Downstream: Trauma Farming and the Politics of Public Suffering w/ Catherine Liu

SPEAKER_1 (0:00)

It's time to talk about China. I'm Richard Haynes, and I'm the host of Do Your Own Research, a show from Novara Media. In the first series, I tried to make a map of everything in the world that had ever mattered and ever would. And did I succeed? Yeah, why not? This time, I'm tightening my focus. The second series is all about China, the most interesting place in the world. And particularly for the left, it's the site of all manner of hopes and fears for the 21st century. Are those hopes legitimate? I'm going to find out.

I'll be covering everything I can. From China's endlessly dramatic and often catastrophic history, like the time in the 1840s, that a man declared himself to be the younger brother of Jesus Christ, and triggered a rebellion that ended up with anywhere between 20 and 70 million people dead. I'll be gawping, like so many have, at its dazzling modern skylines, and astonishing innovations in high-speed trains, drone shows, and online shopping. I'll be diving into its internet culture, by turns funny, acerbic, and despairing, and asking whether or not we will one day wake up and all somehow be Chinese. Because if we're really going to be China-maxing, pitching our hopes to what is likely to be the defining superpower of the 21st century, we should know what it is.

So watch or listen to Do Your Own Research with me, Richard Hames, on Novara Media's YouTube channel, or right here in this podcast feed. And the maps that I'm making, which will, yes, eventually depict everything that has ever mattered, are available anytime at novaramedia.com/d-y-o-r.

That's do your own research.

Ash Sarkar (2:01)

Bye everybody. God, some of you have really never been to a panto in your entire fucking lives.

SPEAKER_1 (2:15)

There you go.

Ash Sarkar (2:17)

Now, I've done my time I'm. getting in trouble for criticizing liberal identity politics. Which is why I'm so excited to introduce our next guest, Catherine Liu. Yeah.

A professor of film and media studies and comparative literature, Catherine Liu has been an unrelenting critic of the bourgeois stranglehold on social possibility. From her blistering critique of the professional managerial class Virtue Hoarders to her latest book Traumatized, The New Politics of Public Suffering. Traumatized poses a deliberately uncomfortable question. What happens when suffering is elevated to the status of an identity? What kind of politics emerges when we take pre-packaged, ready-made trauma scripts and turn them into sources of authority and legitimacy?

This book isn't, as some might caricature it, a sneery broadside against the snowflake generation. It's about how our understanding of psychological harm has always been bound up with ruling class ideology, and that today's trauma culture has been shaped by psychiatry, neoliberalism, social media's attention economy, and the sense that it's all but impossible to actually break with capitalism. It's a provocative thesis, if our Instagram page is anything to go by, it's one that people certainly have strong feelings about. So tonight we're going to talk about trauma, victimhood, class, and then we're all going to have a drink at the bar afterwards. So please join me in welcoming to the stage Catherine Liu.

I have never seen such a strut on to this stage before.

Catherine Liu (4:34)

Sorry, I can't help it. I'm just such a ham. It's terrible.

Ash Sarkar (4:39)

So when we first announced that we were doing this event with you, it's fair to say that there was some controversy. There were some comments on our Instagram page, people saying that they felt that the framing of the event in your book was contemptuous of people who had PTSD diagnoses, CPTSD diagnoses.

And I wonder what you made of that, but that was sort of your red carpet onto downstream IRL.

Catherine Liu (5:08)

It wasn't unexpected. And it is painful for me to see people reacting immediately without having read the book without understanding what my point was about it. And one of the things that I think that is lost when people see us discussing trauma culture is that we're not actually talking about the true traumatic experiences that people suffer. We're talking about its commodification, its instrumentalization and its weaponization. And I felt that I had to write the book because we've all been in left liberal spaces where there's so much promise in organizations and someone uses their lived experience, their hyper subjective, affectual, you know, emotionality to sidetrack or to blackmail the organization from achieving its goals. So there was that one thing. Then there was the other question that I've been working on for a long time, which is this idea that trauma is a very, very middle class category. And this is because the term was originally used by businessmen who rode the railways between London, Liverpool and Manchester, Birmingham in the early days of the railroad, when they would be in railway accidents and collisions without having physical ailments.