Hi friends,
I’ve been following along from across the world with updates from the Derek Chauvin trial all week, and the most striking thing is how every witness who takes the stand has expressed their grief and guilt over not having been able to do more to help save George Floyd’s life.
Off-duty firefighter Genevieve Hansen recounted in tears how she pled desperately and unsuccessfully with police to allow her to perform CPR. Darnella Frazier, the then-17 year old girl who recorded the smoking-gun video footage, said she is agonised over whether she ought to have intervened instead of filming. ‘It’s been nights I stayed up apologising and apologised to George Floyd for not doing more, and not physically interacting,’ Frazier recounted on the stand this week, before adding that—despite 10 months of sleepless nights—she is trying her best not to blame herself and other witnesses for Floyd’s death, reminding herself that: ‘It’s not what I should have done… It’s what [Chauvin] should have done’. Cup Foods cashier Christopher Martin, who accepted Floyd’s potentially counterfeit $20 bill, echoed Frazier’s sentiment: ‘If I would’ve just not taken the bill, this could’ve been avoided.’
This is a trial which is supposed to be a referendum on the criminal actions of Minneapolis police officer/murderer Derek Chauvin, not on the panicked reactions of random bystanders. And yet it is the bystanders, the witnesses who were walking their dogs or bagging groceries and just happened to come across a brutal lynching in plain sight, who are forced to bear the misplaced mantle of guilt and shame. Perhaps, like energy, guilt can not be created or destroyed; if the culpable party refuses to accept any guilt, and if systems and structures conspire to enable this elision of responsibility, then everyone else in the vicinity ends up absorbing a sense of guilt by osmosis though they shouldn’t have to.
So what is the role of the witness? In a court of law, to be a witness is a serious responsibility. At least in the many corners of the world grounded in the frameworks of English common law, you can be subpoenaed as a witness. Failure to comply can place you in contempt of the court. (And witness testimony, as we all know from Legally Blonde, can swing a case.) To witness then, entails a civic duty to speak.
Because Christianity was deeply baked into the formation of common law, it’s therefore not surprising that all of this has a Biblical derivation. To witness, in the context of the Bible, is to provide testimony of belief. Each of the Abrahamic religions have core prayers that are, essentially, such a testimony: the Lord’s Prayer, the Shema, the Shahada. The terminology of ‘witnessing’ your religious beliefs is also used to indicate living in a way that reflects these beliefs (the worst insult you can give a pious person is to say they aren’t behaving in a godly way). I’m no theologian but I’d suppose this is probably the origin of why some religions are alllll about proselytising—they feel it’s a form of witnessing, the right thing to do as a manifestation of their beliefs. (I guess this sort of testimony = the spiel that teenage Mormon boys in short-sleeve button-downs do on their mission trips when they go to vulnerable communities and knock on doors in pairs like the creepy twins from The Shining. No/some offense to any Mormons reading this.)
However, the turn of phrase ‘bearing witness,’ which we hear a lot these days, is derived from the psychology realm, where it is rooted in theory around working with trauma survivors. In the psych context, it has to do with validating someone’s experience by being a receptive listener. The idea is that there is healing power in communicating. To bear witness is to provide an empathetic, supportive container, helping the teller to process their experience and reach catharsis. It has less to do with enacting external societal change, and more to do with internal change and personal healing.
But in the journalism and documentary world, we throw around the term ‘bearing witness’ often to refer to the act—on the part of the documentarian—of amplifying, holding space for, sharing a story to a larger audience. I guess this falls somewhere between the two aforementioned definitions. It’s an active role but also a listening role. In my thesis research, I’ve been leaning heavily on the work of theorist Ariella Azoulay, who wrote a somewhat groundbreaking tome called The Civil Contract of Photography. Azoulay’s overarching argument is that images are composed of a complex tapestry of relationships. She problematises Susan Sontag’s well-worn concept of ‘compassion fatigue’ (Sontag herself actually later walked this idea back in her seminal book Regarding the Pain of Others, but the myth of compassion fatigue persists—pun intended—tirelessly). Theory behind compassion fatigue in journalism would suggest that viewers become desensitised to violent imagery, making it less and less effective as a change-making strategy. There are a great many ethical problems with the trend of viral videos depicting racialised violence such as the murder of George Floyd. (In fact, I wrote about this in my very first newsletter, referencing an excellent piece by Zoé Samudzi called White Witness and the Contemporary Lynching).
But compassion fatigue is not really the issue at hand in these cases, at least in my opinion. Azoulay would probably agree; instead of the fallacy of compassion fatigue, Azoulay suggests that there inextricably exists a binding civil contract between image-maker, sharer, viewer at each phase or facet of image making and consumption. This contract is inextricable from the process of creating, consuming, or amplifying imagery. Resultantly, the dramatic or violent image can’t possibly become banal; engagement with it is part of the Terms & Conditions, so to speak.
Specifically, Azoulay spends considerable time discussing the gaze of the subject-participant (we may call the subject a participant largely to denote that they play an active role in their own portrayal). The variety or diversity that the subject-participant’s gaze can comprise ‘undermines the perception that [image-making and image-viewing] taken in disastrous conditions can be described and conceptualised as separate from the witnessed situation’. So in other words, interacting with imagery is a way of bearing witness: of rendering inescapably evident the link between art and civil society and, therefore, underlining the rights and responsibilities of citizens toward one another and from the state. (I would add that this line of thought can be applied to other subject matter beyond imagery.) And what happens when the civil contract is wholly acknowledged and abided by? Well, drawing on Foucault’s framework on the rights of the governed, Azoulay argues that ‘what is attempted is the reformulation of the citizenship of the governed and of the citizens who coexist in the same territory in given historical situations with the hope of making them equal in standing’.
NB that if this sounds really highbrow please be reassured that I poached half of that analysis from my own thesis lit review, and didn’t just come up with it on the fly today. But given news trickling out from the Chauvin trial this week, all of this has been fresh in my mind. I’ll ask again the question I posed at the start of this essay: what is the role of the witness? All I know is that to witness means to hold space for belief, or to profess it, or both. And belief can be a complicated thing, right? Perhaps the most powerful belief of all is that of our interconnectedness: the webs of viewership and community that bind us as one. I’ve been thinking about my role—all of our roles—as witnesses to this injustice and this court case by virtue of consuming media and news updates on it. And I’ve been thinking a lot about the individuals on the witness stand in Minneapolis, and the complicated cocktail of duty, trauma, regret, and anger they must be feeling. Where is the line between misplaced guilt and responsible citizen-community member? Who draws the lines of the civil contract, when civil society proves a systemic failure?
I’m not sure the answers here, and consequently I’m not sure how to wrap up this newsletter. But I’m always interested to hear thoughts on these topics, so drop me a line and let’s chat.
Wishing everyone a lovely long weekend. Catch you next week,
Maddy