Bearing Witness: Three Digressions Through Art

Modern identity politics is often denigrated; depicted as an irrational mass shouting defiantly about their experiences; a moment of politics that erases the good old fashion posturing of parliamentary debate. While identity politics, like all politics, operates in oppositional or even sometimes fascistic ways, it remains unclear it is theoretically unsound. This piece seeks to locate the root of modern identity politics. That root is born out of bearing witness, giving an account of oneself. This is best explored through an engagement with Adornian pessmism. When Adorno claimed, amongst the ruins of Europe and the aftermath of WWII, that “to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric” he in essence began to question, in effect, whether bearing witness could have a political function.[1] This essay shows how the acts of bearing witness to the horrors of the holocaust ran counter to Adorno’s pessimism. Adorno’s negative comments are set up in relation to a debate about exteriority and critique, an issue that can be illuminated by the use of outward gaze in modernist painting. This constitutes the first digression. With this background, a discussion of the poetry of Paul Celan as a poetry that bears witness to the horrors of the holocaust ensues. It is through Paul Celan’s poetry that we begin to see how bearing witness is political and thus runs against Adorno’s pessmism. This is the second digression. Finally Gregor Von Rezzori’s book Memoirs of an Anti-Semite is discussed in relation to Celan’s poetry. This is the third digression. In this comparison of the poetry of Paul Celan and Memoirs of an Anti-Semite, we can discover a political use for bearing witness that undoes Adorno’s glum proposition and allows us to see how bearing witness, giving an account, serves a proper political function.

I.

“Think more than you paint”John Russell To Tom Roberts, circa 1885In the introduction to Foucault’s The Order of Things, he provides a careful analysis of Velasquez’s painting Las Meninas (Maids of Honour).Foucault notes the outward gaze of the subjects of the painting – the various maids of honour, dwarves, courtiers, and Velasquez himself all gaze out from within the painting, their sight drawn to where any viewer of the painting would be, their gaze drawn to the exteriority of the painting. However what would be a radical gesture is turned back in itself, as at the centre of the painting there is another image: two figures, presumably contained within a mirror. Indeed Foucault identifies this as a mirror, and the objects within as King Philip IV and his wife Mariana.[2] Located then, in the centre of the painting, is the figure of the sovereign. The outward gazes from the various figures within the painting curve back into the painting itself, as what they are gazing at is given representation itself, the exteriority is reinscribed as the interiority of the painting. The viewer who stumbles across the painting remains a spectator, watching the seen unfold as an objective witness. Indeed, Las Meninas is part of an era of Baroque paintings that includes Rubens magisterial paintings, an era when form, style and representation all strived for objective representation. This is the same era Vermeer attempts to properly capture the effects of light, it is the era where even paintings of biblical scenes are highly detailed and extraordinarily lifelike.The attempt to create hyperrealistic paintings always requires a self-contained universe: the scenes themselves are supposed to have happened in a curtailed space. This is why in Las Meninas the gaze of the subjects of the painting turns back into the painting and Velasquez gives representation to what captures the gaze of Las Meninas. To do otherwise would be the blur the boundary between viewer and painting, to erase the status of the viewer as objective witness to a scene, and with it to undo the striving of objectivity for which the works, intellectual or artistic, of the 17^th century oftenaspired.This point about objectivity may seem obscure, but can be emphasised by way of a comparison. Going forward almost 300 years from Las Meninas, consider Conrad Felixmuller’s 1924 Myself, drawing (Self-Portrait with Nude) (see figure2).