Commentary Witnessing: US citizenship and the vicarious experience of suffering

experience ’ one must ‘direct attention to the instructions of the game itself ’ (1998: 7). This commentary essay examines how citizens learn, and are expected, to bear witness to human suffering through mass mediated depictions. Citizens ‘bear witness’ through both mundane and extraordinary forms of media documentation. Professional and amateur photographic displays of atrocity, for instance, call on viewers to carefully attend to images of suffering and its causes as a practice of ceremonial mourning, but they can also be used to support military action. Even in its apparently ceremonial forms, then, acts of mass mediated witnessing have a necessarily political component. Posters in the windows of retail stores around cities and small towns in the US urge passersby to ‘remember the victims of September 11th ’ not only as a ceremonial act of commemoration – these dead victims also play the lead role in justifications for the US/UK war on terrorism. While the war on terrorism gives meaning to the exhortation to pay witness to the memory of September 11th victims, war supporters have also made invisible many of the civilian and soldier-victims of US and UK military action in the war. Built into the act of bearing witness, then, comes the political distinction between victims whose suffering matters, and those whose does not. Witnessing constitutes a form of selective attention to victims – and sometimes identification with victims – in ways that often make invisible citizens’ own participation in state violence against others. To examine this phenomenon more closely, this essay draws on recent scholarship that probes the link between mass media depictions of suffering and current models of spectatorial citizenship: Susan Sontag’s (2003) Regarding the Pain of Others, several essays and a book by Barbie Zelizer, John Ellis ’ (2000) Seeing Things: Television in the Age of Uncertainty, and John Durham Peters ’ 2001 essay ‘Witnessing.’ Witnessing as a ‘modern ’ mass mediated experience of suffering Witness is the paradigm case of a medium. (Peters, 2001: 709