Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass Media, and the Imagined Lives of Strangers

In most traditional accounts, to be a witness is to be physically present at an event and report it to those who are absent. The ontological principle that authorizes testimony is the individual's corporeal presence at the event, a presence often vouchsafed by the suffering of the witnessing body. The logical extension of this is that media audiences are not the witnesses of the events they see, but the recipients of someone else's testimony. I take issue with such an account, 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 with “witnessing texts,” I focus on these texts’ world-making properties and the imaginative demands they make of their addressees. 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 morally enabling. Keywords: TestimonyImaginationAudience ReceptionCivil InattentionMorality This article is based on a shorter paper given at the Institute of Advanced Studies, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem This article is based on a shorter paper given at the Institute of Advanced Studies, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank Shoshana Blum-Kulka, Tamar Liebes, Amit Pinchevski, Zohar Kampf, John Peters, and Menahem Blondheim for their insightful comments. Notes This article is based on a shorter paper given at the Institute of Advanced Studies, at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem 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 Liberal 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 Communication (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 involves an extremely delicate operation, 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). Peters’ work often exemplifies this kind of account, which very few can pull off convincingly. His discussion of witnessing, however, retains the dream of full communication 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 an anonymous reviewer for clarifying this point. Although “bearing witness to one's faith” is a 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 Haggadah 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% 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). 7. According to Iser (1993), the “as if” of fiction “brackets” any references to reality 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 attitudes 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 (Citation1995). 9. There are important exceptions. However, Hollywood films must explicitly mark their witnessing status (“based on a true story”) in ways that news broadcasts do not. 10. Insofar as we think of this implied agency in terms of Booth's “implied author,” we should remember that Booth (Citation1982) himself was unimpressed with the implied author(s) of television programming, especially commercial television. 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 (Citation1997) 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 collective memory; his strictures regarding the physical presence and suffering of the witness are more severe than Peters’. Hence Margalit might not accept my claims regarding media witnessing. 14. Here I am indebted to Sznaider's article, as well as to Peters’ discussions of “dissemination” (Citation1999) and “impersonality” (Citation2005). 15. This unrealized ideal is key to approaches that stress the importance of institutional media power and dominant ideological assumptions in the unequal representation of others. Additional informationNotes on contributorsPaul Frosh Paul Frosh is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) of Communication at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem