Karyn Ball | University of Alberta (original) (raw)

Essays by Karyn Ball

English Studies in Canada, 2013

Introduction to a special issue of Cultural Critique on "Trauma and Its Cultural Aftereffects"

This essay contextualises the recent controversy about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR... more This essay contextualises the recent controversy about the Canadian Museum for Human Rights (CMHR), which opened in September 2014 in Winnipeg, Manitoba, by documenting the background shadowing the campaigns spearheaded by the Ukrainian Canadian Civil Liberties Association and the Ukrainian Canadian Congress against CMHR advisory board plans to install a permanent gallery devoted to the Holocaust. Their history demonstrates how these ultranationalist lobbies have glorified the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists, its militant wing (UPA), and the Waffen-SS Galizien while rationalising or occluding their roles in Second World War period massacres of Jewish and Polish civilians.

The problem of emotional and spatiotemporal distantiation in Holocaust historiography is approach... more The problem of emotional and spatiotemporal distantiation in Holocaust historiography is approached through an elaboration on ‘affect’ broadly defined as differing intensities of intra- and intersubjective reactivity to an ideational or external source. Within this schema, ‘thick’ or ‘visceral’ affect designates a charged identification with past violences as though they were still actively present, in contrast to ‘thin’ or ‘rarefied’ affect, which refers to an apparent absence of this charge. This distinction is theorised with reference to Sigmund Freud’s ‘Introductory Lecture’ from 1916–17 on ‘Anxiety’ and his ‘New Introductory Lecture’ from 1932–36 on ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’. Reading between these lectures highlights the intimate relationship between anxiety and affect in Freudian psychoanalysis. By extension, the distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ affect is determined by the relative presence or absence of life-preservative stress, which endows an affect with its intensity. The key claim is that while anxiety alone suffices to give an affect its intensity, traumatic episodes trigger a heightened sense of vulnerability and potentially leave behind a toxic confluence of humiliation, shame, paranoia, and ressentiment. Flagrant betrayals of a naively presumed survival consensus plant the social-psychological seeds of ‘visceral’ affect, which magnetises contemporary slights that fuel cycles of retaliatory brutality among subsequent generations during periods of instability. Conversely, ‘thin’ or ‘rarefied’ affect (affect under erasure) refers to variably motivated distantiating reactions: on the one hand, in situations punctuated by widespread atrocities, the perpetrator’s disavowal of the crimes he or she ordered or committed transpires as a defensive tendency to deflect critical judgements of his or her own actions and belittle or blame the victim; on the other hand, in ordinary circumstances, absorption in day-to-day survival might impel bystanders at various removes to disregard suffering, even in their immediate midst. In both cases, thin affect manifests itself as an apparent evacuation of compassionate identification with those in dire circumstances; it signals an economy in which people who might otherwise feel guilty or ashamed, manage, through a variety of psychic mechanisms, to disassociate, forget or even justify persecution or profound inequity. Illustrations of thick affect in bystander testimony draw upon John-Paul Himka’s review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost and Jan Gross’s Neighbors, two discussions that showcase instances of shocking brutality in atrocities committed against Ukrainian and Polish Jews, respectively. To elucidate thin affect, the analysis returns to Martin Broszat’s 1988 exchange of letters with the Jewish historian Saul Friedländer, where the German Second-World-War-generation historian repeatedly demeaned an ‘adamant’, ‘mythical’, ‘accusatory’, ‘insistent’, and ‘contrary’ Jewish memory for ‘coarsening’ historical understanding. Consulting Nicolas Berg’s Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker sheds light on Broszat’s background with the Institute for Contemporary History, which was involved in suppressing the Jewish survivor Joseph Wulf ’s evidence against Dr Wilhelm Hagen. The essay concludes with a reflection on the biopolitical implications of a ‘dialectics’ between thick and thin affect, which suggests that a contemporary historiographic construction of ‘normalcy’ as an appearance or perception of continuity privileges the standpoint of a subject who disavows his or her implication in the violence and crises that sentence others to destruction.

This essay takes up the encounter between philosophy and literature through a reconsideration of ... more This essay takes up the encounter between philosophy and literature through a reconsideration of Walter Benjamin’s remarks from “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” about Henri Bergson’s Matière et mémoire as an attempt “[t]owering above” other ventures into Lebensphilosophie to “lay hold of the ‘true’ experience, as opposed to the kind that manifests itself in the standardized, denatured life of the civilized masses”. Despite his initial affirmation of Bergson’s understanding of experience as connected with tradition, Benjamin criticizes the philosopher’s account for sidestepping “the alienating, blinding experience of the age of large-scale industrialism” in reaction to which, as Benjamin insists, Bergson’s philosophy of memory developed. Yet even as Bergson shuts out the historical import of modernization, according to Benjamin, he also spotlights a “complementary” visual experience “in the form of its spontaneous afterimage”. Benjamin subsequently defines Bergson’s philosophy as “an attempt to specify this afterimage and fix it as a permanent record”, an endeavor that inadvertently “furnishes a clue to the experience which presented itself undistorted to Baudelaire’s eyes, in the figure of his reader”. If the literary critic might be viewed here as weighing in on a long-running antagonism between philosophy and literature, then his assessment is resolute: by praising the self-conscious historicity of Baudelaire’s lyric, Benjamin declares that poetry succeeds where Lebensphilosophie fails. Notably, Baudelaire is not the only figure to upstage “ahistorical” Bergson, since Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud facilitate this victory. To contextualize the second section of “Motifs”, where Benjamin discusses the novelist’s “immanent critique of Bergson” this essay offers a reading of “On the Image of Proust” as a propadeutic to Benjamin’s privileging of “Baudelaire” over “Bergson” in the first section of “Motifs” to broach the destinies of diminished perception before he turns to Freud in the
third section. Drawing upon Freud’s thermodynamic model of a selective and protective perceptual-conscious system from Beyond the Pleasure Principle, Benjamin explains how perception calcifies in adapting to industrialism. Notably, however, his “energetics” does not remain bound by closed-system economic premises insofar as he conceives Baudelaire’s correspondances as an antidote to reification and modernization fatigue. The resulting configuration emerges against the backdrop of a lament about the decline of tradition-infused, long-term experience [Erfahrung] that accompanies the rise of isolated experience [Erlebnis]. In tracking Benjamin’s seemingly melancholic emplotment of the literary image between “Proust” and “Baudelaire”, the essay ultimately focuses on how he amplifies its sociohistorical potential to attest to the dehiscence of tradition as a community-sustaining force.

Comparative Literature Studies, 2005

English Studies in Canada, 2013

Introduction to a special issue of Cultural Critique on "Trauma and Its Cultural Aftereffects"

Comparative Literature Studies, 2005

For those interested in attending the round table and memorial honouring Hayden White at the 2020... more For those interested in attending the round table and memorial honouring Hayden White at the 2020 annual convention of the Modern Languages Association, here are the details, including speakers, for both events.

Choice Reviews Online, 2012

In Popular Trauma Culture, Anne Rothe argues that American Holocaust discourse has a particular p... more In Popular Trauma Culture, Anne Rothe argues that American Holocaust discourse has a particular plot structure-characterized by a melodramatic conflict between good and evil and embodied in the core characters of victim/survivor and perpetrator-and that it provides the paradigm for representing personal experiences of pain and suffering in the mass media. The book begins with an analysis of Holocaust cliches, including its political appropriation, the notion of vicarious victimhood, the so-called victim talk rhetoric, and the infusion of the composite survivor figure with Social Darwinism. Readers then explore the embodiment of popular trauma culture in two core mass media genres: daytime TV talk shows and misery memoirs. Rothe conveys how victimhood and suffering are cast as trauma kitsch on talk shows like Oprah and as trauma camp on modern-day freak shows like Springer. The discussion also encompasses the first scholarly analysis of misery memoirs, the popular literary genre that has been widely critiqued as pornographic depictions of extreme violence. Currently considered the largest growth sector in book publishing worldwide, many of these works are also fabricated. The book concludes with an examination of the fake misery memoir.

History and Theory

ABSTRACTThis mostly admiring review article focuses on Martin Jay's 2020 essay collection ent... more ABSTRACTThis mostly admiring review article focuses on Martin Jay's 2020 essay collection entitled Splinters in Your Eye: Frankfurt School Provocations. Though it highlights details and insights from nearly every essay in the collection, the review devotes significant attention to chapter 4, which focuses on the relationship of the Frankfurt School's first‐generation scholars with Sigmund Freud. The departure point for my engagement with Jay's fourth chapter is the translation of the German word Trieb (drive) as “instinct” throughout The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. Although Jay's treatment of Max Horkheimer's, Theodor W. Adorno's, and Herbert Marcuse's recourses to Freudian psychoanalysis emphasizes their abiding commitment to Freud's theory of instinctual forces (over and against objections to his biologism), the question of whether a drive differs from an instinct does not arise. This question therefore off...

Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature

A focus on trauma’s institutional trajectory in literary and cultural theory serves to narrow the... more A focus on trauma’s institutional trajectory in literary and cultural theory serves to narrow the transnational and multidirectional scope of memory studies. While Sigmund Freud’s attempt in Beyond the Pleasure Principle to define trauma in order to account for World War I veterans’ symptoms might serve as a provisional departure point, the psychological afflictions that haunted American soldiers returning from the Vietnam War reinforced the explanatory value of what came to be called “posttraumatic stress disorder,” which the American Psychiatric Association added to the DSM-III (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) in 1980. Multiple dramatic films released in the 1980s about Vietnam conveyed images of the American soldier’s two-fold traumatization by the violence he not only witnessed but also perpetrated along with the ambivalent treatment he received upon his return to a protest-riven nation waking up to the demoralizing realization that US military prowess...

Freedom and Confinement in Modernity, 2011

I begin in a space between bars—two expressions of futility snatched from the lore surrounding th... more I begin in a space between bars—two expressions of futility snatched from the lore surrounding the figures of Georg Lukacs and Franz Kafka. It is well known that the Hungarian Marxist remained a party loyalist long after it was fashionable and that he notoriously privileged realist literature over its “decadent” modernist other because the latter was unable “to grasp the totality of social relations.”1 After his arrest by the Communist Party in 1956, when he was “deported, locked up in a castle and held without trial in Romania,” Lukבcs was prompted to rethink his aesthetic allegiances while confronting Iron Curtain governmentality.2

Literary and Critical Theory, 2019

Hayden White (b. 12 July 1928–d. 5 March 2018) was a groundbreaking critic of conventional histor... more Hayden White (b. 12 July 1928–d. 5 March 2018) was a groundbreaking critic of conventional historiography whose emphasis on the moral, rhetorical, aesthetic, and fictive valences of narrative as a mode of figuration unsettled professional historians’ tendency to disavow the role of the imagination and form in the selective arrangement of evidence. Despite Metahistory’s manifest affinity with structuralist approaches, White’s 1973 monograph is widely viewed as having inaugurated a “postmodernist” critique of narrative historiography that resonated with the growing influence of a postwar, anti-positivist “linguistic turn” stressing the figural dynamics of texts as objects of discourse. In grasping the implications of referential fragility, White articulated a quintessentially Nietzschean antipathy toward naively mimetic notions of “truth” that govern history treated as an objective mirror rather than as an imaginative construction of the past. In consonance with Roland Barthes, White ...

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2015

Choice Reviews Online, 2009

... Amy Swiffen, Jeff Kerr, Dianne Chisholm, Chrystia Chomiak, Leon Hunter, Janine Brodie, and Ma... more ... Amy Swiffen, Jeff Kerr, Dianne Chisholm, Chrystia Chomiak, Leon Hunter, Janine Brodie, and Malinda Smith have raised my spirits over long periods of outrage fatigue in an Alberta run by an alcoholic and illiterate former premier and a United States co-opted by George W. ...

Alif Journal of Comparative Poetics, 2009

In The University in Ruins, Bill Readings traces shifting ideas about the university from the wri... more In The University in Ruins, Bill Readings traces shifting ideas about the university from the writings of Kant and von Humboldt to their "ruins" in a managerial newspeak that prioritizes profitable programs over humanities scholarship and teaching. The author contends that Readings narrates the dehiscence of these ideas in the form of a lament, even as he urges humanities faculty to abandon melancholic fixations on our deteriorating prestige and besieged values. This article recasts Readings's account in light of Paul Ricoeur's explication of the Augustinian lament to speculate about the ontological lineaments of a sense of lost time among human scientists. ********** A surge of interest among cultural critics and theorists in the conception and literature of melancholy over the last two decades has raised questions about its impetus in and beyond the humanities. In other contexts, I have questioned whether this preoccupation attests to declining morale in the face of changing labor conditions among those teachers and researchers who continue to adopt Bill Readings's The University in Ruins (1996) as a reference point for exchanges about the future of the human sciences in an increasingly corporatized university. (1) Readings's description of the current predicament of the university in general, and the humanities in particular, both criticizes and performs the melancholic presentiments that overdetermine debates about the faltering mission of the liberal arts. What is remarkable about Readings's intervention is that even as it seeks to motivate humanities faculty to forsake despondent fixations on our lost prestige and cultural capital, or our harried intellectual ideals, it, nevertheless, narrates the history of these shifting investments in the form of a lament that presumes the decay of their force and presence over lime. This article recasts The University in Ruins in light of Paul Ricoeur's explication of the form of the Augustinian lament in older to speculate about the ontological lineaments of a melancholic temporality among researchers in the human sciences. I. Ruined Ideals Philosophy is hounded by the fear that it loses prestige and validity if it is not a science. Not to be a science is taken as a failing, which is equivalent to being unscientific.... Thinking is judged by a standard that does not measure up to it. Such judgment may be compared to the procedure of trying to evaluate the nature and powers of a fish by seeing how long it can live on dry land. --Martin Heidegger, "Letter on Humanism" 195 As a young and very naive intellectual, I used to cherish the life of the mind as a higher realm buoyed by the assumption that our society revered the pleasure of learning as an unquestioned asset. Nowadays, it strikes me that only the most earnest among us cling to the prestige of serving as purveyors of enlightenment through reason for its own sake. However, an October 2006 editorial published in the New York Times should quickly lay the last hopes of even these sappiest of optimists to rest. This death knell comes to us in the words of Eugene Hickok, a fellow at the Heritage Foundation and the former deputy secretary of education during President George W. Bush's first term. (2) Hickok complains that President Bush's policy of "no child left behind" should apply to undergraduates whose reading competency and comprehension are declining. He calls for greater accountability from institutions of higher learning in the United States, and for more accurate measures of student achievement. Rather than looking at the under-funded condition of public education as a whole, and the dissipation of reading, he blames impoverished skills on a lazy, entitled faculty who, according to Hickok, decide "what they want to teach and when they want to teach, if indeed, they teach at all." This "is particularly true regarding undergraduate instruction, which is something of an afterthought on many campuses. …

Law and Critique, 2016

This essay focuses on Judith Butler’s configuration in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique ... more This essay focuses on Judith Butler’s configuration in Parting Ways: Jewishness and the Critique of Zionism (2012a) of sacred life from the mystical motifs that traverse Walter Benjamin’s writings as the pivot of an anti-identitarian ethics committed to non-violent resistance. To gain critical leverage on Butler’s post-secular stance, my analysis turns to Talal Asad’s ‘Redeeming the “Human” Through Human Rights’ chapter from Formations of the Secular (2003), where he enunciates a disparity between a ‘pre-civil state of nature’ and the notion of ‘inalienable rights’ that informs the subject’s rights under secular law. In underscoring the secular state’s inability or refusal to ascribe sacredness to ‘real living persons’ over and against ‘“the human” conceptualized abstractly, or imagined in a state of nature’ as presumed by natural law, Asad indirectly articulates what is at stake in Butler’s explication in Parting Ways of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’. In this context, Butler unpacks Benjamin’s remarks about the sixth commandment’s non-coercive disposition and the inner struggle its provisional applicability prompts. A conception of ‘sacred life’ crystallizes through Butler’s emphasis on the open-endedness of this struggle, which encourages us to abandon a solipsistic investment in our own suffering in the process of acknowledging its eternally transient rhythm. I argue that Butler supplements this motif by drawing upon Hannah Arendt’s grounding of the political in cohabitation. My contention is that while ‘sacred life’ forms the backbone of Butler’s affirmation of civil disobedience, Arendt empowers Butler’s ethics to transcend Benjamin’s Jewish-messianic melancholy by radicalizing the passivity that refracts it.

Angelaki, 2015

Abstract This essay undertakes a critique of recent trends in affect theory from the standpoint o... more Abstract This essay undertakes a critique of recent trends in affect theory from the standpoint of the “human motor”: a trope that presupposes a thermodynamic psychophysiology distended between energy conservation and entropy. In the course of reanimating thermodynamic motifs in Marx's labor power metabolics and Freud's trauma energetics, the essay broaches entropics as a poetics of depletion that offsets affect theories promoting open-system metaphors. Open-system affect theory sometimes amalgamates emancipatory post-humanist gestures inherited from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari with neuroscientific terms. In the course of “liberating” affect from subject-oriented topoi, this “liberation-scientistic” admixture expropriates organic matter's degeneration over time. An “entropical” perspective also challenges Antonio Negri's Spinozaist affect conceived as a capacitating power that encounters obstacles but never limits. Both “liberation scientism” and “capacitation rhetoric” mimic capital's abstraction in infinitely expanding its potential to extract surplus value from finitely embodied labor. With enervation and deterioration at its crux, entropics illuminates how people might feel individuated by their respective struggles to safeguard scarce energy and forestall “heat death” while navigating simultaneous demands. The question is whether or not open-system motifs in affect theory can effectively register the political force of this struggle with depletion and present or imminent debilitation as its common ground.

Women in German Yearbook: Feminist Studies in German Literature & Culture, 2003

Holocaust Studies, 2014

The problem of emotional and spatiotemporal distantiation in Holocaust historiography is approach... more The problem of emotional and spatiotemporal distantiation in Holocaust historiography is approached through an elaboration on ‘affect’ broadly defined as differing intensities of intra- and intersubjective reactivity to an ideational or external source. Within this schema, ‘thick’ or ‘visceral’ affect designates a charged identification with past violences as though they were still actively present, in contrast to ‘thin’ or ‘rarefied’ affect, which refers to an apparent absence of this charge. This distinction is theorised with reference to Sigmund Freud’s ‘Introductory Lecture’ from 1916–17 on ‘Anxiety’ and his ‘New Introductory Lecture’ from 1932–36 on ‘Anxiety and Instinctual Life’. Reading between these lectures highlights the intimate relationship between anxiety and affect in Freudian psychoanalysis. By extension, the distinction between ‘thin’ and ‘thick’ affect is determined by the relative presence or absence of lifepreservative stress, which endows an affect with its intensity. The key claim is that while anxiety alone suffices to give an affect its intensity, traumatic episodes trigger a heightened sense of vulnerability and potentially leave behind a toxic confluence of humiliation, shame, paranoia, and ressentiment. Flagrant betrayals of a naively presumed survival consensus plant the social-psychological seeds of ‘visceral’ affect, which magnetises contemporary slights that fuel cycles of retaliatory brutality among subsequent generations during periods of instability. Conversely, ‘thin’ or ‘rarefied’ affect (affect under erasure) refers to variably motivated distantiating reactions: on the one hand, in situations punctuated by widespread atrocities, the perpetrator’s disavowal of the crimes he or she ordered or committed transpires as a defensive tendency to deflect critical judgements of his or her own actions and belittle or blame the victim; on the other hand, in ordinary circumstances, absorption in day-to-day survival might impel bystanders at various removes to disregard suffering, even in their immediate midst. In both cases, thin affect manifests itself as an apparent evacuation of compassionate identification with those in dire circumstances; it signals an economy in which people who might otherwise feel guilty or ashamed, manage, through a variety of psychic mechanisms, to disassociate, forget or even justify persecution or profound inequity. Illustrations of thick affect in bystander testimony draw upon John-Paul Himka’s review of Daniel Mendelsohn’s The Lost and Jan Gross’s Neighbors, two discussions that showcase instances of shocking brutality in atrocities committed against Ukrainian and Polish Jews, respectively. To elucidate thin affect, the analysis returns to Martin Broszat’s 1988 exchange of letters with the Jewish historian Saul Friedländer, where the German Second-World-War-generation historian repeatedly demeaned an ‘adamant’, ‘mythical’, ‘accusatory’, ‘insistent’, and ‘contrary’ Jewish memory for ‘coarsening’ historical understanding. Consulting Nicolas Berg’s Der Holocaust und die westdeutschen Historiker sheds light on Broszat’s background with the Institute for Contemporary History, which was involved in suppressing the Jewish survivor Joseph Wulf’s evidence against Dr Wilhelm Hagen. The essay concludes with a reflection on the biopolitical implications of a ‘dialectics’ between thick and thin affect, which suggests that a contemporaryhistoriographic construction of ‘normalcy’ as an appearance or perception of continuity privileges the standpoint of a subject who disavows his or her implication in the violence and crises that sentence others to destruction.

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2007

... Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980. Ball, Karyn. "The Substance of Psychic Li... more ... Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1980. Ball, Karyn. "The Substance of Psychic Life." The Dreams of Interpretation: A Century Down the Royal Road. Eds. ... Chow, Rey. The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism. New York: Columbia UP, 2002. Crawford, Claudia. ...

Parallax, 2005

I want to begin this reflection on ‘visceral reason’ with the blunt assertion above, which the na... more I want to begin this reflection on ‘visceral reason’ with the blunt assertion above, which the narrator ‘Jean Genet’ attributes to the mother of his dead lover, Jean D. The mother is a ‘sexual collaborator’; she hides her lover, a German soldier, in her apartment after the liberation of Paris. The mother’s mouth is obscenely full of food at this moment when she denigrates servants in earshot of the ‘little maid’, who has just buried her infant daughter, Jean D’s progeny. The mother’s attitude is emblematic of a hypocritical bourgeois society that Genet denounces throughout his writings. His disgust with this society spurs him to rail against conventional rituals that would incorporate his dead lover as a martyr into a homogenous narrative of national resistance. The narrator of Funeral Rites affirms his lover’s singularity through lurid fantasies of violent seduction and through a perverse celebration of betrayal, more pure, to his mind, than French identifications with their heroes and legends. Genet’s provocation to French society is to employ such fantasies to bury the national nose in its own shit – in a past that should not pass.

Holocaust Studies, 2014

ESC: English Studies in Canada, 2013