On Bearing Witness to Fight Injustice

To my last post, there have been some very critical comments because they had misunderstood a very important assumption that I had neglected to narrate. It is the idea of bearing witness. It is a  newer type of theory that has been established, for the most part, in the writings of Fuyuki Kurasawa from the York University. The following passages are from his book A Message in a Bottle: Bearing Witness as a Mode of Transnational Practice.

So there are two questions that arise:
(1) What is bearing witness?

"Using Celan’s allegory of the poem as a message in a bottle, we can come to understand bearing witness as a web of transnational testimonial practices structured around five dialectically related tasks and perils: giving voice to mass suffering against silence (what if the message is never sent or does not reach land?); interpretation against incomprehension (what if it is written in a language that is undecipherable?); the cultivation of empathy against indifference (what if, after being read, it is discarded?); remembrance against forgetting (what if it is distorted or erased over time?); and prevention against repetition (what if it does not help to avert other forms of suffering?). These testimonial practices are Sisyphean in character, for actors perpetually encounter such perils without transcending them; fragile and unfinished, the work of bearing witness merely parries threats and difficulties integral to the expression and communication of limit-experiences (see Figure 1). In other words, drawing on Ricoeur’s (2000) argument about the work of memory and Derrida’s (2001) use of Freud’s notion of the work of mourning, I am contending that the labour of witnessing such experiential crises is aporetic, for it simultaneously confronts their pure alterity and their normalization, while putting into play – rather than resolving – the tension between these two tendencies."

(2) How does it work? How does "bearing witness" fight injustice?

"To underscore the analytical specificity of the conception of bearing witness employed here, I want to denote two of its defining features: intersubjectivity and publicity. First, witnessing is an intrinsically dialogical process of recognition involving two parties, namely, eyewitnesses and their audiences, who are engaged in processes of address and response through which they establish and negotiate each other’s roles.4 Both primary eyewitnesses (victims and survivors who experienced atrocities) and their secondary counterparts (who witnessed such atrocities first-hand but did not directly experience them, such as journalists and international observers) pursue the representational task of attempting to reconstitute and transmit their first-hand experiences of catastrophe in order to initiate struggles against silence, incomprehension, indifference, forgetting and return; they write messages, place them in bottles and send them out to sea. However, contra monological or monistic paradigms that present testimony as merely an act of personal conscience or of a solitary, heroic individual, we should insist on the inter-subjective character of the transnational labour of bearing witness. Integral to testimonial performances is an appeal to audiences that must in turn respond to it, for both the positions of addressee and addressed are constructed through mutual recognition of each by the other. Those having lived through a particular situation or event only become eyewitnesses to it if and when institutional sanctioning or popular acknowledgement of their status occurs; the bottle must reach land, and others must both read and understand the message it contains. At the same time, testimonial practices vitally depend upon the constitution of audiences, who become such by accepting the moral asymmetry and political responsibility that binds them to those who directly witnessed a limit-experience. Social actors become testimonial audiences by heeding eyewitnesses’ narrative appeals, and responding to their calls for reflection and action about a particular instance of situational or structural violence. Bearing witness requires that addressees pick up the bottles washed up on land, decipher the enclosed messages, ponder them and intervene accordingly with the aim of alerting the world, making sense of what has taken place, cultivating empathy, remembering and preventing the reoccurrence of the immediate or structural circumstances that are at the root of mass suffering."

 So by supplementing bearing witness with history, we can fight injustice. We must accept all the injustices that have happened before we can fight them and we fight them by showing the oppressors all that they have done wrong and still do wrong. We fight without guns or, even, risking tear gas. We fight with pens...is the pen not stronger than the sword? It is. And we will prove it is.