MATERIAL WITNESS
Media • Forensics • Evidence

Susan Schuppli MIT Press 2020

This book introduces a new operative concept—material witness—an exploration of the evidential role of matter as both registering external events as well as exposing the practices and procedures that enable such matter to bear witness. Material witnesses are non-human entities and machinic ecologies that archive their complex interactions with the world, producing ontological transformations and informatic dispositions that can be forensically decoded and reassembled back into a history. Material witnesses operate as double agents: harboring direct evidence of events as well as providing circumstantial evidence of the interlocutory methods and epistemic frameworks whereby such matter comes to be consequential.

Organized in the format of a trial, Material Witness focuses on the entanglement between media, law, aesthetics, and politics and moves the reader through a series of cases each of which progresses our understandings of the ways in which materials become contested agents of dispute around which certain stake holders gather. In pursuing this research, I examine a wide range of materials that have recorded trace evidence of the violence that generated their contexts and explore the institutional and disciplinary protocols that enable their latent histories to be rendered intelligible and made to speak, even if their ‘speech acts’ oftentimes fall upon deaf ears or challenge accepted truths. My cases are drawn from historical contexts (1970s) to contemporary political situations that are still unfolding (Sri Lanka) and reflect upon events in which different forms of technical media have combined to record a violation or transgression. Indeed what each of the cases highlights is the degree to which a rearrangement of matter exposes the contingency of witnessing soliciting questions about what can be known in relationship to that which is seen or sensed, about who or what is able to bestow meaning onto things, and about whose stories will be heeded or dismissed. Consequently the book also reflects upon the specific requirements that must be met to secure ‘legitimate’ acts of witnessing from legal tribunals to climate change summits as they adjudicate over whether certain kinds of observational practices and testimonial methods should be enlisted or rejected. It is within these institutional forums that “witnessing” can itself be witnessed, for it is here that it achieves its most prominent articulation as a distinct realm of procedural expression subject to agreed-upon conventions that turn on questions of expertise and direct experience.

In as much as Material Witness seeks to trouble settled understandings of the concepts that organize its case studies, it also engages directly with the institutional logics that structure their difference in order to expand acts of witnessing to more-than-human realms. Throughout I’ve tried to account for the myriad ways in which the responsiveness of matter to external forces demands an acute and renewed sense of material specificity in order to grasp the full political implications that such ongoing changes or interactions might yield. As a conceptual imperative and practical project my aim is ultimately to relink the material world and its affordances with the space of the aesthetic, the juridical, and the political.