(creating what’s known as market “surplus value”).49
The Active Consumer and the Question of Power
The question of audience power is a knotty one. Does, for example, the idea of the citizen consumer/audience-witness mean the consumer is a powerful actor in the marketplace? Arjun Appadurai argues not: “merchandising is so subtle that the consumer is consistently helped to believe that he or she is an actor, where in fact he or she is at best a chooser.”50 Appadurai locates the “real seat of agency” and power with the producer and other actors within the market who decide what to produce, how to market it, and so on, all of which are behind-the-scenes actions that contribute to the illusion of consumer agency.51 I have a mixed reaction to the view of consumers as “choosers.” On the one hand, consumers do not have input into what cultural work is promoted to them, and how—indeed the rise of authenticity as a marketing tool alone should make us suspicious of how the outcome consumers desire (contact with “the real”) is actually not the outcome, but the medium of the real message (the world is a consumer playground). As I discuss throughout the book, consumer agency in choosing which theatres to visit, and which shows to patronize, should not be mistaken for real social or political action or activism. As Baudrillard scathingly puts it, when audiences consume suffering all too often what happens is that “they swap their distress with the misery of the poor, both of them sustaining each other.”52 This is not a relationship productive of social good, but of social exploitation. On the other hand, at the very least, audiences do exercise choice. I am biased here, I realize—as a critic and teacher, I am a major consumer of theatre and so, for the sake of retaining passion in what I do, I have to believe that audiences are not powerless: I believe we can be active witnesses.
Exercising consumer power is not restricted to choosing which show to buy a ticket for and thus influencing the real economy of the cultural memory marketplace. Consuming, or even witnessing, a show does not mean being uncritical about it. On the contrary, critical witnesses add surplus value and further capital to a production by interpreting and responding to what they see and hear. Jacques Rancière argues against the view that the spectator is passive because they are “immobile” in their seat—instead recognizing the “activity peculiar to the spectator. Every spectator is already an actor in her story.”53 The audience as not just witness, but also actor, takes the idea of the active spectator further. This formulation understands that the audience-witness always interprets what they are seeing and hearing via their own story, their own subjectivity, their own position in the marketplace. John Durham Peters interprets the spectators’ subjectivity as being vital to their act of witnessing, because for Peters it is only in retelling or reproducing the original act of witness that the spectator themselves witnesses: “an active witness must first have been a passive one.”54 This view chimes with Stuart Hall’s reception theory of media, in which audiences not only receive but actively construct identities in relation to media; Jukka Törrönen terms this the “mutual modelling” of media and audiences.55 This audience-forward reading of reception does not equate to the power to set the agenda, it is a reactive, “soft” power; yet in the moment of the performance, and in its aftermath, it is nevertheless a performance of consumer agency. It is thus not as simple as labeling some consumers active and others passive—with power or without power—but instead identifying the multiple ways in which audiences perform different roles, consecutively and concurrently, in the marketplace.
Reflecting on consumers as agentic, and the performance of witnessing as an active role, leads us to acknowledging that audiences also carry out labor: the work of watching, listening, processing, and reacting to what is being performed. The labor entailed in spectating a show, often most obvious in experimental or avant-garde theatre, means that the audience are (to different degrees) cocreators of the mnemonic capital that the show produces. The labor of the audience—what Harvie calls “prosumerism”56—demonstrates how vital the consumer is, not just to the marketplace, but to the production of meaning and thus capital; without the audience, the performance is not only unseen, but unproductive.
Audience agency also means that spectators may choose not to witness. One reason for this choice is that they may not invest their belief or trust in the testimony being performed. Paul Ricoeur points to the role of the audience in determining which testimony is seen as trustworthy,57 while Elizabeth Jelin points out that audiences only accord authority to certain witnesses.58 While gatekeepers can influence how an audience encounters a firsthand witness, it is ultimately up to the audience how well the show does in the marketplace.
When Jay Winter asks “Who has the right to speak of the violent past?”59 he seems to address the ethical issue of rights (who grants this right, who guarantees it?). But he is also raising, of course, a series of questions about the marketplace: is there a market for stories of “the violent past,” which firsthand witnesses and gatekeepers have the capital to command consumer investment in those stories, and how does consumer investment create the necessary memory capital to institutionalize those stories in remembrance culture? The agency of both the audience-consumer and the audience-witness is therefore not only necessary to the operation of the market, but to who gets remembered and who forgotten.
From Consumers to Witnesses?
The debate around the relative activity and passivity of audiences emerges from the question of what kinds of witnessing audiences perform. As Lisa Fitzpatrick argues, the “increasing emphasis on trauma and traumatic experience in arts practice” has led to an equal rise in the “use of the term ‘witness’ in place of spectator.”60 No longer do we ask audiences to simply watch or listen, now the expectation is that audiences will provide a much larger service—that of witnessing, a term and identity that, as Fitzpatrick points out, emerges from the relatively new dominance of trauma in the arts. We are in an era of witnessing others’ pain.
Dori Laub defines witnessing as having three levels: from the firsthand witness of subjective experience, to secondhand witnesses to others’ subjective experience, to thirdhand witnesses who observe the testifying process.61 Laub argues for the importance of testifying and witnessing in the wake of painful experience, and the importance of being an “authentic witness” by recognizing the truth of the experience being testified to. Without all three levels of witnessing functioning authentically, Laub argues, there is a “collapse of witnessing” whereby neither the experience nor its subjective pain are recognized.62 Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski, likewise, view witnessing as a complex field in which there are three zones: (1) the eyewitness, (2) the mediator, and (3) the audience.63 This tripartite schema demonstrates that successful witnessing involves the event being seen by one person, who then testifies about their experience to a second person (who did not experience the event), and that second person then choosing how to mediate the testimony for the third form of witness, the audience. This is a complex performance chain, akin to the making of theatre in fact, as the information about the event must go through two stages in order to be communicated to the audience. It is also a perpetuating performance, in which the audience further mediates the testimony to another person, creating new audiences in turn (surplus value). Laub adds an additional requirement to the definition of witnessing: positing the witness as someone who can step outside the totalizing and dehumanizing frame of reference in which the event takes place.64 The witness must therefore not only be able to identify what is happening within the frame, but also, in stepping outside it, be able to achieve a greater understanding and perspective on the suffering caused by the event. Acknowledging these different levels to, and articulations of, witnessing is important to understanding how these performances function—and also to identifying how they may become blocked if one or more of the levels does not flow smoothly or clearly. As Peters argues, “witnessing is an intricately tangled practice.”65 Naming the audience as “witnesses” then demands not only that they be active, but that they pursue a particular agenda in how they spectate and what their response will be.
Aleida Assman’s definition of the “moral witness”
