Until recently, the scholarship on witnessing in literature, media, and culture has made the assumption that testimony is produced by and addressed to human subjects. This is evidenced, for example, by the semantic field developed around the concept of the witness in public and scholarly discourses, including the connotations of representing a persecuted minority, of addressing the national or global community with an otherwise unknown historical account, or of survival of atrocities to which one has been proximate. Here, the witnesses’ presence at the event which they attest to means that it is something they had lived through and endured in circumstances where not only their own survival, but the event’s inscription in collective memory, has remained uncertain. This special issue on witnessing after the human engages the problem of testimonial account, address, historical proximity, and the ethics and aesthetics of representation in new ways by reaching beyond and decentring the human subject in relation to the question of witnessing. The issue creates a multifaceted and cross-disciplinary platform for the study of testimonial politics, law, philosophy, and culture, while calling into question the fundamental assumptions of witnessing, including its instantiation by a deliberate human agency or its inextricable link to the verbal act of narrativization of violence. Instead, the focus is on extending and reformulating the concept of witnessing in relation to the non-human or post-human.
Some articles featured in this special issue are concerned with relational modes of witnessing, which connects human and non-human actors, including animals, plants, and inanimate objects. Other articles presented here seek to re-think and re-imagine witnessing through diverse scientific and technological vistas, such as artificial intelligence, digitality, and virtual technology, as well as machinic and cyborg technologies, as potential producers of, and stakeholders in, testimonial knowledge. The permeation of the testimonial field by technological and digital innovation raises questions of the political and ethical implications of the outsourcing of witnessing to computers and machines.
The aim of working beyond the limits of the humanist imaginary of the witness as a historical agent, is undertaken in this special issue’s contributions in tandem with feminist and queer studies perspectives, as well as with postcolonial, critical race, and whiteness studies. Finally, articles in this issue also uncouple the nexus of witnessing and verbal narrative, by paying careful attention to the role of senses, silence, affect, gesture, code, materiality, and other non-verbal communicative modes in testimonial practice. If witnessing is, at its core, about entering into ethico-political relation to history, then the essays collected here show how those relations produce divergent forms of testimony and remake in multiple ways the figure of the witness.
The open-ended and never-complete process of becoming-witnesses requires a conceptual disidentification of testimony and human agency, whereby witnessing is envisioned not as a property of the human, but, rather, as belonging to a non-anthropocentric and reciprocal affective space of the encounter with the other. As the articles collected in this special issue demonstrate, attending to witnessing and testimony of, and in response to, other-than-human seems certain to return us to the human. Yet this return is not circular, but rather requires us to reconsider the human itself, the claims to knowledge that sustain it and which it sustains, and the many forms of violence done in service to guaranteeing the privileged status of the human witness.
Issue image: Sky and Water, Carol Heft (2021), by permission of the artist.