I want my work to become part of our visual history, to enter our collective memory and our collective conscience. I hope it will serve to remind us that history’s deepest tragedies concern not the great protagonists who set events in motion but the countless ordinary people who are caught up in those events and torn apart by their remorseless fury. I have been a witness, and these pictures are my testimony. The events I have recorded should not be forgotten and must not be repeated.1
It is very common for photojournalists to refer to themselves as witnesses to historical events and their work as a form of testimony. James Nachtwey’s account of his work is typical of this approach. In the quote above, he conveys the common sense understanding of the link between photography and witnessing: the photographer is present at a significant event and he or she records that event in real time usually for distribution via high circulation publications such as newspapers and magazines and their online equivalents. When encountered in the mass media under the auspices of a respected media outlet, the photographs are treated primarily as information about the world; the scepticism about the veracity of the digital image or the mediating role of the camera is not usually at play. In this everyday encounter, photographs simply illustrate or document current events. In other words, they contribute to the news. The very word ‘news’, as the strange plural form of ‘new’, underscores the demand that such imagery is novel, current and immediate.
This common sense understanding of witnessing has been profoundly complicated by the use of this same term to describe a variety of contemporary art practices that do not depend on the artist being present at the ‘decisive moment’, to invoke photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson’s famous adage.2 The range of practices that has been assembled under the rubric of witnessing is quite astonishing: from the staged photographs of Carrie Mae Weems, to the fictional archives by The Atlas Group, and encompassing Colombian sculptor Doris Salcedo as well as conceptualist Felix Gonzalez-Torres and the performances of James Luna, to name just a small sample.3 Some of these artists attest to their ongoing experience of oppression rather than a singular event (Luna, Weems, Gonzalez-Torres); others confront wars in their countries of origin in unconventional ways. For example, humour is a consistent tactic in the presentation of the Lebanese wars in the work of The Atlas Group, and the sculptures and installations of Salcedo memoralize the victims of the Colombian conflict by using strange and poetic amalgams of furniture and clothing.
The link between witnessing and typical documentary protocols is overwhelmingly rejected here, while, as these examples indicate, the traditional focus on lens-based media is similarly eschewed. The underlying idea seems to be that artists bear witness to the enduring experience of oppression or protracted civil war, and their work can have a testimonial character, even if they are not eyewitnesses to specific significant events. Dispensing with the necessity of first-hand experience of particular events forgoes one of the defining features of witnessing in both juridical and historical contexts. This curious action essentially unhooks the meaning of witnessing from what is usually regarded as one of its indispensable limits. How do we explain this radical expansion of the concept of witnessing? This chapter examines the peculiar inflation of the purview of this term. In particular, I focus on the intriguing shift in spectatorship signalled by its widespread, but seemingly inappropriate, adoption to describe distanced relations to world events.
While the immediacy of the eyewitness photograph is crucial for traditional documentary photography and photojournalism, in the scholarly literature on witnessing, oral testimony told after the fact is the more usual focus. The centrality of oral accounts no doubt flows from the importance of Holocaust testimony for the initial theorization of witnessing. In particular, discussions of the Yale-Fortunoff Archive, composed of over 4,400 videotaped interviews with Holocaust survivors and witnesses, has generated some of the most incisive analyses of testimony as well as setting the initial terms of the debate.
The importance of oral testimony has oriented the field in a particular way. Perhaps most significantly it has foregrounded the issue of memory, because oral testimony is a recollection rather than a record. Despite the substantial difference between visual and verbal testimony, the issue of memory is frequently carried across into the studies of the image. For example, recent books in the visual arts combine the concepts of witnessing and memory, as these titles demonstrate: The Image and the Witness: Trauma, Memory and Visual Culture (2007), Memory Effects: The Holocaust and the Art of Secondary Witnessing (2002).4 But is the photographic image (which is my concern here) really akin to a recollection? It can certainly be a trigger for remembrance and become part of collective memory, but is it subject to the vagaries of human memory that afflict oral testimony? Allowing for the unreliability of memory is integral to the efficacy of witnessing in the Holocaust literature; rather than being an error to eradicate, it goes to the heart of the nature of testimony, which is not so much concerned with verifiable factual truth (although this is not unimportant) but with the subjective experience of historically significant events.
Dori Laub, who is both a Holocaust survivor and a psychiatrist involved in the gathering of Holocaust testimony for the Archive, addresses precisely this issue of unreliable memory in his account of the specificity of witnessing. In what is now a well-known example, he cites a survivor’s testimony that recalls an uprising in Auschwitz where the eyewitness claimed she saw four chimneys being destroyed by flames.5 Laub notes that, when the testimony was presented to a group that included historians, there was consternation about a factual error; there was only one chimney. In response, he defends the exaggeration by pointing to what the event represented psychically: the occurrence of the seemingly impossible. As he puts it:
One chimney blown up in Auschwitz was as incredible as four. The number mattered less than the fact of the occurrence. The event itself was almost inconceivable. The woman testified to an event that broke the all compelling frame of Auschwitz, where Jewish armed revolts just did not happen, and had no place. She testified to the breakage of a framework. That was historical truth.6
Laub uses the survivor’s mistake to explain what testimony can reveal that historical accounts cannot, namely: the knowledge it brings into being about survival and for survivors and, in this instance, how the faulty recollection stands metonymically for recovery. The woman, he suggests, in recalling this brief but powerful glimmer of hope, is put in touch with her own capacity for survival and resistance: ‘The woman’s testimony … is breaking the frame of the concentration camp by and through her very testimony: she is breaking out of Auschwitz even by her very talking.’7
In other words, her exaggeration speaks to the magnitude of the event and its profound psychic significance. Like enlarged elements in a dream, the inflated number of chimneys underscores the shattering of her expectations and beliefs about what was possible in Auschwitz. The testimony magnifies the break in the everyday reality of the concentration camp, yet the unreality of four chimneys more surely attests to the shock to perception that the incident constituted. The misremembered details signify that shock and the extraordinary psychic importance of something that broke with her immediate experience, or represented an outside to it; thereby connoting, when retold in the present, a world and a life not reduced to that framework.
Laub’s deceptively simple language manages to hold apart the different temporal registers (past and present) of the survivor’s testimony, and the shifting locations of agency (her actions, the actions of others), while also evoking their collapse: she is out of Auschwitz but also still in it, still breaking free; those who instigated the uprising broke the framework, she is breaking the framework. This careful rendering of the way equivalences are forged between internal and external events provides a startling glimpse into the unconscious processes involved in witnessing. The complexity of memory described here is hard to imagine outside the therapeutic testimonial framework.
This vignette of Holocaust witnessing brings to the fore another distinctive issue about the field as it has emerged in Holocaust studies: the importance of traumatic memory. More often than not, interpretations of witnessing in the visual arts are coupled with analyses of both memory and trauma. Indeed, when witnessing is invoked, it is implicit that the event has an afterlife, it calls for extended attention, precisely because it is not digested or understood, or cannot be by conventional means.
Laub’s complex account of Holocaust memory appears in the seminal text Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History, which he wrote with literary critic Shoshana Felman. The book addresses not just witnessing, but also the challenges and difficulties entailed. While it is one of the earliest publications on the topic (published in 1992), it has far more psychological and aesthetic complexity than most of the work in the visual arts that has followed, as his account of traumatic memory should testify. In this book, Laub provides a definition of the three levels of witnessing that retrospectively can be viewed as providing the toeholds for the current inflation of the term. Witnessing for Laub is expanded to consider not just the eyewitness, but also the reception of testimony. The three levels of witnessing are: internal witnessing (being one’s own inner witness), external witnessing (being a witnesses to others) and finally the third level, which he describes as ‘being a witness to the process of witnessing itself’.8 Laub conceives these levels as operating within the specific dialogic framework of testimony gathering, with the external witness playing a crucial role in the production of testimony.
His account of the internal witness, and its destruction under severe traumatic conditions, accounts for why survivors have difficulty remaining separate from, and reflective about, the events taking place outside them. Feminist philosopher Kelly Oliver develops Laub’s idea of the primacy of the inner witness in her refiguring of witnessing as the bedrock of subjectivity.9 To bear witness requires this internal witness, yet much of the literature about witnessing in art or film seems to forgo this necessary separation, advocating instead the kind of viewing associated with the experience of trauma itself, that is, a kind of psychic flooding where identification borders on merger and admits no critical or reflective distance. The capacity for critical reflection is as necessary for the evaluation of art as for the maintenance of healthy psychic boundaries. I will return to this issue, which speaks to one of the potential problems with the adoption of this nomenclature in the visual arts.
Shoshana Felman in her sections of the book also complicates the role of the witness. As a literary critic, she draws attention to different, more formal qualities of artistic testimony; challenging content, she suggests, exerts pressure on language, such that poetry has to ‘speak beyond its means’.10 Here and throughout her chapters, she presents typical qualities of avant-garde art as fundamental to the experience of the literature of testimony, such as: inducing an experience of strangeness, or having qualities of opacity and incomprehensibility.11 It is in this way that the ‘crises’ of witnessing of the book’s title are articulated, the experiences to be communicated are consistently discussed as almost beyond representation, certainly beyond straightforward transmission.
One of her most cited examples, however, is not drawn from the literary texts she analyses but rather considers the reaction of one of her classes to viewing video testimony from the Yale-Fortunoff Archive. Here, the idea that the experience of trauma is untransmittable is undercut by the transmission of something akin to a traumatic experience to the class. The students, after viewing the testimony, described it as ‘a shattering experience’ that led them to feel lost, isolated, ‘disconnected’, almost dissociated.12 Felman explains the crisis in the classroom as caused by the way the students felt ‘actively addressed not only by the videotape but by the intensity and intimacy of the testimonial encounter throughout the course’.13 Asking the students to reflect on their experience in order to work through and integrate it, she instructs them to write about it, concluding that the results were a statement ‘of the trauma they had gone through and of the significance of their assuming the position of the witness’.14
The idea that watching video testimony is a form of witnessing, or that it can traumatize its viewers, has sparked considerable debate. Critics such as Dominick LaCapra initially regarded this as hyperbolic, only later conceding that viewing for some individuals could lead to secondary trauma.15 In distinction to Laub, LaCapra introduces the term ‘secondary witnessing’ to distinguish between the eyewitness and the receiver of testimony such as the historian or psychoanalyst.16 The ambit of this term is then frequently expanded to include the children of Holocaust survivors.
In the visual arts, Dora Apel identifies Art Spiegelman as the first to create a popular depiction of this kind of intergenerational transmission. His comic books, Maus, are described as ‘a story about the relationship of the secondary witness to the memory of the Holocaust’.17 Artists who make work from, or about, this subject position are then described as secondary witnesses; for Apel, this means artists born after the Holocaust, who nonetheless ‘view themselves as links to an obliterated past’ [my emphasis].18 In a chapter discussing the appropriation of the testimonial form, she describes the artists’ work as proceeding from identification with survivors, as well as a desire to refigure that experience. She states: ‘While identifying with survivors, secondary witnesses also resist and reject the pathos and abjectness that are associated with victimhood, often constructing the survivor in ways that create a tension between the horror of the past and the resilience to it that has brought them into the present.’19
In sum, the term secondary witness correlates with second-generation Holocaust memory, what is called ‘postmemory’ by Marianne Hirsch, ‘afterimages’ by Robert Young and ‘memory effects’ by Apel.20 The art of secondary witnessing, then, has a very restricted meaning for Apel: artists must see themselves as linked to the past through second-generation memory.
In contrast to Apel, Ulrich Baer, in his book Spectral Evidence: The Photography of Trauma, applies the term secondary witness to the viewer of photography. Like Apel, he uses this expression to describe photography predicated on a belated relation to historical events. However, it is the reception of such images, rather than the subject position of the producer that interests him. Referring specifically to recent photographs by Mikael Levin and Dirk Reinartz of empty, nondescript landscapes that were the sites of former concentration camps, he argues that the tension between the historical significance of the sites, which engages our interest, and the absence of anything to see, makes us feel excluded from the images.21 Ambivalence, absences, detachment and being thrown back on ourselves seem to be crucial for his idea of secondary witnessing. I say ‘seem’ advisedly, as this is not a well-developed concept in his book; instead, he has a series of suggestive asides about how secondary witnessing might be triggered. For example, concluding his analysis of these empty images, he states: ‘By creating an experience of place for areas designed to destroy the very possibility of experience, Reinartz and Levin show that Holocaust commemoration is not site-specific and that acts of secondary witnessing depend less on geographic or cultural positioning than on becoming aware of our position as observers of experiences no one ever wanted to know about.’22
These empty images, Baer seems to suggest, raise the issue of remembrance in the face of historical oblivion. In other words, the photographs deliver an experience of place, or more accurately of absence, which is at once consonant with a site of annihilation and yet also a wholly inadequate representation of it. Presumably the play between what is offered to perception and our knowledge of these historically freighted sites is what shifts our attention away from the site itself. There is simply nothing to see, and this lack of evidence becomes in turn evidence. Evidence, as Baer puts it, that no one ever wanted to know about these sites. Baer assumes that the images, although inadequate for the purposes of commemoration, nonetheless trigger the desire to know. Such images, Baer continues, ‘position us as secondary witnesses who are as much spectators as seekers of knowledge’.23
Baer returns to the question of secondary witnessing in the following chapter ‘Meyer Levin’s In Search/Mikael Levin’s War Story: Secondary Witnessing and the Holocaust’. In this analysis of two interrelated texts, Mikael Levin occupies the conventional position of secondary witness outlined by Dora Apel. When travelling with the American Army in April 1945, his father, war correspondent Meyer Levin, was an early eyewitness of the liberated concentration camps. Mikael Levin becomes a secondary witness by retracing the journey of his father. War Story consists of Meyer Levin’s autobiography, In Search, original photographs taken by Eric Schawb, with whom his father travelled across Europe, and Mikael Levin’s photographs from 1995.
Focusing on Mikael Levin’s photographs, Baer argues it is precisely the evacuation of the photographer’s point of view that forces the viewer into the position of witness: ‘The viewer is turned into a witness precisely by the absence of a gaze with which he or she could identify.’24 Amplifying this point, he argues: ‘This is the crux of Mikael Levin’s photographic investigation of the nature of witnessing: although one might choose to testify at a later date, one becomes a witness involuntarily.’25 It is curious here that in a chapter ostensibly devoted to secondary witnessing, Baer uses the more immediate term witnessing to describe the viewer’s position.
While this may seem a strange term to use for images so distanced from the event, the practice of referring to the viewer of mediated testimony as a witness is routinely adopted in media studies. Indeed it is in media studies that the inflation of the concept of witnessing reaches its apotheosis. Not only is the viewer conceived as a witness, so too is the camera. The technological armature of Holocaust witnessing, namely the reliance upon the camera in the production of video testimony, is seized upon as evidence of the centrality of technology. Returning to the seminal account of witnessing in Laub and Felman’s book, media theorist Amit Pinchevski contends that Felman’s analysis of the crisis in the classroom overlooks the central role of what he calls the ‘audiovisual technology of recording and replaying’.26
In media studies, typically the difference between oral and visual media is collapsed by emphasizing the issue of mediation. The mediation of oral testimony by language is regarded as equivalent to the mediation by the camera. The distinction between a recollection and a record is lost, as is the primacy of the eyewitness. The camera is regarded as the eyewitness for an audience that hypothetically can be expanded to include anyone and everyone. The audience, in turn, becomes implicated in the strange contagious effects of video testimony, just like Felman’s class.
Stretching the term to its limits, John Ellis asserts that photography, cinema and television have made us all into witnesses of distant events.27 Paul Frosh extends this argument to include digital media, claiming that in the contemporary world ‘witnessing has become a general mode of receptivity to electronic media reports’.28 In short, witnessing is so generalized that it has become a synonym for watching television or surfing the net; the only limit perhaps being that the content watched should be disturbing, traumatic, catastrophic or historically significant.
In some of the strongest arguments for the importance of mass media, the audio-visual technology of transmission is even argued to displace or surpass the importance of the original oral testimony. For example, against the idea that witnessing is first and foremost an interpersonal relationship, Pinchevski asserts that the camera provides what the Buberian I–Thou relationship cannot. He states: ‘the camera … serves as a technological surrogate for an audience in potentia – the audience for which many survivors have been waiting for a lifetime – providing them with the kind of holding environment that is unattainable in the solitude of an off-camera interview’.29 The therapeutic holding environment is shifted to the public sphere; this conflation presumes the safeguards of the psychoanalytic dyad can be mobilized in the agonistic and antagonistic realm of public discourse. The inadequacy of this presumption is clearly evident in the responses to Holocaust art placed in the public domain in Berlin. Dora Apel reports that when the artist Shimon Attie projected archival images of lost Jewish Berlin onto the walls of the city, the images stirred up a range of antagonistic responses. She reports that in the last three months of the project he was harassed or threatened every single night.30 The transposition of the therapeutic register into the public domain is another key problem for the utilization of the concept of witnessing in the visual arts.
A further drastic displacement occurs in Pinchevski’s account. For him, the video archive itself constitutes an ‘affective community’ for the survivor.31 The emphasis on the archive and the camera, at the expense of the human participants and human relations, follows the materialist anti-intentionalist methodology criticized by Ruth Leys, which was canvassed in the previous chapter.
Most controversially, Pinchevski argues that the audio-visual recording is the repository of traumatic or deep memory. In his words: ‘the audiovisual archive is the ultimate depository of deep memory’.32 Updating Walter Benjamin’s idea of an optical unconscious, he argues for a ‘technological unconscious of trauma and testimony’.33 According to Pinchevski, the audiovisual marks of trauma are uniquely visible in the archive, the capacity to replay the video testimony grants access to pauses and moments of silence,34 and what he calls ‘hidden aspects of familiar reality’.35 That hidden aspects of familiar reality might signal the ‘disrupted narratives’ of trauma, as Pinchevski asserts, overlooks the very ordinary capacity of the camera to make mundane reality strange.36
For art historians, the revelation of the hidden moments of the familiar is a well-known artistic strategy, more usually referred to as defamiliarization or making strange. The expression, first coined by literary theorist Victor Shklovsky in 1917, is applied to photographic techniques that rendered the familiar unfamiliar, particularly German photographers of the 1920s associated with New Objectivity.37 There is now a very long tradition of artistic engagement with this idea. For example, the capacity to replay and make the familiar strange is exploited by videos artists like Candice Brietz. Plucking small vignettes from Hollywood cinema in works like Mother and Father (2005), she renders the narratively inconsequential details of gestures into radically asignifying elements simply through repetition. The gestures, or ‘indexical and temporal markers of corporeality captured by the camera’, to use Pinchevski’s phrasing, when replayed several times in quick succession become progressively stranger and stranger until they appear like incomprehensible tics.38 That repeated viewing of gestures, pauses and silences enables access to deep memory simply because they become unfamiliar, confuses the capacities of the camera with the nature of the traumatic testimony.
The key voice in media studies opposing this inflation is John Durham Peters. He reinstates the primacy of the eyewitness, underscoring the importance of proximity to the event and the mortality of the body exposed to risk: ‘Witnessing places mortal bodies in time. To witness always involves risk, potentially to have your life changed.… You can be marked for life by being the witness of an event.’39 His interpretation curtails the contagion of testimony, limiting the role of the witness to those directly involved. While this is an appealing corrective, it cuts across the inflation rather than taking it into account.
Reading the inflation symptomatically, it seems to me, what it demonstrates first and foremost is a desire for deeper engagement with global events such that a more sharply defined kind of spectatorship is required, one that has a reparative, pedagogical or ethical function.40 Additionally, the inflation marks a powerful turn to worldly affairs and a less sceptical attitude to documentary and the representation of reality than prevailed during the heyday of postmodernism. This shift can be discerned in media theory and in the dramatic rise of art practices that adopt ethnographic or documentary protocols, as well as in the reinventions of those genres whose departure from tradition is marked by terms such as postdocumentary or semidocumentary.41 Finally, the inflation speaks to the strange currency that some significant past events still possess, such that exposure to the testimony of those marked for life leads to what Caroline Wake has described as a feeling of emotional co-presence. Wake introduces this term to distinguish between the spatiotemporal co-presence of the witness required by Durham Peters and the sense of empathetic proximity invoked in more distant audiences.42 Her advocacy of tertiary witnessing as the most appropriate term for distant audiences maintains the sense of a distinct mode of viewing while also honouring the distance from an event.43 When artists deal with highly charged historical material, the idea of making viewers into tertiary witnesses more closely approximates the kind of emotional co-presence that is evoked. This emotional co-presence is the terrain of identification that will be discussed in the next section.
That simply seeing can mark your bodily fate is a suggestive way of getting beyond the idea of mere spectatorship.44
JOHN DURHAM PETERS
In contrasting ‘mere spectatorship’ with the transformative experience of witnessing, John Durham Peters inadvertently touches on the immense appeal of witnessing as a modality of viewing. A powerful relation to events seems much more desirable, when the alternative is simply looking. Yet, the kinds of traumatic experience that forever mark one’s bodily fate are not transformations anyone would want to undergo willingly. One of the most profound and damaging long-term consequences of trauma is losing one’s inner witness through unbidden processes of identification. In the psychoanalytic trauma literature, this phenomenon is referred to as identification with the aggressor, first theorized by both Sándor Ferenczi and Anna Freud in very different ways in the 1930s.45 Identification with the aggressor renders the victim forever porous to the feelings and projections of others, subject to the ‘confusion of the tongues’, to use Ferenczi’s evocative term, and thereby more prone to complementary identifications, rather than the more familiar concordant identification associated with empathy.46 I will return to this term ‘complementary identification’ that rarely, if ever, rates a mention in contemporary criticism, despite its unacknowledged prevalence in the reception of contemporary art.
It is perhaps not surprising that complementary identification is not a key term of analysis in art history. Identification has never had the kind of critical purchase in the visual arts that it has had in film theory. From apparatus theory to feminist film criticism, psychoanalytic ideas of identification and disidentification have been central to thinking about film spectatorship. Substantial engagements with identification have also featured prominently in feminist and queer theory, suggesting that the issue is considered most pertinent for the analysis of subaltern identities.47
As the attentive reader will have noted, identification was mentioned several times in the previous section on witnessing. Usage like this, en passant, as it were, rather than as a key term to tackle or nut out, is extremely common in art history. However, when politically or socially engaged contemporary art is discussed, identification is not a prominent theme. When it is mentioned, it is more often as a term to be qualified or rejected. Or to broaden the source of contention, in the analysis of political art practice the rejection of the psychological dimension of art is very widespread, if not systemic. No doubt the aversion stems from a longstanding opposition to liberal ideas of individualism when collective issues are at stake, for which psychology is sometimes a convenient, if misguided, shorthand.48 Some typical examples of this tendency can be found in Claire Bishop’s approach to relational art and Ariella Azoulay’s recent work on photography.
Azoulay’s book The Civil Contract of Photography is one of the most important recent texts on trauma and witnessing in the visual arts, although significantly she does not emphasize these terms. Her reticence about using the term ‘trauma’ no doubt proceeds from her desire to move the discussion of images of victims of catastrophe out of a psychological framework and into the political arena. Her text suggests that she believes these are mutually exclusive approaches. Discussing her exposure to photographs that document ‘the daily horrors of the Israeli occupation’, which one might expect to arouse shame, guilt, empathy, identification or emotional co-presence, she asserts that she wants to look at these ‘photographed individuals beyond guilt and compassion – outside of the merely psychological framework of empathy, of “regarding the pain of others”’.49 Susan Sontag’s phrase ‘regarding the pain of others’, from her book of that title, becomes shorthand for a merely psychological framework.
While Sontag was concerned with modes of representing atrocity and the spectator’s response to the surfeit of images of pain and suffering, Azoulay endeavours to displace speculation about the nature and qualities of the image and its reception. In the place of such traditional aesthetic assessments of photography’s role and value, she wants to substitute an entirely political and ethical function for photography. Hence, she deflects attention away from universal themes like victims’ pain and suffering by using the less emotive nomenclature ‘citizens of disaster’ to refer to those affected by catastrophe or chronically vulnerable to injury and injustice.50 Using this terminology enables the non-citizens of her native Israel, as well as other stateless or displaced peoples, to be properly included in the claims made by and through photography. Identification, for her, works against this kind of inclusion; it is negatively viewed as state-sanctioned cohesiveness. As she puts it:
The nation-state creates a bond of identification between citizens and the state through a variety of ideological mechanisms.… This, then, allows the state to divide the governed – partitioning off non citizens from citizens – and to mobilize the privileged citizens against other groups of ruled subjects. An emphasis on the dimension of being governed allows a rethinking of the political sphere as a space of relations between the governed, whose political duty is first and foremost a duty toward one another, rather than toward the ruling power.51
To effect this neutralization of state partitioning, the political and ethical function of photography is framed primarily in juridical terms. Azoulay contends that audiences should ‘watch’ photographs rather than merely look at them, asserting that photographs thereby enact what she calls the civil contract of photography.52 All parties involved in the photographic act are part of this contract; photographed victim, photographer and audience are all on an equal footing. Hence the language of trauma – victim, perpetrator and bystander – is mostly avoided as it introduces a differentiated field of positions that her analysis aims to neutralize.
Looking at what she calls ‘the image of horror’ does not require the spectator to take on the special role of witness to disaster; instead the image is what she calls an ‘emergency claim’.53 Rather than eliciting empathy, sympathy or identification with the victim, photography is the field where the victim’s claim is lodged; it is, she says, a ‘space of political relations’.54 For Azoulay, photography is like a court of law: the space to air grievances, to expose injustice, to appeal for justice. Her aim is to downplay the reliance on feeling by invoking the ideas of citizenship, claims and what she describes as a contractual obligation to look at photographs. As she puts it, ‘I employ the term “contract” in order to shed terms such as “empathy,” “shame,” “pity” or “compassion” as organizers of this gaze.’55 In short, the language of law – with contractual obligations and responsibilities – is to regulate the traffic between victims and the public.
But who will enforce this civic duty, these obligations to attend to injustice? In the absence of a community of feeling, what will motivate the public to ‘watch’ distressing images of atrocity and violence? Rather than disputing compassion fatigue, Azoulay’s approach simply disqualifies compassion as a valid response, or indeed any other psychological engagement with the citizens of disaster. Here, Azoulay echoes a long line of theorists from Bertolt Brecht to Allan Sekula whose arguments are structured by these same oppositions: the political must be separated from the personal, ideas from feeling, knowledge from identification.
Claire Bishop’s rejection of identification proceeds somewhat differently, there is no alignment of the state and citizenry entailed, however her analysis similarly relies on the idea that art concerned with politics and democracy is not served by its means. In her article of 2004, ‘Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics’, she sharply contrasts relational art practices that involve identification and those that do not. Identification is aligned with a recognition of commonality, as she puts it ‘a community of viewing subjects with something in common’.56 The typical view of concordant identification is relied upon here; Bishop calls it ‘transcendent human empathy’.57 The practices she favours involve what she calls ‘nonidentification’, where instead of mutual recognition there is mutual estrangement.58 Such practices she sees as offering not only better politics but also a more complex concept of subjectivity, as she puts it ‘not the fictitious whole subject of harmonious community, but a divided subject of partial identification open to constant flux’.59
Her key examples of artists making this kind of praiseworthy relational art are Santiago Sierra and Thomas Hirschhorn. For example, Sierra’s work for the Venice Biennale in 2001 is commended for setting up a situation of ‘mutual nonidentification’ between Biennale visitors and the street vendors selling knock-off Fendi bags in his allocated space at the Arsenale.60 Reflecting on the subdued behaviour of the vendors in this unfamiliar location, Bishop concludes that vendors and visitors were ‘mutually estranged by the confrontation’.61 Sierra’s slightly sadistic scenario, she continues, ‘disrupted the art audience’s sense of identity, which is founded precisely on unspoken racial and class exclusions, as well as veiling blatant commerce’.62 In a similar vein, Thomas Hirschhorn’s Bataille Monument (2002) in suburban Kassel for Documenta XI constructed a situation where visitors became ‘hapless intruders’ in the working-class migrant community where the work was constructed.63 Situated between two blocks of flats were temporary shacks housing a locally run bar as well as a library dedicated to the work of French philosopher, Georges Bataille. Visitors were ferried to the site by a Turkish taxi service and, as Bishop puts it, they were ‘stranded’ there until a return cab could be secured.64 Rather than the local community being subjected to what Hirschhorn calls the ‘zoo effect’, Bishop argues the work set up a ‘complicated play of identificatory and dis-identificatory mechanisms’.65 While the source of dis-identification is fairly obvious, quite what enabled identification here is not spelt out. It is interesting to note that the current preference for dis-identification, noted by Ruth Leys in the trauma literature, is also present in the more distant field of art historical discussions of political art. In the previous chapter, this antimimetic model of trauma was presented by her as resisting internalization.
In sum, both of these artworks brought together people who would not normally share social space and both exploited the unease or social discomfort this might provoke in some viewers. These situations, while a useful foil to the conviviality model of relational art, fall a long way short of providing a model of democracy founded on ‘contestation’, which is the guiding principle of Bishop’s evaluation.66 The contrived situations successfully underscore class and ethnic divisions, if that is their main aim, but it is hard to see how estrangement leads to the kind of vibrant public sphere advocated by Roslyn Deutsche. Bishop cites with approval Deutsche’s argument that: ‘Conflict, division, and instability … do not ruin the democratic public sphere; they are conditions of its existence.’67 While mutual estrangement or non-identification might be one of the preconditions for conflict, surely something more than embarrassment is required for productive contestation?
Like Azoulay, Bishop’s analysis relies on a narrow view of identification, which in turn is used to polarize the two types of art practice. Identification is based on sameness and empathy, whereas non-identification supposedly leads to antagonism, conflict and contestation. Examined more carefully, identification in fact is precisely what unifies these different practices and the supposedly mutually exclusive inter-subjective relations they incite. Despite the very widespread understanding of identification as a synonym for empathy, it is not simply a mechanism of recognition or idealization of the other, nor is it necessarily generative of sympathy or empathy.68 It is, as Freud noted, ‘ambivalent from the very first’, that is, potentially violent and tender, aggressive and loving. In ‘Group Psychology and the Analysis of the Ego’ of 1921, he states:
Identification, in fact, is ambivalent from the very first; it can turn into an expression of tenderness as easily as into a wish for someone’s removal. It behaves like a derivative of the first, oral phase of the organization of the libido, in which the object we long for and prize is assimilated by eating and is in that way annihilated as such.69
According to Freud, identification is the very basis of the social bond. That such ambivalence underpins this bond helps to explain on the one hand the idealization of community as built on communion, as well as the alternative group formation so well described by the crowd, the rabble or the mob. Non-identification, then, is not the opposite of identification if antagonism is the salient issue of comparison. However, non-identification could be the opposite of identification if it is conceived as a kind of sociopathic indifference.
An exception to the general rule of downplaying or dismissing identification in political art can be found in the work of Ernst van Alphen. In his discussion of the highly contentious use of Nazi imagery in contemporary art, he distinguishes between two kinds of identification. Drawing on the work of Kaja Silverman, he considers idiopathic and heteropathic identification. Essentially, concordant identification is split into two. The quest for sameness proceeds in two directions: idiopathic identification emphasizes projection, the other becomes like the self; heteropathic identification emphasizes introjection, the self becomes like the other.70
From this small but typical sample of the literature on identification in political art, it is clear that even when the concept is seen as having pertinence, there is no acknowledgement of the ambivalence at its root. Most importantly, concordance is overwhelmingly assumed to be the base note of identificatory processes, whether that sameness is assumed to be projected outwards, or taken into the self. Complementary identification upsets this assumption. Originally theorized to account for the variety of identificatory responses evoked in the psychoanalyst – in clinical parlance, the psychoanalyst’s countertransference – complementary identification is defined by Heinrich Racker as a failure of concordant identification. He states: ‘it seems that to the degree to which the analyst fails in the concordant identifications and rejects them, certain complementary identifications become intensified’.71 Instead of identifying with the analysand, Racker observes that the analyst is scripted into identifying with an internal object of the analysand, such as a parental figure.72 The contrast between these two types of identification is well explained by Jay Frankel. Speaking from the point of view of the analyst, he says: ‘if I am with someone who is outraged about an injustice and I respond by also feeling outraged, I have made a concordant identification; if I am with the same outraged person but instead feel guilty, as if I have caused this person to be hurt, I have made a complementary identification’.73
The dynamic described by Frankel, where a complementary emotion is aroused instead of a shared one, accounts very vividly for the shaming effect of certain kinds of identity politics art. A work of art that demonstrates anger or outrage about racism, sexism or homophobia may well lead to a complementary identification of this kind by a viewer from a beneficiary or bystander group. The viewer is not identifying with the expressed emotion but rather with the internal object of the artist – the authority figure, oppressor or aggressor. In the responses of conservative critics to political art, as Amelia Jones demonstrates, one can see very clearly the public operation of complementary identifications. She notes how responses to the 1993 Whitney Biennial, renowned for its high percentage of political art, assumed the works spoke to the ‘guilt’ of the aggressor, in the words of one critic: ‘that enemy was the mythologically constructed “straight, white, male” – the preeminent protector of culture’.74 In such instances, the fleeting affect of shame is frequently outpaced or displaced by anger, derision and contempt. The desire to push away the feeling of shame, discussed in the previous chapter, leads to a series of evasions.
The complicated intertwining of inner objects and outer feelings that takes place in complementary identification is also a crucial process in the experience of trauma. The passage from Frankel cited above appears in the context of his effort to understand what underpins Ferenczi’s theory of identification with the aggressor. Frankel uses Racker’s work to explain how trauma induces complementary identification with the aggressor:
To know her attacker from the inside, the victim molds her own experience into the attacker’s experience of himself – what Racker calls concordant identification. By doing this, she learns who he expects her to be and may be led to identify, in her feelings and behavior, with her attacker’s inner object, his ‘other.’ This complementary identification then guides her compliance with him.75
Complementary identification, then, begins to address the annihilation that Freud argues is the other face of communion and empathy. In this instance, however, it is self annihilation instead of the annihilation of the other. Complementary identification also vividly demonstrates how the inner witness is lost. Miguel Gutiérrez Peláez describes the devastating result of trauma in stronger, more active, terms as ‘self-abandonment’.76 Commenting on Ferenczi’s description of the shock of trauma, he writes: ‘Subjectivity lies in ruins, and the person is destroyed, having totally surrendered to the “other” who perpetrated the aggression.’77 Ferenczi’s ‘confusion of the tongues’ is, then, just one consequence of the shock of trauma. In notes from 1932, the year he delivered the ‘Confusion of the Tongues’ paper, he describes not just a skinless openness to the feeling and thoughts of others, but a loss of one’s own form.
‘Shock’ = annihilation of self-regard – of the ability to put up a resistance, and to act and think in defence of one’s own self; perhaps even the organs which secure self-preservation give up their function or reduce it to a minimum. (The word Erschütterung is derived from schütten, i.e. to become ‘unfest, unsolid,’ to lose one’s own form and to adopt easily and without resistance, an imposed form – ‘like a sack of flour’).78
This colonization of the soul is reserved for the victim of trauma, the one whose bodily fate is forever marked by the experience. However, as Felman’s classroom example ably demonstrates, empathy can lead the spectator to resonate with that experience. In other words, there are ways in which these processes and feelings circulate in entirely able-bodied bystanders.
In the well-meaning directives to be empathetic or to consider the public sphere as like a therapeutic holding environment for testimony about injustice, there is an unwitting replication of this merged identification and resulting formlessness. Rather than responding critically and reflectively, as befits the public sphere, the emphasis in the witnessing literature frequently falls on issues such as identification and emotional co-presence. It is in this context that the need for distance, if not confrontation, comes to the fore. To confront injustice in the public domain requires contestation, as Bishop rightly argues, but the capacity to argue, to disagree and to contest opinions and cultural representations will not proceed successfully from embarrassment and shame.
Bringing together the two strands of scholarship canvassed in this chapter, which curiously do not often intersect, an interesting debate emerges about the stance spectators should adopt in relation to political art dealing with victims of injustice, state violence or disaster. The two sides of the debate about politically engaged art can be characterized as on the one hand a sort of bleeding-heart openness to victims by the advocates of witnessing, and a steely resolve to outlaw identification and empathy from the anti-psychological theorists on the other. In the chapters that follow, I outline how women artists have carefully navigated the difficult territory of pity and shame, facilitating a reparative approach that enables a qualified kind of witnessing that is mindful of the contagious effects of trauma and its confusion of tongues, but that does not reject the need for aesthetic engagement and identification.