Witnessing: US Citizenship and the Vicarious Experience of Suffering

Abstract

argues in The Good Citizen, 'to understand American political experience' one must 'direct attention to the instructions of the game itself' (1998: 7). This commentary essay examines how citizens learn, and are expected, to bear witness to human suffering through mass mediated depictions. Citizens 'bear witness' through both mundane and extraordinary forms of media documentation. Professional and amateur photographic displays of atrocity, for instance, call on viewers to carefully attend to images of suffering and its causes as a practice of ceremonial mourning, but they can also be used to support military action. Even in its apparently ceremonial forms, then, acts of mass mediated witnessing have a necessarily political component. Posters in the windows of retail stores around cities and small towns in the US urge passersby to 'remember the victims of September 11th' not only as a ceremonial act of commemoration -these dead victims also play the lead role in justifications for the US/UK war on terrorism. While the war on terrorism gives meaning to the exhortation to pay witness to the memory of September 11th victims, war supporters have also made invisible many of the civilian and soldier-victims of US and UK military action in the war. Built into the act of bearing witness, then, comes the political distinction between victims whose suffering matters, and those whose does not. Witnessing constitutes a form of selective attention to victims -and sometimes identification with victims -in ways that often make invisible citizens' own participation in state violence against others.To examine this phenomenon more closely, this essay draws on recent scholarship that probes the link between mass media depictions of suffering and current models of spectatorial citizenship:

Youtube and Proposition 8

“…These videos serve as a form of witnessing that groups can use to build community among like-minded others, reveal suffering to those geographically distant and, in some instances, serve as legal evidence of human rights abuses (Gregory 2006). Witnessing as a political strategy gained new meaning following World War II, when the term came to represent both the person and the action: a witness is someone who has witnessed suffering (Rentschler 2004). Therefore witnessing involves more than seeing.…”

Victims’ Rights and the Struggle over Crime in the Media

“…These "private" victim images help define crime as an emotive, psychological experience best understood from the vantage point of family victims' rights to represent crime. And as Barbie Zelizer (2002) has argued, the news archiving of amateur photographs of major acts of violence, like those of September 11, 2001, in New York City, work to establish moral accountability and call into being the need for collective response, in ways that often favour punishment over understanding and reconciliation (see also Rentschler, 2004;Sontag, 2003;Zelizer, 1998). News of crime victims, then, can reinforce ideological constructions of crime as a battle between innocent victims, signified through the portrayal of the unexpected nature of crime and the violent interruption of victims' life narratives, and guilty, predatory violent offenders.…”

“Distant” beings or “human” beings: real images of violence and strategies of implication or distancing from victims

“…Amongst the most important of these is a witnessing function that impels the audience to become involved as witnesses to real-life events, and by consequence to become implicated in actions that derive from this knowledge. Although the images don't implicate the viewer as a witness in a judicial sense, neither can they completely distance themselves from responsibility by arguing that they "didn't know them" or "didn't know anything about it" (Ellis, 2000(Ellis, , 2009Frosh & Pinchevski, 2009;Rentschler, 2004;Dayan, 2006;Peters, 2001). In much the same way, the identifying function fosters a connection between people that live in different places.…”