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.Although historical trauma was focussed on the Holocaust, it is worth noting thatthe uncovering of history as trauma occurred at the same time that child abuse and59 T I MEother forms of familial and social persecution were becoming increasingly open tomedia discussion and drawn into the ambit of the juridical and therapeutic professions.Trauma became a popular paradigm for thinking about the past after US militarypersonnel returning from Vietnam and suffering flashbacks, hallucinations, rage anddepression were diagnosed with a new syndrome Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder(PTSD).Somewhat later, organised collective injustices such as the stolen generationamong Australian Aborigines (the governmentally sanctioned uprooting of childrenborn into Aboriginal communities) or the enforced prostitution of Korean women bythe Japanese during World War II were also recognised as traumatic and simultaneouslyreceived increased publicity and demands for apology and reparation (see Frow 2001).Trauma is a contested concept (see Leys 2000), but at its heart lies the notion thatsome events are too damaging to be able to be dealt with consciously.Trauma victimsrepress their pain and displace it into symptoms, many of which involve more or lessdistorted repetitions of the traumatic events themselves.In them the past lives on, butnot in the form of conscious, or at least controlled, memory or representation.Thecrucial question that confronts thinking about trauma psychologically is: to whatdegree is it a performance in which strategy and suggestion mingle with pain andpathology? Can, for instance, the Holocaust be regarded as a trauma for modernity orjust for (some) survivors? Is Australian cultural identity in part a collectivisingresponse to the trauma of Gallipoli, the disastrous World War I campaign that cost over8000 lives for almost no military gain and which has become an official icon ofAustralian (Anglo) character.The problem with trauma theory once it is applied togroups rather than individuals is that it tends to overemphasise the unity and sharedexperience of groups and, indeed, to grant past experience too great an influence onpresent realities.After all, if there is one thing that sustained reflection on the pastfrom a cultural studies perspective teaches us it is that the past we have today is not, inany clear way, the past as it was once variously experienced.Which nonetheless doesnot mean that it is, as historicism supposes, simply other.Further readingConnerton 1989; Hewison 1987; Leys 2000; Morris 1998; Nora and Kritzman 1996; Samuel1994;Williams 1961.60 2.2The presentThe contemporaryAs we have seen, cultural studies is marked off from disciplines such as literary studies,film studies and art history partly through its focus on the contemporary.In this section Iwant to examine what the contemporary means, first by analysing it as a concept andthen by offering a summary of postmodernism, which has been the most influentialcategory used to theorise it.And we should remind ourselves at once that the contem-porary looms larger in the West today than it has ever done.After all, it seems as if weare today more interested in time now than in time past compared to earlier genera-tions the emergence of cultural studies being itself an expression of that.Culturalstudies commitment to the contemporary orientates it towards what in critical termsis called presentism , which means both seeing the past through the light of thepresent in ways that lose sight of the past s otherness and being narcissistic historicallyspeaking, that is, being overconfident that historical trends are reaching their apogeenow (even though, as we know from section 2.1, anti-presentism also has its costs).So what is the contemporary? At one level, it connotes the present.But to say that isto say very little since the present is an elusive category: simultaneously, the zero,through which the future becomes the past, and the plenitude in which our lives occur.As semiotics teaches us, the present acquires meaning only by virtue of its place in anordered array which contains elements different to itself, that is, in relation to the pastand, though much less so, to the future.The present means something in terms of itsperceived differences and similarities to the past, where the past is figured as a jumbleof (debates over) events, images, tendencies, thresholds, repetitions and dead ends.Thus (in the West) the present means what it means in relation to events such as the61 T I MEFrench Revolution and the Holocaust, which define it as a moment in modernity, orfor instance in relation to a supposedly more tranquil past as imaged by a more or lessmythical traditional English village without media or consumerism and with anunspoiled environment.Or, alternatively, the present means something in terms of itsrelation to the future, to predictions of an era when China will become more powerfulthan the USA, or when human beings will be synthesised with machines, say.Thepresent is strictly meaningless without imagined and narrativised pasts and futures,images and narratives constituted by tropes of events and processes.And the greaterthe will to make the present meaningful (perhaps because we are losing our confidencein history as a meta-concept), the more likely that the pasts and futures which grant itmeaning will be represented over-simplistically
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