Witnessing as a Field

Abstract

Witnessing has recently become a contested issue in media scholarship, constituting a complex practice midway between experience and agency. Occupying a distinctive place in contemporary media studies, witnessing combines the evolution of media technologies — production, transmission, and representation — with weighty questions of morality and audience responsibility. Arguably, the very definition of what it means to be a witness in this day and age has changed with the expansion of media technologies. This chapter is an attempt to rethink the stakes and implications involved in media witnessing. It is beneficial to open by outlining the main points to be developed in the following discussion. (1) Witnessing, we suggest, is subject to a constant struggle and is hence an inherently political practice. (2) We regard the act of witnessing as contingent upon the specific event witnessed; thus, the ontology of witnessing is dependent on its context, as different events give rise to different modalities of witnessing. (3) As a political practice relative to a specific event, witnessing transpires in what Pierre Bourdieu (1977) designates as a field. Thus, witnessing is regarded as a field comprised of various agents, interests, positions, and resources. (4) The field of witnessing operates on terms of trust, which is the basic currency among the agents and the object for which they compete. The final section of the chapter will be devoted to a case study, an analysis of the field of witnessing in two documentary films produced shortly after the clashes in the Jenin refugee camp in the West Bank in March 2002. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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