Media Witnessing

Also by Paul Frosh

THE IMAGE FACTORY: Consumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content
Industry (2003)
MEETING THE ENEMY IN THE LIVING ROOM: Terrorism and Communication
in the Contemporary Era (with Tamar Liebes, 2006)

Also by Amit Pinchevski

BY WAY OF INTERRUPTION: Levinas and the Ethics of Communication (2005)

Media Witnessing
Testimony in the Age of Mass
Communication

Edited by

Paul Frosh
Senior Lecturer, Department of Communications and Journalism,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel

and

Amit Pinchevski
Lecturer, Department of Communications and Journalism,
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel
Introduction, selection and editorial matter © Paul Frosh and
Amit Pinchevski 2009
Individual chapters © contributors 2009
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-55149-7
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Frosh, Paul.
Media witnessing : testimony in the age of mass communication / Paul
Frosh and Amit Pinchevski.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.

1. Mass media—Influence. 2. Reporters and reporting. 3. Mass

media—Audiences. I. Pinchevski, Amit, 1971– II. Title.
P94.F76 2009
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Contents

Acknowledgments vii

Notes on the Contributors viii

Introduction: Why Media Witnessing? Why Now? 1

Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski

Part I Perspectives on Media Witnessing

1 Witnessing 23
John Durham Peters

An Afterword: Torchlight Red on Sweaty Faces 42

John Durham Peters

2 Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass Media, and the

Imagined Lives of Strangers 49
Paul Frosh

3 Mundane Witness 73
John Ellis

4 Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication: Historical

Roots, Structural Dynamics, and Current Appearances 89
Günter Thomas

5 Archaic Witnessing and Contemporary News Media 112

Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes

Part II Performances of Media Witnessing

6 Witnessing as a Field 133
Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski

7 From Danger to Trauma: Affective Labor and the Journalistic

Discourse of Witnessing 158
Carrie Rentschler

v
vi Contents

8 Scientific Witness, Testimony, and Mediation 182

Joan Leach

9 Witnessing Trauma on Film 198

Roy Brand

Index 216
Acknowledgments

This project has been long in the making, emerging from intermittent
but continuous discussions (and disputations!) between the individual
authors and many other scholars at a number of different gatherings
over several years. There are many to thank for their (sometimes unwit-
ting) contributions to the spirit, if not the letter, of this project; those
who, while they have not contributed essays to this volume, have kept
us enthused and intellectually alert to the many dimensions of media
witnessing and who have read and responded to previous versions of
the work presented here: Elihu Katz, Daniel Dayan, Paddy Scannell,
Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Zohar Kampf, Eva Illouz, Sandrine Boudana,
Tally Gross, Louise Bethlehem, and Nick Couldry, to name only a few.
In addition we would like to thank Becky Feinberg for her diligence,
efficiency, and heroic meticulousness in preparing the manuscript for
publication. The Hebrew University Authority for Research and Devel-
opment and the Smart Family Foundation Communications Institute
both made generous financial contributions towards our editorial costs.
Finally, we would like to thank Sage Publications Ltd. for permission to
reprint John Durham Peters’s article ‘Witnessing’ from Media, Culture &
Society, Volume 23, Issue 6, pp. 707–23, 2001, and Taylor and Francis
Ltd. for permission to reprint Paul Frosh’s article ‘Telling Presences: Wit-
nessing, Mass Media, and the Imagined Lives of Strangers’ from Critical
Studies in Media Communication, Volume 23, Issue 4, pp. 265–84, 2006
(www.informaworld.com).
Paul dedicates this book to his parents, Sidney Frosh and the late Ruth
Frosh.
Amit dedicates this book to the new family, to Iris and Ilai.

vii
Notes on the Contributors

Tamar Ashuri is a Lecturer at Ben-Gurion University’s Department of

Communication Studies and in the School of Communications at Sapir
Academic College, Israel. The Arab Israeli Conflict in the Media is forth-
coming from I.B. Tauris in 2008, and her new book on the history of
media technologies will be published in 2009.

Menahem Blondheim is a Professor in the Department of Communi-

cation and Journalism and the Department of American Studies at The
Hebrew University of Jerusalem. He serves as Director of the Smart Fam-
ily Foundation Communication Institute. His research interests include
the history of communication and communication in history and com-
munication technologies, old and new. Among his publications are News
over the Wires (1994); Copperhead Gore (2006); and The Toronto School of
Communication Theory (2007), a volume edited with Rita Watson.

Roy Brand is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Philosophy at

Sarah Lawrence College, USA. His main areas of interest include media
studies, critical theory, and contemporary European philosophy. Cur-
rently, he is working on a book entitled The Art of Experience: Films and
New Media.

John Ellis is a Professor of Media Arts at Royal Holloway, University

of London. He is the author of Seeing Things (2000) and Visible Fictions
(1984) and has recently contributed to New Directions in Documentary
(eds. J. Corner & A. Rosenthal, 2004) and The Television Studies Reader
(eds. R. Allen & A. Hill, 2004). Between 1982 and 1999 he ran the inde-
pendent company Large Door Productions, making documentaries for
British TV. He is currently working on the history of television and the
nature of the present moment.

Paul Frosh is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Communica-

tion and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Israel.
His research interests include visual culture, consumer culture, media
and nationhood, and communication theory. The Image Factory: Con-
sumer Culture, Photography and the Visual Content Industry was pub-
lished in 2003, and Meeting the Enemy in the Living Room: Terrorism

viii
 Notes on the Contributors ix

and Communication in the Contemporary Era (with Tamar Liebes) appeared

in 2006.

Joan Leach is currently convener of the science communication pro-

gram at the University of Queensland, Australia. She has taught at
Imperial College, University of London, and the University of Pitts-
burgh. She is editor of the interdisciplinary journal, Social Epistemology,
and has published on communication ethics, public scientific contro-
versies, and rhetorical theory.

Tamar Liebes is a Professor of Media and Journalism and holds the

Carl and Matilda Newhouse Chair in Communication at the Hebrew
University of Jerusalem. Her books include American Dreams, Hebrew
Subtitles: Globalization at the Receiving End (2004); Reporting the Arab
Israeli Conflict: How Hegemony Works (1997); The Export of Meaning: Cross
Cultural Readings of Dallas, with Elihu Katz (1992), and two edited
volumes Media, Ritual, Identity (with J. Curran, 1998), and Canonic Texts
in Media Research: Are There Any? Should There Be? How About These (with
Elihu Katz, John Durham Peters, and Avril Orloff, 2002).

John Durham Peters is an F. Wendell Miller Distinguished Professor of

Communication Studies at the University of Iowa. The author of nearly
50 articles and book chapters and over a dozen book reviews, his books
include Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication (1999)
and Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Liberal Tradition (2005). He is
the co-editor of Canonic Texts in Media Research: Are There Any? Should
There Be? How About These? (with Elihu Katz, Tamar Liebes, and Avril
Orloff, 2002) and Mass Communication and American Social Thought: Key
Texts, 1919–1968 (with Peter Simonson, 2004).

Amit Pinchevski is a Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in the Department of

Communication and Journalism at The Hebrew University of Jerusalem,
Israel. His research interests include communication theory, philosophy,
and ethics. His book By Way of Interruption: Levinas and the Ethics of
Communication was published in 2005.

Carrie Rentschler is an Assistant Professor of Communication Stud-

ies in the Department of Art History and Communication Studies at
McGill University. She has published on media activism in the U.S. vic-
tims’ rights movement, feminist self-defense, the gendering of public
safety campaigns, private security industries, and models of injury in
x Notes on the Contributors

discourses of U.S. citizenship. She is writing a book, Victims’ Rights and

the Counter-Publics of Crime Victims, that examines how ‘victims’ rights’
developed into a powerful media discourse on crime and terrorism. Her
current research investigates the emergence of trauma as a strategic news
discourse.

Günter Thomas is a Professor of Protestant Theology at Ruhr-Universität

Bochum in Germany. His books include Medien-Ritual-Religion: Zur
religiösen Funktion des Fernsehens [Media-Ritual-Religion: The Religious
Function of Television] (1998); Implizite Religion: Theoriegeschichtliche
und theoretische Untersuchungen zum Problem ihrer Identifikation [Implicit
Religion: Historical and Theoretical Studies of the Problem of Its Identifi-
cation] (2001); Das Symbol der Neuen Schöpfung [The Symbol of New Cre-
ation] (2006); and, as editor, Religiöse Funktionen des Fernsehens? Medien-,
kultur- und religionswissenschaftliche Perspectiven [Religious Functions of
Television? Perspectives from Media, Cultural, and Religious Studies]
(1999); together with Andreas Schüle, Die Rezeption Niklas Luhmanns in
der Theologie [The Reception of Niklas Luhmann in Theology] (2006).
Introduction
Why Media Witnessing? Why Now?
Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski

‘Media witnessing’ teeters on the brink of tautology. On the one hand,

every act of witnessing implies some kind of mediation: most funda-
mentally, putting an experience into language for the benefit of those
who were not there. On the other hand, every act of mediation entails
a kind of witnessing, particularly the use of technology as a surrogate
for an absent audience. Yet the compound ‘media witnessing’ implies
more than the equivalence of its two terms, capturing something cen-
tral to the practices of contemporary media as well as to recent scholarly
interest in the aesthetics, ethics, and politics of representation.
We might begin with a simple definition. ‘Media witnessing’ is the
witnessing performed in, by, and through the media. It is about the
systematic and ongoing reporting of the experiences and realities of
distant others to mass audiences. But this in turn requires further specifi-
cation since ‘media witnessing’ collapses a number of different semantic
alignments among its two components. It refers simultaneously to
the appearance of witnesses in media reports, the possibility of media
themselves bearing witness, and the positioning of media audiences as
witnesses to depicted events, configurations that are amenable to handy
summary through a tripartite distinction (with apologies to Abraham
Lincoln) between witnesses in the media, witnessing by the media,
and witnessing through the media. In conflating these three strands,
‘media witnessing’ not only speaks to the complexity of their inter-
actions (a television news report may depict witnesses to an event,
bear witness to that event, and turn viewers into witnesses all at the
same time), but it also appears as a ‘problematic’ in communications
theory: ‘a term that organizes a field of phenomena in a way that
yields problems for investigation’ (Abrams, 1980, p. 9). Media witness-
ing, we contend, offers new ways of thinking through some abiding

1
2 Introduction

problems of media, communication, and culture that were previously

addressed by terms such as ‘representation’, ‘mediation’, ‘reception’,
‘dissemination’, and ‘effects’.
But why now? Why is ‘media witnessing’ not only a useful ‘prob-
lematic’ term but also a timely one, whose increasing visibility in
contemporary scholarly discourse itself bears witness to deeper processes
at work in the cultural, political, and technological contexts of media?
Answering this question in a full and adequate manner is beyond the
limited scope (and space) of this brief introduction. Clearly one way
of approaching the timeliness of media witnessing is to understand
it in a narrow sense, in relation to the development of the figure of
the journalist and to journalism as a kind of testimony. Media wit-
nessing in this narrow sense can be traced back to the emergence of
professional journalism and journalistic norms in war correspondence
from the nineteenth century to the present day, especially in relation
to crises in the reliability of reporting in situations where, as Phillip
Knightley (2004) famously put it, truth is ‘the first casualty’. However,
as our opening paragraphs suggest, there is much more at stake in the
concept of media witnessing than the focus on journalism allows. This
focus – which puts the journalist’s professional practices center stage –
makes it difficult to give full weight to contemporary developments in
media technologies and audience participation. Let us take the exam-
ple of so-called ‘embedded journalism’, the term used to designate the
practice of war correspondents accompanying specific army units dur-
ing the Second Gulf War. Seen through the prism of journalistic norms,
this practice is a contemporary manifestation of roles fulfilled within
traditional war correspondence (where journalists were once designated
as ‘camp followers’): accompanying the troops as they go into battle and
writing (or photographing) appropriate accounts. Understood through
the framework of media witnessing, however, fundamental shifts have
occurred as a result of technological changes. In addition to their tra-
ditional journalistic tasks, the embedded journalist is increasingly a
vehicle for audiovisual media technologies that provide nonstop feeds
to global news outlets on a multitude of media platforms. Moreover,
the embedded journalist is also an operational model for audiences
themselves. The same or similar technologies – cellphone-based cameras
and recording devices hooked into immediately accessible distribution
networks – are available to ordinary individuals ‘embedded’ in their
everyday lives, as dormant potential journalists ready for ‘activation’
when events (and an internalized sense of newsworthiness) require. It is
through a more expansive concept such as media witnessing that one
 Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski 3

can glimpse the underlying connections between the phenomena of

‘embedded journalism’ and ‘citizen journalism’.
Rather than confining the contemporary relevance of media wit-
nessing to developments in journalism, we briefly consider its emer-
gence in relation to two intersections between media and witnessing:
the Holocaust and the destruction of the World Trade Center on
September 11, 2001. Those two events can even in some ways be under-
stood as antithetical limit cases of media witnessing. Whereas in the
former the ultimate, authoritative witnesses are generally understood to
be those who were there, in the latter we are haunted by the possibility
that it is the distant television viewers – and not those at Ground Zero
on the day – who were the event’s true witnesses.

The Holocaust and the crisis of witnessing

The rise of what we call ‘media witnessing’ parallels what Shoshana

Felman and Dori Laub (1991) have dubbed the ‘crisis of witnessing’ in
the wake of the Holocaust. Indeed, to speak of witnessing in this day
and age is inevitably to invoke the discourse of the Holocaust witness,
which has come to constitute a paradigm case for witnessing in gen-
eral (see Agamben, 1998; Caruth, 1996; Hartman, 1996; LaCapra, 2001;
Langer, 1993). At the core of this paradigm is the impossibility of bear-
ing witness: the traumatic event that has left its survivors speechless, not
because they did not witness it, but rather because they did so all too
overwhelmingly. When words fail or are unavailable, trauma itself bears
witness to the black hole of experience through displaced repetitions
and the acting out of unconscious conflicts. Taken to its logical extreme,
this would mean that the Holocaust is an event without witnesses: no
outside witnesses, neither those from nearby (bystanders or neighbors)
nor those from afar (Jews worldwide or the nations of the world), were
able (or willing) to report about the catastrophe. Moreover, no inside
witness was capable of sufficiently removing him or herself from the
contaminating power of the event so as to remain unaffected by it.
But more devastatingly, the Nazi system succeeded in extinguishing the
internal witness of its victims, convincing them that their experiences
were indeed incommunicable even to themselves, never mind to others.
To finally bear witness, the survivor has to reestablish an inner witness
and build a discourse with an interlocutor (in Laub’s case, a therapist),
who bears out the traumatic process with the survivor, allowing him or
her to bear witness – possibly for the first time – to his or her experience.
4 Introduction

It is instructive to note that these and other insights on the nature of

witnessing were the result of interviews conducted for the Video Archive
for Holocaust Testimonies at Yale. The project was first undertaken in
1979 in New Haven, Connecticut by Dori Laub, a child-survivor and
psychiatrist, and Laurel Vlock, a television journalist and documentar-
ian, who premised that the medium of video could be used successfully
to document the personal memories of Holocaust witnesses. This was
chiefly due to the pressing concern that ‘time is running out and that
every survivor has a unique story to tell’ and that ‘the living portrai-
ture of television would add a compassionate and sensitive dimension
to the historical record’ (Yale Library, 2007). Recording testimonies was
thus undertaken in order to perpetuate the narratives of survivors, cap-
turing each singular testimony for the benefit of future generations.
Yet the function of media technology in this project was more than
the establishment of an audiovisual archive: video cameras effectively
constituted a technological surrogate for an audience of the witnessing
process underway. Any act of recording implies an unlimited potential
of reproduction, circulation, and broadcasting. This was all the more
crucial in this case, for what media technology provided here, and
with abundance, was precisely what precluded bearing witness before
the project – the existence of an audience as addressee. In this sense,
recent speculations on Holocaust witnessing such as Felman and Laub’s
are inherently predicated on what we call here ‘media witnessing’. The
unstated yet integral premise of Holocaust witnessing as pursued at Yale
is the inexhaustible potential of reiteration, dissemination, and repro-
duction supplied by media technology. Media technology was utilized
from the inception of Holocaust witnessing, bearing witness on cam-
era to the recovery of survivors’ repressed narratives. It is in this respect
that media witnessing can be said to be the ultimate goal and primary
justification for Holocaust witnessing.
The Yale project and many others that followed (most famously
Steven Spielberg’s Survivors of the Shoah Visual History Foundation)
have contributed to the popularization of the figure of the survivor
and the genre of Holocaust testimony and, in so doing, to the ‘audi-
encing’ of the Holocaust in mass media. It is somewhat ironic that
the discourse of ‘that to which no one can bear witness’ has recently
become the benchmark of witnessing discourse in general. More than
60 years after the end of World War II, various forms of testimony and
representation of the Holocaust now fill the mass media. If the primary
concern before was that the catastrophe should not be forgotten, it is
safe to say that oblivion is no longer an issue, rather the contrary – the
 Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski 5

ever-growing visibility of the Holocaust in various texts and contexts

and the ever-expanding forms of its assimilation in popular culture.
Geoffrey Hartman (2000) recounts the reproduction almost verbatim of
a Yale videotaped testimony in a Harold Pinter play which dealt with
violence and loss but had nothing to do with the Holocaust. According
to Hartman, this repetition is indicative of the ways that the Holocaust
affectively influences a wider public, to the point of becoming the deep
structure of contemporary depictions of trauma, loss, and suffering.
Perhaps the ultimate embodiment of such transference is the case of
Benjamin Wilkomirski, the so-called child-survivor who turned out to be
a false, if not fake, witness. Many have written about this peculiar story,
yet only a few have noted the fact that Wilkomirski was an avid con-
sumer of films and books about the Holocaust (Hartman, 2000; Lappin,
1999). Wilkomirski’s personal motives aside, this story is possible only in
a media-saturated world, where everything – including the Holocaust –
is rendered fully visible. Only when survivors’ experiences are made
accessible to the rest of the world can someone assume a false memory
of the Holocaust. Beyond being raw material for fabrication, though,
Holocaust representations circulating in the media are also a repository
from which to judge how a Holocaust testimony should sound. This
might account for the success of Wilkomirski’s book, which seems to
have spoken to the popular image and expectations of child testimony.
It may be said that Wilkomirski recycled what was already out there,
evoking the deep structure of witnessing already in place, which in turn
enabled the ‘correct’ encoding of his text but also explains the outrage
at the discovery of its falsification. Wilkomirski is a product of the age
of media witnessing, and as such his overidentification with survivors
can be interpreted as a fateful leap from media witnessing to Holocaust
witnessing.
No one can better attest to the imperative of witnessing than Primo
Levi, arguably the paradigmatic case of the Holocaust witness. His reflec-
tions on the role assigned to him by history or fate reveal the complexity
of the charge of bearing witness. Levi insists that those who survived the
Holocaust are not the true witnesses of the catastrophe precisely because
they were somehow saved. The true witnesses, according to Levi, are
those who will never be able to bear witness, those who reached rock
bottom never to return to tell the tale – the Muselmanners. As Giorgio
Agamben (1998) notes, the value of Levi’s testimony lies in what it lacks:
its center contains a lacuna that bears witness to the missing witness,
thereby making Levi and other survivors witnesses by proxy. It is an
exception to the rule testifying to the rule. Yet what prevented someone
6 Introduction

like Primo Levi from becoming a true witness – that is, a Muselmann –
was precisely what enabled him to finally bear witness, even if par-
tially or vicariously. Levi’s testimony occupied a narrow bridge of being
removed enough but not removed altogether. A precarious combination
of distance and proximity kept him from being consumed by the event
but still affected enough so as to testify about it. As such, Levi meets
the conditions of a moral witness stipulated by Avishai Margalit (2002):
speaking against evil in the name of humanity while being exposed to
the evil thus witnessed. In speaking for those who cannot speak for
themselves, Levi’s testimony undertakes limitless responsibility towards
the Other (Pinchevski, 2005). In this respect, Holocaust testimony can
be said to bear the mark of the silence of those who were infinitely
close – the Muselmanners – as well as infinitely distant – God.
In his afterword to If This is a Man, Levi expresses the moral charge
extending from the period of Nazism to the contemporary world:

The world in which we Westerners live today has grave faults and
dangers, but when compared to former times our world has a tremen-
dous advantage: everyone can know everything about everything.
Information today is the ‘fourth estate’: at least in theory the reporter,
the journalist and the news photographer have free access every-
where; nobody has the right to stop them or to send them away.
Everything is easy: if you wish you can receive radio or television
broadcasts from your own or any other country. You can go to the
newsstand and choose the newspaper you prefer . . .
In Hitler’s Germany a particular code was widespread: those who
knew did not talk; those who did not know did not ask questions;
those who did ask questions received no answers. In this way the typ-
ical German citizen won and defended his ignorance, which seemed
to him sufficient justification of his adherence to Nazism. Shutting
his mouth, his eyes and his ears, he built for himself the illusion of
not knowing, hence not being an accomplice to the things taking
place in front of his very door (Levi, 1987, pp. 382–3, 386).

Implied in Levi’s commentary – which also serves as the epigraph for a

key media witnessing text, Luc Boltanski’s Distant Suffering (1999) – is
the belief that in a world of mass media where all is visible, excuses like
‘we did not know’ will no longer be acceptable; with media prolifera-
tion, ignorance can never be used as justification for inaction. Contrary
to the time of the Holocaust, when restriction and censorship were
 Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski 7

the rule, the media today supplies what was unattainable then: distant
witness. Thus, for Levi the media are entrusted with the momentous
task of ‘never again’ by undertaking to forewarn against future catas-
trophes. In this sense, media witnessing is essentially the continuation
of Holocaust witnessing by other means, bearing out the imperative
of speaking against evil and misfortune wherever and whenever they
might occur. Levi’s view is admittedly naïve in assuming that knowing
necessarily leads to acting and in presupposing that information entails
involvement. If anything, the question today is not how violence takes
place without us knowing about it, but how violence takes place when it
is almost impossible not to know about it. Indeed, similar concerns have
accompanied media studies as early as Merton and Lazarsfeld’s discus-
sion of narcotic dysfunction (1948) and more recently in a wider context
under the heading of ‘compassion fatigue’ (Moeller, 1999). Nevertheless,
what Primo Levi’s words attest to is the profound commitment entailed
by witnessing in a post-Holocaust world. Media witnessing is inherently
post-Holocaust witnessing, and that black horizon is what informs its
undertaking.

9/11 and the ubiquity of witnessing

In the seminal essay on witnessing which opens the first section of this
volume, John Durham Peters makes the following claim: ‘ “Being there”
matters since it avoids the ontological depreciation of being a copy. The
copy, like hearsay, is indefinitely repeatable; the event is singular, and
its witnesses are forever irreplaceable in their privileged relation to it.
Recordings lose the hic et nunc of the event.’ This argument echoes a
similar point made by Derrida (2000) about the event being witnessed
and the event of witnessing: ‘the event’ as an instant – a singularity, a
unique and unrepeatable irruption in space and time that escapes full
encapsulation in discourse – and the event as an instance, repeatable
and designed for reiteration. According to Derrida, testimony necessarily
implies both instant and instance, both the singular and the univer-
sal, and irredeemably so: ‘The singular must be universalizable; this is
the testimonial condition’ (2000, p. 41). This latter notion of ‘instance’
approaches the idea of the ‘media event’, an occurrence created and
staged not only on behalf of its own singularity, its ‘un-depreciated’
ontological standing, but precisely in order to be represented, repeated,
and recognized over and over again – in short, to be communicated. The
Holocaust would appear to constitute ‘the event’ par excellence and to
be as far from a ‘media event’ as is possible. Its horrific uniqueness is
8 Introduction

borne out by the ultimate impossibility of its representation, by its trau-

matic irreducibility to discourse. In its extreme incarnation as an instant
that resists transmutation into discourse, the Holocaust is the event that
produced no witnesses.
What, however, of ‘the mother of all events’ as Baudrillard (2002) calls
it – the attack on the World Trade Center of September 11, 2001? This
was an event that was designed as an act of communication, as the ulti-
mate media event. In fact, it became identifiable as a particular instant
(planes being flown one after another into the Twin Towers) at the very
same time that it became meaningful as a symbolic performance staged
for global television audiences. Its nature as an instance, an image to
be distributed, repeated, and symbolically transmuted, is precisely the
reason for its occurrence as an unrepeatable and unique instant. And
what of the ‘hic et nunc’, the here and now, which according to Peters
distinguishes the event from the copy? These space–time parameters
have been utterly transformed, distended across space to the ubiquitous
point of viewing, extended in time beyond the transitory chronology of
news (here today, gone tomorrow) and into a historic temporality which
Chouliaraki, borrowing from Heidegger, calls ‘ecstatic’ – a minute that
lasts a lifetime (2006, p. 158). The ‘here’ of the planes’ impact upon the
towers, the location of the event’s ‘being’ as an instant, occurs at the
site of its symbolic decoding by viewers; its experiential ‘now’ occurs
as viewers recognize such an attack as an epochal, world-changing fact,
a historic ‘now’ which subsists far beyond the instant. This explosive
spatial and temporal extension means that television viewers are always
already interpellated by the event as its witnesses in ways that those
physically present at the horror of ground zero are not and cannot be.
Not only are they better informed about what is going on – as journalists
manage, despite the immense confusion, to piece together a remark-
ably accurate interpretation of what is happening as it is happening
(Scannell, 2004) – they are also those for whom the event occurred, its
goal and its justification, the necessary condition for its existence. The
instance is internal to the instant, and mass-mediated witnessing at a
distance underpins the very ontology of the physical event. This radical
reversal of the conventional relations of dependence between event and
media event – irreducible singularity and reiterable representation, real
and symbolic, being there and not being there – means that, in contrast
to the Holocaust, 9/11 is the event that cannot not produce witnesses.
This logic of media witnessing, this inclusion of the instance within
the instant and the representation within the event, is embedded
in the communicative structures and aesthetics of audiovisual media
 Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski 9

themselves. Photography, cinema, television, and video are technolo-

gies that, notwithstanding their reliance upon cultural conventions of
production and interpretation, nevertheless produce an indexical or ‘ref-
erential excess’ (Baker, 1996) that cannot be entirely controlled. That
is why, for Barthes’s, the photograph is the ‘absolute Particular, the
sovereign Contingency’, a unique material trace of its referent in an
irredeemable context that nevertheless – and here is the key paradox –
‘mechanically repeats what could never be repeated existentially’ (1981,
p. 4). The singularity of the instant, what Benjamin (1931/1980, p. 202)
called ‘the spark of accident’, is integral to its infinite repeatability and
is in fact what is represented and relayed. Rather than ‘ontological
depreciation’, might it not be that contemporary audiovisual media are
perpetually open to the emergence of unique events, that they enable
the recuperation of the singular?
This is a new kind of witnessing, one that is radically inclusive since
it equally registers the principal subject and the extraneous detail in
the scene before the camera, this being the real point of Barthes’ punc-
tum. John Ellis makes this one of the central tenets of his thesis, that
witnessing has become a generalized mode of relating to the world in
the age of mass media, since what is true for photography is no less
apposite for cinema (and later on, television): ‘The most astonishing
thing was that everything in the picture moved, “even the leaves on the
trees” as one observer put it . . . . It was the sudden ability to witness the
incidentals of life just as they were that produced the effect of witness’
(2000, pp. 19–20). The radical inclusion of the incidental by contem-
porary audiovisual media is at the heart of the repeatable singularity
of 9/11. Tourists taking conventional video footage of the World Trade
Center on a beautiful Manhattan morning just happen to also register
the fleeting but clearly visible outline of a plane as it approaches the
towers – filming it entirely by accident but also through the inexorable
referential excess of the camera. Seconds later, they record the explosive
moment of impact that casts off the plane’s marginal, incidental status
and retrospectively makes it the principal subject of the preceding images.
The plane only gains our attention at the moment of its destruction, just
as the image of it repeats mechanically what can never be repeated exis-
tentially, thanks to technologies of media witnessing whose referential
excess records and relays the singularity of all incidents and all events
as immanently significant.
9/11 thus marked the deliberate use of the referential inclusiveness
of modern media to interpellate its audiences as the ultimate witnesses.
You could not but see the planes hitting the towers (see them because
10 Introduction

they hit the towers) and could not but know that it was done in order
to be seen by you. This unexpected, overwhelming event, engendered
in the act of being witnessed, was the result of media witnessing in its
most mundane, everyday, and yet extraordinary incarnation: a world-
wide complex of relations between media organizations and ordinary
people that has turned anyone into a testimony-producer. More and
more of us create testimony not only because we appear in media (‘I was
there; this I what I saw’) but because we can bear witness by media,
thanks to the proliferation of cell phone and other miniature cameras
that we carry around with us as basic equipment. It was this ubiquity
of media-witnessing devices and their everyday deployment in perfectly
unremarkable contexts (tourists on holiday) that fed into the reports of
national and global television channels and provided them and their
viewers with much of the footage of the impact.
The intersection between mass media witnessing and ubiquitous
everyday media usage is not restricted to 9/11. The Asian tsunami of
2004, the bombs in London on 7 July 2005, and many other ‘unex-
pected’ events are now at least partially witnessed through the cameras
of ordinary people. 9/11 is therefore more exemplary of contemporary
media witnessing than its exceptional symbolic qualities and historic
political effects would suggest. It participates, in fact, in a system of
perpetual vigilance that takes the recurrence of catastrophe as a histor-
ical given and which involves both media organizations and ordinary
people. Vigilance is clearly a key term derived from the ‘never again’
imperative of Holocaust witnessing. One bears witness in an attempt
to make its repetition impossible. Yet witnessing post-9/11 is not only
perpetual, but also generalized across multiple, unpredictable threats
that take the whole world as their arena. In an age of globalized risks
(nuclear disasters, climate change, epidemics, terrorist attacks) we sim-
ply do not know where the next catastrophe is coming from or what
it will be (Beck, 1992). Moreover, a fundamental assumption underpin-
ning such generalized vigilance is that the acts of media witnessing of
which it is composed – whether performed by professional broadcast-
ers or a tourist’s cell phone camera, whether in New York or Sumatra –
represent a shared world: shared, that is, by both viewers and those
depicted. Media witnessing thus helps shape the creation of supra-
national ‘cosmopolitan risk publics’ (Beck, 2006) who can perceive their
own commonality through representations of shared existential threats.
The intersection between ubiquitous everyday recording technologies
and mass media organizations is often seen in purely Foucauldian terms
as a contemporary incarnation of the panopticon. Indeed, the border
 Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski 11

between vigilance and surveillance can be dangerously thin, and the

perception of commonality may simply be the consequence of a shared
apparatus of subjection. Moreover, media organizations and everyday
cell phone camera users are by no means equals. Television channels
are the gatekeepers of the airwaves – not all footage will reach their
audiences. They are also the guardians of the event’s repeatability: they
can reproduce the footage and broadcast it again whenever they want –
or not, as the case may be. There is clearly an institutional politics of
contemporary media witnessing that informs how witnessed worlds are
represented as shared and who may depict them and appear in them.
It is no accident, of course, that the most globally televised live ‘news’
event of recent years, 9/11, happened in the United States, which is
in any case the most widely reported country in the world (Wu, 2000).
Indeed, this is precisely what its perpetrators were relying on. It is also no
accident, but a direct result of global inequalities in wealth-distribution
and in the dissemination of new media technologies (as well as the tra-
ditional bias of national broadcasters in favor of culturally ‘proximate’
protagonists), that around 40 per cent of the Western news coverage
on the 2004 Asian tsunami focused on the Western tourists who made
up about 1 per cent of the victims (CARMA Report, 2006). This is the
same 1 per cent whose video cameras and cell phones were so central
in furnishing Western audiences with footage of the disaster in the first
place.
Nevertheless, media witnessing should not be reduced to either its
panoptic or political–economic characteristics. For media witnessing as
we have described it – a perpetual, generalized apparatus that welds
together singularity and its ceaseless representation, the exceptional
and the routine, specialized communication bureaucracies and ordi-
nary people with their everyday gadgets – has become autotelic. Unlike
traditional notions of judicial or scientific witnessing, and unlike the
panopticon, it does not only serve an instrumental purpose (to enable
a judgment, furnish a replicable result, discipline bodies and behavior).
Contemporary media witnessing serves as its own justification, putting
society permanently on view to itself for its own sake, as the audience
perpetually witnesses its own shared world because this is what mass
media do.
Finally, putting society on view to itself might imply that media wit-
nessing is simply a continuation or transmutation of ceremonial media
events as analyzed by Dayan and Katz (1992). This is true only to a
limited extent. Ceremonial media events can be seen as a modern, secu-
larized incarnation of traditional forms of religious witnessing. Whereas
12 Introduction

the latter brought the community together to testify to the transcen-

dence of divinity beyond historical time, ceremonial media events
affirm the continuity of the collective from one extraordinary occasion
to another by means of vicarious participation. Media witnessing, we
suggest, represents a third phase: it casts the audience as the ultimate
addressee and primary producer, making the collective both the subject
and object of everyday witnessing, testifying to its own historical reality
as it unfolds. It is the emergence of this collective performance of mun-
dane, perpetual self-affirmation – in, by, and through the media – that
makes media witnessing not only analytically useful but also culturally
significant.

∗ ∗ ∗

The moral and historical urgency in recording survivor testimony of

the Holocaust; the sense of the inadequacy of that representation; the
mass-televised trauma of 9/11 and the enormous shifts in media prac-
tices, technologies, and audiences it exemplified: these are just some
of the factors contributing to the rise of media witnessing as a topic
of increasing attention in the humanities and social sciences and its
emergence as a ‘problematic’ for thinking anew about the aesthetics,
ethics, and politics of representation. This book is an attempt to focus
that attention and to explore new directions of thought. Its articles take
as axiomatic the fruitfulness and timeliness of media witnessing as a
way of enabling reflection upon a range of historical and contemporary
concerns: the epistemology of communication, the sociology of knowl-
edge, media ethics, the authority of journalism, technology and agency,
the depiction of suffering and the challenges of humanitarian interven-
tion, the representation of otherness, and morality and political action
among many others.
The book is divided into two sections. The first, ‘Perspectives on Media
Witnessing’, groups together five chapters that probe the theoretical
and philosophical dimensions of media witnessing. The second, ‘Per-
formances of Media Witnessing’, includes more case-specific studies.
The first section begins with a reprint of John Durham Peters’s essay
‘Witnessing’, originally published in 2001. Along with John Ellis’s book
Seeing Things (2000), to which it is in many ways a critical response,
Peters’s essay lays the groundwork for much of the subsequent dis-
cussions of media witnessing, providing them with a vocabulary of
concepts and claims, and – occasionally but inevitably – serving as
the target of their criticisms. The essay sets out the complex historical
 Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski 13

dynamics and high philosophical stakes of witnessing as a form of medi-

ation, outlining the perpetual fragility of witnessing and the enduring
moral centrality of its foundation in embodied experience, no less in the
age of media replication and simulation than in any other. Unpacking
the various aspects of the veracity gap inherent in such traditions as law,
religion, and epistemology, Peters finally sketches out four modalities
of witnessing: ‘being there’ (presence in time and space), ‘live trans-
mission’ (presence in time, absence in space), ‘historicity’ (presence in
space, absence in time), and ‘recording’ (absence in time and space). Of
the four, he argues, the last is least likely to sustain the act of witness-
ing, while the remaining three form a gradation of witnessing, with full
presence as the paradigm case.
In addition to this reprint we publish ‘An Afterword: Torchlight Red
on Sweaty Faces’, especially written by John Peters for this volume in
the light of the debates sparked by the original essay, which serves not
to end the discussion but to further lay open its terms for reflection and
disputation.
Peters’s article and afterword are followed immediately by an essay
by Paul Frosh, which is one of the most explicitly critical published
engagements with Peters’s views on witnessing and media (some read-
ers may prefer to read Peters’s Afterword after they have read Frosh’s
chapter). Frosh’s main area of disagreement is with Peters’s emphasis on
‘being there’ as the paradigm case of witnessing. The logical extension
of this emphasis is that media audiences are not the witnesses of the
events they see, but the recipients of someone else’s testimony. Frosh
takes issue with this view, claiming that contemporary witnessing has
become a general mode of receptivity to electronic media reports about
distant others. Replacing the ontological primacy of the witness with
the interpretive encounter between audiences and ‘witnessing texts’,
Frosh uses the example of the Passover Haggadah to outline these texts’
world-making properties and the imaginative demands they make of
their addressees. He then argues that mass media witnessing situates this
imaginative engagement with others within an impersonal framework
of ‘indifferent’ social relations, creating a ground of civil equivalence
between strangers that is fundamentally linked to the social production
of moral universals in contemporary societies.
In the next chapter, John Ellis develops his take on the position of
television audiences as witnesses, arguing that their role intricately com-
bines the direct interpersonal hearing of testimony, the observing role
of the bystander, and the necessity for judgment. Modern audiovisual
media give audiences the possibility of seeing almost directly any aspect
14 Introduction

of the action. Yet ‘seeing through the camera, hearing through micro-
phones, is always already a position of analysis’. Against the assumption
that audiences are naïve dupes of media representations, Ellis maintains
that viewers can see televised events in the knowledge that their view
is partial and circumscribed. In addition, audiences are the addressees
of a form of witnessing that is ‘complexly discursive’: unlike eyewit-
ness testimony in a courtroom, televisual witnessing is assembled from
many fragments of information, footage, diverse viewpoints, sources by
a large number of people working in organizations subject to discur-
sive rules and power relations. Audiences therefore also potentially sit
in judgment of the witnessing acts of the broadcasters themselves, an
analytical mode of reception which has itself been thematized within
media output as ‘the forensic attitude’ shared by interrogatory news
reporting and crime lab television dramas. This attitude of judgment,
however, is constantly mixed with the social dynamics of media witness-
ing’s mundane, everyday nature, which unceasingly permeates the lives
of viewers with an awareness of themselves as historical actors, sharing
their present with others beyond their immediate experience. A defining
characteristic of contemporary civilization, ‘mundane witness therefore
gives us a responsibility to know about the actions of others almost as a
precondition of knowledge about ourselves’.
Günter Thomas posits witnessing as a distinctively ‘successful’ cultural
form that has endured a complex process of evolution and adapta-
tion. Tracing the historical roots of witnessing within religious and legal
practices from antiquity to modernity, Thomas proceeds to analyze the
dynamics of witnessing in terms of its structural attributes, its stabil-
ity as well as its adaptive plasticity. While acknowledging the discursive
and performative aspects of witnessing, his perspective seeks to place
witnessing within the broader context of communication systems, cul-
tural forms, and formats. This allows for the re-conceptualization of
concepts such as confession as a ritualized form of witnessing, the diary
as an introspective form of self-witnessing, and the modern novel as
an outgrowth of the two. Furthermore, Thomas identifies the latest
transmutation of the religious and legal forms of witnessing in con-
temporary media genres. Journalists and newscasters are heirs of legal
witnessing in that their undertaking ‘relates to and transforms disputed,
unstable, conflicting, or transitory realities and makes accessible the inac-
cessible’; the confessional genre, so popular in various entertainment
television formats and talk-shows, is heir to religious witnessing in that
it allows ‘individuals the chance to articulate their miseries, their wrong-
doings, their conflicts, their “sins”, and their moral status’. Witnessing
 Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski 15

thus arises as an exceptionally resilient cultural form of communication,

successfully shifting from the medium of speech to audiovisual media.
Like Thomas, Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes also hark back
to the early roots of witnessing in an ancient past. Likewise, their
analysis deems the archaic constructions of witnessing relevant to
contemporary trends. However, their recourse to biblical witnessing
challenges the prevailing modern notions of testimony, which, accord-
ing to them, are predicated on legal concepts and rationale. In contrast
to the mediating function of witness, Blondheim and Liebes invoke an
understanding of witnessing as a collective experience, unfolding either
through the public recognition of a transformative event or a transfor-
mation enacted through public recognition. In either case, the witness
is cast as an addressee, not a medium; it is the collective that does
the witnessing, directly and without mediation. Such is the meaning
that arises from the biblical text (as revealed by the various inflections
of the Hebrew word ‘ed), which positions the collective as both the
audience and the agent of bearing witness to the covenant between
God and the congregation. This model of witnessing serves to reexam-
ine the different modalities of witnessing produced by modern media
technology. If archaic witnessing is always about ‘here and now’, tele-
vision approximates the archaic mode with ‘there and now’, producing
a contemporary form of the collective, public undertaking. Perhaps the
biggest challenge for this approach is new media and the multichan-
nel distribution they promote, which the authors deem inimical to the
prospect of collective witnessing.
In the opening chapter to the book’s second section, Tamar Ashuri
and Amit Pinchevski attempt to rethink the stakes in media witnessing
by analyzing witnessing as a political struggle. In contrast to previous
speculations by others, Ashuri and Pinchevski see the ontology of wit-
nessing as dependent upon the specific event rather than an abstract
model. Furthermore, they understand witnessing as subject to con-
testation, as something to be earned, not simply given. Drawing on
Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of the field, they designate witnessing as a
field of special power–knowledge configurations. The field of witnessing
accommodates all the key agents of media witnessing – eyewitnesses,
mediators, and the audience – each with their own interests, goals, posi-
tions, and resources. While among the agents the mediators are the
most dominant, the inbuilt hierarchy of the field is tempered by the
agents’ interdependency, from those closest to the event to those most
remote. What is at stake for each actor is the ability to gain his or her
addressee’s trust (and thereby render the competition untrustworthy).
16 Introduction

It follows that witnessing is a conflict-ridden practice, part of life’s

struggles and ordeals – a far cry from both the elevated, transcenden-
tal model of religious witnessing and the rational–logical model of legal
witnessing. The essay concludes with a case study analysis of two docu-
mentaries about the contested events in the Jenin refugee camp during
the clashes between the Israeli army and Palestinian fighters in March
2002. The two films serve to further exemplify the competing attempts
at dominating the field of witnessing with respect to the event of Jenin.
Carrie Rentschler’s essay also concerns the practice of media witness-
ing by examining the framing of journalism’s witnessing role in profes-
sional training manuals and programs as well as in the self-descriptions
of journalists themselves. In particular, Rentschler examines how the
concepts of ‘witness’ and ‘testimony’ as well as the experiential dimen-
sions of ‘trauma’ are being reworked through depictions of journalism as
a wounded, affective practice of observation. Rentschler critically ana-
lyzes this reworking by focusing on two particularly conspicuous images
of journalism in contemporary North America: the endangered war cor-
respondent and the traumatized domestic journalist covering major
catastrophes and crimes. The dangers of war reporting are depicted
most directly in news stories of reporters killed in Iraq and other war
zones and in first-person accounts of combat by correspondents. Such
depictions typically construct the reality of reporting through a dis-
course of risk in which journalists are situated as witnesses to militarized
states of insecurity. The perils facing domestic news reporters are por-
trayed in contexts as varied as training manuals and courses addressing
post-traumatic stress disorder in journalism education, psychological
studies on noncombat reporters, and first-person reports by journal-
ists on their experiences of psychological trauma after covering major
crises. Trade journals and training protocols are, according to Rentschler,
increasingly foregrounding the concept of trauma in journalism as a
concomitant of journalism’s witnessing imperative, often drawing on
the language of emergency service personnel to define domestic news
workers as ‘first responders’ and news reporting as being on the front-
line. By critically analyzing contemporary portrayals and professional
self-depictions of journalism, the essay pries open the practical and
organizational intersections between reportorial witnessing, risk, and
trauma, providing a unique vantage point from which to evaluate
changes in the status of journalists as key agents and subjects of media
witnessing.
Joan Leach presents a different take on the mediation process
involved in media witnessing by addressing the question of the scientific
 Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski 17

witness. While media scholars have often resorted to trauma discourse

when thinking through the prospects of mediated witness, Leach fol-
lows an alternative trajectory drawing on the epistemological tradition,
in which witnessing is regarded as a practice that combines observation,
corroboration, and the diffusion of knowledge. Testimony is at the heart
of many scientific procedures, as very few actually witness the exper-
iments, results, or data that support scientific postulations. Scientific
testimony is therefore doubly mediated, involving ‘reports of others’
reports and of machines and instrumentation’, thereby locating science
at the junction of social communication and technological mediation.
Tracking the intellectual roots of scientific witnessing in the seventeenth
century, Leach demonstrates its reliance on rhetoric to produce a ‘scien-
tific author’ as a figure of knowledge and authority. This puts scientific
witnessing alongside other forms of witnessing – particularly of the reli-
gious kind – which proceed as a social process that engages various
audiences. Leach observes the historical coincidence between the rise of
machine testimony (and its depictions in popular culture in television
shows like CSI) and the prevalence of the traumatic witness in vari-
ous realms of culture. These seemingly unrelated forms of witnessing
bespeak the power of mediation in contemporary culture.
Finally, Roy Brand approaches media witnessing from the precepts
of trauma theory. Designating witnessing as a pragmatic mode of relat-
ing to trauma, Brand departs from the ontological and epistemological
legacies of witnessing to recast it as deeply paradoxical: ‘To witness is
to stand in for the absence of experience, but in so doing, witnessing
recalls the very absence it attempts to resolve.’ Thus witnessing is predi-
cated upon a certain absence; it is about what it lacks rather than what
it can capture. At the center of the discussion is Gus Van Sant’s film
Elephant (inspired by the events surrounding the high school massacre
in Columbine),which, according to Brand, enacts cinematically what
Walter Benjamin called the loss of communicable experience. The film
evokes a kind of media witnessing that is ever so vigilant of what it can-
not fully narrate. Contrary to other attempts to explain or describe what
happened on that day (such as Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine),
this film opts for an affective impact; neither factual nor fictional, it
performs the loss of experience rather than articulating it. The audi-
ence thus comes to inhabit a precarious position that defies convenient
deduction, bearing witness to the impossibility of bearing full witness.
Through this experiential limbo a more profound sense of media wit-
nessing is said to emerge: the acknowledgment of our involvement
when watching and ascribing meaning to what we see.
18 Introduction

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 Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski 19

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Part I
Perspectives on Media Witnessing
1
Witnessing
John Durham Peters

Witnessing is a common but rarely examined term in both the pro-

fessional performance and academic analysis of media events. Media
institutions have enthusiastically adopted its rhetoric, especially for
nonfiction genres such as news, sports, and documentary. Such titles
as Eyewitness News, See it Now, Live at Five, or As it Happens advertise
their program’s privileged proximity to events. Media personae such as
correspondents and newsreaders can be institutionalized as witnesses.
Cameras and microphones are often presented as substitute eyes and
ears for audiences who can witness for themselves. Ordinary people can
be witnesses in media (the vox pop interview, ‘tell us how it happened’),
of media (members of studio audience), and via media (watching his-
tory unfold at home in their armchairs). The media claim to provide
testimonies for our inspection, thus making us witnesses of the way of
the world. As a term of art, witnessing outshines more colorless com-
petitors such as viewing, listening or consuming, reading, interpreting,
or decoding, for thinking about the experience of media. What is the
significance of this pervasive way of talking?
In this chapter, I propose to untangle the concept of witnessing
in order to illuminate basic problems in media studies. Witnessing is
an intricately tangled practice. It raises questions of truth and expe-
rience, presence and absence, death and pain, seeing and saying, and
the trustworthiness of perception – in short, fundamental questions
of communication. The long history of puzzlement and prescription
about proper witnessing that developed in oral and print cultures is a
rich resource for reflection about some of the ambiguities of audiovisual
media. Hoary philosophical issues (such as the epistemological status
of the senses) often show up in media practices in surprising ways; in

23
24 Witnessing

turn, media practices can, if seen in the proper lighting, also clarify old
philosophical worries.
An important step in this direction has been taken in John Ellis’s See-
ing Things (2000), whose lucid arguments I wish to extend and nuance.
Witnessing, for Ellis, is a distinct mode of perception: ‘we cannot say
we do not know’ is its motto. To witness an event is to be responsi-
ble in some way to it. The stream of data flowing through the unaided
senses already exceeds our explanatory schemata. The present moment
supplies enough sensory information to outlast a lifetime of analysis.
Audiovisual media, however, are able to catch contingent details of
events that would previously have been either imperceptible or lost to
memory. A camera can reveal the impact of a bullet in an apple; the tape
recorder can fix an off-the-record comment. Such mechanical, ‘dumb’
media seem to present images and sounds as they happened, without
the embellishments and blind spots that human perception and mem-
ory routinely impose. We thus find ourselves endowed with a much
amplified and nuanced record of events, a ‘super-abundance of details’
rich with evidentiary value. Though photography, sound-recording,
film, and radio have all expanded the realm of sensory evidence, Ellis
singles out television in particular. ‘Separated in space yet united in time,
the co-presence of the television image was developing a distinct form
of witness. Witnessing became a domestic act . . . . Television sealed the
twentieth century’s fate as the century of witness’ (Ellis, 2000, p. 32).
Liveness is a key characteristic of televisual witnessing, including the
morally problematic witnessing of violence and carnage. He advances
witnessing as a key term for media analysis that, he believes, is freer of
ontological baggage than other more commonly used concepts.
For Ellis, in sum, witnessing has to do with complicity; owes much
to modern media of inscription; is an attitude cultivated by live televi-
sion, particularly nonfiction programming; and a valuable resource for
media analysis. I would concur with Ellis in everything with the excep-
tion that witnessing actually carries weighty baggage, if not ontological,
at least historical. Yet this baggage is not only a burden, but also a poten-
tial treasure, at least since it makes explicit the pervasive link between
witnessing and suffering and shows the degree to which media problems
with witnessing are built upon venerable communication problems that
are inherent in the witness as a kind of signifying act. The ‘baggage’ has
three main interrelated sources: law, theology, and atrocity. In law, the
notion of the witness as a privileged source of information for judicial
decisions is ancient and is part of most known legal systems. In the-
ology, the notion of witness, especially as martyr, developed in early
 John Durham Peters 25

Christianity, though it has resonance for other religious traditions as

well. The third, most recent, source dates from the Second World War:
the witness as a survivor of hell, prototypically but not exclusively the
Holocaust or Shoah. These three domains endow ‘witnessing’ with its
extraordinary moral and cultural force today, since each ties the act
of witnessing, in some deep way, to life and death. The procedures of
the courtroom, the pain of the martyr, and the cry of the survivor cast
light on basic questions such as what it means to watch, to narrate, or
to be present at an event. Witnessing, as an amazingly subtle array of
practices for securing truth from the facts of our sensitivity to pain and
our inevitable death, increases the stakes of our thinking about media
events.

Analyzing the term

As a noun, witness is intricate. The term involves all three points of a

basic communication triangle: (1) the agent who bears witness, (2) the
utterance or text itself, (3) the audience who witnesses. It is thus a
strange but intelligible sentence to say: the witness (speech-act) of the
witness (person) was witnessed (by an audience). A witness can also be
the performance itself. Thus we speak of a Holocaust survivor’s witness
against fascism. In African-American churches when preachers ask ‘Can
I get a witness?’, they invite audience affirmation and participation, the
witness as a public gesture of faith. In religious contexts, witness can also
have a more private meaning as inward conviction of religious truth,
which in turn may motivate the activity of ‘witnessing’ (evangelizing).
In law, literature, history, and journalism alike, a witness is an observer
or source possessing privileged (raw, authentic) proximity to facts. A wit-
ness, in sum, can be an actor (one who bears witness), an act (the making
of a special sort of statement), the semiotic residue of that act (the state-
ment as text), or the inward experience that authorizes the statement
(the witnessing of an event).
As a verb, to witness has a double aspect. To witness can be a sensory
experience – the witnessing of an event with one’s own eyes and ears.
We are all, constantly, witnesses in this sense simply by virtue of finding
ourselves in places and times where things happen. Most of what we
witness is insignificant in the larger scheme of things and vanishes into
oblivion. But witnessing is also the discursive act of stating one’s expe-
rience for the benefit of an audience that was not present at the event
and yet must make some kind of judgment about it. Witnesses serve as
the surrogate sense organs of the absent. If what we have witnessed is
26 Witnessing

crucial for a judgment, we may be summoned to a formal institutional

setting: a court of law, a church, or a television studio. A witness is the
paradigm case of a medium: the means by which experience is supplied
to others who lack the original.
To witness thus has two faces: the passive one of seeing and the active
one of saying. In passive witnessing an accidental audience observes the
events of the world; in active witnessing one is a privileged possessor
and producer of knowledge in an extraordinary, often forensic, setting
in which speech and truth are policed in multiple ways. What one has
seen authorizes what one says: an active witness first must have been a
passive one. Herein lies the fragility of witnessing: the difficult junc-
ture between experience and discourse. The witness is authorized to
speak by having been present at an occurrence. A private experience
enables a public statement. But the journey from experience (the seen)
into words (the said) is precarious. Witnessing presupposes a discrepancy
between the ignorance of one person and the knowledge of another: it is
an intensification of the problem of communication more generally. It
always involves an epistemological gap whose bridging is always fraught
with difficulty. No transfusion of consciousness is possible. Words can be
exchanged, experiences cannot. Testimony is another’s discourse whose
universe of reference diverges from one’s own. Like somebody else’s
pain, it always has a twilight status between certainty and doubt. A par-
ent may bear witness to a child that a stove is hot, but getting burnt
may be more persuasive. Witnessing is a discourse with a hole in it that
awaits filling.

The unreliability of witnesses

Witnesses, human or mechanical, are notoriously contradictory and

inarticulate. Different people who witness the ‘same’ event can produce
remarkably divergent accounts. Though awareness of the poor epis-
temological quality of witnessing is ancient, twentieth-century social
science has explored it in detail. Eyewitness testimony, for instance, has
been subject to intense social–psychological scrutiny (for example, Ross
et al., 1994). We now know that errors in identifying people and faces
are common, with potentially devastating consequences for justice. In
reports by different eyewitnesses, moustaches fly on and off faces, blon-
des morph into brunettes, and clothes change color like chameleons.
Hats have major effects on recognition, because of the role of the hair-
line in identifying faces. Post-event tampering, both from inside and
 John Durham Peters 27

outside, can also alter testimony. From within, the psychological pro-
cess of dissonance-reduction has the paradoxical effect of increasing
confidence in accuracy of recall even while the memory of the event is
fading; from without, testimonies can be shaped by the schematic con-
straints of narrative structure and altered, perhaps even created, by the
way they are probed (‘refreshed’) by others. Social science methodology
has noted the dubious evidentiary status of statements about even one’s
own attitudes and opinions. From polling, we know about acquiescence
effects (the tendency of people to agree), the huge effects of phrasing
on reported opinions, and the divergence between front-door and back-
door measures (Webb et al., 1981). Fabrication seems inherent in the
loose coupling between sentences and the world; witnesses are evidently
a fallible transmission and storage medium for sensory experience.
The legal theory of evidence is also a compendium of reflections about
the (un)reliability of witnesses. There is a long history of excluding
people as incompetent witnesses on various grounds. Non-Christians,
convicts, interested parties, spouses, children, the insane, or those stand-
ing in a relationship of professional privilege with the defendant have
all been considered hindered in truth-telling or as possessing special
motives to fabrication. As in survey research, the law has an acute aware-
ness about the ways that modes of interrogation (for example, leading
questions) can manufacture, rather than elicit, testimony.
Since the transformation from experience to discourse lies at the
heart of communication theory, witnessing entails many of the most
fundamental issues in the social life of signs, especially how the raw,
apparently private, stuff of sensation can have any input into the public
world of intelligible words (also a fundamental question in empiricist
philosophy since Locke and Hume). The forensics of the trial, the pains
of the martyr, and the memoirs of the survivor are all attempts to
overpower the melancholy fact that direct sensory experience – from
the taste of pineapple to the pains of childbirth – vanishes when put
into words and remains inaccessible to others except inasmuch as they
claim to share similar experiences. Sensation is encircled into privately
personal ontologies. Only words are public.

Pain and the veracity gap

A variety of answers have been offered to cope with the fallibility of wit-
nessing. Devices to compensate for its inherent dubiousness are ancient.
One can vouch for veracity by an oath promising to trade death or pain
for truth, a practice that persists in the children’s line, ‘cross my heart
28 Witnessing

and hope to die’. One may appeal to ultimate authority: ‘God is my

witness’. According to Aristotle, witnesses in a court of law testify at
risk of punishment if they do not tell the truth; he considers dead wit-
nesses more trustworthy, since they cannot be bribed (Rhetoric, 1376a).
To witness as if you were as dumb and indifferent as the dead is the
obvious ideal, since you would be free from interest, interpretation, care,
and spin. A signature is a testimony: ‘in witness hereof . . . ’, and like all
forms of witnessing, it founders on the reef of forgery. The requirement
of swearing on a Bible before testifying in court is yet another device to
enforce truth-telling, presumably by instilling the specter of eternal con-
sequences. A reminder of the ancient worry about corrupt testimony is
the ninth Mosaic commandment forbidding false witness (not the same
thing as simple lying).
From the ancient Greeks to ‘modern’ intelligence-gathering, the effort
to assure the transition from sensation to sentences in testimony has
involved torture – a perverse but illuminating fact. As Page duBois (1991)
argues, the ancient Greek word for torture, basanos, originally meant a
touchstone, against which you could rub golden artifacts to test if they
were genuine; if so, a bit would rub off and leave a mark. From there,
basanos came to mean any test of truth or authenticity (for example, of
friendship or fidelity), and eventually moved specifically into torture,
which served as an instrument of proof in ancient Athens. In Greek ide-
ology, torture served as a cultural line dividing slaves, who respect only
bodily pain, and citizens, who speak the logos in freedom. Since slaves
supposedly lie compulsively, torture exposes the truth by extinguish-
ing the power to invent. (Here again we see the snobbery about who
can be expected to be a truthful witness.) Torture enforces the claim
that slaves are ruled by necessity (anangkê). A slave could not appear in
court, but a slave’s testimony obtained under torture was admissible as
evidence. Even so, there were already doubts about the notion that pain
produces truth. Aristotle (Rhetoric, 1377a) thought testimony obtained
under torture ‘inartistic’ and generally distrusted testimony in any case.
The shift toward the confession as a source of legal proof in
thirteenth-century Europe reintroduced judicial torture. It was not
understood as a kind of punishment, but, cruel as it may sound, as a
kind of data-gathering; that innocent people might suffer and even die
under interrogation was considered an unfortunate by-product of legal
investigation (Langbein, 1977; Peters, 1985). Pain was supposed to be
the midwife of authenticity. Judicial torture was an attempt to assure the
validity of the confession, a rather nasty way of coping with the verac-
ity gap. In our grisly age, torture is both a method of punishment and
 John Durham Peters 29

of extracting intelligence, a fact signaled in the French term la question,

which means both torture and interrogation, or the English phrase, ‘put
to the question’. Even a polygraph test – a ‘lie-detector’ that circumvents
discourse to tap ‘direct’ physiological indicators – shows the retreat to
the body as the haven of truth. Deathbed confessions possess special
legal status, since the incentive to deceive is thought minimal. As one
judge wrote, ‘they are declarations made in extremity, when the party is
at the point of death, and when every hope of this world is gone; when
every motive to falsehood has been silenced, and the mind is induced
by the most powerful considerations to speak the truth . . . ’ (Cross, 1974,
p. 472). Here again is the sense that death or pain impels the mind to
forego the temptation to embellish.
The bodily basis of testimony is seen in a strange etymological com-
plex. Testimony stems from testamentum, covenant (testis plus mentum).
Testis, which in Latin means both witness and testicle, itself stems from
tertius, meaning third (party). In ancient Greek, the word for witness
is the word for testicle: parastatês, which literally means bystander. In
German, Zeugnis means testimony, and zeugen means to testify as well
as to procreate. The explanation of this pervasive and odd system of
metaphors is obscure, but one may conjecture that the testicles, as phys-
ical bystanders to the act of procreation, were thought witnesses of
paternity or virility in Indo-European culture. That knowing first-hand
should be associated with the testicles may suggest an ancient preference
for the testimony of men over women. This curious web of metaphors,
whatever its significance, attests to some deep assumptions about the
physicality of witnessing. The body serves as a sort of collateral to jus-
tify the loan of our credence. The whole apparatus of trying to assure
truthfulness, from torture to martyrdom to courtroom procedure, only
testifies to the strange lack at its core. Witnessing is necessary, but not
sufficient: if there are no witnesses, there is no trial, but witnesses do not
secure a conviction or acquittal. A witness is never conclusive or final
despite the most militant attempts of martyrs or torturers to make it so.
Another ancient attempt bodily to bridge the gap between inner con-
viction and outer persuasion is the tradition of Christian martyrology.
As Paul Ricoeur argues:

The witness is capable of suffering or dying for what he believes.

When the test of conviction becomes the price of life, the wit-
ness changes his name; he is called a martyr. But is it a change of
name? – Martus in Greek means ‘witness.’ . . . Testimony is both a
manifestation and a crisis of appearances (1981, p. 129).
30 Witnessing

To judge from appearances is the fate of all who have to rely on com-
munication for access to others’ experiences. The martyr’s death proves
nothing for certain, but demonstrates the limit-case of persuasion,
the vanishing point at which proof stops and credence begins. Saints
Stephen or Sebastian, or their secular equivalents, the many political
martyrs whose legacies are so powerful today, may impress bystanders
with their composure under the most gruesome abuses, but their deaths
alone will not convince anyone of the truth of their faith: one needs
internal grounds for believing. To bear witness is to put one’s body on
the line. Within every witness, perhaps, stands a martyr, the will to cor-
roborate words with something beyond them, pain and death being the
last resorts.
Since the Second World War, new kinds of witnessing have been
forged in the furnace of suffering. The Holocaust has generated deep
thinking about the nature of witnessing (Felman and Laub, 1992). It is
striking, by the way, that Ellis (2000), despite his incisive comments on
psychoanalytic working-through of trauma and the complicity of the
bystander, hardly mentions the Holocaust – perhaps because it is too
obvious. In any case, from ashes and hell have emerged witnesses whose
task, paradoxically, is to proclaim experiences that cannot be shared and
to immortalize events that are uniquely tied to the mortal bodies of
those who went through them. Elie Wiesel, for instance, has made his
career reflecting on the privilege and loneliness of the survivor. One’s
responsibility to bear witness, he argues, cannot be delegated: testimony
is unique to the survivor. It is impossible for the witness to remain silent;
but it is also impossible for the witness to describe the event. The mil-
itancy in the survivor’s voice owes to the battle against oblivion and
indifference. Such militancy is found no less in the martyr, who like-
wise uses his or her body as spectacle of pain to convict the conscience
of the observer. Already having cheated death, the survivor seeks to save
his or her experiences for others who can never have them.
Specifically, the witness has become a literary genre growing out of the
Second World War. Primo Levi, Anne Frank, Victor Klemperer, Wiesel,
to name a few, have the cultural authority of witnesses of atrocity.
As survivors of events, they in turn bear active witness which we, at
one remove, can in turn witness passively. There is a strange ethical
claim in the voice of the victim. Witnessing in this sense suggests a
morally justified individual who speaks out against unjust power. Imag-
ine a Nazi who published his memoirs of the war as a ‘witness’ – it
might be accepted as an account of experiences, but never as a ‘wit-
ness’ in the moral sense: to witness means to be on the right side.
 John Durham Peters 31

Václav Havel, Jacobo Timerman, Rigoberta Menchú, Martin Luther King,

Solzhenitsyn, Mandela, Aung San Suu Kyi – those who have languished
in jail – all stand as witnesses against inhumanity. (Testimonio is a recent
genre of Latin American writing which records the cry against oppres-
sion.) The prison (or prison camp) is the house of witness, a maker of
moral authority, just as prison literature has turned out to be one of the
great forms of twentieth-century writing. The moral privilege of the cap-
tive and martyr is a founding narrative in European civilization, as in the
case of both Socrates and Jesus. Not surprisingly, there has been some-
thing of a scramble to capture the prestige of the victim-witness, and
media who speak of their role as witnesses are not immune. (A recent
book on the making of Schindler’s List is pretentiously called Witness,
confusing the film and what the film was about.) Witnessing places mor-
tal bodies in time. To witness always involves risk, potentially to have
your life changed. The Roman poet Ovid bemoaned his banishment to
the Black Sea for seeing something in the emperor’s court he was not
supposed to. You can be marked for life by being the witness of an event.
The FBI runs the evocatively named ‘witness protection program’ pro-
viding personal security and sometimes new identities for those willing
to turn state witness. Abraham Zapruder is famous (and his heirs are now
rich) for a few seconds of home-movie footage of a presidential parade
in Dallas on 22 November 1963. In Graham Greene’s Brighton Rock, the
gangster Pinky marries the only witness to a murder he committed in
order to make her, as a wife, an incompetent witness, but of course, as
usual in Greene, a sort of redemption occurs via the corruption. That
simply seeing can mark your bodily fate is a suggestive way of getting
beyond the idea of mere spectatorship.
In sum, the indisputables of pain and death can serve as a resource
to persuade others of the truth of one’s words of witness. Witnessing is
a mode of communication intimately tied to the mortality of both the
one who bears witness and the one who in turn witnesses that act. As
Jorge Luís Borges writes:

Deeds which populate the dimensions of space and which reach their
end when someone dies may cause us wonderment, but one thing,
or an infinite number of things, dies in every final agony . . . In time
there was a day that extinguished the last eyes to see Christ; the battle
of Jenin and the love of Helen died with a man (1964, p. 243).

Witnessing, as we will see, not only turns on the mortality of the

witness, but the contingencies of the event.
32 Witnessing

Objectivity and the veracity gap

A different tradition seeks to secure the validity of statements without

the metaphysical and moral conundrums of pain. Very roughly speak-
ing, the effort to put testimony on a sound footing is a project of the
Enlightenment, both in the effort to minimize violence and to secure
trustworthy knowledge. Indeed, one of the major tasks in the rise of
modern science generally, with its need for cumulative observation from
many eyes and ears, was to overcome the low repute of testimony. This
was first achieved in seventeenth-century England with the creation of a
genteel class of scientists, whose shared social status and norms of civil-
ity established a basis for trusting each other’s reports (Shapin, 1994).
As one scholar quips of the epistemology of testimony in early modern
English science, gentlemen prefer gentlemen (Lipton, 1998). Without
trust in others’ statements about sensory experiences, science as we
know it would be impossible. Further, the use of scientific instrumen-
tation was motivated in part by the desire to bypass the stains of subjec-
tivity, fallibility, and interest that attach to our sense organs. Scientific
instruments such as the microscope or telescope were thought thing-
like, and hence credible, in their indifference to human interests. The
camera and microphone inherit this tradition of objectivity as passivity.
John Locke exemplifies these transformations. In his Essay Concerning
Human Understanding (1975, book 4, chapters 13–16), Locke inverts the
medieval notion of testimony: he maintains it is not the authority of an
ancient text (such as scripture) but the report of the senses. Few things,
he argues, in human knowledge are demonstrably certain. As social crea-
tures with limited time to gain knowledge of a world in commotion, we
rely on the reports of others but must find ways to test their trustwor-
thiness. Among the various standards he offers, key is a hierarchy of
testimony determined by the witness’s proximity to the event: ‘any Tes-
timony, the farther off it is from the original Truth, the less force and
proof it has’ (1975, pp. 663–4). Eyewitness accounts lose truth (but may
gain color) as they pass from mouth to mouth:

A credible Man vouching his Knowledge of it, is a good proof: But if

another equally credible, do witness it from his Report, the Testimony
is weaker; and a third that attests the Hear-say of an Hear-say, is yet
less considerable (1975, p. 664).

Locke notes already the infinite regress in witnessing: to be an active

witness requires another to witness your testimony (a passive witness).
 John Durham Peters 33

Locke reflects the low legal status of hearsay: the reporting of state-
ments made by someone else outside court without the opportunity
for cross-examination. Any statement not made in court under oath
is of dubious admissibility. Hearsay is quotation, testimony at second-
hand. Each sentence is supposed to be funded by direct sensation, and in
reporting another’s reports, one is a passive witness of an active witness
(instead of the reverse), which is dangerously derivative. The low esteem
in which hearsay is held signals not only the hierarchy of the senses (the
precedence of eyes over ears) but also the working epistemology of the
courtroom: the act of linking experience and discourse must be done in
a controlled setting in which speech is subject to cross-examination and
penalties for perjury are in force. In this the law still maintains respect
for death or pain as truth-serums. Witness is borne under sanction –
whether of pain or death or legal charges and dishonor. One testifies
quite literally sub poena – under threat of punishment. Witnesses can
find themselves bodily compelled to appear in court. It does not take a
Foucault to see that today witnessing is policed at its boundaries by an
apparatus of pain.
Legal rules prefer a mechanical witness. A witness, for instance, may
not offer an opinion (about culpability, for instance) but may only
describe the facts of what was seen. The blanker the witness the better.
Things, after all, can bear witness – the biblical stone of witness, tro-
phies, or other sorts of material evidence (bloodstains). The ideal human
witness would behave like a thing: a mere tablet of recording. The struc-
ture of address in testimony should be radically open and public, not
varying the story for different audiences. (‘Estoppel’ is the legal principle
that prevents altering testimony previously given.) Since a dumb witness
does not know what is at stake, there is no motive to lend comfort to
one party or the other.
In the preference for the dumb witness lies a distant origin of both sci-
entific and journalistic ideas of objectivity: the observer as a mirror, dull
as the microscope to human concerns or consequences. The objective
witness is very different from the survivor, whose witness lies in mortal
engagement with the story told. The objective witness claims disem-
bodiment and passivity, a cold indifference to the story, offering ‘just
the facts’. The hearers have to compose the story for themselves. In one
sense, the claim to objectivity is simply passive witnessing idealized, that
is, the dream of an unadulterated and public record of events as they
‘really happened’. The cultural authority of mechanical recording lies
in the claim to document events without the filter of subjective expe-
rience. Since witnesses were supposed to be like machines, machines
34 Witnessing

are also held to be good witnesses. The conventional wisdom about

film and photography today, however, is the inescapability of interest
in all representation. What most irks the friends of science and reason –
Locke’s heirs – about this position is not so much the notion that a
consensual and objective document of events is impossible, but rather
its darker corollary: that pain serves as the default measure of reality
and authenticity. We were, they say, supposed to have graduated from
all that!

Broadcasting and the veracity gap

Distance is a ground of distrust and doubt. We waver about another’s

testimony because of our distance from the experience they narrate.
In the same way, reports from distant personae are more dubious than
those from people we know and trust. The communication situation of
broadcasting is analogous to that of witnessing: experiences are medi-
ated to an audience which has no first-hand acquaintance with them.
The legitimation of the veracity gap in media followed the same path as
in witnessing: using pain and the body as a criterion of truth and truth-
fulness. The body is authenticity’s last refuge in situations of structural
doubt. Perhaps the best single thing Walter Cronkite ever did for his
reputation of credibility, besides the years of steady service, was to shed
an unrehearsed tear on camera when reporting the news of President
Kennedy’s assassination. In the Gospel of Luke, Christ’s disciples ‘were
startled and terrified, and thought that they were seeing a ghost’ (Luke
24:37). The resurrected Jesus assures them, ‘Handle me and see, for a
ghost does not have flesh and bones as you see that I have’ (Luke 24:39).
Modern media – which resurrect and transport phantasms in optical and
acoustic channels – both place us in the situation of doubting Thomas
and attempt a similar reassurance: handle me and see (Peters, 1999).
One of the most daring things in media events theory (Dayan and
Katz, 1992) is the question: just when can media be agents of truth
or authenticity instead of prevarication and ideology? In other words,
can the media sustain the practice of witnessing? The notion that home
audiences could be witnesses is one of those apparent category mistakes
whose elaboration the media events movement has made its task. It
is easy to mock Ronald Reagan for confusing newsreels and his own
experience: he claimed to have witnessed the liberation of the concen-
tration camps in the Second World War when he had never left the
United States. He believed in false presence: that he had really been
there when he had only watched films. But presence-at-a-distance is
 John Durham Peters 35

precisely what witnessing a media event claims to offer. Critical theory

has rightly highlighted the veracity gap in mass communication, the
hermeneutics of suspicion, but media events studies seek the conditions
in which the willing suspension of disbelief is justified. In media events,
the borrowed eyes and ears of the media become, however tentatively or
dangerously, one’s own. Death, distance, and distrust are all suspended,
for good and evil.
Singularity is key to the communication economics of witnessing.
President Clinton came to my hometown, Iowa City, Iowa, for exam-
ple, in February 1996, on a campaign stop, and spoke in an indoor
arena. The whole event was to be televised locally, but the tickets were
snapped up within two hours. Why the excitement to attend when one
could get a better view on television at home? Because at home you
cannot be a witness to history. If Clinton were to be shot, or make a
major announcement, people could say, ‘I was there.’ That would be a
witness forever thereafter restricted to 14,000 people (if they are hon-
est), whereas we home viewers, a much larger and potentially infinite
group, would only be able to say, ‘I saw it on television.’ There is no
comparison in the authority or cultural capital of the two statements!
Clinton’s goal after the speech was to touch as many people as possible,
to spread the charisma of the king’s body by working the crowd, in the
apt idiom of ‘pressing the flesh’. A live witness can shake hands with
the great man, receive the torch of contagious magic, in the same way
that Clinton shook JFK’s hand as a teenager (luckily for him on camera).
‘Handle me and see’ said the man we know mostly as a TV persona.
‘Being there’ matters since it avoids the ontological depreciation of
being a copy. The copy, like hearsay, is indefinitely repeatable; the event
is singular, and its witnesses are forever irreplaceable in their privileged
relation to it. Recordings lose the hic et nunc of the event. The live event
is open to unscripted happenings, chance, and gaffes. Accidents are a
key part of media events – going off script. That so much of live coverage
involves some sort of trauma suggests the draw of the unpredictable and
of those occurrences that leave a mark in time. Media events are not
always the happy social body celebrating its core values, but also the
nasty stuff of degradation and disaster (Carey, 1998; Liebes, 1998).
Presence is fragile and mortal; recordings have durability that survives
in multiple times and spaces. Billions of dollars in the entertainment
industries turn on this apparently minute distinction. Why will people
pay high prices for music performed in concert whose quality and pol-
ish is often better on the CD-player at home? Obviously extra-musical
values shape concert-going: party, spectacle, noise, dance. Even so, live
36 Witnessing

music is different. A concert is an event, not a record. A homemade

bootleg tape is a souvenir, a marker of time and place, but a CD made
from the tape is a commodity, even if they are musically identical. In
a concert, one’s mortal time-line on earth is spent. Touch and eye con-
tact with the artist are possible. So is imperfection: in the concert one
may hear strains edited out in the studio and witness the labor of the
performing body. What post-production adds musically (for example,
overdubbing) it subtracts from eventfulness, since those sounds never
could have occurred in time as we know it. Recording media can do
time-axis manipulation, stopping, slowing, speeding, or reversing time –
one reason why audiovisual media, despite aptitude in recording, are
dubious witnesses. The body, however, lives only in real time. Singing,
dancing, and live performance all engage time’s passage. Music can
reveal the meaning of, and sometimes even provide a brief escape from,
growing older.

Why liveness?

The love of liveness also relates to the power of real time. If one sees it
live, one can claim status as a witness present in time if not in space; if
one sees it on tape, one is no longer a witness, but rather the percipient
of a transcription. Sports fans, in the case of big games, will remain
glued to the television screen, even though they know that any key
plays will be shown ad nauseam in the game’s afterlife as reportage and
video. They must be there as it happens. To see the big moment with
even a slight delay is to be placed in a derivative role, a hearer of a
report rather than a witness of an event. The fan wants to be involved
in history (the happening), not historiography (the recording). The few
seconds between occurrence and replay open up a metaphysical gulf in
the meaning and quality of what is seen. As far as the electromagnetic
tracings are concerned, the live event and its instant replay are identical,
but in the psychology of the fan, one is history, the other is television.
One is a window to the event, the other is its representation. Liveness
serves as an assurance of access to truth and authenticity.
The hard-core sports fan sweating the seconds actually offers a pro-
found lesson about the nature of time. Why should liveness matter?
It does matter, to the tune of billions of dollars in bids for live rights,
because events only happen in the present – in a word, gambling. As
Walter Benjamin noted, gambling is a phantasmagoria of time. No one
knows what the future holds, and the gambler infuses the present with
the diceyness of the future. There is absolutely no point in betting on
 John Durham Peters 37

a game or a race whose outcome is already known. A classic con-job, as

in the film The Sting, is to institute a small time lag in publicizing race
results so that punters think they are betting on an uncertain future
when in fact they are wagering on an already determined past. A few
seconds do matter, and profoundly. The past, in some sense, is safe. The
present, in contrast, is catastrophic, subject to radical alterations. In a
single second a swerve of the steering wheel or a pull of the trigger can
change history forever. Possible futures come into being and vanish with
every act. In a brief moment the penalty kick is made or missed, a life
conceived or taken. All history culminates in the present moment. Of
course, the present is rarely so dramatic, but without a live connection
its explosive possibility – its danger – is missing. Nothing quite excites
like an event about to take place. In Raymond Williams’s phrase, one
waits for a knock on the door. Fortuna, goddess of history and gam-
blers, reveals her face only in the present. In the past she veils herself as
necessity, in the future as probability.
The contrast between the live and the recorded is a structuring princi-
ple of broadcasting. It replays the contrast of fact and notion, so central
to modern historiography, a field, like law and theology, whose enter-
prise rests on the evaluation of sources and documents – testimonies.
Though theorists justly remind us of the factuality of fictions and the
fictive character of facts, this contrast stubbornly resists total resolution.
The division of fact and fiction, so central for historians and sports fans,
as well as the structuring principle of media and literary genres, turns
on witnessing. An event requires witnesses, a story only needs tellers
and listeners. A fiction can be heard or told, but a fact is witnessed.
Some kinds of events (baptisms, marriages) legally require witnesses.
Testimony assures us, as children often ask about stories, that it really
happened.
Historicity (or historical authenticity) has a similar logic to live cover-
age. If in visiting the Tower of London I am told that a block of wood
is the one on which Henry VIII’s victims were dispatched, I will act and
feel differently than if I learn the block is a replica, even if it is physically
identical or equally old. The block hovers in a limbo between reality and
fake, its metaphysical status depending on something so slight as a cap-
tion. The caption ‘real’ ties it to a tradition of testimony passed across
the generations, an accumulation of time that links the block histori-
cally to the event. If it has the right label I can ponder edifying lessons
about overweening power and look for traces of martyr’s blood; I will
have to work a lot harder if the caption announces that it is only fig-
urative. Live broadcasting, like objects certified as historical, offers the
38 Witnessing

Table 1.1 Sorts of Witnessing an Event

Presence in time Absence in time

Presence in space BEING THERE HISTORICITY

Assembled audience
For example, concert, game,
theater
Absence in space LIVE TRANSMISSION
Broadcast audience
For example, radio, TV,
webcast
(dead not ‘live’)
Serial mass audience
For example, shrine,
memorial, museum
RECORDING
Dispersed, private audience
Profane, witnessing difficult
For example, book, CD,
video

chance to witness, while recorded material stands at one remove as a

representation (replica) of events. It takes about a sixth-grade education
in our post-modern age to puncture the idea that history is free of repre-
sentation, so that is not the point. Rather, it is to read small distinctions
about what is real in cultural matters, distinctions too often written off
as neurosis or fetishism, as insights into structures of history and experi-
ence. Between the historical and the verisimilar lies a small but gigantic
gap, that of testimony.
Of four basic types of relations to an event, three can sustain the atti-
tude of a witness. To be there, present at the event in space and time
is the paradigm case. To be present in time but removed in space is the
condition of liveness, simultaneity across space. To be present in space
but removed in time is the condition of historical representation: here is
the possibility of a simultaneity across time, a witness that laps the ages.
To be absent in both space and time but still have access to an event via
its traces is the condition of recording: the profane zone in which the
attitude of witnessing is hardest to sustain (see Table 1.1).

Fact and fiction, pain and time

Ultimately, the boundary between fact and fiction is an ethical one

before it is an epistemological one: it consists in having respect for
the pain of victims, in being tied by simultaneity, however loosely, to
someone else’s story of how they hurt. We may weep in reading of the
slaughter of the innocents by King Herod, but we owe them nothing
besides remembrance. ‘Live’ pain is different. Simultaneous suffering
forms the horizon of responsibility: liveness matters for the living. Facts
 John Durham Peters 39

impose moral and political obligations that fictions do not. This is the
ancient ethical problem of tragedy: why people take pleasure in sights
that would terrify or disgust them in real life. Aristotle’s Poetics starts the
debate about why we take pleasure in depictions of violence and human
suffering. In tragedy, the representation of pain (and pain is definitional
for the genre) is not supposed to excite the spectator to humanitarian
service but to clarify through representation what is possible in life. The
drama offers terror without danger, pity without duty. The awareness
of its unreality releases us from moral obligation to the sufferers we
behold. Fiction lacks the responsibility or complicity that Ellis makes
definitional for witnessing. As David Hume remarked (1987), ‘It is cer-
tain, that the same object of distress, which pleases in a tragedy, were it
really set before us, would give the most unfeigned uneasiness.’ Factual
distress calls for our aid, not our appreciation; our duty, not our pleasure.
Death is meaningful in fiction: it marks the passage of time, punishes
the wicked, gives closure to events. But in fact, death is a blank, com-
pletely beyond meaning. ‘Nothing brings them back, neither love nor
hate. They can do nothing to you. They are as nothing’ (Conrad, 1921).
The contrast of fact and fiction has less to do with different orders of
truth than with who is hurting and when. Living people’s pain is news;
dead people’s pain is history.
It is easy to make fun of the obsession to keep up to date with the
news. Kierkegaard suggested that if we treated all news as if it had hap-
pened 50 years ago we would sound its true importance. He is right
about triviality, but misses what he is so lucid about elsewhere: the
present moment as the point of decision. We have to keep up with the
world because we are, in some complicated way, responsible to act in
it, and we can only act in the present. We feel guilty about hurt people
in news, not in fiction films. Pain separates facts from fictions. Facts are
witnessed, fictions are narrated. Fictions may indeed inspire us to action,
but the beholders’ responsibility is diffuse. ‘Live’ coverage of global sor-
row is ethically recalcitrant: because it is fact, we are not protected by the
theater’s ‘teleological suspension of the ethical’ (Kierkegaard); because it
is spatially remote, our duty to action is unclear. We find ourselves in the
position of spectators at a drama without the relief of knowing that the
suffering is unreal. Hence the ‘unfeigned uneasiness’ (Hume) we face in
watching the news. We feel a gruesome fascination for trauma without
the exoneration of knowing it is all an experiment in mimesis. We are
witnesses without a tribunal.
Finally, the curious thing about witnessing is its retroactive charac-
ter, the jealousy the present has for the past. The present may be the
40 Witnessing

point of decision, but it is always underinformed about what will come

after. Most observers do not know they are witnesses when the event is
happening: they are elected after the fact. A vast quantitative difference
separates what we experience and what we are summoned to witness.
There is a lot more sensation around than stories. In testifying we must
take responsibility for what we once took little responsibility for. We
must report on events, the details of which have assumed as massive an
importance as they were once trivial. What time did you catch the bus?
What color was the car? What kind of shoes was the defendant wear-
ing? In witnessing we look backwards on events we did not realize we
were observing, restoring deleted files from memory. We do not know
that what we notice or neglect may be the key to prison and liberty for
someone. The present is blind to what the future will value. We did not
notice the butterfly that started the typhoon.
Hence the notion, found in liberalism, existentialism, and Christian
theology alike, that it is the duty of everyone to be vigilant – to be ready
to stand as a witness at any time or place. Testifying has the structure
of repentance: retroactively caring about what we were once careless of.
A later moment revisits an earlier one in which consciousness was not
fully awake. The witness’s attitude to sensation (radical vigilance) goes
together with the future anterior attitude to time (treating the present
as if it was being witnessed from the future). To witness is to wish that
the record of the past were more whole, and to grasp this lesson now
is to live vigilantly, to make the present worthy as we imagine contem-
plating it from a future point. To cope with our fixity in the present,
we can at least be awake. Every act puts one in the witness box, both
seeing and saying. In Christian eschatology this attitude is dramatized
by the notion of a Last Judgment that calls up the whole history of the
world as judge and witness. In Nietzsche’s thought it is the notion of the
eternal return, acting in the present so that the action could be eternally
repeated (and witnessed) without regret. In everyday civic ideology it is
the idea that citizens have a duty to be informed about the events of
the day. In a phrase all broadcasters would endorse, and with apologies
to Matthew 25:13, the motto of witnessing should be: ‘Watch, therefore,
for you know neither the day nor the hour wherein the event will come’.

References
P. duBois (1991) Torture and Truth (London: Routledge).
J.L. Borges (1964) ‘The Witness’, Labyrinths Selected Stories and Other Writings (New
York: New Directions).
 John Durham Peters 41

J.W. Carey (1998) ‘Political Ritual on Television’, in T. Liebes and J. Curran (eds)
Media, Ritual, and Identity (London: Routledge).
J. Conrad (1921) The Secret Agent (New York: Doubleday).
R. Cross (1974) Evidence, 4th edn (London: Butterworths).
D. Dayan and E. Katz (1992) Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).
J. Ellis (2000) Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I.B. Tauris).
S. Felman and D. Laub (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge).
D. Hume (1987) ‘Of Tragedy’, Essays: Moral, Political, and Literary, rev. edn
(Indianapolis: Liberty Fund).
J.H. Langbein (1977) Torture and the Law of Proof: Europe and England in the Ancien
Régime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
T. Liebes (1998) ‘Television’s Disaster Marathons’, in T. Liebes and J. Curran (eds)
Media, Ritual, and Identity (London: Routledge).
P. Lipton (1998) ‘The Epistemology of Testimony’, Studies in the History and
Philosophy of Science, vol. 29, no. 1, 1–31.
J. Locke (1975/1690) An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P.H. Nidditch
(Oxford: Clarendon Press).
E. Peters (1985) Torture (New York: Blackwell).
J.D. Peters (1999) Speaking into the Air (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
P. Ricoeur (1981) ‘The Hermeneutics of Testimony’, in Essays in Biblical Interpreta-
tion (London: SPCK).
D.F. Ross, J.D. Read, and M.P. Toglia (1994) Adult Eyewitness Testimony: Current
Trends and Developments (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
S. Shapin (1994) A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth-Century
England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
E.J. Webb, D.T. Campbell, R.D. Schwartz, L. Sechrest, and J.B. Grove (1981)
Nonreactive Measures in the Social Sciences (Boston: Houghton Mifflin).
An Afterword: Torchlight Red
on Sweaty Faces
John Durham Peters

The previous essay was first written for a conference on media events
held at the University of Westminster in June 2000 and then pub-
lished in Media, Culture and Society. Some of it was later integrated
into the final chapter of my book Courting the Abyss (2005), where it
served an argument about the productive place of passivity, inarticu-
lateness, civil disobedience, and ‘body-witnessing’ in democratic theory
and practice. Discussions at the Institute for Advanced Studies at the
Hebrew University of Jerusalem (2005), the National Communication
Association (2005), and the International Communication Association
(2006) have convinced me that witnessing deserves more thinking and
study than I have given it so far. What follows here consists of a few
brief responses to critics, some revisions, and wishes for future direc-
tions. I am grateful for discussions with friends and colleagues such as
Tamar Ashuri, Menahem Blondheim, Lilie Chouliaraki, Daniel Dayan,
John Ellis, Paul Frosh, Ian Glenn, Elihu Katz, Joan Leach, Stephanie
Marriott, Carolyn Marvin, Amit Pinchevski, Carrie Rentschler, Paddy
Scannell, Louis-Georges Schwartz, Robin Wagner-Pacifici, and Barbie
Zelizer, though I cannot claim to have registered all of their points in
this brief afterword. Perhaps the best thing about working on this topic
is the remarkable network of people it has helped bring about.
That being there in space and time is not necessarily the only position
for a witness is a concession I am glad to grant. For both subjective and
objective reasons, being present at the event might mean precisely not
being able to witness. Subjectively, real attendance at an event might
disable the witness from testifying. Trauma or shock rarely provides the
conditions for producing coherent accounts. Though the testimony of a
rape victim or child witness may be essential in a court case, the question
remains whether testifying does not force the witness to relive the event

42
 John Durham Peters 43

as if in a repetition of the abuse. Living through hell might disqualify

one from testifying coherently—or at all.
And yet, such incoherence is often part of the authenticating power
of witnessing. A survivor’s witness of a shattering experience is often
more persuasive by performing blockage than fluency. The witness in
this sense is both necessary and impossible, as Primo Levi, Eli Wiesel,
Giorgio Agamben, and many others have argued. The failure of speech
can dramatize the gap between experience and speech and thus under-
line the reality of the experience. Witnessing occurs somewhere between
death and God, as Amit Pinchevski has said. Its home lies in the liminal
space between the universal experience that knows no witness (death)
and the being who knows everything in its most intimate details (God).
Paul Frosh quotes an eyewitness named Olga, interviewed on Israeli tele-
vision in 2003, who was injured in a terrorist bombing of a restaurant in
Haifa: ‘Horror, something that is impossible to describe, little children
wounded and blood and people. I can’t describe this horror, I can’t.’
The fractured syntax illustrates her point, and a witness who could
calmly detail what had happened might ipso facto demonstrate distance
from the event. (Such a position would be one ideal of the objective
journalist.) Sometimes muteness can itself be a form of witnessing. As
LSD guru Timothy Leary supposedly said: ‘If you can remember the
1960s, you weren’t there.’ The material wear-and-tear that peril exerts
on the body and soul of the witness is always front and center in the
semiotics of witnessing. Witnessing is a form of communication that is
uniquely attentive to its own conditions of mediation. It is a performa-
tively reflexive genre. The witness must enact how he or she came to be
a witness: ‘And I only am escaped to tell thee’ (Job 1:19).
Objectively, presence does not necessarily provide the best view of
an event. The Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, the last supper of Jesus
and his disciples, or the Hijra of Mohammad are sites visited again
and again in the World Wide Web of history, but they each only hap-
pened or started on one night. (It is characteristic of the three ethical
monotheisms—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam—to memorialize events
that are claimed to be historical and yet also assume a mythic repeatabil-
ity.) If through some kind of time machine we could transport ourselves
back to the moments in question, we might be sorely disappointed by
our piecemeal access to The Event. Historicist pilgrims present on one
of those nights would need to worry about paying for inns, being at the
right place at the right time, and fighting the crowds, not to mention
dodging soldiers and angels of destruction. Being there, as any tourist
44 Afterword

knows, sometimes gives a more limited view than one had in imagina-
tion, books, or movies. Being there can immerse one in the indelicate
contingencies and limited points of view that narrative and remem-
brance conveniently erase. An eyewitness of the passion of Christ might
only see ‘the torchlight red on sweaty faces’ (T.S. Eliot). One thinks of
Monty Python’s uncanny knack for reducing mythic events to bathos
by immersing them in plausible circumstantial necessities. With the line
‘Blessed are the cheesemakers?’, The Life of Brian puts the Sermon on the
Mount in the auditory conditions of its delivery. Being there matters,
but it does not necessarily provide access to the whole experience. The
witness has access sooner to parts than to wholes. The event only comes
into focus later—usually after all the eyewitnesses are dead. Events are
messy; stories are coherent.
Subjective inarticulateness due to trauma, objective partiality due to
limited access—these are everlasting obstacles to witnessing. But they
are also features that grant witnessing both power and distinctness as a
kind of signifying act. Thus, I am hesitant to fully accept Paul Frosh’s
argument that the Haggadah presents a form of witnessing across time
and space. The Haggadah, like other forms of liturgical or dramatic
transport across space and time, is a wonderful kind of medium and
the sort of medium we scholars, too long dazzled by circuits and dig-
its, should be studying. It enables a kind of identification both across
time to a historical event and across space to an imagined community
of co-participants in the Passover Seder. I am delighted that Frosh, like
Menahem Blondheim, has used it to enrich our understanding of media,
but I am not sure if should we call its unique communicative accom-
plishments witnessing. The crucial point is that each person is invited
by the Haggadah to act ‘as if’ he or she were a witness. ‘As if’ is the sure
sign of metaphor, and metaphor is the simultaneity of assertion and
negation. The is of metaphor always means both is and is not. The partic-
ipant in the Seder is both a witness and also not a witness. The Haggadah
enacts the Exodus ritualistically, that is, by negation of the actuality.
It gives us the convenience of well-ordered, tradition-packed signs rather
than the chaos of the actual Exodus, with its packing up, forgetting to
leaven the bread, and ‘borrowing’ jewelry from the Egyptian neighbors.
We have a secure perch from which to witness the unfolding event—a
luxury of position that would be impossible for a real participant in the
Exodus. Belated celebrants can be grateful to time for removing all the
dull bits—precisely the kinds of circumstantial details a witness would
have known. Imagine the quarrel of interpretations if we had to hear tes-
timony of the people who took part in the Exodus: we might learn a lot,
 John Durham Peters 45

but such testimony would probably not be very useful for ritual pur-
poses. Events are jagged and stories are smooth, and witnessing always
involves some translation between the two; the Haggadah tilts toward
the latter pole. Reality is under no obligation to be coherent, but our
explanations of it certainly are.
Witnessing in the passive sense of seeing, hearing, and being there is,
to use Jakobson’s distinction, metonymic rather than metaphoric. Wit-
nessing traffics in pieces, parts, and circumstantial details, not in stories
with beginnings, middles, and ends (which are the province of active
witnessing, of saying rather than seeing). Witnessing is a relatively prim-
itive and fallible recording medium for gathering experience. It presents
trophies rather than tropes—proofs of an experience not susceptible to
copying. Such experience can be narrated, but it cannot be transmitted.
It is the scar of Odysseus and his secret knowledge of the inner sanc-
tum of the house that provides the telltale proof of his identity to his
long-lost wife Penelope—much more than his prowess at battle, voice,
or demeanor, things that might have been mimicked or learned by an
impostor. Frosh’s critique rightly aims at a kind of brute positivism in
my definition of witnessing and marvelously shows that a vital sense of
participation is not necessarily attenuated but often enhanced by dis-
tance in space and time. Who is to say who is the ‘real’ participant in
the Seder—the belated celebrant or the historic refugee? My aim is not
to defend the rawness of experience in a kind of vulgar empiricist way,
but to seek clarity of definition. I would be the first to praise the essential
powers of imagination for human sociability and sense of history, and
I see my book Speaking into the Air as a celebration of distance in com-
munication. But I would not want to call imaginative reconstruction
‘witnessing’. Witnessing, in my view, remains tied in some fragile way
to the mortal limits of the human sensorium. It is limited, weak, and
fragile; it is also essential. Sometimes the meaning of the Passion can be
caught in a passing glimpse of torchlight. Witnessing at second-hand, in
contrast, is crucial to the human repertoire, but it is a derivative form.
Perhaps the old contrast of reversible sacred time and profane irre-
versible time will help us analyze the varieties of witnessing. As myth,
ritual, or memory, an event can resound forever and repeat without any
exhaustion; the past is not lost forever but open to constant refresh-
ment. Perhaps my definition of witnessing depends on a profane sense
of time that once lost is lost forever. Frosh’s Haggadah presupposes
reversible time. The event is not lost: it presents itself anew for our wit-
ness. Religious witnessing perhaps eliminates the need for the passive
face of witnessing and puts all the emphasis on mediated ritual acts of
46 Afterword

listening, speaking, eating, and drinking by which we bear active wit-

ness as adherents to the story. As we take part, we no longer dwell in the
present; we are free to travel like immortals across time and space to his-
tory’s turning points. Release from the mortal bounds of sensation has
always been the privilege of narrative. Rituals, novels, films, and televi-
sion all provide a coherence of access that presence in the flesh could
never attain. If I want to experience ‘London’ as a totality, a film, novel,
or newspaper will do a better job than walking its streets for several days.
But walking its streets will yield a harvest of experience that such recon-
structions will never afford. The overpriced meal on Leicester square, the
pigeons and pickpockets on Trafalgar square, and the traffic and wind all
mix with uniquely personal humors of mood and memory. I can bear
witness of this experience in a way that I cannot of what I learned from
secondary sources. The implicit positivism in my account of witness-
ing is partly a reaction against the privilege that the virtual receives in
much post-modern theory. Distance is not dead; gravity still holds us
down; the simulacrum has not swallowed up fresh sensory impressions.
The grit and surprise of experience in all of its ‘uncopyability’ is a pre-
cious resource that communication scholars neglect at our peril. Which
is it to witness: to narrate intellectually or to experience sensorially?
Running the risk of barbarism for the sake of clarity, I give first rank
to the second. We would be epistemologically incoherent if our only
source of knowledge were witnesses, but we would lack ground alto-
gether if we had no witnesses. In this, I think I follow the pragmatist
(or neo-Kantian) principle that sensory evidence, though never deter-
minative of any knowledge claim, will always be in some way a decisive
ingredient.
Even so, the notion of a witness stretching over time and space will
never vanish from religious liturgy and cultural institutions that bor-
row from it, such as television, in part because witnessing is always
a rhetoric of commitment. Christian theology no less than Jewish rit-
ual is rife with this notion of witnessing at second-hand. Participants
in the communion of bread and wine, itself of course first instituted
at/as a Passover meal, are figured as witnesses. Latter-day disciples are
to remember something they never experienced directly—the Last Sup-
per. They are, in the classic position of active witnesses, sayers rather
than seers: as a Mormon hymn has it, ‘partaking now is deed for word.’
Perhaps more fundamentally, Paul of Tarsus was the first apostle who
could not claim to be an eyewitness of the mortal Jesus or of the res-
urrection. Paul’s claims to apostleship, in fact, explicitly downplayed
eyewitnessing: he preferred the ‘testimony of conscience’ to ‘fleshly
 John Durham Peters 47

wisdom’ (2 Cor. 1:12). Paul had an apparent blatant lack of interest

in the life or even words of the historical Jesus. To be a witness of
Christ, in other words, you did not need sensory experience. A spiritual
witness was unlimited by space, time, and body. In this radical claim,
Paul de-parochialized Christianity by detaching faith from a cultural or
experiential connection with Jesus or his historic setting. Paul is the
archetype of the believer who encounters Christ at a distance, not as an
apparently mortal human, but, as Alain Badiou argues, as an event. He
was the first Christian believer without an empirical witness (and such
a stance of commitment without sensory evidence is definitive of ‘faith’
in Christianity). Paul was an active witness who declared the Christ of
faith without ever having been a passive witness of the Jesus of his-
tory. As Paul’s latter-day disciple Søren Kierkegaard said in Philosophical
Fragments, an eyewitness of Christ might get stuck in sensory immediacy
and thereby risk missing the meaning. The ‘follower at second hand’ in
contrast can get the message in all its mediated completeness.
Religious ritual thus gives us witnesses without experience and mem-
ories without events. The downplaying of the sensible in favor of the
intelligible also occurs in the case of the expert witness. Expert wit-
nesses do not narrate sensory experiences acquired by presence; they
deliver intellectual opinions acquired by study. They deal in generalities
of knowledge, not particulars of events; in probabilities, not actualities.
The Roman rule that the witness is to testify de visu suo et auditu (what
he saw and heard for himself) is suspended: an expert witness is sup-
posed to be precisely objective, that is to ignore anything personal and
only state professional opinion. A sensory witness in a court proceeding,
in contrast, would be commanded by the judge to stick to the facts as
they were experienced and avoid statements of opinion. Expert witness-
ing, moreover, is susceptible to debate in a way that personal-experience
witnessing is not, which fits Daniel Dayan’s well-punned concern that
subjective witnesses can engage in a certain form of ‘dictatorship’.
A public sphere in which witnesses only spoke from experience, and
not from reflection, would, he fears, make reasoned debate impossible.
Witnesses are show-stoppers, and pain is always both the topic and the
outer limit of the public sphere. In this, we are reminded that witnessing
is not always benign, but often dangerous, and not only for the witness.
Hence I would take distance from John Ellis’s notion that witnessing can
become mundane via television; it is important for my definition that
witnessing retains its peril and risk. To use a recently fashionable term,
witnessing is always a state of exception, an emergency. It is something
special, not something routine.
48 Afterword

Finally, does my essay on witnessing betray the argument of Speaking

into the Air by succumbing to a dream of full communication, as Frosh
suggests? He is right that the veracity gap is central to my argument
and that I make epistemological transmission perhaps too central to my
story. If you read my piece as an effort to eliminate all the threats to the
validity of witnessing, it is easy to see it as another version of the long-
ing for communication without noise. In a fine cultural studies spirit,
Frosh shows that witnessing is a property of texts and audiences as well
as authors. But if witnessing becomes an attitude of reception instead
of a hint of the real, something is indeed lost: transmission still mat-
ters. Knowing who is really your intimate friend, kin, or lover in this
world of noisily friendly appeals is still something that matters greatly.
We need some clearer criterion for the veracity of witnessing besides the
phenomenology of audiences. A world without the rigor of some form
of process of trial or judgment would be a paradise for con artists and
seducers. A world without fictions would be an aesthetic wasteland; a
world without a procedure to tell fictions from facts would lack justice
altogether. I read Speaking as faithful to the spirit of William James’s
pragmatism – renouncing the dream of a mental fusion between people
without also abandoning the question of authenticity or fidelity. Wit-
nessing is a form of communication that, to its credit, does not give up
worrying about what is real and what is not, even if it can provide no
final satisfying answer. Even though it is impossible in any strict sense
to bring experience into discourse, witnessing happens all the time and
continues to matter deeply for our knowledge of the world and our abil-
ity to change it. It is a mode of epistemo-discursive action that retains
some link to the fragile stuff of reality, especially our fleshly beings.
If my essay has a deviation from Speaking, it might come in this
phrase: ‘Living people’s pain is news; dead people’s pain is history.’
I strayed from the spirit of Speaking not by succumbing to the dream
of communication, but by positing such a clear threshold between the
living and the dead, thus illegitimately releasing us from our obligation
to them. What seems like an epistemological conundrum, the veracity
gap, is actually an ethical problem of how to witness experience that
is not our own. And this is ultimately the point that Paul Frosh has,
thankfully, invited me to reconsider.
2
Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass
Media, and the Imagined Lives of
Strangers
Paul Frosh

‘We are driving through a war zone.’

These words open a television documentary called State of Terror: A Dis-

patches Investigation, made for and broadcast by the UK’s Channel Four
in May 2002. The documentary attempts both to explain the bloody
intricacies of the Israeli–Palestinian conflict and to ascertain whether or
not the Israeli army massacred Palestinian civilians in the Jenin refugee
camp during ‘Operation Defensive Shield’ in 2002.1 Accompanied by
shaky, handheld visual images of the inside of a car traveling through
the West Bank, and featuring direct address to the camera by the film’s
narrator and central character, the journalist Deborah Davies, these
words signal a fundamental textual ambition at work throughout the
film as a whole. They establish the presence of the journalist and her
crew as witnesses of the depicted events, and, since the first word ‘we’
can refer to both those in the car and to the watching television audi-
ence, the co-presence of the viewers alongside them. Presence is thus
discursively created, told verbally and visually, referentially and virtu-
ally, in space (the war zone) and time (the present tense). It putatively
unites, in the same communicative interaction, the two faces of witness-
ing (Peters, 2001): direct experience of an event and discourse about the
event to others who were not there. Presence is not just told. It is also
telling – it makes a difference – since it anchors the discursive authority
of the film as a source of testimony about an event which is removed
from its audience in space and time. They (the journalists) are there,
their bodily sensation and experience authoring and testifying to the
knowledge they impart to distant others.

49
50 Telling Presences

State of Terror belongs to an identifiable genre of ‘first-person’ journal-

ism in which the present-tense narrative of the journalist’s search for the
truth of an event becomes the central story of the film. Even if the film
is ostensibly about Jenin or the Israeli–Palestinian conflict, its primary
fabula is the filmmaker’s quest to bear witness. Traditional documen-
taries and television war reporting rarely work in this way. They are not
narrated in the present tense, and are not focused on the journalist’s
efforts to grasp and relay the truth. Nevertheless, the film’s conspicuous
emphasis on its own testimonial immediacy exposes underlying ques-
tions which are pertinent not only to what Stam (1983) has called the
‘televisual metaphysics of presence’ in general, but to a large range of
media genres, texts, and audiences – questions of knowledge, trust, and
ethical response that arise from the phenomenon of media witnessing.
How can we understand the vast number of events which do not hap-
pen to us personally, which are removed from us in space and time?
What is the moral and epistemological status of the understanding we
might gain of such events through the reports of witnesses – those who
were ‘there’ – especially if those events involved great suffering? What
are the social and cultural consequences of such reports and the kinds
of knowledge they impart?
Of course, witnessing is by no means a new phenomenon; it occu-
pies a central position in legal, religious, and philosophical traditions
of thought that long predate electronic media. Yet, the advent and
expansion of those media do seem to have substantially augmented,
if not transformed, what it means to witness. As Walter Lippmann
(1922) noted long ago, we are all – almost whether we like it or not,
as a condition of our participation in modern public life – the recipi-
ents of reports by others about the events they have experienced. The
extension of media systems over the last two centuries, using new tech-
nologies of representation and telecommunication to connect different
parts of the globe at increasingly fast speeds, has forced us to assess and
digest with ever greater frequency reports of far-flung and often horri-
fying events, related by people whom we do not know personally. This
unremitting exposure to the discourse of strangers about their lives has
perhaps become a defining characteristic of what it means to be mod-
ern (Thompson, 1995). Electronic media have multiplied the number
of witnessed events reported to distant others, and multiplied greatly
the number of those distant others. Most significantly, perhaps, elec-
tronic media have altered the relationship between the witness and his
or her addressees through the intervention of a complex organizational
and technical apparatus of audiovisual representation. Hence a fourth
 Paul Frosh 51

question to add to the three already mentioned: What is the impact of

the routine organizational and technological mediation of witnessing
on its cultural and moral roles?
John Ellis, in Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (2000),
treats witnessing as one of the central communicative modes of mod-
ern media and suggests that electronic media have altered both the
scope and nature of what it is to witness. John Durham Peters simi-
larly emphasizes questions of mediation in ‘Witnessing’ (2001), in part
a response to Ellis’s arguments.2 But although they ostensibly comple-
ment one another, their views of witnessing are in fact dramatically
different. Building upon these differences helps to explain the signifi-
cance of witnessing for contemporary conjunctions between personal
experience, shareable discourse, and public representation.
In what follows, then, I engage with these important meditations,
beginning in the first section with a critique of Peters’s argument as an
extremely sophisticated orthodoxy whose emphasis on problems of tes-
timonial veracity unwittingly compromises attempts to think through
the full transformative implications of media witnessing. The next two
sections trace these implications through a reception-oriented account
of witnessing. Focusing mainly on how ‘witnessing texts’ work with
respect to their audiences, they accord particular significance to these
texts’ world-making properties and the imaginative demands they make.
The final section deals with the institutional organization of witness-
ing in contemporary media systems. Arguing against the grain of much
thinking about media and the ethical response to others, I claim that
mass media witnessing is routinized and depersonalized in a way that
is morally enabling because it maintains a ground of ‘indifferent’ civil
equivalence among strangers.

Witnessing and the veracity gap

A recurrent motif of John Peters’s essay on witnessing is the ‘veracity

gap’. This phrase refers to difficulties afflicting the practice of bearing
witness: difficulties of memory (does the witness remember everything
he or she saw?), honesty (is the witness being truthful?), presence (was
the witness really there at the crucial moment?), perception (did the
witness see and hear everything important?), and scale (was the witness
traumatized and overwhelmed by the magnitude of the event?). Ulti-
mately, however, the ‘veracity gap’ is about the problem of mediation.
It designates that chasm of fallibility and potential misunderstanding
52 Telling Presences

across which the experience of a person present at an event is trans-

muted into discourse about that experience for others who were not
present. ‘The journey from experience (the seen) into words (the said)
is precarious . . . . It always involves an epistemological gap whose bridg-
ing is always fraught with difficulty. No transfusion of consciousness is
possible. Words can be exchanged, experiences cannot’ (Peters, 2001,
p. 710).
Peters traces the various religious, legal, scientific and – for want
of a better term – cataclysmic histories of witnessing’s veracity gap,
culminating with its relationship to broadcasting. The article reaches
its schematizing zenith in a typology of witnessing positions – spatial
and temporal relations to an event – which receives the following
explanation:

Of four basic types of relations to an event, three can sustain the atti-
tude of a witness. To be there, present at the event in space and time
is the paradigm case. To be present in time but removed in space is
the condition of liveness, simultaneity across space. To be present in
space but removed in time is the condition of historical representa-
tion: here is the possibility of a simultaneity across time, a witness
that laps the ages. To be absent in both space and time but still have
access to an event via its traces is the condition of recording: the pro-
fane zone in which the attitude of witnessing is hardest to sustain
(2001, p. 720).

According to this typology, much of radio and television broadcasting –

because of its liveness, its temporal simultaneity with an event – is able
to sustain a form of witnessing, although it deviates from the ‘paradigm
case’ of being present at the event in space and time. Even the position
which is furthest removed from that paradigm case, the transmission
of a recorded film of an event that has already occurred, can achieve a
kind of pseudo-witnessing. It can do this, of course, through the logic of
broadcasting, whereby it is transmitted simultaneously to a large public,
such that the broadcast itself becomes the witnessed ‘event’, at which the
audience is co-present in time and is co-extensive in space. In addition,
such recorded films can also achieve a kind of pseudo-witnessing
through the deployment of a host of discursive and representational
techniques that imply liveness, immediacy, and co-presence. Many
of these are found in State of Terror: the use of the present tense and
the first-person singular and plural; the inclusion of seemingly raw,
unedited visual sequences; the presence of a dominant narrating voice
 Paul Frosh 53

and persona – especially of the reporter ‘in the field’; the interviewing of
eyewitnesses (in State of Terror mainly Palestinians, but also some Israeli
Jews and ‘outside experts’); the dramatic reconstruction of events in the
places where they happened; the prominence given to indexical signs –
filmed traces of a real event, like bloodstains on the walls.
Yet within such recordings, as well as within more paradigmatic cases
of bearing witness, the veracity gap rarely disappears entirely. In State
of Terror, for instance, virtually every technique designed to bring view-
ers closer to the event under investigation, the purported massacre in
Jenin, also becomes conspicuous as a mediation, as a sign of our irre-
ducible distance and separation from it. The physical reconstruction of
a killing in the exact location of its earlier, unfilmed occurrence brings
us spatially closer to the original happening while at the same time rein-
forcing our temporal remoteness from it. In another sequence, where a
Palestinian woman shows home video footage she took of men being
rounded up, the television set upon which the video is viewed by the
journalist acts both as a window onto the event and as a screen which
divides us from it, a marker of our layers of non-presence (we were not
present at the filmed event, nor at its screening before the journalist).
The multiplicity of languages and the use of a translator has a similar
effect. The translator’s job is to make what we see and hear intelligi-
ble and accessible, but her very presence further emphasizes our lack
of experiential and informational access to the testimony being given.
Thus every step towards Peters’s paradigm case of ‘being there’ in space
and time is also a step away from it, every open window an opaque
screen, every bridge a frontier.
Peters’s brilliant article is a kind of friendly but restraining hand
placed upon the shoulder of John Ellis, who claims that photography,
cinema, and broadcasting ‘brought citizens into a relationship of direct
encounter with images and sounds: a distinct experience which I shall
explore, the experience of witness’ (2000, p. 9). In the broadcasting age,
Ellis argues, witnessing has earned a privileged place as a new way of per-
ceiving the world beyond our immediate environment. Based upon the
superabundance of details of an event recorded by modern audiovisual
technologies, and television’s promise of audiovisual liveness, media
witnessing places audiences in an unprecedented position:

The feeling of witness that comes with the audio-visual media is

one of separation and powerlessness: the events unfold, like it or
not. So for the viewer, powerlessness and safety come hand in hand,
provoking a sense of guilt and disinterest (2000, p. 11).
54 Telling Presences

The moral resonance of this new modality of experience is our com-

plicity in the often horrifying events we now know about yet cannot
alter; the responsibility that such knowledge bestows. Its combination of
involvement and passivity is summed up in the doubly negative appeal:
‘You cannot say that you did not know’ (2000, p. 11).
Ostensibly Peters’s main disagreement with Ellis is historical (2001,
p. 708). Peters eloquently shows how much of the apparently new
modality that Ellis describes is actually very old, and how scholars of
modern media need to take seriously the ‘hoary philosophical issues’
(p. 707) raised over many centuries concerning witnessing. However,
Peters also implicitly challenges Ellis on two other interconnected
fronts. The first challenge is to the idea that witnessing has become a
general mode of receptivity to contemporary media. Despite his remarks
concerning the spatial and temporal relations to an event which can
sustain ‘the attitude of a witness’, for Peters, real witnesses are few
(fewer certainly than the number of television viewers), and their lives
are transformed by the burden of testimony: ‘Witnessing places mor-
tal 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’ (2001, p. 714). The ontological principle underpinning this
notion of witnessing is the individual’s corporeal presence at the event
(Peters’s ‘paradigm case’), a presence vouchsafed by the potential suffer-
ing of the witnessing body: ‘To bear witness is to put one’s body on the
line. Within every witness, perhaps, stands a martyr, the will to corrobo-
rate words with something beyond them, pain and death being the last
resorts’ (2001, p. 713). This has the effect of greatly limiting the scale
of witnessing. Its logical extension is that television audiences are not
the witnesses of the events they see, but the recipients of someone else’s
testimony. It is a far cry from Ellis’s sense that witnessing is a new, gener-
alized mode of experiencing media, characterized by the powerlessness
and safety of the viewer.
Peters’s second, interrelated challenge to Ellis builds upon the ontol-
ogy of presence to insist on the inescapability of the veracity gap.
Witnessing, as we have seen, involves a recurrent impasse. Between the
witness and the viewer stands the opacity of discourse; the fragile thread
linking the event to its representation is always in peril. Yet making the
veracity gap the central concern in the study of witnessing threatens
to close off more avenues for investigation than it opens up, including
avenues tentatively suggested by Ellis. It threatens to create a deadlock
in which every analysis of media witnessing arrives at the same result:
a lacuna between the necessity for witnessing and its impossibility,
 Paul Frosh 55

between its performance and its inevitable deconstruction. Increasingly,

it produces a sense of analytical déjà vu.
There are two main problems with emphasizing the veracity gap, both
of which seem central to the way in which we conceptualize witnessing
intuitively, and which are hard to refute. The first is its implicit direc-
tionality. Peters (2001) notes that witnessing involves ‘all three points
of a basic communication triangle: (1) the agent who bears witness,
(2) the utterance or text itself, (3) the audience who witnesses’ (p. 709).
However, in dwelling upon the infinite gap between experience and dis-
course, the techniques for bridging it and their fragility, and in setting
out a hierarchy in which the ‘paradigm case’ of witnessing is the experi-
ence of spatial and temporal presence at the event, this triangle mutates
into a line. The witnessing agent becomes a point of transmission and
the audience one of reception (the utterance or text is the line itself,
becoming increasingly fuzzy and broken as it approaches the audience).
The second problem is that the veracity gap makes witnessing ulti-
mately an ontological and an epistemological affair (what is it to be,
what is it to know) rather than a communicative one. Peters has con-
vincingly argued elsewhere (1999) that questions of communication are
at the heart of ontological and epistemological concerns, and that if you
scratch a debate about communication you will find an ontological or
epistemological itch. But making the veracity gap so central risks reduc-
ing communicative capacities to – often insoluble – questions of being
and knowing. It risks continually asking, ‘How can I know what it is to
be you? How reliable is this utterance as testimony of your experience?’
rather than ‘What is it about this text that gives me an inkling of what
it’s like to be you? What is it about this utterance and its performance
that makes it work as testimony?’ In other words, it limits the way we
can conceptualize and understand how witnessing works as a form of
communication, because it primarily treats communication as full of
‘hoary issues’ to be overcome, rather than as a cultural achievement to
be explored.3
And it is witnessing as a cultural achievement that most interests Ellis;
not the referential fidelity of media reports, the truth of discourse to
experience, or of appearance to reality. Discussing (and dismissing) the
film theorist André Bazin on the question of audiovisual realism, Ellis
states:

Lost under the weight of all this confusion is the fact of witness: a
particular modality of the experience of recorded images and sounds,
rather than an inherent quality to be found within those images.
56 Telling Presences

‘Witness’ brings a model of the viewer’s experience to the center of

the definition of the audio-visual without entangling it with ontolog-
ical arguments about the relationship between representation and its
objects (2000, p.14).

Witnessing and world-making: The case of the Haggadah

Standing with Ellis against the tyranny of the veracity gap is Shoshana
Felman’s interpretation of Claude Lanzmann’s Shoah. Lanzmann’s film,
says Felman, is not only about witnessing a catastrophe such as the
Holocaust. It is also:

About the relation between art and witnessing, about film as a medium
which expands the capacity for witnessing. To understand Shoah, we
must explore the question: what are we as spectators made to wit-
ness? This expansion of what we in turn can witness is, however, due
not simply to the reproduction of events, but to the power of the film
as a work of art, to the subtlety of its philosophical and artistic struc-
ture and to the complexity of the creative process it engages. ‘The
truth kills the possibility of fiction’ said Lanzmann in a journalistic
interview. But the truth does not kill the possibility of art – on the
contrary, it requires it for its transmission, for its realization in our
consciousness as witnesses (2000, p. 105, original italics).

This beautiful passage advances the notion that media can expand our
capacity to witness. Much of this expansion has to do with the rela-
tionship between the structure of the text, its creative potentialities,
and the audience. Exploring how the structure and creative propensi-
ties of media texts might enhance the sense of witnessing requires a shift
of emphasis, away from Peters’s fixation upon the fragile relationship of
discourse to an original event and experience. Two methodological tac-
tics are of service here. The first is to ignore the veracity gap for as long
as possible. The second is to flesh out Ellis’s model of viewer experience
by focusing upon the relationship between the audience and the wit-
nessing text; to attack witnessing from the wrong end, so to speak, by
assuming that testimony – and the presence-effect of the witness at the
event described – is created in the interaction between audience and
text, rather than between the witness and his or her own utterance.
Such a hermeneutical and reception-oriented account of media witness-
ing might appear counterintuitive given the weight of physical presence
attending the act of witnessing in legal and journalistic discourse. It
 Paul Frosh 57

will involve making further counterintuitive propositions about the

relationship between witnessing texts and audiences in the age of broad-
casting media. However, to introduce these propositions I begin with
another example, far older than radio and television, of how the cre-
ative intersections between witnessing texts and their addressees have
long conjured up testimonial presence.
The example comes from the Passover Haggadah. This text, whose
name literally means ‘saying’ or ‘talking’, is one of the most popular
and most published of Jewish liturgical works. Its reading structures
the ‘seder’, the meal-ceremony held on the first night of the festival
of Passover (and on the second night for many Jews outside Israel).
Designed to enable participants to fulfill a principal commandment
of the festival – to relate the story of the exodus from Egypt – the
Haggadah contains the following injunction: ‘In every generation a per-
son [lit. man] is obligated to see himself as if he went out from Egypt.’4
If we were to follow Peters’s typology of witnessing positions, we would
need to make an immediate objection: whatever the Haggadah might
tell us about how to experience the story of the exodus, and however
realistically that story might be realized in the discourse, this is not a
witnessing text. It does not place its audience in a relationship of either
temporal simultaneity or spatial contiguity with the event described.
Furthermore, it is neither a ‘recording’ in the modern mechanical or
technological sense, nor does its surprisingly colorless and undramatic
description of the exodus seem to be the discourse of someone who
was there. ‘It doesn’t tell the story of exodus in full, let alone in detail.
Moses is not even mentioned in the text’ (Blondheim, 2004, p. 4). The
text’s source is collective and impersonal, its reception far removed in
time and space from the event concerned. In terms of the veracity of
discourse, the gap here seems to be so huge that the Haggadah cannot
possibly have the status of testimony.
Yet the tradition of witnessing goes beyond the veracity gap precisely
in its religious resonance. ‘Witness, an Anglo-Saxon word of ancient
religious usage, adopted again in our time, has been used to name our
human, and therefore imperfect, attempt to impart to others the grace
and perhaps the excitement perceived in the personal and partial expe-
rience of the divine’ (Dooling, quoted in Hebdige, 1993, p. 205). Linked
etymologically to ‘wit’ and ‘wisdom’, witnessing concerns both the con-
dition and quality of knowing. Its linkage to facticity and verifiability
is by no means exclusive, especially since it is used extensively in tra-
ditions, as Peters himself amply demonstrates, where it is far removed
from legal notions of proof or scientific standards of reporting. It is,
58 Telling Presences

in part, about publicly confirming and conveying personal beliefs, and

thereby sharing them: bearing witness to one’s faith. This idea is of
course especially important in religions which rely on long traditions
of public rather than domestic ritual display, such as Catholicism.5 In
this context the Haggadah is also a kind of witnessing, an imparting
of the grace and excitement of participation in ‘the divine’ experience
of the exodus, especially if approached from the point of view of its
performance and its interaction with its readers.
The Haggadah is a discourse about a past event containing, as part
of its own text, instructions about how the relationship to that event
should be experienced: about how it itself should be ‘taken’. In fact, as
Blondheim (2004) argues, the Haggadah ‘is a perplexing literary hybrid:
a to-do list intended to structure the Seder rituals, merged with scattered
references to the Biblical story’, whose effect is to make the participants
themselves into the narrators of the exodus (p. 4). Those instructions
tell participants that the past event should be envisioned (they are obli-
gated to ‘see themselves’) as happening to them ‘now’, where that ‘now’
provides a link across and between the generations to the time and place
of the exodus. The Haggadah opens up what Star Trek fans would call a
wormhole in the space–time continuum, requiring the recipients of the
discourse to become first-hand witnesses to the events it describes. It
combines ‘envisioned’ experience of the event and discourse about the
event, but in reverse order. Rather than the ontology of presence under-
pinning subsequent testimonial discourse, it is the process of relating
the exodus – performing discourse through a witnessing text – that
allows participants to make themselves imaginatively present at the
event.
This ‘now’ of the event created in the encounter with the Haggadah
is not only successively experienced by each passing generation, it is also
simultaneously experienced by the members of each particular genera-
tion, through both a physical collective performance (the Seder meal is
a group activity) and a virtual collective performance (all Jewish peo-
ple, or at least all those observing the Seder, do so on the same night).6
Much like the grand ceremonial of media events described by Dayan
and Katz (1992), the performance of the Haggadah binds participants
together, assembles and gathers them in a distributed but cohesive space
in which they are all imaginatively ‘co-present’ at the same moment
in another place and time. Yet notwithstanding the collective condi-
tions and effects of this performance, the obligation to make oneself
virtually present at the event described is an individual responsibil-
ity. The injunction is phrased in the third person singular: ‘In every
 Paul Frosh 59

generation a person is obligated to see himself as if he went out from

Egypt.’ By accepting the obligation participants also signal recognition
of their place in the collective, of their definition as a ‘person’ who can
be obligated. In Althusserian terms, the witnessing text interpolates a
collectively established yet individually assumed subject-position.
How is one to envision oneself in another place and time? The Hag-
gadic injunction hinges on the ability to imagine a world into which
one can be transported. This is the significance of the Hebrew word
‘ke’ilu’, ‘as if he went out from Egypt’: an ‘as if’ of imaginative world-
making which is usually associated with literary fiction (Iser, 1993,
pp. 13–8). However, the ‘as if’ of the witnessing text does not ask
participants to suspend or ‘bracket’ their sense of spatial and tempo-
ral distance from the depicted world.7 Rather, it enjoins them to split
themselves into two. For, by their very incantation of the command-
ment to envision themselves in the world of the exodus, participants
also reiterate their location in the present tense of the Passover meal.
This is the significance of the third-person formulation. The injunc-
tion does not say ‘I must envision myself’ or even ‘you must envision
yourself’ but ‘every person [lit. man] must envision himself’. One is
transported in the abstract, as ‘he’ rather than as ‘I’: one imagines
oneself as another (Ricoeur, 1992). Participants are never wholly trans-
ported. Their envisioned journey into the distant event simultaneously
requires that part of themselves stay in the performative present of the
Haggadah recitation, as enunciator and envisioner. Witnessing is not full
immersion into the witnessed world. It is an imaginative act of expe-
riential construction that nevertheless remains in the here and now of
discourse.
This collective and (third-) personal transportation into a different
place and time occurs within a hermeneutically regulating context. Such
contexts attend all interpretive acts and communities (Fish, 1976). They
constrain and guide interpretive strategies about what the text is asking
us to do and what kind of text it is. In this case the context consists pri-
marily of a regular but relatively infrequent (yearly) ritual and religious
performance. Such a context makes it almost impossible to take seriously
the as if injunction while also interpreting the world imaginatively cre-
ated (the world of the exodus) as a fiction. For the acceptance of the obli-
gation to imagine oneself in the world of the exodus, the performative
raison d’être of the whole exercise, is underwritten by the same religious
and cultural commitment which accepts the importance and reality of
the exodus as a sacred event, and which also underwrites the design
and purpose of the Haggadah as a text. It is the acceptance, among
60 Telling Presences

other things, of the authority of an implied author (Booth, 1983), or

more precisely an implied witnessing agency or intentionality, created by
the regulated interaction of text, reader, and context, which guarantees
the truth of the event and the text that gives us access to its world.
Finally, this performance of imaginative world-making and witnessing
is not undertaken primarily as an aesthetic exercise, but for a purpose
‘higher’ than that of the transportation itself, most obviously a reli-
gious or moral purpose regarding the welfare of depicted others. This is
another key distinguishing feature between witnessing and fiction, for
notwithstanding claims concerning the social and moral utility of fic-
tion, such utility is not usually a primary reason for writing or reading
it – although there are many fine lines and blurred boundaries here.8
The religious or moral rationale of witnessing is a key component of
the witnessing intentionality of a given text, since such intentionality
is the result of the reader’s conjecture that the text was designed to bear
witness. Feeling that a text imposes an obligation towards the events
or people it depicts is part of what enables readers to judge that it is a
witnessing text.

Witnessing as receptivity, texts that bear witness

‘Bearing witness’, then, is an act performed not by a witness but by

a witnessing text. It is the witnessing text which creates presence at
the event, which produces experience out of discourse. ‘Witnessing’,
following Ellis’s argument, is an expanded and generalized mode of
receptivity to these witnessing texts by their addressees. As the example
of the Passover Haggadah should make clear, this mode of receptiv-
ity is not passive, but the performative co-constructor of witnessing
as a form of discourse and experience. Moreover, a major implication
of the Haggadah for modern broadcasting is that while the audiovi-
sual mediation of witnessing may be historically new, its structure as
a type of communicative act is not. There are historical precedents for
the expanded mode of contemporary media witnessing. Here, in brief,
are some of its main features:
Witnessing Modality and Intentionality. Witnessing texts invite us to
engage them in producing imagined worlds. Like fictions, their textual
cues (verbal narratives of events, utterances of anchors and journalists,
affirmations of other ‘characters’ interviewed or depicted, photographic
techniques of verisimilitude) combine to transport us ‘there’, and at
the same time produce the text’s overall agency or ‘intentionality’.
Here I refer to what Eco (1992) calls ‘intentio operis’, the reader’s
 Paul Frosh 61

interpretation of the ‘purpose’ of the text based upon a conjecture about

its dominant semiotic strategy and ‘topic’. However, unlike fictions,
witnessing texts encourage the conjecture that the world to be imagi-
natively produced is or was an actual world, not just a lifelike one, that
it was witnessed or is being witnessed by the agency producing the text,
and that our engagement with this world (and hence our engagement
with this text) is morally important. What linguists and semioticians
call the modality of a witnessing text is significant here. Modality ‘refers
to the semiotic resources we use for expressing “as how true” or “as how
real” a given representation is to be taken’ (Van Leeuwen, 2001, p. 396).
The question of modality is not ‘ “Did what we see in this image really
happen” but . . . “are we to take it as something that has really happened
or really exists or not?” ’ (Van Leeuwen, 2001, p. 396, original italics).
Witnessing texts signal to readers that they are to be taken as reporting
real events at which the reporter was present; they are, to use Doležel’s
(1988) distinction, descriptive texts which ‘are representations of the
actual world, of a world existing prior to any textual activity’ rather
than constructional texts ‘which are prior to their worlds’ (p. 489).
A witnessing text is one whose structure interacts with the audience
to create not just an imaginative experience regarding the subject of its
discourse (what it was like to be caught up in a tsunami, for instance)
but also the conjecture that this text is a witnessing text, that the event
described really happened, and that the text was designed to report it
(for a religious or moral purpose). Therefore, under certain ‘felicitous’
circumstances (felicitous in Austin’s sense: 1962), texts produced by peo-
ple who were not at the event can pass as texts produced by people who
were at the event, because the emphasis is not on the ‘origin’ of the dis-
course but on the experience of the world we imagine through the text
and the signs it gives of its own status as that world’s witness. Such ‘pass-
ing’ texts are obviously false witness or mere fictions if we judge them
by the veracity gap and Peters’s typology of witnessing positions. In the
reception-oriented version of witnessing outlined here, however, they
are valid witnessing texts – again, under certain circumstances.
Ideational and Interpersonal Ecology. Those circumstances are important
because a text does not acquire its status as testimony on its own. What
helps to secure an audience’s conjecture that a text does not just rep-
resent a world, but bears witness to it? What makes a radio broadcast
or a television program such as State of Terror identifiable as a wit-
nessing text? In semiotic terms, the capacity of a piece of discourse
to be constituted as a recognizable type of text (such as testimony) is
theorized under the ‘textual’ metafunction of language (Halliday, 1978).
62 Telling Presences

This metafunction does not apply only to testimony of course, but

to all language; or, in the extension of Halliday’s scheme by Hodge
and Van Leeuwen (1988), to all signifying practices. Furthermore, the
recognizability of a text is in turn related to the two other semiotic
metafunctions described by Halliday: ideational (the text creates repre-
sentations) and interpersonal (it creates interactions between addressers
and addressees).
The ‘ideational’ ecology of a witnessing text refers to its echoing of
and corroboration by other texts which purport to represent the same
witnessed world. As ‘textually determined constructs, fictional worlds
cannot be altered or cancelled, while the versions of the actual world
provided by descriptive texts are subject to constant modifications and
refutations’ (Doležel, 1988, p. 489). The witnessed world is a textually
constructed representation; yet, since the text’s modality means that
audiences are to ‘take it as’ the report of an actual world, it can be
verified, modified, or challenged by other similarly taken reports: fic-
tions attempting to pass as testimony will only do so if they can survive
such challenges. Thus, the ideational ecology of a witnessing text is
par-excellence the arena of symbolic and representational politics, in
which questions of legitimacy, accuracy, and corroboration arise in the
struggle between rival testimonies. This does not return us, however,
to the ontological foundation of testimonial discourse in the physi-
cal presence of the witness at the event – although this is part of the
currency of this struggle, the persuasiveness of each text’s construction
of the telling presence of witnesses. It means rather that each witness-
ing text is itself an agent in a shifting field of relationships between
diverse and often competing texts, performances, addressees, and insti-
tutional contexts (some of these manifested textually – the work-notes
of reporters, the raw unedited film footage of an event). The veracity
gap, if it appears anywhere in this reception-oriented model, is most
relevant here: in the fissures and contradictions between versions of the
same constructed actuality, rather than in the inevitable failure to bridge
the chasm between experience and discourse.
The ‘interpersonal’ ecology of a witnessing text refers to the norms
and expectations audiences associate with particular types of text, and
their comprehension of the institutional and technological settings of
production and viewing. Genre is probably the most conspicuous and
important element of this ecology, understood as the structured conven-
tions and classificatory regimes that link viewers, texts, and producers
in a common framework of meaning. Crucially, genre refers not only to
categories of texts with shared formal or referential attributes, but also to
 Paul Frosh 63

‘specific systems of hypothesis and expectation’ among addressers and

addressees (Neale, 1990, p. 49). Generic expectations for witnessing texts
include discursive effects of narrator presence in the depicted world and
of a moral or religious obligation to that world, effects that are not neces-
sary components of other non-fiction genres (such as historical writing).
These ideational and interpersonal factors interact in routine but
nevertheless complex ways to underpin the textual metafunction of
a piece of testimony. Together they contribute decisively to the ordi-
nary, everyday, and usually automatic conjectures audiences make about
the witnessing intentionality of a text, its having-been-designed to bear
witness – hence, for example, such unremarkable but far-reaching con-
sequences as witnessing status being more easily granted to a BBC news
program than to a narrative feature film. This is because news broad-
casts are connected generically to the morally charged representation of
actual worlds, and because the BBC is known among viewers as a more
certain institutional site than Hollywood studios for the production of
witnessing texts. And those BBC news broadcasts will be held to more
stringent standards of referential comparison and moral significance
with other reports on the same subject than would most Hollywood
films.9
A concomitant of this claim is that organizations can be witnesses, or
at least the originators and purposive agents of witnessing texts. Given
the significance of first-person experience and discourse in traditional
accounts of witnessing, this would seem unacceptable. The witness in a
news report from India about the tsunami is surely the eyewitness inter-
viewed, or the journalist, or the cameraman. A witness must surely be
someone: testimony ultimately depends upon the body’s material pres-
ence as a guarantor of veracity. However, something needs to assemble
this testimonial apparatus, to bring together all these separate utterances
of witnesses (the journalist, the eyewitness, the camera) into a coherent
purposive conjecture about the point of the text which encompasses
them: this is precisely the implied witnessing agency or intentionality
of the text.10 In fact, given the belated arrival of journalists at many
events, news reports are frequently accounts of other people’s accounts
(as in State of Terror), and the witnessing intentionality of media texts
becomes even more important both as an agent and an effect of overall
textual coherence.
Such a textually constructed agency is conjecturally linked by
the reader to the context of actual organizations and institutions
which make such texts available: broadcasters, newspapers, news
organizations, and so on. Beyond the eyewitnesses, journalists and
cameras of the film about Jenin is Channel Four, an organization already
64 Telling Presences

known by UK viewers as the author and distributor of other witness-

ing texts. Such knowledge can, of course, be deliberately manipulated:
a viewer’s conjecture regarding the intentionality of a text is shaped not
only by previous encounters with the texts made by media organiza-
tions, but with those organizations’ reputations and public images more
broadly, by the paratextual paraphernalia of advertising and promotion.
Not only then can organizations be witnesses: their status as such can
be established, maintained, and enhanced by media branding.
Impersonal and Personal. Like the individual experience of collective
third-person injunctions found in the Haggadah, media witnessing usu-
ally intertwines the impersonal and the personal at all three points of
the communication triangle described by Peters (witnessing agent, text,
and audience). This intertwining has important implications for how we
understand the social and moral consequences of media witnessing.
To begin with, the witnessing agent is often presented in the guise
of an identifiable individual personality, or in a manner that emulates
interpersonal communication. This should come as no surprise, given
broadcasting’s use of direct modes of address (Scannell, 1996; Tolson,
1996), its systematic and strategic invocation of forms of ‘parasocial’
interaction with viewers (Horton and Wohl, 1956), and the ways in
which the monological, spatially extended and often non-synchronous
characteristics of ‘mediated quasi-interaction’ (Thompson, 1995) are
controlled to evoke the dialogical specificity of face-to-face engage-
ments. All of these suggest that the bureaucratic and technical imperson-
ality of the witnessing agency is usually articulated through encounters
with the voices, faces, and utterances of individual witnesses (includ-
ing reporters) and of figures who stand for the organization (such as
news anchors). In State of Terror, for instance, the witnessing agency is
tightly focused via the film’s narrator and central character, the jour-
nalist. Her physical and experiential journey through the dangers of
the West Bank, and parallel epistemological journey to inconclusive
knowledge about the events in Jenin (but deeper sympathy with the pro-
tagonists), come to exemplify both the testimony of others in the film
and to represent the audience’s part as the attentive addressee of all this
witnessing.
At the textual level the witnessing discourse usually intertwines
both ‘experience’ of and ‘information’ about the witnessed world.
‘Experience’ and ‘information’ are problematic terms because they
are associated with ontological and epistemological issues surround-
ing the state of the witness at the event, whereas I want to emphasize
the experience elicited by the text in the reader, and the information
relayed to the reader by the text. One way of treating ‘experience’ and
 Paul Frosh 65

‘information’ hermeneutically is through the narratological notion of

‘focalization’ (Genette, 1980; Bal, 1997): who is ‘seeing’ the world of
the text at any given point in the narrative.11 Experience could be
replaced very roughly by what Bal calls ‘internal’ or ‘character-bound’
focalization; it is elicited through techniques that ask us to construct a
world through the eyes of someone within it. Information, in contrast,
is more generally conveyed by ‘external focalization’ which constructs
the depicted world from positions exterior to it. Experience suggests
personal transportation into the world of the event; information is
impersonally, and sometimes anonymously, observed from a vantage
point outside of, or on the edge of, the event, and tends to connote
factuality. Both are central to contemporary witnessing texts; both trans-
form the imaginative construction of a private narrative into ‘something
which, by definition, goes beyond the personal, in having general
(nonpersonal) validity and consequences’ (Felman, 2000, p. 104).12
Lastly, media witnessing shares in the radical intertwining of the
impersonal and the personal by which broadcasting addresses its audi-
ences. Scannell (2000) describes modern radio and television broadcast-
ing as a ‘for-anyone-as-someone’ structure. Television programs are not
tailor-made for a particular individual, but for anyone who happens to
be watching. They are oblivious to me as their particular addressee, their
logic is one of impersonality. Indeed, I am so irrelevant as an individual
viewer that, converted to a statistical unit, I can be sold to advertisers for
money. At the same time, however, when I watch television I hear voices
and see faces talking to me directly, quite often informally and with
apparent intimacy, as though engaging with me as an individual. This
almost never happens with films; it can happen with written fiction.
This sense of being personally addressed is a concomitant of the ‘person-
ality’ of the witnessing agent discussed earlier. And of course everyone
else watching is also personally addressed; they are also treated simul-
taneously as part of an anonymous mass and as an individual. Hence,
the mutual intertwining of impersonal and personal witnessing agents,
and of experiential and informational textual mechanisms, meet up in
broadcasting’s ‘for-anyone-as-someone’ audience dynamics. In fact, one
could claim that the for-anyone-as-someone structure is a prerequisite
of all modern public discourse. The ‘strategy of impersonal reference, in
which one might say “The text addresses me” and “It addresses no one
in particular”, is a ground condition of intelligibility for public language’
(Warner, 2002, p. 161).
Scannell links the for-anyone-as-someone dynamics of broadcasting
to what he calls, following Heidegger, the ‘care structure’ of modern
66 Telling Presences

society. For Scannell, the broad moral point of witnessing texts (rather
than their legal, theological, or historical purpose) is to make us care
about the lives of others. Yet how can witnessing texts achieve this if
they emanate from organizations, if they are mediated by a complex,
routinized, and possibly manipulative technological and bureaucratic
broadcasting apparatus, and if they treat their addressees, at least in part,
as ‘no one in particular’? Surely only intimacy at a face-to-face level,
personal engagement with the other and his or her direct self-disclosure,
can create the conditions for genuine care for another’s welfare.

Witnessing, civil inattention, and stranger sociality

Again, media witnessing is usually articulated through (mediated)

encounters with individual others, as well as benefiting from forms of
address that individualize the viewer and create intimacy at a distance.
It can therefore elicit some of the intense empathetic responses that are
assumed to be necessary for the creation of moral concern. Beyond this,
however, are those impersonal, institutionally routinized, and system-
ically abstract characteristics of media witnessing only impediments to
moral care, which need constantly to be overcome by personalization?
Or is a form of ‘mass morality’, a primary mode of generalized moral
response to otherness, at work in those very facets of media witnessing
which seem so inimical to traditional emphases on the personal nature
of both testimony and care?
Such mass morality can be found by connecting the third-person
qualities of contemporary witnessing, and the for-anyone-as-someone
nature of broadcasting, to the phenomena of ‘civil inattention’ and
stranger sociality within modern societies. Goffman (1963) describes
civil inattention:

What seems to be involved is that one gives to another enough

visual notice to demonstrate that one appreciates that the other is
present . . . , while at the next moment withdrawing one’s attention
from him so as to express that he does not constitute a target of
special curiosity or design . . . . By according civil inattention, the indi-
vidual implies that he has no reason to suspect the intentions of the
others present and no reason to fear the others, be hostile to them,
or wish to avoid them (p. 84).

Civil inattention, epitomized by the way individuals briefly glance

across the eyes and faces of physically proximate others in a public
 Paul Frosh 67

space, is ‘perhaps the slightest of interpersonal rituals, yet one that con-
stantly regulates the social intercourse of persons in our society’ (1963,
p. 84). Zygmunt Bauman (1990) describes what he calls ‘civil indif-
ference’ as an ominous symptom of our contemporary relationship to
people who we do not know, as characteristic of the art of ‘mismeet-
ing’ by which the other is relegated to the background of our attention.
Crucially, for Bauman, mismeeting is primarily a modern (and largely
urban) technique for de-ethicalizing the relationship with the other: ‘This
is the realm of moral void, inhospitable to either sympathy or hostility’
(1990, p. 25).
This pessimistic reading of Goffman would appear to leave not only
civil inattention itself, but also media witnessing in a moral void. Rou-
tinized, conventional, generic, and impersonal, media witnessing seems
to operate as a form of mismeeting, designed not to bring viewers into
personal engagement with others but rather to transform those others
into strangers: ‘Neighbourly aliens. Alien neighbours . . . That is: morally
distant yet physically close. The aliens within physical reach. Neigh-
bours outside moral reach’ (Bauman, 1990, pp. 24–5). Except that media
witnessing apparently adds to civil inattention and stranger social-
ity the extra vices of virtuality, unidirectionality, and anonymity. The
neighborly aliens it creates are not even physically proximate to an
identifiable viewer they can see in return. Under these circumstances
media witnessing would not seem to lend itself to any kind of moral
mission.
Yet, as Goffman implies, civil inattention (and by extension media
witnessing) is not without its virtues. The apparent indifference it cre-
ates is not morally neutral. To begin with, inattention is ‘civil’. It
recognizes strangers without singling them out as objects of special
curiosity. While Bauman emphasizes that this recognition lacks sympa-
thy and solidarity, Goffman stresses the absence of fear and hostility.
Such absences may not be the most attractive or indeed passionate
of ethical relations, but they are certainly crucial to encounters with
a multiplicity of others in cosmopolitan societies. Their tremendous
moral value is sometimes only realized when these subtle mecha-
nisms of indifference are breached – for instance, in the paranoid
suspicion of strangers in public places in the days following terrorist
attacks – and civil inattention gives way to its semantic opposite: uncivil
attention.
Moreover, the relation to the stranger is, as Simmel noted, a posi-
tive relation characterized by a realignment of distance and proximity,
a bringing closer of our general similarities with those who are remote.
68 Telling Presences

The stranger lives among us, but ‘with the stranger one has only certain
more general qualities in common’, similarities which connect us ‘only
because they connect a great many people’ (Simmel, 1971, pp. 146–7).
In this context media witnessing greatly multiplies every individual’s
encounters with a constantly shifting sea of faces worldwide. It mul-
tiplies these abstract, general connections to others who are remote,
maintaining the thin threads by which the most distant and differ-
ent can be bound together. Like civil inattention, media witnessing
habituates individuals to the otherness of others, to the alienness of
aliens, and to the generality of our connectedness to them. Yet, whereas
civil inattention does this by transforming the shared public ‘here’ into
a space of non-hostile recognition and indifference, media witnessing
does this by asking audiences to imagine momentarily what it is like for
remote others over ‘there’. This indifferent extension to multiple oth-
ers is also characteristic of the ways in which mass media make their
audiences: television ‘gathers populations which may otherwise display
few connections among themselves and positions them as its audience
“indifferently”, according to all viewers the same “rights” and promot-
ing among them a sense of common identity as television audiences’
(Hartley, 1999, p. 158, original italics). Such constant gathering and
representation of different and dispersed populations makes TV a key
promoter of civility and ‘neighborliness’ (Hartley, 1999).
Bauman’s argument that civil inattention de-ethicalizes the other –
and its application to media witnessing – is therefore open to a
nuanced counterargument. In a sense the charge of ‘de-ethicalization’
is true, if, following Avishai Margalit (2002), one takes ‘ethics’ to
refer to that which ought to guide our ‘thick relations’, our behav-
ior toward those with whom we enjoy strong social bonds (family,
friends, and so on). But the indifference of civil inattention and
media witnessing is moral rather than ethical: it guides our ‘thin rela-
tions’, our behavior ‘toward those to whom we are related just by
virtue of their being fellow human beings’ (Margalit, 2002, p. 37).13
As Natan Sznaider (2000) argues: ‘Indifference is not nothing. It is
a very subtle something. It means treating everybody the same. It’s
not corrosive of morality. It’s the basis of modern morality. And the
institutional form of indifference – of treating everyone the same –
is rights’ (p. 304).14 As a moral force, then, media witnessing – like
civil inattention – is a routine and institutionalized social procedure for
moralizing strangers by placing them within the framework of those
whom we recognize as equally human. It extends to them through
its very impersonality and generality the fundamental non-hostility
 Paul Frosh 69

and equivalence that underpins both modern cosmopolitanism and the

discourse of universal human rights.
Media witnessing thus helps to maintain that unexciting but essential
sphere of indifferent relations to strangers in which potential feelings of
hostility are neutralized without requiring that individuals become per-
sonally acquainted or committed. Such non-commitment is often the
object of criticism. It fuels the charge that audiovisual media technolo-
gies insulate viewers from any kind of ethical or emotional responsibility
to those represented on the screen; the screen acts as a barrier as
much as a window, allowing us ‘to maintain a considerable distance
from what we see and thus to acquire an anaesthetised form of knowl-
edge’ (Morley, 2000, p. 184). Yet non-commitment is as important a
moral characteristic of media witnessing as is non-hostility. It avoids the
exclusiveness of intimacy. Non-commitment makes possible a primary
level of impersonal equivalence among individuals which is morally
enabling, since its thin relations do not present some people as spe-
cially connected to us rather than to others (or more connected to
others than to us). It also avoids representing strangers as incommen-
surably different, as too precious in their individuality, too unique for
anyone else to understand. It therefore sidesteps the epistemological
impasse of Peters’s veracity gap and of the translation of another’s
experience into shareable discourse. Rather, it creates a social space of
uncommitted observation and impersonal witnessing in which people
are sufficiently the same – sufficiently interchangeable and equivalent –
for each person to be able to imagine what it might be like to be in
another’s shoes. Media witnessing produces and maintains a ground of
civil equivalence among strangers, upon which it subsequently becomes
possible to see through their eyes (because their eyes are like mine, even
though their situation might not be). It acts as the social and moral
prerequisite for more focused expressions of concern and responsibility.
Ethicalizing strangers occurs only once they have been moralized. In
line with the ‘for-anyone-as-someone’ dynamics of modern public dis-
course, the care structure of such a society is that to be someone you
must first be anyone. Its unrealized ideal is that anyone can be some-
one.15 Witnessing in and for such a society needs to be generalized and
depersonalized.
This is why media witnessing in the age of electronic broadcasting is,
according to Ellis (2000), the child of ‘mass society’. He does not use
the term pejoratively. Being one of the masses means being one of the
‘ordinary people’, a statistical mean perhaps, an anyone, but above all
enough like others to have an imaginable life, to inhabit an imaginable
70 Telling Presences

world. This, I would argue, is the laudable, if limited, moral ambition of

contemporary media witnessing. On a daily basis it extends and replen-
ishes our ability to imagine what it might be like to be someone else –
wherever they might be – and to care about them because we can care
about anyone.

Notes
1. The film finds no hard evidence of a massacre of civilians.
2. Peters also discusses witnessing in Courting the Abyss: Free Speech and the Lib-
eral Tradition (2005), as part of a broader argument about the philosophy of
free expression. I focus on his earlier essay because it (conveniently) presents
his views on witnessing in concentrated form.
3. Admirers of Peters’ Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communi-
cation (1999) may be perplexed by the way in which its eloquent call for
renouncing ‘the dream of full communication while retaining the goods it
invokes’ (p. 21) seems to be contradicted by the emphasis on the veracity
gap. A renunciation that also retains constitutes an extremely delicate oper-
ation, as does giving ‘an account of communication that erases neither the
curious fact of otherness at its core nor the possibility of doing things with
words’ (p. 21). Yet, Peters’s work usually exemplifies this kind of account,
which very few can pull off convincingly. In his discussion of witnessing,
however, he retains just a little too much.
4. Although the injunction is phrased in the masculine, it is binding upon all
adult Jews irrespective of gender.
5. I thank John Ellis for clarifying this point. Although ‘bearing witness to one’s
faith’ is not a phrase native to Judaism, the retelling of the exodus during
the Seder is treated as a collective affirmation of personal belief (specifically
in what God has done ‘for me’ in bringing me out of Egypt). The Hag-
gadah includes a parable about ‘Four Sons’, in which the ‘wicked son’ is
rebuked for excluding himself from the community by rejecting the personal
meaningfulness of its ritual witnessing of the exodus.
6. According to Blondheim (2004), ‘The Seder is observed by more than
80 per cent of Israeli Jews, secular as well as religious, and is also the most
commonly observed religious ritual among contemporary identifying Jews
of the Diaspora’ (p. 22, note 1).
7. According to Iser (1993) the ‘as if’ of fiction ‘brackets’ any references to real-
ity that are incorporated into a fictive text – asks readers to treat them as
fictions – so that ‘it is clear that we must and do suspend all natural atti-
tudes adopted toward the “real” world once we are confronted with the
represented world’ (p. 13).
8. For a compelling articulation of the public social value of literature, see
Nussbaum (1995).
9. There are important exceptions. However, Hollywood films have to explic-
itly mark their witnessing status (‘based on a true story’) in ways that news
broadcasts do not.
 Paul Frosh 71

10. Insofar as we think of this implied agency in terms of Booth’s ‘implied

author’ it is well to remember that Booth himself was unimpressed with
the implied author(s) of television programming, especially commercial
television (Booth, 1982).
11. As both Genette and Bal make clear, focalization (who is seeing) is not the
same as narration (who is speaking), although in a witnessing text like State of
Terror the two are often combined in the personage of the journalist-narrator.
12. The duality of experiential and informational focalizations in witnessing
texts corresponds to what Peters (1997) describes as modernity’s capacities
for seeing (and representing) the world ‘bifocally’, for representing both the
‘near-sight’ of the individual’s local experience and the ‘far-sight’ of (media)
representations of the social totality that transcends our bodily location and
personal knowledge.
13. Margalit is more interested in the ethical imperatives of personal and collec-
tive memory; his strictures regarding the physical presence and suffering of
the witness are more severe than Peters’s. Hence Margalit might not accept
my claims regarding media witnessing.
14. Here I am indebted to Sznaider’s article, as well as to Peters’s own discussions
of ‘dissemination’ (1999) and ‘impersonality’ (2005).
15. This unrealized ideal is key to approaches that stress the importance of insti-
tutional media power and dominant ideological assumptions in the unequal
representation of others.

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3
Mundane Witness
John Ellis

In Seeing Things (Ellis, 2000, pp. 6–38), I asserted that broadcast moving
images turn modern citizens into witnesses of the events of their time.
Further, I claim that this process has produced a new and distinct form
of perception which carries a sense of responsibility – however weak –
towards those events, summed up in the telling words ‘they cannot say
that they did not know’. The arguments outlined in Seeing Things may
have unleashed a debate, but they now seem inadequate. Others have
developed the concept (see Peters, 2001; Rentschler, 2004; Frosh, 2006;
Scannell, 2004). Peters, for instance, has brought considerable clarity to
the distinctions involved in the noun ‘witness’:

The term involves all three points of a basic communication triangle:

(1) the agent who bears witness, (2) the utterance or text itself, (3) the
audience who witnesses. It is thus a strange but intelligible sentence
to say: the witness (speech-act) of the witness (person) was witnessed
(by an audience) (Peters, 2001, p. 701).

However, his overall argument, which moves quickly from the act of
seeing to the act of giving an account of what is seen, raises issues of
trust. What escapes Peters’s argument, as Frosh shows, is the position of
the people who hear this witness (Frosh, 2006). In much of the debate
about the concept of witness, the position of ‘hearer’ is taken for granted
and seen as relatively unproblematic compared to the problems of those
who are forced, by terrible events in their lives, to bear witness. How-
ever, to be the recipient of such acts of witness indeed carries with it
problems of its own. Jurors in particularly gruesome or traumatic trials
receive counseling for the effects on them of the detailed accounts they

73
74 Mundane Witness

have heard. Empathy or ‘identification’ with both perpetrators and vic-

tims can be profoundly disturbing over the period of a long trial. Writer
Nicci Gerrard, who as a journalist sat through the details of the abusive
and murderous careers of Rosemary and Fred West in 1995, had this to
say after time had elapsed:

The couple gave us a collective wince of terror, as if their monstrous

actions offered a glimpse into a hidden side of our psyche. We called
them evil and unnatural to comfort ourselves, because we feared they
were human, like us–though it was a humanity taken to extremes and
unraveled before our eyes (Observer, 2001).

Journalists and jurors alike are forced to be the recipients of the raw
accounts of witnesses. Their emotional difficulties in coming to terms
with what they hear are sometimes profound. To receive witness,
to witness witnessing, involves difficulties which are now becoming
increasingly apparent as therapeutic perspectives are more commonly
employed in everyday life. There is extensive literature on the activity
of bearing witness, of the pain that it involves. There is less, however,
on what the rest of us are supposed to do about having received this
witness.
The activity of witnessing witness through the media has similarly
become commonplace. Bad things happen, and we see them happen or,
at least, the evidence of them having happened. At the same time, we
witness many more happenings which are mundane. We see and hear
people dealing with the everyday frustrations of life, with common ill-
nesses or traffic wardens. We receive their accounts of petty injustices or
successful challenges to arbitrary authority. We witness children argu-
ing with parents; couples in the throes of divorce; strangers thrown
together and deprived of outside stimuli; people challenged to change
their behavior. Such is the nature of contemporary media witness: the
monstrous and the mundane occupy the same space, and the mundane
predominates.
Modern media witness places citizens in the position of the witness,
as the persons to whom testimony is directed. It is therefore important
to understand this seemingly new and complex form of witnessing that
broadcast media have brought about. It is by no means clear what is
expected of the millions who view news events or witness authentic
emotions nightly through the relatively new devices of broadcast sound
and vision: radio, TV, and the internet.
 John Ellis 75

In Seeing Things, my discussion of the peculiarities of moving image

media (the surplus of meaning and the ‘reality effect’ that they carry)
failed to draw a particular conclusion. Namely, I did not sufficiently
emphasize the conclusion that the particularities of moving image
media produce for the viewer a different kind of position to that of the
jury member in a trial, the person who, in Peters’s words, ‘witnesses a
witness bearing witness’. The viewer of a TV news bulletin or documen-
tary or of factual footage streamed over the internet sees in a way that
provides an impression of directness and objectivity that differs from the
spoken or written account, however vivid or honest, of an eyewitness
observer.
This is not to argue for the superior ‘realism’ of the moving image over
other forms of depiction. The viewers of audiovisual material do not see
and hear for themselves: they are the persons to whom a particularly
complex form of testimony is directed. The moral weight of such media
witnessing is different. To hear the account of an individual implies a
powerful interpersonal relationship: one of both belief and sympathy.
Such is the power of the witness provided by Holocaust survivors to the
generations of the future, an activity which is becoming rarer as the
years go by as ageing takes its toll. There is also a direct interpersonal
relationship between the formal witness in court proceedings and those
who witness their witnessing. Judges and juries must assess for them-
selves the veracity of the person giving an account. This depends on the
techniques of interpersonal judgment of truth and trust. Many TV court-
room dramas are concerned with the problem of how to seem to tell the
truth, the problem of performing truthfulness in this most treacherous
of theatrical spaces (see Clover, 2000).
Witness carried by, and provided by, the audiovisual is altogether
more complex. The moving image does not provide the same direct
interpersonal relationship by which the veracity of a testimony may
be judged; neither does it place the viewer in the position of being the
bystander or direct witness of the events similar to that of an eyewitness.
No one was ever summoned to court to bear witness to what they wit-
nessed through TV footage. When necessary, the footage itself is called
in as evidence. Media witnessing involves certain elements of both the
direct interpersonal hearing of an account and that of the bystander, as
well as something additional.
Everyday media witnessing offers the possibility of seeing and hear-
ing directly something of the events. It is possible, sometimes, to see
and hear the shells landing, the moment when the interviewee cracks
or the interviewer loses patience, when the contestant decides, or the
76 Mundane Witness

comedian retorts with the perfect comeback. Often, we see moments

of elation, disappointment, or shame. If footage of such moments is
unavailable, then at the very least we see the spaces in which the alleged
action took place and the aftermath of these actions: Here is the blood
on the tarmac, there are the severed limbs, the wounded being tended;
Here is the family trying to come to terms with the row they have had;
Here is the politician reflecting on his mistakes. TV and broadcast images
provide viewers with the possibility of seeing almost directly an aspect
of the action; there is the possibility of seeing the circumstances, of get-
ting the lowdown. However, this is demonstrably not the same as being
‘on the scene’, of being an eyewitness. Seeing through the camera or
hearing through microphones is always a position of analysis, of try-
ing to understand a representation rather than experiencing a person or
events in front of you. Different reactions on the part of the viewer are
appropriate. Importantly, though, action is not possible. It is impossible
to offer help or console with a hug.
However, this position of distanced observation opens up the possi-
bility of a second element of witnessing, an assessment unencumbered
by the feeling that an appropriate form of action is required, which is
the necessary problem for any bystander or participant. Instead, along-
side an element of direct observation of fragments of an event, media
witness implies the possibility of judgment. The portrayed events always
already attest to something and act as witnesses whose veracity should
be assessed from the position of the viewer of the screen on which they
appear. Modern viewers characteristically ‘take things with a pinch of
salt’, viewing with a degree of skepticism or incredulity. The viewer sees
events, but knows that the cameras and microphones are placed some-
where by individuals and have a necessarily circumscribed view. The
viewer can see the interviewees but knows that the circumstances of the
interview are usually unclear. Many of the elements of being in a shared
place are necessarily absent. A juror assessing an uncomfortable witness
knows that the room is too hot or that lunchtime is near; the TV viewer
does not.
There exists yet a third element to the broadcast audiovisual in addi-
tion to this not quite direct, not quite interpersonal set of relations,
namely the complexly discursive nature of any audiovisual representa-
tion. The viewer does not witness the account of one person or a series
of discrete personal accounts as does the juror. The viewer witnesses an
account drawn together from many sources and constructed by groups
of people who work within organizations specifically devoted to this
task. They work within organizations devoted to the construction of
 John Ellis 77

such accounts within both discursive rules and a particular constrained

relationship of interests and powers. The account that they produce
is, as Dayan insists, an enounced account. It is a ‘monstration,’ to use
Dayan’s term, a particular organized deployment of sounds and images
that form an account which is the product and responsibility of both
individuals and the organization for which they work. Here, the viewer
is not addressed directly by those eyewitnesses who are interviewed on
screen. What they say is addressed to, and constructed for, reporters and
cameras. Nor are viewers direct witnesses to the events that seem to be
unfolding before the camera. The viewer is addressed by the broadcast-
ing organization, by the BBC or CNN or Fox News. Thus, viewers also
relate to the attempts at communication that are made by that organiza-
tion, as they simultaneously take part in a witnessing relationship to the
events and testimonies that are displayed through that communication.
As both Dayan and Meyrowitz have demonstrated, in a world of mul-
tiplying images, it is not enough that a sequence has been recorded
(Dayan, 2006; Meyrowitz, 2007). If it is to acquire meaning and signifi-
cance, it must be enounced by an agent. The recording has to be made to
make sense, to become relevant or meaningful. This is precisely the task
of discursive structures: to take a recording and make of it an attempt at
communication. Discursive structures grant a recording, a channel, and
a structure – in essence, an intentionality that it did not previously pos-
sess as an inert piece of footage. The filmed footage is endowed with a
communicative intent through its inclusion (or ingestion) by the com-
municating apparatus of the broadcasting organization. It is included in
a communicative attempt by that organization, and, importantly, this
attempt might be greeted with a degree or two of skepticism, or even
indifference, by the viewers to whom it has been addressed.
Such is the third aspect of what I claim to be a new state of witness: the
organization of aspects of direct-witnessing and testimony-witnessing
into a further activity of enunciation, of attempted communication.
There are two important implications of this new combination. First,
witnessing becomes without exception structured and synthetic, and
second, communication itself becomes a frequent subject of investiga-
tion and interrogation.

The discursive as synthetic

From the beginning, a news event is already processed towards a discur-

sive complexity, towards the drawing together of many accounts into
a more definitive account. The event that occurs in front of the official
78 Mundane Witness

cameras or unfolds in the time and space of rolling news coverage is very
rare: it has the status of a 9/11. Normally, reporters arrive on the scene
after an event and search for eyewitnesses. Alternatively, they attend
an event that has been predicted in some way, typically an event that
has been partially pre-processed for them through press releases. Addi-
tionally, they may be reporting on an event that is the latest part of an
already known story, perhaps one they wish to inflect in a particular
direction. The reporter will then produce an account of accounts, bring-
ing together eyewitness accounts, experts’ ideas, politicians’ comments,
and a dose of speculation about the future. These synthetic reports are
themselves compared to what other news agencies are generating. News
editors have an eye on every channel. The eventual account that is
broadcast is thus a complex structure of fragments, organized in relation
to questions of veracity (‘How true is this statement?’), lines of relevance
(‘How much does this tell us about . . . ?’), and interest (‘What questions
need to be asked?’).
The media accounts that we witness are always already processed.
Even in the case of a live news event such as 9/11, events are quickly
brought into narrative order through a continual process of ‘recapping’
for joining viewers. As Paddy Scannell has demonstrated, this con-
stant structuring was able, by the end of September 11, 2001, to bring
the incomprehensible events into a narrative order that has proved
relatively durable.

At first it was utterly incomprehensible but, by the end of the day,

the situation had been accurately analyzed and correctly under-
stood. Immediate action had been taken and future courses of action
predicted and assessed (Scannell, 2004, p. 573).

Thus, media witnessing is not that of encountering the brute fact, the
feeling of participation, or the actual experience. It is witnessing from
a privileged position; what we know is the discursive construction of a
totality of an event. We know that a certain event is taking place or has
taken place but not what it is like to be a part of it. As a result, news insti-
tutions strive to obtain the vivid individual testimony, the story that
allows person-to-person empathy to become ‘part of the mix’. These eye-
witness accounts are particularly important in making acceptable and
grounding the discursive structuring of levels of discourse within a news
broadcast. Viewers are well aware that this mix is a form of multiple see-
ing. It is constructed from different points of view and engagements
with the events and has recently been enriched by a further category of
 John Ellis 79

points of view as ‘citizen journalists’ provide their own footage of events

that involve them or that they witness as bystanders with mobile phone-
cameras. Nevertheless, the contemporary media user is also painfully
aware that this complex seeing is equally a partial seeing, constructed
from fragments of larger testimonies and segments of longer shots and
sequences.
The viewer explicitly receives a construct whose terms are more or less
familiar. This construct has levels of discourse and classes of speech. Dis-
tinctions are routinely made between the voice of the commentary and
the voices of participants in a reality show. In the current fashion, the
commentary tends to be ironic and the utterances of participants are
seemingly sincere but may well not be. The viewer’s judgment is guided
both by the commentary and by their own observations of body lan-
guage, tone of voice, and so on. In the different genres of factual footage,
images and sounds are combined and different people speak according
to rules that are well defined and communally accepted (or at least toler-
ated). Though these genres are complex constructions, they are very far
from fiction. Although these are constructed discourses with rules, nar-
ratives, and storytelling, they are distinct from the forms and discourses
that are recognized as fictional. Those who are acting are acting in a
defined set of roles (newsreader, reporter, correspondent, interviewer)
under the requirements of being plausibly true rather than emotionally
convincing. Those who present a performance are performing aspects
of themselves and preserving and violating their personal privacy in
ways that have become familiar, at least since Erving Goffman recog-
nized the practice of dividing behavior into the front-stage and the
back-stage. Hence, these complex discursive constructions of witness are
recognized as distinct from fiction and are perceived as constructions in
which questions of accuracy, completeness, truthfulness, and trust are
centrally relevant. Yet they remain ‘stories’.

The forensic attitude

News and factual information are still constructed as ‘stories’ even if

they are not fictional. Their ‘storyness’ is a subject of particular concern,
as it seems to be at odds with the need for accuracy and truth. This is
not a new problem as it dates to the beginnings of the mass media. This
problem, then, is perhaps the reason for the emergence, at the same
time as the popular printed news press in the late nineteenth century,
of a new genre of fiction which examined the habits of mind and the
80 Mundane Witness

discursive traces of the construction of news. This is the genre of detec-

tive fiction which, like news, depends upon the construction of a story
(the crime) from the traces that have been left behind, in similar fash-
ion to the news reporter who arrives after an event. Detectives examine
physical evidence and the statements of witnesses. From Conrad’s The
Secret Agent and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes have descended fictions
which interrogate fact, truth, and accuracy, and in doing so often ask
questions about the details that are overlooked in the construction of
a coherent narrative. The emergence of the two forms of the detective
novel and modern news is perhaps more than a simple coincidence.
The development of popular news in story form, the news-story, strad-
dled the boundaries between fact and fiction and required a reflection
on what it presented as evidence and the forms in which it presented
this evidence.1
Newspaper news at least maintained its distance from fiction. Televi-
sion news shares its space with fictions and is sometimes almost crowded
out by them. In this relationship of close proximity in TV schedules,
the linkage has tightened between fictions which are concerned with
the process of detection and the approach of news reportage to the evi-
dence that it deploys in constructing news stories. TV news has become
more interrogatory, firing questions at its subjects, questions that can
often seem banal but nevertheless spring from the need to seek out
information rather than to simply receive it. TV news has also become
more powerful in the picture and information resources that it can com-
mand and in the speed with which it can react to events. News stories
now contain many more diverse fragments of events than a quarter of a
century ago.
Television fiction has responded with a new form of detective fiction
appropriate to these new news circumstances. Forensic fiction abounds
in the form of series like ‘CSI’, ‘Without a Trace’, ‘Waking the Dead’,
and ‘Silent Witness’. These are fictions that emphasize the process of
interrogation – gathering and sifting information in order to produce
knowledge. As stories, they guide their viewers through a similar process
of developing knowledge as do news stories. They assemble fragments of
information, assess their relative veracity and/or usefulness, and seek to
fit them into a larger framework of explanation. Significantly, these new
forensic dramas offer visual reconstructions of events, some of which
are true and some of which are merely hypothetical. At the limit, there
are even some accounts which are completely untrue, reconstructing
the false testimony of untruthful witnesses. These forensic fictions are
there to be enjoyed as stories in their own right, of course, but they
 John Ellis 81

have other significance as well. They continue the interrogation of the

storyness of broadcast news by dramatizing the process of discovering
events from the available evidence and including substantial elements
of unreliable evidence which must be sifted. If newsrooms have become
the forensic laboratories of reality by assessing footage for its evidential
qualities, then forensic fiction is the training ground for its audiences.

Witnessing communication itself

Alongside TV’s concern with the forensic lies a concern with com-
munication. TV provides a vast repertoire of examples of attempts
at communication. Much of the humor of situation comedy revolves
around failures of communication, in which one character willfully or
mistakenly misunderstands another. Sitcoms also display the futility
of communicative attempts, the ways that people delude themselves,
thinking that they are communicating their ideas or feelings but instead
showing how little they know themselves or understand the world. Self-
delusion is one of the great resources of reality TV and documentary,
placing the viewer in a position of superior or analytic knowledge, able
to perceive the inadequacy of what is being said.
TV allows us to witness a vast repertoire of communicative attempts
and to become aware of their particular styles. The role of the impres-
sionist has grown with this increasing awareness of communicative
styling. It is no longer enough to capture the voice of a famous figure,
whether politician or TV personality. Contemporary impressionists like
Rory Bremner must imitate their entire styles of speech: their typical
vocabularies and turns of phrase, their hesitations and speech patterns,
their rhetorics, and their blindnesses. A further development of this ten-
dency is fictional: the creation of behind the scenes series such as ‘The
West Wing’ or ‘In the Thick of It’ which claim to present the forms of
communication that take place beyond public pronouncements, in the
backstage of politics.
Through TV we witness communicative attempts rather than success-
ful communication. In Peters’s view, this emphasizes the isolation of
the individual (see Peters, 2000); in Scannell’s more optimistic view this
emphasizes the constant everyday negotiations that constitute social
life. We are equally aware of the performative aspects of communication,
the fact that communication is neither a direct window into the soul,
nor a means of bodying forth intimate emotions. Communication has
its rules. Discourse speaks the person even as people utilize it to speak
their thoughts and feelings. Linguists have known this for ages. Now,
82 Mundane Witness

however, it has become a common perception because of the empha-

sis that TV has placed upon communication and the everyday access
that it provides to a vast gallery of communicative styles, both actual
and fictional, along with a position of reflection, analysis, or superior
observation of those styles in action.
This awareness is an ingredient in the media literacy that is part of the
equipment of the modern citizen. It extends to the media’s own speech:
the attempted communications of news broadcasts and presenters. As a
component of media witnessing, we are aware that individuals within
institutions attempt to communicate a particular gathering and structur-
ing of disparate material that is, for want of a more accurate term, ‘drawn
from reality’. There is a constant tug-of-war between the known forms of
communication, the rhetorics of news, and the elements of other forms
of witness that are glimpsed through them. There is an instability within
these complex attempts at communication which are coming to the fore
as media literacy develops. The canny news organization appeals occa-
sionally to this awareness by showing us individual members of staff
making genuine attempts at sincerity. These will be temporarily success-
ful until they themselves become a recognized rhetorical device. Equally,
whole news organizations have to pay increasing attention to the trust
with which they are regarded. One lapse of accuracy, one hasty distor-
tion, can lead to major problems, as the BBC has discovered through a
series of challenges to its news authority over the past decade.

The experience of mundane witness

The synthetic nature of media witness has important consequences.

First, it provides the TV viewer with an overview of communicative
attempts and permits and encourages a more forensic attitude to the
sifting of information. Second, it carries an awareness of the process
of its own construction. Yet it does so by using the sincere utterances
of individuals who themselves have an experience to recount. Thus,
media witnessing is not a simple experience. Three elements of other
forms of witness are combined into a new state of witness. There are ele-
ments of the eyewitness experience as well as elements of the experience
of responding to and weighing the truthfulness of other eyewitnesses.
These aspects are combined within a form that provides a third ele-
ment within media witnessing: the complex discursive form of the
audiovisual. Thus far, I have examined what is involved in the com-
plex discursive form, but what of my original questions: What are we
meant to do with this witnessing? What are the implications of this
 John Ellis 83

state? How is it experienced socially, and what are the implications for
this experience?
The witnessing that we experience frequently through the media is
an everyday state, a process of mundane witness. Television in partic-
ular produces a distinct experience of witness which in turn serves to
‘keep us in touch’ or keep us informed. Mundane witness produces an
awareness of events around us and of the people who make up our soci-
ety and wider world. As Peters points out, we keep up with the news
because ‘the present is the moment of decision’ (2001, p. 722). The news
along with the wider factual depictions of contemporary society that we
witness do not themselves require our decisions, except for the infre-
quent moments of casting votes at elections. However, we do need to
be aware of what they contain as they provide the present that frames
our immediate decisions. This awareness does not necessarily have to
extend to the detailed recall of news stories, even current ones. Recall of
events witnessed in their complex televisual construction is often hazy
at best. Nevertheless recall serves a purpose, enabling us to frame our
individual actions within a far wider context than that of our imme-
diate experience. Paddy Scannell provides a further account that teases
out the social implications. Scannell sees the awareness of the current
context not only as framing private actions and choices but equally as
engendering a sense of sociality, of a connection with the wider world.
In Scannell’s account, awareness of the world brings with it an active
feeling of engagement with the concerns of everyday life which are
common to most or all people. With awareness comes a sense that ‘we
are all in it together’, which implies a place within a common history
or histories. This sense of the historical nature of the moment is also
expressed through another common reaction: ‘There but for the grace
of God, go I’. Such reactions are intensified by the emotional appeal of
witnessed personal accounts provided by the testimony of eyewitnesses
or people directly affected and of the events that can be witnessed daily
in factual programming.
Awareness is the first element of the experience of witness. Its second
element is perhaps less obvious. Witnessing induces a specific and possi-
bly novel state of mind and involves a specific form of acquaintanceship
that feels personal and yet is not. Its novelty can be traced in the many
literary and popular references to a sensation of unexpected familiarity
with that which cannot be familiar. One concrete experience of this state
of mind is the spontaneous recognition of an actor or media figure as an
acquaintance. This experience is becoming familiar to urban dwellers
as the stock of everyday celebrities grows ever larger. The recognition
84 Mundane Witness

is spontaneous, and some will even step forward with a greeting, con-
fident that they know the celebrity but are, just for a second, unaware
of precisely how. This is the confidence of a direct, personal, and sen-
suous knowledge, the same feeling as meeting a real-life acquaintance
in the street, and perhaps more intense given the emotions that may
have been induced by that media celebrity, particularly by an actor. This
initial recognition is usually, but not always, replaced almost immedi-
ately by a sense of embarrassment as the category confusion becomes
clear. Actors and TV personalities rarely comment in interviews on the
frequency with which this misrecognition takes place as it implies that
they are not quite as famous as they would like you to believe. How-
ever, in private, performers will acknowledge that this is a fairly frequent
event.2 From the point of view of the (mis)recognizing individual, this
process is one of the unrecorded, un-researched aspects of everyday life
which seems to have happened to most people.
The sensation is that of the ‘double take’ as Draaisma defines it:

We are in the middle of reading, somebody asks us something and

as we look up – ‘what did you say?’ – we can still ‘hear’ the question
and we reply to it. Or we let our eyes roam vaguely over a crowded
outdoor café and only realize a moment later that we spotted an
acquaintance. In these cases, now often referred to as ‘double takes’,
there is a delayed assimilation of something already present as a sense
impression (2004, p. 155).3

Draaisma describes a dislocation of understanding produced by a sense

of inappropriateness. It is significant that Draaisma takes as one of his
examples the ‘civil inattention’ that is both a necessary and charac-
teristic posture of modern urban life (‘we let our eyes roam vaguely
over a crowded outdoor café’). This civil inattention sees the multitudi-
nous others who share our social space as proximate but unconnected,
equally human in their rights and existence as we are, but with no nec-
essary connection to us. Such inattention is necessary to deal with the
impossibility or inappropriateness of making human contact with these
other people. Frosh (2006) traces many of the connections between
media witnessing and this civil inattention (see Frosh, Chapter 2).
The people whom we encounter regularly through the media are
familiar to us but in a particular way. If and when we encounter such a
familiar person, the encounter breaks through this state of civil inatten-
tion. It provokes a ‘double take’ in so doing, a realization that our form
of civil inattention has somehow not been the appropriate response to
 John Ellis 85

the person whom we are seeing. We recognize someone we believe to

be known to us and only subsequently realize the specific way in which
we know them. The (mis)recognition is neither that of civil inattention
nor that of real acquaintance but somewhere between the two. This
(mis)recognition of a media figure as a real acquaintance is a specific
instance of the effects of media witnessing. Media witnessing engenders
a specific kind of familiarity with that with which we are not actually
acquainted. We ‘know’ the city of Bazra as we ‘know’ Paris Hilton or
Fiona Bruce. They are at once familiar and hard to place exactly within
the realm of our own experience. The known events and faces of the
media hover in an uneasy space between that of civil inattention and
personal acquaintance. This is a new state of everyday knowledge which
could be summed up as being ‘known unknowns’.4

Conclusion

What, then, is expected (or can be expected) of such witnessing? It pro-

duces an awareness of the social and even global context that might
frame individual actions. It involves an element of sociality. It moves
us from civil inattention towards the engagement that is implied by
acquaintanceship, but stops well short of actual acquaintanceship. It is
the product of and contained within known complex, but economic,
discursive forms of the news-story.
However, sometimes, these discursive forms are not enough. Some
events demand more than the particular engagement that mundane
witnessing involves and the particular discursive economy of the short
news-story. They become the object of a fascination that is sometimes
personal but is just as often shared. Such events include both public
catastrophes, like 9/11 or the Tsunami of 2002, and events with more
personal resonances, like the death of Diana Princess of Wales in 1997
or the abduction of the 3-year-old Madeleine McCann in 2007. Events
such as these may be traumatic in their implications for normal states of
awareness or may bring up painful personal associations and deep fears.
They are given and seem to require a multiplication of detail that spills
out of the normal discursive forms. In this, they are helped by rolling
news channels which are able to generate endless detail and speculation
about further details. They seem to create a need for a multiple seeing
that is more detailed than the normal discursive forms will allow. They
involve a level of engagement that takes media professionals by surprise
and is viewed by them as somewhat suspect. According to the vulgate
of the media, the reaction to the death of Princess Diana was dubbed
86 Mundane Witness

‘an outpouring of grief’; the abduction of Madeleine McCann involved

‘a sophisticated media campaign’ on the part of her parents. Yet these
news events are special moments, when the normal levels of empa-
thy implied in mundane witness are exceeded. These are not events of
which it seems enough simply to be aware, nor are they events in the
elsewhere of the world beyond our immediate experience. They have
resonance within our immediate experience and draw on the awareness
of our human frailty, the fears of parenthood, or the anger that the world
continues despite the death of someone you love.
Mundane witness involves an awareness which does not require
action. However, it does call on both empathy and analysis. It is con-
structed by known organizations into stories which are nevertheless
factual and evidential. It enables us to be witnesses not so much to
events as to our own times. We share in the unfolding of a complex and
largely arbitrary world which we struggle to comprehend. In this pro-
cess, we feel something of the emotion of others and have a sense that
we are engaged in a difficult process of understanding that is shared
by others. We are aware that we both know and do not know. Such
awareness is a new phenomenon, born of mass news but sealed in the
complicated constructs of the audiovisual. This awareness frames per-
sonal action, constraining it and socializing it and inducing degrees of
anxiety or asociality depending on the degree to which it is accepted
or ignored. Such framing of personal action is not simply of the kind
that guides self-interested decisions in the way that an awareness of
stock market rumors might guide decisions to buy or sell. It is rather
an awareness of ourselves as historical actors, sharing our present with
that of many others. The complex seeing, hearing, and narration that it
involves provides us, through showing the ideas and actions of others
played out over time, an awareness of ourselves within history and as
part of specific histories. Mundane witness therefore gives us a respon-
sibility to know about the actions of others almost as a precondition of
knowledge about ourselves. As a result, we carry a sense of responsibility
towards what we see on TV. This responsibility towards events is not that
of the witness called to attest. Yet it has significant features in common
with the position of a witness in court. Mundane witness also carries
with it the sense that seeing brings with it a set of social implications
and an emotional commitment.
I call this ‘mundane witness’ to distinguish it from the strong (and
sometimes enforced) obligations that come with being an eyewitness
rather than a TV-witness to immediate events. I also use the term to
indicate just how ordinary and everyday such an experience really is.
 John Ellis 87

Although it is less than a century old, it has become one of the defining
features of contemporary civilization. The experience of mundane wit-
ness is usually as close as we need to get to events. Its limits are rarely
breached, and it is a significant social event when such a breach occurs.

Notes
1. Conan Doyle makes the co-emergence of news and detective procedures into
a recurring theme. Holmes keeps all newspaper cuttings related to crime in
his archives and learns the initial details about specific cases (such as in ‘Silver
Blaze’) from newspapers while sometimes disparaging these reports for their
superficiality. Watson only goes public with his account (in ‘The Final Prob-
lem’) of the events leading up to Holmes’s ‘death’ when locked in combat
with Moriarty at the Reichenbach Falls in order to counter the misleading
letters distributed by Moriarty’s family through the press.
2. The actor Teryl Rothery, a familiar figure from the sci-fi TV series ‘Stargate’ said
in an interview, ‘I get recognized, but not necessarily from my name. I get a lot
of people who will say I look so familiar to them. Some will know the show.
But for the most part, no. I get recognized when I’m outside of Vancouver. In
the U.S. I get recognized. And certainly in Europe a lot’ (GateWorld, 2006).
Complete information provided in references.
3. Though this state of mind relies on having seen the person before, the literal
meaning of ‘déjà vu’, Draaisma claims that it does not share the essential
characteristics of that state: ‘There is no sense of repetition, no placing of
an event into an indefinite past, no sense of knowing in advance what will
happen the next moment’ (2004, p. 155).
4. The problem with this useful concept is that it has been devalued by its use in
a widely lampooned speech by the discredited Donald Rumsfeld.

References
C. J. Clover (2000) ‘Judging Audiences: The Case of the Trial Movie’, in C. Gledhill
and L. Williams (eds), Reinventing Film Studies (Arnold: London).
D. Dayan (2006) Lecture presented at the International Communication Associa-
tion, Dresden, Germany, June.
D. Draaisma (2004) Why Life Speeds Up as You Get Older: How Memory Shapes Our
Past (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
J. Ellis (2000) Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I.B. Tauris).
P. Frosh (2006) ‘Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass Media, and the Imagined
Lives of Strangers’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 23, no. 4,
265–84. Also in this volume, Chapter 2.
GateWorld (2006) http://www.gateworld.net/news/2004/12/interviewwithteryl
rothery.shtml, date accessed 25 February 2007.
N. Gerrard, 7 January 2001, Observer.
J. Meyrowitz (unpublished paper 2007) ‘Watching us Being Watched: State,
Corporate, and Citizen Surveillance’, projected for End of TV?
88 Mundane Witness

J. D. Peters (2000) Speaking into the Air: A History of the Idea of Communication
(Chicago: Chicago University Press).
J. D. Peters (2001) ‘Witnessing’, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 23, no. 6, 707–23.
Also in this volume, Chapter 1.
C. A. Rentschler (2004) ‘Witnessing: US Citizenship and the Vicarious Experience
of Suffering’, Media, Culture & Society, vol. 3, no. 26, 296–304.
P. Scannell (2004) ‘What Reality has Misfortune?’ Media, Culture & Society, vol. 7,
no. 26, 573–84.
4
Witness as a Cultural Form
of Communication
Historical Roots, Structural Dynamics,
and Current Appearances
Günter Thomas

Introduction

Radio and television (audiovisual mass communication) at the begin-

ning of the twenty-first century broadcast multiple forms of witnessing,
confession, and testimony in a variety of genres ranging from journalis-
tic forms of reporting, eyewitness news, the recollections of historical
events, public hearings, talk-shows, magazine programs focusing on
advice and support, to advertisements, and so on. In order to ana-
lyze and interpret these phenomena, this paper adopts a specific analyti-
cal and hermeneutical perspective: Witnessing is viewed as a historically
and evolutionary ‘successful’ cultural form of communication that can
be analyzed, at least in part, through comparative work.
This paper proceeds in five steps. The first step will be an attempt
to sketch out the specifics of cultural forms of communication vis-á-vis
formats and genres. The second step will shed some light on the two,
interconnected historical roots underlying the form of witnessing – the
long-standing cultural heritage of witnessing and confession within the
religious and legal social spheres. While there is no ‘original’ in cultural
forms, the third step builds on these historical considerations in an
attempt to develop the dynamic structure or texture of the cultural form
of witnessing. Against the background of this analysis, the fourth step
will then introduce some further historical dimensions and variations
and will consider witnessing as confession, diary, and novel. Based on the
description of the dynamic structure of the form (and phenomena) of
witnessing in early modernity, the final section will examine witnessing
in television under the conditions of late modernity. This move is tied to a

89
90 Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication

specific thesis, namely, that the religious traditions of confession seem

to emerge predominately in entertainment formats, while the traditions
of legal or forensic testimony appear more prevalent in informational
formats. Hence, two ‘old’ cultural forms of communication have now
shifted to the realm of audiovisual communication.

On distinguishing formats and cultural forms

In cultural practices (and particularly in forms of communication) we

are rarely faced with a totally new invention or an exact replication.
In order to understand both the continuity and the changes in com-
munication processes over time, we need a clear insight into two
distinct cultural inventions which, despite multiple interpretations and
readings, have emerged as relatively stable entities in many communi-
cation processes across various symbol systems: (1) genres or formats, and
(2) cultural forms of communication. In an evolutionary sense, it is not a
multiplicity of readings which is unlikely, but rather the emergence of
relatively stable formats and forms.
How are we to distinguish cultural forms of communication from
genres and formats? Expectations solidified into patterns of consump-
tion and reception do form and mould the communication process
(formats, semantics, themes, and so on). Mutual expectations of expecta-
tions among communicators create feedback loops in which fairly fluid
forms harden, and fairly fixed forms are made more flexible. As a conse-
quence, in speech and writing as well as in audiovisual communication,
we have flexible formats with long histories. Without relatively clear
genres (formats, conventions, expectations of expectations) most com-
munication would be too risky, too unpredictable, too unforeseeable – in
short, too stressful and too strenuous. In both news and entertainment
formats, the media play with the covariance of secure expectations on
the one hand and with surprise/irritation/novelty on the other. Being
interlinked, they both need to be engaged at the same time. For exam-
ple, the more surprising the content, the more structure is required:
when novelty touches upon the uncannily unexpected (as on Septem-
ber 11, 2001), repetition reigns. Hence, in order to raise the degree
of surprise/irritation/novelty, the media are in a constant search for
stable and reliable formats which can be adapted to the media envi-
ronment and which provide a security of expectation – which can then
be playfully ‘deconstructed’.1
Embedded in diverse formats (yet still clearly distinguished from
them) we find a variety of cultural forms of communication. In order
 Günter Thomas 91

to unpack their complex interactions (such as the interferences and

dynamics between law, religion, and media), it is ultimately important
that so-called cultural forms are stored within shaped, relatively stable,
expectation-steering, and thoroughly system-specific formats. Vital to
note here is that they themselves are not system-specific, but rather
extend across distinct symbol systems.
While cultural forms of communication, such as ‘ritual’ or ‘witness-
ing’, cannot be fixed or set in an essentialist way, they are so ‘successful’
within the evolution of social communication that differing social sys-
tems fall back upon them. In this way, these cultural forms fuse relative
stability with high plasticity and can therefore move ‘between’ systems:
they may be copied, integrated and combined, treated with irony,
quoted both implicitly and explicitly, or even operate quite effectively at
a thoroughly unobserved level. While they may arise from diverse ‘ori-
gins’, their tenacity stems from their ability to adapt to their symbolic envi-
ronments. Their presence or absence can also lead to an affinity towards
or the adoption of specific motifs and specific media formations.
In some cases, we may talk about religious, political, or legal cultural
forms which reflect the historical fact that cultural forms generally have
some primary field of cultivation and development. However, system-
specific cultural forms are not ones that appear only in religions, but
those that are primarily (though not exclusively) related to cultural
systems.
For this reason, a dual fluidity of cultural forms can be observed. The
first is a basic evolutionary fluidity which is required for stable forms in
varying historical, social, political, cultural, and media-technology con-
texts. In the evolution of legal discourse, or in the evolution of religions
or of political or artistic communication, only those forms that attain
stability by sufficient adaptive plasticity survive. Without a doubt, cultural
evolution resembles certain aspects of biological evolution: only a suffi-
cient degree of plasticity works in favor of ‘endurance’. Cultural forms
are not unchangeable or ‘eternal’. Only change and variation work in
favor of stability over the course of history. For example, ritual is a cul-
tural form which has ‘survived’ in many different stages of religious
development and in sociocultural environments of religious commu-
nication. Similarly, witnessing is an extremely prevalent cultural form
in legal systems; nevertheless, it shows a great deal of variety. One could
call this intra-systemic fluidity.
However, in order to come to terms with a range of cultural
phenomena – such as the sacralization of media and the mediatiza-
tion of religion or the appearance of ‘witnessing’ in television – one
92 Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication

must distinguish intra-systemic fluidity from inter-systemic fluidity. This

second type of fluidity allows cultural forms to ‘travel’ from one social
system to the other or from one cultural sphere to the other. This process
allows for co-evolutions, parallel developments, conflicts, and subtle
‘competition’. For example, the cultural form of witnessing originated
in both legal and religious practices and then moved into the media
in journalistic as well as entertainment formats. This kind of ‘cross-
fertilization’ can lead to quasi-hybridized phenomena. For instance,
what appears to be the progressive sacralization of the media can be
seen, at least in part, as the increased importation of religious cultural
forms into the media (leaving aside for the moment statements about
the reasons behind such a development).
In order to perceive the shifts, transformations, and recombinations
of these cultural forms, we need a history of cultural forms of commu-
nication. This would be analogous to a history of the interpretation of
specific concepts – tracing the movements of concepts across particular
realms of discourse. Such a history of cultural forms of communication
would assist us in observing the movements and mutations of forms of
communication across the various realms of cultural practice and would
open up research to synchronic and diachronic comparison. The follow-
ing remarks on witnessing aim to present a preliminary contribution to
such a history of cultural forms of communication.

Law and religion: Two interconnected historical roots

of witnessing

In the famous Ten Commandments, the eighth commandment (in Exo-

dus 20:16) reads: ‘You shall not bear false witness against your neighbor’
. Rather literally translated, it commands that: ‘You shall
not say/testify against your neighbor as a false witness.’
Interestingly, this ancient text sheds some light on the practice and
form of witnessing (Philips, 1970; Simian-Yofre, 1972, pp. 1107–28).
First, this religious text is not referring to a religious practice, but rather
to a specific legal practice. In Leviticus 5:1, a witness ( ), `ed) is a man
(in practice, women were not allowed to be witnesses) who has seen or
heard something about which he must witness; the witness is a privi-
leged observer, someone who saw something others could not see, who
heard something others did not hear. Contrary to our modern use of the
legal witness, the ancient witness could be both the witness in another’s
case or the claimant or plaintiff who accuses (Stoebe, 1952, p. 119f.).
This double aspect of witnessing is not specific to ancient Hebraic law
 Günter Thomas 93

but is also evident in the oldest legal codex: the Babylonian code of
Hammurabi (1760 BC). However, witnesses were not only required in
courts – a witness might be needed for entering into contracts (Isaiah
8:16; Jeremiah 32:10–16). Important legal agreements with potential
future conflicts required attestation by witnesses, for example, when
purchasing property or at an engagement or wedding. However, appre-
ciating the initial dual role of the witness – as a neutral observer or an
accuser – is crucial to understanding the contemporary use of witnesses
in regard to modern atrocities, such as the Holocaust or other crimes
and violence in the twentieth century.2
From this perspective, the cultural invention of the ‘witness’ opens
up a new path in legal procedures, since the requirement of a wit-
ness corresponds to a basic idea of the presumption of innocence. The
introduction of multiple witnesses means that both the accused and
the accuser have the opportunity to provide the necessary evidence. In
cultures populated with various ‘non-humans’ (such as ancestral spir-
its, and so on) the invention of the witness is a significant step toward
empiricism and objectivity. In a similar vein, later religious receptions
of the trope of ‘witnessing’ called upon ‘heaven and earth’ as witnesses,
thus signifying the highest form of objectivity (Deuteronomy 4:26).
As the claimant or as the observer of an action, the witness (`ed) is not
called upon to make a mere utterance, but rather to present a statement
in the context of a conflict or dispute. The witness enters into a hotly
contested and unstable reality. Moreover, this instability has resulted from
some severe deviance from a (divine, social, legal, or political) norm
or from a crucial transition (marriage, new contract, and so on). It is
this complex situation of contested and unstable realities in which the
knowledge of a privileged observer makes him or her a witness. When
common sense reigns, no witness is required.
Closely related to the feature of a contested and unstable reality is
the issue of power and authority. If a person is called to witness, he
or she is officially endowed with authority. The witness called forth is
entitled to perform a specific speech act. It is this aspect of the power
of witnesses which calls for guarantees, moral securities, and proof
of his or her competence. While in the oldest biblical texts (such as
Deuteronomy 19:16–19) only one witness was required, in later texts
(and especially in cases of capital punishment) at least two witnesses
were then required (cf. Numbers 35:30; Deuteronomy 17:6; 19:15). In
Deuteronomy 17:7, the witness is even required to participate in carry-
ing out the punishment – in order to demonstrate his own belief in his
testimony.
94 Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication

That the problem of false witnesses was included in religious codes

points to an interesting fact: the sociocultural invention of ‘witness-
ing’ offers procedural support for the legal settlement of social conflicts.
In this respect, it is a solution in a situation regarding an indetermi-
nate reality: to the questions ‘What happened? What was the case?’ it
affirms ‘This happened! This is the case!’ Yet this power for determining
reality is also dangerous because it opens the door for selfish, destruc-
tive, and wrongful manipulations of reality. In short, witnessing can
be a solution, but it is also a problem. Once seen through Deuteronomy
19:16, which refers to the ‘witness of violence’, the false witness in
Exodus 20:16 becomes one who attempts to murder by means of such
false witnessing. The false witness who testifies against his ‘neighbor’ is
endangering social life in a fundamental way: veiled in the rhetoric of
righteousness and using the law, he/she erodes trust in close relation-
ships beyond kinship relations, a basic component in the evolution of
any society. Consequently, in Deuteronomy, as in the Code of Ham-
murabi, a proven false witness was subjected to the same punishment
he sought to inflict upon the victim of his witnessing. In these old legal
contexts, the witness was risking his own life and limb – a false witness
could accuse a truthful witness of being a false witness. In short, the legal
speech act of witnessing demands honesty, sincerity, and faithfulness to
the truth – at the risk of a destructive manipulation of truth and real-
ity. The invention of ‘witnessing’ is intrinsically risky since the attempt
to solve a social and legal problem can – through false witnessing –
deepen and broaden the social problems by a rapid deterioration of
trust.
Without a doubt, there have been many legal attempts to limit the
risks of witnessing. Demanding two or more witnesses is one mea-
sure (and according to the Mishnah, each witness was to be heard
separately – if they contradicted one another on important points
their witness was invalidated [Sanhedrin 5]); requiring eyewitnesses is
another. Enforcing the lex talionis against false witnesses (inflicting upon
the witness what he meant to inflict on the accused) was a rather drastic
measure.
And yet, the early religious discourses about legal witnessing docu-
ment an attempt for religious support for the legal measure. However,
the false and violent witness became such a distinct cultural topic
that it reappears in religious texts such as individual Psalms of lament
(for example, Pss 27, 35). In spite of the prohibitions, false witnessing
appears to have been a very common crime (Proverbs 6:19; 12:17; 14:5;
19:5; 24:28; Matthew 26:60; Acts 6:13).
 Günter Thomas 95

The transposition of this legal cultural form into the religious sphere
becomes even more prominent in Isaiah 43:8–13, which portrays a
lawsuit between YHWH and other deities in which YHWH asks for wit-
nesses. This use of the cultural form of witnessing as a trope in religious
discourse seems to have paved the way for types of specific religious wit-
nessing closely linked to the Greek term martur . . . a ‘testimony’ (Beutler,
1972, pp. 106–18). Since the fourth century BC and then in Christian
times, the term martyr (‘witness’) came to mean one who attests to the
truth by suffering (Acts 22:20; Revelation 2:13; cf. 1:9; 6:9; 11:3; 20:4;
Hebrews 11; 12:1).
Christian martyrdom continued the long tradition of martyrdom
in Judaism, which was interpreted, with reference to Leviticus 22:32,
as sanctification of God’s name (Kiddush Hashem). In
the first and second book of Maccabees, narrations of martyrdom refer
to Jews being executed for such ‘crimes’ as observing the Sabbath, cir-
cumcising their children, or refusing to eat pork or meat sacrificed to
idols.
In both Jewish and Christian traditions, martyrs were recognized due
to the fact that in their public persecution of their faith, they personally
preferred to die than to renounce that religious faith. However, martyr,
as a technical term, has several meanings and only slowly did it become
identified with those Jews or Christians who died for the faith – most
of whom after being subjected to torture (Gleason, 1999, pp. 287–313;
Glancy, 2005, pp. 107–36). In the pre-Christian era, the term was often
used for anyone who was persecuted or suffering, even those who sur-
vived. Only gradually did martyr come to mean someone who actually
died under persecution for her or his faith (Acts 22:20; Revelation 2:13;
17:6) as a culturally powerful witness (Castelli, 2004, p. 203) – though,
in the New Testament, the Gospel of John already linked Christ’s witness
to his death.
While there is sufficient evidence to assume a certain continuity
between witnessing in legal contexts and witnessing in contexts of reli-
gious persecution, there is also good reason to speak of two roots, or
types, of witnessing, even though they may be placed at two ends of a
spectrum.

General patterns of the cultural form of ‘witnessing’

If the stability of a cultural form of communication rests in its plastic-

ity over time and its ability to adapt to specific contexts, then, strictly
speaking, there exists neither an ‘original state’ nor an ‘original form’.
96 Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication

Instead, both the original and the copy constantly concur. However, in
order to better observe variations and to use the form heuristically for
the analysis of a given culture, we need a particular ‘ideal type’. For
the heuristic purpose of analyzing late-modern media society, I aim to
develop the ‘texture’ or ‘pattern’ of the cultural form of witnessing from
the historical roots described above. Therefore, the following remarks
are admittedly contingent and relative to a specific perspective; they
must be reinvested into the analysis of present late-modern cultures.
Both the legal and the religious witness are located in situations
of conflicting realities: contested interpretations of what is real and what
truly occurred (Assel, 2005, p. 1853). Any act of witnessing presupposes
the instability, ambiguity, and actual indeterminacy of reality and a
structural (legal or political) attempt to steer toward stability and deter-
minacy. Any act of witnessing, confession, or testimony – even in
‘historical’ cases – relates to disputed, unstable, conflicting, or transitory
realities. These aspects imply the eventual introduction or elimination of
novelty.
Against the background of this instability, every act of witnessing is
tied to a ‘transformation’ that can be expected or even ‘triggered’. In the
act of witnessing, something is added to the witnessed ‘event’ (be it
either ‘inside’ or ‘outside’ the witness), thereby changing the event itself.
The witness becomes part of the event to which he or she is witnessing.
In legal witnessing, the witness is called in to clarify what occurred, in
order that the event might be perceived in an accurate way. The work
of the witness comes in ‘changing’ the event – at least for the others
in court. In religious witnessing, the act transforms the witness himself/
herself. The change can be reflexive in that he or she becomes, at least
in the eyes of the community and the divine observer, a particularly
faithful witness. Along these lines, the act of witnessing can become
intrinsically intertwined with self-observation. For this reason, witness-
ing is a ‘contagious form of speech’, an ‘infectious act’ that affects
the witnessing person – not just the transmission of information. The
debates about the dangerously close relationship between martyrdom
and suicide in the second century BC demonstrate that this transforma-
tion may be prompted in religious witnessing: when one actively seeks
the experience of martyrdom it becomes almost indistinguishable from
suicide. In any case, if the ‘event’ is aware of the possibility of such trans-
formation, it may attempt to ‘trigger’ or elicit an act of witnessing. This
transformation may be desired (as self-transformation in psychoanaly-
sis), or it may be seen as problematic (as a change of reality in advocacy
journalism).
 Günter Thomas 97

Nonetheless, the two traditions represent almost opposite ends in the

spectrum of witnessing. In the legal context, witnessing aims for the
legal resolution of a conflict. In one way or the other—depending on
the final judgment—the witness helps to overcome indeterminacy. The
religious witness follows a different procedural logic: the martyr resists
the unification of worldviews and convictions and keeps the ideolog-
ical conflict explicitly open by witnessing to a counterfactual reality
and resisting any harmonization. The legal witness assists in settling
a conflict in (legal) procedure; the religious witness resists any such
settlement.
However, while the legal witness refers to an ‘outside’ and quite
specific state of the world, the religious witness refers to a rather funda-
mental worldview with a peculiar understanding of reality which claims
to see everything in a different light. These witnesses differ in terms of
the scope and type of reality to which they witness. The legal witness seeks
to testify to an empirical reality; the religious witness seeks to testify to
what is ‘really real’ – which is by no means irrelevant for reality but at
least potentially dangerous for those attempting to rule and manage the
dominant political, legal, or religious reality. Historically, the witness
to what is seen as an event and to what is unseen in the event might
converge.
The cultural form of witnessing involves a complex relation between
presence and absence. In order to be a potential witness, the person must
‘be there’. Physical co-presence is central to witnessing, and the possi-
bility of substituting such bodily presence with media is crucial for the
development of the cultural form. A witness is, or is assumed to have
been, either close to an event or even part of an event (in terms of
space, time, social proximity, or subject matter). This event may have
been a communication, an ‘extra-semiotic’ event, or a complex mix-
ture of the two. Witnessing is not only related to the transition from
experience to communication: from ‘seeing’ to ‘saying’ (Bernard-Donals
and Glejzer, 2001, pp. 49–78; Peters, 2001, p. 709) or from ‘perception’
to ‘utterance’ since what is seen is interspersed with communication.
Witnessing to a single act without the use of signs and communica-
tion is exceptionally rare. In most cases, witnessing serves as an interface
between communications.
However, when the time for witnessing arrives, the initial situation
is absent. In both types of witnessing (legal and religious), the reality
testified to in the very performance of witnessing is not just ‘at hand’
but, in a way, transcendent to the actual here and now. If the reality
to which the witness refers is easily accessible, the witness would not
98 Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication

be necessary. Nondisrupted permanence does not require witnessing.

Each act of bearing witness transcends what is immediate, obvious, and
self-evident for the co-present audience. Since the performance of wit-
nessing links past presence, the present past, and present presence, it is a
prime mechanism for the communicative construction of public mem-
ory (Zelizer, 2002). It is currently heatedly debated whether there can
be some form of ‘vicarious witnessing’ or ‘witnessing by imagination’
where the processes of witnessing are distributed socially, that is, no
longer limited to a single person or generation (Friedman, 2005, p. 82f.;
Rentschler, 2004).
In a very subtle and recursive process, the act of witnessing con-
tributes to the ‘construction’ of history and the preservation as well as
an accumulation of collective memory (Felman and Laub, 1992). Again,
one must keep in mind that the actual inaccessibility or transcendence
of lost ‘presence’ can be temporal, social, spatial, or can occur in terms
of subject matter. First, the situation in which the act of witnessing is
elicited introduces a horizon of relevance. This horizon of relevance
then imposes structures of selectivity onto the vast array of past events
and guides the selectivity of witnessing. Not everything that happened
is of equal importance. The selective recall of the witness – based upon
his or her individual recollections – ‘constructs’ history as it exists in
current communication (Esposito, 2002). It is epistemologically signifi-
cant that the witness is a cultural ‘tool’ which distinguishes, within the
medium of communication/narration, between fact and fiction, between
what is more than communication/narrative and what is simply just
a narrative (Weigel, 2000, p. 116). In the act of witnessing, there is
no way to escape narrating since the reality perceived by the witness
is no longer ‘at hand’. And yet, in the performative act of witness-
ing, this distant, otherwise inaccessible, reality is performatively made
‘present’ or ‘real’ – though empirical and experiential correctness may
conflict with it (Oliver, 2001). In this act of ‘re-presentation’, material
and rhetorical aspects of witnessing become relevant. In addition, the
‘private’ memory of the witness is made public in the act of witness-
ing. The public rendering of this private memory plays a significant role
in the communicative construction of a collective memory—a mem-
ory in which people memorize events which they did not personally
experience. The active witness, in his or her performance, functions
as a medium, actively mediating between past presence and present
presence, while at the same time guarding the past against attempts to
‘experience’ it, to confuse the event and its representation. For this rea-
son, the act of witnessing is also an act of distancing the past from the
 Günter Thomas 99

present. It is a way of preserving the irretrievable and inaccessible other-

ness or even the monstrosity of the reality witnessed to. The very act of
witnessing makes known and stabilizes a distance and a notion of indis-
posability and unavailability. Consequently, any ‘secondary witness’ can
only witness to the witness of a primary witness – nothing more.
Seen in this way, to witness is to be an ‘event-generator’ in a dual
sense. First, the very act of witnessing creates an event (the perfor-
mance of the witness) – an event which can itself again be witnessed
and become a historical ‘moment’. In some sense, this event must be
‘outstanding’. Second, in the act of witnessing the witness creates a past
event – at least for the real or imagined audience and in the present
moment. By making the transcendent accessible to communication,
witnessing involves the social objectification of that to which the wit-
ness is testifying. As such, witnessing is an ‘identity-generator’ (Hahn,
2003, p. 14). For this reason, legal and religious witnessing are differ-
ent in terms of the type of transcendence they imply and the nature of the
transcendent reality, but both are pre-audiovisual ‘media events’.
This observation exposes the relation between the act of witnessing
and power. In a legal context, the temptation to be a false witness arises
due to the considerable power the legal witness wields in shaping the
course of events. In contrast, the martyr in the Jewish and Christian
traditions is in a situation of utter powerlessness, at least regarding the
political power exercised over him or her. While attempts to define one-
self in such a situation as a ‘sacrifice’ (and not merely as a ‘victim’) might
be an attempt to exercise a degree of religious power, this dialectic of
power and powerlessness is central to religious witnessing.3 In its his-
torical roots, witnessing was not an act that rested upon one’s will; it
was not a voluntary act. In both legal and religious contexts, the witness
was ‘forced’ to be a witness by another party. Determining who it is who
has asked for the act of witnessing is a key question in both situations,
even if the demanding power differs in terms of legitimacy, use of brute
force, and so on. This aspect of force reappears in modified form in the
context of witnessing to the Holocaust.
While both types of witnessing result from greater social forces, they
diverge in terms of the ‘acceptance’ or ‘rejection’ of their witness. Legal
witnesses can generally rely on the acceptance of their witness – it is
unusual that the testimony of a subjectively true witness (that is, one
who appears to be convinced of what he/she witnesses to) should be
rejected based on counter-witnesses. In contrast, the religious witness in
the conceptual frame of martyrdom is rejected in principle – otherwise
he/she would not be a witness.
100 Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication

Due to these aspects, the religious witness does not offer the same
type or pattern of self-inclusion as the legal witness. In some respects,
all witnessing is communication with strong ‘self-inclusions’. As we have
seen, even the legal witness – at least the false witness – faces risks. The
different patterns of self-inclusion become visible by distinguishing four
dimensions of this concept:

1. Both types of witnesses present strong notions of self-assertion

(strong convictions, authenticity, clear judgments, integrity, and
credibility in terms of eyewitnessing, and so on). The exclusion of
doubt corresponds to strong convictions and clear empirical obser-
vations. In the case that a witness has doubts, these doubts (as
meta-communication) become a topic of the act of witnessing.
2. And yet the aspect of self-thematization is very prominent in forms of
religious witnessing and all of its secularized successors. The personal
experiences supporting one’s own convictions increasingly become
a theme of the act of witnessing. This might be traced back to the
inner nature of religious experiences or to the one-to-many/majority
constellation of martyrdom. Self-thematization introduces a high
degree of self-reference in the speech act of witnessing. In modern
post-martyrdom contexts of post-religious witnessing, the self is the
theme, content, and object of witnessing, seen for example in psy-
choanalysis, confessions, and diaries and, at times, empirical research
in the social sciences. The reality to which the witness refers is not
primarily an outside reality (as in legal contexts), but rather an inner
reality.
3. Witnessing cannot be performed anonymously or be based merely
on processes of social attribution. The demand to be a witness needs
an active response. In the legal context, the act of being accepted,
or called up, as a witness requires basic processes of self-attribution,
of the self as belonging to something: to telling the truth and true
observations, or in other terms, to the ‘exercise’ and ‘maintenance’
of the law. This basic self-attribution in the process of self-conscious
witnessing can be extended in religious witnessing to the reality to
which one is witnessing. Empirically speaking, the martyr threatened
with death is not in the comfortable situation of having the freedom
to doubt and to question religious reality.
4. The fourth type of self-involvement can be found in the mediatization
of the body for meta-messages: to differing degrees, the body of the wit-
ness can itself become a ‘parallel’ medium for the performative act of
witnessing. Moreover, the message of the bodily medium can become
 Günter Thomas 101

the grounding or commenting meta-message of that message uttered

in the linguistic medium, either in the form of pain as a means of
self-authentication or as imposed pain (Peters, 2005, pp. 249–57).
Interestingly enough, today almost all cases of legal witnessing still
require physical presence in court. The body of any witness is part
of human witnessing. Obviously, in situations of complex physical
interaction, the trustworthiness of a witness can be better discerned
than in other forms of communication. But the mediatization of the
body also opens up the possibility of a double-bind which shows the
power of the witness to define the situation. An ‘oppressor’ might
accept the impossibility of changing another person’s religious con-
victions by nonviolent means and acknowledges the steadfastness of
the religious devotee. If the oppressor does not respect the limits of
nonviolence and seeks to use force, the devotee as victim can rede-
fine the situation by being a sacrifice. Any bodily pain and suffering
then counts as a powerful religious act of the utmost value. Suffer-
ing itself or even the bodily state (initially the result or implication
of witnessing) becomes a message, a witness. The suffering becomes
a ‘meta-message’ which confirms the truth of the original witness
against the will of the oppressor.

These four dimensions of self-involvement can vary according to the

extent to which they influence the actual communication. However,
any performance of witnessing implies self-inclusion which draws to
some extent on all four of the layers. Since these aspects of self-inclusion
are public, the performance of witnessing is always a self-presentation.
Like any specific and event-related public self-presentation, witnessing
is highly typified, rule-governed, or even ritualized. Only a culturally compe-
tent observer can immediately identify when witnessing is taking place.
If witnessing is only seen as a specific form of perception, then these
performative aspects cannot be sufficiently taken into account. ‘To wit-
ness something’ can occur exclusively on the level of perception, but
‘to witness to something’ implies a communication process. Only the lat-
ter understanding can be differentiated from perceiving events, even
though this communication influences perception (Crary, 1999). What
is considered in a given culture as worth being witnessed to influences
its perceptions. As a result, the forms and types of witnessing contribute
to a culture’s ‘economy of attention’ (Thomas, 2004).
Any act of witnessing, either in the courtroom or as religious confes-
sion, implies a complex and combined pattern of an individual, personal
102 Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication

statement and a ‘real’ as well as ‘imagined’ public. No act of witness is

merely a personal statement. In the situation of legal witnessing, the
immediate public is the court, and yet the judge, the accuser, and the
jury represent ‘the law of the state’ and ‘the people’. By means of a
system of representation, the persons gathered in the court make up
a specific local public and at the same time open up the space for the
imagined public of the state and the people. ‘Imagined communities’
(Anderson, 1983) are part and parcel of witnessing. In a similar way,
the religious witness/martyr is part of a specific local public and, at
the same time, performs his/her witness to a heavenly public encom-
passing ‘the living and the dead’ as well as all heavenly creatures. This
double-layered structure of two publics – a local/empirical and an imag-
ined public – appears to be part of the cultural form of witnessing. How
are the two publics related? As already mentioned, one link can be via
a system of representation: the local public is representing a larger, only
imagined community. If the local public is reduced to two persons (one
witness and one listener), the performance of witnessing actually com-
bines a very high degree of intimacy with an equally high degree of
‘publicity’. At first glance, the double public in witnessing allows for
the performance of a paradox: an act of intimate publicity or public
intimacy.
Returning to the issue of ‘false witness’, we can now point out a
final feature of the cultural form of witnessing: trust (Luhmann, 1979).
The possibility of a false witness confronts social life with the prob-
lem of a regressus ad infinitum: since we cannot trust person x, we need
witness y; yet if we cannot trust witness y we may need another wit-
ness to his/her witness (for example, God as witness). But can we trust
this other second-order witness? Clearly, the performance of witness-
ing ‘solves’ the problem of trust while at the same time reproducing
it. Yet without trust, the performance of legal witnessing fails. In the
case of religious witnessing, the suffering body makes the issue of trust
superfluous, and yet we have a deep suspicion that religious frenzy
as a type of untrustworthy religious witness is a real possibility. Over
the centuries, societies developed an entire array of techniques to test
the ‘trustworthiness’ of the witness. These techniques or procedures
range from torture, to lie detector tests, to displays of disaffectedness
(or even the opposite: proper emotions indicating pain or contriteness)
(Peters, 2005, p. 251). All of these can shift the issue of trust back
one degree (by placing trust in one’s chosen techniques) but cannot
eliminate it.
 Günter Thomas 103

Historical dimensions and variations: Witnessing

as confession, diary, and novel

To date, we still lack a cultural history of witnessing. Nonetheless,

before moving to late-modern cultures, I briefly wish to point out an
interesting development which took place within the religious system,
a development highly relevant for current phenomena ranging from
psychotherapy to television programming.
At least in the Christian tradition of the medieval Church, one key
form of institutionalized witness was the religious confession. It pre-
sented a very powerful variation and combination of the legal and
religious performance of witnessing. The reality to which one wit-
nessed shifted to the witnessing self. As highly ritualized performative
acts, the confession of sins represents acts of self-thematization. They
imply ongoing acts of self-observation. Compared with the legal model,
the devotee has a double identity as both the transgressor and the
witness who observed the transgression. Through this combination,
the ecclesiastical institution of confession became a cultural technique
which combined aspects of ‘the secret’ with ‘self-disclosure’ and ‘self-
revelation’ in a movement toward self-domestication. As a kind of self-
thematization, the religious confession of sin belongs to the category of
culturally powerful ‘Biography-Generators’ (Hahn, 1987, pp. 9–24; 1997,
pp. 150–77).
The confession of sins in front of a priest offers a specific pattern
of combining the real and the imagined public. The tension between
secrecy and publicity in the act of confession is solved by means of social
distribution: the priest is such a small local audience that secrecy can be
preserved, even though the public of the whole church, and even the
heavenly public, are also being addressed as an imagined public.
After the twelfth century, there was a powerful shift regarding the
reality under observation. While the reality observed by the witness was
still the self, there was a shift from the external deeds of sin to the inner
intentions which led to sin. In other words, there was a subjectiviza-
tion of sin. The observed reality was no longer the social person but
the inner landscape of motives, intentions, and inclinations, accessi-
ble only by means of self-reflection. The witness thus became an even
more privileged observer, since in principle only he/she (besides God)
was able to observe the inner self. This shift dramatically increased the
requirements for introspection and self-exploration. This form of intro-
spection was not completely novel. Such amplified concentration on
the inner self resembles movements already underway in the Hebrew
104 Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication

Bible, particularly in the so-called wisdom traditions. The Fourth Lateran

Council (summoned by Pope Innocent III, 1213–1215 AD) introduced
an annual, mandatory confession as a means of control over intellectual
deviance. In subsequent centuries, contrition and penitence became
increasingly crucial for the reception of grace. The practice of public
repentance came in response to a need for making this witness to the
inner reality outwardly trustworthy: the body became a medium of
communication; to chasten oneself became an obligation.
The Protestant Reformation did not abandon the practice of confes-
sion, though it did change its dynamic. Once again, it shifted the focus
of religious attention. According to Alois Hahn, in pre-Reformation
times the traditional confession was not necessarily linked to biograph-
ical coherence. As Max Weber would show, the Reformation shifted
attention to the systematization of the whole of one’s life as being in
accordance with God (Weber, 1968). The certitudo salutis must be mir-
rored in the whole course of life. As a consequence, the relation between
the inner life of faith, intentions, motives, and inclinations, on the one
hand, and the practical ethical life, on the other, became the focus
of religious attention. It was particularly the Puritan traditions which
connected self-exploration, self-control, and confession, thus fostering
a sense of individuality which eventually manifested itself in the cul-
tural tool of the diary. The diary as secularized religious confession
solved the problem of shaping the double public in a rather radical
way: the local public is reduced to the writer making an utterance. It is
no longer the performance of communication. Private solitude became
the location of witnessing. Through writing, the diary could tempor-
alize the real audience and the imagined audience: a reader may exist
later, perhaps the writer himself/herself. The unstable and contested
reality requiring witness became life in modernity. Without an actual
conflict, the writing of a diary has to become an ongoing practice of
witnessing.
During early modernity, the implications of confession – introspective
self-exploration and self-control – became, together with writing, the
cultural resources for the biographical novel. This sought-after coher-
ence in the Protestant concept of life became celebrated biographical
coherence. At the beginning of modernity, the novel reconciled the
inbuilt tension in the performance of witnessing (in writing and read-
ing) and publicity, or public intimacy, by offering a product of fic-
tion. Again, there are precursors: Augustine’s Confessions represent a
very exceptional and early mixture of confession, diary, and published
record – public intimacy. (The Psalms are another exception, making
 Günter Thomas 105

a public formula available for private use both in private as well as in

public services.)

Old wine in new wineskins: Short remarks on the form of

witnessing in television

Major changes for witnessing in late modernity

Legal and religious forms of witnessing still exist in the twenty-first
century. In a world of religious conflicts and legal quarrels, a seemingly
old form is still part of society’s current practice of communication.
Nonetheless, the cultural form of witnessing shows up in unexpected
cultural contexts. To understand the ‘traveling’ or the pluri-form contex-
tualization of witnessing, one must keep in mind that late modernity is
marked by three substantial changes, all of which ‘tickle out’ seemingly
new types of witnessing which are, upon closer inspection, transformed
versions of legal and religious witnessing.
Against the background of the historical roots of witnessing sketched
out above, I would like to propose the following thesis for analyz-
ing today’s television programming. If we use the insights into legal
and religious witnessing as a conceptual instrument for an analytical
look at contemporary television, we observe a surprising phenomenon:
The two historical traces of witnessing – law and religion – appear on
two sides of the audiovisual media system. The fact-oriented forensic
form of witnessing shows up in journalism, and the transformations
of religious witnessing emerge in entertainment talk-show formats. Yet
to understand this ‘traveling’ of a cultural form of communication,
we must ask: What changes in late modernity have led to these two
‘appearances’?

1. The functional differentiation of systems of law, economics, art, pol-

itics, religion, and media no longer require nor enable the con-
struction of a strong biographical coherence which would integrate
all spheres of individual action (Luhmann, 1997). A person’s legal,
religious, moral, political, and health communications need not
form a coherent whole. The person is ‘liberated’ from the expec-
tation of coherence. Particular, individual aspects of biography are
only used insofar as they are relevant to systemic communication:
only one’s credit history is relevant when applying for a bank loan;
health insurance companies only ask for a health biography; and
106 Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication

in court, only the existence of a criminal record is of interest, not

the number of religious conversions. For the individual, this process
is simultaneously both one of devaluation and liberation. Inside
society, there is no place for the ‘whole self, the unified individ-
ual’. At the same time, the actual opacity of a modern, functionally
differentiated society creates a permanent impression of a contested
reality.
2. Being an individual person becomes a project for the self, occurring
mostly outside of distinct functional social systems. The individual
is defined less by inclusion than by exclusion. For the human being,
the project of ‘being an individual’ becomes more pressing and risky;
for society, it becomes less relevant. There is a rising need to construct
oneself by means of self-expression.
3. Foreshadowed by the many technological developments of the nine-
teenth century, and so far manifest in cinema and television, late
modernity is also marked by a shift to the audiovisual over against
textual and physical co-presence. von Goethe’s dictum ‘To see I was
born, To look is my call’ (von Goethe, 1961, pp. 1128ff.) uninten-
tionally prophesied a move to ‘seeing things’. As a consequence, the
traditionally oral and textual witness is increasingly supplemented
by highly mediatized, audiovisual forms.

Keeping these three elements in mind, we may clearly see the place of
a particular invention of late modernity. In late-modern societies, this
cultural and technical invention provides a highly specific and effective
response to the three aspects mentioned above. While in pre-modern
times witnessing and confession were attributable only to individual
‘authors’, late-modern society ‘invented’ a social system for witnessing –
predominantly in an audiovisual form: namely modern, audiovisual,
mass media (Luhmann, 2000). Thus, within the new context of the
social system of mass media ‘witness is a new form of social experience’
(Ellis, 2000) as well as an old yet transformed one.
Based on the suggestion by John Ellis (2000), I would like to go
just one step further. Inside the overall witnessing institution called
television, we can see that both traditional forms of witnessing play
an important role. Variations of legal witnessing appear in television
journalism and news shows, while variations of religious witnessing
appear in entertainment formats, particularly in talk-shows. An his-
torically informed observer might be able to see ‘old wine in new
wineskins’.
 Günter Thomas 107

Heirs of legal witnessing: Journalist and anchor persons

In what sense are journalists and anchor persons taking up the tradition
of legal witnessing? People in late-modern societies face two problems.
In a continuously changing world, the situation of contested reality is
one of permanent instability and full of conflicting interpretations of
reality. In addition, what people experience is a huge gap between what
is known to exist and what parts of reality are accessible. It is in this
situation that the journalist witnesses the events of the day, most of
which would otherwise be inaccessible or in realities transcendent to
the lifeworld of the audience. As a privileged observer, she finds out
‘what is the case’ in worlds beyond one’s own small world. In particular,
negativism as a news factor (Schulz, 1976) promotes acts of witnessing
geared towards actual endangerments and disruptions of reality. Yet the
very act of witnessing an anchor person like Haim Yavin on Israel TV or
Jan Hofer in Germany (or Karl-Heinz Köpcke in the past) presents reality
not just as instable, catastrophic, and in constant flux, but as something
manageable. However, since the world of television is in permanent flux,
the daily performance of witnessing is without end, permanent. The
need for witnessing is never ending. Compared with the classic legal
witness, the journalist bears witness to a reality which is spatially distant
but in terms of time quite close.
Still, there seems to be at least one field in which the journal-
ism profession, as the heir of legal witnessing (‘objective’, less self-
thematizing discourse), needs to borrow from the religious root of
witnessing and its long secular transformation: the field of credibility
and trust. In a reflexive modernity, in which the selectively constructed
character of reports seeps into public consciousness, the trustworthiness
of the reporting person/network is used to attribute credibility to the
reported message. For this reason, the management of trust becomes
central to journalistic witnessing. While the standards of trust might
vary from country to country, this necessary edification of trust requires
specific public measures or ‘confessions’ – even though all know that
these confessions may also be forged. In extreme situations (such as
war), journalists risk their lives to become martyrs for the freedom
of the press, thereby raising through their sacrifice the level of trust
in the entire profession. Even in ordinary situations, strategies blend-
ing elements from legal and religious witnessing are becoming part of
the professional routine: being physically ‘on the spot’, including the
reporter in frame, having live witnesses confirm one’s own witnessing, at
the same time staging emotions to communicate authenticity, offering
108 Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication

objective numbers and credible sources, and showing commitment. All

of these are measures to ensure the factual trustworthiness of the person
bearing witness to ‘real reality’.
In short, since witnessing relates to and transforms disputed, unsta-
ble, conflicting, or transitory realities and makes accessible the inaccessible,
the witnessing activity of journalism and anchor persons contributes to
what Roger Silverstone called ‘ontological security’ (Silverstone, 1993).

Heirs of religious witnessing and its transformations: Individual

confessions in entertainment genres
Under the sociocultural conditions of a late-modern, functionally dif-
ferentiated society, people face two seemingly paradoxical yet difficult
tasks: (1) The construction of an individual identity becomes at the same
time increasingly socially (for the function of the society) irrelevant and per-
sonally pressing. (2) People must learn to become individuals, learn to
deal with the paradox of being a unique copy.
One key stage for the performance and observation of this process are
entertainment formats in television. Numerous entertaining TV-genres
(talk-shows, contests, wedding shows, and so on) give individuals the
chance to articulate their miseries, their wrongdoings, their conflicts,
their ‘sins’, and their moral status (Herrmann and Lünenborg, 2001).
They are allowed to act out their aggression and their longings; they are
called to witness to their lives (Winterhoff-Spurk, 1999). These formats
of ‘affect-television’ (Bente and Fromm, 1997) appear to blur the border
between the private and the public and create a specific type of public
intimacy. While for ‘early-modern people’ these forms of publicizing
private matters appear utterly strange, they demonstrate that the late-
modern self invents new forms of ‘absolution’ in response to traditional
‘confessions’. Such television confessions are not free from the search
for absolution, namely the inclusion into a moral community. At the
same time, their attractiveness results from the attention transgressions
of moral boundaries can attract.
Identity-forming processes freed from the search for coherence
(which, while structurally encouraged, is not a necessary implication
of late-modern cultures) result in self-perceptions which benefit from
heightened emotional intensities. In audiovisual formats of ‘affect-
television’ supporting ‘confessions’, intensity is more important than
(textual) coherence. Confessions of public intimacy clearly search for
resonance with the two publics characteristic of religious witnessing: not
 Günter Thomas 109

just the conversation in the studio, but the (imagined) emotional res-
onance with the imagined audience creates repercussions that can be
attributed to oneself. What can be ‘confessed’ in the framework of public
intimacy becomes for the late-modern self symbolic capital which can
be traded for the attention of this imagined public. The performance of
the self in front of a TV audience is the preliminary ending point of the
secular variant of religious witnessing.
To observe this shift from coherence to ‘confessional’ witnessing to
one’s own (seemingly unique) experience does not necessarily imply
a pessimistic stance. Without any doubt, this shift is structurally sup-
ported by the constant need for attracting larger audiences and the fast
pace of public discourse. However, this shift might dampen controver-
sial exchange – because the more the authenticity of the utterance is
emphasized over against the argument, the less the witness can be ques-
tioned without being offensive. ‘Confessional’ witnessing can endanger
discourse. Depending on one’s theoretical stance toward the possibil-
ity for a rational integration of modern society, this can be seen as a
problem or a solution.
When ‘old’ institutions of witnessing incorporate television into their
inner execution new hybrid types of witnessing emerge. This is the case
at the intersection of law and media as well as of religion and media: the
introduction of audiovisual journalistic witnessing into the core space
of legal witnessing, the courtroom, something substantially changes.
Accordingly, when the ‘confessional witnessing’ of television is blended
with religious confession the latter one is transformed.
These final remarks on witnessing in journalism and ‘affect television’
are short and sketchy. Nonetheless, they hopefully make visible how
fruitful it can be to look at the present media system with historically
informed eyes. The history of the cultural form of communication called
witnessing is not yet over. It is the charm of cultural forms of com-
munication helping to combine historical analysis, interdisciplinary
exchange, and a fresh look at phenomena too well known.

Notes
1. In some special cases, the same format/genre can appear in different cultural
systems: in European television, we find wedding shows in the media, while
in some Christian parishes in the United States, we find talk-show-like com-
munications in religion. On the format level, one may indeed find a surprising
degree of proximity between media and religion. However, most formats are
deeply system-specific.
110 Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication

2. Thus, bearing witness to atrocities is a not an independent field of witnessing,

in addition to law and religion, but rather has developed out of both of these
fields (Peters, 2001, p. 708).
3. However, it should be noted that due to the theologically motivated close
connection between their religious and political communities, the Islamic tra-
dition of religious witnessing includes the possibility of being both a religious
witness and a political witness simultaneously. While these inter-religious dif-
ferences can only be noted in passing here, and would require more detailed
elaboration, they are crucial for an adequate understanding of religiously
motivated terrorism.

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B. Zelizer (2002) ‘Finding Aids in the Past: Bearing Personal Witness to Traumatic
Events’, Media, Culture & Society, vol. 24, 697–714.
5
Archaic Witnessing and
Contemporary News Media
Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes

As witnessing is becoming a key issue in communications and media

studies, its understanding is proving more complicated and even con-
troversial. In what follows, we attempt to simplify our understanding of
the fundamental concept of witnessing by considering its meaning and
role when it was a few millennia younger. We will use the biblical mean-
ing of witnessing to trace the origins of the contemporary debate and try
to see whether and how veteran notions have conditioned our under-
standing of the institution of witnessing. We will apply these insights
to journalism, a social practice that over the last generation seems to
have experienced radical shifts in its potential and practice of social
testimony.

I.

An essay by John Peters that is fast becoming seminal finds witnessing

a central communicative concept in that it serves as a model for, and
charts the limits of, any form of mediated communications (Peters,
2001). After all, the witness is a medium who bridges the ontological
and epistemological by converting a real-world occurrence he/she expe-
rienced into an utterance. But further, this experience-cum-words is
communicated to others at a different time, place, and, inevitably, in
a different context. What makes witnessing special as a communicative
act, beyond its bridging the essential discontinuities that communica-
tion is supposed to bridge, is the challenge of veracity – that events are
communicated as they happened.
Rather than focusing on the problem of a reliable conveyance of
experience, John Ellis and Paul Frosh center on its consequences: the
processing of testimony on the receiver’s end of the witnessing chain,

112
 Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes 113

which connects real-world events with once-, twice-, or more times

removed recipients. Frosh focuses on the potentially creative role of
recipients and the ways ‘witnessing texts’ can generate involvement
and transform their audiences. Rather than focusing on the creative
potential of audiencing ‘witnessed texts’, Ellis returns us to a Peters-
like suspicion of audiences in accepting the veracity of witnessed texts.
The complete mongrelization of factual and fictional genres in broadcast
media today, and the emphatically forensic nature of the latter, social-
izes viewers to seek the story behind the story – not to accept witnessed
texts at their face value (Frosh, 2006; Ellis, forthcoming).1
However divergent, these two general approaches to witnessing – one
focusing on the tellers, the other looking at their audience – share a com-
mon view of the fundamental process. It entails two steps: a real-world
experience coded into a text, and a text decoded into a personal expe-
rience by its audience. The courtroom situation, in which the witness
recounts, as a medium, an experience he/she sensed in the past to a for-
mal gathering of people serves as the model for witnessing as a two-step
process. In this model, which dominates modern notions of witness-
ing, the challenge of the witness is to successfully bridge what Peters
calls the ‘veracity gap’. At the same time, what Frosh playfully calls the
‘telling presence’ of the witness (or her/his text) confers responsibilities
on the audience to judge and ultimately implement that judgment, with
the prospect (or specter) of transformative action or a transformed view
of the world.
This two-step model2 has impacted other arenas in which events are
recounted at a distance. A prominent example is the migration of the
notion of witnessing to journalism. The function of the news media is
understood to be observing the world go by and keeping tabs on it on
behalf of the public – in Ellis’s terms, ‘monitoring’ the world through the
eyes of the journalist (Ellis, 2000).3 The journalist’s report is expected to
call for, or even to shape, a response – at the very least, in the form of
newly processed public opinion.
In fact, the term ‘reporter’ as a tag for a practitioner of a certain
kind of journalism may have had its origins in the court of law. Scribes
who recorded proceedings in court, like all professionals responsible
for transcribing official oral proceedings, were originally designated
‘reporters’ (hence, what they produced were known as ‘law reports’).
Once newspapers began describing real-world occurrences first-hand to
their readers, courts of law became a key ‘beat’ for useful and often
dramatic new information on the world. Those who recorded court
proceedings for newspaper readers assumed the same tag as those
114 Archaic Witnessing and Contemporary News Media

who transcribed the proceedings for official purposes. Subsequently,

all journalists who provided descriptions of real-world events of pub-
lic interest – inevitably across time and space – came to be known as
reporters.4
Not surprisingly, journalism too belies the two-fold problem of
witnessing, corresponding to the two steps of its flow. The problem of
veracity emphasized by Peters’s approach may be associated with the
long-standing debate on the ontology of journalism: its reliability, objec-
tivity, and ethical standards. The reception side of witnessing, addressed
by Ellis and Frosh, is lavishly elaborated in our contemporary debate on
the ethics of audiencing, as underscored by Luc Boltanski’s deliberations
on the responsibilities of mass media consumers.5
A puzzling aspect of the witnessing debate is the insistent linking of
the two fundamental steps, or aspects, of witnessing. In both the debate
over the institution’s essential meaning and the discussion of its implica-
tions for understanding mass media, the epistemology of witnessing and
the very different issue of the consequences of testimony are fused, seen
as a unit. This linkage would appear unnecessary, serving only to com-
plicate and blur either aspect of the problem of witnessing, raising the
question of why indeed they are understood as and discussed in unison.
In other words, why has the law-court model of witnessing been so dom-
inant in our thinking about witnessing and testimony? In what follows,
we will suggest that, at its roots, the concept of witnessing combines
changes in reality and their transformative recognition, seeing the two
as simultaneous and inseparable; hence the lingering insistence on link-
ing the two steps of witnessing today – in the courtroom, in scholarship,
and in mass news media.
At issue, then, is our fundamental conception of witnessing and its
origins. Following de Tocqueville’s advice, ‘Go back, look at the baby
in his mother’s arms’, we will be looking at the roots of Western
thinking on witnessing. For a number of rather obvious reasons, ref-
erences to witnessing in the Hebrew Bible would appear to be a good
place to start. The Bible, as an ancient text, is one site for excavat-
ing an archaic – perhaps original – meaning of witnessing, particularly
since one construction of the Bible itself is as a testament (to some:
the ‘Old Testament’). But moreover, the Bible has made considerable
impact on the evolution of the Western mind from a (perhaps) sim-
pler past to its complex present. The Bible thus represents not only a
point of origin, but also a significant influence on the historical evolu-
tion of ideas and sensibilities in the West – among them, the idea of
witnessing.6
 Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes 115

II.

Even a cursory survey of the Bible would suggest that the term ‘wit-
ness’ is an exceptionally poor witness to its archaic meaning. When
one considers the meaning of witnessing in the Bible, the law-court
model is nowhere to be found. Rather, witnessing is related to what the
shorthand of scholarly jargon calls the social construction of reality. Its
meaning was two-fold: one aspect was the public recognition of signif-
icant change in the world, usually the recognition of a transformation,
while the other was the act of transforming the world through public
recognition.
There is a degree of tension, however, between these two kinds
of witnessing. In the first case, new knowledge updates the public’s
view of reality, or catches up with a transformed reality. In the sec-
ond case, public recognition is elemental to the transformation. To
illustrate from the realm of news media – our contemporary registrars
of change – when pictures like the atrocities of Abu Ghraib explode
on the nation, they can effect change in the public’s perception of
the war, the military, and the moral state of the nation. They can
also lead, at a second stage, to change in actual social practices. This
kind of witnessing represents the first type of transformative public
knowledge.
The media event genre can represent the second type of witness-
ing, that in which the public’s ‘being there’ is in itself transformative,
with the audience giving the event a particular meaning. Sadat’s visit
to Jerusalem, conditioned by the Egyptian leader on its live broadcast
to Israeli audiences, was a towering historical moment in that its wit-
nessing by the Israeli public created a new reality of ‘no more war’.
Similarly, staged events such as presidential inaugurations are effected
through the collective’s witnessing the proceedings via media, thus tac-
itly sanctioning the change of power (Dayan and Katz, 1992; Liebes and
Blondheim, 2005). In either construction of biblical witnessing, the wit-
ness is the addressee, not the medium. It is the collective which performs
the witnessing.
In other words, in the Bible, the two steps of witnessing, as we
understand the institution today, are one. Biblical witnessing conflates
experience and the transformed public awareness resulting from that
experience, into a single step. This primordial construction of witness-
ing as a public experience of transformation may explain the seemingly
unnecessary effort of modern scholars to link personal experience and
the transformation of public consciousness.
116 Archaic Witnessing and Contemporary News Media

Returning to the Bible, the Hebrew root of witness, ed, is y’ad or

eda – assembly, and/or congregation, both as a noun and as a verb.
The root thus hints at the public nature of witnessing, and points to
the public sphere as the locus of witnessing.7 The verb-like connota-
tion of the root of ‘getting together’, can explain, in turn, a second
biblical meaning of the word witness, ed, which is ‘covenant’ (Lifshitz,
2002, pp. 180–2; G. von Rad quoted in ‘Edut’, Encyclopedia Mikrait).8
In a covenant, two parties become linked and bound together through
that to which they agreed, but in covenanting the parties are not alone
in congregating. In the Bible, entering into a covenant is usually an
audienced, public event. And of course, by its nature, a covenant is
a transformative event, changing the status quo in a significant way
through a socially accepted new configuration of social relations and
obligations.
These aspects of transformation, publicity, and social sanction are
underscored in the second occurrence of the word ed in the biblical
narrative.9 It appears in the settlement of the strife between Jacob and
Laban (Genesis 31). Following their confrontation and in discussing the
possibility for a resolution, Laban says to Jacob:

44: Now therefore come thou, let us make a covenant, I and thou;
and let it be for a witness between me and thee. 45: And Jacob took
a stone, and set it up for a pillar.

46: And Jacob said unto his brethren, Gather stones; and they took
stones, and made an heap: and they did eat there upon the heap.
47: And Laban called it Jegar-sahadutha: but Jacob called it Galeed.
48: And Laban said, This heap is a witness between me and thee this
day. Therefore was the name of it called Galeed;

49: And Mizpah; for he said, The LORD watch between me and thee,
when we are absent one from another. 50: If thou shalt afflict my
daughters, or if thou shalt take other wives beside my daughters, no
man is with us; see, God is witness betwixt me and thee. 51: And
Laban said to Jacob, Behold this heap, and behold this pillar, which
I have cast betwixt me and thee; 52: This heap be witness, and this
pillar be witness, that I will not pass over this heap to thee, and that
thou shalt not pass over this heap and this pillar unto me, for harm.
53: The God of Abraham, and the God of Nahor, the God of their
father, judge betwixt us. And Jacob sware by the fear of his father
Isaac.
 Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes 117

In the Hebrew text of this passage, the meaning of ed as witness and as

covenant are synonymous. The interchangeability of meaning is under-
scored in the name of the pillar and stone heap: Galeed, which could
be read as both ‘heap of covenant’ and ‘heap of witness’. The covenant
between Jacob and Laban transformed a state of belligerence and near-
war to a lasting peace. The covenant was entered into in the presence
of ‘brethren’, who took part in the formalistic set-up of a ritual meal.
But not only was there a public presence in the transaction; the ultimate
authority for verifying and sanctioning human deeds, God, was invoked
as present in the transformative event. God – the ultimate sanctioning
and legitimizing presence – would reappear as witness in many other
significant transactions and transformations in Biblical literature (for
example, Joshua 22:22; Judges 11:10; Kings 3:5; Samuel 12:5; Jeremiah
29:23; Job 16).
However, even with God’s presence, parties to biblical covenants
sought additional publicity and recognition for their transactions. Thus,
Jacob and Laban’s pillar and stone heap would indicate the place of their
historical agreement – a location that was to serve as a boundary, too,
according to conventional biblical commentary. Time, however, also
enters into this spatial demarcation. Future passersby, by sight of the
stone construction, would become aware of the covenant made long
ago and, and in a way, retroactively witness it – namely, recognize it.
In fact, it is God himself/herself who would show the way in pro-
viding physical evidence to future generations of his/her transformative
acts and decisions – which in the case of a deity are one and the same.
Thus, once it was decided that a second flood would not happen, God
created a physical ot (‘sign’) in the form of the rainbow, as evidence of
this one-sided covenant: ‘I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be
for a token of a covenant between me and the earth’ (Genesis 9:13). The
bow reappears over the generations specifically when a deluge could be
feared – after rainfall. Like the Galeed, its ‘place’ is also suggestive: It
appears between cloud and ground, the locus of rain, but more signifi-
cantly between heaven and earth – figuratively, between the parties to
the transformative one-sided decision, which God nevertheless refers to
as a covenant.10
These elements of establishing a new reality in a public arena,
and recording its launching by a physical object, present themselves
most clearly in the Sinai covenant, that is, the (Old) Testament. All
of the people congregated at the foot of the hill, they entered into
a covenant with God. They also witnessed the ceremonial transac-
tion and were ultimately given physical evidence of the transformative
118 Archaic Witnessing and Contemporary News Media

agreement – the stone tablets, known in Hebrew as the ‘tablets of edut

(testimony/covenant)’. The tablets were to be placed in an ark, ‘the ark
of edut’ which was to be placed in ‘the sanctuary of edut’, itself a trans-
portable affair, testifying to the covenant wherever its terrestrial party
happened to be. The other party was supposed to be everywhere anyway.
God’s interactions with man were understood to have an overarching
historical significance. The Hebrews’ god was to be dealt with not as a
philosophical entity but as a shaper of history, for example, ‘I am the
Lord thy God, which have brought thee out of the land of Egypt, out
of the house of bondage’ (Exodus 20:2). God’s acts in history were thus
testimony to his powers and to his covenant with the Hebrews. Appro-
priately, they were reaffirmed in time – not historical but cyclical time.
Great historical events were to be publicly reaffirmed by the Hebrews in
this dimension of time – the mo‘ed – a holiday marking an anniversary.
Mo‘ed of course includes the ed-witness element.
Thus, witnessing – the public recognition of transformed worldly
conditions – could be performed in three distinctive configurations:
‘here and now’, as when entering into a covenant; ‘here and then’, as
when passersby see the Galeed and recognize its standing transforma-
tive power; and finally ‘then and there’, as when, for instance, Jews at
the four corners of the earth remember the Exodus on its anniversary,
millennia later, through performing the Passover seder. Children playing
during Hanukkah have the ‘then and there’ configuration inscribed on
the four sides of their dreidel: ‘A great miracle happened there.’11
Enter witnessing in jurisprudence. It is widely acknowledged that the
legal sections of the Hebrew Bible are relatively late layers of the text.
In them, witnessing gradually assumed a more specific meaning, which
nevertheless carried the traces of its original, archaic connotation. These
origins may be gleaned from the concluding scene of the story of Ruth
and Boaz. In the story’s happy ending, Boaz receives public sanction to
marry Ruth and acquire her real estate rights. This process underscores
the fundamental meaning of witnessing as an act transforming reality
through public recognition.

1: Then went Boaz up to the gate, and sat him down there: and,
behold, the kinsman of whom Boaz spake came by; unto whom he
said, Ho, such a one! turn aside, sit down here. And he turned aside,
and sat down. 2: And he took ten men of the elders of the city, and
said, Sit ye down here. And they sat down. 3: And he said unto the
kinsman, Naomi, that is come again out of the country of Moab,
selleth a parcel of land, which was our brother Elimelech’s: 4: And
 Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes 119

I thought to advertise thee, saying, Buy it before the inhabitants, and

before the elders of my people. If thou wilt redeem it, redeem it: but
if thou wilt not redeem it, then tell me, that I may know: for there
is none to redeem it beside thee; and I am after thee. . . . 6: And the
kinsman said, I cannot redeem it for myself, lest I mar mine own
inheritance: redeem thou my right to thyself; for I cannot redeem
it. 7: Now this was the manner in former time in Israel concerning
redeeming and concerning changing, for to confirm all things; a man
plucked off his shoe, and gave it to his neighbour: and this was a
testimony in Israel.

8: Therefore the kinsman said unto Boaz, Buy it for thee. So he drew
off his shoe.

9: And Boaz said unto the elders, and unto all the people, Ye are
witnesses this day, that I have bought all that was Elimelech’s, and all
that was Chilion’s and Mahlon’s, of the hand of Naomi. 10: Moreover
Ruth the Moabitess, the wife of Mahlon, have I purchased to be my
wife, to raise up the name of the dead upon his inheritance, that
the name of the dead be not cut off from among his brethren, and
from the gate of his place: ye are witnesses this day. 11: And all the
people that were in the gate, and the elders, said, We are witnesses.
(Ruth 4:1–11)

As in the cases of covenant, the transformative formal change of status

of persons and property requires witnessing, namely, recognition and
sanction of the change by the public; hence, the elaborate set-up at the
gate. Even the physical element embodying the public transaction has a
residual presence here, the ‘plucked off’ shoe.
However, the Ruth and Boaz episode exhibits signs of change. Rather
than gathering the entire public, as in, for instance, the Sinai covenant,
witnessing in this case is performed by representatives. The symbolic
significance of the site of the transactions, however, is maintained: the
city gates – the ultimate public sphere. With time, the court of law
would become a mere symbolic shadow of the public and its function of
transforming and confirming reality. The process of shifting the respon-
sibility of public witnessing from the public in assembly to the courts
(as a virtual public) is underscored by passages in the legal layer of the
Bible which refer to the judge (!) as a witness. Traces of this process of
change have been maintained all the way to the present: the principle
of transparency of the legal process and its being open to the public hint
at the residual presence of the community (eda) as the ultimate witness.
120 Archaic Witnessing and Contemporary News Media

The closest the Bible comes to witnessing as we now know it is in

the Ten Commandments: ‘Thou shalt not bear false witness against thy
neighbor’ (Exodus 20:16; Deuteronomy 5:20). Similarly, in Leviticus 5:1
we find the following: ‘And if a soul sin, and hear the voice of swear-
ing, and is a witness, whether he hath seen or known of it; if he do not
utter it, then he shall bear his iniquity.’ Nevertheless, according to bib-
lical scholars, there is a significant difference between the conception
of witness in these verses and our contemporary witness in court.12 The
main role of the contemporary witness is to verify a known or claimed
version of reality. In contrast, the witness of the Ten Commandments
and Leviticus is a person bringing charges in court. He is therefore
the medium breaking the news (of a murder, a rape, a transgression)
to the public, introducing it to a new view of reality in the process. It
is the witness as a prosecutor that transforms the public status of a per-
son to a possible criminal, from saint to sinner, and accordingly changes
the public perception of things, in the style of ‘Et tu Brute?’
With time, the nature of witnessing we constructed in the preced-
ing section from biblical texts was effectively swamped by the law-court
version, in which society’s quest for aligning the epistemological with
the ontological constitutes the center of the project of witnessing.
We posit however that the function that archaic witnessing has filled
has remained deeply entrenched in Western culture. It forms the heart
of our political processes, in which the public is understood as sovereign,
and therefore its opinions and voice are fundamental to governing.
Media have become a crucial agent in shaping public consensus and
its definition of reality as well as in transforming it.

III.

The archaic function of witnessing has thus come to be filled, today,

through a joint venture of modern news media and its audience. Yet the
ways media serve society in its function of witnessing are dynamic, and
have undergone considerable change during the course of the modern
era. It seems worthwhile to trace these vicissitudes in the way media take
part in social witnessing for the purpose of a better understanding of
witnessing, of media, and of the role of media in contemporary society.
The evolving technological affordances societies could apply in shaping
their media environment, and, inevitably, their ways of witnessing have
been an important dimension of change.
A reasonable starting point in reviewing the changing nature of wit-
nessing via news media in the modern era is the printing press-enabled
 Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes 121

newspaper. The newspaper dramatically expanded the reach and bound-

aries of a collective view of reality. It had the ability to unite people over
vast expanses in recognizing meaningful transformations. Yet this siz-
able footprint came at the expense of the simultaneity of the collective
construction of reality characteristic of the archaic model of witnessing.
Unlike the unanimous, real-time – yet deliberate – public endorsement
of Boaz’s taking Ruth as his wife, reports of marriages in the press were
only able to recognize marriages after the fact. Moreover, this variant of
witnessing – the recognition of significant change – cannot be complete
until the newspaper’s partner in the process of witnessing, the public
at large, recognizes the change. This is inevitably a staggered process:
the newspaper is delivered and read at different times, and of course,
reading it is a purely individual affair, separating the reader from the
immediate social surroundings. Thus, reality as construed by the news-
paper is inevitably ‘there and then’; it cannot recognize transformations
simultaneously, ‘here and now’, as the archaic model of witnessing can.
Yet, while only a feeble shadow of the collectivity and participatory
nature of archaic witnessing, newspaper news could provide meaning-
ful improvements in an important aspect of the biblical witnessing
process – its legal dimension. As noted, the witness conceived by the
Bible in legal proceedings was essentially a reporter breaking news. Insti-
tutionally, the legal witness functioned as a plaintiff or prosecutor. In
this respect, the newspaper reporter could be a dramatically better wit-
ness. Experience, professional standards, institutional resources, and in
most cases an ‘objective’ posture in uncovering and reporting change,
were better credentials for disseminating public knowledge than those
of the amateur biblical plaintiff, who was usually a ‘principal’ in the
case. The newspaper reporter, as a dedicated, paid news chaser, could
deliberately seek events transforming reality, and be there ‘at the kill’.
In the event he missed, he had the perceived authority and occasionally
the luck to find first-hand witnesses, ala the BBC journalist reporting on
atrocities in the Belgian Congo who wandered through a refugee camp
yelling: ‘Anyone here been raped and speaks English?’ Journalists had
in their arsenal professional tools, and usually, experience in perceiving
and reporting the new reality, and reporters’ colleagues in the edito-
rial department could help evaluate, frame, and give depth to the new
aspects of reality, before bringing them to the public.
Even Janet Cook’s style of witnessing, as in her 29 September
1980 Washington Post report on conditions of life in the ghettos of
Washington, may have been an improvement in constructing reality
over biblical legal witnessing. Cook’s story of ‘Jimmy’, a desperate
122 Archaic Witnessing and Contemporary News Media

8-year-old junkie, which received accolades including a Puliter prize that

was later withdrawn, was technically false witness: ‘Jimmy’ was fiction.
But Janet Cook had intuitively grasped that in order to reach out and
touch the public consciousness, one would have to connect with a flesh-
and-blood sufferer, preferably the testimony of a child. A post-modern
perspective, a generation later, would endorse the thrust of this kind of
journalism, informed by the understanding that a constructed archetype
may better capture the reality, in this case of the ghetto, than any actual
living child. In fact, the journalistic practice of hanging an issue or a
claim about the world on a specific human witness is the most effec-
tive way of enlisting public attention and thereby making change. It
proves to be the best strategy for changing consciousness – the original
function of witnessing.
With all of its advantages, though, newspaper witnessing could do no
more than reconstruct reality ‘then and there’. It could only provide
building blocks for a scattered, staggered public to potentially witness
the world – namely, to revise its view of reality. Journalism could not
possibly perform the miracle of reconstructing reality here and now, as
in the biblical real-time, oral, communal model.
In this respect, a significant step forward – back to the archaic
model – was inherent in the advent of electric communications. The
telegraph provided a whole new dimension of technology-mediated
communications – broadcasting. Employing the telegraph as a one-way
medium, a single sender could have his message reach all points on
the telegraph network simultaneously. Broadcast telegraphy thus intro-
duced an entirely new mode of witnessing: ‘now and there’. The novelty
of this variant, added to the ‘here and now’ mode of archaic witnessing
and to the ‘then and here’ and ‘then and there’ modes of the courtroom
and press, was rapidly acknowledged. With the launching of teleg-
raphy, prominent New York editor James Gordon Bennett explained
to his readers that the new departure was momentous, for the tele-
graph could ‘impress the whole nation . . . with the same idea at the
same time’ (Quoted in A Journalist [Isaac C. Pray], 1855, p. 365).
The telegraph possessed the potential to nationalize knowledge of the
world simultaneously and ultimately bring about consensus. By utiliz-
ing the telegraph’s news broadcast mode, observed the editor of the
New York Express, ‘The Union will be solidified at the expense of the
State sovereignties.’ He went on to predict that:

We shall become more and more one people, thinking more

alike, acting more alike, and having more and more one impulse.
 Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes 123

Washington is as near to us now as our [New York City] up-town

wards. We can almost hear through the Telegraph, members of
Congress as they speak . . . Man will immediately respond to man.
An excitement will thus be general, and cease to be local. Whether
good or ill is to come from all this, we cannot foresee (Quoted in the
Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, 1846).

This new vision of public participation was both forward- and backward-
looking. To Morse, it was the dream of ‘making one neighborhood
of the whole country’, a vision later paraphrased by McLuhan as the
‘global village’, juxtaposing the pristine village and the electronically,
then digitally, shrunk globe.
But this (literally) revolutionary prospect of archaic witnessing
which was revived had its limitations. Unlike subsequent broadcast
technologies – even unlike time-honored journalism – newsgathering
by telegraph offered only a fleshless skeleton of public news. Providing
neither texture nor context, it was epitomized by the inverted pyramid
technique of reporting, presenting the bottom-line first (supposedly, a
precaution for the risk of lines breaking down before the ‘meat’ of the
story was reported) (Mindich, 2000). The telegraph provided only choice
ingredients plucked out of reality, recounted tersely and anonymously,
not a living experience of the world personally narrated, to which peo-
ple could relate and with which they could identify. Timeliness was
achieved but at the cost of a shriveled picture of reality that could
barely stand for witnessing as a deep and nuanced consensual public
construction of a changed world.13
Moreover, the notion of communality generated by sharing news
knowledge on the time dimension could not resurrect the unmedi-
ated ‘here and now’ experience of archaic witnessing. Although it may
appear paradoxical, the mere act of instantaneously communicating
with distant points appears to have accentuated the notion of distance
rather than proximity. Numerous descriptions of early use of the tele-
graph record the communicators commenting on the great distances
that separated them, while at the same time they marveled at the novel
rapid connection. They spoke of communicating with ‘friends who seem
so near but are indeed so far away’ (Quotation from the Philadelphia
Pennsylvanian, 1846). The unity of communication and transportation,
from prehistory to telegraphy, most likely helped make real-time meet-
ings of minds across space accentuate the physical distance of bodies.14
Even today, people respond to an overseas call by exclaiming, ‘But you
sound so near!’
124 Archaic Witnessing and Contemporary News Media

IV.

The capacity of radio and television to connect listeners and view-

ers to a changed reality, or to a reality that is being changed, in
real time and in front of them, allows for a full ‘liveness’. These two
electronic technologies that have dominated the media environment
of the twentieth century facilitate connecting with reality ‘now and
there’ far better than the telegraph, whose messages had to be modu-
lated to another medium (the printed page) before reaching the public.
In addition to cutting through the technical stages of mediation, radio
and TV took one more step in the direction of the ancient form of wit-
nessing by simulating the modalities of unmediated perception. The
ability of the radio and television to provide authentic voice and image
clips, preserving the modalities of the originals, shortens the process
of reading and translating a script into sounds and sights of the imag-
ination.15 Moreover, unlike the telegraph, they allow a robust view of
reality with which one can identify or, alternatively, mobilize against.
And like print journalism, they can provide a professionally reported,
thought-out, and edited picture of reality.16 The familiar voices of the
anchors and correspondents, with their idiosyncratic styles, convey
continuity, credibility, and responsibility.17 Most significantly, perhaps,
unlike the newspaper, radio and television provide a gratifying sense
of communitas, in the awareness that other members of the com-
munity are also listening to the news in their cars or kitchens or
viewing primetime TV news in their living rooms at precisely the same
time.18
This workaday sense of continuity and belonging is dramatically
intensified in the media events genre, which makes ‘there and now’ feel
like ‘here and now’. The communal viewing of media events, promoted
in advance as potentially transformative, plays an active, essential part
in their success. Recall the enthusiastic ‘participation’ at a distance of the
British public in Diana and Charles’s royal wedding, which was essential
in endorsing the legitimacy of the institution of Royalty. Going beyond
public recognition and sanction, the live broadcast of Israeli Prime
Minister Yitzhak Rabin’s funeral following his assassination, viewed by
Israelis from both sides of the political divide, marked not only reuni-
fication, but also a renewal of the covenant on which democracies are
founded – the commitment to operate according to the rules (Liebes and
Peri, 1998).
At the turn of the twentieth century, with the explosion of fiercely
competing global news channels, television’s capacity to bear live
 Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes 125

witness to what is happening ‘now and there’ at any given place or

moment has taken a problematic turn. The live genre of media events,
based on an implicit contract binding the trio of media, government,
and public – all of whom pre-endorsed the event – has become marginal-
ized. It is being replaced by ‘disaster marathons’ in which authorities
temporarily lose power and media are coerced to convey death, destruc-
tion, and helplessness – live – to an anxious public. 19 In this version of
witnessing, professional journalists are deprived of the tools to supply
credible information and are reduced to watching recycled pictures on
the screen with the rest of the public. In intentional man-made disas-
ters such as terrorist attacks or violent individual rampages, the media,
imprisoned by their competitive habits, may even act as agents of the
instigators. The latter, well-versed in the rules of global media, may
initiate the disaster precisely for its publicity, in order to gain fame, ter-
rorize the witnessing public, and/or cause a mood of despair through
the inevitable live broadcast of disaster. Instead of providing closure for
a change that has taken place in reality, ‘then and there’, or giving pub-
lic legitimacy to a covenant entered into ‘now and there’, the media can
only serve their temporary master by endlessly replaying the dramatic
images, speculating in the studio, 9/11-style, on ‘Who’s done it?’ and
completely confusing their listless audiences in the process (Blondheim
and Liebes, 2003).20
Still, in the daily news genres, as Ellis and Boltansky suggest, there is
genuine public witnessing, archaic-style, taking place. Underlying their
argument is the acknowledgment that in the new media environment
‘we can no longer say that we didn’t know’ (Ellis, 2000). Situated in
the era of global news channels, this approach raises the issue of the
limits of responsibility. True, what is happening ‘now’ is always ‘there’,
some distance away. At what distance are ‘we’ viewers freed from being
responsible? Atrocities seen from up close, as breaking news that is hap-
pening ‘now’, may be happening in ‘our’ community, ‘our’ country, ‘our
region’ (for example, Europe), or, alternately, far away on the other side
of the globe.21 Contemporary television, as does the biblical God, has
the capacity to see (and show) a piece of reality in any part of the world,
but it lacks God’s power to act. When the viewing public witnesses the
suffering of people to whom they feel close (geographically, emotionally,
and so on), public opinion may demand action. Some media scholars
argue that it matters less whether seeing evil that is happening ‘now
and there’ does or does not affect the viewing public; it is enough that
the politicians in charge believe that it does so, for them to attempt to
amend this reality. And there is evidence to show that this new kind
126 Archaic Witnessing and Contemporary News Media

of public participation is affecting the ways in which armies and states

conduct themselves.
In routine broadcasting, the problem with national radio and TV news
lies in their selective representation of reality. Their news-net is sta-
tionary, covering only the places where news is most expected – the
White House, Wall Street, police headquarters, the courts. Only rarely
do news crews venture into the field to investigate a reality which the
establishment is not interested in reporting. Only rarely does an individ-
ual possessing knowledge appear before the public as the biblical legal
witness – the plaintiff or prosecutor. Such was the case of Daniel Elsberg,
who, guided by his belief that the U.S. should withdraw from Vietnam,
mortgaged his future by disclosing a secret report he had written for
the Pentagon. Another was the case of the tobacco company researcher
who revealed to a ‘60 Minutes’ producer that his company was using
addictive substances. Most importantly, media broadcast is unlike the
experience of archaic witnessing in its oracle-like, one-to-many, top-to-
bottom nature. It does not allow a sense of participation, except, to an
extent, in media events.
Twenty-first century television is more democratic – a plethora of
channels can now show practically everything from everywhere, live,
through a combination of ubiquitous surveillance technologies and
satellite broadcast. But even this new laterality cannot seem to revive
the archaic experience of witnessing, for at least three reasons. One
is fragmentation. In our era of segmented and splintered audiences –
even local communities are split by what they view – no longer can
any single channel assemble the entire collective to witness in the man-
ner described by the Bible. Consider the paradigmatic case of biblical
witnessing: Moses gathering the Hebrews at the foot of Mount Sinai
for establishing the covenant between them and God (and the Hebrew
‘covenant’, it will be recalled, is synonymous with ‘witnessing’). The site
for entering the covenant was carefully chosen based on its topography,
and the experience of enacting (namely witnessing) it, featured dramatic
audiovisual effects.
But it was not over when these space-transcending signals were
over. Television’s fleeting signals replace each other in rapid succes-
sion, the later ones erasing, as it were, the earlier ones. The Sinai
covenant was different: a text, etched in stone yet portable, was to
serve as witness to the covenant, transcending time and space. From
the perspective of future generations, the tablets were to serve as a
witness to what was enacted ‘then and there’, yet binding always and
everywhere.
 Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes 127

Finally, in our era of ubiquitous recording, documenting, posting,

and broadcasting, it is no longer necessarily significant events that are
shared and recognized by the collective, but rather anything the cameras
happen to pick up. The model of reality TV as continuous, unselective
eavesdropping thoroughly undermines the archaic habitus of witness-
ing. Rather than a sacrosanct enactment or recognition of significant
and transformative events, television programming has become the
ongoing, live documentation of vanity fairs. From the vantage point
of archaic witnessing, today’s television seems to proclaim that there
is no longer a public, no longer a shared view of reality, and no more
consensually significant transformations of it to witness.

Notes
1. Ellis’s position may be seen as a retreat from his previous, more trust-
ing approach to mass-mediated news coverage in Seeing Things: Television
in an Age of Uncertainty (2000) (London: I.B. Taurus). Based on trust in
media-witnessed experiences, Ellis considers there the ethical implications
of audiencing as tacit acquiescence with atrocities at a distance.
2. This wording invokes Elihu Katz and Paul Lazarsfeld’s notion of social medi-
ation in Personal Influence: The Part Played by People in the Flow of Mass
Communications (1955) (Glencoe, IL: Free Press). In a sense, the two steps
of witnessing correspond to the broadcast of information and the shaping of
opinion influenced by opinion leaders.
3. Recently, however, Ellis upgraded the role of the audience from ‘monitor-
ing’ to the more active role of ‘seeing’, just shy of ‘gazing’ – a focused,
involved scrutiny of images, and through them, the world, as when viewing
a movie. Ellis contrasts the gazing of the movie theater to the monitoring of
television, a perfunctory, isolated glimpsing of the outside world to sustain
individual safety from the crazy world outside, coupled with a sense of and
moral superiority over the agents of chaos out there.
4. On law reporting as a staple of early active news gathering, see M. Schudson
(1978) Discovering the News: A Social History of American Newspapers (New
York: Basic Books); D. Schiller (1981) Objectivity and the News: The Public and
the Rise of Commercial Journalism (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania
Press); and A. Tucher (1994) Froth & Scum: Truth, Beauty, Goodness, and the
Ax Murder in America’s First Mass Medium (Chapel Hill: University of North
Carolina Press). M. Blondheim (1994) News over the Wires: The Telegraph
and the Flow of Public Information in America, 1844–1897 (Cambridge, Mass.:
Harvard University Press) p. 44, n. 66 traces the drifting of the term ‘reporter’
from official bodies whose transactions are oral to the practice of journalism.
At first, early telegraphic news gatherers transmitted deliberations and reso-
lutions of official bodies such as Congress in Washington, D.C. and the New
York State legislatures and courts in Albany. Delivering official reports, the
telegraph newsmen became known as reporters. As the telegraph became the
main medium for gathering premium ‘fast’ news, the journalistic practice of
128 Archaic Witnessing and Contemporary News Media

describing transpiring events of public interest assumed the name associated

with telegraphic news professionals and became known as reporting.
5. See L. Boltanski (1999) Distant Suffering: Morality, Media, and Politics
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
6. Relevant too is the Bible’s standing as a distinctively religious text, which
inevitably presents an ethical point of view. That view may have impacted
cotemporary sensibilities directly, or indirectly, through a lingering influence
on the development of Western thought on ethics.
7. An alternative possibility is that ed derives from the root od, additional,
which in this context would point to other people present, as in the Latin
‘testis’ which derives from ‘tritos’ – third person. See Y. D. Zeligman (1992)
Studies in Biblical Literature (Jerusalem: Magnes), p. 257, note 44, and cf.
Peters’s fascinating discussion of the relation between the two meanings of
‘testis’: witness and testicle, ‘Witnessing’, p. 712.
8. In both Aramaic and Greek, the same word serves for witnessing and entering
into a covenant.
9. The first appearance of the word is in the context of Abimelech’s recogni-
tion of Abraham’s right to the well he dug in Beer-sheba (Genesis 21:30).
That episode, however, is too skeletal to provide much insight into the early
meaning of ‘covenant’. Referring to these episodes as early does not imply,
of course, that they were written before others in the scribing of the biblical
testament.
10. ‘I do set my bow in the cloud, and it shall be for a token of a covenant
between me and the earth’ (Genesis 9:13).
11. Indeed, the dreidel Israeli children play with is inscribed with ‘a great miracle
happened here’. On this aspect of witnessing, see P. Frosh (2006) ‘Telling
Presences: Witnessing, Mass Media, and the Imagined Lives of Strangers’,
Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 23, no. 4, 265–84; Also in this
volume, Chapter 2.
12. See Zeligman (reference information provided in endnote 7), p. 255, and the
literature quoted therein.
13. See, for example, J. W. Carey (1989) ‘Technology and Ideology: The Case
of the Telegraph’, in Id., Communication As Culture: Essays on Media and
Society (New York: Routledge), pp. 201–30; M. Blondheim (2004) ‘ “Slender
Bridges” of Misunderstanding: The Social Legacy of Transatlantic Cables’, in
N. Finzsch and U. Lehmkuhl (eds), Atlantic Communications: Political, Social
and Cultural Perspectives on Media Technology in American and German History
(Oxford: Berg), pp. 153–70.
14. See M. Blondheim (1993) ‘When Bad things Happen to Good Technolo-
gies: Three Phases in the Diffusion and Perception of American Telegraphy’,
in Technology, Pessimism, and Postmodernism, Sociology of Sciences Yearbook
1993 (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers), p. 79.
15. There is a lively literature on the types of effectiveness of each of the
options – pure voice versus image and voice. For more, see W. Booth (1982),
‘The Company We Keep: Self-Making in Imaginative Art, Old and New’,
Daedlus, 111, 33–59; S. Chatman (1981) ‘What Books Can Do That Films
Can’t and Vice Versa’, in W.J.T. Mitchell (ed.), On Narrative, 117–36 (Chicago
and London: University of Chicago Press); M. McLuhan (1964) Understanding
Media (New York: McGraw-Hill).
 Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes 129

16. Nevertheless, it can be argued that editing may smooth out the more com-
plex picture of reality, telling it according to the reporter’s and/or editor’s
pre-existing script.
17. To an extent, the newspaper too provided a measure of this effect by the
familiarity of its format, design-templates and layouts, let alone recognizing
by-lines and writers’ styles. See K. G. Barnhurst and J. Nerone (2001) The
Form of News: A History (New York: Gilford Press); P. Frosh (2004) The Image
Factory (Oxford: Berg Publishers).
18. This argument is based on our paper on ‘The End of Television News’,
presented at the Second International Workshop on ‘The End of Televi-
sion? Its Impact on the World (So Far)’, Philadelphia, 17–18 February 2007;
forthcoming in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
James Carey did argue, quite convincingly, that the daily newspaper was
the first to gather its readers, as members of the community, around shared
news, thereby reinforcing their consensual perspective. However, reading the
printed words lacks the emotionality that is aroused when listening to or
viewing an event in real time, with the knowledge that one is taking part of
a collective experience.
19. The nature of this coercion is analyzed in Tamar Liebes (1988) ‘Disaster
Marathons’, in T. Liebes and J. Curran (eds), Media, Ritual, Identity (London:
Routledge).
20. Naturally, in the edited news show, which summarizes the developing story,
editors and journalists may recapture their poise and re-exercise their daily
journalistic routines.
21. There are, of course, cases in which the viewer’s government is responsi-
ble for conducting atrocities in another country, in which case relevance
remains.

References
M. Blondheim and T. Liebes (2003) ‘From Disaster Marathon to Media Event: Live
Television’s Performance on September 11, 2001 and September 11, 2002’, in
A. Michael Noll (ed.), Crisis Communications: Lessons from September 11, 185–98
(Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield).
D. Dayan and E. Katz (1992) Media Events: The Live Broadcasting of History
(Cambridge: Harvard University Press).
J. Ellis (2000) Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I.B. Tauris).
J. Ellis ‘(Not) the End of Television: TV, Politics, and the new Emotionality’, paper
presented at the Second International Workshop on ‘The End of Television? Its
Impact on the World (So Far)’, Philadelphia, 17–18 February 2007, forthcoming
in Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science.
P. Frosh (2006) ‘Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass Media, and the Imagined
Lives of Strangers’, Critical Studies in Media Communication, vol. 23, no. 4,
265–84. Also in this volume, Chapter 2.
T. Liebes and M. Blondheim (2005) ‘Myths to the Rescue: How Live Television
Intervenes in History’, in E. W. Rothenbuhler and M. Coman (eds), Media
Anthropology, 188–98 (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publication).
130 Archaic Witnessing and Contemporary News Media

T. Liebes and Y. Peri (1998) ‘Electronic Journalism in Segmented Societies: Lessons

from the 1996 Israeli Election’, Political Communication, vol. 15, no. 1, 27–43.
B. Lifshitz (2002) Law and Action: Terminology of Obligation and Acquisition in Jewish
Law (Jerusalem: Mosad Bialik).
D. Mindich (2000) ‘Edwin M. Stanton, the Inverted Pyramid, and Information
Control’, in D. B. Sachsman, S. Kittrell Rushing, and D. Reddin van Tuyll (eds),
The Civil War and the Press, 179–208 (New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers).
J. D. Peters (2001) ‘Witnessing’, Media, Culture & Society, vol.23, no. 6, 707–23.
Also in this volume, Chapter 1.
A Journalist [Isaac C. Pray] (1855) Memoirs of James Gordon Bennett and his Times
(New York: Stringer and Townsend).
Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, 17 June 1846.
Philadelphia Pennsylvanian, 30 December 1846.
G. von Rad, quoted in ‘Edut’, Encyclopedia Mikrait (Biblical Encyclopedia).
Part II
Performances of Media
Witnessing
6
Witnessing as a Field
Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski

Witnessing has recently become a contested issue in media scholarship,

constituting a complex practice midway between experience and
agency. Occupying a distinctive place in contemporary media studies,
witnessing combines the evolution of media technologies – production,
transmission, and representation – with weighty questions of moral-
ity and audience responsibility. Arguably, the very definition of what it
means to be a witness in this day and age has changed with the expan-
sion of media technologies. This chapter is an attempt to rethink the
stakes and implications involved in media witnessing. It is beneficial to
open by outlining the main points to be developed in the following dis-
cussion. (1) Witnessing, we suggest, is subject to a constant struggle and
is hence an inherently political practice. (2) We regard the act of witness-
ing as contingent upon the specific event witnessed; thus, the ontology
of witnessing is dependent on its context, as different events give rise
to different modalities of witnessing. (3) As a political practice relative
to a specific event, witnessing transpires in what Pierre Bourdieu (1977)
designates as a field. Thus, witnessing is regarded as a field comprised of
various agents, interests, positions, and resources. (4) The field of wit-
nessing operates on terms of trust, which is the basic currency among
the agents and the object for which they compete. The final section of
the chapter will be devoted to a case study, an analysis of the field of
witnessing in two documentary films produced shortly after the clashes
in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank in March 2002.

Theorizing witnessing

Recent scholarship has provided much insight into the history, practice,
and consequence of media witnessing. At the risk of oversimplification,

133
134 Witnessing as a Field

it is possible to distinguish from the variety therein two central

approaches: the vicarious witness and the implicated witness.
The prototype of vicarious witness is arguably John Ellis’s discus-
sion of contemporary media witness. According to Ellis (2000), the
twentieth century is the century of witness and has brought audiences
visual evidence of worldwide events through the media of photography,
film, and television. The most striking result of this situation is that
‘ “I did not know” and “I did not realize” are no longer open to us as a
defense’ (Ellis, 2000, p. 9). Similarly, Roger Silverstone (2002) claimed
that regarding audiences as active and reflexive presumes that audi-
ences inevitably assume a moral stance: ‘If audiences refuse to take that
responsibility, then they are morally culpable. And we are all audiences
now’ (Silverstone, 2002, p. 774). Both Ellis and Silverstone contend that
a profound shift has taken place in the way we perceive the world
beyond our immediate reach. We are all witnesses to what is taking
place somewhere else, and this very fact implies that we are somehow
responsible.
The second approach offers a more restricted take by emphasizing the
distinction between mere spectators and witnessing agents. The funda-
mental premise here is that one qualifies as a witness predominantly by
virtue of being present at the event. In this vein, John Durham Peters
(2001) specifies three types of relations to an event that qualify as wit-
nessing: to be present at the event in time and space (the modality of
‘being there’); to be present in time but removed in space (the modal-
ity of liveness); and finally, to be present in space but removed in time
(the modality of historicity) (pp. 720–21). For Peters, the first modal-
ity is the paradigmatic case of witnessing: ‘The witness is authorized
to speak by having been at the occurrence’ (2001, p. 710). He neverthe-
less concedes that witnessing may transcend time and space specificities:
being present-at-a-distance, as in the case of watching a live broadcast,
allows for a sense of participation from afar. Similarly, absence in time
but presence in place also constitutes a modality of witnessing, enabling
participation across time, particularly through physical artifacts of the
past. It is clear, however, that for Peters the latter two are derivates of the
first paradigmatic case insofar as they retain the basic time/space deter-
minants. This hierarchy of witnessing excludes a fourth modality – that
of absence in both time and space – deeming it a situation ‘in which
the attitude of witnessing is hardest to sustain’ (Peters, 2001, p. 720).
The importance of presence is further explicated in Avishai Margalit’s
(2002) conception of moral witness. Margalit supplements time and
 Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski 135

space with the factor of risk: ‘The moral witness should himself be at
personal risk, whether he is a sufferer or just an observer of the suffering
that comes from evil-doing’ (p. 150). What makes someone into a moral
witness is not merely the fact of being there but also the fact of being in
harm’s way.
These two approaches to conceptualizing witnessing draw from dif-
ferent sources and promote different understandings of witnessing
altogether. The vicarious witness approach has spawned discussion on
the audience’s engagement in distant suffering (Boltanski, 1999), on the
moral stance of mediated experience (Frosh, 2006; Sontag, 2004), and on
morality in a mediated world (Couldry, 2006; Silverstone, 2007). Never-
theless, the position occupied by the remote viewers of distant suffering
was also credited with generating social indifference (Tester, 1997),
producing an organized ‘state of denial’ (Cohen, 2001), and, more gen-
erally, coinciding with forms of moral distanciation (Bauman, 1990).
The implicated witness approach, on the other hand, found theoret-
ical explication in trauma theory and Holocaust studies, promoting
questions of history, identity, and the social implication of traumatic
experience (Felman and Laub, 1992; Caruth, 1996; Agamben, 1999;
Oliver, 2001).
As much as these perspectives differ, they nevertheless seem to
share a common presumption about witnessing, which deems it a
situation one simply inhabits, independently and discretely, irrespec-
tive of the specific event witnessed. In other words, witnessing is
understood as a position one already holds, not something one must
obtain. Much of the existing literature is therefore concerned with
the ontology of witnessing as existing separately from its contextual
specificities. Moreover, in contrast to other entries in media studies
lexicon, witnessing, in a late-modern reincarnation of its theological
roots, appears as an exceptionally pristine term, possessing a purity and
wholesomeness incompatible with critical thinking (see Peters, 2001;
Thomas, Chapter 4, in this volume). As such, witnessing seems to
be both at odds with issues of power and politics as well as incon-
gruous with struggle and domination. In what follows, we propose
a different perspective for assessing witnessing, one which casts wit-
nessing as contingent on the specific parameters of the event. We
further posit that witnessing is a field in which various forces, resources,
and agents compete. In other words, witnessing is to be regarded
as subject to contest and struggle, and hence as a genuine political
arena.
136 Witnessing as a Field

Witnessing as a field

The re-conceptualization of witnessing as a field is premised on the

claim that witnessing is linked with and conditioned by the event
witnessed. Whereas previous scholarship understands witnessing as the
independent variable and the event as the dependent, we opt for the
reverse – witnessing as contingent upon the event being witnessed. Of
critical importance here are the contextual parameters (political, histori-
cal, rhetorical, technological, and so on) of the act of witnessing, that
is, the specificities of the event under consideration. Thus, rather than
looking at the different modalities of witnessing while bracketing out
the event, we give priority to the event and the modalities of witness-
ing it promotes or restricts. One consequence of this perspective is that
witnessing cannot be analyzed outside its specific context, apart from its
conditions of possibility. Witnessing is always ad hoc and case-specific.
Following Peters (2001), we regard witnessing as a communication
triangle comprised of (1) the agent bearing witness, (2) the utterance or
the text itself, and (3) the audience. However, this model is here sup-
plemented by and contextualized within the parameters of the specific
event in question. In this sense, what Peters takes as the three fixed com-
ponents of witnessing, we take as three zones of contention: the first is
to obtain agency, the second is to attain voice, and the third is to compel
the audience to take notice. It follows that being a witness is subject to
struggle, not privilege; it is something to be accomplished, not simply
given.
In positing witnessing as a field, we draw on the work of Pierre
Bourdieu (1977, 1992). According to Bourdieu, a field is a social
space consisting of interrelated positions – a configuration of relations
between positions – within which social agents strive to operate and
prevail. Put differently, a field is a social arena in which struggles take
place over resources and access to them; a field is defined by the stakes
which are at stake (Jenkins, 2006, p. 84). The social consists of many
fields, each operating according to sets of rules and norms – much like
a game in which players try to achieve their objectives. The field of
witnessing may then be seen as populated by agents occupying differ-
ent positions and holding divergent abilities, interests, and resources.
Agents are equipped to play in this field by means of their habitual
schemas or forms of know-how. This set of primary classifications and
predispositions (which usually operate below the level of conscious-
ness) is what Bourdieu calls habitus. Furthermore, each agent makes
use of various resources available to him or her – political, symbolic,
 Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski 137

social, technological, or economic forms of capital – which are unevenly

distributed across the field.
We propose that the game being played in the witnessing field is
a game of trust in which agents compete to gain the trust of their
designated audiences. Trust, however, is a tricky business: when some-
one gains trust, another might lose it. Agents utilize the capital available
to them, as well as their habitual schemas, in order to operate within
the field of witnessing with the aim of gaining the trust of those whom
they seek to address. A preliminary condition for playing this game is,
of course, being admitted into the field. One corollary to this condition
is that there will always be those who a priori remain – or are kept –
outside the field, those who are barred from entering. They are excluded
from the field, but their exclusion is no less a political act, for in such
cases someone is divested of the means to bear witness. Being outside
the field of witnessing means being relegated to silence (see Lyotard,
1989).
One way to imagine the field of witnessing is as the power-knowledge
projection of an event, the epistemological map emerging from its spe-
cific arrangement. The field of witnessing is populated by various agents,
not all of whom are witnesses. In a legal context, the field of witness-
ing is inhabited by lawyers, judges, juries, defendants, plaintiffs, and
witnesses. In a historical context, the field is occupied by professional
historians, agents and agencies of collective memory (official and unof-
ficial), archives, and witnesses (see Assmann, 1995). Even when one
acts as a corroborating witness in an official procedure (for example,
co-signer on a contract or a witness at a wedding), one operates within
a field that designates her or him by virtue of one’s qualities, affiliation,
or availability as a bona fide witness.
Our concern here is with the field of media witnessing. As stated
above, this field is inhabited by various agents, not all of whom are
witnesses, near or far. It is possible to divide this field into three zones:
eyewitnesses, mediators, and audiences.

Eyewitnesses
Eyewitnesses are those who appear in various media genres as individ-
uals who were there and consequently give their accounts of the event.
It is usually the case that there is more than one witness to an event,
be it mundane or exceptional. Those who lived through the event are
then asked to relate their experiences, and in doing so they draw on the
resources available to them. First, of course, is their presence at the event
138 Witnessing as a Field

and their firsthand experience of it, which is the entry card, as it were,
to presenting oneself as a witness. However, there are other resources as
well. Rhetoric is often a consideration: someone must remember what
happened, have a desire to report it, and translate what she/he saw
into words. Presence and rhetoric thus form the basis for the witnessing
discourse. Nevertheless, these are necessary but not sufficient conditions
for bearing witness. In many cases, the identity of the individual bear-
ing witness is important, particularly when witnesses are survivors of a
man-made catastrophe. It is unlikely that the perpetrator of a mass mur-
der would then serve as a witness; in such cases, witnessing seems to
be the lot of victims. This means that insofar as the field of witnessing
is concerned, being a victim may count as a resource, a form of capital
in producing testimony. Who counts as a victim might be a simple or
difficult question, depending on the field at hand. Once considered a
victim, though, the path to be considered a witness is open. Technol-
ogy might also be an issue in certain instances, for example, when one
captures pictures of an event on camera or video. In this case, the tech-
nologically inclined would have an advantage over the merely verbal
(say, someone who reports an encounter with a UFO but can back this
up with filmed evidence). From this perspective, a professional reporter
is a species of eyewitness, combining the traditional narrative or textual
practices with technology of sound and/or image.
There may be other conditions and requirements, which, in keep-
ing with the framework suggested here, extend from the specific
event in question. Resources available to individual agents might also
vary from one event to another, making the task of gaining trust
both specific and provisional. In short, presenting oneself as a wit-
ness implies presenting one’s habitus as certification for trustworthi-
ness. As Bourdieu stresses, players’ success depends on their habitual
schemas and the different forms of capital available to them (Bourdieu
and Wacquant, 1992). To work in the field of witnessing, one must
employ both habitus and capital, that is, operate in the field by
taking advantage of a particular combination of circumstance and
competence.

Mediators
Beyond witnesses, the field of media witnessing includes another cru-
cial player: the mediator. Mediators are the various agents and agencies
that film, direct, edit, produce, archive, and broadcast testimonies. The
 Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski 139

mediators are the producers, in the deep sense of the word, of media wit-
nessing. As such, they correspond to what Stuart Hall (1980) designates
in his encoding/decoding model as ‘technical infrastructure’ and ‘rela-
tions of production’ (the third component, ‘frameworks of knowledge’,
partly correlates here with the input given by eyewitnesses). Indeed, it
is possible to claim that media witnessing is encoded as a meaningful
text, one which bears and reflects the dominant codes of its producers.
The employment of eyewitnesses in the media is a practice that serves
certain goals in certain situations, which suggests that this genre might
better complement one set of preferred meanings than another. When
the mediator presents an eyewitness, an unsaid statement is thereby
conveyed: this specific person is an authentic eyewitness who has some-
thing important to contribute to the mediated articulation underway.
This is a fairly straightforward yet crucial point. Insofar as media wit-
nessing is concerned, mediators determine who qualifies as a witness.
Their choice has to do with technical, professional, circumstantial, and
ideological considerations that may differ from one report to another.
A crude example is the BBC reporter in the Belgian Congo who wan-
dered through a refugee camp yelling, ‘Anyone here been raped and
speaks English?’ (Behr, 1982). Although rarely presented so callously,
this logic is at the core of media witnessing in general. Thus, the wit-
nesses we see or hear on the media are the result of a selection process,
a process that while contingent on the specific event bespeaks the
dominant codes of the mediators.
When producing a recorded account, mediators have more time and
resources to locate appropriate witnesses who suit the overall statement
they want to produce. In a live broadcast, where immediacy is of the
essence, the selection process serves the objectives and restrictions typ-
ical of liveness (above all ‘being there’). Still, both cases involve some
kind of selection, and so the eyewitnesses we see or hear are those whose
profiles (that is, competence plus circumstance) meet the requirements
of the mediators at a given time. Other potential eyewitnesses who,
for whatever reason, are deemed unwanted, remain outside the field of
media witnessing.
As mentioned above, on-site reporters might be considered a subcat-
egory of the eyewitness, as actors in an institutionalized practice of
witnessing with its specific combination of competence and circum-
stance – in other words, professional eyewitnesses. Reporters are in
this sense extensions and direct delegates of the mediators. In some
instances, having a reporter on scene will prove beneficial, especially
140 Witnessing as a Field

in introducing new and exclusive information. However, in some cases

using lay witnesses (in addition to or instead of the professional ones)
may prove valuable, particularly when trying to recreate the impression
of the event and its effects on the immediate surrounding. It is precisely
the crude and unrefined quality of such accounts that make them an
indispensable resource in the hands of mediators, providing them with
a sense of authenticity no reporter can match. Mediators are therefore
the gatekeepers of the field and occupy a pivotal position in it. An event
can be witnessed through the media only insofar as it is constructed as
‘witnessable’ by the media. And the conditions by which an event will
come to be witnessed are never divorced from ideology.

Audience
The audience is the ultimate addressee of mediated testimonies; audi-
ence members are witnesses to the witnesses. The position they occupy
is that of remote spectators, which is the opposite position of the
eyewitness. For the former, remoteness means detachment and hence
the ability to observe and reflect; for the latter, ‘being there’ entails
proximity, which means involvement, and hence the annihilation of
perspective.1 Yet the audience is not merely a witness by proxy, bear-
ing witness through the media to distant events. Media audiences
are also in a position to judge what they see – they are not simply
observers, they are, at least potentially, judge and jury. The audience,
then, inhabits a distinctive position in the field of witnessing, a posi-
tion which comes with its particular modes of experience and discourse.
Luc Boltanski (1999), in providing a detailed catalog of the status
of watching ‘distant suffering’, has specified the emotional and dis-
cursive situations involved therein. Audiences respond to what they
see in previously unexplored ways by means of denunciation, sympa-
thy, or pity. Yet their privileged situation also enables them to watch
others’ pain as a spectacle. A crucial point arising from Boltanski’s
analysis is that while audiences share a common moral universe with
the mediators and eyewitnesses, they inhabit a separate sphere within
which they engage with images of suffering beyond their immediate
context.
The situation in which the worldwide audience watches the plights
and misfortunes of distant others is certainly a novelty of the twentieth
century. The challenges this situation poses are enormous, particularly
the question of the audience’s responsibility and culpability (Ellis, 2000;
Silverstone, 2007). Yet the impression arising from previous accounts
 Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski 141

is that if the audience is a sort of judge and jury, then in many

respects, the judge is faltering and the jury is out and may never recon-
vene. Still, the framework of the field of witnessing may help to better
understand the possibilities and constraints implied in this situation,
this by re-conceptualizing the act of witnessing itself. Rather than deter-
mining the ontological status of witnessing – the debate between Ellis’s
approach and Peters’s – this perspective deems both as integral parts of
the witnessing field. Eyewitnesses and audience occupy two different
strategic positions in the field, each with its own distinctive circum-
stances and competences. Proximity and distance are therefore two key
variables in the field which may be utilized in some cases by mediators
as resources for producing trust.

Framework for analysis

The purpose of the following framework is to specify the different ele-

ments that influence the way trust is produced and distributed across
the field, given a specific event. There are three zones in the field: eye-
witness, mediators, and the audience. The zone of eyewitness stretches
between the event and discourse; the zone of mediators stretches
between discourse and meaning; and the zone of audience draws on
meaning in order to pass judgment. There are three spheres of nego-
tiation in the field: discourse, meaning, and judgment. Discourse is
the intersection of the eyewitness as addresser and the mediator as
addressee; meaning is the intersection of the mediators as encoders
and the audience as decoders of meaning; judgment is the inter-
section of audience as spectators on the one hand, and as moral
agents on the other hand (see Boltanski, 1999). Originating from the
event, the fundamental currency of the field is trust: the mediator’s
trust in the eyewitness, which enables discourse and consequently
the production of meaning, and the audience’s trust in the media-
tors, which enables meaning-making and ultimately passing judgment.
An important consequence arising from this construction of witness-
ing as a field is that trust is a precondition for the audience to pass
judgment.
The figure below specifies the various elements in the field, followed
by a brief definition of each. This catalog is by no means exhaustive, nor
is it exclusive of additional or alternative items. Nevertheless, it serves
to elucidate what we believe to be the fundamental components of the
field.
142

Event

Performative

Circumstance

Capacity

Eyewitness

Enunciation

Status Trust

Communicative

Discourse

Testimony

Evidence

Technology

Mediators

Authorship

Narrative Trust

Genre

Meaning

Denunciation

Audience Sentiment

Aesthetic

Judgment
 Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski 143

Standing between event and discourse, eyewitnesses make use of the

following resources to substantiate their position:

• Performative – The pronunciation of the eyewitness: ‘I was there,

I saw’. While there may be different variations of this phrase, its gist
is the same, that is, someone pronouncing herself/himself an agent
bearing witness, even before and beyond what she/he has to say. This
pronunciation may not necessarily be verbal, voluntary, or even con-
scious. Moreover, it might be diegetic or non-diegetic (for instance,
when the mediator makes a claim about the eyewitness: ‘She was
there and saw’). Yet, in every instance of witnessing there must be a
performative assertion on some level. This preliminary yet necessary
act initiates witnessing on the part of the eyewitness.
• Circumstance – The circumstance by which one came to witness the
event, thereby locating and binding the eyewitness in space and time
(‘I was sitting on the porch across from X when . . . ’, ‘I was walk-
ing on street when . . . ’). Such circumstance is always in terms of and
contingent upon the event.
• Capacity – In what capacity one experienced the event (‘As a doctor,
I arrived at . . . ’, ‘As a Jew I was sent to . . . ’). While circumstance is
related to the event, one’s capacity is external to it (one is a doctor
or a Jew before, during, and after the event, and regardless of it) (see
Hutchby, 2001).

The eyewitness makes use of the following resources to communicate

the event:

• Enunciation: The verbal communication and gestural cues by which

the eyewitness enunciates his or her experiences for potential
addressees. The eyewitness communicates not only his/her knowl-
edge of the event (information, circumstance, and capacity) but also
his/her emotional states (‘I was terrified’, ‘I was shocked’). Only
through enunciation does the eyewitness come to finally bear wit-
ness to the event. As long as the event remains exclusively individual
memory, it remains incommunicable. However, incommunicability
might be considered a special type of enunciation, as in the case
of the traumatized witness (‘I can’t describe it, it’s beyond words’).
The inability to communicate nevertheless communicates some-
thing: the emotional imprint left by the event. While psyches are
idiosyncratic, emotions are universal, and thus by resorting to a
144 Witnessing as a Field

description of emotions, the eyewitness provides a common basis for

the participation and recognition of potential addressees.
• Status: The social standing of the eyewitness. Status can be beneficial
or detrimental, depending on the event, the mediators, or the audi-
ence. Furthermore, status might change over time. The status of a
soldier eyewitness might affect, for better or worse, the evaluation of
his testimony; likewise for a layperson, journalist, doctor, and so on.
Status might therefore confer credibility or fault, but in any case, it is
a factor when someone presents himself/herself as an eyewitness.2
• Relevance: In order to render experience communicable, the eyewit-
ness also employs cues of relevance to draw in potential addressees.
These may vary from using familiar speech or slang to employing ele-
ments from collective memory, popular culture, or history. Together,
these rhetorical resources are meant to evoke ‘experiential closeness’
(Bilandzic, 2006).

Situated between discourse and meaning, mediators make use of the

following resources to substantiate their report as pertinent to the event:

• Testimonies: The input gained from eyewitnesses. Granting an eyewit-

ness the status of testimony is the mediator’s prerogative. In terms
of the field, one is an eyewitness only insofar as one is found qual-
ified by the mediator. Hence, an eyewitness who fails to gain the
status of testimony does not figure in the field and is consequently
condemned to silence. As stated, the selection made by mediators
speaks for their biases, agenda, and interests; moreover, it speaks for
the ideological framework within which they operate.
• Evidence: In addition to testimonies, mediators utilize corroborating
evidence when mediating the event. Drawing on various sources
unavailable to any individual witness, mediators utilize institutional
networks (economic, governmental, and technical) to give a wider,
more comprehensive overview of the event. Evidence and testi-
monies constitute the material on which mediators draw. In this
way, mediators combine proximity and distance as two distinctive
and equally beneficial resources.
• Technology: Mediators utilize technology in order to convey the
event, most frequently while on the scene. It is usually the case that
mediators (or their delegates) arrive on the scene only after the event
is in process or has finished. Mediators are, by definition, always
late to the event. Thus, they must rely on those who were there to
compensate for the time gap in their reporting on the aftermath.
 Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski 145

Technology is an important resource here, as it substantiates media-

tors’ presence at the event, even if belatedly. In cases in which the
reporter is also an eyewitness, technology and testimony converge
into one enunciation. Still, additional testimonies are often sought
to provide the more authentic perspective of the layperson.

Mediators make use of the following resources to render the event

meaningful:

• Authorship: Every media report is the product of a media agency

which has its own public standing, reputation, and profile. When
mediating events worldwide, media agencies put forward their cred-
ibility and prestige as collateral, as if stating, ‘We vouch that this
has indeed happened.’ In every act of mediating authorship is
announced, either directly (‘This is the BBC’) or indirectly (‘We take
you live to our reporter’).
• Narrative: Through their authorship of the event, mediators provide it
with a timeline, context, circumstance, and causality. In other words,
they construct a narrative from a previously chaotic event. While
their narrative may be provisional or fragmentary, it is nevertheless
an attempt to create order by means of the resources outlined above.
There may be an initial phase in which information is too scarce to
construct a narrative, particularly in cases of disastrous events (for
example, reports during the first hours of 9/11), but it is mediators’
top priority to shorten this phase and replace it as soon as possible
with a narrative (see Scannell, 2004).
• Genre: Mediators construct their narratives within genres. Two genres,
for instance a live coverage report and a documentary, might both
draw on testimonies but employ them differently. The use of testi-
monies serves different purposes in different genres. A live broadcast
uses them to bridge the time gap between an event and the report
on it, bringing the audience as close as possible to the occurrence.
A documentary, on the other hand, might use testimonies to add an
emotional dimension rather than concrete knowledge. Mixing genres
is yet another resource available to mediators in certain cases.

Situated between meaning and judgment is the audience. As specta-

tors, their involvement is predicated on the fact of their absence at
the scene of witnessing and, consequently, on their inability to bear
witnesses themselves. Distance from the event and the perspective it
provides are their main resources within the field. Following Boltanski’s
146 Witnessing as a Field

analysis of distant suffering (1999), it is possible to outline three ‘topics’

of involvement:

• Denunciation: Identifying a persecutor whose figure serves as the

object of the audience’s denunciation.
• Sentiment: Identifying a benefactor whose figure serves as the object
of the audience’s sentiment.
• Aesthetic: Focusing on the spectacle itself, as an experience of the sub-
lime, which is generated by aesthetic appreciation of the scene (see
Chouliaraki, 2004).

The framework presented here conforms to Boltanski’s typology, yet

with one important qualification: here, the three topics are subject to
the audience’s negotiation of meaning only insofar as they are ori-
ented toward judgment. As such, the different modalities of displaced
involvement above are understood as emotional routes leading from
meaning-making to passing judgment.
Before considering the case studies, one final observation on the
field of witnessing is noteworthy. The foregoing discussion has sug-
gested that competition is part and parcel of the field of witnessing;
indeed, competition is what makes it a political arena. It is possible
to distinguish in this respect two levels of competition: across zones
and between zones. The former relates to the competition among eye-
witnesses for the attention of mediators and among mediators for the
attention of audiences; hence, horizontal competition. The latter relates
to the discrepancies between eyewitnesses and mediators and between
mediators and audiences; hence, vertical competition. Whereas horizon-
tal competition consists of agents of the same kind, vertical competition
involves unequal agents, among whom the dominant is the mediator.
Indeed, the field of witnessing is anything but egalitarian, exhibiting a
hierarchical organization with the mediator at the top. However, this
hierarchy is not extensive, as agents in all zones – eyewitnesses, media-
tors, and audiences – are, respectively, dependent on each other. Thus,
while the mediators are arguably the dominant agent in the field, their
privilege is forever tainted by their reliance on eyewitnesses insofar as
providing the one thing the mediator will always lack – presence at the
event. The distinctive quality of ‘being there’ is therefore the eyewit-
ness’s exclusive resource, which secures for them an integral, if limited,
point of ascendancy within the field. Likewise the audience’s involve-
ment, while relying on the mediator’s input in negotiating meaning
and judgment, is conceivable only within particular cultural boundaries,
 Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski 147

ideological settings, and power relations. Thus the audience’s moral

engagement is not entirely determined by variables within the field but
transcends its boundaries, outstripping both eyewitnesses’ and media-
tors’ implications. In this way, each of the three zones demonstrates
both dependence and autonomy, together comprising a field whose
construction is as structured as it is flexible.

The case of Jenin

On 3 April 2002, the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) launched a major

military operation in the West Bank refugee camp of Jenin, home to
some 14,000 Palestinians. The aim of the Israeli operation was to cap-
ture Palestinian militants responsible for suicide bombings and other
attacks that had killed more than 70 Israelis since March of that year.
The incursion into the refugee camp was carried out on a much larger
scale than other military operations mounted by the IDF since the sec-
ond Intifada broke out in September 2000. At least 140 buildings were
destroyed, rendering around 4000 people, more than a quarter of the
camp’s population, homeless. On 9 April, 13 Israeli soldiers were killed
in an ambush in one of the most densely populated districts of the
camp. The operation ended on 12 April.
The Israeli army enforced a strict media blackout during the oper-
ation. After clashes subsided, rumors of a massacre in Jenin began to
spread across the West Bank, reaching the local and international press.
The Israeli government denied these allegations. Consequent media
coverage was largely based on eyewitness accounts of Palestinian res-
idents, international aid workers, journalists, and in some cases also
soldiers and army officials. The testimonies that appeared in media out-
lets presented different views and interpretations of what transpired in
Jenin. Here we focus on two documentary films which were produced
shortly after the IDF withdrew from the camp: Jenin Jenin (2002), pro-
duced and directed by Mohammad Bakri, and The Battle of Jenin (2002),
produced and directed by Noam Shalev. Both films are based, by and
large, on testimonies of eyewitnesses who experienced the occurrences
in Jenin firsthand. Yet, while employing similar means and format, the
two films represent two different attempts to dominate the field of
witnessing.
Soon after the battle in Jenin had quieted down, Mohammad Bakri,
an Israeli actor and director of Palestinian origin, entered the refugee
camp with a filming crew. Bakri took upon himself the role of a mediator.
Having appeared in various roles on stage and in films, Bakri has been
148 Witnessing as a Field

a known face in Israel for the last 20 years. His long-standing career has
afforded him a unique form of cultural capital. In Israel, Bakri is espe-
cially known for playing Arab roles in many films and plays dealing
with the Israeli–Palestinian conflict. His on-screen credentials made it
possible for him to position himself as the representative of the Pales-
tinian misfortune spawned by Israel. Being a Palestinian by origin and
an Israeli by circumstance allowed Bakri to take the role of a spokesper-
son for the community under attack. His Israeli citizenship proved most
valuable in this case. In contrast to the Palestinians featured in the film,
who reside in the West Bank, Bakri could (in most cases) travel freely
and enjoy some civil liberties. This double status provided him with a
distinctive resource when it came to telling the story of Jenin.
Bakri appears in person in the second sequence of the film, where
he is shown walking amid the ruins of the camp and speaking with
residents. By appearing in name, face, and voice, as well as at the place of
the event, he claims authorship of the field. However, Bakri’s position as
an author is by no means straightforward, as the resource that enabled
him to produce the film is also that which eventually jeopardized its
release. The Israeli Film Board banned the film from being shown in
Israel, claiming that the director presented a distorted version of the
events. By banning the film, the board strived to disqualify Bakri as a
mediator and exclude him from the field of witnessing.3
Bakri utilized the documentary genre to produce a stand-alone
50-minute film, suitable both for cinema screening and television broad-
cast. The documentary genre, which is nothing less than an attempt to
produce and represent the truth on screen, comes with a heavy responsi-
bility (Corner, 2000, 2001, 2002; Ellis, 2000). Bakri employed two main
forms of documentation: interviews with witnesses and archival footage
of the camp taken on-site immediately after the Israeli army withdrew
from the area. Since all eyewitnesses in the film speak Arabic, English
subtitles are used throughout, which in this context might be considered
a technological resource available to the mediator. Accompanying indi-
viduals who endured the event, Bakri declares his intention to unveil
Israeli cover-ups and tell the true story of what he calls a ‘massacre’,
which allegedly took place in Jenin.
The narrative Bakri tells is that of trauma and victimhood. It should
be noted that all the testimonies collected are those of Palestinian
victims. By providing a space for victims to recount their traumatic
experiences, Bakri effectively facilitates a reenactment of the greater
Palestinian trauma – the Nakba.4 Thus, the trauma of Jenin is narrated
as a metonymy of and as the latest catastrophe in the history of the
 Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski 149

Palestinian people. Bakri’s choice of testimonies attests to the traumatic

narrative he sets out to unfold. The first witness to appear is a verbally
impaired young man who uses excessive gestures and pantomime to
express an occurrence he saw. Bakri’s decision to open the film with a
witness who is unable to verbally express himself is telling, not only
of the loss of lives and property but also of the loss of voice. A wordless
testimony thus serves to symbolize the collective trauma of Palestinians.
Other testimonies used by Bakri also conform to the traumatic narrative.
The following sequence introduces two children who, like their parents,
testify to the destruction of their land: ‘Everywhere in the camp you find
someone looking for a relative, looking for their home or a missing body.
There is not a single person at the camp who did not suffer.’ Utilizing
testimonies by children, Bakri seems to be suggesting something about
the passivity, and possibly the naiveté, of the Palestinian people.
Alongside these testimonies, Bakri features the testimony of a
Palestinian physician. Filmed in a hospital, which further emphasizes
this eyewitness’s social status, the physician recounts his experiences of
the battle: ‘The hospital was bombarded at 3 a.m. on the 4th of the
month by Israeli tanks which fired 11 missiles. They destroyed the oxy-
gen tanks, the water pipes, the sewage pipes, the hospital wards, the
doctors’ rooms, and the infirmary.’ As a physician, his enunciation car-
ries more weight than an identical witnessing discourse made by, for
instance, a nurse, orderly, or patient. All would bear witness under the
same circumstances but would do so in different capacities and draw on
different social statuses – and hence exhibit different habituses. However
in this case, the doctor – the epitome of authority – appears vulnerable
and powerless, thereby producing an enunciation that further stresses
the severity of the situation, as if saying, ‘Even a doctor was helpless in
Jenin.’
Bakri also includes testimonies of Palestinians who were absent
from Jenin. By incorporating testimonies outside the event, Bakri fur-
ther demonstrates the link between Jenin and the original Palestinian
trauma – the Nakba: ‘We were displaced before and our fathers have
been through the same ordeal. Where do you expect us to go now? . . .
We’ve had enough. We’ve been through three or four Nakbas. That’s
enough.’ Such enunciations produce a sense of extended capacity, that
is, of extending the event being witnessed both temporally and spatially
so as to suggest that all Palestinians have been and still are, in one way
or another, witnesses to the Nakba.
It is important to note that all testimonies in this film were shot
on-site. This use of cinematic technology provides the filmmaker – in this
150 Witnessing as a Field

case the mediator – with a means of producing a sense of ‘presentness’

(similar to what Peters calls ‘historicity’), which in turn complements
the overall narrative of trauma. This formation of victimhood is repeated
in the last sequence of the film. The final eyewitness is a Palestinian res-
ident of Jenin who is holding an old sandal like a telephone, making
an imaginary call to the U.S. president and the Chairman of the U.N.,
asking them to come to Jenin: ‘Hello, Mr Bush? Is it possible to speak
to Mr Kofi Annan? Hello Kofi Annan, how are you? Listen, why did you
cancel the investigation committee that was supposed to come to Jenin?
Was it a request from Israel? Why not speak to the U.S. or Bush, maybe
they can solve the problem?’ Here, too, the witness is chosen for his
enactment of despair: a poor inhabitant of an easily forgettable camp,
pleading to deaf ears about his plight and hopeless situation. It is in this
sense that Mohammad Bakri, as a mediator, takes upon himself the task
of being a ‘telephone by proxy’ through which Palestinians can ‘call’ the
outside world and voice their grievances.
Most of the eyewitnesses appearing in the film are Palestinians who
experienced the catastrophe firsthand. Upon examining their accounts,
it becomes clear that they do not simply communicate knowledge, but
rather express emotion and pain. This enunciation of a personal experi-
ence is manifested in all of the testimonies. One witness, for example,
says, ‘I was sleeping when, at midnight, I heard the loudspeakers order-
ing us to gather in the school courtyard. I dressed and went outside.
On my way, from about one and a half meters away, a sniper shot my
hand, from a window. I fell to the ground in shock.’ Another declares,
‘All my efforts of 45 years were destroyed in 5 minutes. They burned
down the whole of the third floor where I kept some canary birds.’
That such enunciations, which emphasize the experience of shock and
horror, found their way into the film is indicative of the kind of enunci-
ations sought by the mediator. Yet in order to ‘play’ the field, as it were, a
necessary connection between the experiences testified to and the event
depicted had to be demonstrated. Hence, the eyewitnesses point to the
circumstances by which they came to witness the occurrence, emphasiz-
ing their presence in both space and time: ‘I wanted to save myself so
I ran down. I found myself amongst the tanks and bulldozers which
were demolishing this area. They turned one house into a sort of court-
room and they called people one by one. They killed some and spared
some.’
All of the eyewitnesses testify to the destruction they endured and
to its aftermath, thus presenting themselves as victims. In this case,
their weakness serves as a key resource in securing their place in Bakri’s
 Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski 151

narrative. Their victimhood becomes ever more salient in the manner

they discuss the capacity in which they came to be at the event. The
eyewitnesses highlight first and foremost their Palestinian nationality
and in many cases point out their Arab affiliations: ‘Every young Pales-
tinian like myself is armed to defend peace, both our freedom and theirs.
There are certain Israelis who want neither peace nor freedom.’ Another
witness testifies, ‘I was nine when the occupation of 1967 started. There
has not been one good day since. I am 44 today and have not lived
one normal day. They interfere in everything we do.’ By emphasizing
their national origins, the eyewitnesses tie the tragedy they have suf-
fered to the general fate of Palestinians. In binding their personal stories
to collective history, they re-establish a common frame of reference with
their addressees and produce a sense of closeness with the potential
audience.
Some cues of relevance seem to strengthen this effect. Many refer-
ences are made to the Palestinian tragedy and more specifically to the
Arab–Israeli conflict: ‘In 1948, we went through the same suffering, but
it’s worse this time. All the achievements of a lifetime, a house, children,
disappeared in an hour. Let Bush rejoice with his friend, the murderer,
the criminal of Sabra and Shatila.’ Another person recounts the hard-
ships of daily life: ‘Let the Jews come and see the camps and experience
the bombardment we endure for just one day. They would immedi-
ately forget their idea of a great Israel and of Jerusalem as its capital.
If only a Jew could experience what we’ve been through for one day!
They would abandon their conquest of Jerusalem.’ In addition, several
references are made to contemporary episodes: ‘When a Jew dies, Bush
wails and accuses us of being tyrants, accusing us of killing the Jews.
When 100 million Arabs are murdered, it doesn’t matter, that’s life. No
one in the world has committed such atrocities. They demolished the
houses over the children’s heads.’ By integrating collective memories,
firsthand knowledge, and popular beliefs in their testimonies, the eye-
witnesses evoke ‘experiential closeness’ and call potential audiences to
act upon the event mediated, to make judgment, to take sides.

In the spring of 2002, a few days after the Israeli army had withdrawn
from Jenin, Noam Shalev began collecting information on what took
place in the refugee camp. Shalev, an Israeli director and producer in his
early forties, served – like many Israelis his age – in an IDF reserve unit.
The two milieus of which he was a member – his professional sphere
as well as his military background – granted him a distinctive form of
cultural capital.
152 Witnessing as a Field

Drawing on exclusive testimonies, Shalev produced another claim

upon the field of witnessing as a mediator. Like Bakri, Shalev intended
his film for both Israeli and foreign audiences. Again like Bakri, his
biography is also of importance; having been involved in the pro-
duction of documentaries on the Israeli–Palestinian conflict for over
a decade, Shalev’s films have been broadcast worldwide, earning him
standing within his professional milieu both locally and internation-
ally. Yet this distinctive combination of filmmaker-cum-soldier may in
fact be a mixed blessing, as it could easily give the impression that Shalev
is representing the Israeli army’s version of what happened in Jenin.
This might explain why the Israeli director, in contrast to his
Palestinian counterpart, decided to position himself, literally, outside
the frame. Throughout the film, Shalev never appears on the screen in
face, body, or voice. The eyewitnesses filmed are speaking directly to
the camera, directly to the viewers. No voiceover or any kind of narra-
tion is provided to supplement their testimonies – the author/director is
actively constructing his authorship through his own absence. It is pre-
cisely this absence that substantiates his position as the author of the
narrative of Jenin, for in contrast to Bakri, who produced a narrative
of trauma, Shalev produced a narrative of vindication. To that effect, he
posited the two parties – the Palestinian fighters and the Israeli soldiers –
one against the other. Again in contrast to Bakri, who featured a cast of
camp residents, Shalev featured the testimonies of five Israelis and three
Palestinians. The Palestinian eyewitnesses are presented as determined
fighters who stalwartly resist the Israeli violent occupation: ‘The Islamic
Jihad’s military wing was, of course, ready with the guys who pre-
pared the bombs, like Mahmud Tawalbe may he rest in peace. Mahmud
Tawalbe, the martyr, was ready with the explosive devices.’ To highlight
this effect, Palestinian fighters were filmed near the location of the battle
wearing uniforms and dark masks.
On the opposite side, the Israeli soldiers, wearing civilian clothes, are
continuously portrayed as moral, law-abiding citizens who found them-
selves in an immoral situation: ‘My job is to save lives. If I were to kill
a child, it would leave a mark inside me, the kind of mark you don’t
want, because your mission in life is completely different. I have no
problem with having to defend my country, but against soldiers or an
army, not children.’ By featuring both sides and by placing the different
testimonies one against the other, Shalev simulates a courtroom wherein
the opposing parties explain and justify their deeds. This explains his use
of distance and proximity, which is the opposite of Bakri’s. While Bakri
seeks minimal distance in constructing a narrative of trauma, Shalev
 Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski 153

utilizes distance in constructing a narrative of vindication. His tech-

nique of presenting the Israeli eyewitnesses against a neutral setting,
outside the battlefield, effectively removes their testimonies from the
event witnessed, as if saying, ‘Fighting is not what Israelis usually do;
they are sometimes forced to fight.’ In contrast, by filming the Pales-
tinian eyewitnesses on location, he produces a sense of juxtaposition
whereby the Palestinians are presented as inherently and purposefully
violent. The opposite tactics used by the two filmmakers demonstrate
that distance and proximity possess no inherent significance when it
comes to generating trust in the field. In some cases, such as Bakri’s
film, proximity is an asset, whereas in other cases, such as Shalev’s film,
it is a liability. The same is true for distance, depending on the various
agents’ agendas, chiefly the mediator’s.
Shalev’s absence from the film further emphasizes the overall judicial
setting, effectively issuing a call for the audience to act as judge and jury.
Indeed, in this film, eyewitnesses are ‘called to the stand’, as it were. All
eyewitnesses refer, first and foremost, to their presence at the event and
to what ensued. In their testimonies, they make references, both explic-
itly and implicitly, to the capacity by which they came to be at ‘the battle
of Jenin’, frequently highlighting their role as soldiers and fighters. The
first eyewitness to appear is an Israeli reserve soldier who immediately
states his ideological allegiance to the IDF: ‘You say to yourself, “I gave
the people of Israel the greatest gift on Passover by stopping a terrorist.
No explosion today.” ‘ In the testimonies that follow, other eyewitnesses
express a similar sense of purpose and commitment. Moreover, they
stress their Jewish affiliation by inserting a number of significant cues
of relevance:

There’s a custom of searching for leavened bread on Passover eve,

and the following morning the leavened bread is removed, and that’s
what we did . . . We stopped the Jeep, performed the ceremony of
removing the leavened bread, got back in the Jeep, drove onto the
main road and we see an ambulance rushing towards us, without
the siren going, without flashing lights, driving very fast. Some kind
of intuition tells us to stop it. We try to get them to stop, they
won’t stop.

By marking his Jewish background, this eyewitness ties his experience

from Jenin to the collective sentiments of those he is addressing, thereby
minimizing the experiential distance with the potential audience.
154 Witnessing as a Field

While the Israeli eyewitnesses proclaim their civil, national, and reli-
gious associations, the Palestinians eyewitnesses claim their religious
and rebellious commitments:

In the name of Allah the merciful and the compassionate, there is no

voice greater than the voice of the almighty God. We, the Al-Aqsa
Martyrs’ Brigades, the military wing of the Fatah movement, will
operate with all our strength and might and by any means that we
possess to stand in the way of any attack that Sharon and his gang of
criminals plan to carry out in the Jenin area.

Both Palestinian and Israeli eyewitnesses attempt to secure their position

in the field by pointing out the circumstances by which they came to wit-
ness the event. All eyewitnesses provide a detailed account of the battle
in which they participated and in doing so underline their presence in
time and space. As one Israeli soldier recounts:

The D-9, unlike a tank or other armored combat vehicles, has a wide
field of vision, a huge window all around it. You can see everything.
It’s unreal. The other vehicles look through a periscope, they hardly
see a thing and we feel like we’re in a movie like ‘Saving Private Ryan’,
we can see everything that is going on. You see them sticking their
rifles out the windows, sparks of fire, smoke, enemy running out-
side next to you with Kalashnikovs, guns, terrorists running between
the houses, jumping from house to house, shooting, that’s what you
see, the whole time. I was there for four days. All they do is shoot
and shoot and throw bombs from the rooftops, more shooting, more
bombs, to the right, to the left.

On the other hand, one the Palestinian fighter recounts:

Despite Sheikh Riad’s old age, he insisted on being one of the van-
guards of the fighters from the Jenin refugee camp and was wounded
in combat. The fighters wanted to take him back because he was
wounded, but he insisted on staying and died in the house where
he was positioned. We found him crouching down, holding a rifle
in one hand, with the Koran open in front of him. The bulldozer
demolished the house on top of him.

Both testimonies offer exclusive knowledge of the event, providing

details and nuances available only to someone who experienced the
 Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski 155

occurrences firsthand. Interestingly, the Israeli eyewitnesses made no

references to their military service prior to their time in Jenin. The Pales-
tinian eyewitnesses, in contrast, link their involvement in the battle to
their overall contribution to the struggle against the Israeli occupation.
As one Palestinian eyewitness states, ‘When a person wants to defend
his child, his land, and wants to return to his village and to his wife,
he fights brutally without any fear whatsoever. The guys welcomed the
idea of sacrificing themselves as martyrs.’
In sum, mediated events may be viewed as interventions in the field
of witnessing, a field through which reality is discoursed, meanings are
produced, and audiences are called upon to pay heed and pass judg-
ment. The two films present two attempts at dominating the field of
witnessing, each following a different path in obtaining audiences’ trust
in the mediators’ claims about the truth of the event. What is revealed
thereby is witnessing as a practice entangled with conflict and power,
itself attesting to the contested ground of experience.

Notes
1. Taken to the extreme, ultimate involvement would amount to being con-
sumed by the event, that is, death – infinite proximity and no perspective.
Conversely, infinite distance and total perspective can be attributed perhaps
to the ultimate witness, God. Hence witnessing takes place between God and
death, and although never coming close to either extremes, retains something
from both (see Peters, Chapter 1, Afterword).
2. In certain cases, status and capacity might converge. For instance, a doctor
can be both a status and capacity (another example is a child).
3. The ban was ignored by many who watched the film privately. Furthermore,
the film received intense attention in mainstream media and elsewhere. In
2004, Israel’s High Court reinstated a ruling which overturned the ban, saying
that the Film Board did not have a ‘monopoly over truth’. Despite reject-
ing the ban, the court described Jenin Jenin as a ‘propagandistic lie’ which
falsely accused Israeli soldiers internationally of killing children, women, the
disabled, and the mentally ill.
4. Al-Nakba refers to the Palestinian catastrophe marked by the establishment of
the state of Israel in 1948 and the dispossession of hundreds of thousands that
became refugees as a result.

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G. Agamben (1999) Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press).
156 Witnessing as a Field

Z. Bauman (1990) ‘Effacing the Face: On the Social Management of Moral

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Also in this volume, Chapter 1.
 Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski 157

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7
From Danger to Trauma
Affective Labor and the Journalistic
Discourse of Witnessing
Carrie Rentschler

‘The journalist becomes a victim too.’

—Roger Simpson, Director of the University of Washington
Dart Center for Journalism and Trauma

‘Reporters are victims, too.’

—Reporter Charlotte Aiken in Nieman Reports, Fall 1996

According to recent reports on violence committed against journalists,

journalism is a dangerous, fear-inspiring job. In the wake of Daniel
Pearl’s kidnapping and murder in January 2002 and the less-publicized
but equally brutal killings of journalists in Bangladesh, the Philippines,
the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, and other locales around the world,
the international community of foreign correspondents has become par-
ticularly concerned for its safety in zones of conflict. Yet, outside of war
zones, and in U.S. newsrooms in particular, reporters and news photog-
raphers who cover domestic beats and work on general assignment are
also being represented, through risks to their safety and mental health
on the job, in ways that depict what John Durham Peters calls ‘the
weighty baggage of witnessing’: the ontological and historical weight of
paying witness to events that ‘makes explicit the pervasive link between
witnessing and suffering’ and ‘what it means to watch, to narrate or to
be present at an event’ (2001, pp. 708–9).
Currently, some profession-specific discourses portray journalists as
traumatized witnesses, linking the putative pained feeling of witnessing
(for example, Berlant, 2000) to the meaning of journalistic observa-
tion. They do so within an industrial context in which news companies
continue to cut back on investigative reporting and foreign bureaus
while increasing the workloads of those reporters still on the job. This

158
 Carrie Rentschler 159

means that the profession’s own portrayal of the dangerous conditions

in which news workers labor comes at a time when the U.S. industry is
putting less people into the field overseas and investing less in research.
Like the reflexive turn in anthropology which accompanied the move
away from field research toward writing studies (for example, Clifford
and Marcus, 1986; Clifford, 1988), the emergence of a discourse of jour-
nalistic witnessing also represents a reflexive turn in reporting, in which
decreasing industry investment in research-intensive and field-based
reporting coincides with a proliferation of in-profession communica-
tion about the potential traumas of the job. The discourse of journalistic
trauma recodes the labor of journalism in terms of its personal psy-
chological costs on individual workers across different conditions of
potential danger. Danger here signifies the possibility to be psycholog-
ically injured as an effect of the job, only the job itself is positioned
both more locally and more concertedly around accident coverage and
manufactured news events. Thus, covering war zones, the police beat,
car accidents, or doing interviews with the survivors of house fires and
other catastrophes all represent the potential to be traumatized from
what one sees on the job. The discourse of trauma re-signifies ‘danger’
away from the field, the people being reported on, and the physicality of
journalistic work on the scene, locating it more squarely in the psycho-
logical and emotional dimensions of the work experience of individual
reporters, where traumas, despite their different sources, share similar
effects and diagnoses in the psychological realm.
This chapter examines recent profession-based reports and training
films on journalistic trauma in order to explain the distinction between
discussing journalism as a dangerous profession (signified through phys-
ical injuries and the mortalities of journalists) and defining it as a
traumatizing one (signified through bodily signs and the emotional lan-
guage of psychological injuries). As I argue, ‘bearing witness’ becomes
a language for describing the work of journalism in affective terms and
a means for indicting some of the conditions of journalists’ labor as
potentially traumatizing. In the process, it critically refigures the cultural
work of ‘trauma’ in a post-9/11 and post-Columbine world by exam-
ining the conditions of witnessing that create it as work, but not, as
Michael Hardt suggests, as an immaterial form of affective labor (1999,
p. 94). The affective dimensions of reporters’ work lives, framed through
the discourse of journalistic witnessing, portray this labor as deeply
material and the work process and product as particularly embodied.
Hardt suggests that affective labor, like service industries and primar-
ily communication-based work, is ‘immaterial, even if it is corporeal
160 From Danger to Trauma

and affective, in that its products are intangible’ (1999, p. 96) because
they are affective. However, reporters’ own articulation of their work
as an affectively experienced form of witnessing – at times as trauma –
suggests quite differently that the ‘intangibles’ of journalism are actu-
ally highly tangible at the level of embodied experience, whether that
experience is pleasurable and exciting or injurious and painful. Feminist
scholarship on ‘care work’ is instructive here, for feminists have exam-
ined the gendered aspects of caring labor as a form of work ‘in the bodily
mode’ that they claim, contra Hardt (and despite his use of their work
to argue otherwise), is quite materially located in social relations of cap-
italist dependency and the sexed and gendered bodies of its providers
(for example, Sargent, 1981; Kittay and Feder, 2002). By following in
the footsteps of the feminist claims asserted above, my analysis of the
work that discourses of journalistic witnessing describe, addresses the
affective dimensions of their labor as embodied, material practices (see
also Rentschler, 2007).
Unlike other forms of journalistic practice that challenge the dom-
inant professional norms of objectivity and cast news-making in
advocacy-based terms, the current articulation of ‘traumatized journal-
ism’ emphasizes not only the reporter’s agency and involvement in
the events and issues on which he/she reports in an implicit critique
of objectivity; it goes one step further to identify and recode journal-
istic practice as primarily affective, and in some cases extraordinarily
so. Several backchannel texts in the field currently aim to cultivate the
unmaking of journalists as distant observers in order to remake jour-
nalism as an act of witnessing. These texts use the concept of trauma
to redefine news work through the codification of workers’ wounded
psyches, from their observation work, as post-traumatic stress disorder
(PTSD). They include one of a recent set of training films used in U.S.
journalism education, a documentary film called Covering Columbine
that was produced in the journalism program at the University of
Colorado-Boulder. The film portrays the events of the 20 April 1999
shootings by Dylan Klebold and Eric Harris through reporters who are
visibly disturbed by their professional obligation to cover what Univer-
sity of Toronto trauma researcher Anthony Feinstein describes as the
‘consequences of death’ on its survivors (2003, p. 27).
While Covering Columbine deploys trauma as an apparatus for train-
ing reporters how to better prepare themselves to perform their
jobs, psychological studies and reports on combat and non-combat
reporters authorize the discourse of journalistic witnessing on which
the film draws by medicalizing the symptoms of trauma through which
 Carrie Rentschler 161

witnessing is most visibly brought into representation. The studies cod-

ify the litany of horrors reporters have seen as generative conditions of
PTSD, the seed concept from which trauma’s broader cultural authority
has grown. They then use journalists’ self-reports to translate the expe-
riences of what they have seen into a diagnosable medical condition:
PTSD.
Studies of journalistic trauma authorize the truth of journalistic wit-
nessing by turning its affective dimensions into a medical condition,
‘making medical’ (Conrad, 1992, p. 210) those self-representations of
journalism that until recently had been largely understood within the
post-Vietnam War rubric of masculine tales of danger, adventure, and
heroism in covering war zones (for example, Knightley, 1975; Pedelty,
1995, 1997; Loyd, 1999; Hedges, 2002). PTSD, in other words, ‘evi-
dences’ the practice of journalistic observation and ‘proves’ its veracity
in the pained bodies and minds of the reporter. The training film Cov-
ering Columbine and psychological studies on journalistic trauma give
form to and mobilize the discourse of journalistic witnessing (for exam-
ple, Gal, 2003) in ways that achieve broad circulation in the profession’s
interpretive communities (for example, Zelizer, 1993). They also trans-
form it into a profession-specific discourse of what it means to see others
suffer as part of the work of journalism and be made a ‘victim’ of the
job – as Simpson and Aiken suggest above – through the medical lan-
guage of trauma, the ‘most powerful proxy for speaking pain’ (Scarry,
1985, pp. 6–7; see also Starr, 1982).

PTSD: Generalizing journalistic witness from the war zone to

the domestic beat

The texts on journalism and trauma examined here describe the work
of reporting in affective terms by generalizing the labor of journalism
from the war zone to the domestic beat, much as psychiatric diagnoses
of traumatic stress disorders have generalized from combat stress to
other stresses. According to Wilbur Scott, the codification of PTSD that
emerged through the advocacy work of anti-war psychiatrists and Viet-
nam Veteran groups recognized that ‘soldiers disturbed by their combat
experiences are not, in an important sense, abnormal; on the contrary,
it is normal to be traumatized by the abnormal events typical of war’
(1990, p. 308). Rather than treating psychologically disturbed veterans
as ‘mentally weak’ men, the diagnostic criteria for PTSD depicted war as
a set of overwhelming conditions that cause trauma. The criteria also
brought into recognition as ‘normal’ traumatic reactions beyond the
162 From Danger to Trauma

war zone to include man-made or ‘naturally’-made disaster zones. PTSD

studies have since generalized its symptomology across a diverse class of
patients and contexts, from combat veterans to victims of rape and car
accidents (for example, Scott, 1990; Herman, 1992; Young, 1995).
In fact, the DSM-III definition of PTSD from 1980 generalized the
sources of trauma away from the specific experiences many Vietnam War
veterans had of being both ‘victim’ and ‘perpetrator’ of the war and
thereby codified their combat stress as one caused by being a witness
to it (see Scott, 1990; Turner, 2001). Witnessing became the genera-
tive source for traumatic conditions, enabling definitions of trauma
to generalize across various life experiences and contexts of violence.
War, then, becomes the barometer of ‘traumatic likeness’ in Covering
Columbine and other trauma texts in journalism, in part because the dis-
cursive apparatus of the PTSD criteria uses the traumatizing conditions
of war as the point of comparison for non-combat traumatic encoun-
ters. Their portrayal of journalists as traumatized witnesses follows
from PTSD’s generalization of trauma, portraying a traumatic reality for
beat reporters sent to cover school shootings and other crime scenes
that compare covering them to covering war. As such, the traumatic
experiences of foreign correspondents are scripted into discourses of
journalistic trauma through the category of experience reporters as a
class share: witnessing.
Journalists articulate additional forms of traumatic experiences
through collections of ‘trauma stories’ in which journalism is defined by
its potential risks for psychological damage over and above that of phys-
ical injury. A recent report from a Freedom Forum Center symposium
‘Risking More than Their Lives: The Effects of Post-Traumatic Stress Dis-
order on Journalists’ addresses the current state of ‘frontline journalism’
through the rubric of trauma. The title alone suggests that traumatic
experience is a more serious risk than death itself, or in another inter-
pretation, that the risks to journalists on the job extend beyond those
already identified as threats to their lives and include other forms of
injury and danger that are less openly addressed in the profession. The
report includes testimony from several correspondents who describe the
effects of their jobs through the discourse of trauma. One, Sunday Times
correspondent Marie Colvin, who was nearly killed after being hit by
shrapnel while covering the Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers in their war against
government forces, is quoted from her hospital bed saying, ‘My job is to
bear witness.’ Another foreign correspondent, John Sweeney of Radio5
Live, speaks of breaking down while shopping in the dog food aisle of
the grocery store because he involuntarily recalled the people he had
 Carrie Rentschler 163

seen hacked to death. Allan Little of the BBC speaks of telling friends
who invited him over for dinner after he spent 2 years in Burundi and
Rwanda that their five-year old child was the only living child he had
seen in a year (Freedom Forum European Center, 2001).
When collected in professional reports, anecdotes such as these build
an archive of horrors tied to the profession that further link the potential
traumas of combat reporting to non-combat reporting. ‘Risking More
than their Lives’ portrays journalistic traumas from war zones as haunt-
ing experiences that travel beyond the time and place of reporters’
assignments – the ‘literal return of the event against the will of the
one it inhabits’ (Caruth, 1995, p. 5). Literary theorist Cathy Caruth
(1991) describes trauma as ‘unclaimed experience’, the inability of the
traumatized subject to bring traumatizing events into consciousness
and narrative memory so that they languish in piecemeal, involuntary
behavioral specters that, if representational, are often non-referential.
Caruth’s work on trauma addresses the relation between traumatic expe-
rience and the telling of history, suggesting that histories of violence
are narrated through metaphor, fantasy, and sensorial traces that do
not directly reference the past event being remembered, but instead
reference the teller’s affective and bodily relation to the event and its
telling and re-telling. Caruth’s (1991) argument is that trauma is and
can be expressed, but its expression does not signify direct correspon-
dence between the representation of it and its reality. Trauma is ‘not
a pathology . . . of falsehood or the displacement of meaning, but of his-
tory itself’, the mark of having borne witness to an event in the recent or
distant past (Caruth, 1995, p. 5). The traumatized, accordingly, ‘become
themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely process’
(p. 5), carrying trauma – ‘the hauntingly possessive ghosts’ (LaCapra,
2001, p. xi) – in their bodies because they cannot process it in their
minds.
According to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III, the 1980 version
of the diagnostic text for defining mental disorders within the Amer-
ican Psychiatric Association that first codified PTSD, the survivors of
traumatizing events are unable to process their experiences through
the normal channels of cognition, so they remember it in involun-
tary, bodily form: as nightmares, quick startle responses, and other
haunting physical signs. People who suffer from PTSD re-experience
traumatic events through intrusive thoughts and nightmares. They also
avoid stimuli associated with the traumatic event by detaching from
others and avoiding thoughts about the event that traumatized them.
Many are unable to sleep and are easily startled. These physiological
164 From Danger to Trauma

and involuntary bodily behaviors are corporeal evidence of traumatic

memories that, because they are not accessible to normal conscious-
ness and recollection, are expressed through other means. The disorder’s
symptoms mark in medical form what journalist Bruce Shapiro (1995)
describes as a ‘profoundly political state in which the world has gone
wrong, in which you feel isolated from the broader community by the
inarticulable extremity of experience’.1
Interestingly, Caruth’s (1991) article ‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma
and the Impossibility of History’ begins with an epigraph from war
correspondent Michael Herr’s (1977) Vietnam War autobiography,
Dispatches:

It took the war to teach it, that you were as responsible for everything you
saw as you were for everything you did. The problem was that you didn’t
always know what you were seeing until later, maybe years later, that
a lot of it never made it in at all, it just stayed stored there in your
eyes (quoted in Caruth, 1991, p. 181, emphasis added).

While the Vietnam War was not the first war to be addressed by psycho-
analysts and psychologists as ‘traumatizing’, it did provide the historical
and political background against which PTSD was defined as a medi-
cal condition (for example, Scott, 1990; Shay, 1994; Leys, 2000; Turner,
2001).2 To set the stage for Caruth’s argument on the non-referentiality
of trauma’s representation, she not only turns to the war that helped
frame the medical codification of trauma into PTSD in the DSM-III. She
also turns to a journalist, Michael Herr, who could utter precisely the
problem of representing the atrocities reporters have seen when those
experiences and the tools for their representation are not easily har-
nessed by the ritualized routines and writing practices of journalism,
or for that matter, history.
In ‘Risking More than their Lives’, the dog food cans and the images
of dead children described by reporters function as symbolic forms that,
while perhaps not direct references to traumatic events according to
Caruth, nonetheless carry with them the literal imprint of the things
reporters have seen and the eyewitness accounts they have heard, but
cannot fully process in and through their memories or their professional
practices. They lack an ‘account’ that can be used to represent trauma
that films like Covering Columbine and the Freedom Forum Center step
in to provide (for example, Davis, 2005). Thus, what journalists also risk
in this formulation of their work is the loss of the very foundation on
 Carrie Rentschler 165

which news representation depends: the referentiality of trauma’s reality

in the words and bodies of both news subjects and journalists.
As professionals increasingly diagnosed with PTSDs, according to
trauma specialist Dr Frank Ochberg, a member of the psychiatric team
that constructed the diagnostic criteria for PTSD in the DSM-III, journal-
ists become surrogates for news audiences, bearing in bodily form the
traumas of the events they have witnessed so that others, presumably,
do not have to so. ‘Those with daring fight the tigers. Those with PTSD
[post-traumatic stress disorder] preserve the impact of cruelty for the
rest of us’ (Ochberg, 1996, p. 22). Ochberg’s statement moves from the
descriptive to the prescriptive, from the depiction of PTSD as the bodily
sign of bearing witness to recent and past violence to the intimation that
sufferers of PTSD should sacrifice themselves as ‘bodily media’ in order
that others might receive the wisdom to be gained from their wounded
psyches. In Ochberg’s construction, PTSD signifies a martyr. His or her
value resides in the ability to serve as the medium of exchange between
the traumatized person’s experience of an event and the abstraction of
that experienced event in the form of representation, in which the trau-
matized witness stands in as ‘the paradigm case of a medium’ (Peters,
2001, p. 709).
Ochberg and Caruth assert that trauma is a form of repetitive pos-
session, a record, as Dori Laub states, ‘that has yet to be made’ (1991,
cited in Caruth, 1995, p. 6). This does not mean that traumas never
come into representation; quite the opposite, in fact, as training films
like Covering Columbine demonstrate (as I discuss later). Without reduc-
ing the film and other texts like it to ‘merely a social construction’ of
journalistic trauma, I suggest that that training media help articulate
the lived reality of trauma by giving an account of it through journal-
ists’ own first-person statements that are ‘collectivized’ in the film and
other profession-based documents. Accounts, as Joseph Davis defines
them, are ‘ “story-like constructions”, with a plot structure that ties
together attributions of responsibility, reported memories, description,
and emotional expression. Like stories more generally, they reconfig-
ure the past, endowing it with meaning and continuity and projecting
a sense of what might or should happen in the future’ (Davis, 2005,
p. 17). As Wilbur Scott again suggests, ‘each new narrative about the
disorder [PTSD] reaffirms its reality, its objectivity, its “just thereness” ’
(1990, p. 308).
In training films, symposium reports, and other profession-produced
documents, reporters discuss their traumatic experiences covering
human catastrophes as if they were simply waiting for their experiences
166 From Danger to Trauma

to be recognized and affirmed as trauma. These documents facilitate

the formation of a trauma-based interpretive culture within journalism
that brings into representation journalistic trauma as a way of demon-
strating the disorderly nature of reporters’ working conditions and the
realities of their work as witnesses. As Ann Cvetkovich (2003) argues in
The Archive of Feelings, if we begin to see trauma as producing public cul-
tures that form around the struggle to represent it, then we may escape
the conundrum of having to categorize traumas as either ‘representable’
or ‘un-representable’. If we see trauma as something produced and rec-
ognized in and through representation, and witnessing as a practice of
bringing representations of experience into depiction, then profession-
specific texts contribute to journalistic witnessing being a potentially
traumatic practice around which professionals-in-training are asked to
rally.
‘Risking More than their Lives’ and Covering Columbine not only rep-
resent journalistic trauma, they also organize its representation into
training tools. They are instrumental texts whose audiences are not the
news-reading and viewing public, but rather news editors, producers,
journalists, journalism educators, and students. Their task is to redefine
the work of the profession in terms of what journalists see and the trau-
matic reactions they may have to this act of seeing in order to produce a
different explanation for the tense relationships that develop between
reporters, their professional ideologies, and the industries for which they
work. While Tony Bennett argued in ‘Useful Culture’ that many forms
of cultural production should be examined for the ways they are mobi-
lized by and into policy discourse, training texts like Covering Columbine
are produced specifically to be used programmatically and are ‘directed
toward practical deployments’ (1992, p. 397). The first-person accounts
in ‘Risking More than their Lives’ do this by linking journalistic trauma
to the profession-building norm of presence to events – to be present is to
witness, and to witness is to be subject to trauma. In other words, to pay
witness signifies bodily presence at an event; to be traumatized by it
provides proof of that presence.

PTSD and the metaphor of ‘first response’

Proof of presence in the form of trauma has also spawned a new moniker
for photojournalists and reporters: ‘first responders’. Some journalists
and journalism educators have taken to describing the work of beat
reporters and news photographers as that of ‘first responders’, draw-
ing on the lingo used to describe paramedics, police officers, and other
 Carrie Rentschler 167

emergency service personnel, who, since the early 1980s, have also been
classified as sufferers of PTSD. The label of first responder reinforces the
value of reporting with being the ‘first on the scene’ – first to see and
record the sights of disarray and carnage at car accidents, and the devas-
tation left in the wake of tornadoes and house fires, among other things.
Reporters, and photojournalists in particular, get close enough to the
consequences of others’ death and misfortune to physically feel it, smell
it, and otherwise engage in it as a vivid sensory experience. The lan-
guage of ‘first responder’ turns reporters into what Carolyn Marvin and
David Ingle (1998) refer to as ‘death touchers’ – people who get close
to other people’s deaths and who often must literally or figuratively
sacrifice themselves, and their psychological health, in the process.
As a name for an occupational position premised on proximity to oth-
ers’ lives and deaths and the responsibility for responding to them, the
language of ‘first response’ embodies the news value of being first on the
scene. It also suggests, though, that journalists suffer from PTSD as other
first responders do, functioning as a means of classification for journal-
istic trauma alongside that of emergency service personnel. Just after
September 11, 2001, Director Roger Simpson of the Dart Center for Jour-
nalism and Trauma at the University of Washington-Seattle published a
‘Note from the Editor’ on the Center’s website in which he, too, refers
to reporters using the moniker of ‘first responder’. His editorial opens,
‘Journalists are first-responders today in New York, Washington, and
Pittsburgh. They, like emergency aid workers, have witnessed scenes and
situations that sear and assault their emotional systems’ (Dart Center,
2001). On 12 September 2001, Robert Frank of Newscoverage Unlim-
ited, an organization devoted to helping journalists deal with traumatic
stress, also described reporters as ‘just like a doctor working in a hospital
emergency room’: they need to ignore their overwhelming emotional
reactions to others’ deaths and suffering in order to do their jobs well,
as those first on the scene (Dart Center, 2001).
Both Simpson and Frank situate reporters as professionals positioned
to and responsible for paying witness to events like emergency service
personnel – that is, professionals whose jobs obligate them to assist oth-
ers in need. Journalists have no such obligation, and yet calling them
‘first responders’ describes what they do, and what they see, as if they
should occupy an observer position homologous to emergency service
workers (see for example, Sharp et al., 1995). The homology Simpson
and Frank draw above between reporters and paramedics or police offi-
cers is meant to capture not their similarity of purpose or task, but the
experiential likeness of being first on the scene to witness it.
168 From Danger to Trauma

Today the burden of first response is defined in primarily psycho-

logical terms. Over the past ten years, research teams of psychologists,
psychiatrists, and journalism scholars have surveyed journalistic reports
of post-traumatic symptoms in order to codify news workers as a class
of trauma sufferers (for example, Simpson and Boggs, 1999; Pyevich,
2001; Feinstein and J. Owen, 2002; Himmelstein and Faithorn, 2002;
Feinstein, 2003). While many of these studies compile data on the
incidence of post-traumatic stress symptoms among a range of journal-
istic assignments, they also hint at a broader narrative of journalistic
post-traumatic stress that can be documented in a litany of poten-
tially traumatizing events that news photographers and reporters have
witnessed. This litany of horrors may do far more work in defining jour-
nalism as a potentially traumatizing profession than the measurement
of the incidence of PTSD symptoms by emphasizing the spectacular
violence of the scenes they witness. The incidence of PTSD symptoms
nonetheless helps to authorize tales of journalistic witnessing through
medical constructions of the reporter’s body and psyche as fragmented
markers of the violent scenes they have seen.
PTSD ‘is fundamentally a disorder of memory’ (Leys, 2000, p. 2).
According to medical historian Allan Young, ‘traumatic memory is a
man-made object’ (1995, p. 141) that becomes knowable as an object of
study, diagnosis, and treatment when it is brought into representation
as a medical disorder. PTSD is not a timeless condition but a disorder
‘glued together by the practices, technologies, and narratives with which
it is diagnosed, studied, treated and represented’ (Young, 1995, p. 5).
Training texts and psychological studies use PTSD to script narratives of
journalistic trauma that construct the source of reporters’ psychological
stress in having seen and been near overwhelming sights of destruction
and death. Recent studies demonstrate that combat and non-combat
journalists see sights of carnage and face the task of organizing and
interpreting these horrifying scenes of disorder into news stories: fields
of burned and butchered corpses after military battles, twisted bodies
and vehicles at crash sites, the charred remains of humans and fam-
ily pets caught in house fires, city streets awash in sewage after floods.
They become, as Pierre Bourdieu (1990) might suggest, ‘transubstanti-
ated media’, the embodied means of exchange between the scenes they
witness and their means of constructing it as news.
According to Roger Simpson and James Boggs’s (1999) study on non-
combat journalists, just under one-half of their 131 survey respondents
had experienced at least one form of violence directly, either from
combat, car wrecks, assaults, or fires. Most (86 per cent) had covered
 Carrie Rentschler 169

one or more violent events at the scene, including fires, auto crashes,
murders, air crashes, violent assaults, and earthquakes (in order from
least to most common). Some respondents also witnessed more unusual
forms of violence and death: volcanic eruptions, tornadoes, drowning,
train derailments, explosions, prison riots, executions, and an ele-
phant charge. While their study does not diagnose journalists’ traumatic
stress, it codifies the breadth of violence and disorder that some non-
combat reporters cover, suggesting that seeing scenes of violence are a
ubiquitous feature of reporters’ work lives (for example, Hartley, 1999).
According to Simpson and Boggs, some journalists witness forms of
mayhem that occur far outside the borders of war zones, but unlike war
correspondents, where there is at least some notion that war journal-
ists ought to be trained in how to deal with the risks and dangers of
the war zone (see Rentschler, 2007), domestic reporters work under no
such belief in the necessity of training regarding the hazards of report-
ing. In other words, journalists experience the kinds of scenes discussed
in Simpson and Boggs’s study without any professional preparation for
how to respond, a reality Covering Columbine represents and seeks to
rectify through its use in new journalism and trauma programs.
As other recent studies suggest, war correspondents seem to suffer
from a higher prevalence of PTSD than police officers, in rates on par
with combat veterans (Knightley, 2001; see also Feinstein, 2003). A sur-
vey of 170 war correspondents by University of Toronto researcher
Dr Anthony Feinstein found that 25 per cent of his respondents suf-
fered from symptoms of PTSD at some point in their work lives. All of
Feinstein’s survey respondents had been shot at, two experienced mock
executions, and three had experienced their colleagues being killed in
the field (Tomlin, 2001). Another national survey of non-combat news-
paper journalists conducted by Caroline Pyevich found that ‘covering
trauma-related stories and being personally threatened while covering
assignments uniquely relates to PTSD symptoms.’3 While only 4 per cent
of Pyevich’s respondents could be formally diagnosed with PTSD,
70 per cent of them experienced intense horror and disgust, fear, or
helplessness in relation to their most stressful work-related assignments,
the top three of which they reported as the death or injury of a child,
murder, and motor vehicle accidents (Pyevich, 2001). Many experienced
individual symptoms that constitute part of the symptomology of PTSD.
These studies medically codify beat reporters and news photographers
as sufferers of PTSD, interpreting their having seen sites of violence as
a condition of traumatic illness that uniquely ‘makes up’ the subjectiv-
ity of the journalist-cum-witness (for example, Hacking, 1986) on par
170 From Danger to Trauma

with emergency workers. The metaphor of ‘first response’ then becomes

an umbrella term not only for different kinds of time-sensitive work
practices (such as policing and reporting), but also for the experiential
dimensions of that work insofar as they can be reduced to the particular
experience of seeing. PTSD, then, is not simply a condition that is ‘just
there’ waiting to be discovered, but one which has to be brought into
representation through the use of cultural metaphor (for example, Scott,
1990, p. 308; Treichler, 1999, p. 15) and medical terminology. In order
for reporters to be recognized and speak as traumatized professionals,
journalistic trauma must first be made into a condition for which there
are accounts (for example, Davis, 2005; Hacking, 1986). Thus, as Sander
Gilman suggests, ‘the palpable signs of illness, the pain and suffering
of the patient, cannot be simply dismissed as a social construction,
even though this pain may be understood . . . in a socially determined
manner’ (1988, p. 10). The significance of journalistic PTSD is in its
reconfiguration of the practice of journalism as a practice of ‘bearing
witness’, proven through the similarities of trauma’s symptoms across
the body vocational.

Training films in trauma: Covering Columbine

Covering Columbine is one of a number of training artifacts that now

circulate in what I call ‘trauma training’ curricula within some U.S.
journalism schools. Currently, schools with such curricula include the
University of Colorado-Boulder, where Covering Columbine was made,
the University of Washington-Seattle (and its associated Dart Center
for Journalism and Trauma), Michigan State University’s Victims in the
Media Program, Indiana University/Purdue University in Indianapolis,
IN, and the University of Central Oklahoma in Edmond, OK, among
others. Journalism programs began to adopt trauma-based curricula in
the 1990s as a response to victim advocates’ critiques of news media
treatment of crime victims. Trauma and victim-based training seeks to
teach students how to think about what the physically and potentially
psychologically traumatic experience of being a crime victim is like in
order to cover them in less harmful and insensitive ways. The concept
of ‘trauma’ is used in this training as a framework for representing the
psychological marks of crime, disaster, and accident on their victims
and survivors, which knowledgeable reporters can use to re-orient their
interviewing practices to treat victims and survivors more responsibly.
Training also teaches journalists about their own potential for psycho-
logical injury on the job as a result of listening to crime and disaster
 Carrie Rentschler 171

victims’ accounts of their experiences and seeing the scenes of violence

they must cover (particularly news photographers).
Trauma is a significant concept in this training because it provides
reporters a language for describing the psychological dimensions of
physical injuries and the experiences of those who are proximate to
others’ suffering and become subject to it vicariously. While journal-
ists learn to document physical suffering and devastation, they are less
well trained to cover and understand its psychological dimensions. The
concept of PTSD sits precisely at this juncture between the physical and
the psychological wound; through its classification schemes, ‘the medi-
cal wound, trauma, became the psychic wound’ (Hacking 1996, p. 85).
Understanding the concept of trauma in this training means that one
learns to become a better reporter, one who is better able to cover news
subjects by learning how to face ‘the consequences of death’ armed with
a language for talking about those consequences as trauma.
The dramatic hour-long documentary retraces journalists’ memories
covering the Columbine shootings up to a year after the event, translat-
ing the discourse of journalistic witnessing into a discourse of journal-
istic trauma in the process. It models what some journalism educators
envision as the potentially therapeutic practice of more victim-centric
coverage of school shootings, their victims, and victims’ families and
communities. Rather than focusing on the news subjects from that day
or the news audiences and their reactions to the coverage, it is clear
from the start that reporters are the subjects of Covering Columbine. It is
their memories of the coverage, their own reflections on the assignment,
and their emotional responses that the film depicts, modeling for view-
ers an emotionally literate form of reflection on the work of reporting.
While the film addresses how intrusive coverage was for community res-
idents, the shooting victims, and their families, it specifically highlights
how the obligation to cover Columbine was intrusive and overwhelm-
ing for reporters, too. In the context of training journalism students, the
film models how to talk about trauma, not in the search for a talking
cure, but instead as a means of speaking ‘truth’ about the psycholog-
ical realities of reporting – realities to which Covering Columbine gives
representation.
Most of the journalists and editors who appear in the film live in
or near the Columbine community and speak of identifying with the
parents and students they covered. In the film, a professional ethos
of ‘toughness’ and psychological detachment fragment under the emo-
tional weight of covering their own communities and imagining their
own children dead. One female TV news reporter is shown crying and
172 From Danger to Trauma

unable to finish her report from the triage scene after the shootings,
barely able to state between her sobs, ‘As a parent, this is just really
hard.’ Health/science reporter Ann Schrader observed, ‘I was talking to
this 16-year-old kid, and I was thinking, “I’m talking to you and your
parents don’t even know you’re alive” ’ (Watkins, 2000). Without know-
ing what to expect or how to prepare for the effects of ‘first contact’
at a major crime scene, journalists go in cold to a culture of trauma in
which they know little to none of the language for talking about it and
understanding it.
Covering Columbine not only provides this language, it nurtures a
different image of professional journalism premised on reporters’ emo-
tional proximity to the events they cover, rather than the detached
distance so central to the stoic masculinity of the field’s dominant pro-
fessional ideology. Over and over again, journalists talk about how the
professional demands made on them to cover Columbine caused their
emotional distress – in the film and in other reports that echo the point
of the film. Amanda Onion, a reporter for Fox News Online, stated
that she felt ‘sick, knowing I would have to ask [students] to tell me
about what was probably the most horrible experience of their lives’
(Onion, 1999). Dan Meyers, Metro Editor for the Denver Post echoes
Onion’s sentiment on the day of the shootings: ‘I was one of thou-
sands of journalists who went home and cried that night, and then
again the next morning. I could hardly read our own coverage of it’
(Covering Columbine). Patty Dennis, news director for KUSA-TV in Den-
ver reported, ‘After 13 funerals, I had photographers coming in saying
they couldn’t do anymore’ (Covering Columbine). Ann Schrader describes
the feeling, saying, ‘It scorched your soul. It made you really look down
deep within yourself’ (Watkins, 2000). New York Daily News photogra-
pher David Handschuh describes his experience: ‘I cried at Columbine.
A lot of photographers stood outside the church that day and did a lot
of self-reflection. We asked ourselves why we do what we do and how we
do it. [ . . . .] Photographers are exposed to multitudes of trauma. Every
time you see the picture, whether it be on the front page of the newspa-
per or displayed for an award, you relive the sights, sounds, smells and
the adrenaline that is associated with the picture’ (Bui, 2000).
In addition to its dramatic visual displays of journalistic emotion
and reporters’ own statements about the psychological burdens they
bear from covering the Columbine High School shootings, the film
narrates a common newsroom struggle between what editors demand
and what photographers and reporters are willing and able to do on
the job. Schrader, Handschuh, and Onion represent an emotionally
 Carrie Rentschler 173

identified journalistic ethos being put to work against the callous news
organizations by whom they are employed. The competitive industrial
battle within the news business appears in the film as a confrontation
between emotion and profit, on the one hand, and empathy and profes-
sional objectivity, on the other. In both cases, reportorial affect, and the
literacy with which reporters speak it, indexes a position that reporters
occupy to question the needs of the industry for breaking news and
anniversary coverage of major crimes and the doxic beliefs of the pro-
fession around covering them. According to the film, many journalists
began to refuse assignments because of their unwillingness to intrude
on survivors in interviews or because they felt they could not emotion-
ally handle revisiting the particulars of the shootings. After reporter Ann
Schrader of the Denver Post refused her editor’s request to interview the
husband and daughter of a woman who had just committed suicide
(the daughter, Mary Ann Hochhalter, was paralyzed in the Columbine
attack), and in again refusing to interview her neighbors, another jour-
nalist took her place, inadvertently notifying the woman’s best friend of
her suicide.
Reporters’ consciousness of the intrusive nature of the news inter-
view for survivors, the families of the students, and bystanders to the
event acquires a heightened affective charge in the film from its associ-
ation with the testimony of witnesses to the event. This charge extends
the in-profession critique of interviewing’s intrusiveness on the lives of
those dealing with shock and grief by reframing it in terms of the emo-
tional weight it places on some reporters. Yet Covering Columbine takes
the critique of interviewing’s intrusiveness further by suggesting that to
feel as a reporter (and to have a language for talking about it) signifies
that journalists themselves are witness to catastrophic events in ways
that place them in ethical opposition to the requirements of the job.
To ‘feel strongly’ as a reporter, then, further signifies that the affective
dimensions of the job (and their display in the film) evidence reporters’
own bodily and psychological transformation in the process of reporting
crisis. Their transformation makes explicit, ‘naming the unnameable’
(Bourdieu, 1991, p. 129), those regulative codes of the profession that
abstract the journalist from his or her body and try to distance what
the journalist reports from what the journalist sees and hears in oth-
ers’ accounts. Covering Columbine criticizes that move to abstract the
journalist from the testimony of others as the denial of the affective
dimensions of news work. ‘In situations of crisis’, Pierre Bourdieu has
argued, ‘these paradoxical and extra-ordinary situations call for an extra-
ordinary kind of discourse, capable of raising the practical principles
174 From Danger to Trauma

which generate (quasi-) systematic responses, and of expressing all the

unheard-of and ineffable characteristics of the situation created by the
crisis’ (1991, p. 129, emphasis in original).
The charged portrayal in the film of journalists’ emotional and psy-
chological responses to covering Columbine not only dramatizes the
failures (or ‘remainders’, we might say) of journalism’s dueling codes of
detached objectivity and invested advocacy. It also enunciates the link
between the affective dimensions of the job and the larger political labor
of news-making. Feeling becomes a kind of symbolic capital in this artic-
ulation of journalistic practice, a sign that the reporter himself/herself
literally and symbolically embodies not only the catastrophic event on
which he or she reports, but also the labor of the news industry itself.
Covering Columbine portrays a form of ‘emotional literacy’ with which
reporters talk about their surrogacy role as carriers of the affective traces
of the events they witness, the testimonial accounts they receive from
their interviews, and their work as laborers for the news business.
To be clear, feeling here is not code for ‘trauma’; it is instead code for
the practice of witnessing around which journalism is being redefined.
The film signifies the potentially traumatic dimensions of journalistic
witnessing by emphasizing reporters’ roles as bodily carriers of oth-
ers’ stories of trauma; they are proxies for the reception of traumatic
accounts of the events they cover and for the news industry and its
audiences that affectively reverberate for reporters. Covering Columbine’s
critique is aimed at the news industry’s failure to function normatively
as a responsible ‘witness’ to the event – as an agent itself, bound by an
expectation of concern for how and what it produces as news that is
borne not through the abstract countenance of the news business, but
through the bodies and psyches of its workers. It prescribes a model
of journalistic practice in which news-making bears the moral burden
of witnessing for what it covers. In describing news in this way, it also
prescribes news behavior, telling reporters that they should witness the
consequences of others’ deaths ‘because audiences need to see it’.
Textbooks in journalism education make this prescriptive function
even more explicit. William Coté and Roger Simpson, two former jour-
nalists turned journalism professors, argue in Covering Violence: A Guide
to Ethical Reporting about Victims and Trauma:

The journalist’s obligation to represent the public means, above all,

going where human beings are most at-risk. For better or worse vio-
lence is an important part of the report we want journalists to bring
back to us . . . [C]itizens in a democracy must know about violence if
 Carrie Rentschler 175

they are to make responsible decisions about how to protect them-

selves, their families and their communities. The job of the media is
to tell them, accurately, fairly, and comprehensively (2000, p. 223).

In Coté and Simpson’s text, the representation of journalism has an

explicitly dual character, signifying (1) the depiction of realities that
news audiences need and (2) the act of standing in for news audiences,
for bystanders and eyewitnesses, and for the news industry itself (see
Ganguly, 1992; Spivak, 1988). Covering Columbine and Covering Violence
describe news-making as an act of moral and social agency, where news
both depicts violence in the world and intervenes in it in the process
of acting as its witness. As texts used to cultivate modes of professional
conduct in students, these training media have a powerful ‘capacity to
prescribe while seeming to describe’ (Bourdieu, 1991, p. 128) the work
of journalists covering crisis. Their descriptions of journalism as a prac-
tice of witnessing also direct their viewers and readers to understand
themselves as witnesses, to see journalists’ work not simply as the doc-
umentation of an event and its effects but as a form of agency born
by a responsibility that leaves physical and psychological marks on its
bearers.
Interviewed reporters also talk about the harms of inaccurate portray-
als in the early coverage of the Columbine shootings to both survivors
and the profession, defining the agency of news representation in part
through its ability to inflict harm. When the harm is directed at sur-
vivors, the solution partly comes in reconstituting the memorial record
of the event through more accurate accounting of the details of the
shooting and its effects and in providing more victim/survivor control
over the representation of the event. Bearing witness signifies a kind
of reporting that seeks to reduce the harms that representation itself is
said to produce. It also signifies a valuation of the news as a commodity
around its use value as a potential social palliative, where the emotional
literacy of journalists translates possibly harm-producing coverage and
news behavior into news-making aimed at its own ‘harm-reduction’.
Subjects covered as victims in the news further extend the critique
that training texts make of the harmfulness of news coverage, par-
ticularly when the crime victim is also a journalist. Bruce Shapiro, a
contributing editor for The Nation and executive director of the Dart
Center for Journalism and Trauma, survived a brutal knife assault at a
New Haven, CT coffee shop and also paid witness to the images of his
assault on the news. The representation of victimization in the news
176 From Danger to Trauma

appears in his testimony as an additional harm to the one he suffered

from his assault:

On the local evening news, I have unexpectedly encountered footage,

several months old, of myself writhing on an ambulance gurney,
bright green shirt open and drenched with blood, skin pale, knee
raised, trying desperately and with utter frailty to find relief from
pain . . . a picture of my body, contorted and bleeding . . . a propaganda
image in the crime war (Shapiro, 1995).4

Shapiro occupies a unique position from which to examine the personal

costs and political abstractions of crime news. He is a survivor who tes-
tifies about the struggles that occur over the reportorial obligations to
cover crime and the experience of that coverage as its victim, high-
lighting the politicized terrain of covering crime and catastrophe as an
interaction between the institutions of news-making and crime politics
in addition to the individual needs of the victim. The reporter mediates
between these positions, caught in a system of industrialized looking
that requires journalists to translate other’s experiences of crime into
marketable news commodities in which law-and-order politicos have a
particularly vested interest, but also into potentially sympathetic and
‘useful’ narratives of crime’s victims. Crime and catastrophe news do
both: they sell a commoditized product of others’ suffering and their
accounting of it, but they also ‘bear witness’ to the individual and social
effects they have. One is not reducible to the other, nor does one prac-
tice replace the other. Shapiro and Covering Columbine suggest instead
that news is witness commoditized. The problem is that the discourse
of witnessing can make it harder to talk about the industrial production
of crime and catastrophe news by masking its commodity form and the
alienated labor of its workers.

Conclusion: Bringing trauma back to the profession

Against this backdrop, in which news is reconceived, on the one

hand, as harmful, commoditized, and abstracted, and on the other
as commemorative and potentially palliative, journalists are taught to
re-conceptualize their position as reporters through the lens of ‘bear-
ing witness’. This is an obligation to see and receive accounts of others’
suffering that some journalists say is pushing them out of the profes-
sion altogether. While some might want to dismiss these journalists as
simply ‘not cut out’ for the pressures of the job, another interpretation
 Carrie Rentschler 177

recognizes that the language of trauma may enable reporters to name

the harm-creating conditions of the job, connecting the labor of jour-
nalism with the labor of bearing witness by conceiving of witnessing as
itself a form of work. In Covering Columbine, journalists’ voiceovers speak
of the personal, emotional effects of their assignments at Columbine
and their desires to change jobs or move into a different kind of report-
ing, associating the responsibility for the potential traumas of the job
with the industry and profession. One male reporter even says to the
camera, with a look of serious resignation on his face, ‘I’d rather cover
a war than a school shooting.’ Another reporter admits, ‘I don’t know
how much longer I can do this. I might open a bait shop.’ In another
scene, a local TV reporter stands in the spring rain on the day after the
shootings, her face marked with red splotchy streaks from the tears she
cannot hold back. She weeps so powerfully she is unable to continue
speaking, a metaphor resonant with meaning if we consider witnessing
not as a form of passive experience as it is so often described, but as a
form of labor that for reporters is significantly lacking conventions – or
even recognition – for its representation.
Covering Columbine and psychological studies of journalists mark the
emergence of a larger discourse of journalistic witnessing that interprets
the conditions of the profession as themselves traumatizing, and the
work of journalists, in part, as a mode of affective labor. Against the
construction of psychological trauma as ultimately un-representable in
referential form (Caruth, 1991, 1995; see also van der Kolk and van der
Hart, 1995), the training films and studies analyzed here suggest, along
with Elaine Scarry, that ‘psychological suffering, though often difficult
for anyone to express, does have referential content, is susceptible to ver-
bal objectification, and is so habitually represented’ as nearly ubiquitous
in public culture (1985, p. 16; see also Furedi, 2004) as well as in pro-
fessional ones. These films and studies create a discourse of journalistic
witnessing that translates a medical discourse of traumatized witnessing
into a professional discourse that prioritizes the work of journalism as
affective labor.
Ultimately, the discourse of journalistic witnessing turns the con-
cept of witnessing others’ suffering inward into a reflexive discourse on
the profession, one aimed at its therapeutic transformation. Like other
forms of trauma discourse emerging in the post-9/11 context, the con-
struction of journalists as sufferers of PTSD locates the problem of the
intensified industrialization and commercialization of catastrophe news
in the effects it has on individual workers and not in the structural con-
ditions that make news work and the events being covered more trauma
178 From Danger to Trauma

prone (see Cloud, 1998; Berlant, 2000). Professions are being asked to
bear the burden of traumatizing conditions and the responsibility for
their rectification at the same time (for example, Miller and Rose, 1994).
Journalistic trauma becomes both the proof and code for journalistic
witnessing in the current political and industrial juncture that media
industries occupy, the means for both affectively investing in the pro-
fession and the news industries’ mandates, and the possible means for
rejecting the illusion of detached and heroic models of reporting on the
front lines.

Notes
1. This work appeared online without page numbers. Other reference informa-
tion has been provided in References section.
2. Freud himself discussed the links between war and traumatic experiences in
his Introduction to Psycho-Analysis and War Neuroses; British military psychia-
trist C. S. Myers defined the condition ‘shell shock’ in 1915 in his Lancet article
‘A Contribution to the Study of Shell Shock’ in order to explain the traumatic
consequences of war on the psyches of World War I veterans; and Kardiner
published in 1941 his book The Traumatic Neuroses of War (see Lamprecht and
Sack, 2002).
3. Of her 906 survey respondents, 87 per cent of Caroline Pyevich’s study sub-
jects were reporters, 6 per cent were editors, another 6 per cent were both
reporters and editors, and 1 per cent were ‘other’. See her unpublished disser-
tation, ‘The Relationship among Cognitive Schemata, Job-Related Traumatic
Exposure, and PTSD in Journalists’, Department of Psychology, University of
Oklahoma at Tulsa, 2001.
4. This work appeared online without page numbers. Other reference informa-
tion has been provided in References section.

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8
Scientific Witness, Testimony,
and Mediation
Joan Leach

Are you ready to testify?

Get ready to testify.
Are you ready to testify?
Get ready to testify.
‘These are machine translations. Please do not send corrections to the
machine.’ 1

Proposals for the twentieth century to be understood as the century of

traumatic witness have dominated post-millennial criticism and anal-
ysis in multiple genres of life-writing and history.2 For the media, the
claim has been made directly that ‘television sealed the twentieth cen-
tury’s fate as the century of witness’ (Ellis, 2000, p. 32). It would seem,
then, that trauma and its attendance in witnesses and testimonies are
central to understanding the century gone and the one recently begun.
The sciences sit peculiarly on the edge of this claim. On the one hand,
scientific witnessing suggests a remove from the witness to trauma; ‘the
objective witness is very different from the survivor . . . the objective wit-
ness claims disembodiment and passivity, a cold indifference to the
story, offering “just the facts” ’ (Peters, 2001, p. 716). On the other hand,
scientists may claim objectivity and disinterestedness in the way they go
about research, but they certainly are not disinterested in the results, the
‘story’, or the interpretations of their data. Further, the goals of science
do not include only representation, but intervention, belying the pas-
sivity in the appeal to objective witness; the point of science is both to
represent the world and do things in it (Hacking, 1983; Pickering, 1995).
Finally, through tracing the history of the position of scientific witness,
historians of science have drawn attention to the mediated nature of sci-
entific observation and the moral, political, and epistemic commitments

182
 Joan Leach 183

of scientific observers as they invent (in the rhetorical sense of inventio)

testimony from observation. Thus, while witnessing media events on
television may frame the paradigm of contemporary attitudes toward
testimony, exploring the stance of scientific witness provides an alter-
native trajectory for understanding the contemporary role of testimony
and witness. To be sure, scientific witnessing does not step outside of
history; the discussion of testimony and witness from the seventeenth
century in natural philosophy is, in part, a discussion of the relationship
of observation to witnessing in an ordinary sense, a legal sense, and a
religious sense (Shapiro, 2002). There are important continuities among
these many senses of witness. But there are disparities, too. This paper
offers an outline of recent approaches to scientific witnessing and their
attendant theoretical constructs of credibility, trust, and authority. After
surveying these approaches and presenting scientific witnessing in this
alternate tradition, I offer one limit case for scientific testimony, the tes-
timony of machines. This limit case brings the argument back around
to mediation and its role in the stance of scientific witnessing.

A different tradition

Media critics have drawn attention to trauma, pain, and suffering as

central to the experience of mediated witness. John Durham Peters
(2001) suggests that ‘a different tradition seeks to secure the validity of
statements without the metaphysical and moral conundrums of pain’
(p. 715). By this, he points to the ‘alternative’ tradition of scientific wit-
ness in which the scientific witness observes nature and experiment.
If pain is at the irreducible center of debates and analyses of media
witnessing, the ‘social’ is at the center of much theorizing about scien-
tific testimony. The point of examining the role of testimony in science
has been to ask ‘how deeply’ social relations underpin scientific claims.
Social epistemologists have variously argued that there is something
irreducibly social about knowing and its relationship to the representa-
tion practices of knowers; science is no exception to this general claim.
The ubiquitous position of testimony, the act of telling what you know,
demonstrates the irreducibly social basis for scientific knowlege (Fuller,
1996). In this epistemic frame that features the social, an astonishing
amount of scientific knowledge is based on testimony. From the labels
on laboratory materials and the interpretation of data to speculative
discussions among scientists, most professional scientists rely on the
testimony of their colleagues for their beliefs about fundamental sci-
entific questions. In short, a very precious few scientists have ‘seen for
184 Scientific Witness, Testimony, and Mediation

themselves’ or ‘directly witnessed’ the experiments, the proofs, or even

the raw data that supports scientific claims. Scientific testimony, then,
is usually a double-mediation. Reports of scientific results are reports
of others’ reports and of machines and instrumentation. John Hardwig
(1985) was one of the first epistemologists of testimony to point out
that ‘big science’ collaborative projects provide an ideal model for the
array of beliefs supported by testimony that people generally hold.3 In
this sense, science is not unusual, but exemplary. What is of note, how-
ever, is the management of this situation in light of science’s purported
epistemic status as the best-justified knowledge available.
As science is increasingly seen as a social enterprise, the status of
testimony and witnessing in theories of scientific knowledge continue
to ascend. Instead of the ancient dogma (from Greek rationalism to
Hume) that a knowledge claim should be endorsed only if one has
seen for oneself or has a deductively conclusive argument for it, the-
orists of scientific knowledge concede that there is at least a ‘testimonial
moment’ to the dissemination of much scientific knowledge. Here,
however, is where the waters become murky. Is scientific testimony
only a testimonial moment, a moment of witness when the scien-
tist points at something objective, something beyond the social? Or,
does an exchange of scientific knowledge boil down to the evaluation
and exchange of credentials or bona fides between testifiers? Historians
of science have suggested a middle road and have called upon ‘wit-
nessing’ as a theory-laden stance of observation to historically frame
scientific attitudes toward knowledge exchange. Some of these his-
torical views of scientific witnessing will be outlined below. The key
point here is that theorists of scientific knowledge agree that testi-
mony is a feature of science (as it is of ‘just getting on the world’),
but disagree about how central theories of observation, or witnessing,
are to the ways in which knowledge is justified and disseminated in
science.
Science looks to be, at least at some level, epistemically reliant on
testimony as well as rhetorically reliant on its disavowal. Who wants
to know that scientific knowledge is only as good as the observer’s
account of that knowledge? But to suggest that because this disavowal
is rhetorical it is not powerful would be mistaken. This is all the more
obvious when the results of science and technology are discussed in
media forums; the standards for judging the sense of what is being said
is a testimonial standard as well as (or even more than) a scientific one.
This has meant that the authority of scientific testimony, or grounds to
trust what scientists say, have been carefully structured by peer review,
 Joan Leach 185

extensive checking of sources and methods, and lengthy apprenticeship

in science – precisely to create the kind of credentials that can act as
markers of potentially credible testimony. Increasingly, this has also
meant that scientists have adopted a range of ways to work with sci-
entific testimony, especially in journalism-dominated media contexts.4
It is not incorrect to suggest that scientific institutions have developed
an effective mode of public scientific testimony that is self-conscious as
well as motivated and that is inadequately captured by the description
of ‘public relations’.
There are a number of limits to place on the discussion to this point.
First, there is a clear problem with discussing ‘science’ instead of the
many disciplinary practices that the word ‘science’ includes. The discus-
sion here does not delve into the manifest distinctions between different
intellectual endeavors in the sciences. The physics of the new Hadron
Collider is very different than the biology of wetland ecology, and the
practices that sustain these sciences are also widely divergent. How-
ever different these practices are at a local level, though, the rhetorical
stances taken by scientific actors in these varying sciences are surpris-
ingly similar. Testimony, in the form of scientific witness, offers such
a rhetorical stance. It is also the case that further mediation along
the lines of ‘scientists say . . . ’ produces nearly rhetorically equivalent
claims.5 This is not to say that there are not ‘situated textualities’ in
the sciences, to use Lynette Hunter’s useful phrase, but rather to say
that the rhetorical stance of scientific testimony in mediated contexts
is surprisingly coherent across the sciences (1999). The discussion of
media is also very particular; those who study scientific testimony in
mediated contexts tend to take very seriously an instrumental view
of science journalism where ‘journalism’ means science news and fea-
tures.6 In other words, the role of science journalism is to present
science to laypeople (the exemplary function of science in the medi-
ated context), and this media can be utilized to carry the messages of
science to a broader populace. Thus, scientists are becoming a large
market for ‘science media courses’ where ‘media skills training work-
shops can help to break down barriers, and give scientists a feeling
of greater confidence and control over media appearances’ (Metcalfe
and Gascoigne, 1997, p. 275). The implicit argument is that scientists
should be concerned about their credibility both inside and outside of
their professional places of work and pay more attention to the packag-
ing of their testimony to audiences outside the sciences.7 This attitude
toward science in mediated contexts fits well with the ‘poll culture’ of
mass communication in the latter half of the twentieth century. The
186 Scientific Witness, Testimony, and Mediation

question ‘How trustworthy do you find scientists?’ is routinely asked,

and the answers fluctuate, sparking moral panic or concern for how
scientists are viewed by media consumers (Mead and Metraux, 1957;
Durant, 1989).
What is less explored is the role of popular media in representing the
image of scientists as it has been transformed in the twenty-first cen-
tury. This has been called the emergence of the ‘rad scientist’ of CSI,
Numbers, and other television serials of the early twenty-first century
(Postrel, 2007). What is important about the theoretical preference to
view mediation as instrumental to scientific testimony is that it reveals
the multiple projects that orbit the study of mediation and witness. ‘Tes-
timony’ is a shared term in these endeavors, but the meaning, focus,
and intellectual trajectories it suggests can vary greatly. This seems to
be especially important, as mediated accounts of science and technol-
ogy are extraordinarily powerful in shaping beliefs about science and
technology. Yet, media scholars rarely tackle questions of the testimo-
nial stance of scientists and science studies scholars have only recently
taken on the frameworks of media witness. Epistemologists tend to
ignore both. This is, in some sense, an observation of the interdisci-
plinary space occupied by questions of witness and testimony as applied
to science. It even appears as if there are contradictions and ironies in
disciplinary approaches that themselves need explaining.8 Thus, while
an exploration of testimony in science is also an exploration of a ‘differ-
ent tradition’ of media witnessing, coming from discussions of scientific
witness back to the role of science in media testimonies lands one in
different territory than if one starts from the tradition of media witness-
ing and heads to the other country of science. The following discussion
introduces various types of scientific witness useful for considering the
historical role of mediation in science and the challenge of machine
witness.

Scientific witnesses

Scientists, natural philosophers, and scientific writers have all troubled

over the mediated nature of scientific knowledge and worried about
the idiom in which nature is represented. Indeed, the ‘language pol-
itics’ of the sciences is one of the best-known features of historical
accounts of science (Montgomery, 1995). The particular stance of sci-
entific ‘witness’ has been, in fact, one of the reasons given for the rise
of the sciences in the seventeenth century. If the twentieth century was
the century for mass-mediated traumatic witness, the seventeenth was
 Joan Leach 187

surely the century of literate scientific witness. One powerful account

of this is given by Stephen Shapin, who has argued for the centrality
of the role of testimonial maxims for understanding scientific truth-
telling. Shapin’s well-known studies of the early Royal Society, notably
in A Social History of Truth, focus on a thorny question for science (then,
as today): Why should one believe the testimony of someone reporting
the experimental results (never mind more theoretical enterprises) of a
scientific inquiry? After all, very rarely are such experiments reproduced
in other labs, and sometimes results seem quite fantastical. The answer
to this question sheds light on the role of testimony in the institu-
tions of science. We are warranted to believe the testimony of a scientist
because an experiment is replicable (even if it is never, in fact, repli-
cated), because there is consensus among experts that the experiment
‘seems right’, that the methods used are ‘fitting’.9 But, as an histori-
cal development, before we can acknowledge contemporary warrants
for believing experimental results, we must ask, ‘What warranted the
initial belief in scientific testimony, before there was consensus, before
methodological orthodoxy, before replicability seemed obvious?’ Before,
even, the profession called ‘scientist’ was coined? Shapin finds that there
are a series of ‘testimonial maxims’ that guide the reception of scientific
testimony at its outset: plausibility of the testimony, number of occa-
sions of the finding, consistency of accounts, closeness of connection
among observations and accounts, the skill of the witnesses, the man-
ner of communication, and the ability and fidelity of the sources. In
each of these maxims, to be sure, is buried a historical and rhetorical
treasure, nothing short of a history of our basic assumptions about war-
rant for scientific belief. However, Shapin’s point turns out to be that
there is an important social code that backs these warrants, a code of
gentlemanly conduct without which these maxims are rendered non-
sensical. It was, in short, one’s standing as a gentleman that insured
that at least an initial plausibility be attached to what one said, that
one’s manner of communication be decorous to get one heard in the
first place, that one’s ‘fidelity’ was assured. To quote Peter Lipton’s gloss
on this account of scientific testimony, ‘Gentlemen prefer gentlemen’
(1998, p. 10).
There is a long-standing tradition, going back to Hume, of discerning
guiding rules by which testimony can be given and received. Shapin,
following this tradition, refers to the ‘maxims and counter-maxims’ that
guide sensible scientific testimony and its reception. These have also the
flavor of Gricean maxims which are, in a sense, rules that make sense of
their violations (Wilson and Sperber, 1981). It is not that violation of
188 Scientific Witness, Testimony, and Mediation

the maxims is impossible or even improbable. It is rather, says Shapin,

that maxims guide interpretation and the generation of claims:

The maxim is recognized to depend utterly upon taken-for-granted

background knowledge and to vary in its sense and force according
to the scene and purpose of practical activity. It has a local rather than
a global sense and potency. The speaker and hearer of a maxim take
it as a prudential guide to specific actions in specific settings (1994,
p. 188).

The local nature of maxims makes it probable that there will be other
similar maxims and, indeed, counter-maxims for other practical activ-
ities and that these maxims might rely on the knowledge of other
maxims to make sense or be applicable. The importance of these max-
ims is that they guide testimony, that is, the form, format, and genre
of believable scientific witness. Shapin’s account links the production of
believable scientific witnesses with their status as gentlemen who, qua
gentleman, regularly produce various reliable testimonies as bona fide
truth-tellers.
This scientific witness, furthermore, is tied to civility through the
threat of force; violence underwrites civility and, thus, trust in testi-
monial accounts. Shapin’s account of the mentita (‘giving the lie’ and
proceeding to a duel) and its function in early modern England recalls
the link between gentlemanly culture and violence. Gentlemanly cul-
ture depended on the knowledge that some quarrels could end in
violence, and gentlemen needed significant rhetorical resources that
could mitigate the chance of violence. Shapin argues that the manage-
ment of these particular resources added to the power of early scientific
witness as they provided ways that skepticism and difference of opinion
could be expressed without insult (1994). Thus, the rhetorical manner
of early scientific writing, including the exchange of views in letters, was
guided by the overarching rhetorical decorum of gentlemanly conduct
aimed at avoiding offense or the possibility of violent disagreement.
The seventeenth-century scientist was also the skeptical and modest,
objective and civil gentleman, avoiding any threat of violence. It is he
who leaves a rhetorical legacy in the form of testimony of the scientific
witness.
Donna Haraway’s version of the role of testimony in science high-
lights the decorum of the scientific rhetorical stance of witness as one of
modesty. She characterizes the scientific ‘modest witness’ as follows:
 Joan Leach 189

He bears witness: he is objective; he guarantees the clarity and purity

of objects. His subjectivity is his objectivity. His narratives have a
magical power – they lose all trace of their history as stories, as
products of partisan projects, as contestable representations, or as
constructed documents in their potent capacity to define the facts.
The narratives become clear mirrors, fully magical mirrors, without
once appealing to the transcendental or the magical (1996, p. 24).

What is crucial in this reading of the objective appeal of the modest wit-
ness is the seemingly unmediated nature of his locutions. The authority
of the modest witness paradoxically stems from the appearance that
authorship itself disappears. The very stance of the modest witness dis-
guises itself and achieves a reality effect in which the witness is a mere
conduit for nature itself. While Haraway echoes Shapin’s account of
the ‘gentleman’ scientist, she emphasizes the translucency of scientific
witnessing; it is a ghostly process that does not reveal itself in any
straightforward rhetorical way. Scientific witnessing follows the code
of realism which demands that audiences accept that ‘there is nothing
rhetorical going on here’. Here, scientific witnessing is more straightfor-
wardly seen in continuity with accounts of media witnessing such as
those given by Peters. Technologies such as the phonograph, in which
audiences are separated in both space and time from the recorded voices
that they hear, can have uncanny effects that must be rhetorically man-
aged lest they conjure voices of the dead. The rhetorical management of
the modest witness who both authorizes knowledge claims and is invis-
ible is achieved through the various literary technologies of science and
their particular grammatical formulations. The scientific author was the
first ‘modern’ author to ‘die’, disguising subjectivity for objectivity and
exiting the text. The key example is the passive voice through which the
modest witness, through careful use of the copula and a past participle,
disappears from the text and whose role it is to remain translucent. It
is little accident that the passive voice and the modest witness hearken
from the same era (Harmon and Gross, 2007).
Alongside Shapin’s historical account and Haraway’s critical analysis
lie a number of epistemologically centered analyses of what testimony
is and does in a scientific setting, which highlight the rhetorical power
of scientific witnessing and troubles over its mediated nature. Many
epistemologists certainly accept (and, in some cases, even preempt)
a Shapin-style historical account. Jonathan Adler, for example, puts
it clearly: ‘If we know much of what we think we know, then we
do so through testimony. Testimony only succeeds if there is trust’
190 Scientific Witness, Testimony, and Mediation

(1994, p. 264). While being a gentleman in the seventeenth century may

have been necessary and, in some cases, sufficient to cement that trust,
what cements this trust now? Kristina Rolin provides ample evidence
that the characteristics of gentlemanly or ‘modest’ witness catalogued by
Shapin and Haraway are not far from the fore of trust in contemporary
science (Rolin, 2002). Rolin also points out that the epistemologically
minded analyses of trust in science have made two important errors:
they have linked credibility with trustworthiness (in the manner of
Shapin’s gentlemen) and underplayed aspects of communication (such
as who has access to others to communicate effectively in science). Fur-
ther, Steve Fuller (1996) has criticized the excessive attention given to
trust in Shapin-esque accounts of scientific testimony. In short, he asks,
why should the important epistemic question be ‘Do I trust you?’ rather
than ‘What do you have to say about the matter?’ His view is that the
attention to trust has meant that epistemologists have had the tendency
to evaluate trust relations in hindsight. This means that certain com-
mon cases have escaped notice. In cases in which we might find trust
lacking (in a colleague who is not very adept at getting reliable data
from a particular instrument, for example), we still might listen to see
what account the untrustworthy person gives and form some interme-
diate view. Thus, while the rhetorical stance of scientific witness might
be aligned with the objective stance and reliant in some ways on trust
relations backed by various forms of power, rhetorical practice could
look otherwise, especially if the model in question is not one scientist
giving testimony of results (I got a positive test for the presence of X),
but a scientist giving testimony that provides one piece of an answer
to a question asked by a larger community. (Is it safe to eat X given
a high probability of contamination?) In short, critics are building on
the picture of the modest witness to include communication among
testifiers in a variety of epistemic modes, including trust-building and
credibility-gaining. However, pointing out the mediated nature of scien-
tific testimony suggests that it is not just the credibility or trust-building
functions of scientific discourse that are worthy of attention, but also
the rhetorical principles of credulity that audiences use to guide the
acceptance of mediated communication.10
To summarize these three approaches to witness: Shapin sees the max-
ims of credibility, bolstered by gentlemanly status, as central to the stance
of witness in early modern science. Haraway emphasizes the authority
that is gained by the modest witness by disavowing the very posi-
tion of witness and disappearing, through various literary technologies,
from the narrative of scientific research. More epistemologically inspired
 Joan Leach 191

accounts, such as Rolin’s and Fuller’s do not necessarily disagree with

Shapin and Haraway, but put the focus on the when, where, and how of
scientific witnessing in relation to audiences; that is, scientific witness
is more appropriately referred to as witnessing, an ongoing process, per-
haps akin to religious witnessing, that requires audiences to engage in
particular ways not always guided by the maxims of science or the ‘rules
of the game’.

Machines as excellent witnesses

The three brief sketches above provide some guidance for thinking about
mediation in science and an attitude toward mediation that includes
machines and instrumentation. First, scientific testimony (and its pop-
ular representation in various media) is viewed as using mediation in an
instrumental manner; that is, scientists can use the media to ‘get their
message out’ much in the way that they can use laboratory instrumen-
tation to get information in. It is this instrumental sense that informs
a common view of testimony that is begotten from machines. In one
sense, science produces a remarkably Aristotelian attitude to testimony.
Aristotle famously made the distinction between artistic and inartistic
proof and infamously put testimony in the category of inartistic proof
(Rhetoric, 1360). What this means in terms of understanding testimony
rhetorically is that testimony is outside the art of rhetoric; testimony
is somehow immune to the rhetorical savvy of the witness. This dis-
tinction, while it has been heavily criticized through the ages, still
holds some intuitive and critical purchase; after all, the ‘data cannot
lie’. Popular representations reinforce this Aristotelian scientism when
researchers or technicians are shown standing around machines that
spit out answers to various questions asked of them. Recent television
science has done much to underscore this view; instrumentation and
machinery (or as the CBS website would have it, ‘cutting-edge forensic
tools’) are at the center of producing ‘facts’ that lead various characters
to produce testimony about or stand in witness to crime. Frequently, on
shows such as CSI, for example, the data spewed from machines autho-
rize a kind of moral discourse from the techno-police: ‘The facts don’t
lie . . . but people do.’ Instrumentation, then, produces testimony under-
stood in the Aristotelian fashion as inartistic, in contrast to people who
artistically embellish their accounts. Scientific testimony informed by
this inartistic testimony is then more reliable than views or interpreta-
tions that scientists could come up with on their own (and, as we have
seen, this is epistemically unlikely anyway). This account forms a kind of
192 Scientific Witness, Testimony, and Mediation

folk epistemology of scientific mediation that privileges the truth-telling

status of machinery and instrumentation.
The technology of the contemporary sciences seems to have garnered
so much authority for the practices of science that epistemologists, too,
have joined in this folk theory. Thus, it now makes sense to ask if tech-
nology can produce testimony, too. In the words of two epistemologists,
Martin Kusch and Peter Lipton, the question might be framed as one of:

How we should compare human informants and instruments in

regard to testimony. Is learning from others a special case of learning
from instruments, in that, for example, the tracking of track records
(as one of us once put it) is similarly applicable in both cases? Or
is the assimilation of humans to instruments a violation of think-
ing of testifiers in terms of the ‘participant stance’? . . . Alternatively,
should we go the other way, and assimilate computers and machines
to humans? Should we extend the participant stance to machines as
well? (2002, p. 215).

There are a number of reasons to take this suggestion seriously.

Chief among them is the claim that, through the production of
human/machine cyborgs, we have already produced a kind of ‘machine
testimony’ (Haraway, 1985). As a question of testimony as an embodied
practice, what we see and what we say are at one with who we are. If who
we are is an integrated hybrid of machine and human and what we see
and what we say are part of that hybridity, testimony already occupies
a post-human space and epistemic accounts will not need to speak of
‘extending’ a participant stance as much as revise who participants are.
For critics who have not yet made a post-human turn, the account
offered by Shapin, in which scientific witnessing was initially guided by
maxims of credibility, offers a guide to thinking about how machine wit-
nessing might function in a more straightforwardly testimonial sense.
In the context of scientific research, however, the maxims of credulity
for machines and instruments are different than those of humans and
it is fairly clear that there is not yet a good understanding of how
(and whether and when) these maxims function (Hutchins, 1995; Such-
man, 2007). Lucy Suchman’s ethnographic analysis of human–machine
interactions suggests that there may be different maxims at play with
almost any particular machine in its own setting. In this sense, an anal-
ysis of maxims in an historical context is easier than an analysis of
 Joan Leach 193

contemporary maxims. She adds that a key problem is the work of the
‘folk theory’ that epistemologists have accepted:

The task for critical practice is to resist restaging stories about

autonomous human actors and discrete technical objects in favor of
an orientation to capacities for action comprised of specific configu-
rations of persons and things. To see the interface this way requires
a shift in our unit of analysis, both temporally and spatially (2007,
p. 284).

A key question is whether, under this reformulation, it makes any sense

at all to talk in terms of testimony or witness. Under this approach,
terms such as ‘testimony’ and ‘witness’ may belong to a previous
regime of epistemological concerns that cannot account for current
‘human–machine reconfigurations’. It would, however, seem that ‘medi-
ation’ would remain a term of significant theoretical import. Encounters
among humans, artifacts, and machines occur along interfaces that
extend in time and space and make, inter alia, epistemic demands of
exchange and knowledge translation and transformation.
But the temptation to give up on the theoretical constructs of tes-
timony and witness in the sciences may be premature and indicative
of how this ‘alternative tradition’ runs up against other contemporary
views of testimony and witness.
The post-humanist move to give epistemic status to machines comes
precisely at the historical moment when the trauma of human beings
can be read as never before. Fuller characterizes this general trend as
‘a kind of reaction to humanity’s failure to solve ordinary problems of
poverty, to enable people to participate actively as citizens in their soci-
ety . . . consequently a lot of so-called progressive thinkers just move on
to something else’ (quoted in Barron, 2003, p. 96). Given the kind of
translucency of witnessing produced by scientific testimony, it is per-
haps unsurprising that ‘moving on to something else’ does not seem
to need to engage with the traumatic testimonies of witnesses to atroc-
ity in other cultural realms. Science can make the post-human move
with more moral alacrity than other cultural fields precisely because the
moral authority of scientists is seen only under erasure.
There is also a troubling remainder to the material history of machin-
ery and instrumentation in science. As Barbara Shapiro notes in her
accounts of seventeenth-century scientific testimony, ‘Those with tele-
scopes, for example, were deemed better observers than those without’
(2002, p. 257). In contemporary scientific contexts, there is no science
194 Scientific Witness, Testimony, and Mediation

without telescopes or their multidisciplinary equivalents. The credibility

conferred by the ownership or access to instrumentation has become
such that it is not an option but a precondition for scientific work. The
data produced by instruments does not so much confer credibility on
the operator but is scrutinized for its own markers of credibility and
verity; the operator’s credibility comes from their ability to yield ‘good’
data from the instrumentation. This has meant that the gentlemanly
status of the seventeenth century has given way to an expertise cul-
ture, heavily dependent on expertise in instruments to which access is
frequently heavily circumscribed. Thus, the credibility system described
by Shapin has become more, rather than less, exclusive even as more
people have entered the domain of science. The instrument-expertise
culture has also changed the credibility markers for providing truth-
ful scientific testimony, namely knowledge and familiarity with the
instrumentation itself.
Finally, the mediated nature of scientific testimony and witness out-
lined above is largely in agreement with views of media witness precisely
because instrumentation in science may play a role analogous to the role
played by technology in other mediated contexts. While it may seem,
at first blush, that the stance of traumatic witness in contemporary pop-
ular media and scientific witness have little in common, the focus on
the media and instrumentation in both traditions invokes theoretical
constructs that could be mutually informing. By viewing witness as a
rhetorical stance, a way of managing subject positions in an account
of ‘the way things are’, some distinguishing features emerge that allow
the position of traumatic and scientific witness to operate as foils. The
emphasis on the state of subjectivity, or as Dori Laub puts it, the ability
of the witness to bear witness to the process of witnessing, is fore-
grounded in traumatic witness (Laub and Feldman, 1991, p. 217). This
moment of subjectivity is disguised in the stance of scientific witness;
the singular moment of witness is reframed as a representative moment
of scientific witness available to all others through the literary technol-
ogy of the scientific article. The rhetorical stance of scientific witness is
then to make the recipients of scientific testimony into virtual witnesses;
we can all say that we have seen by proxy (Shapin, 1984). This mediating
moment, whether foregrounded or disguised, seems to be a fundamen-
tal moment of modernity, made possible by science and technology as
well as the rhetorical stance that is taken toward the possibilities of
mediation itself. It is here that scientific witness, while the result of a
different tradition, remains in relation to the centuries in which it was
birthed. The scientific witness remains mediated and struggles with this
 Joan Leach 195

mediation, denying it, using it to establish credibility, and defying it

with a realist style. Yet, the scientific witness stands at one remove, now
further mediated through technology, ready to testify to the power of
mediation itself.

Notes
1. Lyrics and commentary on Testify by Rage Against the Machine from http://
www.lyricsdepot.com/rage-against-the-machine/testify.html, date accessed
8 November 2007.
2. L. Gilmore (2001) provides a lengthy list of examples of this claim in critical
and popular sources. Also see V. Das et al. (2001) who examines this claim in
light of political theory in the late twentieth century. J. Wolfreys’s Occasional
Deconstructions, especially chapter 7, makes and examines the reiterations of
this claim in relation to literature and historiography.
3. For other accounts, see Lipton (1998), Kusch and Lipton (2002), Coady
(2002), and Shapin (1994). Each goes into some detail about the range of
unjustified beliefs that one can hold while actively practicing legitimate
science as well as going about daily events.
4. See, for example, the number of training programs, guides, and resources
available for scientists under the rubric ‘working with the media.’ A canon-
ical example is available at: www.foodrisk.org/powerpoint/Workingwiththe
Media.pdf.
5. This is under-examined in the rhetoric of science literature; Scott
Montgomery (1995) raises this unity of rhetorical stance as a question, but
there has been little study to explore this further. Harmon and Gross (2007)
produce a collection in which the rhetorics of the various sciences become
more similar, but this feature is only briefly noted. When reported in news
media, it can look as similar as these two: ‘Scientists say they’ve found a code
beyond genetics in DNA’ (www.nytimes.com/2006/07/25/science/25DNA.
html) and ‘After Trio of Explosions, Scientists say Supernova is imminent’
(www.nasa.gov/vision/universe/watchtheskies/grb_supernova.html). Taken
as testimony, the local methodological distinctions in substantiating these
claims with evidence do not result in vastly differing rhetorics.
6. See, for example, Steven Shapin’s last chapter or ‘epilogue’ in The Social
History of Truth where this view is implicit and in contrast with his historical
view of scientific testimony. Indeed, he seems to suggest that this instrumen-
tal character is part of what might make contemporary science different than
earlier periods.
7. This implicit argument is made explicit in national ‘science literacy’ and
‘public understanding’ drives. See, for example, AAAS project 2061 where
scientists and future scientists are encouraged to develop communication
and outreach skills so that they can better represent scientific results as well
as values to ever-larger audiences.
8. Even sensibilities about whether testimony is a useful category vary widely.
See, for example, J.D. Peters’s (2001) discussion of witnessing being a more
useful term than testimony or S. Fuller (1996) who argues that ‘testimony’
196 Scientific Witness, Testimony, and Mediation

has come only to reference issues of trust in authority which has impover-
ished the term in philosophical circles. Also, there is Felman and Laub (1992)
who argues that testimony gives a special moral privilege.
9. See John Ziman’s (2000) Real Science for a discussion of the various norms
(from the positivists through Popper and beyond) for when and how results
are accepted.
10. The key critical analysis here is Lorraine Code (1990) What Can She Know:
Feminist Theory and the Construction of Knowledge (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press).

References
J. Adler (1994) ‘Testimony, Trust, and Knowing’, Journal of Philosophy, vol. 91,
264–75.
Aristotle, ‘The Art of Rhetoric’, in Jonathan Barnes (ed.), The Complete Works of
Aristotle, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press; publication date: 1984).
C. Barron (2003) ‘A Strong Distinction between Humans and Non-Humans is No
Longer Required for Research Purposes’, History of the Human Sciences, vol. 16,
no. 2, 77–9.
C.A.J. Coady (2002) ‘Testimony and Intellectual Autonomy’, Studies In History and
Philosophy of Science Part A, vol. 33, no. 2, 355–72.
V. Das, A. Kleinman, M. Lock, M. Ramphele, and P. Reynolds (eds) (2001)
Remaking a World: Violence, Social Suffering and Recovery (London: University
of California Press).
J. Durant (1989) ‘The Public Understanding of Science’, Nature, vol. 340, 11–4.
J. Ellis (2000) Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty (London: I.B. Tauris).
S. Felman and D. Laub (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis, and History (New York: Routledge).
S. Fuller (1996) ‘Recent Work in Social Epistemology’, American Philosophical
Quarterly, 3, 149–66.
L. Gilmore (2001) The Limits of Autobiography: Trauma and Testimony (London:
Cornell University Press).
I. Hacking (1983) Representing and Intervening (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press).
D. Haraway (1985) ‘A Manifesto for Cyborgs’, Socialist Review, vol. 80, 65–88.
D. Haraway (1996) Modest Witness@Second Millennium: Femaleman Meets Onco-
mouse (New York: Routledge).
J. Hardwig (1985) ‘Epistemic Dependence’, The Journal of Philosophy, vol. 82,
335–49.
J.E. Harmon and A. Gross (2007) The Scientific Literature: A Guided Tour (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press).
L. Hunter (1999) Critiques of Knowing: Situated Textualities in Science, Computing
and the Arts (London: Routledge).
E. Hutchins (1995) Cognition in the Wild (Cambridge: MIT Press).
M. Kusch and P. Lipton (2002) ‘Testimony: A Primer’, Studies in History and
Philosophy of Science, vol. 33, 209–17.
D. Laub and S. Feldman (1991) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalyis and History (New York: Routledge).
 Joan Leach 197

P. Lipton (1998) ‘The Epistemology of Testimony’, Studies in the History and

Philosophy of Science, vol. 29, no. 1, 1–33.
J. Metcalfe and T. Gascoigne (1997) ‘Incentives and Impediments to Scientists
Communicating through the Media’, Science Communication, vol. 18, no. 3,
265–82.
M. Mead and R. Metraux (1957) ‘The Image of the Scientist among High-School
Students’, Science, vol. 126, no. 3270, 384–90.
S. Montgomery (1995) The Scientific Voice (London: Guilford Press).
A. Pickering (1995) The Mangle of Practice: Time, Agency and Science (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press).
J.D. Peters (2001) ‘Witnessing’, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 23, no. 6, 707–23.
Also in this volume, Chapter 1.
V. Postrel (2007) ‘Beautiful Minds’, The Atlantic, vol. 300, no. 2, 140–1.
K. Rolin (2002) ‘Gender and Trust in Science’, Hypatia, vol. 17, no. 4, 95–118.
S. Shapin (1984) ‘Pump and Circumstance: Robert Boyle’s Literary Technology’,
Social Studies of Science, vol. 14, 481–520.
S. Shapin (1994) A Social History of Truth: Civility and Science in Seventeenth Century
England (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
B. Shapiro (2002) ‘Testimony in Seventeenth-Century English Natural Philoso-
phy: Legal Origins and Early Development’, Studies in the History and Philosophy
of Science, 33, 243–63.
L. Suchman (2007) Human–Machine Reconfigurations: Plans and Situated Actions,
2nd edn (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
D. Wilson and D. Sperber (1981) ‘On Grice’s Theory of Conversation’, in P. Wersh
(ed.), Conversation and Discourse (New York: St. Martin’s Press).
J. Ziman (2000) Real Science: What It Is and What It means (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press).
9
Witnessing Trauma on Film
Roy Brand

The issues of trauma and cultural memory or the effects of violence

and victimization on the formation of identity are no doubt of great
relevance to our present times. This has not escaped the notice of the
academia, and trauma theory, which has been in circulation for many
years, is at the forefront of academic research in a large range of fields –
from psychology and cognitive science to literature and screen stud-
ies. In this chapter, I will relate the rise of trauma theory to a ‘crisis
in representation’ evidenced in both the humanities and the social sci-
ences.1 Trauma is not restricted to the outcome of devastating events.
As Thomas Elsaesser notes, the significance of the term is due less to its
reference to catastrophic events than to the revised understanding of
referentiality that it fosters. Thus, according to Elsaesser, ‘Trauma theory
is not so much a theory of recovered memory as it is one of recovered
referentiality’ (2001, p. 201).
Trauma in contemporary culture raises the question of how to rep-
resent the unrepresentable or how to experience in retrospect what
previously escaped experience (see Caruth, 1992, 1996; Felman and
Laub, 1992). Trauma is an experience that is registered without being
processed or experienced in the full sense. Therefore, trauma requires
a different form of exposition. It cannot simply be expressed or repre-
sented due to the fact that there is nothing there to be expressed or
represented. To provide a narrative or produce an explanation would
be tantamount to explaining away what cannot be grasped and, hence,
doing the event an injustice. How may we insert understanding into
such an event? How can we bring light to this darkness?
In this chapter, I claim that witnessing is the paradigmatic mode of
relating to trauma. To witness is to stand in proximity to an event that
escapes representation but calls for communication nevertheless. Thus,

198
 Roy Brand 199

witnessing is situated in the gap that exists between event and repre-
sentation. It is the mode by which trauma is communicated outside the
logic of representation. Contrary to first impressions, witnessing does
not mean having an immediate and fully present experience of the
event, but rather, it stands for the impossibility to represent or under-
stand. The notion of ‘event’ already suggests the idea of a happening
which cannot be subsumed under concepts. We call on the witness
precisely when we do not fully comprehend what, if anything, has hap-
pened. The witness is a surrogate for the lack of an experience and, as
such, occupies a paradoxical position, acting as a surrogate both for
the experience itself and its impossibility. The witness yearns to com-
municate what cannot be communicated. To witness is to stand in for
the absence of experience, but in so doing, witnessing recalls the very
absence it attempts to resolve. It is as if the act of witnessing hovers over
an abyss which it simultaneously covers and reveals. This chapter will
expose this complex dynamic by relating witnessing to trauma, as a way
of communicating the loss of experience that trauma entails. I will do so
through a close examination of one cinematic example – Gus Van Sant’s
Elephant. My claim is that this film communicates a trauma by induc-
ing an experience of loss. In doing so, it positions the viewer as witness,
turning the loss of experience into an experience of loss.

Everyday horror

Most viewers know, before the movie begins, that Elephant is about the
school shooting in Columbine. They know the facts relatively well,
but they do not understand why two teenagers would go to school
one day and kill 12 fellow students and a teacher before committing
suicide. This lack of comprehension prompts viewers to scramble for
evidence: Who were the murderers, what lives did they live, and what
was their motivation? It is detective work that, by now, viewers of
films are largely accustomed to performing. But this one is different.
The Buddhist parable, suggested by the title, about the five blind men
who attempt to figure out what the elephant is, with each man feel-
ing one part and guessing the whole, should warn us against such guess
work. The film opens with a view of a cloudy sky cut by an electric line.
Our view is relaxed, as if we are lying on our back watching the clouds
pass. However, a tilted electric line (vaguely reminiscent of a scarecrow
or a cross) already charges the image with an ominous, palpable but
inexplicable sense of violence. Everything moves quietly, slowly, and
in flux. This might seem contrived, artificial, or detached, given the
200 Witnessing Trauma on Film

magnitude of the tragedy, but Elephant takes its cue from the survivors’
and bystanders’ descriptions of horror, rather than from the Hollywood
clichés. Their experiences are of silence, emptiness, or slow-motion
numbness (Auerhahn and Laub, 1984) rather than the spectacular explo-
sions and general hysteria commonly produced in cinema. Gus Van
Sant’s Elephant, as Damon Young writes, deals with the ‘everyday as a site
of horror’ (2005, p. 497). The movie, a docu-fiction with a cast of ama-
teurs and a loose script, follows the daily high school routine as seen
from the perspective of seven students. The movie unfolds primarily
in real time, and we gradually understand that what we are witness-
ing (and witnessing is the appropriate word here) are their last minutes
prior to the massacre. The atmosphere is charged, but nothing inter-
esting or dramatic occurs. When the two murderers appear, the movie
breaks away from its real-time presentation to show us bits of their lives
at home, playing music or video games, waiting for the shipment of
arms to arrive, or reviewing their plans. The movie ends with the scene
of the massacre, which is horrible but also alarmingly calm – evil but also
banal. The effect of horror is achieved not through a surplus of affect
(as in the oversaturation of affect in the mass media) but in precisely
the opposite way – by an emptying of affective response. The presenta-
tion is flat and seemingly untouched by the violence of its own content.
The narrative is not formed around climactic events delivering emo-
tional intensity but is rather designed to deliver the everydayness of the
horror, its existence as part of the texture of our lives.
We may contrast the everydayness of horror with the shocking effect
intended by Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine. The two movies
broach the subject of violence from radically different perspectives.
Moore’s movie is an angry man’s account, one that points a blaming
finger at the arms industry and the politics supporting it. The message
is clear, as is the offered solution. Gus Van Sant’s Elephant, on the other
hand, is a poetic meditation on the culture or way of life that might
give rise to such events. The message is ambiguous, and the movie
offers no practical solution. We leave Moore’s film with clear views and
armed for a debate; we leave Van Sant’s numbed, speechless or, at best,
confused.
Many commentators fault Elephant with a placid and evasive descrip-
tion of the problem. The killers seem quite normal (as normal as
teenagers can be), living in a well-to-do environment and enjoying all
the privileges and freedom that are typical of American adolescence.
At times, the movie seems almost sympathetic, if not to the killers’
actions then to their physical beauty. The audience is not given a clear
 Roy Brand 201

enemy to hate or a clear cause to blame. Thus, the movie itself is

blamed as a post-modern rumination lacking social and political con-
sciousness. As one commentator describes it: ‘Elephant comes up fairly
empty; it has little to offer in the way of analysis or explanation, and
one is left with nothing but the same numb response produced by the
original newscasts of the event: it happened, it was horrible’ (O’Brien,
2003, p. 39).
The emptiness that the movie reflects and the numbness it evokes are
an appropriate starting point, but I wish to turn this criticism on its
head. Emptiness and numbness are precisely what the movie intends to
portray. Emptiness functions as a condition for explanation, revealing
the world the killers occupy in such a way that we witness what it feels
like to be there as an adolescent. The movie does not reject explanations
in favor of a poetic rumination. Rather, it offers a different kind of expla-
nation outside the increasingly reductive rationalization and standard-
ization of the day. The emptiness the movie reveals is full of significance,
but to notice this ‘nothing’ (which is very different than not noticing
anything) demands attentiveness to one’s own lived experience.

An empty emotional space

The third scene captures most distinctly this sense of an emotional space
empty of emotions. It depicts Nathan, a high school teen, as he journeys
from the sports field to the cafeteria. The camera rests still on the grass,
capturing whatever happens to enter the frame. The characters present
themselves in groups or in isolation, and they play in groups or in isola-
tion, but in a peculiar manner, without real contact and without words.
We hear background murmurs, little noises, and the slow movement of
nature. The soundscape is interlaced with an amateur pianist’s rendition
of Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata. Later, we learn that the amateur pianist
is one of the killers.
When Nathan enters the frame to occupy it in its entirety, the camera
comes to life and, like a cautious predator, follows him from behind.
The sense of play or a hunt is intensified by the enclosure of the high
school, and we do not yet know what this game is about. The partici-
pants as well seem to partake in it without awareness. There is a feeling
of destiny and of time swirling slowly, falling like leaves in the air. The
scene, following Nathan through the corridors and into the cafeteria,
lasts roughly ten minutes (including only one cut between two very long
shots). It delineates, in its temporal and spatial extension, the playing
field of the massacre. The remainder of the movie will trace different
202 Witnessing Trauma on Film

perspectives in this same enclosed four-dimensional time–space, and

it will venture outside of this sphere – but not for long – only when
depicting the assassins.
Much of what is to come may already be anticipated. It is commu-
nicated not by means of narrative or dialogue (there is none, other
than small talk) but through an atmosphere or mood. Heidegger claimed
that moods are ontologically existential, meaning that they open up a
world and possibilities for existence in this world.2 The German term
[Stimmungen] suggests tuning or attunement, as if one’s mood deter-
mines the range of possibilities and the increments between them (one’s
degree of sensitivity). Moods are not merely the coloring of facts; they
are not an inessential addendum to the objective world. Rather, moods
first make a certain world possible. Wittgenstein claimed that the world
of the happy man is different than that of the unhappy man.3 The idea
here is the same. Since a ‘world’ is not merely an objective, physical
reality but also a relational and functional one, moods participate in the
very making of the world and in the kinds of lives it may contain.
Witnessing a mood means being attuned to the kind of lives and expe-
riences that it entails or makes possible. What then is communicated by
the overriding mood of Elephant? To start, it evokes a sense of alienation,
distanciation, and indifference.4 The participants seem to be living in
parallel worlds, like monads without windows: time seems to stop still,
expression seems voided, and interactions appear like empty rituals.
Elephant provokes the same dissociation that, for Van Sant, pervades
contemporary society. As Van Sant explained in an interview:

The way I thought the film is supposed to work is that it leaves a

space for you to bring to mind everything you know about the event.
It doesn’t give you an answer. There’s no one-stop solution. And if
you think there’s an answer you can isolate – maybe it’s video games,
maybe it’s the parents – then that lets you think that the problem is
somewhere else and that you aren’t part of it. And that’s a mistake,
because we all are part of it. But I find it interesting that there’s one
thing no one has mentioned about the film. The thing you’re actually
watching all the time is a dislocation and a nonconnection. It’s vis-
ible, it’s in the representation. It’s what the film represents (Taubin,
2003, p. 33).

From that perspective, the avoidance of this film, of its message or of

its manner of communication, is itself an indication of the problem.
Elephant summons a world that is empty because the people living in
 Roy Brand 203

it are isolated and dissociated. This dissociation results in an absence

of affect, a kind of numbness of the living dead. The paradox is that
Elephant makes this very dissociation affectively present in our expe-
rience, hence, evoking and reflecting a peculiar numbness. Faulting
the movie for its emptiness, then, is failing to recognize its performa-
tive aspect. Elephant enacts rather than says outright what it is about.
It reminds us of the loneliness and beauty, the isolation and elevation
that lies in the in-between state that is adolescence.

The loss of communicable experience

Since our subject concerns the loss of experience and the witnessing of
this loss, it is worthwhile to elaborate on what we mean by experience
and how it may be lost. I turn here to Walter Benjamin who was one of
the first to detail the historical transformations of experience from pre-
modernity to modernity. It is important to note that ‘experience’ is a
tricky concept, meaning many things to many people. Etymologically,
‘experience’ denotes the capacity for transformation, an ‘undergoing’,
a learning process, or a movement of meaning and significance. Expe-
rience is a going out (ex) and through (para) – a going throughout or
an ‘undergoing’. In Benjamin’s context, this ‘undergoing’ is intrinsi-
cally related to language and to acts of communication. Language is the
medium and communication is the process by which meanings travel
and transform the participants along the way.
If experience is in essence an undergoing and a passing through,
then communication is intrinsic to its very meaning. Communicabil-
ity is essential to experience such that a loss of communicability is a
loss of experience. Benjamin famously criticizes the shift in the signifi-
cance of experience, wherein it loses its communicative and communal
dimension for the sake of a more mechanical, uniform, and compli-
ant economy of information.5 He relates the dwindling in the value of
experience to the destruction of the First World War. In a long, heartfelt
paragraph, which is repeated in two of his essays, he writes:

No, this much is clear: experience has fallen in value, amid a gener-
ation which from 1914 to 1918 had to experience some of the most
monstrous events in the history of the world. Perhaps this is less
remarkable than it appears. Wasn’t it noticed at the time how many
people returned from the front in silence? Not richer but poorer in
communicable experience? . . . For never has experience been contra-
dicted more thoroughly: strategic experience has been contravened
204 Witnessing Trauma on Film

by positional warfare; economic experience, by inflation; physical

experience, by hunger; moral experiences, by the ruling powers.
A generation that had gone to school in horse-drawn streetcars now
stood in the open air, amid a landscape in which nothing was the
same except the clouds and, at its center, in a force field of destruc-
tive torrents and explosions, the tiny, fragile human body (1999/2,
p. 732).

The soldiers coming back from the war were silent, ‘not richer but poorer
in communicable experience’. They lost the capacity to relate their
experiences, or rather, their experiences lost the dimension of communi-
cability that fosters a sense of community or communality. Kant already
emphasized the importance of such communality in his Critique of Pure
Judgment.6 According to Kant, communicability conditions the scope of
possible experience. Though the argument is made explicit only with
later thinkers such as Wittgenstein and Habermas,7 we can find already
in Kant’s third critique the claim that experience cannot, in principle,
be private. One may chose not to divulge certain parts of one’s experi-
ence, but if experience is meaningful, it must relate to a shared world,
and hence, in principle, be communicable.
Communicability is further related by Benjamin to the passing of
time, that is, to history and to tradition. The soldiers came back to
a world in which they no longer belonged. Their experiences were
incommunicable with the new reality, and thus, they were cut off
from their times, as if still living amidst the haunted memories of the
war. Freud developed his theory of trauma based on the same obser-
vations of soldiers coming back from the war. As described in Beyond
the Pleasure Principle, the returning soldiers were haunted by memo-
ries which repeated in the present since they were never actually lived
through or experienced in the first place (see Freud, 1961). Hence
trauma, for Freud, exhibits a peculiar temporal structure wherein it is
first experienced in retrospect as a memory of a past that was never
present. What is lost is the inner thread that weaves our lives together,
internally, within oneself, and socially, through language, history, and
tradition.
In a later essay titled the ‘Storyteller’, Benjamin relates the loss in
experience to the lost art of storytelling. According to Benjamin:

The art of storytelling is at its end. Meeting people who can tell
a proper story is becoming very rare. Often embarrassment spreads
when in a group of people someone asks for a story. As if a certain
 Roy Brand 205

power or faculty has been taken away; one that we thought cannot
pass; one that we took for granted – it is the ability to make others
share in experience (1999/3, translation amended).

The art of storytelling is precisely the art of sharing a story, that is,
sharing an experience. Benjamin distinguishes storytelling from the
development of the modern novel. Storytelling is born out of the texture
of a common life whereas the novel is born out of the solitary indi-
vidual. One who listens to a story is part of a community whereas the
modern reader is isolated. The object of reading a novel is consuming
an experience whereas the object of storytelling is passing it on. In fact,
according to Benjamin, the value of storytelling consists in the very act
of retelling. Storytelling is a practice that supports the passing on of
tradition or the continuation of history.8
According to Benjamin, experience itself is contradicted by the new
forms of life that are characteristic of industrialization and mechanical
reproduction. The new mode of experience lacks temporal duration; it
flashes in disconnected instances, always in a ‘now’ that is not even a
present since it is cut off from a past and a future. The reduction of time
to the present yields its inevitable fragmentation. The stripping away
of duration from our contemporary forms of living leaves each of us
alone with a presence that is as unique as it is empty and anonymous.9
Time is any time whatsoever and it is attached to any biographical
self whatsoever.10 We live a series of moments, each self-contained and
disconnected. This shrinking of existential time to a series of present
moments is already a form of violence.11 Hence, Benjamin describes life
in modernity as a series of shocks or as an extended trauma.
As our short discussion of Benjamin reveals, communicability is not
something added to experience. Communicability is intrinsic to experi-
ence in such a way that its loss implies a loss of experience. Witnessing
is precisely the attempt to make experience communicable, that is, to
bring it back to life by reconnecting it with the whole person or the
community. Thus, witnessing is the proper response to the reduction of
experience to a series of ‘nows’ voided of continuity or duration. Wit-
nessing does not compensate for the loss by adding content. It stands
in the position of loss and testifies to it. Witnessing is the way we expe-
rience reality as lost or missing in some sense. Witnessing, we can say,
latches on to the significance of an experience at a time when there is no
meaning present. It is a mode of communicating or transferring experi-
ence when other modes have failed. Witnessing is what experience turns
into when experience remains present to its loss.12
206 Witnessing Trauma on Film

The performance of loss

Elephant is an experience-based investigation of our forms of living in

the present, a reenactment of sorts, but one that concerns the present
rather than the past. The problem with the present is that it is like an
elephant right under our noses – it is too close, too immediate, and
too all-encompassing to be noticed. Like our life or our health, our
present experience becomes apparent only when it is transformed, suf-
fers degradation, or when we are distanced from it. Elephant uncovers
two forms of such degradation, both concerning the loss of continuity –
of wholeness and temporal duration – within experience. These losses
are countered in the film by the utilization of an almost seamless camera
movement and editing techniques that emphasize duration and tempo-
ral plasticity. The result is a clash of form and content – a continuous and
peaceful depiction of a life that is discontinuous, dismembered, and vio-
lent. This juxtaposition itself serves as an experience-based explanation
for the eruption of violence.
Elephant is not a theory about the loss of experience but a cinematic
enactment of that loss. The film performs rather than says what it is
about, or it is about what it performs. Reading the film as performa-
tive, rather than descriptive, shifts our critical attention. We no longer
ask about the reality the film narrates or represents. (Is it true or accu-
rate? What are the causes? Who is to blame?) Rather, we ask: How does
this film make me feel? What kind of experience does it evoke? How
can I articulate this experience in words? And what does this tell me
about the message the movie is trying to communicate? More specifi-
cally, since the movie detours from the usual storyline conventions, the
viewer is left to reconstruct a narrative within an emotional space–time
that lacks clear factual coordinates. In the words of Jeffrey C. Alexander,
the viewer operates within the ‘trauma process’, struggling to bridge the
gap between event and representation (2004, p. 11). The viewer is thus
placed in the position of a witness – midway between a mood and its
articulation, a loss and its narration. It is this position that forces the
viewer to struggle for comprehension. In this respect, the failure to reach
a conclusion only serves to maintain the act of witnessing.
According to Alexander, cultural trauma is always, in some sense, per-
formative. There is no natural event in the world that is traumatic,
but rather our articulations and interpretation construct the event as a
trauma in retrospect (Alexander, 2004). The shift to a performative read-
ing of the movie is essential. Elephant not only addresses what happened
but also how we interpret what happened – that is, our own trauma
 Roy Brand 207

or cultural memory of the event. Performativity, here, means that the

trauma will receive its meaning only in retrospect, by the kinds of mem-
ories it will engender and the ways in which these will be interpreted.
In other words, performativity implicates the viewer in the production
of the meaning of the work.
However, if trauma belongs to the category of the performative, it is
nonetheless a special case. Trauma has nothing to perform, and so it per-
forms this nothingness. As Elsaesser explains, ‘One would have to invent
the category of the “negative performative”, because trauma affects the
texture of experience by the apparent absence of traces’ (Elsaesser, 2001,
p. 199). Elephant provides a perfect example for such a performativity
of emptiness. Paradoxically, the flatness of affect itself becomes the con-
tent of experience. Emptiness is made self-aware (we feel and recognize
that we feel nothing), mixing with the looming sense of horror we know
is coming. It is as if the movie poses the question: Why can’t you feel
anything? Why this numbness? Elephant makes us distanced and disso-
ciated, but most peculiar is that we feel our dissociation – we witness
our loss.
It is here that the film functions both as a social critique and as a
form of therapy. It serves as both due to the fact that it enacts this
loss in our present. We are made to view it on screen at the same
time that we experience it within ourselves. Importantly, we are, like
the participants in this film, in a state of experiential limbo – living
dead. Unlike them, however, we are not only living this death but we
are also keenly aware of it. We are made witnesses, which means that
reflection arises from within our own experience. This is not simply the
realization of what happened there and then, but a recognition of what
happened to us, here and now, such that what we experience serves
as an explanation of why and how something like Columbine hap-
pens. It is as if experience reflects on its own loss of communicability
thereby performing an immanent critique, which is already a form of
recovery.

Engaging the passage of time

I have argued that there exists an intrinsic relation between trauma

and witnessing, the latter being the attempt to communicate the
former, not by means of representation but through a negative per-
formance that affects experience with its own loss. The scenario of
the loss of communicability and its performative recovery may also
be told in temporal terms. I take my cue from the fact that Elephant
208 Witnessing Trauma on Film

presents a four-dimensional time–space, repeating the same ten min-

utes prior to the shooting as lived through seven different perspectives.
If trauma means a fragmentation of experience and a sense of a haunted
present that repeats itself again and again, witnessing, by contrast, yields
narration, continuity, and an eventual overcoming of trauma.
The evocation of time in Elephant is essential to its performative work.
Contrary to most movies that make us ‘forget about time’, Elephant
induces a pregnant, tangible kind of emptiness by allowing us to
experience time as duration rather than as a sequence of fragmented
happenings.13 In Elephant, time becomes palpable. It almost stands still
before the event, but of course, it does not. It is as if the hourglass
is spilling the seconds away, taking us towards a death we know is
unavoidable. This phenomenalization of time (making it affective in
experience) is brought to our attention precisely through the lack of
events and through the fact that the film repeats the same stretch of
time from different perspectives. There is a short scene showing Elias,
an amateur photographer, developing a roll of film he shot earlier in the
school’s laboratory. He shakes the negative in a chemical developer back
and forth for almost a minute, as if counting time. There is something
hypnotic about this pendulum-like movement. Consciousness is emp-
tied and experience is voided, and what remains is the mere flux of the
temporal passage. We cannot avoid temporality; we cannot forget that
life is ephemeral. The everyday routines of an American high school are
charged with the utmost significance, not because of their content but
because of their passing away.
Engaging the passage of time is a paradigmatic characteristic of the
witness. For many, this engagement means being there at the time and
the place of the event. But I would like to claim that it can also mean
that the witness is privy to the temporality of the event or to its unfold-
ing in time. The witness is ‘there’ at the time of the event, though
‘being there’ does not necessarily mean being at the same place at the
same time. We must be careful here to distinguish the form of witness-
ing we ascribe to a movie such as Elephant from the more traditional
claims, which relate witnessing to raw experience, authenticity, original-
ity, wholeness, and presence. As Peters explain, witnessing, traditionally
conceived, carries an ontological baggage. In law, theology, and atroc-
ity, ‘A witness is a paradigm medium – the means by which experience
is supplied to others who lack the original’ (Peters, 2001, p. 709).14
In contradistinction to the traditional view, the burden of this essay
has been to prove that, at least in the case of trauma, the witness is pre-
cisely the one who lacks the experience and is made aware of this deficit.
 Roy Brand 209

Witnessing can be further delimited as marking and communicating

the presence of absence in experience. Hence, it is precisely in cases
of trauma that we call for the figure of the witness, not to testify to
the facts but to testify to the fact that the event cannot be reduced
to facts. Witnessing, Peters reminds us, is more about recognizing the
gaps and failures of experience rather than its authentic original con-
tent: ‘Witnessing is a discourse with a hole in it that awaits filling’
(2001, p. 710).
Notwithstanding these important elaborations of the concept of wit-
nessing, it is vital that we remain faithful to the event and to its
‘presentness’ since this is what distinguishes witnessing from, say, view-
ing or reporting. The witness engages the temporality of the event even
when the event itself is emptied of content. Witnessing means following
the unfolding of the event, be it a sports fan who lives the real time of
the event albeit indirectly15 or audience members who find themselves
implicated in its duration. What is at stake in ‘being present’ is not the
metaphysical aspect of ‘being there’ at the time and place of the event,
which is never an actual simultaneity but always a more or less abstract
present. Being present is not to be taken ontologically (as being there)
but ethically – as being responsible or at least responsive to the event.
Responsibility or responsiveness carries over time, such that we can be
responsible for the (memory of the) past as well as the consequences
for the future. Obviously, we cannot change the past or determine the
future, though we can still see ourselves as answering to their demands.
Likewise, we cannot change what we view on screen, but we can see
ourselves implicated in some important ways. In the case of Elephant,
the events are brought to our proximity since the question concerns
not the past but the way the past affects the present. This explains the
unusual effect of suspense that underlies Elephant. We know what is to
come, but nevertheless every instance is pregnant with the potential of
leading in some other direction.16 Here, fate and a sense of open possi-
bilities are most intimately connected. This juncture may be called the
defining phenomenological characteristic of witnessing. The witness, we
might say, is both an agent and an observer. She experiences the event
as a personal call for her concern, but at the same time, she knows that
what happened is in some way outside her power. The witness is, as
the traditional view goes, a bridge between those who were there and
those who were not. The witness, though, includes this duality from
within; the events for her are both contingent accidents and necessities,
sharing in both freedom and fate and implicating her as a participant-
observer.
210 Witnessing Trauma on Film

Shifting our sense of the problem

What kind of discovery does Elephant afford? What is entailed in the

recognition of a certain dissociation that we usually fail to notice due to
the fact that it has become the norm? As Dominic LaCapra explains,
‘Nonconventional narratives addressing the problem of absence, for
example those of Samuel Beckett or Maurice Blanchot, tend not to
include events in any significant way and seem to be abstract, evacu-
ated, or disembodied. In them, “nothing” happens, which makes them
devoid of interest from a conventional perspective’ (LaCapra, 1999,
p. 696).17 It is important to note that the phrase ‘ “nothing” happens’
can be understood in at least two ways. In the conventional interpreta-
tion, there is simply nothing occurring. The narrative is empty, devoid
of content, lacking a point or moral, and includes no significant insight,
but as Heidegger’s infamous phrase goes ‘the nothing itself nothings’
(Heidegger, 1998, Section 32),18 meaning that the nothing is not a thing
but a doing. The nothing nothings – it clears up a time–space and so
makes something possible. Nothing opens up a time–space for think-
ing or for experiencing in ways other than the ordinary. Alternatively,
we might agree with Cavell in saying that it allows us to experience
the ordinary as extraordinary, that is, to notice it in the first place (see
Cavell, 1994).
Elephant ‘nothings’, that is, it works as a ‘negative performative’; it
instills a sense of nothingness that does work. Elephant does not sim-
ply represent an empty world; it summons it by means of experience.
Emptiness becomes thematic in our experience. The title stems from the
British director Alan Clarke’s (1989) short film of the same name, which
examines but does not provide solutions to the violence in Northern
Ireland. Clarke’s title refers to the aphorism about the elephant in the
living room that goes ignored. That ‘there is an elephant in the room’
suggests a form of social repression – a problem that is so close and so
overbearing that it leaves us speechless. There is an elephant in our pub-
lic living room – we all avoid it and this avoidance is itself part of the
problem.
It is this pact of silence that Elephant attempts to break, and the public
reaction to the event as well as to the movie, especially in the U.S., iron-
ically justifies the claims Elephant makes. The movie indeed mentions,
in passing, most of the reasons given after the event by politicians, psy-
chologists, and the media. Among these reasons are the harassment the
killers suffered in school, the possibility of their homosexuality, their
fascination with Nazi propaganda, the horrible ease of buying weapons
 Roy Brand 211

in the U.S., and the destructive effects of video games. In mentioning

these, though, Elephant dismantles their explanatory force. The movie
deals with a story the audience already knows (like Van Sant’s remake
of Psycho or Last Days), the purpose being to shift the way we articulate
the problem and the kind of explanations we envisage as possible rather
than simply introducing one more explanation.
That is to say, the reasons given after the event are far from providing
an adequate explanation. They serve more as indications of our need to
produce an explanation of a specific kind or to replace the pain with
comprehension. What we want is to be able to point a blaming finger
at something or someone. We want to know that the problem is out
there – not here – and that we can make it disappear. However, to explain
the massacre with one or more determined and familiar reasons is to
avoid its proximity and magnitude (its elephant-like character). Bearing
witness to the event means recognizing our involvement in it. Elephant
is not only about why others kill but also what we do when others kill,
to where and why we turn our eyes, and what kind of explanations
we wish for and produce. In other words, Elephant is not about a set
of facts but about our cultural memory of these facts and our ways of
interpreting them. It is an exemplary case for a performative work that
makes us witness rather than represent or understand our own forms of
living in the present. Thus, our experience of watching a movie about
the massacre is, in this case, of greater significance than the reality upon
which it is based.

Notes
1. Susannah Radstone (2000) convincingly argued that trauma theory is the
response, mainly in the academic community, to a number of deadlocks.
For example, it redefines the use of psychoanalysis as a hermeneutic tool
and changes its focus from dynamics of desire, fantasy, and repression to
dynamics of recovered memory and politics. Fritz Breithaupt argues that in
opposition to the traditional claim that trauma spells the loss of subjectivity,
trauma has developed as a theory of modern subjectivity since ‘trauma and
self are the flipside of the same coin’ (2005, p. 98).
2. The description of moods [Stimmungen] in Sein und Zeit (Heidegger, 1972)
primarily occurs in Section 29 of Chapter V of Division One.
3. ‘The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy’
(Wittgenstein, 1922, Section 6.43).
4. I treat these as synonymous, but of course they are not. Their differences
are less important for our purpose. What is crucial at this point is to point
towards the common mood that their combination evokes.
5. More precisely, the cultural critics of the Frankfurt School define experience,
on the one hand, as ‘the uniform and continuous multiplicity of knowledge’
212 Witnessing Trauma on Film

(Benjamin, 1999/1, p. 108), and on the other as ’the selective, discon-

nected, interchangeable and ephemeral state of being informed which . . . will
promptly be cancelled by other information’ (Adorno, 1993, p. 33). The first
kind of experience (Erfahrung) includes real movement and duration but is
therefore indeterminate and dialectical, whereas the second kind of experi-
ence (Erlebnis) is made of exchangeable bits of information that are uniform
in quality.
6. Kant uses the notion of aesthetic common sense as a sense for what is uni-
versally communicable. The Kantian common sense is very different from
the English kind. It means the capacity for estimating, without a concept,
what is universally communicable in the presentation. Kant would go as
far as identifying this common sense with taste itself: ‘I maintain that taste
can be called a sensus communis . . . We could even define taste as the ability
to judge something that makes our feeling in a given presentation univer-
sally communicable without mediation by a concept’ (Kant, 1987, Section
40, AK. 296).
7. Wittgenstein argues for the essential communicability of experience in the
sections of the Philosophical Investigations known as the ‘private language
argument’ (Wittgenstein, 1958, in particular Sections 256–261). This read-
ing is also influenced by Habermas’ claim regarding the essential dialogical
nature of rationality. When I fail to accept the other partner in a debate
as an equal, my own rationality and autonomy suffer (Habermas’s, 1979,
1989). The Hegelian notion of ‘recognition’ is at the heart of these differ-
ent arguments. The idea is that reciprocity is essential to experience, (self)
consciousness, and reasoning. Without a grain of communality, we cannot
achieve our humanity even in ourselves.
8. In a previous work (Brand, 2002), I argued that communicability is at the root
of what Benjamin means by Das passagen. In the Parisian Arcades, Benjamin
finds the material manifestation for the passing of time or the passing of
tradition from pre-modernity to modernity.
9. Here, I follow Bergson’s use of the notion. Duration names the passing of
time – its flow or movement. It is an immanent temporal transformation
rather than an external measuring unit or an infinite, homogenous series of
the present moment (Bergson, 1926).
10. Since this presence is homogenous, the subject occupying it is equally
exchangeable. The rise of demographics and statistics, along with cinema,
testifies to this new framework.
11. The intimate relation between reduction to the present, fragmentation, and
violence is clearly reflected in the obsession of the media with death and
aggression – from early actualities depicting executions to present-day catas-
trophe cinema. The popular sub-genre of execution film included titles such
as: Execution of Czolgosz with Panorama of Auburn Prison (1901), Execution by
Hanging (1905), Reading the Death Sentence (1905), Execution of a Spy (1902),
Beheading the Chinese Prisoner (1900), The Execution of Mary Queen of Scots
(1895), and the horrifically absurd Electrocuting an Elephant (1903), which was
intended more to promote the power of electricity than to execute Topsy, the
man-killing elephant from Coney Island. For a detailed analysis of the first
and the last actuality films, see Doane, 2002, pp. 140–71.
 Roy Brand 213

12. It is interesting to note that the loss of communicability in experience

impinges on its epistemic authority. Benjamin explains that the lost art of
storytelling played an important social function – a form of practical wis-
dom that passed from one generation to the next and from one person or
community to the next. With the loss of communicability, that form of
practical and dialogical reason which the Greek named Diánoia lost its suste-
nance. As Benjamin writes, ‘Wisdom is advice woven into the fabric of life’
(Benjamin, 1999/3, translation amended).
13. As mentioned before, I use Bergson’s notion of duration. It is important to
note, though, that Bergson viewed the cinema as part of the problem. The
moving image, he thought, is just that, a static image projected at a speed
that creates the illusion of movement (Bergson, 1926, 308). Deleuze, bor-
rowing the notion of duration from Bergson, believes that the time-image
involves an opening of the image to something not only outside the frame
but outside what can be potentially framed. This is why the time-image is sit-
uated ‘between images’. See Deleuze, 1989, pp. 179–80. For a good exposition
of Deleuze and an argument for the ability of new digital media to represent
time, see Hansen, 2004. For a thorough discussion of cinematic time arguing
for an intermediated, conflicted static/temporal image, see Doane, 2002.
14. Indeed, witnessing customarily referred to the presence of the subject in
the time and the place of the event. This traditional concept has under-
gone transformation, in some cases radical, since it includes much of the
‘metaphysics of presence’ that deconstruction, as well as our current media
environment, has taught us to distrust. Today, appeals to ‘authentic experi-
ence’ or to an ‘original’ strike us as fantasy or as a marketing strategy, and
the model of a present-experiencing subject communicating the event to
non-present audience is, at best, suspicious.
15. As Peters writes, the sports fan ‘wants to be involved in history (the
happening), not historiography (the recording)’ (Peters, 2001, p. 719).
16. Fortuna, Peters writes after Benjamin, ‘reveals her face only in the present.
In the past she veils herself as necessity, in the future as probability’ (2001,
p. 720).
17. LaCapra insists on the distinction between absence and loss. He locates
absence on the trans-historical level, while situating loss on the histori-
cal level. Loss can and should be rectified by real personal, social, legal,
or political acts. Absence, on the other hand, is a constitutive condition
that requires recognition rather than remedy. When absence is confused
with loss, the result is some mythic creation of an Edenic past or a utopian
future: ’When absence itself is narrativized, it is perhaps necessarily identi-
fied with loss (for example, the loss of innocence, full community, or unity
with the mother) and even figured as an event derived from one (as in the
story of the Fall or the oedipal scenario)’ Such confusion harbors real risks.
It can motivate extreme acts of restitutions (of the Edenic past) or of purg-
ing (towards an utopian future). Absence must be addressed in other terms
since it is not something that has gone missing and can be recovered or
replaced.
18. ‘Indeed: the Nothing itself – as such – was present. . . . What about this
Nothing? – The Nothing Itself Nothings.’
214 Witnessing Trauma on Film

References
T. W. Adorno (1993) ‘Theory of Pseudo-Culture’, Telos, vol. 95, 33.
J. C. Alexander (2004) ‘Towards a Theory of Cultural Trauma’, in J. C. Alexander
(ed.), Cultural Trauma and Collective Identity, 1–30 (Berkley, California: Univer-
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N. C. Auerhahn and D. Laub (1984) ‘Annihilation and Restoration: Post-
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W. Benjamin (1999/1) ‘On the Program of the Coming Philosophy’ (1918),
Selected Writings, vol. I, ed. M. W. Jennings, H. Eiland, and G. Smith,
trans. Rodney Livingstone and others (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
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W. Benjamin (1999/2) ‘Experience and Poverty’ (1933), Selected Writings, vol. 2.
W. Benjamin (1999/3) ‘The Storyteller’, Selected Writings, vol. 3.
H. Bergson (1926) Creative Evolution, trans. Arthur Mitchell (New York: Henri
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R. Brand (2002) ‘Experiment in the Technique of Awakening: Working through
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no. 2, 213–26.
F. Breithaupt (2005) ‘The Invention of Trauma in German Romanticism’, Critical
Inquiry, vol. 32 (autumn), 77–101.
C. Caruth (1996) Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History (Baltimore,
MD: Johns Hopkins University Press).
C. Caruth (1992) Trauma: Explorations in Memory (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins
University Press).
S. Cavell (1994) In Quest of the Ordinary: Lines of Skepticism and Romanticism
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
G. Deleuze (1989) Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert
Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press).
M. A. Doane (2002) The Emergence of Cinematic Time (Cambridge, MA: Harvard
University Press).
T. Elsaesser (2001) ‘Postmodernism as Mourning Work’, in ‘Special Debate:
Trauma and Screen Studies’, Screen, vol. 42, no. 2, 193–201.
S. Felman and D. Laub (1992) Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature,
Psychoanalysis and History (New York and London: Routledge).
S. Freud (1961) Beyond the Pleasure Principle, ed. and trans. J. Strachey (New York:
W.W. Norton).
J. Habermas (1979) Communication and the Evolution of Society (Boston: Beacon
Press).
J. Habermas (1989) The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry
into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Oxford: Polity Press).
M. Hansen (2004) ‘The Time of Affect, or Bearing Witness to Life’, Critical Inquiry,
vol. 30, no. 3, 584–626.
M. Heidegger (1972) Sein und Zeit (Tubingen: Max Niemeyer).
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I. Kant (1987) The Critique of Judgment, trans. W.S. Pluhar (Indianapolis: Hackett
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 Roy Brand 215

D. LaCapra (1999) ‘Trauma, Absence, Loss’, Critical Inquiry, vol. 25, no. 4,
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G. O’Brien (2003) ‘Stop Shooting’, Artforum, vol. 42, no. 2, 39.
J. D. Peters (2001) ‘Witnessing’, Media, Culture and Society, vol. 23, no. 6, 707–23.
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495–505.
Index
Tables are indicated by table, notes by n.; e.g. absence in space, 13, 38 table 1.1.
9/11, 3, 7–12
absence in space, 13, 38 table 1.1
absence in time, 13, 38 table 1.1, 134
absolute Particular, the, 9
Abu Ghraib, 115
active witnessing, 26, 45
Adler, Jonathan, 189–90
affective labor, 158–9, 177
‘affect-television’, 108
Agamben, Giorgio, 5, 43
Aiken, Charlotte, 158
Alexander, Jeffrey C., 206
An Afterword: Torchlight Red on
Sweaty Faces (Peters)
‘being there’, 42–45
epistemological transmission, 48
Haggadah, the, 44–45
historicist pilgrims, 43
The Life of Brian (Python), 44
Odysseus, 45
Paul of Tarsus, 46–47
presence, 43
religious ritual, 47
religious witnessing, 45–47
sensory evidence, 24, 46, 47
sensory witness, 47
speech, failure of, 43
veracity gap, 48
witnessing, 45, 47–48
witnessing, authenticating power
of, 43
anangkê (Greek), 28
anchor persons, 107–108
archaic witnessing, 15, 112–27
Boltanski, 114
configurations of, 118
Cook, 121–2
Ellis, 112–13
Frosh, 112–13
216
Hebrew Bible, see Bible, the
journalism, 114
journalists, 121
law-court model of witnessing, 115
newspaper, the, 121–3
newspaper reporter, 121
public witnessing, 119, 125
radio, 124–7
reporter, the term, 113–14
telegraph, the, 122–3
television, 124–7
two-step model, 113
The Archive of Feelings (Cvetkovich),
166
Aristotle, 28, 39, 191
Ashuri, Tamar, 15, 133–55
Asian tsunami of 2004, 10, 11
atrocities, 93, 110n.2
audience, 140–1, 145–6, 155
audiovisual media
‘affect television’, 108–9
audiovisual mediation of
witnessing, 60
audiovisual realism, 55
communicative structures/aesthetics
of, 8–9
dubious witnesses, 36
law and religion, 92–5, 105
media witnessing and, 50
representation, discursive notion of,
76, 82–3
viewers, insulating from, 69, 75
witness, carried/provided by, 75
witnessing, 13–15, 23–4
see also radio; television
audiovisual realism, 55
Augustine, 104
Badiou, Alain, 47
Bakri, Mohammad, 147–8

basanos (Greek), 28
The Battle of Jenin (Shalev), 147, 153
distance and proximity, use of,
152–3
Islamic Jihad’s military wing, 152
Israeli eyewitnesses, 153, 154, 155
Palestinian eyewitnesses, 152, 153,
155
relevance, cues of, 153
Shalev’s absence from film, 153
Bauman, Zygmunt, 67
Bazin, André, 55
BBC, 63, 82, 139
‘bearing witness’
audience and, 17, 144
communication triangle, part of,
136
definition of, 60, 159, 175
Haggadah, the, 57
Holocaust, 3, 4, 5
individual, identity of, 138
PTSD, 165
veracity gap and, 51–6
witnessing and, 97, 114
witnessing text and, 59–66
Becket, Samuel, 210
‘being there’, 35, 38 table 1.1, 134,
139, 140, 146, 208, 209
Benjamin, Walter, 17, 36–7, 203–5,
212n.5, 8, 213n.12, 16
‘Storyteller’, 204–5
Bennett, James Gordon, 122
Bennett, Tony, 166
‘Useful Culture’, 166
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud),
204
Bible, the, 114, 128n.6
‘ark of edut’, 118
Biblical witnessing, 115, 121
community (eda), 119
covenants, 116–18
dreidel, 118
ed, 116–17
Galeed, 116, 117, 118
God’s interaction with man, 118
jurisprudence, 118
media event genre, 115
mo’ed, 118
(Old) Testament, 117–18
Index 217
Ruth and Boaz, story of, 118–19
‘sanctuary of edut’, 118
Sinai covenant, 117–18, 119, 126
‘tablets of edut
(testimony/covenant)’, 118
Ten Commandments, 120
y’ad or eda, 116
Biblical witnessing, 15, 115, 121, 126
biographical novel, the, 104–5
‘Biography Generators’, 103
Blanchot, Maurice, 210
Blondheim, Menahem, 15, 112–27
Boggs, James, 168–9
Boltanski, Luc, 6, 114, 140
Distant Suffering, 6
Borges, Jorge Luís, 31
Bourdieu, Pierre, 15, 133, 136, 168,
173
Bowling for Columbine (Moore),
17, 200
Brand, Roy, 17, 198–211
Bremner, Rory, 81
Brighton Rock (Greene), 31
broadcasting, veracity gap and, 34–6
distance, 34
Gospel of Luke, 34
presence, 35–6
presence-at-a-distance, 34–5
singularity, 35
Bruce, Fiona, 85
camp followers, 2
Caruth, Cathy, 163
‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and
the Impossibility of History’,
164
Channel Four, 63–4
Chouliaraki, Lilie, 42
Christian martyrdom, 95
Christian martyrology, 29–30
civil inattention, 66–70, 84–5
‘civil indifference’, 67
Clarke, Alan, 210
Clinton, President, 35
Code of Hammurabi, 93, 94
Colvin, Marie, 162
communicability, 203–4, 212n.7, 8
218 Index

communicable experience, loss of Coté, William, 174–5

Benjamin, 203–5
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud),
204
communicability, 203–4, 212n.7, 8,
213n.12
Critique of Pure Judgment (Kant), 204
existential time to present
moments, shrinking of, 205
experience, new mode of, 205
soldiers, communicable experience,
204
storytelling, the art of, 204–5
time, 205, 212n.8, 9
communication, witnessing, 81–2
confession, 103–4
annual, mandatory confession, 104
‘Biography Generators’, 103
certitudo salutis, 104
Christian tradition of medieval
Church, 103
confessional witnessing, 109
deathbed, 29
entertainment genres, individual
confessions in, 108–9
external deeds of sins, 103
Fourth Lateran Council, 97
genre, 14
Hebrew Bible, 114
inner intentions which led
to sin, 103
judicial torture and, 28–9
legal poof, source of, 28
Protestant Reformation, 104
public intimacy of, 108–9
Puritan traditions, 104
religious, 103–5, 109
self-inclusion and, 100
of sins, in front of a priest, 103
television, 108
trust and, 107
witnessing as, 103–5
confessional genre, 14
‘confessional’ witnessing, 109
confessions, 29, 107, 108–9
Confessions (Augustine), 104
Cook, Janet, 121–2
Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical
Reporting about Victims and
Trauma, 174–5
Courting the Abyss (Peters), 42
covenant, 15, 116–18, 119, 124,
128n.8, 9
Covering Columbine, 160–1, 170–6
Bourdieu, 173–4
Dennis, 172
Handschuh, 172
Hochhalter, 173
interviewing intrusiveness, 173
journalists, 171–2
Meyers, 172
Onion, 172
photographers, 172
Schrader, 172, 173
subjects of, 171–2
Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical
Reporting about Victims and Trauma
(Coté and Simpson), 174–5
crisis of witnessing, 3–7
Critique of Pure Judgment (Kant), 204
Cronkite, Walter, 34
cultural forms of communication,
89–109
confession, 103–4
cultural form of witnessing, patterns
of, 97–103
cultural forms, 90–2
diary, 104
expectations of expectations, mutual,
90
formats and cultural forms,
distinguishing between, 90–2
genres or formats, 90–1
high plasticity, 91
inter-systemic fluidity, 92
intra-systemic fluidity, 91
introduction, 89–90
law and religion, 92–5
legal systems, in, 91
novel, 103–5
relative stability, 91
television, remarks on witnessing
in, 109
 Index 219

cultural form of witnessing, patterns Dennis, Patty, 172

of, 97–103
conflicting realities: contested
interpretation of what is real and
what truly occurred, 96
false witness, 102
horizon of relevance, 98
introduction, 96
introduction or elimination of novelty,
96
Islamic religious witnessing, 110n.3
legal context, 97
legal witness, 96, 97
legal witnessing, 96, 101, 102, 106
‘perception’ to ‘utterance’, 97
personal statement, 102–3
‘pre-audiovisual media events’, 99
presence and absence, relation
between, 97
public rendering of private memory,
98
religious witness, 96, 97, 99–100
religious witnessing, 96, 99
‘re-presentation’, act of, 98
‘seeing’ to ‘saying’, 97
self-inclusion, dimensions of:
mediatization of the body for
meta-messages, 100–1–4;
meta-message, 101; self-assertion,
100; self-attribution, 100;
self-thematization, 100
‘self-inclusions’, 100
‘transformation’, 96
trust, 102
‘vicarious witnessing’, 98
‘witnessing by imagination’, 98
Cvetkovich, Ann, 166
The Archives of Feelings, 166
danger to trauma, see affective labor;
journalistic discourse of
witnessing
Davies, Deborah, 49
Davis, Joseph, 165
Dayan, Daniel, 42, 47
deathbed confessions, 29
‘death touchers’, 167
de-ethicalization, 68
degradation, 206
detective fiction, genre of, 80
Deuteronomy, 17:7, 93
Deuteronomy, 19:16, 94
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III,
163
Diana, Princess of Wales, 85–6
diary, the, 104
‘disaster marathons’, 125, 129n.19
discourse
for-anyone-as-someone structure,
65, 69
audience and, 140, 141
co-constructor of witnessing, as a
form of, 60
‘confessional’ witnessing and, 109
experience and, 26, 27, 33, 52, 55
eyewitness, 141, 143
Haggadah, the, 56–7
Holocaust witness, 3, 7
journalistic trauma, 159, 162
legal, 56, 90
mediators, 141, 144
media witnessing, 68, 78
moral, 191
news broadcasts, 78
presence and, 49
public, 64, 69, 109
religious, 94, 95
scientific, 190
‘speaks the person’, 81–2
testimony, 26, 61
trauma, 17, 177
witnessing and, 4, 26, 49, 52, 54,
138
witnessing, field of, 141, 143
witnessing text, 60, 64
see also journalistic discourse of
witnessing
discursive as synthetic, 77–9
Dispatches (Herr), 164
dissonance-reduction, 27
distance
audience and, 141
Bakri, 152, 153
broadcasting and, 34–5
celebration of, 45
Covering Columbine, 172
distanced observation, 76
220 Index
distance – continued
Elephant (Van Sant), 211
mediators and, 144
present-at-distance, 134
proximity and realignment of, 67
Shalev, 151–2
viewers, freed from being
responsible, 125–6
Distant Suffering (Boltanski), 6
distant witness, 7
documentary genre, 148
double aspect of witnessing, 92–3
‘double take’, 84–5
dreidel, 118, 128n.11
duBois, Page, 28
‘dumb’ media, 24
dumb witness, 33
duration, 205, 212n.5, 9, 213n.13
eda or y’ad, 116
‘ed (Hebrew), 15, 128n.7, 15
electronic media, 13, 50–1
Elephant (Van Sant), 200–211
Bowling for Columbine, contrast
between, 200
Buddhist parable, 199
communicable experience, loss of,
203–5
criticism of, commentators, 200–1
cultural trauma, 206–7
degradation, 206
Elias, 208
emotional space, an empty, 201–3
emptiness/numbness, portrayal of,
201
everyday horror, 199–201
evocation of time, 208
four-dimensional time-space, 208
horror, achieving effect of, 200
loss, performance of, 206–7
moods, 202, 211n.2, 4
Nathan, 201
‘negative performative’, 210
‘nothings’, 210–11
opening, the, 199–200
passage of time, engaging, 207–9
performative reading, shift to, 206–7
performativity, definition of, 207
performativity of emptiness, 207
the problem, shifting our sense of,
210–11
reasons given, after the event,
210–11
suspense, effect of, 209
Ellis, John, 9, 12, 13–14, 24, 42, 47, 51,
53, 73–87, 106, 112–13, 127n.1, 3
Seeing Things, 12
Elsberg, Daniel, 126
embedded journalism, 2, 3
embedded journalist, 2
Enlightenment, the, 32
entertainment genres, individual
confessions in, 108–9
enunciator, 59
envisioner, 59
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(Locke), 32–3
estoppel, 33
event as an instance, 7
event as an instant, 7
‘event generator’, 99
Exodus, 20:16, 94
eyewitness
audiences, as opposed to, 140
discourse and, 141
event, communicating the, 143–4
mediators and, 139
mediator’s trust in, 141
media witnessing, 75, 82
reporter as, 138
status, 144, 155n.2
zone of, 141
see also eyewitnesses
eyewitness accounts, 32, 78, 147, 164
eyewitnesses, 137–8, 143–4
The Battle of Jenin (Shalev), 153
Jenin Jenin (Bakri), 147
journalists as, 175
media, employment in, 139
mediators, discrepancies between,
146
professional, 139
requiring, 94
testimonies, 144
truthfulness of, 82
unreliability of, 26–7
eyewitness testimony, 14, 26–7
 Index 221

false presence, 34 Greene, Graham, 31

false witness, 92, 94, 99, 100–1, Brighton Rock, 31
102, 122 Gricean maxims, 187–8
false witnessing, 94
Feinstein, Anthony, 160, 168 habitus, 136
Felman, Shoshana, 3, 56 Hadron Collider, 185
field of witnessing Haggadah, the, 56–60, 70n.5
analysis, framework for, 141–7; enunciator, 59
audience, 145–6, 147; envisioner, 59
competition, 146; elements, ‘as if’ of witnessing text, 59, 70n.7
141, 144; eyewitness, 143–4; Passover Haggadah, 57
mediators, 144–5, 146–7; Seder meal, 58
purpose of, 141; zones, Seder rituals, 58
definitions of, 141 Shoah (Lanzmann), 56
Bourdieu, 136 Hahn, Alois, 103
eyewitnesses, 137–8 Hall, Stuart, 139
introduction, 133 Handschuh, David, 172
Jenin, case of: Bakri, 147–53; Shalev, Haraway, Donna, 188–9
151–3 Hardt, Michael, 159–60
mediators, 138–40 Hardwig, John, 184
overview, 136–7 Harris, Eric, 160
reporters, 139–40 Hartman, Geoffrey, 5
theorizing witnessing, 133–5; Havel, Václav, 31
implicated witness, 134, 135; hearsay, 7, 32–3, 35
Margalit, 134–5; Peters, 134; Hebrew Bible, 114, 118
presence, importance of, 134–5; see also Bible, the
vicarious witness, 134, 135 Herr, Michael, 164
trust, 137 Dispatches, 164
film, witnessing trauma on, 198–211 hic et nunc, 35
first-person journalism, 50 Hilton, Paris, 85
‘first responders’, 166–7 historical dimensions/variations,
‘Focalization’, 65 103–5
‘for-anyone-as-someone’ audience confession, witnessing as, 103–4
dynamics, 65–6, 69 diary, witnessing as, 104
forensic attitude, 79–81 novel, witnessing as, 103–4
Fortuna, 37, 213n.16 ‘historicity’ (or historical
‘frameworks of knowledge’, 139 authenticity), 13, 37–8, 38 table
Frank, Anne, 30 1.1, 134, 150
Frank, Robert, 167 Hochhalter, Mary Ann, 173
Frosh, Paul, 1–19, 49–70, 112–13, 135 Hofer, Jan, 107
Fuller, Steve, 190 Hollywood films, 63, 70n.9
Holocaust
Galeed, 116, 117, 118 bearing witness, 3
gambling, 36–7 crisis of witnessing and, 3–7
Gerrard, Nicci, 74 event, as an, 7–8
Gilman, Sander, 170 Levi, 5–7
Glenn, Ian, 42 Muselmann, 6
‘global village’, 123 Muselmanners, 5
Goffman, Erving, 79 nature of witnessing and, 30
222 Index
Holocaust – continued
Nazi system, 3
recording testimonies, 4
Survivors of the Shoah Visual
History Foundation, 4
Video Archive for the Holocaust
Testimonies at Yale, 4
witnessing, 4
horizon of relevance, 98
Hume, David, 39
Hunter, Lynette, 185
Ideational Ecology, 62–3
IDF, 147
If This is a Man (Levi), 6
imagined communities, 102
imagined public, 102
implicated witness, 134
‘implied author’, 60, 71n.10
implied witnessing agency, 60
indifference, 67, 68, 135, 202
Ingle, David, 167
‘instance’, 7–9
intentionality, 60
‘intentio operis’, 60–1
Interpersonal Ecology, 61–2
Intifada (the second), 147
Israel Defense Forces (IDF), 147
James, William, 48
Jenin, 147–55
Bakri, 147–53
Intifada (the second), 147
Jenin Jenin (Bakri), 147–53
overview, 147
Jenin Jenin (Bakri), 147–53
Bakri, appearance in, 148
banned, 148
documentary genre, using, 148
documentation, forms of, 148
enunciation of personal experiences,
150
eyewitnesses, 150–1
‘historicity’, 150
Israeli Film Board, 148
Nakba, the, 149
narrative, the, 148–9
personal experience, enunciation of,
150
relevance, cues of, 151
testimonies, 149–50
testimonies, location of, 149–50
victimhood, formation of, 150–1
Jesus, 31
journalistic discourse of witnessing,
158–78
‘care work’, feminist scholarship on,
160
introduction, 158–61
journalistic trauma, 159, 161, 163,
166, 167, 168, 170
PTSD: generalizing journalistic
witness from war zone to
domestic beat, 161–6
PTSD and metaphor of first
response, 166–70
training films in trauma: Covering
Columbine, 170–6
trauma, bringing back to the
profession, 176–8
‘traumatized journalism’, 160
journalistic trauma, 159, 161–2, 163,
166, 167, 168, 170
journalists, 107–8, 121, 167
citizen, 79
Covering Columbine, 172–3, 177
disaster marathons, 125, 129n.19
‘first responders’, 166–7
Jenin and, 147
legal witnessing, 14
PTSD, 167, 168–9, 171
receiving witness, 74
training films and, 170–6
see also journalistic discourse of
witnessing; reporters
Judaism, 43, 95
judicial torture, 28
jurors, 73–4, 76
Kant, I., 204, 212n.6
Katz, Elihu, 42
‘kéilu’ (Hebrew), 59
Kierkegaard, Søren, 47
King, Martin Luther, 31
Klebold, Dylan, 160
Klemperer, Victor, 30
Knightley, Phillip, 2
knowing, 7, 29, 55, 57, 183

‘known unknowns’, 85
Köpcke, Karl-Heinz, 107
Kusch, Martin, 192
LaCapra, Dominic, 210, 213n.17
Lanzmann, Claude, 56
Shoah, 56
la question (French), 29
late modernity, 105–6
Laub, Dori, 3, 4, 194
law and religion, interconnected roots
of witnessing, 92–5
atrocities, 93, 110n.2
Christian martyrdom, 95
Code of Hammurabi, 93, 94
Deuteronomy, 17:7, 93
Deuteronomy, 19:16, 94
double aspect of witnessing, 92–3
Exodus, 20:16, 94
false witness, 94
Gospel of John, 95
Hebraic law, 92–3
Isaiah, 43:8–13, 95
Judaism, 95
Kiddush Hashem, 95
Leviticus, 5:1, 92
Leviticus, 22:32, 95
lex talionis, 94
Maccabees, first and second book of,
95
martyr, definition of, 95
‘non-humans’, 93
power and authority, issue of, 93
Psalms of lament, 94
Ten Commandments, 92
YHWH, 95
layers of non-presence, 53
Leach, Joan, 16–17, 42, 182–95
Leary, Timothy, 43
legal systems, 24, 91
legal theory of evidence, 27
legal witnessing, 14, 94, 96, 101, 102,
107–8
anchor persons, 107, 108
journalists, 107–8
see also law and religion,
interconnected roots of
witnessing
Index 223
Levi, Primo, 5–7, 30, 43
If This is a Man, 6
lex talionis, 94
Liebes, Tamar, 15, 112–27
lie detector, 29
The Life of Brian (Python), 44
Lippmann, Walter, 50
Lipton, Peter, 187, 192
Little, Alan, 163
liveness, 24, 52, 124, 134, 139
liveness, why
historicity (or historical
authenticity), 37–8
recorded, contrast between, 37
local public, 102, 104
Locke, John, 32–3
Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (Locke), 32–3
logos (Greek), 28
London bombing, 7 July, 2005, 10
McCann, Madeleine, 85
machines, as excellent witnesses,
191–5
Aristotelian scientism, 191–2
human-machine interactions, 192–3
‘human-machine reconfigurations’,
193
instrumentation, credibility by
ownership or access to, 193–4
‘machine testimony’, 192
technology and, 192
Mandela, 31
Margalit, Avishai, 6, 68, 71n.13, 134–5
Marriott, Stephanie, 42
Martus (Greek), 29
martyr, definition of, 95
martyrdom, 95, 96, 99–100
martyrs, 24–5, 29, 30, 95, 97, 99, 107,
152
Marvin, Carolyn, 42, 167
mass media, 49–70
electronic media, 50–1
everyday media usage, intersection
between, 10
first-person journalism, 50
introduction, 49–51
morally enabling, 51
224 Index
mass media – continued
State of Terror: A Dispatches
Investigation, 49, 50
‘televisual metaphysics of presence’,
50
‘mass society’, 69–70
mechanical witness, 33
media
audiovisual, 8–9, 13–14, 23, 24,
36, 105
‘dumb’, 24
electronic, 13, 50–1
event genre, 115
mass, see mass media
recording, 36
‘science media courses’, 185
‘transubstantiated’, 168
witnessing, see media witnessing
Media, Culture and Society, 42
mediated communication, 112,
122, 190
mediation
double-mediation, 184
historical role in science, 186
Jenin and, 53
machines and, 191–5
media witnessing, 1, 2, 13
power of, 17
radio, 124
scientific testimony, 17, 183, 184,
186, 190–1
scientific witness, 13, 186–91
television, 124
veracity gap and, 51–6
‘Witnessing’ (Peters), 51
mediators, 138–40, 144–5
media witnessing
audience, 140–1
audiovisual representation,
76–7
child of ‘mass society’,
69–70
definition of, 1–2
eyewitnesses, 137–8
introduction, 1–3
logic of, 8–9
mediators and, 138–40
as a moral force, 68
non-commitment, 69
why now, 1–19
witnessing witness through, 74–6
Menchú, Rigoberta, 31
mentita, 188
Meyers, Dan, 172
mismeeting, 67
(mis) recognition, 84
modality
of ‘being there’, 35, 38 table 1.1,
134, 139, 140, 146, 208, 209
definition of, 59
of historicity, 13, 37–8, 38 table 1.1,
134
of liveness, 11, 24, 36–8, 38
table 1.1, 52, 134, 139
‘recording’, 4, 7, 12, 13, 33–4, 35–6,
38 table 1.1, 52
of witnessing, 13, 15, 124, 133,
136, 146
Mo’ed, 118
moods, 202, 211n.4
Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven), 201
Moore, Michael, 17, 200
Bowling for Columbine, 17, 200
moral witness, 6, 134–5
mundane witness, 14, 73–87
conclusion, 85–7
definition of, 86–7
discursive as synthetic, 77–9
experience of, 82–5
forensic attitude, 79–1
introduction, 73–7
witness communication, 81–2
Muselmann, 6
Muselmanners, 5
Nakba, 148, 149, 155n.4
Nazi, 30
Nazism, 6
Nazi system, 3
newspaper news, 80, 121
newspaper reporter, 121
newspapers, 80, 113–14, 121–23, 124,
129n.17, 18
New York Express, 122–23
ninth Mosaic commandment, 28
non-commitment, 69
‘non-humans’, 93

‘nothing happens’, understanding,
210
‘the nothing itself nothings’, 210,
213n.18
objective witness, 33–4, 182
Ochberg, Frank, 165
(Old) Testament, 117–18
Onion, Amanda, 172
ontological baggage, 24–5, 158, 209
‘ontological security’, 108
Operation Defensive Shield, 49
Ovid, 31
pain
King Herod, 38
live, 38–9
Poetics (Aristotle), 39
veracity gap and, 27–31
Palestinians, 14, 53, 147, 149, 150–1,
153, 154
‘Parasocial’ interaction, 64
parastatês (Greek), 29
passive witnessing, 26, 33
Passover Haggadah, 57
Passover Seder, 44, 118
Pearl, Daniel, 158
performativity, 207
perpetual vigilance, 10
Peters, John Durham, 7, 12, 23–41,
42–8, 51, 134, 158, 183
An Afterword: Torchlight Red on
Sweaty Faces (Peters), 42–8
Courting the Abyss, 42
Speaking into the Air, 45
‘Witnessing’, 23–41
Philosophical Fragments, 47
photograph, as the absolute Particular,
the sovereign Contingency, 9
Pinchevski, Amit, 1–19, 42, 133–55
polygraph test, 29
post-event tampering, 26–7
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
definition of (DSM-III), 162
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III,
163
‘first responders’, 166–7
‘first response’ and, 166–70
Index 225
‘fundamentally a disorder of
memory’, 168
generalizing journalistic witness
from war zone to domestic beat,
161–6
involuntary bodily behavior, 163–4
physiological behavior, 163–4
‘Risking More than Their Lives: The
Effects of Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder on Journalists’, 162,
163
‘traumatic likeness’, 162
‘traumatizing’, 164, 178
Vietnam War, 164
presence
and absence, relation between, 97
an event, view of, 43–4
bear witness, 54
broadcasting and, 35–6
co-presence, 97, 106
in court, 101
eyewitnesses, 137–8, 150, 153
false, 34
‘first responders’, 166–7
God’s, 117
importance of, 134–5
layers of non-presence, 53
lost ‘presence’, inaccessibility or
transcendence of, 98
making a difference, 49
mediators, 145, 147
narrator, 63
ontology of, 54
past presence, 98
in place, 134
presence to events – to be present is to
witness, and to witness is to be
subject to trauma, 166
present past, 98
present presence, 98
in space, 13, 38 table 1.1
‘televisual metaphysics of’, 50
testimonial, 57
in time, 13, 38 table 1.1, 154
witnessing text, 60
witness, ‘telling presence’ of, 113
presence-at-a-distance, 34–5
present-at-distance, 134
Protestant Reformation, 104
226 Index
Psalms, the, 104–5
‘psychological suffering’, 177
PTSD, see post-traumatic stress
disorder (PTSD)
‘put to the question’, 29
Pyevich, Caroline, 169, 178n.3
Python, Monty, 44
The Life of Brian, 44
Rabin, Yitzhak, 124
radical inclusion of the incidental, 9
radical vigilance (attitude to
sensation), 40
radio, 52, 61–2, 65, 89, 124–26
Radio5 Live, 162
‘rad scientist’, 186
Reagan, Ronald, 34
receptivity, 13, 54, 60–6
recording, 4, 7, 12, 33–4, 35–6, 38
table 1.1, 52
recording media, 36
recuperation of the singular, 9
‘referential excess’, 9
regressus ad infinitum, 102
‘relations of production’, 139
religion, 51, 91–2, 92–5, 105–6, 109
see also law and religion,
interconnected roots of
witnessing
religious witness, 96, 97,
99–100, 102
religious witnessing, 14,
45–6, 107
Rentschler, Carrie, 16, 42, 158–78
repetitive possession, 165
reporters
audience, 140–1
BBC (Belgian Congo), 139
‘death touchers’, 167
the event and, 77
as eyewitness, 138, 139–40, 145
‘in the field’, 53
‘first responders’, 166–7
mediators, as extensions and direct
delegates of, 139–40, 145
PTSD, 161–2, 168, 169–70
‘Risking More Than Their Lives’,
164–5
term, origin of, 113–14, 127n.4
training films in trauma: Covering
Columbine, 160, 170–76, 177
trauma and, 159, 160–1, 165–6, 171
traumatized journalism, 160
as traumatized witnesses, 158–9
violence, having experienced
(survey), 168–9
war reporting, dangers of, 16
‘the weighty baggage of witnessing’,
158
as witness, 121, 166
see also journalistic discourse of
witnessing; journalists
Ricoeur, Paul, 29–30
‘Risking More than Their Lives: The
Effects of Post-Traumatic Stress
Disorder on Journalists’, 162,
163, 164
Rolin, Kristina, 190
Rothery, Teryl, 87n.2
Ruth and Boaz, story of, 118–19
sanctuary of edut, 118
Scannell, Paddy, 42, 78, 81
Scarry, Elaine, 177
Schlinder’s List, 31
Schrader, Ann, 172, 173
Schwartz, Louis-Georges, 42
science journalism, 185, 195n.3, 5,
6, 7
‘rad scientist’, 186
‘science media courses’, 185
scientific testimony, 185, 195n.6, 7
‘alternative tradition’, 183
authority of, 184–5
introduction, 182
machines, as excellent witnesses,
191–5
science journalism, 185
scientific witness
‘alternative tradition’ of,
183, 193
introduction, 182–3
scientific witnesses, 186–91
authority, 190
credibility, 190
Gricean maxims, 187–8
mentita, 188
‘modest witness’, 188–9

seventeenth century, 186–8
see also machines, as excellent
witnesses; scientific witness
Scott, Wilbur, 161, 165
secondary witness, 99
The Secret Agent (Conrad), 80
Seder, , 44, 45, 58
Seder meal, 58
Seder rituals, 58, 70n.5, 6
Seeing Things: Television in the Age of
Uncertainty (Ellis), 12, 51
self-inclusion, dimensions of
mediatization of the body for
meta-messages, 100–1
self-assertion, 100
self-attribution, 100
self-thematization, 100
‘self-inclusions’, 100
sensory evidence, 24, 46, 47
sensory witness, 47
Shalev, Noam, 151–2
Shapin, Stephen, 187, 188, 195n.3, 6
A Social History of Truth, 187
Shapiro, Barbara, 193
Shapiro, Bruce, 164, 175–6
shared world, 10, 11, 204
Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle), 80,
87n.1
Shoah (Lanzmann), 56
Silverstone, Roger, 108
Simpson, Roger, 158, 167, 168, 174–5
Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical
Reporting about Victims and
Trauma, 174–5
Sinai covenant, 117, 119, 126
singularity, 7, 9, 11, 35
singularity of the instant, 9
sin, subjectivization of, 103
‘situated textualities’, 185
A Social History of Truth (Shapin), 187
Socrates, 31
Solzhenitsyn, 31
sovereign Contingency, the, 9
‘spark of accident, the’, 9
Speaking into the Air (Peters), 45, 48
Spielberg, Steven, 4
spontaneous recognition, 83–4
Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, 162
Index 227
State of Terror: A Dispatches
Investigation, 49, 52–3, 63, 71n.11
Stimmungen (German), 202
The Sting, 37
‘Storyteller’ (Benjamin), 204–5
storytelling, the art of, 204–5, 213n.12
stranger sociality, 66–70
sub poena, 33
Suchman, Lucy, 192
Survivors of the Shoah Visual History
Foundation, 4
Suu Kyi, Aung San, 31
Sweeney, John, 162–3
synthetic, 77, 78, 82
Sznaider, Natan, 68
‘tablets of edut (testimony/covenant)’,
118
Tamil Tigers, Sri Lankan, 162
Tawalbe, Mahmud, 152
‘technical infrastructure’, 139
telegraph, the, 122–23
television
‘affect-television’, 108
anchor persons, 107–8
archaic witnessing and, 124–27
communication itself, witnessing,
81–2
confessions, 108–9
editing, 124, 129n.16, 20
fiction, 122
forensic fictions, 80–1
individual confessions in, 108–9
introduction, 24
journalists, 107, 109
late modernity, changes for
witnessing in, 105–6
legal witnessing, 105–6, 109
media witnessing, 75
news, 80
programming, thesis for analyzing,
105
religious witnessing, 105–6
sense of communitas, 124
a social system for witnessing, 106
‘televisual metaphysics of presence’,
50
228 Index
Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass
Media, and the Imagined Lives of
Strangers (Frosh), 49–70
civil inattention, 66–70
discourse, 49
electronic media, 50–1
first-person journalism, 50
Haggadah, the, 56–60
indifference, 67, 68
introduction, 49–51
knowing, 55, 57
law and religion, interconnected
roots of witnessing, 92
layers of non-presence, 53
as a moral force, 68–9
morally enabling, 51
non-commitment, 69
presence, 49
as receptivity, texts that bear
witness, 60–6
State of Terror: A Dispatches
Investigation, 49
stranger sociality, 66–70
‘televisual metaphysics of presence’,
50
uncivil attention, 67
veracity gap, witnessing and, 51–6
witnessing, main features of:
Impersonal, 64–6; Witnessing
Intentionality, 60–3
witnessing, main features of:
Interpersonal Ecology, 61–4
witnessing texts, 60–1
Ten Commandments, 120
tertius (Latin), 29
testamentum (Latin), 29
testimonio, 31
testis (Latin), 29
‘textual’ metafunction of language,
61–2
Thomas, Gunter, 14–15, 89–109
Timerman, Jacobo, 31
torture
current age, 28–9
Greek ideology, 28
judicial, 28
la question (French), 29
polygraph test – ‘lie detector’, 29
‘put to the question’, 29
‘transformation’, 96
‘transubstantiated media’, 168
trauma
‘accounts’, 164
bearing witness, 175
‘concept of’, 170–1
Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical
Reporting about Victims and
Trauma (Coté and Simpson),
174–5
cultural, 206–7
description of (Caruth), 165
on film, see trauma, witnessing on
film
journalistic, 160–2, 163, 166, 167,
168, 170
PTSD, 171
repetitive possession, as a form of,
165
theory, 198, 211n.1
training films in: Covering
Columbine, 170–76
‘trauma training curricula’, schools
with, 170
trauma theory, 198, 211n.1
‘traumatized journalism’, 160
trauma, witnessing on film
communicable experience, loss of,
203–5
Elephant (Van Sant), 199–211
emotional space, an empty, 201–3
introduction, 198–9
loss, performance of, 206–7
passage of time, engaging, 207–9
the problem, shifting our sense of,
210–11
trauma theory, 198
trust
audience and, 141, 155
distributed, 141
eyewitness, 137
‘false witness’, 94, 102
gentlemanly, 190
Jenin and, 154
journalistic witnessing, 107–9
mediators, 141
‘modest witness’, 190
news organizations and, 82
produced, 141–7

science and, 32
scientific testimony, 183–4, 190–1
testimony and, 190–1
witnessing, cultural form of, 102
witnessing, field of, 133, 137
two-step model, 113
uncivil attention, 67
‘Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and
the Impossibility of History’
(Caruth), 164
‘Useful Culture’ (Bennett), 166
Van Sant, Gus, 17, 199
Elephant, 17, 199–211
veracity gap
broadcasting and, 34–6
objectivity and, 32–4
pain and, 27–31
witnessing and, 50–4, 57, 113
witnessing texts and, 60, 61
vicarious witness, 134
‘vicarious witnessing’, 98
Video Archive for the Holocaust
Testimonies at Yale, 4
Vietnam War, 161, 164
vigilance, 10, 11
Vlock, Laurel, 4
Wagner-Pacifici, Robin, 42
Weber, Max, 104
West, Fred, 74
West, Rosemary, 74
Wiesel, Eli, 30, 43
Wilkomirski, Benjamin, 5
Williams, Raymond, 37
witness
attitude to sensation (radical
vigilance), 40
dumb, 33
faces of, 26
mechanical, 33
modest, 188–9
moral, 134–5
as a noun, 25, 73
objective, 33–4, 182
passage of time, engaging, 207–9
scientific, 186–91
sensory, 47
Index 229
traumatic, 193
as a verb, 25–6
Witness (the book), 31
witness as a cultural form of
communication, see cultural
forms of communication
witnesses
9/11, 8, 9–10
active, 46
anchor persons, 107, 108
audience members, 140, 141
authoritative, 3
BBC journalist (Belgian Congo), 121
Cook, 121–2
Covering Columbine, 174
cultural form of, 95–102
Elephant (Van Sant), 207
expert, 47
false, 94
Haggadah, the, 57
Holocaust, 3–4, 5, 8
identity, importance of, 138
Jenin Jenin (Bakri), 147
journalistic, 106–7
journalists, 16, 67, 158, 162
jurors, 73
law and, 92–5
lay witnesses, use of, 140
legal, 97, 99
machines as, 191–5
mass media and, 11
organizations as, 63–4
public, 124–5
religion and, 92–5
religious, 95, 97, 99–100, 102
reporters, 167
scientific, 186–91
subjective, 47
television viewers, 8, 54
true, 3, 5–6
unreliability of, 26–7
untruthful, 80–1
witnessing
active, 26, 45
archaic, 15, 112–27
Biblical, 15, 115, 121, 126
civil inattention, 66–70
communication itself, 81–2
‘confessional’, 109
230 Index
witnessing – continued
cultural form of, 95–102
discourse, 49
events, 38
fact and fiction, 38–40
Haggadah, the, 56–60
by imagination, 98
journalistic discourse of, see
journalistic discourse of
witnessing
knowing, 57
liveness, why, 36–8
main features of: ideational ecology,
62; impersonal, 64–6;
interpersonal ecology, 61–4;
personal, 64–6; witnessing
intentionality, 60–3; witnessing
modality, 60, 61
mass media and, 49–70
as a moral force, 68–9
pain and time, 38–40
passive, 26, 33
phenomenological characteristic of,
209
post-event tampering, 26–7
‘presentness’, 209
as receptivity, texts that bear
witness, 60–6
religious, 14, 45–7, 108
retroactive character of, 39–40
social objectification, 99
sorts of witnessing an event, 38
table 1.1
stranger sociality, 66–70
in television, 47, 105–107
texts, 60–1
trauma on film, 198–211
two-step model, 113
veracity gap: broadcasting and,
34–6; objectivity and, 32–4;
pain and, 27–31; witnessing
and, 51–6
vicarious, 98
see also ‘Witnessing’ (Peters)
witnessing, as a field
analysis, framework for, 141–7;
audience, 145–46, 147;
competition, 146; elements,
141; eyewitness, 144–5;
mediators, 144–5, 147–8;
purpose of, 141; zones,
definitions of, 141
Bourdieu, 136
eyewitnesses, 137–8
introduction, 133
Jenin, case of: Bakri, 147–52; Shalev,
152–3
mediators, 138–40
overview, 136–7
reporters, 139–40
theorizing witnessing, 133–5;
implicated witness, 134, 135;
Margalit, 134–5; Peters, 134;
presence, importance of, 134–5;
vicarious witness, 134, 135
trust, 137
Witnessing Intentionality, 60–1
Witnessing Modality, 60, 61
‘Witnessing’ (Peters), 12
active witnessing, 26
audiovisual media, 23, 24, 36
broadcasting, veracity gap and, 34–6
confessions, 29
deathbed confessions, 29
dissonance-reduction, 27
‘dumb’ media, 24
dumb witness, 33
Ellis, 24
events, 38
fact and fiction, 38–40
false presence, 34
hearsay, 32–3
historicity (or historical
authenticity), 37–8
introduction, 23–5
legal theory of evidence, 27
liveness, why, 36–8
objective witness, 33–4
ontological baggage, 24–5, 158, 208
pain and time, 38–40
passive witnessing, 26, 33
polygraph test – ‘lie detector’, 29
post-event tampering, 26–7
presence, 35–6
presence-at-a-distance, 34–5
recording media, 36
Seeing Things (Ellis), 24
term, analyzing the, 25–6
 Index 231

torture, 28–9 Haggadah, the, 50, 51

veracity gap: broadcasting and, moral point of, 66
34–6; objectivity and, 32–4; ‘witness protection program’, 31
pain and, 27–31 Wittgenstein, L., 202, 211n.3, 212n.7
witnesses, unreliability of, World Trade Center, 9/11 attacks on,
26–7 3, 7–12
witness: faces of, 26; as a noun, 25;
as a verb, 25–6 y’ad or eda, 116
‘witness protection program’, 31 Yavin, Haim, 107
witnessing texts YHWH, 95
addressees, interaction between, 57 Young, Allan, 168
Althusserian terms, in, 59 Young, Damon, 200
‘as if’, of, 59
audiences, 51 Zapruder, Abraham, 31
‘bearing witness’, 60–6, see also Zelizer, Barbie, 42
‘bearing witness’ zeugen (German), 29
generic expectations for, 63 Zeugnis (German), 29