For the official version of record, see here:
Kohpeiß, H. (2023). Missed Feelings: Sexual Violence and the Affective Mediation of Harm. Media Theory, 7(2), 225–244. Retrieved from https://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/579
Missed Feelings: Sexual Violence and the Affective Mediation of Harm
HENRIKE KOHPEIß
Freie Universität Berlin, GERMANY
Abstract
‘Missed Feelings’ addresses the complex repercussions of traumatic experience Lauren Berlant lays out in their article “Structures of Unfeeling” (2015). The article helps to trace the unexpected mediations of injury into affect and discusses the role of victimhood from sexual assault in patriarchal societies. With regard to a case of systemic sexual abuse in Germany, I argue that unfeeling is an essential element of sexual violence. Berlant’s theoretical account of life-sustaining attachments and affect as mediation makes the dialectic of harm and lack of feeling understandable. Unfeeling in the form of social indifference enables gendered violence to occur and to continue uninterrupted, while at the same time, unfeeling is a tool used by survivors in order to be able to live with their experience of assault while often it remains legally and socially unacknowledged. This dynamic of unfeeling explains sexual violence’s subjectifying power: the expectation of not being seen as a credible victim forces survivors to search for other affective mediations of their reality. Therefore, self-protection in a patriarchal world might look risky, idiosyncratic and often unexpected.
Keywords
affect theory, sexual violence, unfeeling, affective mediation
Introduction
It remains overwhelmingly impossible to deal with sexual assault, both socially and legally. The lack of protocols to protect victims (mostly women), and reduce perpetrators’ power to determine the narrative, is an ongoing painful shortcoming. This lack complements the statistics, which indicate that only very few cases of rape are being legally prosecuted, while even fewer lead to convictions (Hellmann, 2014; Hellmann and Pfeiffer, 2015; Rape, Abuse and Incest National Network, 2023). The causes of this impossibility should not be mistaken for a lack of governmental and police-related tools. Rather, the mediation of sexual assault in the shape of narratives, images and feelings is the objects we have to study to understand what rape and assault are in social life and how perpetrators evade consequences. Moreover, the mediations victims use to decenter the experience of sexual assault and move on must be described in order to understand the subjectifying power of sexual violence and to divest from pre-formed images of victimhood and/or its overcoming. The concept of unfeeling, as used by Lauren Berlant and their theory of affective mediation, offers tools through which the difficulty of situating sexual assault in a shared reality might be better approached. I will give a recent example of a case of sexual assault widely discussed in Germany and map the different mediations of unfeeling in public discourse: how perpetrators benefit from it but also how victims might see it as protection. This will help to see how the affective obliteration of sexual assault is a consequence of the difficulties of dealing with it legally and socially, while it remains unclear how far this obliteration can be overcome under current conditions.
Unfeeling has grown to be a commonly used category in affect studies and beyond in order to describe phenomena and repertoires, which deserve attention for the articulation of negativity, lack or refusal and thereby often question the relationship between the social significance and the representation of feeling (Butler, 2010; Norgaard, 2011; Palmer, 2020; Sontag, 2003; Wallenhorst, 2021; Yao, 2021). Berlant describes affect’s role for the grasp of the present like this: “I have made a series of claims about the ways that affect has had a privileged place in the construction of the experience and redaction of the historical present. One involves an aesthetic claim about the centrality of affect to the mediation of the present of any historical moment” (Berlant, 2011: 79). The category of unfeeling is therefore relevant as part of these mediation processes because it accounts for moments of reduced intensity, which might otherwise be overlooked.
When accusations against the lead singer of the German band Rammstein surfaced in June 2023, the social failures regarding alleged – as well as proven – sexual violence painfully unfolded once again. A young woman from Ireland, Shelby Lynn, had made her experience at a Rammstein concert in Vilnius public on Twitter and more women followed in sharing their experiences[1]. In the aftermath of Lynn’s post, a system of targeted abuse of mostly very young women began to assemble in public. The reports of the women point to a practice whereby members of the tour crew specifically recruited young female fans to join exclusive aftershow parties at which only the singer and themselves were present. The invitation did not disclose the fact that the women were picked in line with the singer’s sexual preferences, nor that they were expected to later have sex with him. The women report having been offered alcohol and drugs at these events and many suspect having been sedated and subsequently raped by the singer.
The structure described by more and more affected women and journalists points to the systematic abuse of power, combined with sexual violence, facilitated by the many crew members of the Rammstein touring team. From what has been reported, it is unlikely that the violation of young women at Rammstein concerts was a secret – on the contrary, a number of people must have directly contributed to it and many others must have witnessed what happened[2]. Because the case involves a famous band and played out almost entirely in the public sphere, it became transparent how severe sexual misconduct by a powerful man against young women, who might or might not adore him, is being mediated in such a way that the violence at its core is being circumvented, displaced and repressed. This, of course, happened in the interest of the perpetrator. Parallelly, there is a need on the part of the victim to make engagement with the inescapable patriarchal world bearable – particularly in a situation that appeared more and more hopeless for anyone looking for restorative justice, and in which moral pressure on victims grew to share their experiences in public even when awaiting threats and disbelief. This means that victims too, and for entirely different reasons, constantly look for mediations of what happened to them, helping them to unfeel the injuries caused.
Affective obliteration
A friend tells me that they noticed increased appearances of Rammstein T-shirts in the streets a few days after the reports of women became public and I, too, seem to pass by more and more of such displays of defiance. Fans offer solidarity from the perspective of what makes sense in their own economies of desire: they have hope in Rammstein because they love their music. A lifelong commitment to a machine of desires and everything it allows them to feel and experience cannot be sacrificed, especially not immediately, to defend an aspect of reality that does not seem to touch them[3]. Instead of questioning their own commitments and attachments to the band in order to acknowledge the pain and trauma of victims, a reinforcement of unconditional support for the band takes place – facilitated by a T-Shirt, transporting the affective weight of fan culture. With Lauren Berlant, we can see the T-shirt as a carrier and communicative tool of affect leading to the real “object of desire” and all promises tied to Rammstein[4]. This investment in patriarchy articulated through masculinist fan culture and T-shirts speaking volumes, is cruelly optimistic. How do media infrastructures like this eclipse the harm endured by victims of sexual assault by foregrounding the perpetrator’s perspective? How are patriarchy’s mediations helping subjects to remain shielded from the violence of systematic sexual assault, even when the assaulted may live in close proximity with them, as their friends and family? How do affective mediations, and the more or less intentional distribution of attention, predetermine and often prevent the conditions for injury to be recognized and cared for? And how far are these structures a result of the necessity to – at times as, or as a consequence of, “crisis ordinariness” (Berlant, 2011: 10) – unfeel things that are too overwhelming to process, whether they happened to us or next to us?
I approach these questions from the assumption that affective relations to reality are created, changed and maintained through media infrastructures, which include narratives, images and other objects and representations. Berlant’s work attends to these objects, which give subjects an orientation and sometimes overshoot their mark, denying the violence they were supposed to mediate. It is through investigation of the origins of objects of attachment that we can understand how “objects of desire” guide feelings and handle ongoing violence emanating from power structures that threaten to throw everything in disarray. What is called “attachment” in Berlant’s work describes relations stabilizing ambivalence through the use of concrete media like sex (Berlant, 2011: 147; Berlant and Edelman, 2013), dreams and aspirations (Berlant, 2011: 123) or fictions of autonomy and sovereignty (Berlant, 2011: 98). Berlant traces the ways in which subjects stabilize their often precarious positions in the world by holding onto certain objects and subsequently understanding the world through these objects. This is how they become media of existence, holding ambivalence and uncertainty.
In order to understand how affective obliteration works, we cannot begin this investigation with moral judgments determining the correct ways to feel or premature disqualifications of some of the media and attachments people draw on for their self-reproduction. We should rather see that affective obliteration is an intentional or unintentional emotional neglect of or defence against suffering, facilitated by some of the necessary mediations of violence just named. Structures of feeling can shape reality in such a way that violence happening in close proximity remains unfelt, sometimes for entirely rational reasons, sometimes for irrational ones, sometimes with stabilizing and often with damaging effects[5]. In other words, the necessity to mediate disruptive violence for the sake of everyday life is a necessary and continuous act oscillating between self-protection by repression and harmful denial of structural violence[6].
In “Structures of Unfeeling” (2015), Berlant displaces most expectations of emotional coherence and shows how being overwhelmed is a very common state of being a subject and often expresses itself in unexpected forms or ‘coping mechanisms’. This causes a gap between the suffering caused by violence and the affective articulations of its processing. The feeling of being overwhelmed and its affective mediation is – in a problematic double bind – as much a sign of being harmed as it is of being a passive and useless witness of harm. The mechanisms that keep bystanders from recognizing and acting upon the violence they witness might therefore be very similar to the ones that protect victims experiencing trauma from a fixation on that experience. How can this be? The ability to unfeel what happened or what was witnessed is a tool to continue life elsewhere, whether used as a means of survival or neglect of responsibility.
It will always be in the direct interest of victims to name and state the injuries they have endured if this grants them access to protection and justice, which, so far, is rarely the case. Because of this fundamental insecurity – not knowing if accusations will help to bring about justice[7] or bring further humiliation and retraumatization to victims[8] – an infrastructure of unfeeling might be a reasonable consequence and a tool for self-protection[9].
Unfeeling against victims
Unfeeling does not occur naturally but is often the result of active production. There are a number of media which facilitate it: objects, resources and agencies that help to guide, substitute and absorb feelings in such a way that they serve specific purposes and are being redirected from, for instance, the victim to the perpetrator. This does not necessarily imply targeted manipulation but rather the assumption that materially and collectively produced structures of feeling govern social and institutional life. These structures “cannot without loss be reduced to belief systems, institutions, or explicit general relationships, though [they] may include all these as lived and experienced, with or without tension, as [they] also evidently include[s] elements of social and material (physical or natural) experience […]” (Williams, 1977: 133). Spaces, behavioral expectations, legal frameworks, discourses, and language itself together determine the conditions for articulation and action, sometimes in the concrete shape of institutions and different affective arrangements present in them (Ahmed, 2012; Berlant, 2011; Churcher et al., 2023; Slaby, et al., 2019).
Engaging with these concrete objects of life when analyzing social feeling is how Berlant engages with media carrying emotional repertoires. Affect, to them, is always already mediated as it manifests as “the present”[10]. And since the necessity for mediation lies in “pressures of the present moment on the subject’s sensorium” (Berlant, 2011: 9), some mediations are more explicitly weaponized tools of discipline and control. They shape, for example, the affective possibilities of feeling patriarchal damage: lawyers who threaten victims, the general shame of victimhood, sexual taboos, lack of sexual education. In short, there are economic and material interests connected to social and political power, mediated through institutions and cultural agreements, structuring affective reality in a way that allows for the undisturbed reproduction of different forms of exploitation – sexual and/or monetary. “Violence becomes the medium for its ‘violence control’ as Panoptimism, like a Möbius strip, turns back to the negativity from which it tries to turn away”, Berlant and Edelman write to describe how normative force works (Berlant and Edelman, 2013: 18). That’s how media of unfeeling – the tales of skirts too short and nights too long – help to normalize abuse as a given and to silence resistance against violence’s continuities by making it seem baseless or immoral. Unfeeling is a way to prevent injury, experienced individually, from becoming a shared political issue.
The lack of legal protection from sexual assault in Germany and beyond, and the legal and communicative means available to powerful perpetrators to silence and undermine accusations (Beaumont et al., 2022; Lumsden and Morgan, 2017; Oldfield and McDonald, 2022), provide the material conditions for a structure of unfeeling around sexual assault to stabilize itself. These tools not only protect perpetrators from punishment and consequences or even reputational damage but also enable societies to remain clueless about the dark undertow of the economies of desire they host. The unwillingness to confront, investigate or even to know about the kinds of atrocities committed, situates sexual violence outside what is considered “civil society” and, as such, disguises its ordinariness. The power structures which stabilize the entire repertoire of unfeeling the “pain of others” were activated once the accusations against Rammstein became public (Sontag, 2003). The sullen, aggressive displays of fan culture work as a sensory defense, a mediation of desire through attachment to a particular aesthetics (Berlant, 2011: 52) – they make it possible, and a little bit more attractive, to unhear the young women on Twitter and YouTube and strengthen fans’ sense of being part of something bigger (Frank, 2023)[11]. Accordingly, nothing feels bigger and better than the comfortable alignment with patriarchal power and a safe distance from the inconvenience of other people’s pain (Berlant, 2022).
Unfeeling for survival
Victims speaking up against and about their abuse is one important resource to build opposition against the structures of unfeeling; structures which keep a culture of silencing, forgetting and victim blaming in place[12]. However, it would be seriously mistaken to depict public testimony about sexual assault as a scene of heroic catharsis. Rather, these acts are better understood as part of difficult reckonings with reality from an epistemically precarious position (MacKenzie, 2022; Hänel, 2022a; Tilton, 2022). Instead of reducing it to a question of individual psychology, victims of sexual assault coming to terms with a reality where the violence they experienced most likely has no consequences should be considered a social problem. In terms of affect, we could say that sexual assault, which is individualizing even though it happens to so many, makes it extremely difficult to find a stable, distanced relation to what happened (Burgess and Holmström, 1974). Therefore, it asks for mediations of the unbearable[13]. What Ann Wolbert Burgess and Lynda Lytle Holmström initially called “Rape Trauma Syndrome” includes a variety of phobic symptoms pointing to the possibility of a repetition of the traumatic incident. When these symptoms unfold, they often mark a disruption of the victim’s life so far. The psychiatrists take these crises to be “in the service of self-preservation” (1974: 985) because the fear qualifies as a means to protect the victim from additional experiences resembling the trauma. But of course, these symptoms are at the same time so disruptive that they undermine the subject’s basic orientation towards others, intimacy and selfhood and their protective function turns against itself. In other words, the targeted submission of one’s body for another’s pleasure or demonstration of force is an experience so “self-disintegrating” (985) that it can destroy the metabolism of relation between subject and world. In this case, unfeeling promises relief from traumatic time and becomes a means of survival.
When “the world [is] perceived as a traumatic incident after the assault” (985), conditions arise for the constitutively open and dangerous forms of being that Berlant refers to as “being in life without wanting the world” (Berlant, 2022). But it would be short-sighted to consider all these forms of dissociated life as mere trauma responses in need of elimination through healing. Rather, techniques that allow the subject not to be permanently overwhelmed by the painful past while trying to grasp the uncertain future are inherent to “damaged life” (Adorno, 2005; Berlant, 2022: 121). Berlant sees in their employment a production of environments, which contain the historical past as well as the present moment[14]. In other words, dissociation can help to create environments that are more appealing than the ones completely shaped by harm, if only just for a moment.
Independent of the complex psychology of trauma, there is a simple reason to desire unresolved violence to be unfelt. It is clear that victims as well as bystanders prefer to live in a world where rape is not an issue, not a form of violence defining the social, which has been described as “rape culture” (Larson, 2021; Phillips, 2017). While ignorance and systemic silencing are part of the self-reproduction of a patriarchal culture, the victim’s unfeeling is in part a consequence, but of a different aspect. Unfeeling means to refuse to return to the place where one was almost annihilated. Unfeeling is the grace of being able to forget, especially when public revelations about the experience are not followed by an acknowledgement of that reality and/or legal prosecution. Instead, as in the case of Rammstein, public accusations open the gates for media and parts of society to question the credibility of the painful and fragile descriptions given and ask for impossible evidence of the actual damage caused[15]. This amounts to a profoundly ambivalent concept of unfeeling which is diagnostic in the sense that it points at society’s refusal to register ubiquitous suffering while at the same time being a tool for precarious subjects to shield themselves against the violence of being overlooked. The latter is what Xine Yao calls “disaffection” (2022) – a defense mechanism in which subjects withdraw from scripts of feeling which are directed against them.
Affective incoherence
The difficult relationship to the feelings which mark the event of sexual assault asks for theorizing on morally shaky grounds. This means that an evaluation of a subject’s attempt to deal with their injury, and the lack of social support for overcoming it, cannot expect anything like full recovery, the resolution of the social contradiction in which it unfolds, or catharsis. This is why Berlant specifically focuses on the interesting quality of unfeeling, meaning the underperformative quality of affective mediation as a plausible crisis-response. The different kinds of disengagement, the sets of mediations holding the unbearable we encounter through Berlant’s writing might also be categorized as affective social techniques (Kohpeiß, 2023a) for subjects to sustain themselves.
Berlant’s inquiry contains at least three points of interest: firstly, the claim that there can be too little feeling with regard to a given event suggests a normativity of feelings and its mediation into social expectations towards emotional coherence. Secondly, regardless of the question of whether a given feeling or rather its expression is too big or too small of a response, Berlant’s thinking targets affect’s precarious grasp on reality as such. Unfeeling refers to lesser, weaker mediations of affect. They occur when an intended or unconscious reduction of affective intensity shifts the subject’s perspective towards the situation they find themselves in, as for example in a state of dissociation (Berlant, 2022: 117 ff.). Thirdly, how is the individual or subjective renegotiation and displacement of trauma through unfeeling always already linked to a socially shared and mediated affective response? How is reality being altered or reorganized when societies unfeel the crisis that permeates them?
The quality of underperformativity (Berlant, 2015: 195) directly addresses the relationship between affect and reality in different ways and it zooms in on the kinds of weak mediations that are attempts of handling overwhelming situations. To suspend melodramatic expectations altogether and to retreat to a state of “hesitation or defense against presence” (195) is a way to obliterate the event, which might have triggered this withdrawal. This lack of a melodramatic intensification of event and response gives up on a coherent relation between reality and an affective expression reacting to it: “In the underperformative scene, one can always say nothing happened, because little happens and when it does, it can point at once in many directions. The nothing might mask an event, or not” (Berlant, 2015: 195). How Berlant goes about addressing underperformativity or unfeeling is “to describe the register of underperformed emotional style in relation to an instance of it” (Berlant, 2015: 199).
Berlant’s reading of the movie Mysterious Skin centers sex after the experience of abuse as a scene of presumed traumatic quality. Here, unfeeling is realized through mediations of “flat affect” but rests on the negativity of trauma and the necessity to flatten rather than spark intense emotion in order for the subject to live with its own history. Affect is contained through distance from the event but also through other mediation techniques of reducing feeling, like a “refusal to be exposed having a particular desire” (Berlant, 2015: 206). The main character displays his disinterest “in cultivating the self-revealing intimacy relation that people often build onto sex” (Berlant, 2015: 199) and therefore suggests a deviant relation to sexual trauma. The movie’s protagonist, Neil McCormack, was raped by his baseball coach as a child and engages in sexwork as an adult. The sex is not entirely defined by that monetary exchange, but it offers a form of mediation in which a distanced relation to sexuality’s expectations can be explored. Sex is explicitly desired by Neil, but as a form of contact that is not invested in intimacy, vulnerability or showing oneself.
For Neil, this is intended to withhold any articulation of concrete desire or wish and to offer the most indifferent word of all – “whatever” – when being asked what he wants (Berlant, 2015: 206). Unfeeling does not equal stoicism, or a demonstration of indifference – “whatever” is a concrete medium of overcoming traumatic paralysis while still withholding what cannot be known (which is what one wants). Berlant interprets the utterance of “whatever” as a minimal engagement with sociality. “Whatever” allows the subject to have a desire, even if it does not know what it is, and to hide it within the endless possibilities of that word, maybe to become more specific at a later point.
It could be argued that sex constitutes the paradigmatic medium of simultaneous flatness and depth or that it can be performed with different degrees of involvement so that underperforming does not apply here. But the scene unfolds a demonstration of underperformative indifference – possibly as a means of protection – which holds the power to question the legibility of affect as such. The type of glitch or contingency of emotion, which Neil displays during sexwork, as well as in the aftermath of the sexual abuse he experiences as an adult, “is not only or merely—we just don’t know—the radical dissociation of classic trauma” (206). To state this difference between a mechanical traumatic repetition compulsion as imagined by Freud[16] and the unexpected spaciousness of affective disengagement opens up a way to further describe possible affective mediations of the constitutive damage of one’s surroundings and oneself[17].
A similar breadth of symptoms and re-orientations can be observed in what is classified as dissociative disorders in the DSM 5 (American Psychiatric Association, 2022; Spiegel et al., 2011). In order to divest from a categorization of dissociative symptoms as mere pathology in need of healing, Berlant broadens the term to speak of “politicized dissociation” (Berlant, 2022: 145), which describes the subject’s exit from prescribed ways to feel about the world, while not knowing how to feel otherwise, yet[18]. This cannot be treated as an individual disorder but has to be acknowledged as a consequence of capitalism and the material affective necessities which are part of life in a wrong world. Rather than sitting in the medical/psychological realm, dissociation becomes interesting, in its different media: as a poetics (Berlant, 2022: 145) or “dissociative style” (Wallenhorst, 2021). Maxi Wallenhorst follows the incentive to de-dramatize dissociation, reading it as a different type of perception, realized through the medium of a veil: “The veil feels normal. If everyone knows what it feels like to not feel like yourself, where does it become a problem only some have?” (Wallenhorst, 2021). Dissociation appears as a perceptive strategy that helps one move through a world of dangerous encounters and possibilities, which are difficult to differentiate from one another: “In a politically dissociative consciousness, the distinction between openness and defense is unknowable, open to the inconvenient noise of the world’s devastating realisms, resisting, shredding, but not dying from the encounter” (Berlant, 2022: 145). Dissociation is more than a splitting off of traumatic experience to prevent repetition. It is “not identical to giving up” (145) but a way to “remain in life”, even if it has shown to be ruthless, with the help of veils and other tools of mediation. Dissociation, in Berlant’s and Wallenhorst’s respective reframings, is a space of affective rest, where the missed feelings that have been eliminated through post-traumatic self-protection might be reassembled to result in a different type of openness that welcomes the veil as a permanent medium, in which “[i]t is always the case that the event remains to be sensed” and experience becomes possible anew (Berlant, 2015: 195, emphasis in original).
Trauma, then, appears as a fantasy of depth that helps to deal with the forever insufficient understanding of ourselves and our relationship to the world. The term trauma has little significance or explanatory power regarding the question of how life continues, how one survives. In order to divest from this fantasy, media of low affect, sites of lesser feeling and of reduced intensities (like dissociation and the refusal to articulate desires) have to be considered as important carriers of the structures of feeling that organize everyday life for most.
Berlant asks us to see that reality is made up of mixed feelings and missed feelings. Missed feelings accumulate to become “elliptical life”: a partial “attachment to life without confidence about the object world’s trustworthiness” (Berlant, 2022: 133). The general suspicion about the world’s ability to hold the subject is a reasonable response to violence and it often manifests in a perceived “sensual incoherence” (Berlant, 2022: 133), challenging established ideas of victimhood and “appropriate” behaviors (Gavey and Schmidt, 2011: 451). Incoherence, therefore, might be less of a concept to describe a logical emotional mistake and more of a category used for lack of a better term. There is no proportional ratio between the severity of events and the gravity of affective responses unfolding in temporal proximity to them.
Unfeeling is an affective relation defined rather by what it is not than what it is made of, yet we can observe it in different mediations of weak affect described above. It is produced by the emotional gaps it cannot name, by what could be called unhealthy attachments when healthy ones are not available. Anything concerning sexual violence is rich in these missed feelings, because the quality of its specific violence is to be always either too close or too far and therefore difficult to name or to share. Missed feelings are feelings so solipsistic that unexpected mediations are necessary for them to enter the realm of language, which they sometimes never do. For the sake of survival, language is not always the best, nor indeed the simplest medium to employ here. Missed feelings show up in memory loss, displays of indifference or substitute desires and they are objects radiating damage into sociality, which is why they are intentionally missed out on, pushed towards neglect.
In the gap between reality and images of trauma, in elliptical life, the absence of dramatic breakdowns in proximity to the event causes a problem of recognition. Performative expectations towards victimhood endanger the validity of other mediations of violence (Gavey and Schmidt, 2011: 451). The experience of sexual assault has an impact on the very substance of reality and in order to be able to explore this reality, images of rape trauma, that are as much a myth as what “counts” as rape itself (Hänel, 2022b; Tilton, 2022), have to be sidelined.
The intersection of social marginalization of sexual assault and coping strategies of victims that aim to minimize the effect of traumatic memories produces an agreement on the unfeeling of certain injuries: mediations of violence often aim at its amelioration to reduce the impact of hurtful memories and thereby co-fabricate unfeeling. Unfeeling appears to be a victim’s better option because it avoids confrontation with the very likely failure in seeking justice. Breanna Fahs has studied the use of the label “rape” among sexual assault victims and the effects of its use. Fahs concludes, “[n]aming and labeling rape can impact women’s well-being, though studies find conflicting results about whether labeling is positive or negative for women” (Fahs, 2020: 67). This finding sheds ambivalent light on the practice of public call outs during #MeToo as well as in the Rammstein case. “[W]omen’s feelings of shame, guilt, embarrassment, concerns about confidentiality, and fear of not being believed (Sable et al., 2006) also affected women’s likelihood of labeling rape” (Fahs, 2020: 67). Because these fears were confirmed in many cases, the effects of women naming what has happened to them can by no means be evaluated as only positive and liberating. Rather, additional crises are likely to occur when victims are concretely threatened or accused of lying or craving fame (Larson, 2018).
The question of victims’ relationship to sexual violence and to themselves as victims shifts focus from the supposed center of the issue (the event of rape itself) to the ways in which the event has lost its temporal and spatial specificity, how it unfolds into the future and intervenes into a person’s self-relation. How has the violence been affectively mediated through many layers of coping, defending and forgetting and how do these mediations initiate new forms of life that are familiar with but not reducible to injury? Glimpses of this are to be observed in refusals to name the event, the claim of “whatever desire” and dissociative poetics – methods for “failed subjects” that were created by biopolitical power structures (Berlant, 2022: 132) to remain attached to some parts of reality and their own experiences with it.
Epilogue: Unfeeling injury
Victims are required to perform trauma in specific ways in order for the crime that caused it to appear likely, credible, noticeable. To refuse these affective scripts is the opposite of hysteria and chooses silent mediation instead of demonstrative illegibility in order to protect the truth from its legal and patriarchal mutilation. To unfeel can also be a means of keeping the fact of rape to oneself, claim it as one’s very own individual injury, because whoever is around and shows an interest in its revelation cannot be trusted to take care of the subject who’s borne it up until now. When the assault does not unveil itself as part of a systemic effort with many victims as in the case of Rammstein, the assaulted often bear the full, individual responsibility of accusation because legal prosecution frequently fails to take over. The immediacy of some call outs which have unfolded in the past years is not a lifeline but a very contingent thing to depend on. How can one make something public and expose its grey areas when one has not nearly understood oneself. There is no direct path towards responsible negotiations of harm, guilt and healing. There is barely an institutional offer in order for the myriad of shades of sexual assault to be accounted for and protected against. Berlant’s understanding of affect as a resource for the mediation of unbearable states knows of this impossibility and focuses on how subjects, who are aware of the damaged world that surrounds them, cope instead. There might be unexpected mediations of violence that deserve more and different attention. Such attention might offer acknowledgment of the reality that has shaped victims of sexual assault and of the ways they unfeel it, to enable themselves to endure it further.
Acknowledgments
Thanks to Jasmine Wanjiru Onstad for helping me to improve this article significantly.
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Notes
[1] For an overview of the events and allegations see Connolly, 2023.
[2] From the beginning the allegations have been discussed in the context of Rammstein’s rough and masculine aesthetics that alludes to the objectification of women’s bodies and contains symbolic language adhering to Nazism amongst other controversial tropes. It was suggested that women should have expected to be mistreated because of the band’s aesthetics as well as the unwritten rules of groupie-culture. This form of victim-blaming in which women are asked to foresee and expect assault in order to evade it, was especially forceful in the unfolding of this case.
[3] In the phase of public outcry connected to the initial #MeToo movement in 2017, the power of the public to impact a suspect’s reputation and push for legal investigation has been an important element in the struggle for justice. Without the sheer number of public allegations against Harvey Weinstein for example, which women made under immense pressure and threat, legal persecution wouldn’t have been initiated. In the case of Rammstein, the public’s power is impaired or at least antagonistically set up, since the band’s fanbase has sprung to public defense from the start by accusing the women who spoke out of lying (Frank, 2023; Waibel, 2023). Years after #MeToo, the case of Rammstein displays clearly that believing women’s allegations is absolutely not a given, but that women’s credibility and worthiness to be listened to will be questioned and tested over and over again.
[4] “To phrase ‘the object of desire’ as a cluster of promises is to allow us to encounter what’s incoherent or enigmatic in our attachments, not as confirmation of our irrationality but as an explanation of our senses of our endurance in the object, insofar as proximity to the object means proximity to the cluster of things that the object promises, some of which may be clear to us and good for us while others, not so much” (Berlant, 2011: 24).
[5] Amy Allen mentions how Freud understood the project of psychoanalysis as a “rational theory of irrationality”, which to me is an invitation to let go of any expectations as to what we might find (Allen, 2020: 89).
[6] What Berlant calls unfeelingis rooted in what Freud calls repression as a neurotic, inner-psychic defense-mechanism but can also take the shape of a more psychotic denial of reality (Freud, 1957).
[7] İnan, 2023.
[8] “Naming and labeling rape can impact women’s well-being, though studies find conflicting results about whether labeling is positive or negative for women” (Fahs, 2020: 67).
[9] The conceptualization of unfeeling with the intention of putting it to use in different contexts, brings up another, more general question, that will not be dealt with in this article. Berlant’s theorizing has, especially in their late work, brought more and more focus to sexual violence. Unfeeling, as developed in their article “Structures of Unfeeling”, describes first and foremost the organization of a feeling apparatus around trauma and its transformation into different situations of little intensity. What would be the political and theoretical consequences of broadening the range of phenomena that could be described by the term unfeeling, while at the same time removing it from its intended site of actualization?
[10] “If the present is not at first an object but a mediated affect, it is also a thing that is sensed and under constant revision, a temporal genre whose conventions emerge from the personal and public filtering of the situations and events that are happening in an extended now whose very parameters (when did “the present” begin?) are also always there for debate” (Berlant, 2011: 4).
[11] In addition to the defense and solidarity coming from the band’s fans, the singer’s lawyers ran an extremely aggressive strategy of undermining and punishing any public claims to not completely proven sexual assault. They attacked media outlets as well as many of the women coming forward as victims by accusing them of disrespecting the singer’s personal rights (Der Spiegel, 2023).
[12] The #MeToo movement in 2017 is a history about the power of public outcry (Siemon et al., 2023).
[13] “Another name for that threat, as this book has argued, might be life, where life entails vulnerability to the unpredictable encounter that can often seem, with regard to the selves that we recognize, unbearable” (Berlant and Edelman, 2013: 120).
[14] “Environment denotes a scene in which structural conditions are suffused through a variety of mediations, such as predictable repetitions and other spatial practices that might well go under the radar or, in any case, not take up the form of event” (Berlant, 2011: 101).
[15] In this particular case, an infamous law firm (experts in the defense of those accused of sexual assault) has the mandate to push against any unproven accusations that are being made against the singer by media or victims and has started to sue women coming forward and media outlets quickly after the accusations became public, with partial success. On the other hand, the forced recollection of traumatic events has shown to cause, amongst other things, panic attacks, mental instability, further accusations and hate speech to be expected in the future. One remarkable document of an impressive mediation between the expectation to speak the truth and dealing with the impossibility as well as the consequences of this quest is the hearing of Christine Blasey-Ford before the appointment of Brett Kavanaugh as new supreme court judge. See Kohpeiß, 2023b.
[16] Although even Freud was interested in the shift and development unfolding through repetition and not in its tragic eternal recurrence (Freud, 1920; 1924).
[17] “I suggested earlier that one can always see any emotional performance as a traumatic symptom. Partly this is to say that a symptom is itself a genre of underperformativity, as it conveys and diffuses processes that cannot be tracked back causally through the formalism of a close reading, surface reading, distant reading or any preferred norm of encountering a surface as though it actually expresses all of the intensities it mediates in its aspiration to make something available for an encounter” (Berlant, 2015: 209).
[18] “Life in the ellipsis of politicized dissociation is not identical to giving up; it’s a condition of giving out that leads to feeling out, which is different than the heroics of assurance that accompanies most politically salient modalities of feeling otherwise” (Berlant, 2022: 145).
Henrike Kohpeiß is a philosopher from Berlin. Her research and teaching focuses on Critical Theory, black studies, Feminism and Affect Theory. She is a postdoctoral researcher at the CRC Affective Societies at Free University, Berlin. Her first book Bürgerliche Kälte – Affekt und koloniale Subjektivität (Campus, 2023) stages a theoretical encounter between Frankfurt School critical theory and black studies and is under contract for an English translation to be published in 2025 with divided publishing.
Email: henrike.kohpeiss@fu-berlin.de
This article is part of a special section on ‘Lauren Berlant and Media Theory’, edited by Carolyn Pedwell and Simon Dawes, introduced by Carolyn Pedwell, and featuring articles by Ben Anderson, Ali Azhar & Megan Boler, Lisa Blackman, Sarah Cefai, Angharad Closs Stephens, Chole Turner & Rebecca Coleman, Yasmin Gunaratnam, Chris Ingraham, Henrike Kohpeiß, Susanna Paasonen & Vilja Jaaksi & Anu Koivunen & Kaarina Nikunen & Karoliina Talvitie-Lamberg & Annamari Vänskä, and Greg Seigworth & Rebecca Coleman.
A key detail about Lauren Berlant and pronouns: Laurent’s estate provided a brief statement on this, which we quote here: “Lauren’s pronoun practice was mixed – knowingly, we trust. Faced with queries as to ‘which’ pronoun Lauren used and ‘which’ should now be used, the position of Lauren’s estate (Ian Horswill, executor; Laurie Shannon, literary executor) is that Lauren’s pronoun(s) can best be described as ‘she/they’. ‘She/they’ captures the actual scope of Lauren’s pronoun archive, and it honors Lauren’s signature commitment to multivalence and complexity. It also leaves thinkers free to adopt either pronoun, or both of them, as seems most fitting in their own writing about her/them”.
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