Rob Shields

Urban trauma: Comment on Karen Tills Wounded Cities

AAG Plenary, Seattle 14 April 2011

(Published in revised form in Political Geography 31. 2012. pp.15-16).

Thank you for your paper. Let's explore and amplify some of the central terms that are
mobilized in the idea of 'Wounded Cities' and 'Rootshock' These notions of affect,
stress, shock and wound are specifically united in the understandings of trauma that have
developed in late 19th century psychology and more recently in trauma studies where a
more social and historical approach has been taken to entire communities 'in shock'
rather than only individual patients'. Karen Till, building on a trajectory of works on
the city and memory, brings her urban practice to bear on advancing a vision of posttraumatic shock at an urban scale, appropriate perhaps for an era in which civilian cities
have become primary targets in warfare geared to destroy infrastructure and eliminate
the means of survival on a collective scale. , trauma, is Ancient Greek for
wound, damage-- from the base tere- "to rub, turn" (see throw (v.)) in fact the sense of
"psychic wound, unpleasant experience which causes abnormal stress" as implied in
'traumatic', only appears just over a hundred years ago in psychological jargon (1889).
Roadside Memorials, Monuments, historical plaques, ruins, heritage buildings and so on
provide us with convenient material with which the past can be associated. Rather than
an absence, a past passing, form concretizes the symbolic as well as its brute physical
materiality. We stand in it, run our hands over surfaces, mistake ourselves for, even
become, our ancestors, stretch our bodies over around and into am embodiment of the
relationship between sign and referent. Its a fusion that is best understood as the erotics
of monumentality and the love we have for what Tonya Davidson and others have called
'Stone Bodies' (Davidson 2012).
Karen Till explores the conundrum of memory work around razed communities.
Disappearance, does not offer the body such solace and the mind reels to repopulate
place and the body is left to turn without gesture around a gap, an space of absence that
is both material and abstract representation. As Ondine Park has noted, these are always
ambivalent spaces. This geographical differend to borrow what I believe will be one of
the keywords of the 21st century, Jean-Franois Lyotard's excluded, represent, and unvoiced 'non-oppositional other' the silenced immigrant, the aporetic artwork, and in his
most important intervention, the dead of Auschwitz, who cannot speak and cannot ever
fully name the harm, 'trauma', that is related to the hurt (Lyotard 1984). Caring for a
differend is both a moral-legal and ethical-aesthetic dilemma: it turn it induces
transformative trauma's in Western philosophy as well as in jurisprudential practice and
ultimately societal structures such as institutions, as is being played out in the
International Court of Human Rights. These institutions include not only courts but all

knowledge and culture sites within society, of which Universities and academic
disciplines are examples. Till's community and museum as sites of memory work and a
pedagogy of the past are good examples.
If we think trauma as both stress and wound, we recover a sense of materiality and
embodiment as well as its virtual, less intangible qualities. As a rule, the displacement
inherent in models of trauma involves non-mechanical causalities including affects such
as inspiration (Levinas, 1981: 123). Rather than a transfer of energy between material
objects, trauma can involve the actualization of unexpected aspects and capacities of
places, people and communities. This is often only recorded as paradox in positivistic
social science studies, because it requires an attention to ethics, affect and the virtual.
As Elizabeth Spellman argues in What is a City, New Orleans after Katrina (2008)
spatial imaginaries of post-disaster are also practices of story-telling built around object
survivors that are the material scaffolding of memory. Memory itself, as Antze and
Lambek argue in Tense Past (1996) must be performatively worked up. That is, these
are necessary cues: memories have to re-actualized every time from their virtual state
rather than realized as the expression of stored ideas and a kind of emotional videotape
of the past in our brains. Memory both joyful and melancholic in a Spinoza's language
of the ethics of affect is understood by Proust to be what I call a virtuality: 'real but not
actual, ideal but not abstract' (1982:906; on ecologies of affect, see Dvidson Park and
Shields 2011). Memory is thus neither abstract representation, concrete thing, nor
probability. What Greimas shows is the 'phoria' of place ('atmosphere'), shares its status
with other virtualities or intangibles such as fate, trust, and community (Greimas and
Fontanille 1991). It is managed by ritual, as Kevin Hetherington and Monica Degen
(2001) shows in their Space and Culture issue on 'Archival Spaces' and of hauntings as
inadequate disposal.
The materiality of the body is hardly static. We age, grow and shrink, loose teeth, shed
hair, see our limbs amputated but never loose sense of our corporeal wholeness, on
which we build a sense of capacities and identity, our intra-relationality with others and
our intimacy with and within the geophysical world. Place too has more than a layered
identity of past and present but as Karen Till points out a spatial imaginary which binds
the past with the present, as a shadow is as much a feature of lighting as brightness.
The practice of such 'spaces of representation' is always partial, fleeting but not
epiphenomenal. It is the very play of gesture and engagement which unites the body
with its context in not only its capacities but in touch, grasp and the purchase of the feet
on sloping ground. The dynamic qualities of place-identity suggest a cultural topology
(Shields 2013), a vision of flexing, elastic and constantly refolded spatiality beyond even
the Lefebvrean formulation of a trialectics of space practice, representations (I) , space
of representation or representational space (II) unintentionally grounded in a rhetoric

which does not adequately escape a second order dialectic of representation and
practice.
An ethics of place that responds to the notion of care, suggests an affective
responsiveness couched in the relational moments of embodied, everyday life. Care is
ethical not in a moralizing sense but as a turning toward of the body and its capacities.
Properly speaking, 'care' describes a social relation, not the attribute of a body. It is
aesthesis, part of a 'shared experience'. As such it is embedded, and as Kant told us,
aesthetic in the sense of relational judgement.
It suggests a flexing, cultural topology that walks with us and takes theory to the street.
Sense-making as care is solidarity. Maria Lugones (2003) criticizes radical urban
theorists, Lefebvre specifically, for their lack of commitment to community and to place.
Her 'streetwalker theorist' demands that we reposition ourselves and the academic
enterprise as something that extends beyond the institution and spaces of the academy
to more porous, risky spaces within the City and community. It challenges theorists to
embed theory as a practice intimately related with place and with actors, responsively
performed as an embedded practice and addressed to collective processes of care as
sense-making within the labyrinth of tears, raw scrapes, rather than in the linear
narrative space of theory as an disciplinary institution. Sense-making as care is placebuilding.
Against affectively dis-empowering melancholia of trauma that arrests and immobilizes
the body and dis-embeds it from the present, rituals of disposal and of memory both
bury and invoke the past, directing energy to gestures and relations that enhance the
capacity of the body to care in its turn, to enter a solidarity of struggle, and to engage
with a future that is as much a presence as the past.
References
Antze, P., & Lambek, M. (1996). Tense past: Cultural essays in trauma and memory.
New York: Routledge.
Davidson, T. (2012). Stone bodies in the city: Unmapping memory and belonging in
Ottawa. Edmonton: University of Alberta.
Davidson, T., Park, O., & Shields, R. (2011). Ecologies of affect. Waterloo: Wilfred
Laurier University Press.
Etymonline (nd). Trauma. http://www.etymonline.com Accessed 29.10.11.
Greimas, A. J., & Fontanille, J. (1991). Semiotique des passions. Des tats de choses
avec tats dme. Paris: Seuil.
Hetherington, K., & Degen, M. (2001). Introduction. Space and Culture, 10(4), 3.
Levinas, E. (1981). Otherwise than being or beyond essence (A. Lingis, Trans.). The
Hague: Martinus Nijhoff.
Lugones, M. (2003). Pilgrimages e Pelerinages. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield.

Lyotard, J.-F. (1984). The differend, the referent, and the proper name. Diacritics,
14(3), 4-15.
Proust, M. (1982). Remembrance of things past, Vol. III. New York: Vintage.
Shields, R. (in press). Topologies of space. London: Sage. Q3
Spelman, E. V. (2008). Repair and the scaffold of memory. In P. E. Steinberg, &
R. Shields (Eds.), What is a city? The urban after Katrina (pp. 140-154). Athens:
University of Georgia Press.
Till, K. (2005). The new Berlin: Memory, politics, place. Minneapolis: University of
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