be found. The rethinking of art in the modern era allows the work of art to be conceived of in a way in which play (Spiel) and illumination are brought together, and in which art not only imitates the surrounding world, but also begins to imitate itself as copies are reproduced. This viewpoint also has its effects when we think in more contemporary terms, about how and in what ways art can be a witness. Thus, what is art actually witnessing in these terms? Is it the play of, illumination of or mimetic experiences of the events and their witness?
For instance, Martin Seel remarks upon the importance of Benjamin’s idea in overcoming traditional philosophies of aesthetics (Seel 1993: 771–773). The idea to which Benjamin’s thought leads is that here, art is not conceived of as the presentation of something else, such as ‘reality’ or ‘truth’, but is understood as the presentation itself. Here, presentation is actually the idea that connects to the witness: art has (or might have) the capacity to be a witness in the very act of its presentation.
Wieviorka (2006: 101) notes, in connection with the television mini-series Holocaust, anxiety among survivors that they might be “dispossessed of [their own] history by someone outside the experience who claims to be telling it”. This someone could be, and often is, an artist. And Jill Bennett reminds us that the experience of violence – or, for that matter, the experience of anything else – “is fundamentally owned by someone” (Bennett 2005: 3; italics added). Artists’ attempts to speak on someone’s behalf and to represent someone’s experiences – someone marginalized, someone silenced, someone misrepresented in official discourse or mass culture, someone victimized, even someone killed11 – might amount to expropriation of such ownership and dispossession of survivors’ intimate stories and memories. If artists engage with someone else’s experience from the outside by, for example, showing up on location after the event, they[45] enter the “event-as-aftermath” (Roberts 2014: 107), thus contributing to its discursive reconstruction (see below). In other cases, artists are themselves survivors. Rather than engaging with someone else’s experience from the outside, they are themselves inside the experience they engage with. Like Edilberto Jiménez in Milton’s chapter and Chris Marker in Lindroos’s chapter, they are artists and they are eyewitnesses.
Representation necessarily transforms. It may give voice to people whose voice would otherwise remain inaudible. Indeed, the question of “who gets heard” is, “fundamentally, a political question” (Couldry 2000: 57). Furthermore, giving voice does not necessarily result in getting heard in any substantial sense. Often, however, it is the artist’s voice we hear, not the voice of the people the artist claims to represent. This problem can be observed not only in connection with the work of artists but also in connection with the work of scholars, treating victims’ testimonies as mere data with which to produce knowledge. Tensions occur 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
