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Contents
Preface to the Paperback Edition: No More Excuses
Elihu Katz

vii

Acknowledgments

ix

Notes on the Contributors

Introduction: Why Media Witnessing? Why Now?

Paul Frosh and Amit Pinchevski

Part I Perspectives on Media Witnessing

1 Witnessing
John Durham Peters

23

An Afterword: Torchlight Red on Sweaty Faces

John Durham Peters
2 Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass Media, and the
Imagined Lives of Strangers
Paul Frosh
3 Mundane Witness
John Ellis

42

49
73

4 Witness as a Cultural Form of Communication: Historical

Roots, Structural Dynamics, and Current Appearances
Gnter Thomas
5 Archaic Witnessing and Contemporary News Media
Menahem Blondheim and Tamar Liebes

89
112

Part II Performances of Media Witnessing

6 Witnessing as a Field
Tamar Ashuri and Amit Pinchevski

133

7 From Danger to Trauma: Affective Labor and the Journalistic

Discourse of Witnessing
Carrie Rentschler

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Contents

8 Scientific Witness, Testimony, and Mediation

Joan Leach

182

9 Witnessing Trauma on Film

Roy Brand

198

Index

216

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1
Witnessing
John Durham Peters

Witnessing is a common but rarely examined term in both the professional 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 programs 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 history 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 competitors 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 experience, 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
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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 Elliss Seeing 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 responsible 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 memory 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 centurys 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 television, particularly nonfiction programming; and a valuable resource for
media analysis. I would concur with Ellis in everything with the exception that witnessing actually carries weighty baggage, if not ontological,
at least historical. Yet this baggage is not only a burden, but also a potential 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 theology, the notion of witness, especially as martyr, developed in early

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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 survivors 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 witness, 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 statement 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 ones 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 ones experience 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

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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 juncture 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 anothers discourse whose
universe of reference diverges from ones own. Like somebody elses
pain, it always has a twilight status between certainty and doubt. A parent 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 epistemological quality of witnessing is ancient, twentieth-century social
science has explored it in detail. Eyewitness testimony, for instance, has
been subject to intense socialpsychological 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, blondes morph into brunettes, and clothes change color like chameleons.
Hats have major effects on recognition, because of the role of the hairline in identifying faces. Post-event tampering, both from inside and

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outside, can also alter testimony. From within, the psychological process 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 constraints 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 ones
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 backdoor 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 standing 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 awareness 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 witnessing. 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 childrens line, cross my heart

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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 witnesses 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 consequences. 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 ideology, 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 extinguishing 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 (anangk). A slave could not appear in
court, but a slaves 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 veracity gap. In our grisly age, torture is both a method of punishment and

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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 complex. 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: parastats, 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 physical 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 justify 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 conviction 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 witness 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).

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To judge from appearances is the fate of all who have to rely on communication for access to others experiences. The martyrs 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 ones body on
the line. Within every witness, perhaps, stands a martyr, the will to corroborate 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. Ones
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 militancy in the survivors voice owes to the battle against oblivion and
indifference. Such militancy is found no less in the martyr, who likewise 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. Imagine 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 witness in the moral sense: to witness means to be on the right side.

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Vclav Havel, Jacobo Timerman, Rigoberta Mench, 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 oppression.) 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 captive and martyr is a founding narrative in European civilization, as in the
case of both Socrates and Jesus. Not surprisingly, there has been something 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 Schindlers List is pretentiously called Witness,
confusing the film and what the film was about.) Witnessing places mortal 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 emperors 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 providing 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 Greenes 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 ones 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 Lus 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.

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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 speaking, 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 civility established a basis for trusting each others 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 instrumentation was motivated in part by the desire to bypass the stains of subjectivity, fallibility, and interest that attach to our sense organs. Scientific
instruments such as the microscope or telescope were thought thinglike, 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 1316), 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 creatures 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 trustworthiness. Among the various standards he offers, key is a hierarchy of
testimony determined by the witnesss proximity to the event: any Testimony, the farther off it is from the original Truth, the less force and
proof it has (1975, pp. 6634). 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).

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Locke reflects the low legal status of hearsay: the reporting of statements 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 secondhand. Each sentence is supposed to be funded by direct sensation, and in
reporting anothers 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, trophies, or other sorts of material evidence (bloodstains). The ideal human
witness would behave like a thing: a mere tablet of recording. The structure 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 scientific 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 disembodiment 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 experience. Since witnesses were supposed to be like machines, machines

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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
Lockes 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 anothers
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 mediated 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 truthfulness. The body is authenticitys 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
Kennedys assassination. In the Gospel of Luke, Christs 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 concentration 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

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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, ones 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 example, 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 honest), 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!
Clintons goal after the speech was to touch as many people as possible,
to spread the charisma of the kings 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 JFKs 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 polish is often better on the CD-player at home? Obviously extra-musical
values shape concert-going: party, spectacle, noise, dance. Even so, live

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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, ones mortal time-line on earth is spent. Touch and eye contact 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 times 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 games 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 profound 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

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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 Williamss phrase, one
waits for a knock on the door. Fortuna, goddess of history and gamblers, 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 principle of broadcasting. It replays the contrast of fact and notion, so central
to modern historiography, a field, like law and theology, whose enterprise 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 coverage. If in visiting the Tower of London I am told that a block of wood
is the one on which Henry VIIIs 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 caption. The caption real ties it to a tradition of testimony passed across
the generations, an accumulation of time that links the block historically to the event. If it has the right label I can ponder edifying lessons
about overweening power and look for traces of martyrs blood; I will
have to work a lot harder if the caption announces that it is only figurative. Live broadcasting, like objects certified as historical, offers the

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Table 1.1

Sorts of Witnessing an Event

Presence in time

Absence in time

Presence in space

BEING THERE
Assembled audience
For example, concert, game,
theater

HISTORICITY
(dead not live)
Serial mass audience
For example, shrine,
memorial, museum

Absence in space

LIVE TRANSMISSION
Broadcast audience
For example, radio, TV,
webcast

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 representation, 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 experience. 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 attitude 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 elses 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

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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. Aristotles 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 certain, 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, completely 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 peoples pain is news;
dead peoples 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 happened 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 sorrow is ethically recalcitrant: because it is fact, we are not protected by the
theaters 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 character, the jealousy the present has for the past. The present may be the

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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 wearing? 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 witnesss 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 contemplating 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 Nietzsches 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).

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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
Rgime (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).
T. Liebes (1998) Televisions 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, 131.
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 Interpretation (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).

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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 published 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, inarticulateness, 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 directions. 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

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

one from testifying coherentlyor at all.
And yet, such incoherence is often part of the authenticating power
of witnessing. A survivors 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 underline 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 television 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 cant describe this horror, I cant.
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 werent 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 performatively 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 happened or started on one night. (It is characteristic of the three ethical
monotheismsJudaism, Christianity, and Islamto memorialize events
that are claimed to be historical and yet also assume a mythic repeatability.) 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

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Afterword

knows, sometimes gives a more limited view than one had in imagination, books, or movies. Being there can immerse one in the indelicate
contingencies and limited points of view that narrative and remembrance 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 Pythons 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 laterusually after all the eyewitnesses are dead. Events are
messy; stories are coherent.
Subjective inarticulateness due to trauma, objective partiality due to
limited accessthese 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 Froshs
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 digits, 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 accomplishments 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 participant 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 eventa
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 bitsprecisely the kinds of circumstantial details a witness would
have known. Imagine the quarrel of interpretations if we had to hear testimony of the people who took part in the Exodus: we might learn a lot,

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but such testimony would probably not be very useful for ritual purposes. 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 Jakobsons distinction, metonymic rather than metaphoric. Witnessing 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 primitive and fallible recording medium for gathering experience. It presents
trophies rather than tropesproofs 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 sanctum of the house that provides the telltale proof of his identity to his
long-lost wife Penelopemuch more than his prowess at battle, voice,
or demeanor, things that might have been mimicked or learned by an
impostor. Froshs 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 distance in space and time. Who is to say who is the real participant in
the Sederthe 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 communication. 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 irreversible 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 refreshment. Perhaps my definition of witnessing depends on a profane sense
of time that once lost is lost forever. Froshs Haggadah presupposes
reversible time. The event is not lost: it presents itself anew for our witness. Religious witnessing perhaps eliminates the need for the passive
face of witnessing and puts all the emphasis on mediated ritual acts of

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Afterword

listening, speaking, eating, and drinking by which we bear active witness 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 historys turning points. Release from the mortal bounds of sensation has
always been the privilege of narrative. Rituals, novels, films, and television 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 reconstructions 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 witnessing 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 precious 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 altogether if we had no witnesses. In this, I think I follow the pragmatist
(or neo-Kantian) principle that sensory evidence, though never determinative 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 borrow from it, such as television, in part because witnessing is always
a rhetoric of commitment. Christian theology no less than Jewish ritual 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 directlythe Last Supper. 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 resurrection. Pauls claims to apostleship, in fact, explicitly downplayed
eyewitnessing: he preferred the testimony of conscience to fleshly

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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 history. As Pauls latter-day disciple Sren 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 memories without events. The downplaying of the sensible in favor of the
intelligible also occurs in the case of the expert witness. Expert witnesses 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 supposed 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 witnessing, moreover, is susceptible to debate in a way that personal-experience
witnessing is not, which fits Daniel Dayans 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 Elliss 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.

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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 longing 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 matters. 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 Jamess
pragmatism renouncing the dream of a mental fusion between people
without also abandoning the question of authenticity or fidelity. Witnessing 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 ability 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 peoples pain is news; dead peoples 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.

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Index
Tables are indicated by table, notes by n.; e.g. absence in space, 13, 38 table 1.1.
9/11, 3, 712
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, 18990
affective labor, 1589, 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, 4245
epistemological transmission, 48
Haggadah, the, 4445
historicist pilgrims, 43
The Life of Brian (Python), 44
Odysseus, 45
Paul of Tarsus, 4647
presence, 43
religious ritual, 47
religious witnessing, 4547
sensory evidence, 24, 46, 47
sensory witness, 47
speech, failure of, 43
veracity gap, 48
witnessing, 45, 4748
witnessing, authenticating power
of, 43
anangk (Greek), 28
anchor persons, 107108
archaic witnessing, 15, 11227
Boltanski, 114
configurations of, 118
Cook, 1212
Ellis, 11213
Frosh, 11213

Hebrew Bible, see Bible, the

journalism, 114
journalists, 121
law-court model of witnessing, 115
newspaper, the, 1213
newspaper reporter, 121
public witnessing, 119, 125
radio, 1247
reporter, the term, 11314
telegraph, the, 1223
television, 1247
two-step model, 113
The Archive of Feelings (Cvetkovich),
166
Aristotle, 28, 39, 191
Ashuri, Tamar, 15, 13355
Asian tsunami of 2004, 10, 11
atrocities, 93, 110n.2
audience, 1401, 1456, 155
audiovisual media
affect television, 1089
audiovisual mediation of
witnessing, 60
audiovisual realism, 55
communicative structures/aesthetics
of, 89
dubious witnesses, 36
law and religion, 925, 105
media witnessing and, 50
representation, discursive notion of,
76, 823
viewers, insulating from, 69, 75
witness, carried/provided by, 75
witnessing, 1315, 234
see also radio; television
audiovisual realism, 55
Augustine, 104
Badiou, Alain, 47
Bakri, Mohammad, 1478
216

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Index
basanos (Greek), 28
The Battle of Jenin (Shalev), 147, 153
distance and proximity, use of,
1523
Islamic Jihads military wing, 152
Israeli eyewitnesses, 153, 154, 155
Palestinian eyewitnesses, 152, 153,
155
relevance, cues of, 153
Shalevs absence from film, 153
Bauman, Zygmunt, 67
Bazin, Andr, 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, 516
witnessing and, 97, 114
witnessing text and, 5966
Becket, Samuel, 210
being there, 35, 38 table 1.1, 134,
139, 140, 146, 208, 209
Benjamin, Walter, 17, 367, 2035,
212n.5, 8, 213n.12, 16
Storyteller, 2045
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, 11618
dreidel, 118
ed, 11617
Galeed, 116, 117, 118
Gods interaction with man, 118
jurisprudence, 118
media event genre, 115
moed, 118
(Old) Testament, 11718

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217

Ruth and Boaz, story of, 11819

sanctuary of edut, 118
Sinai covenant, 11718, 119, 126
tablets of edut
(testimony/covenant), 118
Ten Commandments, 120
yad or eda, 116
Biblical witnessing, 15, 115, 121, 126
biographical novel, the, 1045
Biography Generators, 103
Blanchot, Maurice, 210
Blondheim, Menahem, 15, 11227
Boggs, James, 1689
Boltanski, Luc, 6, 114, 140
Distant Suffering, 6
Borges, Jorge Lus, 31
Bourdieu, Pierre, 15, 133, 136, 168,
173
Bowling for Columbine (Moore),
17, 200
Brand, Roy, 17, 198211
Bremner, Rory, 81
Brighton Rock (Greene), 31
broadcasting, veracity gap and, 346
distance, 34
Gospel of Luke, 34
presence, 356
presence-at-a-distance, 345
singularity, 35
Bruce, Fiona, 85
camp followers, 2
Caruth, Cathy, 163
Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and
the Impossibility of History,
164
Channel Four, 634
Chouliaraki, Lilie, 42
Christian martyrdom, 95
Christian martyrology, 2930
civil inattention, 6670, 845
civil indifference, 67
Clarke, Alan, 210
Clinton, President, 35
Code of Hammurabi, 93, 94
Colvin, Marie, 162
communicability, 2034, 212n.7, 8

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218

Index

communicable experience, loss of

Benjamin, 2035
Beyond the Pleasure Principle (Freud),
204
communicability, 2034, 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, 2045
time, 205, 212n.8, 9
communication, witnessing, 812
confession, 1034
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, 1089
external deeds of sins, 103
Fourth Lateran Council, 97
genre, 14
Hebrew Bible, 114
inner intentions which led
to sin, 103
judicial torture and, 289
legal poof, source of, 28
Protestant Reformation, 104
public intimacy of, 1089
Puritan traditions, 104
religious, 1035, 109
self-inclusion and, 100
of sins, in front of a priest, 103
television, 108
trust and, 107
witnessing as, 1035
confessional genre, 14
confessional witnessing, 109
confessions, 29, 107, 1089
Confessions (Augustine), 104
Cook, Janet, 1212

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Cot, William, 1745

Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical
Reporting about Victims and
Trauma, 1745
Courting the Abyss (Peters), 42
covenant, 15, 11618, 119, 124,
128n.8, 9
Covering Columbine, 1601, 1706
Bourdieu, 1734
Dennis, 172
Handschuh, 172
Hochhalter, 173
interviewing intrusiveness, 173
journalists, 1712
Meyers, 172
Onion, 172
photographers, 172
Schrader, 172, 173
subjects of, 1712
Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical
Reporting about Victims and Trauma
(Cot and Simpson), 1745
crisis of witnessing, 37
Critique of Pure Judgment (Kant), 204
Cronkite, Walter, 34
cultural forms of communication,
89109
confession, 1034
cultural form of witnessing, patterns
of, 97103
cultural forms, 902
diary, 104
expectations of expectations, mutual,
90
formats and cultural forms,
distinguishing between, 902
genres or formats, 901
high plasticity, 91
inter-systemic fluidity, 92
intra-systemic fluidity, 91
introduction, 8990
law and religion, 925
legal systems, in, 91
novel, 1035
relative stability, 91
television, remarks on witnessing
in, 109

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Index
cultural form of witnessing, patterns
of, 97103
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, 1023
pre-audiovisual media events, 99
presence and absence, relation
between, 97
public rendering of private memory,
98
religious witness, 96, 97, 99100
religious witnessing, 96, 99
re-presentation, act of, 98
seeing to saying, 97
self-inclusion, dimensions of:
mediatization of the body for
meta-messages, 10014;
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

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219

Dennis, Patty, 172

detective fiction, genre of, 80
Deuteronomy, 17:7, 93
Deuteronomy, 19:16, 94
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III,
163
Diana, Princess of Wales, 856
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, 567
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, 812
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, 779
Dispatches (Herr), 164
dissonance-reduction, 27
distance
audience and, 141
Bakri, 152, 153
broadcasting and, 345
celebration of, 45
Covering Columbine, 172
distanced observation, 76

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220

Index

distance continued
Elephant (Van Sant), 211
mediators and, 144
present-at-distance, 134
proximity and realignment of, 67
Shalev, 1512
viewers, freed from being
responsible, 1256
Distant Suffering (Boltanski), 6
distant witness, 7
documentary genre, 148
double aspect of witnessing, 923
double take, 845
dreidel, 118, 128n.11
duBois, Page, 28
dumb media, 24
dumb witness, 33
duration, 205, 212n.5, 9, 213n.13
eda or yad, 116
ed (Hebrew), 15, 128n.7, 15
electronic media, 13, 501
Elephant (Van Sant), 200211
Bowling for Columbine, contrast
between, 200
Buddhist parable, 199
communicable experience, loss of,
2035
criticism of, commentators, 2001
cultural trauma, 2067
degradation, 206
Elias, 208
emotional space, an empty, 2013
emptiness/numbness, portrayal of,
201
everyday horror, 199201
evocation of time, 208
four-dimensional time-space, 208
horror, achieving effect of, 200
loss, performance of, 2067
moods, 202, 211n.2, 4
Nathan, 201
negative performative, 210
nothings, 21011
opening, the, 199200
passage of time, engaging, 2079
performative reading, shift to, 2067
performativity, definition of, 207
performativity of emptiness, 207

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the problem, shifting our sense of,

21011
reasons given, after the event,
21011
suspense, effect of, 209
Ellis, John, 9, 12, 1314, 24, 42, 47, 51,
53, 7387, 106, 11213, 127n.1, 3
Seeing Things, 12
Elsberg, Daniel, 126
embedded journalism, 2, 3
embedded journalist, 2
Enlightenment, the, 32
entertainment genres, individual
confessions in, 1089
enunciator, 59
envisioner, 59
Essay Concerning Human Understanding
(Locke), 323
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, 1434
mediators and, 139
mediators 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, 1378, 1434
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, 267
eyewitness testimony, 14, 267

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Index
false presence, 34
false witness, 92, 94, 99, 1001,
102, 122
false witnessing, 94
Feinstein, Anthony, 160, 168
Felman, Shoshana, 3, 56
field of witnessing
analysis, framework for, 1417;
audience, 1456, 147;
competition, 146; elements,
141, 144; eyewitness, 1434;
mediators, 1445, 1467;
purpose of, 141; zones,
definitions of, 141
Bourdieu, 136
eyewitnesses, 1378
introduction, 133
Jenin, case of: Bakri, 14753; Shalev,
1513
mediators, 13840
overview, 1367
reporters, 13940
theorizing witnessing, 1335;
implicated witness, 134, 135;
Margalit, 1345; Peters, 134;
presence, importance of, 1345;
vicarious witness, 134, 135
trust, 137
film, witnessing trauma on, 198211
first-person journalism, 50
first responders, 1667
Focalization, 65
for-anyone-as-someone audience
dynamics, 656, 69
forensic attitude, 7981
Fortuna, 37, 213n.16
frameworks of knowledge, 139
Frank, Anne, 30
Frank, Robert, 167
Frosh, Paul, 119, 4970, 11213, 135
Fuller, Steve, 190
Galeed, 116, 117, 118
gambling, 367
Gerrard, Nicci, 74
Gilman, Sander, 170
Glenn, Ian, 42
global village, 123
Goffman, Erving, 79

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221

Greene, Graham, 31
Brighton Rock, 31
Gricean maxims, 1878
habitus, 136
Hadron Collider, 185
Haggadah, the, 5660, 70n.5
enunciator, 59
envisioner, 59
as if of witnessing text, 59, 70n.7
Passover Haggadah, 57
Seder meal, 58
Seder rituals, 58
Shoah (Lanzmann), 56
Hahn, Alois, 103
Hall, Stuart, 139
Handschuh, David, 172
Haraway, Donna, 1889
Hardt, Michael, 15960
Hardwig, John, 184
Harris, Eric, 160
Hartman, Geoffrey, 5
Havel, Vclav, 31
hearsay, 7, 323, 35
Hebrew Bible, 114, 118
see also Bible, the
Herr, Michael, 164
Dispatches, 164
hic et nunc, 35
Hilton, Paris, 85
historical dimensions/variations,
1035
confession, witnessing as, 1034
diary, witnessing as, 104
novel, witnessing as, 1034
historicity (or historical
authenticity), 13, 378, 38 table
1.1, 134, 150
Hochhalter, Mary Ann, 173
Hofer, Jan, 107
Hollywood films, 63, 70n.9
Holocaust
bearing witness, 3
crisis of witnessing and, 37
event, as an, 78
Levi, 57
Muselmann, 6
Muselmanners, 5
nature of witnessing and, 30

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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, 623
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, 79
intentionality, 60
intentio operis, 601
Interpersonal Ecology, 612
Intifada (the second), 147
Israel Defense Forces (IDF), 147
James, William, 48
Jenin, 14755
Bakri, 14753
Intifada (the second), 147
Jenin Jenin (Bakri), 14753
overview, 147
Jenin Jenin (Bakri), 14753
Bakri, appearance in, 148
banned, 148
documentary genre, using, 148
documentation, forms of, 148
enunciation of personal experiences,
150
eyewitnesses, 1501
historicity, 150
Israeli Film Board, 148
Nakba, the, 149
narrative, the, 1489
personal experience, enunciation of,
150

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relevance, cues of, 151

testimonies, 14950
testimonies, location of, 14950
victimhood, formation of, 1501
Jesus, 31
journalistic discourse of witnessing,
15878
care work, feminist scholarship on,
160
introduction, 15861
journalistic trauma, 159, 161, 163,
166, 167, 168, 170
PTSD: generalizing journalistic
witness from war zone to
domestic beat, 1616
PTSD and metaphor of first
response, 16670
training films in trauma: Covering
Columbine, 1706
trauma, bringing back to the
profession, 1768
traumatized journalism, 160
journalistic trauma, 159, 1612, 163,
166, 167, 168, 170
journalists, 1078, 121, 167
citizen, 79
Covering Columbine, 1723, 177
disaster marathons, 125, 129n.19
first responders, 1667
Jenin and, 147
legal witnessing, 14
PTSD, 167, 1689, 171
receiving witness, 74
training films and, 1706
see also journalistic discourse of
witnessing; reporters
Judaism, 43, 95
judicial torture, 28
jurors, 734, 76
Kant, I., 204, 212n.6
Katz, Elihu, 42
kilu (Hebrew), 59
Kierkegaard, Sren, 47
King, Martin Luther, 31
Klebold, Dylan, 160
Klemperer, Victor, 30
Knightley, Phillip, 2
knowing, 7, 29, 55, 57, 183

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Index
known unknowns, 85
Kpcke, Karl-Heinz, 107
Kusch, Martin, 192
LaCapra, Dominic, 210, 213n.17
Lanzmann, Claude, 56
Shoah, 56
la question (French), 29
late modernity, 1056
Laub, Dori, 3, 4, 194
law and religion, interconnected roots
of witnessing, 925
atrocities, 93, 110n.2
Christian martyrdom, 95
Code of Hammurabi, 93, 94
Deuteronomy, 17:7, 93
Deuteronomy, 19:16, 94
double aspect of witnessing, 923
Exodus, 20:16, 94
false witness, 94
Gospel of John, 95
Hebraic law, 923
Isaiah, 43:813, 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, 1617, 42, 18295
Leary, Timothy, 43
legal systems, 24, 91
legal theory of evidence, 27
legal witnessing, 14, 94, 96, 101, 102,
1078
anchor persons, 107, 108
journalists, 1078
see also law and religion,
interconnected roots of
witnessing

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223

Levi, Primo, 57, 30, 43

If This is a Man, 6
lex talionis, 94
Liebes, Tamar, 15, 11227
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), 378
recorded, contrast between, 37
local public, 102, 104
Locke, John, 323
Essay Concerning Human
Understanding (Locke), 323
logos (Greek), 28
London bombing, 7 July, 2005, 10
McCann, Madeleine, 85
machines, as excellent witnesses,
1915
Aristotelian scientism, 1912
human-machine interactions, 1923
human-machine reconfigurations,
193
instrumentation, credibility by
ownership or access to, 1934
machine testimony, 192
technology and, 192
Mandela, 31
Margalit, Avishai, 6, 68, 71n.13, 1345
Marriott, Stephanie, 42
Martus (Greek), 29
martyr, definition of, 95
martyrdom, 95, 96, 99100
martyrs, 245, 29, 30, 95, 97, 99, 107,
152
Marvin, Carolyn, 42, 167
mass media, 4970
electronic media, 501
everyday media usage, intersection
between, 10
first-person journalism, 50
introduction, 4951
morally enabling, 51

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224

Index

mass media continued

State of Terror: A Dispatches
Investigation, 49, 50
televisual metaphysics of presence,
50
mass society, 6970
mechanical witness, 33
media
audiovisual, 89, 1314, 23, 24,
36, 105
dumb, 24
electronic, 13, 501
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, 1915
media witnessing, 1, 2, 13
power of, 17
radio, 124
scientific testimony, 17, 183, 184,
186, 1901
scientific witness, 13, 18691
television, 124
veracity gap and, 516
Witnessing (Peters), 51
mediators, 13840, 1445
media witnessing
audience, 1401
audiovisual representation,
767
child of mass society,
6970
definition of, 12
eyewitnesses, 1378
introduction, 13
logic of, 89
mediators and, 13840
as a moral force, 68
non-commitment, 69

March 11, 2011 10:33

MAC/MWG

why now, 119

witnessing witness through, 746
Mench, 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, 378, 38 table 1.1,
134
of liveness, 11, 24, 368, 38
table 1.1, 52, 134, 139
recording, 4, 7, 12, 13, 334, 356,
38 table 1.1, 52
of witnessing, 13, 15, 124, 133,
136, 146
Moed, 118
moods, 202, 211n.4
Moonlight Sonata (Beethoven), 201
Moore, Michael, 17, 200
Bowling for Columbine, 17, 200
moral witness, 6, 1345
mundane witness, 14, 7387
conclusion, 857
definition of, 867
discursive as synthetic, 779
experience of, 825
forensic attitude, 791
introduction, 737
witness communication, 812
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, 11314, 12123, 124,
129n.17, 18
New York Express, 12223
ninth Mosaic commandment, 28
non-commitment, 69
non-humans, 93

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Index
nothing happens, understanding,
210
the nothing itself nothings, 210,
213n.18
objective witness, 334, 182
Ochberg, Frank, 165
(Old) Testament, 11718
Onion, Amanda, 172
ontological baggage, 245, 158, 209
ontological security, 108
Operation Defensive Shield, 49
Ovid, 31
pain
King Herod, 38
live, 389
Poetics (Aristotle), 39
veracity gap and, 2731
Palestinians, 14, 53, 147, 149, 1501,
153, 154
Parasocial interaction, 64
parastats (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, 2341,
428, 51, 134, 158, 183
An Afterword: Torchlight Red on
Sweaty Faces (Peters), 428
Courting the Abyss, 42
Speaking into the Air, 45
Witnessing, 2341
Philosophical Fragments, 47
photograph, as the absolute Particular,
the sovereign Contingency, 9
Pinchevski, Amit, 119, 42, 13355
polygraph test, 29
post-event tampering, 267
post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD)
definition of (DSM-III), 162
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual III,
163
first responders, 1667
first response and, 16670

March 11, 2011 10:33

MAC/MWG

225

fundamentally a disorder of
memory, 168
generalizing journalistic witness
from war zone to domestic beat,
1616
involuntary bodily behavior, 1634
physiological behavior, 1634
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, 434
bear witness, 54
broadcasting and, 356
co-presence, 97, 106
in court, 101
eyewitnesses, 1378, 150, 153
false, 34
first responders, 1667
Gods, 117
importance of, 1345
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, 345
present-at-distance, 134
Protestant Reformation, 104

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226

Index

Psalms, the, 1045

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, 612, 65, 89, 12426
Radio5 Live, 162
rad scientist, 186
Reagan, Ronald, 34
receptivity, 13, 54, 606
recording, 4, 7, 12, 334, 356, 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, 912, 925, 1056, 109
see also law and religion,
interconnected roots of
witnessing
religious witness, 96, 97,
99100, 102
religious witnessing, 14,
456, 107
Rentschler, Carrie, 16, 42, 15878
repetitive possession, 165
reporters
audience, 1401
BBC (Belgian Congo), 139
death touchers, 167
the event and, 77
as eyewitness, 138, 13940, 145
in the field, 53
first responders, 1667
mediators, as extensions and direct
delegates of, 13940, 145
PTSD, 1612, 168, 16970
Risking More Than Their Lives,
1645
term, origin of, 11314, 127n.4

March 11, 2011 10:33

MAC/MWG

training films in trauma: Covering

Columbine, 160, 17076, 177
trauma and, 159, 1601, 1656, 171
traumatized journalism, 160
as traumatized witnesses, 1589
violence, having experienced
(survey), 1689
war reporting, dangers of, 16
the weighty baggage of witnessing,
158
as witness, 121, 166
see also journalistic discourse of
witnessing; journalists
Ricoeur, Paul, 2930
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, 11819
sanctuary of edut, 118
Scannell, Paddy, 42, 78, 81
Scarry, Elaine, 177
Schlinders 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, 1845
introduction, 182
machines, as excellent witnesses,
1915
science journalism, 185
scientific witness
alternative tradition of,
183, 193
introduction, 1823
scientific witnesses, 18691
authority, 190
credibility, 190
Gricean maxims, 1878
mentita, 188
modest witness, 1889

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Index
seventeenth century, 1868
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, 1001
self-assertion, 100
self-attribution, 100
self-thematization, 100
self-inclusions, 100
sensory evidence, 24, 46, 47
sensory witness, 47
Shalev, Noam, 1512
Shapin, Stephen, 187, 188, 195n.3, 6
A Social History of Truth, 187
Shapiro, Barbara, 193
Shapiro, Bruce, 164, 1756
shared world, 10, 11, 204
Sherlock Holmes (Conan Doyle), 80,
87n.1
Shoah (Lanzmann), 56
Silverstone, Roger, 108
Simpson, Roger, 158, 167, 168, 1745
Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical
Reporting about Victims and
Trauma, 1745
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, 834
Sri Lankan Tamil Tigers, 162

March 11, 2011 10:33

MAC/MWG

227

State of Terror: A Dispatches

Investigation, 49, 523, 63, 71n.11
Stimmungen (German), 202
The Sting, 37
Storyteller (Benjamin), 2045
storytelling, the art of, 2045, 213n.12
stranger sociality, 6670
sub poena, 33
Suchman, Lucy, 192
Survivors of the Shoah Visual History
Foundation, 4
Suu Kyi, Aung San, 31
Sweeney, John, 1623
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, 12223
television
affect-television, 108
anchor persons, 1078
archaic witnessing and, 12427
communication itself, witnessing,
812
confessions, 1089
editing, 124, 129n.16, 20
fiction, 122
forensic fictions, 801
individual confessions in, 1089
introduction, 24
journalists, 107, 109
late modernity, changes for
witnessing in, 1056
legal witnessing, 1056, 109
media witnessing, 75
news, 80
programming, thesis for analyzing,
105
religious witnessing, 1056
sense of communitas, 124
a social system for witnessing, 106
televisual metaphysics of presence,
50

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228

Index

Telling Presences: Witnessing, Mass

Media, and the Imagined Lives of
Strangers (Frosh), 4970
civil inattention, 6670
discourse, 49
electronic media, 501
first-person journalism, 50
Haggadah, the, 5660
indifference, 67, 68
introduction, 4951
knowing, 55, 57
law and religion, interconnected
roots of witnessing, 92
layers of non-presence, 53
as a moral force, 689
morally enabling, 51
non-commitment, 69
presence, 49
as receptivity, texts that bear
witness, 606
State of Terror: A Dispatches
Investigation, 49
stranger sociality, 6670
televisual metaphysics of presence,
50
uncivil attention, 67
veracity gap, witnessing and, 516
witnessing, main features of:
Impersonal, 646; Witnessing
Intentionality, 603
witnessing, main features of:
Interpersonal Ecology, 614
witnessing texts, 601
Ten Commandments, 120
tertius (Latin), 29
testamentum (Latin), 29
testimonio, 31
testis (Latin), 29
textual metafunction of language,
612
Thomas, Gunter, 1415, 89109
Timerman, Jacobo, 31
torture
current age, 289
Greek ideology, 28
judicial, 28
la question (French), 29
polygraph test lie detector, 29
put to the question, 29

March 11, 2011 10:33

MAC/MWG

transformation, 96
transubstantiated media, 168
trauma
accounts, 164
bearing witness, 175
concept of, 1701
Covering Violence: A Guide to Ethical
Reporting about Victims and
Trauma (Cot and Simpson),
1745
cultural, 2067
description of (Caruth), 165
on film, see trauma, witnessing on
film
journalistic, 1602, 163, 166, 167,
168, 170
PTSD, 171
repetitive possession, as a form of,
165
theory, 198, 211n.1
training films in: Covering
Columbine, 17076
trauma training curricula, schools
with, 170
trauma theory, 198, 211n.1
traumatized journalism, 160
trauma, witnessing on film
communicable experience, loss of,
2035
Elephant (Van Sant), 199211
emotional space, an empty, 2013
introduction, 1989
loss, performance of, 2067
passage of time, engaging, 2079
the problem, shifting our sense of,
21011
trauma theory, 198
trust
audience and, 141, 155
distributed, 141
eyewitness, 137
false witness, 94, 102
gentlemanly, 190
Jenin and, 154
journalistic witnessing, 1079
mediators, 141
modest witness, 190
news organizations and, 82
produced, 1417

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science and, 32
scientific testimony, 1834, 1901
testimony and, 1901
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, 199211
veracity gap
broadcasting and, 346
objectivity and, 324
pain and, 2731
witnessing and, 504, 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, 1889
moral, 1345
as a noun, 25, 73
objective, 334, 182
passage of time, engaging, 2079
scientific, 18691
sensory, 47

March 11, 2011 10:33

MAC/MWG

229

traumatic, 193
as a verb, 256
Witness (the book), 31
witness as a cultural form of
communication, see cultural
forms of communication
witnesses
9/11, 8, 910
active, 46
anchor persons, 107, 108
audience members, 140, 141
authoritative, 3
BBC journalist (Belgian Congo), 121
Cook, 1212
Covering Columbine, 174
cultural form of, 95102
Elephant (Van Sant), 207
expert, 47
false, 94
Haggadah, the, 57
Holocaust, 34, 5, 8
identity, importance of, 138
Jenin Jenin (Bakri), 147
journalistic, 1067
journalists, 16, 67, 158, 162
jurors, 73
law and, 925
lay witnesses, use of, 140
legal, 97, 99
machines as, 1915
mass media and, 11
organizations as, 634
public, 1245
religion and, 925
religious, 95, 97, 99100, 102
reporters, 167
scientific, 18691
subjective, 47
television viewers, 8, 54
true, 3, 56
unreliability of, 267
untruthful, 801
witnessing
active, 26, 45
archaic, 15, 11227
Biblical, 15, 115, 121, 126
civil inattention, 6670
communication itself, 812
confessional, 109

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230

Index

witnessing continued
cultural form of, 95102
discourse, 49
events, 38
fact and fiction, 3840
Haggadah, the, 5660
by imagination, 98
journalistic discourse of, see
journalistic discourse of
witnessing
knowing, 57
liveness, why, 368
main features of: ideational ecology,
62; impersonal, 646;
interpersonal ecology, 614;
personal, 646; witnessing
intentionality, 603; witnessing
modality, 60, 61
mass media and, 4970
as a moral force, 689
pain and time, 3840
passive, 26, 33
phenomenological characteristic of,
209
post-event tampering, 267
presentness, 209
as receptivity, texts that bear
witness, 606
religious, 14, 457, 108
retroactive character of, 3940
social objectification, 99
sorts of witnessing an event, 38
table 1.1
stranger sociality, 6670
in television, 47, 105107
texts, 601
trauma on film, 198211
two-step model, 113
veracity gap: broadcasting and,
346; objectivity and, 324;
pain and, 2731; witnessing
and, 516
vicarious, 98
see also Witnessing (Peters)
witnessing, as a field
analysis, framework for, 1417;
audience, 14546, 147;
competition, 146; elements,
141; eyewitness, 1445;

March 11, 2011 10:33

MAC/MWG

mediators, 1445, 1478;

purpose of, 141; zones,
definitions of, 141
Bourdieu, 136
eyewitnesses, 1378
introduction, 133
Jenin, case of: Bakri, 14752; Shalev,
1523
mediators, 13840
overview, 1367
reporters, 13940
theorizing witnessing, 1335;
implicated witness, 134, 135;
Margalit, 1345; Peters, 134;
presence, importance of, 1345;
vicarious witness, 134, 135
trust, 137
Witnessing Intentionality, 601
Witnessing Modality, 60, 61
Witnessing (Peters), 12
active witnessing, 26
audiovisual media, 23, 24, 36
broadcasting, veracity gap and, 346
confessions, 29
deathbed confessions, 29
dissonance-reduction, 27
dumb media, 24
dumb witness, 33
Ellis, 24
events, 38
fact and fiction, 3840
false presence, 34
hearsay, 323
historicity (or historical
authenticity), 378
introduction, 235
legal theory of evidence, 27
liveness, why, 368
objective witness, 334
ontological baggage, 245, 158, 208
pain and time, 3840
passive witnessing, 26, 33
polygraph test lie detector, 29
post-event tampering, 267
presence, 356
presence-at-a-distance, 345
recording media, 36
Seeing Things (Ellis), 24
term, analyzing the, 256

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Index
torture, 289
veracity gap: broadcasting and,
346; objectivity and, 324;
pain and, 2731
witnesses, unreliability of,
267
witness: faces of, 26; as a noun, 25;
as a verb, 256
witness protection program, 31
witnessing texts
addressees, interaction between, 57
Althusserian terms, in, 59
as if, of, 59
audiences, 51
bearing witness, 606, see also
bearing witness
generic expectations for, 63

March 11, 2011 10:33

MAC/MWG

231

Haggadah, the, 50, 51

moral point of, 66
witness protection program, 31
Wittgenstein, L., 202, 211n.3, 212n.7
World Trade Center, 9/11 attacks on,
3, 712
yad or eda, 116
Yavin, Haim, 107
YHWH, 95
Young, Allan, 168
Young, Damon, 200
Zapruder, Abraham, 31
Zelizer, Barbie, 42
zeugen (German), 29
Zeugnis (German), 29

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