Apparently unrelated : affective resonance, concatenation and traumatic circuitry in the terrain of the everyday

When I was asked to produce a chapter for this volume I didn’t want to write a purely theoretical paper about trauma. I felt too implicated in what I wanted to say to be able to distance myself in academic discourse. I didn’t want to write fiction, either, since I did still want to formulate some concepts for thinking about what trauma might mean in the everyday, and about a structure of experience that might be to some extent generalizable, even though its contents would be specific. So what follows is neither theory, nor fiction, and yet also both: an impure mixture, a fragment from a larger piece of work that wants to address the affective resonance between images, stories and experience. This resonance, I contend, brings things that are thematically or otherwise unrelated into a relation organized solely by affect, and in doing so, gives rise to what I would describe as a kind of complex circuitry between things in which the effects of events concatenate to produce the everyday as a terrain of trauma. This is not the “trauma culture” decried by Lauren Berlant and others. Nor is this terrain smooth and continuous. Rather, it is rocky, requiring negotiation, but also affording texture in the experience of passage through it.