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Social bonds and psychicalorder: TestimoniesSusannah Radstone aa Teaches in the Cultural Studies department ,University of East LondonPublished online: 17 Mar 2009.

To cite this article: Susannah Radstone (2001) Social bonds and psychical order:Testimonies, Cultural Values, 5:1, 59-78, DOI: 10.1080/14797580109367221

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Cultural Values ISSN 1362-5179Volume 5 Number 1 January 2001 pp. 59-78

Social Bonds and Psychical Order: Testimonies

Susannah RadstoneUniversity of East London

Abstract. This essay places the recent academic fascination with traumaand victimhood in a psycho-social context within which identificationswith pure victimhood hold sway. The essay takes as its starting pointFreud's description, in Civilisation and its Discontents, of theformation of the super-ego via the small child's negotiation ofambivalence towards its first authority figure. It is argued that thisprocess lacks secondary re-inforcement in western urban postmodernity,where authority has become diffuse, all-pervasive and unavailable as apoint of identification. In this context, aggression becomes harder toacknowledge and manage resulting in a tendency towardsManicheanism and the attenuation of ambivalence. Taking as its case-study Marianne Hirsch's writings on the ethical aesthetics ofpostmemorial photography, the essay concludes that recent work ontrauma and testimony fails to acknowledge that identifications maystraddle victimhood and perpetration. This acknowledgement is onlypossible where some containment of aggression feels possible.

I know that the murderers existed ... and that to confuse them with theirvictims is a moral disease or an aesthetic affectation or a sinister sign ofcomplicity; above all, it is a precious service rendered (intentionally ornot) to the negators of truth. (Primo Levi, 1989, pp. 32-3)

(T)he time has come to explore the space which separates ... the victimsfrom the persecutors ... Only a schematic rhetoric can claim that thatspace is empty: it never is ... (p. 25)

Until recently, Foucault's 1981 thesis concerning confession's dominancein contemporary Western society has remained influential. Literaryhistories (Axthelm, 1967) have described the immense transformativeshifts undergone by confession from the religious confessions of StAugustine to the contemporary confessions of, say, Philip Roth (1969).Yet confession has nevertheless been treated as though its varioushistorical manifestations share something in common: a retrospective

©Blackwell Publishers Ltd, 2001,108 Cowley Road, Oxford OX4 1JF, UK and 350 MainStreet, Maiden, MA 02148, USA

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acknowledgement, by the confessant, of their own guilt, sin orwrongdoing. Even so, literary surveys of confession have argued for thespecificity of a particular variant of the confessional mode that firstbecame dominant within autobiographical writing during the mid- tolate nineteenth century (Axthelm, 1967; Stelzig, 1984, p. 26). Thismodern confession emerged as the confessant began to seek absolutionnot from an outside power, but via an 'inward turn' (Kahler 1973; Lasch,1979; Sennett, 1977). Since then, whether in the self-revelatory writingsof William Burroughs and Alexander Trocchi in the 1960s, or in thewoman's confessional novel of the 1970s and 1980s and the more recentconfessions of 'new' men in the 1990s, confession's dominance appearsunassailed.

On a Foucauldian reading, the modern confession constitutes a'technology of the self - one of the 'modes by which, in our culture ... ahuman turns himself into a subject' (Foucault, 1982, pp. 777-78). Thisaccount of the post-eighteenth century western confession's increasinglyinward turn, its growing dominance of the literary field and its culturalinstrumentality as a 'technology of the self needs to be set against anacknowledgement of the heterogeneous and differentiated field ofconfession. Confession does not now (if it ever did) constitute ahomogeneous culture. Though contemporary confessions share someground (self-scrutiny; self-implication) there are significant differencesbetween, say, the confessional outpourings of Philip Roth's torturedeponymous alter-ego Portnoy and the self-lacerations undergone byMira, in Marilyn French's The Women's Room (1978). These differencesmatter. They suggest that confessional 'culture' is a contested field towhich a number of related but distinct modes may belong, albeit insome cases only partially (Radstone, 2000). Though Foucault's thesisacknowledged both the agonism of 'technologies of the self- that'where there is power, there is resistance' (Foucault, 1981, p. 95) - andthat 'there can exist different and even contradictory discourses withinthe same strategy' (p. 102), these claims can be overshadowed by thepositing of an 'age' or a 'culture' of confession. Moreover, though thepositing of the presence of contradictory discourses within the samestrategy remains as a corrective against the positing of a homogeneousculture of confession, it can provide the pretext for the inclusion within afield, of texts or practices which may be more appropriately locatedelsewhere.

These qualifications are of particular significance to what follows.I will propose that confessions need now to be mapped alongside andin relation to testimonies. Like confessions, testimonies cannot be takento constitute a unified or homogeneous 'culture'. Yet at least since the1980s, the confessional injunction has been countermanded by aninjunction not to self-scrutiny and self-implication, but to bear witness,rather, to the sufferings of others. In what follows, my aim is to

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distinguish between two currently discernable tendencies withintestimonies: testimonies shaped by a Manichean vision and those thatoccupy the 'grey zone'. Below, I try to account for the dominance of theManichean testimony over the testimony of the 'grey zone'.

The two only apparently contradictory epigraphs that head thisessay are both taken from Primo Levi's last meditation upon hisexperiences of imprisonment inside Auschwitz concentration camp.Taken together, they mark out the space to be addressed in this essay, aspace which I will describe, following Levi, as 'the grey zone'. Thisequivocal ethical space - a space 'of half-tints and complexities' (Levi,1989, p. 22) - is a space trampled on by a Manichean 'desire forsimplification' (p. 23). In the testimonies addressed below, this 'greyzone' has become only attenuatedly available. In what follows, onepossible explanation for the attenuation of an ethical 'grey zone' withintestimonies will be offered.

The extraordinary impact of Shoshana Felman's and Dori Laub's(1992) seminal work Testimony and of Cathy Caruth's (1995; 1996),equally influential studies of trauma can be attributed in part to therecent ascendancy of Holocaust Studies, as well as to a theoreticalconsonance between their theoretical concerns with the transmission ofthe untransmittable, and the themes of postmodernist theory moregenerally. Yet though sufficient, this explanation of their canonicity doesnot adequately explain the fascination exerted by these studies, for thenerve which they have hit is vibrating far beyond the world ofacademia. A longer essay might trace the complex and polyvalentimpact of the injunction to bear witness to testimony across film,literature and also, perhaps popular television. Such a survey mightreveal that common to much of this US and British contemporarytestimonial material is a Manichean certainty concerning the spacesoccupied by and the distinctions between 'good' and 'bad'.

Here, I can only focus on one testimonial domain - that oftestimony's inflections of contemporary work in the Humanities, wherethe Manichean tendency is, I propose, all too evident. The testimonialperspectives of Caruth, Felman and Laub and their followers mobilize adialogics of witnessing to testimonies of trauma - to the overwhelmingand well-nigh unrepresentable experiences of innocent victimhood. AsLevi has insisted, the necessity of remembering rather than obfuscatingthe distinction between 'victims and murderers' is a burden history mustnever abnegate. Yet the position of witness is a complex one that canexceed an empathic identification with victimhood to includeidentifications with other positions available within any given scenario,including, especially, those of perpetration. If history is not to repeatitself, the task of witnessing and remembering the sufferings of othersought not to be separated from the difficult acknowledgement oftestimonial witnessing's darker side. In turning, now, to some

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contemporary academic treatments of testimonial witnessing, I willsuggest an explanation for the marginality within this field of an ethical'grey zone'.

Testimony's Blind Spots

Marianne Hirsch's essay on projected memory appears in a recentcollection (Bal, Crewe & Spitzer, 1999) belonging to an importantmovement within the Humanities. Inspired by Walter Benjamin, thismovement seeks to redeem the forgotten sufferings and traumas ofothers and to interpret contemporary texts and practices as instances oftestimonial witnessing. This academic 'witnessing' understands thedifficulties of its tasks in relation to the 'unrepresentability' of the verysufferings that it seeks to redeem. Bearing witness to such testimoniesdemands, therefore, sophisticated dialogical interpretation in which thewitnesser plays a key role. Whether this witnesser is understood asreader/listener/spectator or as a construct internal to testimonial textsor discourses, it is witnessing that enables testimony, though what iswitnessed may be the sheer impossibility of representing that whichstruggles towards, but refuses representation. This is work ofimportance that demands respect. It seeks to keep faith with a variety ofpostmodernisms while also attempting the historical articulation of thepast by 'seiz(ing) hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment ofdanger' (Benjamin, 1968, p. 255). This movement struggles to exerciseBenjamin's 'weak Messianic power' (p. 254) with which everygeneration is endowed - a power 'to which the past has a claim' (p. 254).But memories flash up 'at a moment of danger'. These witnessedtestimonies belong to the context of their remembrance - a historical,cultural and psychical context that mediates memories at the point oftheir redemption. How, then, do the mediations of our presenthistorical, cultural and psychical context bear upon the redemptivetestimonial witnessing under discussion here? How, that is, do ourpresent 'dangers' shape the testimonial theories and practices producedby this work? This is the question I now want to explore.

Hirsch's essay which concerns itself with the ethical aesthetics of'postmemory', questions the canonical status of photographs of child-victims for the following generation. Hirsch conceives of postmemoryas yet more disabling than first generation memory. Moreover Hirsch'spostmemory permeates groups linked by ethnicity and is not limited tosurvivors' children. Yet Hirsch's opening epigraph comes fromBinjamin Wilkomirski's infamously fictional survivor 'autobiography'(Wilkomirski, 1996). On my reading, this reference indicates thatpostmemory's reach may exceed generational transmission predicated

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upon bonds of ethnicity or family to inflect a wider cultural domainthan Hirsch acknowledges.

Hirsch's ethical aesthetics of postmemory borrows from KajaSilverman the term 'heteropathic'2 identification (Hirsch, 1999, p. 9;Silverman, 1996) to describe a memorial relation to the experience ofothers predicated upon both identification and difference:'(H)eteropathic memory (feeling and suffering with the other) means ...the ability to say "It could have been me; it was me, also," and, at thesame time, "but it was not me" ' (p. 9; her emphasis). Thus Hirsch'sethical aesthetic of postmemory seeks to witness the particularity of itshistorical subjects without subjecting them to forms of incorporativeidentification that strip them of their very subjectivity. Yet heteropathicpostmemory is put in jeopardy, argues Hirsch, by the ubiquitouspresence of images of children which have become the canonical andiconic representations through which the horrors of the Holocaust are'routinely' memorialised.

Hirsch explains the iconicity of Holocaust photographs of childrenby reference to their capacity to reveal the sheer senselessness andhorror of the Third Reich's inclusion of even children within thecategory of threatening 'other' (p. 10). Though canonical images ofchildren can, argues Hirsch, achieve a degree of heteropathy, in thecomplex, triangulated relations of looking that they invite, heteropathicpotential is more commonly collapsed into identity (p. 16). Hirsh arguesthat the identification these images invite between the spectator'schildhood self and the pictured child-witness is counterpointed, or evenundercut, by the more knowing adult spectator's observance and by theinevitable acknowledgement that this 'wasn't me'. Yet these distancingpotentials are themselves undercut by 'the child's openness toidentification' and by the present political climate's construction of 'thechild as an unexamined emblem of vulnerability and innocence'. Thusimages of children are too easily open to 'trivialization and stereotype'(p. 16) which empties them of their particularity, specificity, subjectivity.This spectatorial over-identification with a trivialized and universalizedinterpretation of 'vulnerability' and 'innocence' can be mitigated, arguesHirsch, by the production of viewing contexts that minimize thepotential for such over-identification through strategies of distanciationand displacement that avoid over-identification while representing 'allthat cannot be - and perhaps should not be - worked through' (p. 22).

Though the question of context is central to Hirsch's ethicalaesthetics of the image, she deploys the term in relation to aestheticstrategies of montage and distanciation. Yet there is arguably anothercontext that has given rise to this aesthetics - a context in whichidentification with innocent victimhood as well as the search for villainshas become rampant (Antze and Lambek, 1996, p. xxvi). This context canbe more clearly grasped by identifying the path not taken by Hirsch: a

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path that is only limitedly available within the testimony work hereunder discussion.

Hirsch's essay opens with a quote exemplary of 'postmemory'from Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz's novel The Final Station: Umschlagplaz(Rymkiewicz, 1994). In this quote, the narrator considers his response toa photograph, taken in the Warsaw ghetto, of soldiers aiming guns at agroup of women, men and children. The quoted passage begins byreferring to the child in the foreground: '(t)he photograph everyoneknows: a boy in a peaked cap and knee-length socks, his hands raised'(Rymkiewicz quoted in Hirsch, 1999, p. 3). In what follows, however, thenarrator's focus falls not on the child, but on the soldiers:

To the right stand four Germans ... Two of their faces, three even in goodreproductions, are clearly visible. I have pored over that photo for solong and so often that if I were now after 45 years to meet one of thoseGermans in the street I'd identify him instantly (p. 3).

In the quoted passage, the narrator goes on to discuss an imaginaryconversation between his own boyhood self and the boy in thephotograph's foreground and it is this imaginary conversation that leadsHirsch to discuss the over-identificatory potential of iconic Holocaustimages of children. But what of the narrator's comments concerning hisobsessive relation to those German soldiers: 'I have pored over that photofor so long and so often that if I were now after 45 years to meet one ofthose Germans in the street I'd identify him instantly'? What might thisquote suggest about the witnessing positions proffered by thisphotographic image? In Hirsch's essay, the focus falls entirely on theover-identifications that constitute the iconic fascination of Holocaustimages of children. In her quest for an ethical aesthetics, Hirschadvocates recontextualisations of such images that deploy broadlyavant-gardist strategies to undercut over-identificatory impulses. But inthis move, what is lost is the opportunity to explore further the complexand multiple identifications this image offers - identifications that arenot excluded by an interpretive framework of testimonial witnessingand that include, but are certainly not limited to, an identification withthe child. For even where bonds of ethnicity do arguably link thespectator/witness to the child, that child forms part of a scenario thatincludes also adult women, men of the ghetto and, most troublingly,perhaps, those soldiers whose faces were so indelibly etched on TheFinal Station's narrator's memory. Theories of testimonial witnessinginsist on the relation between text and history/ memory, at the expenseof theories that emphasise fantasy and its scenes. But must one choosebetween a reading that foregrounds the spectator's witnessing of achild's suffering and a reading that addresses a range of potentialidentifications proffered by this scene, identifications that might move

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between the child, the men and women and the soldiers, also?Riemkiewicz's narrator knew those soldiers' faces well enough toidentify them after 45 years. But the capacity to identify (as in anidentification parade) does not exclude the possibility of identifyingwith. Indeed, in what follows, I want to suggest that scenarios thatinclude the exercise of power and authority arguably prompt aparticular identification with the wielder of that power, as well as withthe object upon whom it is exercised. Yet though these complex webs ofidentification arguably constitute aspects of the 'personal and publicfantasy' of Hirsch's 'projected memory' in Hirsch's essay, the soldiers,as well as The Final Station's narrator's emphatic and obsessive relationto their images are rendered totally invisible. Why?

The Path Not Taken: Seeking The Grey Zone

Though Hirsch's essay explores a number of contextualising strategiesthat might inhibit an over-identification with the victims of trauma, onestrategy for the representation of Holocaust suffering remainsunspoken, in this as in other 'canonical' testimonial work. This strategy- a strategy that has been advocated but has remained marginal withinwritings on Holocaust representations, involves working against thegrain of identifications with 'pure' victimhood, not by deploying avant-gardist strategies of displacement and distanciation, but by undercuttingthe sense of an absolute distinction between 'good' and 'evil' and byproffering, or even foregrounding potential identifications withperpetration as well as with victimhood. This is not to say that thewriters I am advocating here propose that the distinctions betweenperpetration and victimhood should be blurred. Far from it. For to readthat into this work would be to collapse the distinction between fantasyand reality. Identification expresses a perceived resemblance derivedfrom a fantasy (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988, p. 206), and it is thecontention of the writers I mention below, that an art-work's ethicalvalue lies in its capacity to move its spectator through fantasyidentifications with perpetration as well as with victimhood. There is apresumptuousness - an omnipotence, even, at the heart of allidentification — a presumptuousness which, as Primo Levi has shown us,can shade into self-righteousness. Levi (1989) remonstrates with thosewho condemn prisoners forced to work alongside the SS guards in thecamp crematoria by claiming that 'in your place I would not have lastedfor a single day'(p. 43). For Levi, 'one is never in another's place. Eachindividual is so complex an object that there is no point in trying toforesee his behaviour, all the more so in extreme situations ...' (p. 43).Heteropathic identification with perpetration as well as with victimhood- 'it could have been me, but it wasn't me' - might mitigate this self-

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righteousness. It might mitigate (in some small measure) the historicalrepetition of atrocity by avoiding the Manicheanism and simplificationthat lies at the heart of Fascism itself. By reminding us of thepresumptuousness of an identification with utter innocence, the workdiscussed below holds faith with Levi, who argued that 'ambiguity isours, it is our second nature, we hybrids moulded from clay andspirit...'(Levi 1989: 50).

In an essay explicitly informed by Levi's concept of 'the grey zone',Gillian Rose takes exception to the routinised equation of the Holocaustwith the unrepresentable and the ineffable. Terming such equations'Holocaust piety', Rose seeks out, in their place, representations whichare less 'nice about "the ineffable"' (Rose, 1998, p. 244). Rose savagelyattacks the film Schindler's List (Steven Spielberg, US, 1993)3 which shecompares unfavourably both with the original novel (Thomas Keneally,1982) and with the film The Remains of the Day (James Ivory, US, 1993).The novel Schindler's Ark, draws comparisons between its eponymoushero, Schindler, and Goeth, the German commander with whom henegotiates, while the film Remains of the Day, encourages spectatorialidentification with a butler who finds himself complicit with Nazism.Rose's reading of the film Schindler's List argues that it, in contrast,'depends on the sentimentality of the ultimate predator' who need neveracknowledge or identify herself with the predation of any victim since'she can destroy the whole cycle' (p. 246). What Rose emphasises here isthe hidden violence that subtends identification solely with victimhood,since it is only from a position of absolute power that the predatorycapacity of others can cease to be a point of identification. Thus forRose, Spielberg's Schindler's List avoids the difficult task enjoined on usby atrocity: that of working-through our fantasy identifications withperpetration, rather than only with victimhood.

Like Rose, Eric Santner (1990) insists on the urgency of creating aculture in which moral ambiguities and identificatory equivocations canhold sway against the 'certainties' of Manicheanism. But I'm thinking,also, of the writings of Primo Levi and those of Jean Amery (1980),whose accounts of survivorhood testify to their profoundly difficult,though different relations to revenge and resentment. These writersimply a testimonial witnessing very different to that which BryanCheyette (1998) has called the 'Manichean moral certainty ofcontemporary writers and filmmakers in relation to the Shoah' (p. 273).This witnessing takes place, rather, in what I want to call, followingPrimo Levi, 'the grey zone': a zone in which, quoting Cheyette (1988) onLevi again, one can begin to tell and listen to the story of 'someone whounderstands, only too well, his own potential to dehumanize' (p. 280)and in which what is remembered is, in Rose's phrase (1998), ourshared, 'all too human' (p. 244) condition. The availability of this 'grey

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zone' varies from conjuncture to conjuncture. In the rest of this essay Iwant to pursue the question of its contemporary marginality.

The confessional incitement to self-implication contrasts withtestimony's witnessing of external events and the actions of animplicated and censured other. Up until very recently, it was stillaccepted that the West was dominated by the incitement to confess. Yetthough confession still marks contemporary British and US TV andliterature, testimony's ascendence cannot be ignored. Both confessionand testimony emerge in societies that are struggling, to a greater orlesser extent, with similar problems: problems related to authority andsocial order that can best be understood from a psycho-social studiesperspective.

Testimony And Aggression: Civilisation And ItsDiscontents

Whether seen from a Foucauldian or from a Freudian perspective,confession, self-implication and the production of conscience areconstrued in relation to the sustenance of social order and theorchestration of individuals into a larger unit. Neither Freud norFoucault viewed civilisation's constraints without ambivalence. ForFreud, the costs of sustaining social order were understood in relationto inner psychical conflict. For Foucault, the costs of social order areunderstood in relation to the internalised ordering of subjectivity.Central to both Foucault's conception of order and Freud's view ofcivilisation is a 'self-regulating' citizen whose subjection is related totheir self-implication. This self-regulation through self-implicationdepends, in its turn, upon the presupposition of a mode of subjectivityconstituted through both division and relatedness. The narrative thatfollows will map a relation between changes in the experience andstructure of contemporary western social authority and these intra-psychical relations. Though in a longer essay the Foucauldian analysismight be undertaken alongside the Freudian one, in what follows I willfocus only on the Freudian argument.

In Civilisation and its Discontents Freud, ([1930] 1985), explored therelations between social bonds and psychical order. In this examinationof the struggle between individual and social aims, the focus falls uponthose mechanisms implemented by a mature society so that its aims -the greater good of the many - might hold sway over the individual'sdrives. How, Freud asked, does the power of a community come to holdsway over the power, or 'brute force' of the individual (p. 284)? Freud'sresponse described the psycho-social processes which give rise tointernalized authority, in the shape of the super-ego. Freud's description

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of super-ego formation is centrally concerned with the small child'snegotiation of complex and ambivalent feelings towards its firstauthority figure: for Freud, the father. The child depends upon andseeks love from the father, but also develops 'a considerable amount ofaggressiveness ... against the authority which prevents him from havinghis first, but none the less his most important, satisfactions' (p. 322).Freud describes the mechanisms the child deploys to find his way out ofthis 'economically difficult situation' in terms of identification and thesplitting of the ego. Instead of attacking the father, the child:

... takes the unattackable authority into himself. The authority now turnsinto his super-ego and enters into possession of all the aggressivenesswhich a child would have liked to exercise against it. The child's ego hasto content itself with the unhappy role of the authority - the father -who has been thus degraded. Here, as so often, the [real] situation isreversed: 'If I were the father and you were the child, I should treat youbadly.' The relationship between the super-ego and the ego is a return,distorted by a wish, of the real relationships between the ego, as yetundivided, and the external object, (p. 322)

For Freud, then, the maintenance of social order hinges upon theavailability of an identifiable and incorporable authority figure.Identification with this figure 'expresses a resemblance ... derived froma common element which is a fantasy' (Laplanche and Pontalis, 1988, p.206): the common element is the power/aggressiveness which the fatherwields and which the child wishes to wield against him. The resultantdivision allows for some intra-psychical, rather than wholly other-oriented venting of aggression. Thus, the attacks of the super-ego uponthe ego come to substitute for the child's aggressive wishes towards theauthority figure. For Freud, then, the maintenance of social orderdepends upon processes of identification and division that transform anexternal into an internal conflict. Social order comes to depend uponboth the maintenance of relations between this newly divided mind andthe capacity to tolerate inner conflict.

If social order rests, as Freud said it did, upon the dominance ofintra-psychical over inter-personal conflict, what are we to make ofthat nineteenth century moment of the confession's inward turn whenthe ordinarily 'quiet', though painful conflicts between the super-egoand the ego became the matter of so much writing? This was the period,in the West, of the birth of recognisably modern metropolitan life. It wasin 1847-8, that Raymond Williams (1984) saw the decisive emergence of'a new and major generation of English novelists, struggling to makesense of a crisis in experience as (t)he first industrial civilisation in thehistory of the world (came) to a critical and defining stage' (p. 9). ForWilliams 'this is a period in which what it means to live in a community

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is more uncertain, more critical, more disturbing as a question put tosocieties and to persons than ever before in history' (pp. 11-12).

In the modern, nineteenth century inward-turning confession, theconfessant seeks out 'what is hidden from himself (Foucault, 1981, p.66-7). The narrator is therefore split between a narrating super-ego and anarrated ego. The related divideness of intra-psychical life that, inFreud's 'mature' society, went about its business relatively 'quietly' andbelow the surface becomes the explicit focus of attention. But how canthe relationship between the ubiquity of the inward-turning modernconfessional and the crisis of experience with which it is associated bestbe understood?

Williams' understanding of the crisis that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century foregrounds confused relations between individualsand communities. As this crisis deepened, so did the confession'sinward turn. For Christopher Lasch, this inward turn signalled theemergence of a narcissistic culture lacking strong fathers.Notwithstanding its infamous misogyny, Lasch's The Culture ofNarcissism (1979) shares with Williams' analysis an emphasis upon crisesof authority - be that familial or political - in the formation of an inwardconfessional turn. But can the relations between the dominance ofconfession and confusions concerning authority be more preciselyunderstood?

The substitution of the Kleinian or object-relations term'states'over the Freudian term 'stages' emphasises the provisionalnature of psychical resolution. It replaces Freud's emphasis upon'achieved' stages, with an understanding of the unceasing and ongoingnature of psychical labour prompted by the vicissitudes of experience.Freud's account of the achievement of super-ego formation emphasizedthe incorporation of a 'split' father. An object-relations perspectiveforegrounds 'states' over stages, but it also foregrounds the inevitablemediation of psychical life by the social. If psychical life is understood inrelation to both 'states', and to 'sociality', how might the historicalvicissitudes of political and social authority bear upon psycho-sociallife? What dynamic might operate, that is, between psychical 'states'and the confusions and diffusions of modern and postmodernauthority?

From an object-relations perspective, aggressivity towards the'good enough' authority of Freud's 'mature society' can be managedthrough ongoing acts of incorporative fantasy, so that aggressivitytowards that authority comes to be contained, by transmutation intointra-psychical conflict. But in a society where authority is diffuse,incomprehensible or even incoherent, aggressivity towards that authorityis less easily managed, since that authority is harder to identify and thusless available for incorporative fantasy. In short, in the society describedby Raymond Williams, identification with the aggressor, which

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arguably provided the original means through which aggression cameto be contained, has become problematic. Perhaps the hyper self-censureof the inward-turning confession registers the struggle to sustain theburden of intra-psychical conflict, at a time when ego/super-egorelations can be less easily shorn up through incorporative fantasieslinked to authority structures in the present. The hypostatisation of self-censure represented by confession registers, perhaps, a one-sidedstruggle to resucitate the super-ego in the absence of appropriateidentificatory objects. Its emphatic foregrounding of the divideness ofthe inner world - its marking out of a growing distance between itsprotagonist and its self-censuring narrator marks out, too, thebeginnings of a break-down in relations between the ego and the super-ego. Perhaps Freud's fantasy of the mature society was written, indeed,at the very moment when this struggle was taking place.

My hypothesis concerning the psycho-politics of confessionmobilized a contemporary object relations approach to psycho-socialrelations that revises Freud by suggesting a relation of ongoing mutualimplication between the psychical and the social. I will now turn toconsider the emergence of testimony. Ian Craib's (1994) object relationsthesis concerns the relations between changes in authority, governmentand communication and an increasing inability to tolerate theinevitable inner conflicts of everyday psychical life. For Craib, the latetwentieth century west has seen a fragmentation of economic and sociallife and increasingly centralized and amorphous systems ofsurveillance and control. These developments are linked withidentifiable fantasies: specifically omnipotent fantasies of organisationand control bound by a common thread: an 'absence of internalisedpersonal authority' (p. 109).

Testimonial Identifications, Victimhood And TheProblem Of Aggression

Craib associates overwhelming contemporary social systems with twodefensive unconscious scenarios: omnipotent fantasies of organisationand control and identifications with victimhood. The former defendagainst anxiety by mastering, in fantasy, that which seemsunmasterable, while the latter represent a return to those infantilefeelings of helplessness provoked by a social system that evokes thesize and immense power attributed to parents by the child, whilesustaining fantasies of perfection. Though this dominant scenario'scombination of fantasies of power with fantasies of victimhood appearscontradictory, common to both is the absence of or, better put, thedenial and displacement of aggression: control and organisation are

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linked with a self that has achieved total mastery and 'evacuated' all'badness' or aggression from itself, while the victim displaces allaggression into that which it believes to be its victimiser. But though theprojection and denial of aggressivity lie at the heart of the scenariosCraib describes, there are two areas of his thesis that remain sketchy.First, he under-emphasizes the aggressivity tied to an identification withvictimhood and, paradoxically, with the denial of aggression (Rose,1998, p. 246). Second, Craib's remarks about the absence of 'internalauthority' and the consequent intolerability of inner conflict seem tosuggest that it may be becoming harder to contain aggression throughthe mechanism of super-ego/ego relations. But he simply doesn'taddress the question of exactly if or how the contemporary psycho-social scene revises, or sustains this division. This is the question towhich I am now going to turn.

In discussing the modern, inward turning confession, itscompulsive hypostatization of self-censure arguably represented anattempt to resuscitate the inner world's capacity to contain aggressivityin the absence of social reinforcement, in the shape of adequatelyidentifiable and incorporable authority figures. Craib's accountdescribes the further diffusions and confusions of authority associatedwith postmodern social systems in which power is both more dispersedand yet more deeply penetrative and overwhelming than in thecommunities described either by Williams or by Lasch. My contention isthat the ungraspability and unidentifiablity of contemporary authorityexacerbates aggressivity while attenuating possibilities foridentification. Under these circumstances, the transformation ofaggression against an external authority into intra-psychic conflictbecomes yet more deeply unmanageable and threatening than in the ageof confession. This, I think, is a danger of our times. In these dangerousmoments, memories flash up, but they are memories shaped by ourpresent dangers, dangers that our testimonies and witnessings caneither re-inforce or mitigate.

The Grey Zone

Marianne Hirsch's analysis of the projective fantasies that shape thepostmemorial reception of Holocaust images links the iconicity ofimages of childhood with the universalizing and homogenizing lure offantasies of innocence and vulnerability. Yet Hirsch's quest for moreethical, that is less universalizing and homogenizing forms of witnessingleads her to consider ways of recontextualizing such images ofchildhood, so that some testimony might be made to postmemory'simbrication with the particular, specific and, to a degree, alwaysunrepresentable sufferings of others.

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Hirsch's advocacy of particular avant-gardist strategies ofrecontextualising distanciation hinges on a comparison of twophotographs that include images of child survivors. Hirsch chooses tocompare the Stroop Report photograph with which her essay opens, witha photograph which she believes achieves a degree of heteropathy, LorieNovak's 'Past Lives'. This photograph of a composite projection onto awall superimposes images of child Holocaust victims and a picture ofEthel Rosenberg, convicted and then executed for atomic espionage,upon a childhood image of the photographer pictured with her mother.Hirsch's reading of Tast Lives' foregrounds its reflexive staging ofpostmemory and its critical relation to the over-identificatory potentialof images of child victims. It is through specific distancing devices ofrecontextualisation, argues Hirsch, that over-identification of images ofchild victims with the spectator's childhood self - the 'child witness' -can be avoided in the interests of heteropathic memory. For Hirsch(1990), 'Past Lives' layering of Ethel Rosenberg's face over images ofchild-victims and of the photographer herself, 'introduces a third termbetween the child victim and the child witness, and refocuses theattention onto the two adults in the text' (1999, p. 17). Yet Rosenberg'sface surely offers not simply 'distance' between spectator as child-witness and the images of child-victims, but a point of potentialidentification: identification with an image of Rosenberg described byNovak herself as 'hauntingly maternal' (Novak quoted in Hirsch 1999, p.6). This is a potential point of identification made invisible, I want tosuggest, by the context of canonical testimony. Yet it remains a point ofidentification proffered by the image - a point of identification with amaternal figure who, if the law is to be believed, betrayed her childrenand their nation. Though there is not space here to consider thecomplex questions of authority, identification and sexual differenceraised by 'Past Lives', it is nevertheless important to acknowledge thatthe work attempts to stage feminine postmemory and to work throughits burden via an identification with, rather than by distancing itself froman image of perverse or 'toxic' maternity.

Hirsch's discussion of Novak's 'Past Lives' contrasts that image'sarguable heteropathy with the photograph which forms the frontispieceto her own article. This first photograph - a photograph which hasbeen much reproduced - is an archive photograph from the StroopReport on the destruction of the Warsaw Ghetto. As Hirsch's (1999)opening extract from Jaroslaw Rymkiewicz's The Final Station:Umschlagplatz explains, this image is 'the photograph everyone knows:a boy in a peaked cap and knee-length socks, his hands raised' (p. 3).Certainly this is the photograph that everyone knows and its canonicalstatus as an image of a child-victim rests, to some extent, on the croppingof this image prior to its various reproductions.6 But in the versionreproduced by Hirsch, 'extraneous' material has not been cropped out.

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The boy is not separated out, that is, from his context. We see himaccompanied, though slightly apart from a group of men, women andchildren. And as the narrator of The Final Station emphasises, behindthem and slightly to the right 'stand four Germans' (p. 3). This is theversion of the photograph that prompts Rymkiewicz's narrator tomeditate upon not only the identification that he makes between thatboy and his own boyhood self, (the identification that Hirsch's analysispursues), but also, as Hirsch's chosen extract makes plain, hisfascination with the soldiers: 'if I were now after 45 years to meet one ofthose Germans in the street I'd identify him instantly' (p. 3). Earlier, Iproposed that the The Final Station's narrator's remarks about thesoldiers as well as his imaginary conversation with the boy in thephotograph's foreground are suggestive of the complex web ofidentifications that are arguably constitutive of testimonial witnessingand I asked why it might be that canonical testimonial theory, asexemplified by Hirsch's essay, limits itself to a discussion of theidentificatory relation between witness and victim. What, that is, is thenature of a fascination that can etch those soldiers' faces deep intomemory and why does Hirsch pass over this passage?

There are, of course, a number of competing perspectives that canbe drawn on to explain the fascination exerted by those soldiers. It mightbe proposed, for instance, that the etching of the soldiers' faces onto thenarrator's memory exemplifies the 'wounded attachment' (Brown, 1995,p. 68) characteristic of Nietzschian ressentiment, which 'produces a siteof revenge to displace the hurt' (Brown, p. 68). Ressentiment does indeedoffer an explanation for why those faces etch themselves in the memory:'if something is to stay in the memory, it must be burned in ...'(Nietzsche quoted in Brown, p. 68). Yet the passive version of memory itproduces sheds no light on the processes by means of which the psycheactively mediates the images of which it is constituted. My revisedreading of Freud's Civilisation and its Discontents suggests, rather, thatencounters with representatives of authority (and its perversion) willprompt secondary identifications modelled on that primaryidentification rooted in the child's ambivalent relation to its first authorityfigure - an ambivalence that finds no place in the Nietzscheian schemaand that Judith Butler's (1997) bracketing of Freud with Nietzschearguably underplays.

Contra Hirsch, and following but revising the Freud of Civilisationand its Discontents, I am suggesting that the quoted passage from TheFinal Station is suggestive of the complex identifications in play inpostmemorial testimonial scenarios. For the narrator's commentsarguably point to the possibility that alongside an identification with thechild victim runs an identification with the soldiers - a secondaryidentification that takes as its model that primary process by means ofwhich the child negotiates ambivalence and which inaugurates

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conscience. But this terrifying authority is equivalent neither to the'good enough' authority assumed by Freud, nor to the diffusions andpervasiveness of that postmodern authority identified by Craib. Theauthority struggled with here is perverse or 'toxic' authority and thetoxicity of this authority cannot be wholly incorporated. This toxicauthority demands revenge. It is this demand, I want to suggest, which issuggested by the emphatic juxtapositioning, of 'after 45 years' and 'I'didentify him instantly'. As Nancy Wood (1998) has pointed out, thisrefusal of time's capacity to heal is characteristic of what Jean Amerytermed 'the victim's resentment' (p. 259):

The victim's resentment, Amery declared, was, in the first instance a'protest against the anti-moral natural process of healing that time bringsabout... the resentment of the victim of Nazism ... was ... locked bymemories of the deed into a temporal order resistant to the forces ofattenuation that remoteness, through time otherwise effected, (pp. 259-260)

Toxic authority leaves its mark across time, but the mark it leaves, Iwant to propose, is a mark etched upon a psyche struggling toincorporate it on the model of a primary ambivalence that itcatastrophically disappoints. The toxicity of Nazism and the diffusionsof postmodern authority are not equivalent. The authority of the ThirdReich was not hard to identify. But it was perverse. In suchcircumstances, identification cannot (and should not) simply containaggressivity through conversion into intra-psychic conflict. Yet I wantto insist that even the route to resistance passes through an identificationgrounded in the child's ambivalence towards its first authority figureand in a wish grounded in an unconsciously grasped resemblance: thechild's wish to exercise against that authority figure the aggressivityexercised against it. But Hirsch's reading is made under thecontemporary conditions Craib's account of which I described earlier,conditions in which the ungraspability of authority leads to thedisplacement and distortion of aggression, rather than its incorporationthrough secondary identification. Craib identified two dominantdisplacements of aggression: an identification with victimhood whichdenies its own aggressivity and fantasies of innocent 'goodness' inwhich aggression has no place. Under these conditions, a postmemorialwitnessing that embraces both an identification with the child victimand a more torturous identificatory struggle with the soldiers cannot becountenanced. The soldiers disappear. And what, then, of the men andwomen pictured alongside that child victim and those soldiers?

Though I have suggested that the constituency of postmemorymay exceed the ties of ethnic, familial or group relation, Hirsch's essayseeks to bear witness to a second generation postmemory forged

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through identifications grounded in those very relations. Perhaps whatis truly paradoxical, about the effects of canonical testimonial work'sconstraints is not the removal of the soldiers from the scene ofpostmemorial identification, but the disappearance, of the potential theStroop Report photograph offers for identificatory fantasies linked withthose men and women of the ghetto. These men and women'sdetermination for revenge was forged, I want to insist, through processesthat passed through identificatory travails with their tormentors -processes the traces of which emerge in The Final Station's narrator's'even after 45 years ... I'd identify him instantly'.

The focus on victimhood and suffering exemplified by Hirsch'sanalyses can be linked to that essay's psycho-social context - a contextwithin which identification with 'pure' victimhood holds sway. Theethics of witnessing that follows from my essay and that I'madvocating takes a different form. For what I'm suggesting is that wemight return to the Stroop Report photograph and attempt to bearwitness to the more complex, difficult and equivocal identifications thattogether constitute its unrealised potential. What I'm suggesting, then, isthat we struggle to read this image in the 'grey zone', that is, in a zone,in which neither 'pure' victimhood, nor 'pure' perpetration hold sway.This would be a witnessing that works against the grain of canonicaltestimonial work. It is a witnessing made both urgent and difficult bythe particular dangers of the times in which we live.

Ackno wle dgements

With thanks to Couze Venn, for last minute advice.

Notes

1 Here, I have in mind TV shows such as Ricki Lake, in which guests speak outabout wrongs done to them by errant partners and the like. These shows,which arguably straddle confession and testimony are far too complex andmulti-faceted to be discussed here, but need to be included, I want tosuggest, in any comprehensive mapping of the testimonial cultural field.

2 Psychoanalysis distinguishes between 'an identification that is heteropathicand centripetal where the subject identifies his own self with the other, andan idiopathic and centrifugal variety in which the subject identifies the otherwith himself (Laplanche and Potalis, 1988, p. 206).

3 For a much more favourable and compelling reading of the ethical aestheticsof Schindler's List see Thomas Elsaesser's essay 'Subject positions, speakingpositions: from Holocaust, Our Hitler, and Heimat to Shoah and Schindler's List(Elsaesser 1996). For comprehensive coverage of debates on Schindler's Listsee Yosefa Loshitzky's Spielberg's Holocaust, (Loshitzky 1997).

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4 This hypothesis is borne out by Theodor Reik's (1961) finding that tensionprompts the 'retroactive transmutation of th(e) self-tormenting attitude ... Inturning back, the instinct hitherto directed against the ego ... drives towardseruption against an external object...' (p. 414).

5 This is not to say that the divisions of the inner world collapse, but it is to saythat more work needs to be undertaken on exactly how postmodernexperience may be refiguring those divisions and it is to contest theemphasis that has been placed on the role of the 'internal witness' in thework of testimony: 'the testimony is, therefore, the process by which thenarrator (the survivor) reclaims his position as a witness: reconstitutes theinternal "thou", and thus the possibility of a witness or a listener insidehimself. (Felman and Laub 1992: 85). Such analyses of the inner dynamics oftestimony seem to me to be shaped by testimonial culture in that theiraccount of inner life stresses only the difficulties posed to the self by events,rather than those difficulties posed by difficult or even intolerable fantasies,often of revenge or aggressivity, fantasies which remain unacknowledgedand unaddressed in testimonial theory's model of the survivor and theinternal witness.

6 I am grateful to Peggy Phelan who made this point after my original spokenpresentation of this paper at Lancaster University's Testimonial Cultureconference.

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Susannah Radstone teaches in the Cultural Studies department at theUniversity of East London. Her most recent publication is Memory and

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Methodology (ed.), Berg and she is currently completing a book onmemory, confession and the sexual politics of time to be published byRoutledge.

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