The Victim as the Perfect Witness and Affective Witnessing in the Marketplace
In this cultural moment, it is easy to see how victimhood and suffering have become the currency of so much popular culture, and a route to establishing the authority of the witnessing work of art in the memory marketplace. Indeed, Rothberg argues that trauma as a universal condition has become “a form of cultural capital that bestows moral privilege.”110 The victim thus becomes the perfect moral witness. This is a turn from the previous treatment of trauma, which silenced victims in a marketplace that privileged nostalgia on the one hand and progress on the other. Now we live in an “empire of trauma.”111 The shift in the status of the victim has led to the rise of the victim as a valuable commodity—as Peters puts it, “Not surprisingly, there has been something of a scramble to capture the prestige of the victim-witness.”112 Victim prestige is produced by a combination of their testimony as a novelty product in the market and the symbolic capital conferred by their firsthand presence and suffering.
The market dominance of sympathy and empathy can thus be read as both enabling and disabling witnessing. Lauren Berlant’s work on compassion is illuminating here, as she argues that calls to action that utilize these emotions depend on privilege: “In operation, compassion is a term denoting privilege: the sufferer is over there. You, the compassionate one, have a resource that would alleviate someone else’s suffering.”113 It is a generous impulse to want to alleviate another’s suffering, but the question then becomes—how? Berlant goes on, “When we want to rescue X, are we thinking of rescuing everyone like X, or is it a singular case that we see?”114 Further, as Rosanne Kennedy argues, the risk of compassion is that it may “displace efforts that could be more productively put into working for social justice.”115 These empathic dynamics thus make the outcomes of even citizen-consumer witnessing ambivalent.
Let me give an example: in Sanctuary, a verbatim production by Theatre of Witness (2013, Northern Ireland), several asylum seekers testified to an audience about their reasons for seeking asylum—including familial breakdown, death threats, and gang rape. At the end of the show, which was obviously highly emotive, postcards were distributed to the audience to write to the UK home secretary so that each of us could remediate the testimony we’d received, and call on the officials with hard power to grant asylum to these particular individuals. These postcards were a way for audiences to act in a meaningful way in response to what they had witnessed—to become witnesses themselves. It held the promise of political action, a way to balance the emotional reaction during the moment of the play. Direct political actions like these can be highly effective—yet the worry remained for me that as witnesses we were not making a decision based on the political facts, nor were we protesting the structural inequalities of the system, but merely making a plea for one person (X) based on our sympathetic response to her plight (but not all people like X). And in answering the call to sympathize, and then signing the postcard, were we also appropriating her story to enrich our own—in Puar’s terms, was cultural capital accruing to us, rather than to the “other”?116 And if we turn to Landsberg’s model of prosthetic memory, which gives us the feeling of memory as an extra “limb,” we need to ask—are we, as consumers, simply shopping for feel-good limbs?
At one point in Sanctuary, during the female asylum seeker’s testimony, she became unable to deliver her lines and another performer had to take over. The woman’s onstage silence provoked many people in the audience to cry—and I couldn’t help but think that this was not either fair to her (clearly she was still traumatized) or fair to the audience (in the wake of such an emotional performance, it is very difficult to say “I want to think about it before signing the postcard”). And this brings us back to agency—was the postcard signing an indication of being an active or a passive audience, was it an act of witnessing or not? And once the card had been signed and given to a volunteer, were we done? Was that, as Berlant puts it, “the apex of affective agency among strangers”?117
Like Berlant, Givoni questions the capability of witnessing to solve political problems, suspicious of how witnessing is currently marketed as “the most available solution for an increasingly pressing need to cope with political evil.”118 Both these critics instead see affective witnessing not as the solution but a form of amelioration. This is doubly the case when we consider the relatively small scale of the theatre audience—as Upton argues, theatre “does not constitute the public sphere in the way that mass media and particularly television can.”119 Indeed, the theatre of painful memory represents a potentially even smaller-scale market segment. Even a popular show, which tours and enjoys high market impact, cannot change the market structures—or the political and social inequalities beyond the memory marketplace. In fact, if we return to the idea that each “untold story” derives much of its popularity from consumers who constantly crave novelty in content and form, we can then understand why the rise in, for example, theatre shows that perform stories of injustice based on gender or racial inequality do not change the dominance of white patriarchal culture. Instead of actually changing the marketplace, these narratives create new niche market segments for audiences that want to consume those narratives—thereby expanding, but not fundamentally changing, the market.120 Segmentation has been a feature of markets for many decades, as a response to overcapacity that, in turn, creates a need for “market differentiation and for the discovery of new niche” market segments.121 In this model, then, consumer demand leads to the creation of market segments, rather than the decentralization of power.
Hope, Witnessing, and the Marketplace
Do all these limits make theatrical witnessing redundant? I point to all the potentialities of witnessing with a sense of optimism, and I note all the contradictions with a heavy heart. But overall, I believe that even in a crowded and consumption-driven marketplace, witnessing memory can make a difference. I love theatre, and I believe in its transformative power; I believe that we do have the opportunity for community at the theatre; and I believe that theatre can make us better citizens, as well as witnesses. Like Dolan, I see in the choice of audiences to watch live performances as a group “potential for intersubjectivity not only between the performer and spectators, but among the audience as well.”122 Out of that intersubjectivity may grow the grounds of real change. I offer two examples of effective memory plays as a way of gesturing toward the utopian possibilities of theatrical witnessing in practice.123
In By Heart (2015), the Portuguese theatre maker Tiago Rodriguez enlists the audience in a memory collaboration. Rodriguez invites ten audience volunteers to sit onstage with him, and to learn “by heart” one of Shakespeare’s sonnets: “Sonnet 30,” which begins “When to the sessions of sweet