Jane Blocker,
Seeing Witness: Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony.
Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-8166-5476-5
US$25.00 (pb)
153pp
(Review copy supplied by University of Minnesota Press
http://www.upress.umn.edu/)

A wedding is an allegorical event for the vertiginous mise en abyme that witnessing is. Frankenstein becomes a symbol of the monstrous burden of representing our invisibility. Blushing is the skin’s way of expressing our subjectivity. History is the site where the trauma, love, and desire of witnessing occur.

Jane Blocker’s new book, Seeing Witness: Visuality and the Ethics of Testimony, abounds with such metaphors, her textual acrobatics attempting to elucidate the difficult topic of witness. The book is presented in three sections – History, Technology, and Biopower, which can be understood as three different lenses through which witnesses see and function. They are comprised of seven previously written essays. In them, Blocker approaches the multiple facets of the topic of witness – as a position of privilege, as representative of society’s validation of legitimacy, the politics of the visual that a witness must engage in, etc., through the work of various contemporary artists. Within these chapters, Blocker takes up the problematic of the subject’s position of privilege when it takes on the role of witness. Typically seen as having the authoritative hegemony on the truth, she believes the witness is often rendered dangerously “authoritative, disembodied, omniscient, neutral, inevitable, judgmental and moralizing” (p. 128), making invisible the subjectivity of the privileged witness. For her, witnessing is not simply a matter of re-presentation or of testimony, but an issue of subjectivity and the validation of the witness’ subjectivity.[1]

If, Blocker writes, “we consider the witness to be in a specific kind of subject position, it is necessary to contemplate the ways in which subjectivity itself is understood” (p. xxiii). In order to do so, Blocker tries to identify the seer – to make visible this privileged position and seek out what might make this difficult role as bearer of an authoritative truth a more ethical one. She demands, “Rather than ‘how,’ I want to know ‘who’” (p. xix). In the end, whose truth becomes validated? Whose truth becomes history? For her, in order for the act of witnessing to become ethical, one must see themselves seeing – moving from observer to performer, in order to have a distance in which to contemplate one’s own subjectivity.

Rather than engaging each metaphor/chapter individually, I suggest and will discuss foremost her first chapter as essential for comprehending the rest of her book. Her most philosophical moment can be found in her first chapter, which best directly addresses the ethics of witnessing. While her interpretation of artists such as James Luna, Felix Gonzalez Torres, and Alfredo Jaar is equally productive in challenging dominant notions of witness, it is her first that is most focused, most intentional, the most touching. It is the chapter in which she declares ethical witnessing as possible through love. It brings to the fore, the problematic position of privilege by neutralizing its authority as the holder of truth to the one who attempts communication despite difference. Her most engaging example then is of a 1988 performance by Marina Abramović and Ulay, The Lovers, and Cynthia Carr’s account of accompanying them in their journey. Carr realizes the blatancy of her privileged position as witness as a historian when she is called forth to sing a Frank Sinatra song during the journey along the Great Wall in China. She attempts her best to sing Strangers in the Night amidst factory workers during a power outage:

Carr is, in a way, falling in love with China and with the performance, or rather with the experience of disorientation that they produce. She encounters these paradigmatic others and seems sincerely to believe that they will bring her to herself, that they offer some promise of completion. She experiences the break “in [the subject’s] self-possession as a subject.” Read metaphorically, as expressions of the experience of history, Carr’s statements suggest that the ethics of history (history as witness) resides first of all in its recognition of itself as performer and second in it necessary acceptance of (dis)orientation, its willingness to operate within the space of alterity, to undermine its own subject position as situated in the present and looking back over what de Certeau had explained is a clearly circumscribed past (p. 9).

Her love allows the possibility for what is other to her own subjectivity. This is the ethical possibility of witnessing. It is also important to note that this promise of completion is not the same as found commonly in thought such as Postcolonial theory, where the Westerner seeks identification in the Other. Rather, it is the jarring difference that creates opportunity for this “desubjectifying” (or what I what would call a hyper-subjective moment), in which one realizes that the love is actually desire, and in making the distinction, creates love. “To put it more plainly, love seeks fulfillment, that is, knowledge of the self through the other; desire rejects fulfillment and unsuccessfully seeks only knowledge of the other in the name of the self” (p. 5). It is even traumatic; the witness is perpetually outside of the event, unable to comprehend the event. History, as the site of witnessing (a traumatic event), is desire – “‘unhappiness without end’” (p. 5), and love is what allows history to take its many plural forms.

Seeing Witness could be Blocker’s own way of being a witness, as she unravels the phenomenon through allegorical interpretation, attempting to make sense of the mise en abyme that witness is. Her writing is perhaps her own love song, full of metaphors which reveal the author’s own subjectivity in interpretation. The metaphors are what ultimately hold the book together, testifying to the possibility of multiple meanings that she deems necessary for ethical witnessing. In this way, Blocker is able to use four-year-old Adrian McElwee’s painting to illuminate the complicated act of witnessing. The artwork of Felix Gonzalez-Torres is an expression of his trauma experience of being an invalidated witness. Love offers a real, ethical possibility for bearing witness.

Janice Yu,
California Institute of the Arts, USA.

Endnotes

[1] Jane Blocker, Seeing Witness, 29. The heterosexual wedding is given as an example of an “inauguration of witness and an induction into history.”