In the title chapter of his recent book, The Return of the Real: The Avant-Garde at the End of the Century, art critic Hal Foster introduces the term traumatic realism in an effort to mediate the contradictory views surrounding the work of Andy Warhol–that is, as "referential and simulacral, connected and disconnected, affective and affectless, critical and complacent."1
This "contradictorily coherent" view and the complexities of the term traumatic realism, veiled to a certain degree by the notion of immediacy implicit in words like "trauma" and "realism," bear significantly upon the encounter with the figure of Warhol in John Kinsella's "Warhol" poems.2 At the same time, this encounter itself can be seen as providing a subtext to Kinsella's own interrogation of the ways in which concepts such as "realism" (which make claims to disinterested objectivity) mask what is in fact a violent and nihilistic drive to impose upon the structures of representation an ideological absolute.
The Pop-Art aesthetic synonymous with the name of Warhol serves here to throw into relief the complacent conventionality of assertions about the "real" (in the way that various governments, for instance, have asserted claims of sovereignty over colonial "real estate," or that political groups have asserted claims over "real conditions of production," etc.), which in turn belie a more suspicious assertion of proprietal rights; over representation itself. The inherent act of dispossession or disenfranchisement in such assertions appears, in Kinsella's poems, not only to produce and structure a type of "trauma," but in fact to be dependent upon trauma, as the elemental locus of the elemental violence that is never absent from absolutism in any of its many forms.
Realism, in this sense, exists to castigate the aberrant, to redeem through corrective violence, regardless of its particular political or ideological "orientation." Such notions as Sartre's art engagé, therefore, with its admixture of socialist realism and phenomenology, stand equally accused as doctrinaire socialism, fascism, or the simulacra of global capitalism. In this context, Kinsella's solicitation of the figure of Warhol can be seen a "deconstructive" gesture aimed at discrediting the claims of realist ideology and its determination of the aesthetic object either as property or as morally responsible critique of property.
According to Foster, one way in which we can understand the concept of traumatic realism is through "the famous motto of the Warholian persona: 'I want to be a machine.'"3 Foster argues that while this statement has often been interpreted as confirming the ultimate blankness of the Warhol Factory, "it may point less to a blank subject than to a shocked one, who takes the nature of what shocks him as a mimetic defence against this shock: I am a machine too, I make (or consume) serial product-images too."4 In this sense, surface effect becomes a type of camouflage or even prosthesis, in which "reality" becomes a mask, a defence against the traumatic (which in turn becomes viewed as something dis-affected or dis-affecting).
Calling to mind those species caught in the grip of mimicry, this concept of traumatic realism suggests a way in which we might view "the real" in terms of a certain notion of programme, in which a compulsion to repeat describes the basic condition of the "individual" and of cultural production generally.5 Countering an ethics of individual action and art as politically and socially engagé, Warhol posed the idea of "engagement" itself as merely symptomatic of a social condition, one which masks the fact that the objects of engagement already operate within an economy of commodity fetishism. Ethical engagement becomes a compulsion to repeat; to act is to consume.
In a recent interview, Kinsella elaborates upon this in terms of narrative (as verisimilitude) which he insists is "a device, an artifice, not reality"6 (which should also draw our attention to the distinction between "reality" and "realism" in traumatic realism–or again, between "realism" and the "not reality" of narrative discourse). Responding to a statement of Adorno, that "the committed work of art debunks the work that wants nothing but to exist; it considers it a fetish," Kinsella further argues:
Narrative poetry with horror as its subject subscribes to the worst aspects of commitment. It necessarily becomes fetishised and commodified itself.7
On the other hand, some art which might be considered "decorative" (which "wants nothing but to exist"), can in fact be seen as critical, and at the same time resistant to the political coercions of art engagé.8 That is to say, it poses its structural indifference to subject matter as something that requires accounting for, and calls into question the assertions "committed" discourse makes about the value and integrity of its objects while at the same time omitting a critique of its own rhetoric. Indeed, it is difficult to find in Adorno the means necessary to structurally distinguish committed discourse from mere agitprop, as much as from so-called "ornamental" or "decorative" form, whose exclusion by Adorno from the realm of the meaningful thus situates it at a crucial juncture in the (self-) fetishising of the political as a type of aesthetic morality.
Kinsella identifies this critical element of the ornamental or decorative in the structure of repetition:
I feel there's a kind of honesty in the "repetitive formulaic play" [of decoration] that allows me to explore its terms of reference in an apparently disconnected way. But such exploration always reveals the potency of the decorative–it is a core language which backdrops the drama we accept as committed.9
What Kinsella points to is one way in which repetition enacts, as it were, a critique of certain aesthetic values which are implicitly politicised in any discussion of the "real." Serial repetition is seen to trivialise (and downgrade the uniqueness of) the narrative event of realism, or of committed art, and renders it anonymous, substitutable, as though it were chosen by the artist at random, as merely one among many otherwise disconnected pictorial elements. And this is precisely the argument of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, who insists, in his seminar on 'The Unconscious and Repetition,' that "what is repeated is always something that occurs ... as if by chance."10 Here, the appearance of chance is what contributes most to its galling effect.
In Warhol's Death in America series (in which photographic images of electric chairs, automobile accidents, police brutality and so on, are repeated ad nauseam like some sort of tabloid nightmare), the "traumatic" is not so much attached to the images presented, but to operations of technique (such as "a slippage of register or a wash of colour,"11 "suggesting the smudged graininess of newsprint, the reject layout, the uneven inking"12) which punctuates the discontinuous "serial space" of representation itself. These operations, according to Foster, "seem accidental, but they also appear repetitive, automatic, even technological"13 (or we might say, grammatical), to the point that they exhibit their calculations in a way that is virtually menacing (and more so since the images themselves succumb to the violence of the repetition process).
On the other side of this equation there is a traumatic resistance, an effort to deny the "emptying out" of ethical discourse in what critics refer to plaintively as an "age of conspicuous consumption and modern technology."14 Another of Warhol's famous statements is that "the more you look at the same thing, the more the meaning goes away."15 For Foster, this experience of the apparent emptying out of signification, and the resistance to it, can be summed up in a phrase of Lacan's, whose implications are particularly provocative. He defines the traumatic as "a missed encounter with the real,"16 which can be understood as a rupture and a failed rendez-vous, a recoil at the very limits of the representable, an after- effect that is unable to account for itself. We might also say that this "missed encounter" describes a type of nostalgia, an insistence upon going back over past events, a fixation upon particular instances in the hope of isolating the very thing that can never be presented there: the encounter itself. 17 As "missed," this encounter escapes representation; "it can only be repeated" (and "repetition," insisted Freud, "is not reproduction").18