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The Document as Subject and Witness in The Unfinished

Conversation
When approached with the task of making a commentary or
developing a dialog with the work in this incredibly hard-hitting show
and the many challenging conversations that emerge from each work, I
wanted to be conscious on my own position and be sure to avoid
claiming knowledges or experiences that I do not share but can only
try to understand and develop solidarity around. So in thinking of how
to engage with the works I decided to chose an avenue that related to
my own critical practice, specifically the deconstruction of various
technologies that are tasked with mediating and reproducing power,
enframing the subject within a complex tension of ideologies and
histories. This mediating technology which kept reoccurring in the
works, specifically in Steve McQueens End Credits and Sven
Augustijnens Spectres, is the document, not only as tool for
organizing, facilitating and witnessing the process of historical violence
and trauma but also a mediator between that violence and the
perpetuators of it, a tool for the systematic normalization of state
violence. Although the document as tool vastly predates the
contemporary digital condition, its importance in an environment of
leaks, historical document disclosures, and other revelations brought
about by Freedom of Information requests and processes of Truth and
Reconciliation cannot be understated. Rather than to pull attention
from the materiality of the document itself, digital processing and
proliferation has foregrounded the document as material, as subject.
This is dramatically apparent in Steven Mcqueens End Credits, where
the document is not presented in the singular page but as a seemly
endless digital loop of scanned paper. When we are presented with the
quantity the volume, the document no longer behaves singularly as
witness, it is transfigured in the massing together, into a symbol of the
totality, the superstructure, the complete system that seeks to in its
documentation, in its fracturing and regimentation of dissenting
bodies, to reduce them into units that fit into predictive systems, into
complex narratives of state planning in which we as individuals are
expected to enact in petty degrees our limited freedoms. It speaks to
not only the overarching historical violences but the minute quotidian
forms of violence that in their plentitude become too vast to wholly
conceive but which form the basis for the fundamental restructuring of
our beings by the systems which wish to shape or break them or if
proven expedient, to simply erase them.
The age of the document dump, a process that could only have
been facilitated by the foundational restructuring of circulation systems
by the digital, has introduced a duality to the document, it is both a
record or witness of a given injustice or overreach and also in its

quantity an independent subject or pure symbol. A perfect illustration


of this condition was observed in February of 2014 when hundreds of
folders were discovered floating in the reservoir of Victor Yanukovychs
estate containing over 2,500 documents. The very act of attempting to
destroy these documents in haste by tossing them into the water
alerted activists and journalists that they most likely contained the
records of some injustice or another and in so believing a team of said
journalists and activists began to rescue these documents and
painstakingly dry and scan them for immediate posting to a publicly
accessible database. One of the members of the team was quoted as
saying "the first priority was to get the information outwe wanted to
get documents secured, and get them out in public to show that this is
about transparency and accountability." The sheer quantity of
documents, 2,839 in the most recent count, spoke to a desire by the
previous regime to hide vast amounts of information, implicitly
implicated them in an immense wrongdoing before the documents
were even analyzed. The quantity itself was taken as a vindication of
the revolution. However as Orit Gat notes in her article Unbound: The
Politics of Scanning, we should be weary of simplifying the narrative
too much. To quote her:
The romanticized image of the scanner is based on the
assumption that by scanning and uploading we make
information available, and that that is somehow an invariably
democratic act. Scanning has become synonymous with
transparency and access. But does the document dump
generate meaningful analysis, or make it seem insignificant?
Does the internet enable widespread distribution, or does it
more commonly facilitate centralized access? And does the
scanner make things transparent, or does it transform them?
The contemporary political imaginary links the scanner with
democracy, and so we should explore further the political
possibilities, values, and limitations associated with the
process of scanning documents to be uploaded to the
internet.
But the process of scanning and uploading has many positive
attributes as well, as Gat notes:
Although certain services remain centralized and vulnerable
to political manipulation, such as the DNS addressing system,
and government monitoring of online behavior is
commonplace, there is still political possibility in the
aggregate, geographically dispersed nature of the internet. If
the same document is scanned, uploaded, and then shared

across a number of different hosts, it becomes much more


difficult to suppress.
But ultimately, like with all forms of presenting and representing
narratives of power we must be weary of allowing the medium to be a
stand-in for legitimacy, and instead view it as another point of access
into what must be a meaningful engagement with the ruptures, the
rare glimpses of the machinations of state and corporate power,
because as Julian Assange once noted "It's too much; it's impossible to
read it all, or get the full overview of all the revelations." And this is
were the power of End Credits lies for me, in its ability to both engage
with the document as a subject, in its totality, its sheer mass through
the endless loop of documents, and also in its engagement with the
document in its more traditional sense, as a witness, through the
overlay of the voice over. These voices, while generally monotone,
speak these documents to life and humanize the process of
surveillance and oppression, we can no longer see these documents as
the markings of a totalized inhuman effort. We are instead forced to
acknowledge the human in the process and regard the multitude of
complicities that underpin such an organism and how it recasts
individuals in accommodation of its end goals. As Edward S. Herman
notes:
Doing terrible things in an organized and systematic way
rests on "normalization." This is the process whereby ugly,
degrading, murderous, and unspeakable acts become routine
and are accepted as "the way things are done." There is
usually a division of labor in doing and rationalizing the
unthinkable, with the direct brutalizing and killing done by
one set of individuals; others keeping the machinery of death
in order; still others producing the implements of killing, or
working on improving technology Distance from execution
helps render responsibility hazy.
It is this emotional distance afforded by the document and the
bureaucratic process, which Hannah Arendt referred to as the Banality
of Evil. And it is in observing more closely the stream of documents,
that we see the handwritten sections, the modifications and erasures
that are performed by human hands where we trace these complicities,
these banal actions of a paper pusher pushing individuals along an
assembly line of subjugation.
But we should also ask the question of what does the ability to see
these documents now offer the communities that they so affected, why
now, after decades of censorships are these documents finally released
and downloadable, again in bulk, on the FBI website. It was in the

shadows of the events of the Black Lives Matter protests that the FBI
Director James B. Comey in a speech to Georgetown University finally
acknowledges that, quote At many points in American history, law
enforcement enforced the status quo, a status quo that was often
brutally unfair to disfavored groups, Comey goes on to remark that,
One reason we cannot forget our law enforcement legacy is that the
people we serve cannot forget it either. So we must talk about our
history. It is a hard truth that lives on. These disclosures certainly do a
part in disrupting narratives of erasure and begin a process of truth but
the reconciliation part needs to further acknowledge and challenge the
results of these policies in determining the present and the future and
what are ongoing processes of oppression. Furthermore it is important
to likewise reach back further and problematize what Nathan I Huggins
calls the normalization of Black slavery and post-1865 racism in the
master narrative of American history. As Huggins notes:
Slavery was (seen) a "tragic error" (like the Vietnam War),
rather than a rational and institutional choice; it has been
marginalized as an aside or tangent, rather than recognized
as a central and integral feature of U.S. history; and it has
been portrayed as an error in process of rectification in a
progressive evolution, rather than a terrible permanent scar
that helps explain the Southern Strategy, the current attack
on affirmative action, and the enlarging Black ghetto disaster
of today.
And it is another recent story of documents that helps to further
problematize these revisionist narratives and firmly reposition the
process of plundering, enslavement, coloniality and subjugation in the
realm of the planned society. The declassified documents made
available November 29, 2013 at the National Archives at Kew, southwest London, England came from a cache of 8,800 colonial-era files
that the Foreign Office held for decades, in breach of the 30-years rule
of the Public Records Acts and in effect beyond the reach of the
Freedom of Information Act. They were stored behind barbed-wire
fences at Hanslope Park, Buckinghamshire, a government
communications research centre north of London. The documents only
came to light after a high court proceeding by a group of elderly
Kenyans who were suing the government over the mistreatment they
suffered while imprisoned during the 1950s Mau Mau insurgency. What
was revealed in these documents was an extensive operation of
document burning that accompanied the handover of power in former
British colonies. Codenamed Operation Legacy, a plethora of
documents outlined a policy instructing diplomats to burn, quote any
material that might embarrass Her Majesty's [the] government", that
could "embarrass members of the police, military forces, public

servants or others" including all papers which are likely to be


interpreted, either reasonably or by malice, as indicating racial
prejudice or religious bias on the part of Her Majesty's government".
The sheer amount of documents that were burned was staggering with
assistance of the army required in British Guiana and Officials in more
than one colony warning London that they feared they would be
"celebrating Independence Day with smoke". Many more documents
were shipped en masse back to London under the cover of secrecy
with an extensive and complex classification system further
illuminating the depth of racial prejudice and the potentially damning
information held within them.
Documents marked "Guard", for example, could be disclosed
to non-British officials as long as if they were from the "Old
Commonwealth" Australia, New Zealand, South Africa or
Canada. Those classified as "Watch", and stamped with a red
letter W, were to be removed from the country or destroyed.
Steps were taken to ensure post-colonial governments would
not learn that such files had ever existed, with one instruction
stating: "The legacy files must leave no reference to watch
material. Indeed, the very existence of the watch series,
though it may be guessed at, should never be revealed."
Officials were warned to keep their W stamps locked away.
The marking "DG" was said to be an abbreviation of deputy
governor, but in fact was a protective code word to indicate
that papers so marked were for sight by "British officers of
European descent only".
This case brings us back to this contemporary dichotomy of the
document. We have yet to evaluate the content of most of these
documents but the history of their erasure speaks as loudly, it tells of a
desire to revise a history of systematic violence, racism, and
oppression, to remove those markings of a calculated and prolonged
killing that the world found so troubling in the methods of the Nazis.
Its erasure is an attempt to recast a narrative, to disallow a written
corroboration of oral testimony. And of those documents that have
been returned to London, the 1.2 Million of that secret archive which is
termed the Special Collection we can not now know how much has
been unwritten, and we can only take the advice of Orit Gat and not
only make these documents available as subject but to uncover the
human within them and begin to see them as witness, to challenge
Bertold Brechts assertion that as crimes pile up, they become
invisible.
The document has long been seen by western legal systems
and historians as a guard against the ambiguity and degradation of

memory; it formalizes experience, transmuting subjectivities into the


object notes of the ledger of history. But we must problematize this
notion of the document as a de facto legitimate witness, a position that
is constantly reiterated by Jacque Brassinne in Sven Augustijnens
Spectres. In a particularly revealing part of the film Brassinne
approaches a tree which he firmly believes is the tree upon which
Lumumba amoung other political prisoners was executed, referencing
not only his memory but also the documents that he had himself
written for the Lumumba Commission as both witness and historian. He
carefully observes the tree revealing to the camera what he believes
as the remnants of bullet holes in its bark without regard to the
indifferent passage of time that would have surely enveloped those
marking in a layer of thicker and harder skin. His documents become
something other than himself working not from within him and his
testimony but parallel to it, as if they were not in their origins from his
own hand. This firm narrative that he reasserts against the
protestations of a fellow witness, Piet Moens a former territorial agent
of the Belgian Congo, at once becomes troubled when a local woman
reveals that that tree had in fact befallen the very fate of Lumumba, it
had been cut down and rendered into coal and ash. At this point the
document once again re-joins its author and through the flawed
testimony of the author, itself becomes questionable.
It is this moment that reasserts the point that the document as
witness cannot be understood outside the narrative of the author who
produced it, Jacque Brassinnes role as a historian cannot be separated
from his role as witness and participant in that very history. However,
he stubbornly asserts the role of the document as a mediator between
these two versions of himself, as if the document is by virtue of its
documentness is an innate representation of entire truth. This
contention reoccurs in Spectres with regard to the infamous telex sent
by Harold dAspremont the former Minister of African Affairs that
documented a desire to neutralize Patrice Lumumba. Harolds son,
Arnoud, reiterates, quote But the parliamentary investigation
commission that looked into it (the telex), and that produced a 988page report, together with inummerable other documents, proved the
opposite, in my opinion. Namely that the telex referred to his
elimination from the political scene, not to his physical elimination. My
father had his faults, sure, but he wasnt stupid. If his intention had
really been to have Patrice Lumumba killed, he wouldnt have put it in
black and white in a telex to a diplomat. Here Arnoud is both
acknowledging that his father would not speak directly about
assassination and yet at the same time firmly suggesting that his
supposedly ambiguous use of the term neutralize was in no way a
safeguard against future historical interpretation of his involvement.
Through this it becomes apparent how easily the document can bear

false witness, how it is itself constructed with an awareness of its


subsequent role as historical witness and how the legitimacy granted
by its documentness can be cynically manipulated to discount oral
testimony and as Edward S. Herman said to provide distance from the
execution, to make responsibility hazy.

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