even in those cases where no open conflict can be observed between individual memories and personal truths on the one hand and academic discourse and knowledge production on the other (Wieviorka 2006: 128–132).
Artists may speak on behalf of others – others who cannot themselves speak or who do not have access to channels of communication. However, artists may also try to give voice to people who would prefer not to speak, perhaps because they want to avoid “being trapped in an image in which one does not quite recognize oneself” (ibid.: 140) and to which one does not want to be reduced – the image of a witness, a victim, a survivor, a ‘migrant mother’ (see above). In any case, regardless of Photovoice and many other participatory and photo elicitation projects (Harper 2012: 155–206; Delgado 2015), ours are still “societies and cultures where individuals are spoken for, much more than they speak in their own name – and they are not necessarily spoken for accurately” (Couldry 2000: 58).
However, the issue is not primarily one of accurateness. Indeed, as Bennett explains, it is not at all a question of “faithful translation of testimony” but rather a question of art “exploiting] its own unique capacities to contribute actively” to what she calls “a politics of testimony” (Bennett 2005: 3). It is art’s unique capacities to serve as a political witness that this book is interested in exploring.
[46]The Politics of Witnessing
In the context of being an eyewitness, Susan Sontag has extensively reflected on the ways in which the camera is a part of witnessing. In particular, she notes, photography has captured the moments that remain parts of our memories of the vanished past and the departed: keeping company with death (Sontag 2003: 24). Quoting Virginia Woolf’s Three Guineas (1938), Sontag notices that photographs are not arguments; rather, they are “a crude statement of fact addressed to the eye” (ibid.: 26). (The facticity of photographic statements has, however, been controversially discussed in photographic discourses, establishing that a photographic representation is never identical with the ‘fact’ it seems to represent.) The brain registers as memory the connection between the photograph and a certain kind of testimony experienced through the eye and in the human nervous system. The memory also becomes a moment that connects present and past times. Thus, the photograph as a ‘witness’ is also a temporal witness.
Sontag’s discussions of Holocaust photography are well-known and often referred to. However, she also pays attention to war photography, including differences between the eras that are being documented. Sontag claims that we are living “in a world saturated, no, hyper-saturated with images” (ibid.: 105), but that not all wars are documented equally; for instance, the long civil war in Sudan, the Iraqi campaigns against the Kurds or the Russian invasion of Chechnya are relatively under-photographed (ibid.: 37). Similarly, Rancière (2009: 96) has directed our attention to processes of selection in connection with the publication of images of violent conflict and human suffering indicating that, while we may be over-exposed to images of some conflicts, other conflicts may very well be invisible to the public. This assessment, in tandem with Sontag’s claim (2003: 89) that people “remember only the photographs”, raises the question of how to witness conflicts that cannot be seen. In this volume, several contributors pay attention to forms of artistic witnessing other than narrowly visual ones (poetry, literature, dance, theatre and performance).
The dilemma is that although it is problematic to trust media images and war photography as witnesses of certain conflicts and political events, the lack of images documenting a particular conflict affects our understanding of the significance of that conflict and the human suffering it engenders. It also facilitates the politicization of images, as discussed by Bruno Lefort in chapter 7. Lefort explores the “politics of fear” in a 2013 short film that appeared on the Internet to commemorate the 2006 looting of the Danish Embassy in Achrafiyeh, the heartland of Christian Beirut, Lebanon, following the publication of the Prophet cartoons in a Danish newspaper. The video plays on[47] various temporalities – dis-articulating events to re-articulate them in a predefined chain of meaning – so as to stage a memory of communal violence and fear.
Lefort discusses how this representation is enunciated around the tropes of territorial invasion and struggle for survival, embodied by the continual evocation of Martyrs (shuhadâ’) whose meaning is to testify (shahada) the validity of the experience of intergroup violence conveyed in the film. Further, he argues that the film calls upon a political unconscious to activate an affectivity of communion addressed to the Lebanese Christians. Indeed, the images work as witnesses of their past suffering, of the memory of their internal strife, and of their precarious common fate in a region politically dominated by Islam. Conceivably labelled as political propaganda, this representation ultimately sustains a present day actualization of politics as factionalism: it witnesses the composition and mediation of an alleged resilient existential confrontation between everlasting identities.
Video (from the Latin videre, to see) combines both meanings of being a witness – testifying and seeing (see below) – and invites a double act of witnessing: video, as a “social act […] asks that we bear witness to its act of witness” (Saltzman 2006: 30). Photography is said to be uniquely qualified among the visual arts to contribute “to the pathetic understanding of an other” (Thompson 2013: 78). “Pathetic” here refers to pathema – “an experience passively received: acquiescence to what is seen” (ibid.: 14) – but is the experience of looking at a photograph entirely a passive one? Film and photography are capable of visualizing “the commonalities of being human” (MacDougall 1998: 246). By so doing, they may interrupt stereotypical constructions of ‘us’ and ‘them’ evoked in processes of witnessing and help viewers empathetically but partially identify with the people and the conditions depicted in film and photography – ‘empathetically’ because “feeling for another … entails an encounter with something irreducible and different, often inaccessible” (Bennett 2005: 10) and ‘partially’ because one’s own mediated perception of an other’s experience is necessarily different from the other’s personal experience and should not be identified with it. In photographer Diane Arbus’s laconic words (quoted in Dyer 2005: 47): “somebody else’s tragedy is not the same as your own”. You can feel for an other but you can neither be this other nor feel what the other feels. Art can evoke this feeling for.
Poetry “is the most explicit engagement with the very essence of who we are and what we do: language” (Bleiker 2009: 4). Poetry, thus, can be seen not only as a witness of certain events but also, as Tommi Kotonen shows in his contribution, as a witness to the language with which these events get constructed. In chapter 8, Kotonen analyses different linguistic tools and theories on language and communication that Charles Bernstein brings to the play when trying to register and deconstruct US-American politics and[48] mythology after 9/11. Indeed, the question of language – “where does one testify from, and what does one testify to?” (Wieviorka 2006: 32) – is as crucial in the context of political witnessing as is the question of what language one uses when testifying. American poet Charles Bernstein was coming back from LaGuardia airport on September 11, 2001. He was one of the millions who witnessed the attacks on the World Trade Center. During and after that day he wrote several poems where he reflected on the mood in Manhattan, and pondered hate and differing personal and political reactions. As one of the so-called language poets, Bernstein has for his entire career been opposing the presence of the lyric, first-person voice in poetry. When 9/11 unfolds in front of his very eyes, he becomes an unwilling “witness to the unspeakable” (Kotonen, in this volume), to events which also affect his poetry. In his first poems after the attack a witnessing poetical ‘I’ providing personal knowledge is present. The rest of the collection can be seen as a commentary to this ‘I’ and his reflections; a commentary that refuses to impose a singular ‘I’ as a connecting element but instead dwells on insecurities and ambivalences, and tries to talk with no ‘voice’. From the first reactions, and from their prosaic poetry to more distanced, formalistic pieces, Bernstein deciphered the events and their politics and, in the end, the reader, too, becomes one of the witnesses.
The concept of being a witness, traditionally connected with “public recognition of atrocities” (Kaplan 2005: 122), is increasingly decoupled from tragic events and