergson’s philosophy of durée, it illuminates how depression, schizophrenia, and other mental disorders such as obsessive-compulsive behaviours and aphasia were understood to be symptomatic of an altered or disturbed ‘time-sense’. Drawing upon a model of temporal synthesis whereby in healthy individuals, a subjective temporal sense ( Ichzeit, durée, or personal lifetime) was perceived and understood in relation to objective time frameworks ( Weltzeit, clock-time, or quantitative time models like historical chronology), clinicians argued that mentally ill patients were unable to synthesize Ichzeit and Weltzeit, using variations in this disturbance to define specific pathological conditions.

show abstract

Section: The ‘Time-sense’ and Temporal Malfunction In Early Psychiatrmentioning

confidence: 99%

Psychopathologies of time: Defining mental illness in early 20th-century psychiatry

Fryxell

2019

History of the Human Sciences

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…In his analysis of shock in modernity, Tim Armstrong sees modern shock as directly connected to everyday life and the technologies of the urban such as the telephone, trains, and tramways. 34 Thus shock need not necessarily come from a particular package of economic and political reforms, but can carry a more or less constant existence through sometimes barely noticeable changes in the technologies surrounding everyday existence. According to this argument, shock can be present in different ways at all points in time (even before the so-called period of modernity), yet is intensified in modern times because of the character as well as the overwhelming presence of these technologies in our everyday lives.…”

Section: Shock and Practices Of Normalizationmentioning

confidence: 99%

Shock, Therapy, and Postcommunist Transitions

Pusca

2007

Alternatives

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

This article explores how the concept of shock has been used in connection to processes of social change and transition, and argues that a wider exploration of the concept in fields other than political science and international relations can provide us with important insights into the individual and collective impacts of transitions. Although criticizing the idea of shock as therapy, the article presents a number of alternative uses of shock that can be particularly insightful for understanding often contradictory behaviors that characterize periods of transition, as well as a series of dangerous consequences of attempts to deal with shock through various techniques of distancing, distraction, and normalization. KEY-

show abstract

“…With Holland's and Davoine and Gaudillière's arguments in mind, I wish to venture a speculative hypothesis about a potential effect of the experience of reading Atonement, one which might also be applicable to other texts that deal with the mass calamities of the twentieth century. For an attempt to tease out the differences between shock and trauma in their relation to modernity, see Armstrong (2000). Thus, while McEwan's novel itself is necessarily incapable of producing a tuché through which the reader would be pierced by the real's precipitous irruption, the historical conditions that help to shape its fi eld of reception (and inform its production) are such that the text may trigger the reopening of psychic fi ssures engraved on the reading subject by the real's intergenerationally channeled force.…”

Section: Cultural Politicsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Speed, War, and Traumatic Affect: Reading Ian McEwan'sAtonement

Crosthwaite¹

2007

Cultural Politics

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Through an analysis of Ian McEwan's novel Atonement (2001), this essay considers the potentialities and limitations of narrative, and of representation more generally, as means of capturing and conveying the accelerated and intensely traumatic character of mechanized warfare. I show how the unflinchingly detailed depictions of mutilated bodies that feature in the novel's re-creation of the German Blitzkrieg go some way toward evoking a traumatic encounter with the realm of pure, volatile materiality that Jacques Lacan terms the “real.” I note, though, that for Lacan and other theorists it is a characteristic of the most overwhelming experiences that they are not experienced directly, but rather outstrip the capacity of the subject to apprehend and assimilate them as they occur. As Paul Virilio's analysis of twentieth-century warfare makes clear, such events were produced on an unprecedentedly massive scale during the Second World War. I argue that in Atonement these conditions are most effectively evoked when the text relinquishes its aspirations to pure, contemporaneous presence and instead employs tactics of evasion, elision, and belatedness. I conclude by suggesting that, under certain circumstances, McEwan's novel may not merely evoke a traumatic encounter but may also be productive of symptoms associated with this experience in their actuality.

show abstract

Two types of shock in modernity

Cited by 38 publications

References 3 publications

Psychopathologies of time: Defining mental illness in early 20th-century psychiatry

Psychopathologies of time: Defining mental illness in early 20th-century psychiatry

Shock, Therapy, and Postcommunist Transitions

Speed, War, and Traumatic Affect: Reading Ian McEwan'sAtonement

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About