Abstract
Illness and trauma challenge self-narratives. Traumatized individuals, unable to speak about their experiences, suffer in isolation. In this paper, I explore Kristeva’s theories of the speaking subject and signification, with its symbolic and semiotic modalities, to understand how a person comes to speak the unspeakable. In discussing the origin of the speaking subject, Kristeva employs Plato’s chora (related to choreo, “to make room for”). The chora reflects the mother’s preparation of the child’s entry into language and forms an interior darkroom, the reservoir of lived experience, from which self-narratives issue. Unable to speak of their suffering, traumatized individuals need someone to help them make room for a time of remembrance, someone who is a willing and capable listener. I call such a person a healing witness. Through the mediating presence of the healing witness, fragmented memories of trauma are recreated and incorporated into self-narratives that are sharable with others. Unfortunately, opportunities for witnessing are vanishing. In the last section, I examine the failure of modern media and communication technologies to bear (“hold,” “carry,” “transport”) acts of witnessing. I argue that they perturb the semiotic. According to Kristeva, meaning arises from the dialectical tension between the semiotic (drives and affects) and the symbolic (logic and rules) and is threatened by arid discourse, psychosomatic illnesses, and outbreaks of violence when the semiotic is not represented. Unless we open technology to the imaginary, we risk losing the capacity to bear witness to one another and to create narratives and connections that are meaningful.
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Notes
In general, the term survivor will be used in this paper to refer to anyone dealing with any type of trauma, including illness, even in some cases where another word, such as patient, might be more appropriate. The word survivor draws attention to the strength and courage exhibited by those who struggle with the challenges posed by traumatization.
Although people vary in their capacities to handle life crises and repair and rebuild self-narratives, the rebuilding that follows trauma, as demonstrated, for instance, in the life and work of Frankl (1959), can be constructive and empowering.
Ulanov is referencing Jackson’s (1992) observation that many of the Psalms express a "yearning for a listener who cares" and that "their place over many centuries make it clear that listening has been viewed by many as having the potential to ease a person's distress and suffering" (p. 1624).
The difference is that in the holding presence of the healing witness the amplification of the semiotic is safeguarded. Kristeva (1986) tells us that whereas in poetry the semiotic is discharged (catharsis), in analysis it is also named. Writing about trauma can be especially hazardous if not contained, as attested by the number of authors (Améry, Bettelheim, Borowski, Celan, Kofman, Levi, etc.), who, having survived the Holocaust, whether in the camps or in hiding, and having found the courage to write about their ordeals, nonetheless, have committed suicide. "If one talks about trauma without being truly heard or truly listened to," Laub (1992a) warns, "the telling itself might be lived as a return of the trauma—a re-experiencing of the event itself" (p. 67). For a sensitive discussion of this topic from a Kristevian perspective in the life and work of Hofman, see Edwin (2002).
Janet was three years younger than Freud, but it appears that many of his ideas predate those of Freud. On several occasions, Janet complained that Freud had taken his ideas and renamed them without attribution (Ellenberger 1970). Whereas Janet (1919/1925) spoke of the subconscious (a term he coined), Freud referred to the unconscious. The same is true, Janet claimed, regarding his notion of psychological analysis, which Freud renamed psychoanalysis, and his description of narrowing the field of consciousness, was called repression in Freud's work (Ellenberger 1970). Ellenberger adds to the list "Janet's ‘function of reality' which was transposed into psychoanalysis under the name ‘reality principle,'" and "‘automatic talking’” which was changed to “Freud’s method of free association" (p. 539). The most striking similarity in Ellenberger's opinion "is that between [Freud's] psychoanalytic transference and Janet's systematic use of those varieties of rapport between therapist and patient that he called ‘somnambulic influence’ and ‘need for direction’ " (p. 539). Freud did acknowledged using Janet's "subconscious fixed ideas" and its cure via, what Freud and Breuer called, "catharsis" (Ellenberger 1970).
To illustrate the importance of this point, Janet (1919/1925) uses the analogy of a sentinel who watches over a camp. Upon encountering the enemy, the sentinel must either fight or flee. In either case, if he survives, he must make it back to the captain so that he can report his experience to him using words. He cannot reenact what actually took place. The experience must be organized into a "recital of the event to others and to ourselves, and this recital [must be put] in its place as one of the chapters in our personal history" (p. 57). This chapter can then be retold in ways that take into account many variables, including the social contexts of the teller's own life (as soldier, father, and friend) and that of his listeners (as captain, child, and friend).
Van der Hart et al. (2006) remark that inclusion of Janet's work in their text on trauma and its treatment, entitled The Haunted Self, "is not a romantic flight into history" (p. 132) but substantive.
Howell (2005) says the following regarding Janet's theory of trauma, "the key premise of his theory on trauma and dissociation is that when people are terrified or overwhelmed by extreme emotion, they are unable to assimilate the experience into already existing mental frameworks, and are therefore unable to link the experience with the rest of personal history. Overwhelming terror or overwhelming ‘vehement emotion' interrupts the coherence of experience; as a result, the synthesizing functions of the psyche fail. This is still the key premise of trauma theory today" (p. 52).
Erdelyi (1994) defines Janetian dissociation as an "insufficiency of binding energy, caused by hereditary factors, life stresses, or traumas, or an interaction among them, [that] results in the splitting off of personality clusters from the ego, the core personality. The split-off clusters or fragments constitute minipersonalities or, if they cohere, an alternate personality" (p. 9).
Van der Hart et al. (2006), for instance, note that in Western societies, "there is much outrage expressed that abuse happens, but there is little treatment accessible to survivors, even though we know that childhood abuse often has devastating and life-long consequences. Our society seems to have a depersonalize awareness in which people can feel comfortable in being aware enough to acknowledge a problem, but not to the degree that they demand that difficult and complex social and interpersonal changes be made. Thus on both individual and social levels there if often virtually no support for survivors to realize their devastating experiences" (p. 153).
Kristeva's theory of language is based on a Freudian model of language with "its emphasis on the presence of the body at all levels of rationalization" (Gambaudo 2007, p. 18). According to Keltner (2011), "For Kristeva, Freudian psychoanalysis is the only theoretical discourse that takes as its task an analysis of the threshold of the speaking being" (p. 28). In Kristeva's (1974/1984) estimation, philosophies of language "are nothing more than the thoughts of archivists, archaeologists, and necrophiliacs" (p. 13). Missing is the body and a consideration of how desires and drives are put into language. To illustrate the difference, consider Gellner's (1968) rather disparaging description of ordinary language philosophy (espoused, for example, by Austin, Wittgenstein, and Searle): "… the world is just what it seems (and as it seems to an unimaginative man about mid-morning), therefore, naturally language is but a set of activities in it. What else could it be? … language is found, on examination, to be but a set of tools for mundane … purposes …" (p. 23). Language is not a tool for Kristeva, nor is it a subject that can be studied independently from the speaking subject, as Chromsky's treatment of language suggests (Kristeva 1980). Rather, Kristeva's theory of language, encompassing as it does both the mundane and the imaginative (as it might flow from the pen of a poet late at night, to extend Gellner's analogy to Kristeva), is concerned with language as a process that issues directly from the body and its drives (the unconscious) and how these are linked to the symbol and produce the subject.
Or Lacan's Imaginary. Although Kristeva's treatment of the symbolic resonates with Lacan's order of the symbolic, her notion of the semiotic was influenced more by Husserl’s philosophy than Lacan's orders of the real and the imaginary (Keltner 2011). For Lacan, the Symbolic refers to the social order and the law that legislates relations with others and the self. The real is material and inaccessible to language. The imaginary, which is pre-symbolic, yet structured by the symbolic, is related to the child's formation of the ego and its (mis)identification with caretakers (seeing himself as autonomous and whole when in fact he is dependent and fragmented). For Lacan and Freud, the child's union with the mother (imaginary order) is cut by the law and the threat of castration (the symbolic). In other words, he enters the symbolic order by separating from the mother. Kristeva's semiotic, although sharing some features of both the real and the imaginary, differs significantly. As Keltner explains, "[The semiotic] is excessive to language (like the real) and yet structured by it (like the imaginary). However, the semiotic is not characterized as inaccessible or as (completely) unsymbolizable" (Keltner 2011, p. 24). For a discussion on Husserl's influence on Kristeva's conception of the semiotic, see Keltner (2011).
The semiotic expressions of the infant presupposes, according to Kristeva, "that the possibility of language exists either as a genetic program that allows the child to speak one day, so that the echolalias are stages before this possibility of speech, or as a social environment—the child is already in an environment where the parent speaks, his desire to speak already exists in the discourse of the parents, and so the echolalias appear in this environment. In short, there is an already there of language" (Guberman 1996, p. 21).
The mirror stage, as Lechte and Margaroni (2004) note, is "the main paradigm for Lacan's split subject … in the course of which the human infant learns to recognize itself in its mirror image. Through its identification with the image … the infant is able to separate itself from its confusing experience of fragmentation and to bring its disparate body parts into a whole. If the Lacanian subject is split this is because, as Lacan emphasized, it can see itself where (based on experience it knows) it is not. The Lacanian subject, then, speaks (will learn how to speak) across a gap, the gap between ‘here' (the body-in-parts) and ‘there' (the illusionary whole)… By contrast, Kristeva's subject is split because semiotic motility erupts from within its speaking position, destabilizing and rendering it inhospitable to any ‘One'" (p. 26).
This is what Freud calls the degree zero of identity, the primary identification (Kristeva 1994/1996). Gambaudo (2007) notes that whether speaking is genetically programmed or not, the ability to speak requires a societal impetus. She refers to famous cases of human beings raised by animals where the speaking function was not activated early on in the child's development (see, for instance, Malson 1972) and to the account of baby Tanya who learned to behave like a dog (barking, crawling, lapping) because her mother's primary attachment was to the family dog (Hamilton 1993). According to Gambaudo, Tonya followed a normal path of development. What was abnormal was her mother's desire for a canine relationship. She surmises that it doesn't matter what form the maternal interest takes, as long as it is not centered exclusively on the child, he will "develop some form of identity" (p. 117). This is what makes, for Kristeva (1997), the good-enough mother good, namely, what is not given in giving enough: "maybe the good-enough mother is the mother who has something else to love besides her child; it could be her work, her husband, her lovers, etc. She has to have another meaning in her life" (p. 334).
That is to say a subjectivity constituted in the transformational process of the movement of communication from the body with its unconscious desires and drives to the symbol that represents it (Gambaudo 2007).
Lechte (2004) claims that "nobody really consumes images: communication never really takes place" (p. 124).
Kristeva writes, for example, "You are overwhelmed with images. They carry you away, they replace you, you are dreaming. The rapture of hallucination originates in the absence of boundaries between pleasure and reality, between truth and falsehood. The spectacle is life as a dream—we all want this. Do this ‘you' and this ‘we' exist? Your expression is standardized, your discourse becomes normalized. For that matter do you really have a discourse of your own? … before you can speak about your states of the soul, you drown them in the world of mass media" (Kristeva 1993/1995, p. 8).
Kristeva (1997/2002) writes, "I can hear you asking: don't we inhabit a veritable paradise of fantasy today thanks to images in the media? Aren't we saturated with fantasies, stimulated to produce them and to become imaginary creators in turn? … We are inundated with images, some of which resonate with our fantasies and appease us but which, for lack of interpretive words, do not liberate us. Moreover, the stereotypy of those images deprives us of the possibility of creating our own imagery, our own imaginary scenarios [italics added]" (p. 67). She goes on to present the case of one of her patients, she calls Didier, whose ‘operative’ fantasies typify him rather than testify to an interiority. Although he was able to make works of art, they had no meaning, no connection for him as an artist.
Boyne (1999) tells us that "Late modernity has encouraged us to simulate and stimulate our selves and shop for our identities in cults, through films and at chain fashion stores. As identities are constructed statement by statement, performance by performance, we are made and confronted by cut and paste, with citations impeccably and publically correct, and with discursive reaffirmations of sources providing guarantees of presence" (p. 212).
Kristeva says that "In our reality of crisis, many believe they can ‘get out of it’ by subscribing to an ‘identity', preferably the most fundamentalist, the one that replaces individual questions with solutions for the mass, the clan. ‘I do not know who I am, but I belong with them'" (Kristeva 1996, translated Gambaudo 2007, p. 22). Our desire to be has thus been displaced by the desire to belong and "to adhere to a group, to an ideology, to a sect" (Pollock 1998, p. 8).
Debord's (1967/1994) theory of the society of spectacle has assumed increasing importance in Kristeva's later work. Lechte (2004) remarks that "There are few works published since 1993 … where Kristeva does not make some reference to the society of the spectacle" (p. 117).
As Oliver (1997) notes, "We live in a no-fault society in which crime has become a media-friendly spectacle, and government and social institutions normalize rather than prohibit" (p. 410). In The Sense and Non-sense of Revolt, Kristeva (1996/2000) asks, "if prohibition is obsolete, if values are losing steam, if power is elusive, if the spectacle unfolds relentlessly, if pornography is accepted and diffused everywhere, who can rebel? Against whom, against what?" (p. 28).
In Time and Sense, Kristeva (1994/1996) describes how sublimation occurs when fantasies are articulated and the problems that arise when the analysand lacks the narrative capacity to tell his fantasies: "… sublimation takes place when the fantasy is put into words. If the analysand is not ever so slightly like a narrator, he is silenced. He occasionally causes gripping or commonplace signs to emanate from the nameless border of his unconscious, but he never tells his story [the narrative of subjectivity]. The analyst yields to this scenario by becoming bored or by playfully offering his own fantasies to the anaylsand. In other words, if transference and countertransference fail to make the analysand a narrator, the analysis breaks down and dies" (p. 327).
Although in the Western world Holocaust denial has been countered by Holocaust museums and memorials (as well as laws against Holocaust denial, as in France), there are many examples of the denial of suffering in contemporary society. Denov (2004), for example, speaks of a culture of denial regarding the issue of female sex offending, and men in psychiatric units in the US and UK are rarely asked questions about past histories of sexual abuse, despite evidence supporting its prevalence in this population (Lab and More 2005). Moreover, the extent of child abuse and the validity of childhood memories (the creation of false memories, for instance) continues to generate much debate (Bjorklund 2009).
As can telling a physician, as Charon (2006) points out, about the intimate details of one's bodily functions and personal habits.
Fear, shame. and blame are emotions that also overwhelm those who are ill, and, according to Charon (2006), "erect the most unbreachable divides between doctors and patients" (p. 30).
As Balint (1972) stressed decades later, "if you ask questions, you get answers—and hardly anything else" (p. 133); the job of the doctor, therefore, is to "learn to listen" (p. 121).
Jackson (1992) has pointed out that much has been written on the therapeutic effects of talking, in both medicine and psychology. "For all the emphasis on the patient's talking, though," Jackson observes, "it is consistently clear that the physician's role was also crucial and that his listening was a critical feature of that role" (p. 1625). Jackson insists that in the "talking cure," "the healer as listener is at the heart of the matter" and that "The term ‘the listening cure' would be just as relevant" (p. 1629).
A study conducted in 1984 in the US found that the average time from the start of the consultation before the first interruption of the patient by the physician was 18 seconds (Beckman and Frankel 1984). Currently, in the US, insurance companies require that the consultation time be a minimum of fifteen minutes. In France, the average consultation time is twenty minutes, and it is seven minutes in the UK (Hope 2011).
These new patients described by Shorter are strikingly similar to the new patients Kristeva describes. Having lost opportunities and the ability to imaginatively express the stories of their own subjectivities, these patients find themselves disconnected from their emotions and their bodies. As Kristeva (1993/1995) was quoted in the introduction as saying," … the psychic life of modern individuals wavers between somantic symptoms (getting sick and going to the hospital) and the visual depiction of their desires (daydreaming in front of the TV)" (p. 8). Her observations on the couch are supported somewhat by research reported by Pennebaker (1993) and others (for example, Spiegel 1992). These studies show that low levels of emotional expressiveness lead to a decrease in immunization function and an increase in physical illness.
Although religion is mentioned on several occasions in this paper, I have preferred to focus on secular opportunities of reconnecting the semiotic and symbolic. Aside from religious leaders functioning as healing witnesses, prayer to a personal God expresses, according to Fleischmann (1989), a yearning and need for "a God of listening" (p. 8).
Shorter (1991) defines psychosomatic illness as "any illness in which physical symptoms, produced by the actions of the unconscious mind, are defined by the individual as evidence of organic disease and for which medical help is sought" (p. x). Mental illness, trauma, and the stress engendered by life events are not the only factors determining the incidence and nature of psychosomatic illness. Psychosomatic symptoms are influenced and shaped as well by culture, gender, class, race, and age (Shorter 1994). It should also be noted that I am not suggesting here that all illness is psychosomatic, but I do agree with Rudnytsky (2008) that "even a physical illness will be given unconscious meanings by the person who suffers from it, and the metaphors one fashions are likely to affect the outcome of the psyche-soma's efforts at self-healing" (p. 5).
Ferenczi (1919/1980) describes the analyst, in this regard, as an obstetrician "who has to conduct himself as passively as possible, to content himself with the post of onlooker at a natural proceeding, but who must be at hand in the critical moment with the forceps in order to complete the act of parturation that is not progressing spontaneously" (pp. 182–183).
Doctors and psychoanalysts are vulnerable to vicarious traumatization (McCann and Pearlman 1990). According to Pearlman and Saakvitne (1995), vicarious traumatization "refers to alterations in the therapist's identity and usual ways of understanding and experiencing herself and her world" (p. xvi) as a consequence of her work with trauma survivors.
Laub (1992a) describes a number of listening defenses aside from outrage and fear: paralysis, withdrawal and numbness, awe, "obsession with fact finding," and hyperemotionality, where "the testifier is simply flooded, drowned and lost in the listener's defensive affectivity" (p. 73).
Inevitably, some of these reactions will escape the vigilance of the healing witness and be observed by the teller, no matter how hard the listener attempts to constrain them. For many people, trauma and illness magnify another's demeanor, making visible the most fleeting hints of inattention, betrayal, revulsion, and abandonment. In the following passage, Pearlman and Saakvitne (1995) describe how these reactions can sometimes be used to benefit the survivor:
Picture this scenario. Your survivor client is describing a particularly horrific experience of childhood abuse. You know it is coming and brace yourself to listen, yet after a few minutes you realize you are staring out the window behind him feeling numb and inattentive … As you notice your inner departure from the relationship, you can acknowledge your feelings—perhaps dread, revulsion, anger—in response to the trauma material, and your wish not to hear or know it. This inner process will allow you to reenter your body and the room. What if your client has noticed and says that you “spaced out” at a critical moment, and he is hurt and feels abandoned? You can acknowledge that you indeed spaced out, and that you are back … The client will feel heard and acknowledged by the straightforward acknowledgment that you were not fully present, and his feelings of horror may be validated by your need to distance from the material (p. 17).
Harben's story extols light: art is light, music streams from the light of heavenly bodies, light is everywhere and darkness comes only at the end. Evil has disappeared because there is nowhere for it to hide. But the mouth gives the story away. It is abandoned as the site of speech not so much because it is unbecoming for perfect communication to issue from a bodily part as base as the mouth, erogenous orifice of eating and drinking, but because this story reflects an unconscious desire to return to the serenity of the womb, the time in one's life when needs were met instantaneously without having to express them or perform the labor of using one's mouth to secure them—to ask for and to receive by sucking—that is, the time before jaw muscles were called into action. Harden's story is not a vision of the future so much as it is the mourning of a lost past, a lost illusion of wholeness—the time before desire. Nonetheless, it is interesting that love immortal at the end of the story is juxtaposed to a fleeting hint of death and a desire for meaning. The fact death's proximity impinges on the father and the purpose of life concerns the son, if only for a moment, indicates that not all shadows have been eradicated. Even in this world, there are thoughts obscured by the light that, though they may not be heard, they are whispering.
Kristeva, following Lacan (1977, pp. 55–56), sees a trajectory that leads to transcendence—but it is one that breaks out into the world. Moreover, it is a transcendence rooted in listening, specifically, listening to those in need of connecting the symbolic to the semiotic: "Freud has provided us with a preliminary method for achieving this sort of listening, but we still need to elaborate our approach. Our empathy and familiarity with the malady of the soul will enable us to transcend the psyche—forever" (Kristeva 1993/1995, p. 29).
A hint of interpretive capacity in the sense that the destination, in Weaver's modification, seems capable of extracting additional meaning from the semantic noise that the source inadvertently injects. The inclusion of a semantic receiver is a recognition that semantic capacity varies significantly among people. Perhaps this is why Weaver considers semantic noise potentially enhancing. However, this potential seems to go against the purpose of the semantic receiver. In mapping semantic content to the semantic capacity of some known audience, a capacity predetermined statistically, it is quite possible that any additional meanings introduced by semantic noise would be rendered null. Moreover, it is not clear whether Weaver is considering this mapping in terms of the range (what is possible for the audience), the lowest common denominator, the average, or the norm of a given audience.
Moreover, the intense feelings of animosity and hatred that naturally arise towards perpetrators, and the desire for revenge, may lead some survivors to feel that they are no different from the perpetrators: many survivors end up directing this anger against themselves (Summit 1983; van der Kolk 1996).
In Intimate Revolt, Kristeva (1997/2002) explains more fully how the act of naming takes place within analysis:
The act of naming implies abandoning the pleasure and pain of carnal identification, of carnal texture, in order to dissociate thing-presentation and word-presentations. Interpretation fixes word-presentations in their arbitrary autonomy as signs distinct from perception-sensations. It even turns them into fetishes, leads the patient to play with these words-signs-fetishes, and gives them back to him, like a mother to her child, as playthings, first of all. From his flesh, which we have shared with our own, we make word-presentations. But in placing, repeating, and punctuating these words, we give them the consistency of reified symbols; we bring them closer to thing-presentations, like writers who repeat, love, and arrange their texts … Thus, starting with sensorial fixations, analysis works out sensorial games and then words—but word pleasures, word-fetishes. To describe this naming in which the therapist engages, we could say that it is the art of producing transitional objects, starting with the flesh of sign (pp. 61–62).
"From Socrates-Plato to St. Augustine, Western thought affirms that the truth of (the form of) Being preceding human existence can be attained by a movement of retrospection: ‘se quaerere,' ‘quaesto mihi factus sum.’ This common destiny of truth, memory, and speech has, after Augustine, found its affirmation in the interior experience that—from prayer to Georges Bataille—never ceases to reveal the scandalous effects of what I mean precisely by a ‘re-volt'" (Kristeva 1998b, p. 31). Kristeva (2005/2010) also repeats this mantra in Hatred and Forgiveness, where, it is interesting to note, it is associated with the tripartite practices of listening, writing, and reading (see pp. 277–278).
Benjamin also presents another interesting expression of depersonalization in film from the perspective of the actor by quoting Pirandello's descriptions of what it feels like for the actor to perform before the "mechanical contrivance" of a camera:
The film actor feels as if in exile—exiled not only from the stage but also from himself. With a vague sense of discomfort he feels inexplicable emptiness: his body loses its corporeality, it evaporates, it is deprived of reality, life, voice, and the noises caused by his moving about, in order to be changed into a mute image [in silent pictures], flickering an instant on screen, then vanishing into silence … The projector will play with his shadow before the public, and he himself must be content to play before the camera (quoted on p. 229).
This is what makes videotaped court testimonies problematic. Vertical camera angle, for instance, has been shown to influence impressions of the subject’s credibility (Tiemens 1970). As Balabanian (1981) succinctly puts it, "High shots produce pygmies. Low shots yield monoliths of the Citizen Kane type" (p. 27). In situations where credibility is crucial, such as in videotaped interrogations, direct manipulation of camera angle can have devastating consequences (see, for instance, Lassiter 2002; Locke 2009; Hemsley and Doob 1976). Even changes in the vertical position of the viewing screen have been observed to influence receiver perceptions of the subjects credibility (Huang et al. 2002).
The camera must move, as Hartman (2002) says, if it is "to satisfy more naturally the viewer's eye" (p. 74). As we interact with people, our heads and bodies move subtly and continuously, varying our field of vision. We expect something similar from the camera as well. A camera that remains stationary produces a feeling of staring. This effect was powerfully put into play in the French film Irreversible (Noé 2002), where the camera held steady for a full nine minutes while a rape took place, thereby placing the audience in the uncomfortable position of cold-hearted accomplice.
There are exceptional films that push the limits. Take, for instance, the director Lanzmann, who attempted "to reincarnate" the Jewish tragedy in Shoah, his monumental documentary of the Holocaust (Bernstein 1985). The film, which took him over ten years to make, is created entirely from the testimonies of present day witnesses. No historical documents or film footage was used. In Lanzmann's opinion, "using only images of the present, evokes the past with far more force than any historical document" (Bernstein 1985). Lanzmann's patience permeates the nine hour film with its slow camera work and willingness to let the witnesses tell their stories in the pace most comfortable for them. The film strains the powers of audience endurance, especially contemporary audiences, and, in so doing, has the potential of stretching the viewer's capacity to listen and to open up to the suffering of others. Here is an excerpt from VideoMan's (2009) comment about Shoah, published on Amazon.com, that reveals the tension that was generated in him by the film:
The subject matter is very critical for all of us to hear and understand. The editing was very poor in the sense that I lost interest in awaiting responses. I will watch all of the rest of it, but hope I get used to the slowness of the dialog … I am disappointed as I wanted to learn and for others to learn and "take in" subject matter that I felt was so very important and necessary for the world to know. Maybe it's just my impatience and others can learn and not be distracted as I have been. I am not ADD just the kind of person that needs emotions and words to coincide in a timely manner. The film is very good from what I've seen so far and I guess I have to realize the author is not a Spielberg.
These are the expressions Ellis uses when discussing witnessing in the context of audio–video media.
The 160 character limit is arbitrary. One day in 1985, Friedhelm Hillebrand sat down at his typewriter and typed a few pages of random sentences. He discovered that none counted more than 160 characters. "This was perfectly sufficient," Hillebrand recalled thinking later, "perfectly sufficient" (Milian 2009). As he was chairman of the non-voice services committee within the Global System for Mobile communications, or GSM, the group that defines the standards for the global mobile marketplace, he was able to push his 160 character limit. Hillebrand remembers wondering with a friend whether that was enough space to communicate most thoughts. He is reported to have said, "My friend said this was impossible for the mass market. I was more optimistic." Twitter capped the length of tweets to 140 characters to reserve 20 characters for the user's address. Facebook and other messaging systems have found it to be "perfectly sufficient" as well, since most people restrict their communications, as Lanier (2010) points out, to telling others what they are doing.
Turkle comments that "Here we see self-policing to the point of trying to achieve a precorrected self" (p. 258).
For a review of the literature on the impact of the computer screen in the consultation room, see Shachak and Reis (2009).
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Acknowledgments
Special thanks to Marianthe Karanikas for introducing me to narrative medicine and for her discussions and assistance in the early stages of drafting the first few sections of this paper.
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Brahnam, S. To hear—to say: the mediating presence of the healing witness. AI & Soc 27, 53–90 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-011-0327-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-011-0327-5