in Berlin, France, and London, illustrating the market impact of, and demand for, this kind of work.4
To read single performances like Banciu’s and, more generally, to position witness theatre within a marketplace framework allows us as critics not only to understand the ways that witnesses create new narrations of the past, but also to spotlight how the immaterial labor of performing past experience creates and re-creates mnemonic capital. Focusing on the theatrical production of witnesses (both on and off stage), this book argues that painful memory is a commodity in a transactional exchange. This transaction has economic dimensions to it (e.g., institutional and commercial funding of theatre), making the value of pain traceable in the real economy. But witnessing is about producing more than economic value, and there are other forms of capital that require analysis—my argument in the chapters that follow thus engages with the idea of painful memory as a symbolic commodity. By expressing painful experience in witness plays, onstage witnesses gain status in the overlapping cultural, social, and political marketplaces. By producing testimonial work, companies and theatres not only create platforms to enable these witnesses, but also add to their own cultural status (as well as, potentially, their own commercial success given the expanding market for pain). In turn, in attending witness theatre, audiences can confirm themselves as good spectators (and perhaps good citizens) for their own exercise of labor in witnessing the performance of painful memory. These are the infrastructures, commodity chains, and transactional exchanges that lie, so often invisibly, behind every performance of painful memory.
Witnessing: Tell Them That You Saw Us
We get bored easily these days it would seem. Our phones are never off, and rarely out of sight. Our to-do lists are long and varied. The demands on our time and attention are never ending. But in the theatre we leave that behind. It’s not just that theatre provides a break from modern life, it’s that going to the theatre involves a contract in which audiences pledge their attention. This attentiveness flows both from and onto the stage. The person on the stage pays attention to the audience, performing for that audience, and in return the audience pays attention to the performer(s). This may seem too obvious to be worth spelling out here—but, here’s the thing, if we notice that attention is the silver thread binding performer and audience to each other, then the next step is to think about what that attention produces. The performer onstage is always keen to tell their story (despite the challenges this may involve for them). In narrating their memories, the onstage person asserts the importance of their voice, of their identity as a witness. But it is the audience who grants the witness the space and time to perform, who frame their testimony as worthwhile, and who establish their authenticity and authority through their acts of attentive listening. Without the audience, nothing would be produced because there would be no transaction of labor or capital.
In theatre, there are, broadly, two types of witness—those onstage and those in the auditorium. We can better understand the relationship between types of witness, and between memory and witnessing if we look at another play, Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett. In Act 1, Vladimir and Estragon wait for Godot to arrive and impart some information, or meaning, which they are lacking. They wait to be witnesses and to be witnessed. But this desire is constantly frustrated as Godot does not arrive, and those who do—Pozzo and Lucky—do not bring them any closer to either enlightenment or salvation. At the end of the first act, a Boy appears to tell them that Godot will come tomorrow. The Boy then asks if Vladimir has a message for Godot:
Boy: What am I to say to Mr Godot, sir?
Vladimir: Tell him . . . [He hesitates] . . . tell him you saw us. [Pause.] You did see us, didn’t you?
Boy: Yes sir.5
But the following day—Act 2—Godot is again a no-show, and again a Boy comes to tell the pair to wait again tomorrow. The second Boy (played by the same actor) claims not to know Vladimir and Estragon, and says he is the other Boy’s brother. Again the Boy asks for a message for Godot:
Boy: What am I to tell Mr Godot, sir?
Vladimir: Tell him . . . [He hesitates] . . . tell him you saw me and that . . . [He hesitates] . . . that you saw me. [Pause. Vladimir advances, the Boy recoils. Vladimir halts, the Boy halts. With sudden violence.] You’re sure you saw me, you won’t come and tell me tomorrow that you never saw me!6
Throughout Waiting for Godot the characters strive to be witnessed, in an enactment of Bishop Berkeley’s maxim that “to be is to be perceived.”7 Self-perception does not count here, not least because Vladimir and Estragon have no confidence in their own powers of witnessing (they doubt what day it is, what place it is, what has happened). Instead, they require an external witness to validate them. In the second act, Beckett pushes this further—it is not enough for the Boy to see them and to relay that message to Godot, he must remember having seen them. The link between witnessing and memory thus illustrates that witnessing is an ongoing and active task, where repetition and remediation are as important as the first encounter in the creation of meaning. The Boy’s actions are analogous to the audience’s—where the audience is asked not only to spectate (to see), but to transform that act of spectating into witnessing, which is understood as an active role that continues after the act of seeing (remembering). The real meaning of a play, then, is the agglomeration of acts of witnessing: that which happens on the stage, projected outward to the audience; and that which happens internally as the audience sees, listens to, and processes the performance; and finally that which happens as the audience relates their experience and their insights in the future, whether that is for themselves, or to others who have not seen the show. The compulsion to tell becomes the compulsion to retell. In simple terms, this is how the past is witnessed; in a more complicated sense it is also how future memory banks are formed. As Astrid Erll and Ann Rigney assert, cultural memory “is as much a matter of acting out a relationship to the past from a particular point in the present as it is a matter of preserving and retrieving.”8 Through performance a relationship is built that links past and present—and that, through repetition, projects into the future.
Before I expand on the processes of witnessing, it is important to understand the context in which these performances happen. Witnessing—being a witness and being witnessed—is both a necessity and a luxury. The violence of Vladimir’s insistence that he and Estragon be seen and remembered emerges from vulnerability; their precarity means that they struggle to be witnessed and increases the stakes to the extent that a young Boy can become the arbiter of their identity. That a child is elevated above two grown men indicates how witnessing is always performed within social and cultural power structures, in which some witnesses have power and some witnesses have little to none. This exemplifies Anna Reading’s contention that in the capitalist marketplace different agents have “uneven memory capital.”9
How can we read these different agents in this context? How can we interpret performances of witnessing in relation to both the top-down organization of memory culture, and the bottom-up drive for expression and understanding? What relationship is there between the scarce resource of witnessing-attention, and the current “memory boom”? What role do memory gatekeepers play, and what agency do spectators really have? The marketplace is a powerful framework for considering these questions.
THE MEMORY MARKETPLACE
The memory marketplace as both a real market and a metaphoric space of exchange helps us to consider how power and memory intersect: who owns memory, how it is traded, and how it is consumed. The marketplace framework enables us to think in broader terms of memory not just as a performance on both individual and collective levels, but as a product or commodity. Moreover, to follow Pierre Bourdieu, this book suggests that we think of the memory marketplace beyond financial and monetary terms, instead considering the marketplace as a symbolic space where values are produced and consumed. This book thus
