Radical absence: encountering traumatic affect in digitally mediated disappearance

ABSTRACT

Disappearances keep appearing in the digital sphere: video circulates of Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (ISIS) beheading of a kidnapped journalist; MH370 vanishes into sky yet its real and imagined journeys are traced ceaselessly; friends learn someone close to them has died when Facebook ‘memorializes’ their page. Each is different: a lost airplane, unreported boat people and a deceased life. In the work of trauma studies scholars such as Cathy Caruth 1996. Unclaimed experience: trauma, narrative, and history. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press] and Shoshana Felman and D. Laub 1992. Testimony: crises of witnessing in literature, psychoanalysis, and history. New York: Routledge], such events are felt but unrecognized, known to have happened but unable to be represented. Yet these are traumas that can be experienced with intensity and immediacy in the mediated worldings of the digital. They are encounters with radical absence. Affect theory offers the means to conceptualize this ‘vicarious trauma’ Kaplan 2005, Trauma culture: the politics of terror and loss in media and literature. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, p. 87]; it bridges the conceptual gap between an event that happened and the meaning it contains. Since affect is ‘the simultaneous participation of the virtual in the actual and the actual in the virtual, as one arises from and returns to the other’ Massumi 2002, Parables for the virtual: movement, affect, sensation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, p. 35], it offers a way of understanding trauma in keeping with the digital: fluid, moving, changeable, multitudinous and even contagious. This paper traces the contours of encounters with video beheadings, the vanishing of MH370, and markers of digital death as encounters with radical absence that are emblematic of the complexity of traumatic affect and mediated trauma in the digital sphere.