range of emotions linked to trauma—and when it comes to remediating the testimony their reactions may equally be to be afraid again, or to cry again, or rail again at the injustice they have witnessed. These may only be surface-level emotions, exhausted by the performance, but, still, they affect the kind of witnessing that is happening. This leads to what Carol Martin argues is the key problem with memory plays that “instead of offering [audiences] analysis or responsibility, [leave them] to sentimentally weep.”104 As Carole-Anne Upton also argues, staging trauma can lead theatre makers to opt for “a sympathetic portrayal of victims of injustice rather than an interrogation of [social] responsibilities.”105 Given the tendency for sympathy over criticism, the expected activity of the audience thus becomes about emotional expiation rather than political action—meaning that trauma theatre’s potential, as Fitzpatrick puts it, “is often limited [as] the desired transformation is actually interpersonal” not political.106 This form of personal transformation is a worthwhile dividend of the labor that spectators perform at the theatre, but it is a benefit that primarily profits the individual, not the collective, and the witnessing that occurs will primarily drive further consumption, rather than social change. Moreover, the assumption that affect always entails “pleasant” emotions of solidarity and other “affirmative feelings” stubbornly ignores the fact that affect in fact often involves less pleasant emotions—anxiety, frustration, competitiveness—and that while it can be used to mobilize positive forces for change, it can also be used to “collude and reproduce” negative social attitudes such as racism.107
The empathic response by an audience is often assumed to be a necessary context or prerequisite for witnessing, but the recent dominance of empathy not as a tool, but as a mode, of witnessing actually limits the range of audience engagement. Many of the case studies in this book are based on documentary sources, or performed using autoperformance—where the performer onstage is actually a firsthand witness. This allows me to discuss the connections between the performance and the world outside, and to argue that witnessing by both performer and audience member is capable of making a link between the aesthetic representation of injustice and actual injustice. But empathy can be a stumbling block. Though Rokem argues that the awareness of an actor mediating the character’s victimization enables both identificatory and critical responses, I would argue that the turn toward “the real,” combined with the “complete absorption” that characterizes empathy, make it difficult for audiences to avail of any critical distance in making judgements about the performances they see.108 This is why Kabosh Theatre Company in Belfast, though they base their work on documentary and verbatim research, always translate this into a fictional framework, in order to create critical space for both the original memory and the audience to interrogate that memory as a kind of public history (which is more available for critical discussion than someone’s personal memory).109 This is a tricky maneuver as fictional plots and characters, in losing the impact of “the real,” have to work differently in order to establish the authority of the witness text—so that audiences don’t simply dismiss what is being performed as fictional and therefore not applicable to life outside the theatre, or requiring witness. Of course, theatre productions—no matter how real—always go through multiple stages of mediation, so that audiences are always only seeing the outcome of firsthand witnessing, a witnessing text, and never the “real thing.” Nevertheless, the “live” dimension of theatre, in which audiences watch a real person on stage and not via a screen, can occlude the function of mediation, particularly in the case of testimonial theatre, as its reliance on verbatim material and autoperformance produces a kind of invisibly mediated firsthand witnessing. The pain being performed onstage hence has an unavoidable affective power—this really happened, and now it’s happening again, right in front of me. The emphasis on trauma and the real thus makes it easier for the producer to create impact, but harder for the audience to think about how they are being impacted, and to translate their spectatorship into acts of critical witnessing.
The Victim as the Perfect Witness and Affective Witnessing in the Marketplace
In this cultural moment, it is easy to see how victimhood and suffering have become the currency of so much popular culture, and a route to establishing the authority of the witnessing work of art in the memory marketplace. Indeed, Rothberg argues that trauma as a universal condition has become “a form of cultural capital that bestows moral privilege.”110 The victim thus becomes the perfect moral witness. This is a turn from the previous treatment of trauma, which silenced victims in a marketplace that privileged nostalgia on the one hand and progress on the other. Now we live in an “empire of trauma.”111 The shift in the status of the victim has led to the rise of the victim as a valuable commodity—as Peters puts it, “Not surprisingly, there has been something of a scramble to capture the prestige of the victim-witness.”112 Victim prestige is produced by a combination of their testimony as a novelty product in the market and the symbolic capital conferred by their firsthand presence and suffering.
The market dominance of sympathy and empathy can thus be read as both enabling and disabling witnessing. Lauren Berlant’s work on compassion is illuminating here, as she argues that calls to action that utilize these emotions depend on privilege: “In operation, compassion is a term denoting privilege: the sufferer is over there. You, the compassionate one, have a resource that would alleviate someone else’s suffering.”113 It is a generous impulse to want to alleviate another’s suffering, but the question then becomes—how? Berlant goes on, “When we want to rescue X, are we thinking of rescuing everyone like X, or is it a singular case that we see?”114 Further, as Rosanne Kennedy argues, the risk of compassion is that it may “displace efforts that could be more productively put into working for social justice.”115 These empathic dynamics thus make the outcomes of even citizen-consumer witnessing ambivalent.
Let me give an example: in Sanctuary, a verbatim production by Theatre of Witness (2013, Northern Ireland), several asylum seekers testified to an audience about their reasons for seeking asylum—including familial breakdown, death threats, and gang rape. At the end of the show, which was obviously highly emotive, postcards were distributed to the audience to write to the UK home secretary so that each of us could remediate the testimony we’d received, and call on the officials with hard power to grant asylum to these particular individuals. These postcards were a way for audiences to act in a meaningful way in response to what they had witnessed—to become witnesses themselves. It held the promise of political action, a way to balance the emotional reaction during the moment of the play. Direct political actions like these can be highly effective—yet the worry remained for me that as witnesses we were not making a decision based on the political facts, nor were we protesting the structural inequalities of the system, but merely making a plea for one person (X) based on our sympathetic response to her plight (but not all people like X). And in answering the call to sympathize, and then signing the postcard, were we also appropriating her story to enrich our own—in Puar’s terms, was cultural capital accruing to us, rather than to the “other”?116 And if we turn to Landsberg’s model of prosthetic memory, which gives us the feeling of memory as an extra “limb,” we need to ask—are we, as consumers, simply shopping for feel-good limbs?
At one point in Sanctuary, during the female asylum seeker’s testimony, she became unable to deliver her lines and another performer had to take over. The woman’s onstage silence provoked many people in the audience to cry—and I couldn’t help but think that this was not either fair to her (clearly she was still traumatized) or fair to the audience (in the wake of such an emotional performance, it is very difficult to say “I want to think about it before signing the postcard”). And this brings us back to agency—was the postcard signing an indication of being an active or a passive audience, was it an act of witnessing or not? And once the card had been signed and given to a volunteer, were we done? Was that, as Berlant puts it, “the apex of affective agency among strangers”?117
Like Berlant, Givoni questions the capability of witnessing to solve political problems, suspicious of how witnessing is currently marketed as “the most available solution for an
