Harvie Ferguson (University of Glasgow)
Surf War: The Normalization of Trauma in Contemporary Life
The founding myth of modern western society posits humanity as an autonomous, self-creating, and ultimately free being. The realization of this myth requires that modern society is established from a radically new starting point liberated from the past. Modern war emerges as a key mechanism for achieving this decisive break with the past. The fundamental human experience of war, which can be grasped descriptively through the notion of trauma, effectively thrusts the past into oblivion and forces human experiences into an exclusive orientation towards the future (Ankensmit).
Modernity is a condition of repeated trauma. A fundamental contradiction develops between a modern world view that understands reality in terms of identity, continuity, coherence, totality, and reason, and the social practice of trauma upon which its development depends. This contradiction is reflected in the fragmentation of experience and consciousness. New War is a key phenomenon of that transformation. It seizes the process of fragmentation and institutionalizes trauma. New War, therefore, cannot be understood in terms of intentionality, interest, or desire, and is better grasped as a continuous break; it is discontinuity, disproportion, incoherence, fragmentation and the non-identity of violence.
Contemporary life emerges from the oblivion of the past and the fragmentation of the present. It can no longer be constituted as meaningful experience. The historical subject (collective and individual) comes to life in disconnected spasms of awareness. Contemporary life is surf life; surf is the continuity of the fragment, and the persistence of the discontinuous. New War is Surfwar; the provocation to awareness and the futile ‘proof’ that the subject (the State), after all, still exists.
Harvie Ferguson is Professor of Sociology at the University of Glasgow. He has written extensiveley on the development of cultural, philosophical, and psychological aspects of the development of western modernity.
He has published research on war experience in both a modern European and Japanese perspective. His most recent books are Phenomenological Sociology: Insight and Experience in Modern Society (London: Sage 2006) and Self-Identity and Everyday Life (London: Routledge 2009). He is currently writing a book on death.
