Pub list

This chapter considers two cases of contemporary genizah in terms of analog and digital media as they comply and conflict with traditional decrees. The first is a debate surrounding the discarding of audiocassettes containing sermons that if were to be written textually rather than sound recorded would have to be treated as genizah worthy. The second is the feasibility of an obligatory digital genizah, containing both digital artifacts and documents. Ultimately, both cases were not deemed as genizah worthy due to their non-textual and non-inscriptional logic.

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.

“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, María 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 (2016)

Do mass media turn us all into witnesses, and what might this mean? From the Holocaust to 9/11, modern communications systems have incessantly exposed us to reports of far flung and often horrifying events, experienced by people whom we do not know personally, and mediated by a range of changing technologies. What is the truth status of such ‘media witnessing’, and how does it depend on journalists and media organizations? What are its social, cultural and political ramifications, and what kind of moral demands can it make of audiences to act on behalf of suffering strangers? What are its connections to historical forms of witnessing in other fields: legal, religious and scientific? And how is it tied to technological transformations in media, transformations that bridge distances in space and time and can make ordinary people the sources of extraordinary footage? These are the themes taken up within this unique volume, now available for the first time in paperback with a special preface written by Elihu Katz. Contributors include John Durham Peters, John Ellis, Günter Thomas, Tamar Liebes, Menahem Blondheim, Tamar Ashuri, Carrie Rentschler, Joan Leach, Roy Brand, and the editors, Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski. Together they not only make a crucial intervention in ongoing debates about media witnessing and the representation of strangers, but present original conceptualizations of the relationship between knowledge, discourse and technology in the era of mass communications. 

'Why are witnesses to salient socio-political events so important in our age of global media reporting? Testimonies are sometimes the only chance to arrive at more information which would, otherwise, have been swept under the carpet. This excellent book elaborates on, and challenges, the complex and difficult roles of eye witnesses and of the media in truly innovative interdisciplinary ways. Everybody who deals with media in their everyday lives will be able togain new insights.’ — Professor Ruth Wodak, Lancaster University, UK

‘This is a most valuable collection of essays. Innovative, engrossing and rewarding, it provides an excellent exploration of media witnessing and isd efinitely to be recommended.’ — European Journal of Communication