How Has The Cultural Trauma Of The Holocaust Been Understood?

How has the cultural trauma of the Holocaust been understood and what are the sociological implications?

In 1945, the Holocaust was not the 'Holocaust' (Alexander 2012:24). It was not until the late 1960s- early 70s that the Holocaust began to feature prominently in US public life (Novick 1999:2). Alexander argues this is broadly because of the sea-change in US public life; the shift from a progressive to a tragic narrative of the mass killings (Alexander 2009:19). Novick argues that the institutional priorities of the US political elites and the evolutionary nature of Cold War geo-politics was the prime mover behind the emergence of the Holocaust into public life (Novick 1999:156). Alexander argues from the position of the strong program of cultural sociology; Novick is a historian with a primarily top-down, institutional approach to the Holocaust's narrativization. I argue that the 'hermeneutic seal' Alexander places around the autonomy of culture functions as a limitation visa ve theorising culture in relation to other social processes; that his determination not to allow culture to assume a subordinate role means he risks giving it undue prominence at the expense of multi-dimensional theory. Novick is guilty of almost the opposite charge: treating the power of elites as distinct from the object of their message. A sociological approach which takes the respective insights of each approach the cultural trauma of the Holocaust - rendered crudely, a fine-edged hermeneutical understanding of cultural events, and a deep-rooted appreciation of the intents and political aspects of the agents' in the field - provides a more thorough set of understandings of the event, and is indicative of a reflexive sociology, informed by structural hermeneutics, that does not dispense with agency or dimensions other than culture. A study of the cultural trauma of the Holocaust, as understood by Alexander, is a study of the narrative by which the 'Holocaust has become the central myth of our time, the epochal legend that forges the ultimate standard of good and evil' (Alexander 2009:174). It is of the journey from moral particular to moral universal; from the silence of the immediate post-war to a state of affairs where Holocaust Memorial day is a major world event, and dozens of universities have heads of Holocaust studies. Alexander claims that, under the progressive narrative that epitomized the post-war redemptive myth, the Nazis were coded sacred-evil: sufficiently alien that those who suffered at their hands were seen as having suffered by some external, unknowable force (Alexander 2009:11). The victory over the Nazis was held in this light to establish a new world order, one that demanded sanctification and the justification of sacrifice - 'post-war redemption depended on putting mass murder 'behind us,'' (Alexander 2009:19); this, and the attempts of Allied governments to not let stories of the death-camps spread during the war, meant that the American national post-war conversation was denuded of much discussion of the Shoah. Novick's explanation of the silence preceding the Holocaust's emergence into public life in the late 60s is bound up with the agenda of the US government. US Jewish organisations - such as the American Jewish Committee and the Anti-Defamation League - prioritized support for the US in the Cold War, not wishing to be seen as having other allegiances or identities other than those of US Citizens. He cites the editor of Commentary (a journal) to calling on Jews to adopt 'realistic attitude rather than a punitive and recriminatory one' towards Germany, reflecting the desire of the American Jewry to agree with prevailing politics norms (Novick 1999:98). Novick posits this is because of the role of Germany as a Cold-War ally of the US, and Israel's status being far from certain in this regard. There is a certain resonance between Alexander and Novick in this regard - Novick argues that 'Not only did the cold war make invocation of the Holocaust the 'wrong atrocity` for purposes of mobilizing the new consciousness, but the theorizing about totalitarianism itself served to marginalize the Holocaust' ; a tacit acknowledgement that the cultural coding of the Holocaust meant it did not suit elite needs in this context (Novick 1999:87). This sits alongside Alexander's claims that the Holocaust did not fit the post-war political order, though Novick does not address material equivalent to Alexander's insistence that civilians could not relate to Jewish traumatic experience coded as specifically Jewish, alien. Both theoreticians are operating at three distinct levels here: those of the national mood, the political elite, and the populace at large. Alexander addresses the first and third, and second by implication of the first, whereas Novick largely accords the second prioriticity over other levels. According to Glazer, who is largely supportive of Alexander's work on the social construction of the Holocaust, the Holocaust began to make a major impact on internal life of Jewish Americans in 1976 (Glazer 2009:150). Novick attributes the turning point to the Six-Day War of 1967 for generating concern amongst the American Jewish community that the Holocaust was being forgotten, and for destabilising the geo-political landscape of the Middle East such that Israel became a more certain ally in an area of vital interest, with Nasser's action threatening the identity and integrity of other affiliated actors in the region. This was cemented with the 1973 Yom Kippur war, which ran parallel to a rightward shift in the political preferences of the American Jewry. As Israel expanded into previously Palestinian territories, Novick writes that US policymakers began to use the symbol of the Holocaust in order to mobilize public opinion in support of their foreign policy agenda: 'Current conflicts were endowed with all the black-and-white moral clarity of the Holocaust, which came to be, for the Israeli cause, what Israel was said to be for the United States-a strategic asset' (Novick 1999:156). Alexander, too, sees the Yom Kippur war as integral to the changing weighting of the Holocaust. The weighting changed to become 'an evil that recalled a trauma of such enormity and horror that it had to be radically set apart from the world and all of its other traumatizing events' (Alexander 2009:29). The prior publication of Anne Frank's diaries, the Eichmann trial, and an increasing place of the Holocaust in the culture industries served to create and maintain this weighting and to ensure that the Shoah was occupying a prominent place in the cultural imaginary. In the critical response to Remembering the Holocaust, Manne summarizes the differences between Novick and Alexander thusly; 'if Novick is tone-deaf to the transformative power of the Holocaust story, Alexander is almost willfully blind to the interests the story serves' (Manne 2009:142). Whilst Alexander argues for the universalization of the Holocaust narrative, Novick argues for its Americanization (Alexander 2009: 86). Alexander cites the US loss of control over the narrative, it being a stick used to beat the US with for its non-intervention in Rwanda and its response to Darfur, as further indicative of this. Manne's problem with Novick is rooted in his dismissal of the chance we can learn any lessons from the Holocaust, as it is too extreme and is not presented in terms that mean we identify with victimizers, as opposed to victims. This misses the mark; in the language of cultural sociology, Novick is making judgment about the emptiness of the signifiers; I go on to argue, through a criticism of Novick, that it is a polysemic rather than empty signifier. My central problem with Novick's approach is his implication that the cultural trauma of the Holocaust is almost infinitely malleable in the hands of elites, in an account that risks stripping the narrative of a cultural logic. Novick argues that 'individuals from every point on the political compass can find the lessons they wish in the Holocaust; it has become a moral and ideological Rorschach test', and further, that it has become a moral reference point where there is such an ideological and ethical convergence that the 'banal consensus' tells us nothing at all (Novick 1999:12,13). The social constructivist position that I share with Novick and Alexander, does not have to equate the constructed nature of meaning with a perspective that casts it as infinitely malleable: Novick implies the Holocaust is an empty symbol rather than one which has its own weight and signifiers in social contexts. This contrasts with Alexander's treatment which pays especial treatment to the way in which the interpretation of codes shapes understandings, and consequently, use. This is especially apparent in the Israeli case; whereas Novick characterises the symbol of the Holocaust as being captured by Jewish elites, Alexander uses the Yom Kippur war, and the 1982 Lebanon war to examine trauma reconstruction. This trauma reconstruction entails the post-Zionist period - the 'myth of heroism' had been devalued in such a way as to allow empathetic expansion to Palestinians (Alexander 2009:183). Alexander writes of the expansion of solidarity following the non-violent Intifada of 1987, a post-Zionism that was cut short by the assassination of Israeli Prime Minister YitzhakRabin in 1995 (Alexander 2009:184). In Alexander's hands, this is not simply elite-led response to the perception of threat; it is the socially constituted logic of symbolic elements which affect identification and perceptions of threat on a broader social scale, which affects elites at the point at which there society's critical capacity engages with them. Whereas military frustrations deglamourized the military struggle, and a critical history emerged that placed Israelis as complicit in the expulsion of Palestinians, allowing empathetic identification with them in as victims of oppression. Rabin's assassination and the subsequent rise of Likud cut this short - and, I would add, Hamas suicide attacks were significant during Likud's election campaign, serving to reinscribe the status of Palestinians as physical threats to the state of Israel. This symbolic reinscri ption, the weighting of Palestinians as (resuming the status of) threats to national integrity or to the symbolic collective. Alexander draws on the most striking redeployment of the symbol of the Holocaust to espouse a right-wing Israeli view-point as of complete identification with Holocaust victims, in an address a Likud spokesperson gave on Holocaust memorial day: "We shouldn't suppose that we differ from our grandfather and grandparents who went to the gas chambers. What separates us from them is not that we are some sort of new Jew." What has changed is its asymmetry; "the main difference is external; we have a state, a flag, and army" (Alexander 2009: 185). Elsewhere Alexander claims that the Holocaust has become a universal moral symbol, whilst at the same time acknowledging the individual divisions and particularism it can be harnessed in support of. This is a point that eludes Novick's treatment of the Holocaust as an empty signifier: I claim that the universality of the symbol does not undercut its polysemy, or that in its supreme abstraction it can be called upon by diverse interests. But it is these diverse interests that Alexander fails to provide an adequate account of. While he provides an account of the 'patterned relationships' of cultural texts, his wish to reconstruct the 'cultural text' as 'pure form' to first have 'created the analytically autonomous culture object' serves as a barrier to Alexander perceiving of the Holocaust narrative as being deployed by various elites with various agendas. In instances when he touches upon this issue, as in the Likud example above, he is wont to emphasise the role of the symbol separate from that of the actor, in a way that attributes it a degree of autonomy from the actor's agency. The hermeneutic sealing of the cultural provides a barrier for considering the conscious use of such symbols rather than the weighting and coding of them. A multi-dimensional or integrated sociology focuses on the relationality of the both the actors and the cultural; Alexander's call to move from analysis of 'real' 'social structures' need not be accompanied by a lack of concern about the position of different agents in the field, their strategies and intents. Alexander pays insufficient focus to the actor, in a manner converse to Novick's inattention to the autonomy of culture - Novick lacks an account of why different symbolic uses function at different time, and the cultural weighting of narratives. On the theoretical level this implies a need for greater reflexivity about the inter-relationship between culture and other domains of action for the strong program - that the cultural dimension should not preclude an appreciation of the inter-related field of the political. I have juxtaposed the work of Novick and of Alexander to illume my central concern with each of their texts; the role of the actor and the role of the signifier. In doing so, I have explored the reasons for the emergence into American public life of the Holocaust in the late 60s, and then . I explored Alexander's claims about the universality and particularity of the Holocaust symbol in the Israeli case, claiming that universality of symbol does not run counter to particularist uses. I argue that the Holocaust symbol is polysemic rather than empty, and that sociology must integrate a concern with cultural autonomy with an interest on the users and creators of culture. Individuals are not the medium of culture, nor is culture the medium of individuals ; a multi-dimensional sociology appreciates their inter-relatedness.

Bibliography:

Alexander, The Strong Program in Cultural Sociology Alexander, Trauma: A Social Theory (Polity, 2012, Introduction) Alexander (ed.), Remembering the Holocaust: A Debate (Oxford: 2009, Critical commentaries and my response) Bauman Modernity and the Holocaust (Polity, 1999) Novick, The Holocaust in American Life (Houghton Mifflin 1999)