Testimony and Democracy

Testimony, by Yale literary critic Shoshana Felman and psychoanalyst Dori Laub, examines pedagogical and clinical lessons on listening to human suffering and listening to traumatic narratives. They askWhat are the possibilities for liberation from traumatic human experiences? How can we keep memories alive so that we can learn from them? Instead of erasing memory and forgetting history (or selectively sharing some memories while silencing others), the harsh realities of the ideology that drives our history, the history of America's violence and domination, need a place in the classroom. In the classroom, we generally ignore the voices and experiences of students, many of whom have their own traumatic narratives. How can we, teachers, bring testimony -- what Felman and Laub call bearing witness to a crisis or trauma -- to the classroom? By reading and telling stories.

 Claude Lefort, in Democracy and Political Theory  (1988), writes that modern democracy is a contested space of power, knowledge, and the law arguing that modernity is marked by the loss of all "markers of certainty," which means that knowledge and the law depend up on the contested discourses that articulate them. In the larger project of my work about thick democratic pedagogy and using the novel to teach about atrocities, I see this notion of democracy playing out in the classroom. It may seem an unfair analogy to define the classroom as a microcosm of the state, but traditionally the teacher has claimed a near totalizing power in the classroom speaking over the voices of the students. Lefort argues that the only remedy to totalitarianism in the state is a democratic space "wherein no one can claim to know the truth, no one can claim to occupy the space of power"; in other words, the plurality of voices debate "what has been established and what ought to be established" (Lefort 18). Arendt, on the other hand, challenges this remedy suggesting a "factual truth" as the foundation of this debate, which can be established only through testimony of witnesses. (This testimony, you will see in the gacaca of the Rwanda genocide trials where witnesses testify in community courts.)

Birmingham argues that "by testifying to factual reality and thereby making its impact felt, bearing witness breaks into the passive "spectatorship" of those who view this suffering, awakening them to the shock of reality" (212). How do most people understand testimony, however? Felman, in Testimony, explains:

In its most traditional, routine use in the legal context -- in the courtroom situation -- testimony is provided, and is called for, when the facts upon which justice must pronounce its verdict are not clear, when historical accuracy is in doubt and when both the truth and its supporting elements of evidence are called into question.  The legal model of the trial dramatizes, in this way, a contained, and culturally channeled, institutionalized, crisis of truth. (Felman 7)

Birmingham, however, clarifies that the "crisis of truth" is not the "crisis of relativism." What is relative is the "unpredictability and unprecedented nature of the events themselves," so bearing witness works to make known that which exceeds our frame of reference and challenges cultural values, political institutions, and social mores because we are asked to bear witness to a testimony for which we, ourselves could not give. We can see the trauma of bearing witness to the event and the trauma of hearing the testimony. Birmingham writes of Arendt, "To bear consciously the burden of our century is to bear the shock of reality that, she argues, has exploded our traditional categories of understanding" (213).  Only by bearing witness to the unprecedented, will we be able to 'take our bearings in the world' (Arendt Eichmann in Jerusalem 322). What is useful about Felman's explanation of testimony is her notice that language is in process. Testimony is not the verdict or the knowledge but is rather a discursive practice -- to testify is to tell, to promise, to produce a speech as material evidence for truth. It is a speech act. Birmingham writes, "As a discursive practice, testimony requires a plurality of witnesses who testify to the event, to what happened, and yet there is not definitive or conclusive account: (213). And this is why I see narrative as so valuable to the thick democratic pedagogy and fiction as one way of weaving together the plurality of witnesses who testify to the event. Democracy is as Lefort said "marked uncertainty" and a democratic space must embrace the discursive practice of bearing witness rather than the comfort of a historical fact or plot so ubiquitous in textbooks and encyclopedic sources.  Of course, this brings up the relation between testimony and history. LaCapra suggests that all memory is "both more and less than history" because traumatic memory is difficult to assimiliate into a speech act and thus a historical discourse. The language will remain insufficient for rendering a memory that is unrepresentable and incomprehensible. Can a witness craft a testimony that situates the individual testimony within a larger narrative framework so that "we" can derive meaning?  For this reason the artistic skills of a novelist can support this process, but then is it any less than history once a memory is re-rendered? Does the production of a novel constitute an act of witness? And can that production facilitate the construction of a global education?

Martin Jay presents a distinction between "first order narrative" and a "second order narrative" ( "Of Plots, Witnesses, and Judgements"). First order narratives are testimonies that provide material evidence for factual reality. Second order narratives  rely on this material evidence for their accounts.  He states that there are no "linguistically unmediated facts" in that facts require a witness and the language of testimony is discursive; in other words, facts are narrated by witnesses. To hear the first order narrative, requires that one has a voice and that this voice has space to speak testimony.  Does the novel create a fiction from these voices much as America has silenced voices in its history? How can we help students to distinguish between truth and a lie? If we can create a thick democratic space of learning  -- and by thick I mean beyond thin democratic approaches of majority rules and certainty -- students can learn the discipline of bearing witness to events and bearing witness to testimony"what is and appears to them because it is" (Arendt, "Truth and Politics" 229).

Felman suggests that literature can be an alignment between witnesses.  In her research about the response of American graduate students to videotaped testimony of Holocaust survivors, Felman discovers how the symptoms of trauma appear to be mirrored in the students to demonstrate how traumatic narrative affects both the writer and reader. Felman argues that traumatic narrative does that work that few other mediums can -- it erases differences of ethnicity, socioeconomic status, cultural and national to unite humanity to some degree. There is a material of truth in this testimony that creates a material of humanity -- one that is complex and powerful and, in many ways, undeniable. Perhaps this is a utopian vision of community because even thought in testimony the silenced or marginalized voices can speak their stories of trauma, the question remains who is authorized to hear and interpret those stories. What if the listener is to distant from the trauma to have this response that Felman examines?  The question is "how can the witness be heard"?  How should the listener or the witness to the witness listen? Is this question too deep? Is it possible that there will be a visceral response much like that which Felman describes in her graduate students witnessing the stories of Holocaust survivors? Can teachers and students do what Spivak asks in The Post-Colonial Critic?

What we are asking for is that....the holders of hegemonic discourse would de-hegemonize their position and themselves learn how to occupy the subject position of the other rather than simply say, 'O.K., sorry we are just very good white people, therefore we do not speak for the blacks.' That's the kind of breast-beating that is left behind at the threshold and then business goes on as usual. ( 121 )

I think this where we, teachers and students, have to go if we are to engage in thick democratic practice. We do a lot of "this is so awful" and "this makes me want to cry" only to go home to our lives, which are not all without trauma, but we certainly move on to the usual.  Can trauma be a universal signifier? Are there democratic conditions we need to satisfy in the classroom to welcome testimony, or is the ability to beat witness inherent in humanity?

• Arendt, Hannah.  "Truth and Politics,” 227–264. In Between Past and Future. Enlarged edition. New York: Penguin Books, 1977.
• Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem. New York: Penguin, 1963.
• Birmingham, Peg. "Elated Citizenry: Deception And The Democratic Task Of Bearing Witness." Research In Phenomenology 38.2 (2008): 198-215. Academic Search Premier. Web. 5 July 2012.
• Felman, Shoshana, and Dori Laub. Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and  History. New York: Routledge, 1991. Print.
• Jay, Martin. “Of Plots, Witnesses, and Judgments,” 97–107. In Probing the Limits of Representation.
• LaCapara,  Dominick. History and Memory After Auschwitz (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), p. 20.
• Lefort, Claude. Democracy and Political Theory. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1988. Print.
• Spivak,  Gayatri Chakravorty. The Post-Colonial Critic: Interviews, Strategies,Dialogues (New York: Routledge, 1990), p. 121.