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 applied to the everyday: people witness a football match rather than watching or attending it. This application is in accordance with another dictionary entry defining witness, in “loose writing”, as “a synonym of ‘see’.”12 A certain trivialization of our understanding of being a witness may follow. However, this tendency can be valued positively as an indicator of the increasing appreciation in public and academic discourse of the everyday lives and everyday experiences of ordinary people (Sheringham 2006). These experiences, while often decoupled from tragic and traumatic events, are important to people’s sense of place and identity. The “temporality of the everyday” can be, and has been, represented in artistic work, including work by such photographers as Robert Capa, which is often reduced to representations of “the everyday overturned” (Dell 2010: 46).
An ‘everyday’ witnessing might also happen in unexpected spaces. In her chapter, Suvi Alt reflects the role of abandoned places that have received increasingly popular and academic interest during the past decade (chapter 9). Drawing on research that examines the ways in which derelict spaces enable contestation of capitalism and power, Alt combines an auto-ethnographic account of visits to several abandoned sites with a theoretical elaboration of[49] Giorgio Agamben’s concepts of ‘witnessing’ and ‘play’. In discussing ‘urban exploration’ as a practice of bearing witness to and playing with abandoned places, she deploys a notion of onto-poetics as a site of transformation connecting poetics, life and the political. Onto-poetics draws on a Heideggerian conception of art, which does not prioritise a preference for the aesthetic, but refers to the happening of being, and which is here understood as opening up a new space for politics. In this chapter, a twofold political argumentation is searched for. First, Alt argues that urban exploration is a practice of witnessing the past in the present, yet not in the form of recounting an event as a result of having been present as a spectator, but in the form of listening to absence through the materiality of the site. The second argument is that urban exploration is a free and common use of the order of places and identities: a playing with and using what used to be sacred. The onto-poetics of abandoned places lies in the ruins’ potential to effect change in the way in which one conceives of life as well as one’s environment beyond the ruin.
Being a witness is also disconnected from a given person who is a witness. Time periods appear as witnesses: the 1970s and early 1980s, for example, are said to have “witnessed an extraordinary craze for ethnological ‘life stories’” (Wieviorka 2006: 97). Material objects such as photographs can also be witnesses. Ariella Azoulay, for example, notes that it is not a person who is doing the witnessing but a photograph: pictures “witness the moment of the outbreak of disaster” (Azoulay 2014: 129). Paul Lowe (2014: 213) refers to photographs as “social agents … bearing witness to past events”. He explores “the possibility that the act of bearing witness to past atrocities can be located in the photograph itself, rather than in the photographer”. Here, the photograph appears as “secondary witnessing”, an “independent artefact in and of itself as well as serving as the visual testimony of the photographer” (ibid.). Both, then, the photographer and her photograph are witnesses, inextricably linked with one another but simultaneously separate from one another, both serving as social agents. Monuments, quintessential vehicles through which and with which people collectively remember, can be witnesses, too, as Lisa Saltzman (2006: 25–47) shows in her discussion of Krzysztof Wodiczko’s work.
The concept of witnessing is also separated from presence on location when something happens. This is probably the biggest step away from the traditional understanding of being a witness, requiring, in one form or another, presence: contemporaneity. Photography, Sean O’Hagan (2015) writes in a review of a Jeff Wall exhibition, is seemingly “an act of instant witnessing”. Wall’s work, however, remakes something from memory – something that lingers in the photographer. Wall does not photograph something instantaneously but recreates it later from memory, insisting on “imaginative freedom” (Wall) as being “crucial to the making of art” (O’Hagan 2015). Recreating from memory amounts to the creation of something new that is[50] linked with, but simultaneously decoupled from, the witnessed event, as memories invariably change over time. Wall’s work, then, testifies to the artist’s memory at a given point in time of a given event, not to the particular event.
Aftermath, post-factum and secondary witnessing all call into question the formerly defining identification of (eye-)witnessing with being personally on location when something, usually something tragic or unexpected, happens. Artists often arrive on location only after an event; they – and their works of art – nevertheless witness not only the aftermath of this event but also the original event. They witness – and reconstruct – “the event-as-aftermath” (Roberts 2014: 107). Recipients of these artworks also become witnesses, distant witnesses, remote in space and time, not only of the work of art and that which it represents – the aftermath – but also of the original event referenced in the artwork. Thus, testimony can be transferred from one person to another, transforming, for example, the beholder of an image or the observer of a theatre play that witnesses the aftermath of an event into a witness of the original event.
Combining the above observations with Butler and Bleiker’s focus on the body, Susanna Hast’s chapter elaborates on war experience: on the ways
