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!Experienc e bookle t TAD AW 22 / 9 / 0 0

EXPERIENCE Four Essays on Experience

Each essay in this small collection offers an analysis of what it is to 'speak

out' , either as a witness of certain scenarios or as an individual who has 'experienced'

certain events. The contributions from various disciplines, each placing a different

emphasis or slant upon the subject matter, offer the reader a way of stretching out

the interpretative possibilities of the following question ... What is experience? 1

Furthermore, this publication attempts to ask what the effects and/or value

of experience might be if specific autobiographic detail or personal experience is not

foregrounded by the subject as a evidence of their own 'authenticity' (in contrast to

the contemporary trend for 'candour') 2 but instead emerges as traces, which manifest

themselves as a certain way of looking (i.e. making images in the case of artists) 3

or as a way of constructing sentences (i.e. the recording officer who, unwittingly or

not, writes his own viewpoint into a witness's statement.) 4

If the 'content' of experience is withheld yet still spoken or 'confessed '

in this indirect manner, what status does this leakage have, that bleeds through the

subject's way of being and into their form of expression?

Kate Lo ve

David Wolchover and Anthony Heaton-A rmstrong

Susan Morris

Darian Leader

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EXPERIENCE PREFERRED by Kate Love

1

EXPERIENCE PREFERRED by Kate Love

"MY FATHER DIED IN HIS 45TH YEAR OF HEART FAILURE when

I was just seven years old, giving us only one weeks warning that his health was failing.

I have never ever been able to remember anything about that time, nothing from either

before or, for a long time, after his death.

There are though, maybe one or two exceptions, sharp memories, such as the

first day back at school after the summer holidays and starting a new year the teacher

asked each class member to state their father's occupation (this was still the early 60's

afterall) -and I replied quite prosaically- 'deceased'.

I could not say 'dead', or 'has died', partly because I thought it felt vaguely bad

mannered, but also because the sound and the meaning qf the word dead was both far too

final and real, and simultaneously, elsewhere - something I absolutely could not associate

with myself or my grief.

Apart from this and one or two other quite specific recollections, there is nothing

else that I can really recall from this period or before, and for as long as I can remember

I have always considered this space or gap in my memory to be a constituent of my

subjectivity: the fact that I am unable to remember the early years of my life is 'just part

of my history'.

It has been, to say the least, a long and circuitous journey to this point- a point

where I no longer feel so happy to have such a gap or such a hole in my past.

The work, which I have been engaged with for some time on the concept of

experience, has brought me, quite unintentionally, towards an obligation to face this

space of un-knowing.

And in a sense, I now realise that I am making this work in order to

describe an experience: an experience of this gap-space (knowing and yet not

knowing) which, strangely, and quite startlingly, I now also recognise might not be

unlike a new and a possibly more adequate interpretation of experience itself."

2

'The dialectic has its proper fulfilment not in definitive knowledge but in the openness to

experience that is made possible by experience itself.' Hans-Georg Gadamer 1

It is with some trepidation that I begin this text with such a personal

account of my own experience because paradoxically my work on the concept of

experience began as a critique of the ubiquity of such strategies in contemporary art

practice. For example, when I started this work in 1995 it had become incredibly

commonplace to read accounts of particular art works which stressed quite

unproblematically, and I felt untenably, that they were about the artist's own personal

experience rather than that experience as it might be understood discursively

- inter-subjectively - or as very deliberately, an experience 'of' a social or critical

or contemporaneous issue .

The cultural and political shifts which had produced this privileged, and to

some extent overdetermined, sense of the personal as 'confessional', were sanctioned

most particularly in the context of art and literature. Arts anyway residual tendency

to focus on the relationship between 'the work' and 'the self' had been compounded

by a generation or so of visibility politics and the move towards social equality

through encouraging the representation of difference rather than sameness or

universality. Concurrently, a concomitant of this turn 'inwards' was also being

underwritten on an activist level by the increased acceptance of Michel Foucault's

seminal injunction, proclaiming 'the indignity of speaking for others' . Slowly but

surely, this instruction permeated accepted behaviour, to the extent that it became

less and less comfortable to take being spoken 'on behalf of' for granted. Gradually,

more and more people began to respond to the space and the anticipation that they

might now learn to speak 'for' themselves.

In the context of art, these various technologies of writerly inscription and

diversification served to edge forwards the already existing and perhaps politically

inevitable transition from a 1970's/80's art practice based on the 'big' themes of

'Identity' and 'Representability' -towards quite a different body of work

- one which was associated in the 90's with the figuring of a smaller kind of

experience, a localised, and quotidian politics of 'the Everyday'. People just started

to make work about the obviousness and ordinariness of so-called 'mundane'

experience - events that they might bump up against in their day-to day lives, rather

than the great themes typically associated with art. Paradoxically, when this work

first appeared, it seemed so 'out of the ordinary' that it didn't always signify. 2

3

Hitherto this period, art works which were figured in any way as 'personal' or

about 'experience', had unfortunately remained relatively delimited - the province

of certain subjects only. And as a consequence, this work mostly had an audience

'in the know', who knew what they were looking for and how to read the signs.

Furthermore, because this kind of work was often concerned with the 'personal' or

the autobiographical, it was most usually associated with all things female or other

and therefore marginalised as such, and dangerously off-limits for the continuation

of a serious practice. However- in the late 80 's/ early 90's- largely as a result of

these technologies of difference and interpellation - what became startling and

surprising, precisely, for those others - was that this terrific shift in consciousness

produced a mass vindication, whereby anyone who wanted to could just get down

to what they had wanted all along - that is - 'to find their own voice' and start to

'represent their own experience'.

To bring this writing up to date, the point at which I came into this work

was when I first realised that - whilst welcoming such a move - the force of such a

recognition 3 only served to obscure the substantive linguistic, psychoanalytic and

philosophical complexities which surround the probability of finding something you

might call your 'own' voice or your 'own' experience . For example, it seemed that

the political interpellation to go inwards and downwards had been unravelled in

ways which began to overshadow the hard-won victories of earlier poststructuralist

discourse. These deconstructive interpretations had previously liberated individuals

from the confines of artificially induced 'normality' and 'naturalness', by insisting

on the constructedness of the 'self', and were therefore seen initially as a real move

towards the cultural and social mobilisation of subjectivity. But in the context of this

ever-growing propensity for the depiction and valorisation of personal experience,

some artists very deliberately turned their backs on such theory - angry that these

ideas had decentered subjectivity and rendered artistic agency and intentionality

quite impossible. 4

Unfortunately, this sort of round about thinking engendered a morbid

re-visiting of a previously much discredited belief- that is, that the representation

of experience would guarantee transparent access to an authentic knowledge of

subjectivity. As a consequence, the insidious acceptance of this idea, in many diverse

contexts, similarly led back to the older, and relatively pernicious, understanding

of the subject as a singular, autonomous and expressive individual. Typically, these

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beliefs served to legitimate reference to experience, in art, as entirely 'ones own'

-that is, as if knowledges gained through experience were able to deliver meanings

which were immediately present to consciousness. Within art school discourse,

for example, it was, and to some extent still is, so much more usual to hear a student

say that they are 'making work about my experience' - rather than - 'making

work about my understanding of the world.' And in many ways I have found that

this statement usually means the student has internalised the idea that, only by

working on experience, will they be able to release the truth content of their

subjectivity, because only experience, as opposed to understanding, can offer the

right kind of indexical contiguity with the world - as unmediated meaning.

Given the enduring prevalence of such an assertion, it would be relatively

easy to just give in to such declarations, if it were not for a set of unresolved

contradictions that, I feel, still haunt this lingering belief in the 'immediacy' of

experience. That is, that whilst I can obviously accept that there is a qualitative

difference between what it feels like to experience the world, as distinct from what it

feels like to understand the world - I still have problems with the idea that experience

should therefore, on the strength of this difference, be summarily collapsed to

authentic self-presence. That is , whilst it may well be the case that to have had an

experience is - as if to possess it- a feeling of immediate contiguity between

sensation and affect- I remain unconvinced by how this immediacy might turn itself

instantaneously into recognition and meaning. For example, if experience does

transcend discourse, then it's hard to see how we might make sense of our experiences,

if they are always on the out-side of language. On the other hand, if we compensate

for this linguistic predicament by resorting to the proposition that experience is

necessarily 'always already' in signification for it to be understood as experience,

then it really becomes quite difficult to posit experience as structurally different

to understanding, in that both are subject to discursive interpretation through the

movement of differance. And so on - if experience is necessarily subject to the

condition of temporal and spatial deferral which comprises differance - then this would

mean that experience could never be self-present to consciousness, and as a consequence

it becomes difficult to maintain the supposed ' immediacy' of actual experience.

Whatever the outcomes of these contortions, however, one only has to

witness on TV and in popular journalism, the enduring tendency to privilege the

account of someone who has had an actual experience over someone who has not,

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to begin to estimate the strength of this common-sense view of personal experience

as a guarantee of authenticity and truth.

So for me, despite all the attenuated complexities surrounding the

contradiction of experience, the challenge remains - as this publication attests

-the challenge, that is, in the question what is experience? For example, what does

it mean to say you've had an experience, what is its status, and value, and how is

that written and seen?

To begin to answer such a series of questions demands that we scrutinise

the conditions of possibility that have given rise to such inquiries in the first place.

For example, what does it mean to even think of querying the status of actual

experience and how do we begin to understand how the representation of

such an experience might be thought of as authentic? Inevitably, to pose either

of these questions relies on the assumption that it's still possible to think of the

individual as the origin or source of experience, transparently representing the truth

of their subjectivity. But is it still feasible to think in this way? For example, if the

90's 'art of the everyday' hadn't turned its back so resolutely on the gains of 80's

poststructuralism, would we even be thinking in terms such as these? And if such

a 'return to quotidian experience' hadn't disavowed the idea of a constituted

subjectivity would we still be thinking along the lines of the immediacy of experience

and it's possession in art? It's quite possible that it is exactly this feeling of possession

that has fed the desire for - and the interpretation of- so much recent confessional

based art practice . But as I queried earlier - is it still prudent to maintain a belief

in experience as implying unmediated transmission of sensation to effect?

To date, therefore, I am trying to work through the idea of an interpretation

of the concept of experience as yes, being intrinsically different to the feeling of

understanding but no, not by default being posited as self-present and therefore

inevitably other to language and discursive construction.

And a clue here - in the search for the kind of interpretation of experience

which would comply with these conditions - is precisely in the examination of the

similarities and differences between experience and understanding and their

relationship to language. So by way of a conclusion I would like to consider these

relations, if only to attempt to think through what might really be happening when

we say that we have had an actual experience.

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The traditional, ubiquitous reading suggests that experience is sensate

rather than cognitive - 'a buzzing, confusion of things' that just 'happens' to a

subject - whilst the concept of understanding implies a certain command over

knowledge, a process, which is very definitely in language, and one which positions

the subject by such an interpretation and such a control. Its quite possible that it is

this openness which makes experience feel more immediate, but also leads wrongly,

I would argue, to the assumption of self-presence. And similarly, it is almost

certainly the supposed fluidity of experience which distances it untenably from the

fixity of language and discursive understanding.

Given the exacting precision of these conditions, however, it does seem

important that any viable interpretation of experience doesn't ignore these

differences in quality but rather attempts to retain the intuitive sense of the openness

of experience, whilst at the same time making space for the inevitability of its

discursive interpretation. In other words, a more workable and/or conceptually

tenable understanding of experience could be figured as one in which the subject

is concurrently both in language and yet posited at the limits of that language.

A process which could be likened to the subject undergoing and interpreting

simultaneously, and one which would give credence to something called actual

experience - in that it could register an openness rather than a fixity towards

language without conflating that fluidity with the fallaciousness of self-presence. 5

It is interesting to note here that when people talk about making art

- particularly the key moment of 'imaginative variation' - when the seeming

incoherence of an object or an image suddenly gets to 'count as something', they

very often speak about this moment as equivalent to a feeling of being both in

meaning and also at the limits of that meaning - being pushed into meaning - if you

like - as it turns over and is made. To me - this sounds very similar to the above

elucidation of experience, as undergoing and interpreting (not as self-presence or as

collapsed entirely to language, but both- at the same time) and for this reason I am

now working with the idea that the process of making and looking at art could be

used as an exemplar, or model, for understanding the concept of experience itself.

That is, in order to undermine the art theory/art practice binary redolent of so much

contemporary debate - instead of using theory to analyse art- I am attempting to

use the experience of art, itself, as a tool of conceptual analysis. My argument would

be that if these moments with art can act as a metaphor for experience, as we might

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conceptualise it but rarely truly experience it, then in terms of the pursuit of a more

adequate definition of experience, it seems imperative that we try to analyse such

moments of art against the concept of experience that they might tend to produce.

To end, by returning to the beginning of this text, the images included

throughout this writing are my photographic attempt to do just this. Taken in Hyde

Park, London, they are a remembrance of the place, as it was, when I visited it a few

weeks after the death of my Father when I was seven years old. When I took them,

last year, it felt as if I was at the very limit of the sense of such a memory. But it was

as if- through the experience of setting up these photographs - I encountered what

I would now call 'the limit of understanding', or experience, as the limit of

understanding - when experience is seen as a process of consciousness in relation

to itself as a process of consciousness. The interesting thing, so far, is that this

practice does seem to do the analytical work I really hoped it might - that is, produce

an interpretation of such an experience which doesn't feel anything like possession

or fixity (no room to mobilise such memories) but rather strikingly and startlingly

produces an openness 6 to that experience which I have probably always intuitively

known is only made possible by experience itself.

With this in mind, my hope is that maybe someday soon I'll be able to 'do'

something with such 'memories'.

Footnotes for EXPERIENCE PREFERRED by Kate Love. p. 33.

8

TESTING THE EVIDENCE OF WITNESSES by David Wolchover and Anthony Hea ton-Armstrong

9

TESTING THE EVIDENCE OF WITNESSES by David Wolchover and Anthony Heaton-Armstrong

THE OUTCOME OF MOST COURT CASES, be they civil or criminal,

depends on resolving conflicts of fact. The facts are traditionally established by

witnesses giving oral evidence in court describing past events, conditions, feelings,

knowledge, beliefs, or any other states of affairs relevant to the factual issues.

The job of the tribunal is to judge what facts to accept, what to reject . In recent

years the rigidity of the old rule requiring all evidence to be called 'live' has been

relaxed. Nowadays written statements prepared for use in the criminal court may

be read if the witness's evidence is uncontentious and if the parties agree, or in

certain other exceptional circumstances where the witness is unavailable or unwilling

to testify through fear. But where evidence is challenged or otherwise not accepted,

the traditional tool developed by the Common law for testing the integrity or

reliability of contested evidence remains cross-examination, once memorably

described as the 'greatest engine for detecting perjury yet devised.' Whilst this is

perhaps to overstate its efficacy, as the list of notorious miscarriages of justice can

attest, there is little doubt that the classic techniques of cross-examination, which

advocates have honed up over the centuries, do furnish a powerful weapon for

exposing inaccuracy, whether through mendacity, muddle or a combination of both.

Perhaps the most important weapon in the armoury of the cross-examiner

is the test as to consistency. It is traditionally believed that after making all due

allowance for the frailty of memory a comparison between the testimony of an

eyewitness in court and a statement about the events in question uttered on a

previous occasion may provide a compelling indication of the witness's veracity,

accuracy and reliability. Indeed, it was asserted by the Court of Appeal in the case

of Rashid in 1994 that previous statements are 'one of the classic examples of

material tending to undermine the credibility of a witness.' For many centuries now

professional investigators have customarily taken written statements from witnesses

close in time to the events in question. Later, at trial, the witnesses are allowed to

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'refresh their memories' from those statements . To that end, in some cases, they are

handed their statements to use in front of them, in the witness box. More commonly

however, they will be given the statement to inspect before coming in to court,

but not permitted to have it with them when they are actually in court; significant

differences can then be explored in cross-examination. Quite clearly, testing for

consistency is dependent on restricting memory refreshment to out-of-court use

of a statement made to the police, since there can hardly be any valid test of

consistency if witnesses in the box have their statements in front of them in the first

instance. Statements to the police will usually have been signed months before the

trial and, not surprisingly, differences often emerge at trial even though witnesses

may be given their original statements to read outside the courtroom before they

give evidence. Since private witnesses will usually be describing an incident

completely out of their normal experience it is assumed that their content will be

graphically embossed on the memory; whilst details may become fuzzy with the

passage of time the essentials will tend to remain constant. Changes in the memory

of such central matters are therefore supposed to furnish a useful litmus test of

reliability and if conducted well, cross-examination on inconsistency will prove

illuminating, not to say decisive.

The value of testing for inconsistency obviously depends on the accuracy

of the written statement as a record of what the witness said to the police and is

likely to be undermined by flaws in the system of recording. In this country the

statements of private eye-witnesses are still almost invariably taken down by officers

involved to a greater or lesser extent in the investigation, and the content is likely

to be influenced by the way in which the investigator perceives the case and receives

and transcribes the narrative. Interviews in which the police take statements from

witnesses are conducted in private without the keeping of any verbatim record .

Hardly ever are they tape-recorded, and in the absence of any independent means

by which a court can determine exactly how a statement came to be made, the police

are relatively free to engage in manipulation, deliberate or inadvertent.

With the best will in the world, the way in which the story is committed

to paper cannot help but reflect the officer's subjective view of the facts. A statement

often owes as much to the officer's controlling hand as to the witness's actual memory.

It invariably excludes the questions, which may be leading and suggestive, what

purports to be written up can be highly selective and even quite inaccurate, and the

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statement may turn out to be a seriously distorted version of what the witness

actually said. At the time of telling the police their story, witnesses may be exhausted,

depressed, disorientated, unwell or preoccupied. Many witnesses are insensitive to

the nuances of language. So, after the officer has taken down the statement and has

handed it to the witness to check and sign, crucial omissions, errors or distortions

can easily be overlooked. On the other hand, the witness may simply be too tired

or too timid to give voice to objections or reservations.

By contrast with the stringent rules governing the obtaining of statements

from suspects the process of taking statements from witnesses is subject to few,

if any, formal safeguards or regulatory constraints . Until only as recently as 1992,

when the Home Office Central Planning and Training Unit issued A Guide to

Interviewing, a manual based on the 'ethical' method of the 'cognitive interview'

with its stress on the neutral search for facts, it was enhanced by little or no training.

Even now it seems that there continues to be relatively little systematic training

given to officers on conducting interviews, although it must be acknowledged

that there has been an increasing tendency to inculcate awareness of the pitfalls

of inadequate interviewing.

Most officers are coy when asked how they took a witness statement.

Few care to admit that the written narrative was obtained by questioning and the

fiction is still perpetuated that a statement was produced by straight dictation,

possibly preceded by some amount of general 'discussion' of the issues to be covered

and punctuated only by bland questions aimed at clearing up ambiguities or providing

descriptive detail. Broadly innocent reasons may explain why during the taking of a

statement a factual assertion by a witness is omitted from the narrative text, misrecorded

or misrepresented by the writer. For example, the statement-maker may speak in

a rambling or disconnected fashion or may suffer from poor diction or may speak in

an obscure dialect or with an unfamiliar accent. This may lead to misunderstandings

or omissions from the body of the statement if the statement-taker is inexperienced

or insufficiently vigilant to avert them, but it is liable to occur even with old hands .

Again, the witness may lay insufficient emphasis on a particular point despite its

potential significance, with the result that the statement-taker fails to notice it

amongst a mass of other more prominently voiced assertions. However, a more insidious

factor than simple miscommunication is the influence of unjustified supposition.

Whilst officers delegated to take a witness statement often have little or no

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involvement in the investigation this is usually where the witness is of marginal

importance. But statements by major witnesses are usually taken by officers at the

heart of an inquiry and this can lead to unconscious slanting of the narrative content.

In spite of the unquestioned desirability of preserving detachment an investigator may

understandably form an impassioned view of the case not warranted by the actual

evidence available. From this there may stem an emotion-led tendency to assume the

existence of facts conforming with the preconceived belief. The assumption by an

officer of the existence of facts not actually established by available evidence may

lead to their inclusion in a statement in two possible ways, one by direct impact on

the witness's spoken narrative, the other affecting the recording process. By the

influence of suggestion an officer with a forceful and persuasive personality may

impose on an uncertain witness a belief in the existence of a particular fact. As to

distortion through the recording process, ambiguities may tend to be read in favour

of a particular supposition (i.e. the suspected culprit's guilt) although, objectively

considered, they could equally be read to the contrary. Again, averments which, on

the face of it may seem perfectly clear in their meaning, may be misinterpreted in

conformity with the suspect's supposed guilt. The attachment to a given belief may

even cause what is said to be misheard. The consequence may be that statement­

takers will unconsciously rewrite what was actually said in accordance with what

they believe was implied.

In contrast with innocent misquotation, distortion or corruption of the

witness's original account may be the result of deliberate manipulation. Thus the

process of implanting in the witness's mind a belief in a particular fact may occur

quite deliberately. In adopting the belief the witness then 'dictates' it back to the

officer. Another approach is to misquote the witness in writing out the statement and

then to procure a signature without giving the witness an adequate chance to inspect

the record. (This could be achieved by a bogus 'reading' back of the statement.)

Somewhat recklessly, it may be hoped that months later at trial, when the witness

reads the statement before giving evidence, its content will be adopted uncritically on

the basis of the assumption that if it was in the statement it must have been believed

to be true, even though there is now no actual memory of the particular fact but only

a wish on the part of the witness not to be obstructive or unhelpful, or not to be

seen to be incompetent. Deliberate manipulation of witness or record may be

motivated by zeal where the officer firmly believes a particular person to be guilty

and perceives the existing evidence to be inadequate to guarantee a conviction.

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This is an example of what has been called 'noble cause corruption.' But less

'nobly' the motivation of the police may reflect an anxiety to cover their backs

against a legitimate complaint of unlawful arrest or some other illegality or impropriety.

Either way, it is instructive to quote the account by Dr Roderick Munday of having

' . . . regularly heard stories to make the flesh creep concerning the way in which

policemen have sometimes adjusted or attempted to adjust witnesses' versions of

events-verging from an unsuccessful and puzzling attempt to get a member of the

Bar to agree that his wife was with him in a boat on the Thames when he witnessed

a rape on the towpath ("because it looks better sir") to a student who, to his evident

distress, had been politely cajoled into giving descriptions of two men who mugged

him by a bank cash machine which he did not recognise but which happened to fit

those of two persons apprehended that same night by the constabulary.'

('The drafting smokescreen' , New Law journal, 30 May and 6 June 1997)

An important factor in rendering some witnesses vulnerable to deliberate

manipulation is that involvement in a case frequently begins for an individual as

a suspect. The transition to witness is often made in the belief that an escape from

prosecution is being offered and that there is little choice but to co-operate.

Acquiescence in these circumstances hardly conduces to willing testimony. On the

other hand, the witness may be perfectly innocent and eager to help the police but

suggestible, not very observant or possessed of only a mediocre memory. It is easy

to see how in either sort of case people are open to manipulation by a zealous

investigator or one anxious to avoid criticism for impropriety or incompetence.

There will be an obvious and clearly justifiable interest for the defence in learning

how the witness's statement was taken, under what blandishments, and exactly what

was said. It sometimes turns out with a witness who started out being questioned as

a suspect that no official record was evidently kept of the interview which led on to

that person eventually signing a witness statement. Since it is inconceivable that such a

statement will have been prompted without some amount of questioning, it follows that

the officers who were secluded with the witness during that session wrongly failed

to tape-record it. The breach can be used not only to attack the officer's credit on

other aspects of police evidence in the case, eg, admissions attributed to a defendant,

but there may be an argument for seeking exclusion of the witness's evidence from

the outset on the basis that the foundation on which the witness gives evidence

-the statement- was obtained through the commission of a breach of the rules.

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This problem was one of the main reasons behind the widely reported acquittal

of Paul Humphreys and others at Maidstone Crown Court in February 2000.

Many investigating officers will be unaware, or, at least, only dimly aware,

of the possible effect of unconscious influences emanating from a statement-taker

in distorting the content of a witness's statement. But few will fail to appreciate

the implications where deliberate manipulation is suspected. Hence officers are

invariably concerned to cultivate the impression that witness statements are the

product of dictation to an indifferent amanuensis. Thus, they will usually concede

that there was some generalised initial discussion on the broad outline of the subject­

matter and will sometimes admit the occasional interjection intended to keep the

witness within the bounds of relevance, or a neutral question designed to elicit

details of a description, for example. But the suggestion of any greater involvement

in controlling the content of the statement will always be vehemently denied.

The result, then, of these inherent defects in the recording process may be a

document which substantially, if not fundamentally, diverges from what the witness

stated or intended to state. On rare occasions distortion of what the witness actually

said may lead to the conviction of the innocent. But awful as it is to contemplate the

prospect of wrongful convictions, however remote, the lack of an unchallengeable

record of interviews in which witnesses give their statements to the police poses the

courts with what in practice amounts to a much more serious problem. For it is

frequently a direct cause of the acquittal of the guilty. We need to see how this happens

in practice. Because the content of statements is controlled by what investigators,

who record them, choose to include, attempts to use a statement to test consistency

often degenerates into a farce, with unresolved conflicts over just exactly what it was

that the witness did say to the police. Of course, discrepancies may be genuine ones,

truly showing up the witness as unreliable or even dishonest. But defending barristers

have long perfected the art of exploiting inadequacies in the system of taking down

statements in order to cast 'blame' on a witness for ostensible inconsistencies which

may be no more than the spurious product of inherent failings in the traditional

recording process . When a witness answering the prosecuting barrister's questions

departs in some significant respect from an earlier statement to the police, the

defending barrister in cross-examination will embark on a series of standardised

entrapping questions designed to seal up escape routes. Questions tend to proceed

along the following lines . Before making the statement did the witness read the

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printed declaration at the top of the first page indicating the importance of telling

the truth? Did the witness appreciate the importance of honesty, care and accuracy?

Was everything of importance included? At the conclusion of making the statement

did the witness read it through before signing it or was it read back by the officer?

Was the witness shown the statement before coming into court? Was it read through

carefully? Did it revive memory of the facts as clearly as when the statement was

made? Has the evidence in the witness box corresponded exactly with the contents

of the statement?

These preliminary, ensnaring, questions are designed to prevent attempts to

evade the embarrassment of apparent self-contradiction by, for example, blaming the

lapse of time since the events occurred. Finally the trap is sprung and the witness is

confronted with the inconsistency, omission, addition, elaboration, or embellishment,

as the case may be. The result is often an excruciating attempt to claim either that

the officer put down something that was not said or otherwise left out something

that was. If called to resolve the conflict the attesting officer will be torn between

selling the witness short or admitting to inattention or error. Since such officers will

usually be moved to protect their own amour propre witnesses may well end up

being made to look unreliable or dishonest - not the officer whose mode of

interviewing and transcription may have been seriously at fault. At the very least

the conflict will remain unresolved and the doubt will often be applied in favour of

the undeserving accused . Using these expurgated or inaccurate versions of what the

witness actually told the police in private in order to pick holes in their evidence

in court hardly conduces to getting at the truth.

The obvious and simple answer is tape-recording. Better still, if statements

were video -recorded it is possible to envisage a time in the future when the video

tape might be played in court as the original narrative of the witness recorded at a

time when the memory was fresh. Arguably, this would be the best evidence, much

better indeed, than the painful and laboured process of trying to recall details from

many months earlier. It is axiomatic in our courts that evidence is not a memory test

and the witness whose video -taped narrative was played to the jury would still be

liable to be cross -examined.

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ON LOOKING, NOW Digital Video Sti lls by Susan Morris

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On the windowsill of my childhood home stands a honey jar half filled with water,

two wasp-sized holes punched into it's lid. No wasp can escape this lure and once

inside the jar, cannot get out again. Falling into the water, they just smell the honey.

Marcel Proust suggested that 'to see' and 'to desire to imitate' were one and the same

thing. 1 One could observe that this kind of mimicry is often performed blindly, in

the service of love for instance, and that this automatic and compulsive movement

leaves a very particular trace. One falls blindly in love. Drunk with desire, one can

also get blind drunk. The one state often leads to the other. But at what point in the

drinking do drunks and lovers go blind, and why? Perhaps blindness occurs when

the subject is no longer aware of being looked at. By forgetting that you yourself are

visible, you no longer register anyone else. Recovery brings about a dependence on

those who could see, for testimony of what your uncanny other did the night before.

Dreaming can also distract you in the same way, by triggering the blind search that is

sleepwalking. Sleepwalking takes you into your own blind spot - real time and space

are replaced by a parallel event; that of involuntary recollection.

Michel the Crane Child, found isolated in his room, moved as if in imitation of a

machine, and uttered only strange, inhuman noises: 'Through the curtainless window

Michel could see the cranes working nearby. He could see them waving at him -

talking to him. This was the only language Michel could learn, and the window was

the only mirror in which Michel could read the repetitive signs of what he was.' 2

If a desire to look at - to get under the skin of or experience - is aligned with a desire

to imitate, and if identification of oneself with another being is, in Lacanian terms,

'the very process by which a continuing sense of selfhood becomes possible', 3 then it

could be argued that all acts of self expression are synonymous with those of

mimicry, and are also absolutely tied up with looking and being looked at. Subject

and object become synchronised within this visual field, the thinker an echo of

thought. In the case of Proust this thought, this occupation, was of and by death

and, as Waiter Benjamin has noted, his syntax 'rhythmically and step by step

reproduces his fear of suffocating' . Asthma, which kept him trapped in his room,

became intertwined with the breath of the remembered. Proust succumbed to their

heartbeat, tracing blindly, he submitted to memory's laws, laws'of night and honey'. 4

Footnotes p 33 Images from the series 'The Haunting' 2000

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SOME THOUGHTS ON TELLING THE TRUTH by Darian Leader

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SOME THOUGHTS ON TELLING THE TRUTH by Darian Leader

WHY IS IT THAT RATHER THAN REMOVING GUILT, confession so

often aggravates it? Confessing a crime, an infidelity or an emotion might be very

different activities, yet they are not always followed by the sense of relief we might

expect. Is that because we are not really telling the truth in the first place or is it

because truth and guilt are not as opposed as we think?

A confession matters not simply for what it says but for when it is said .

Telling your partner of an infidelity may seem like an act of compassionate honesty

at one moment, and of pure malice at .another. As Theodor Reik once said, it is not

silence that is golden, but tact: which means knowing when to speak and when to

keep silent.

This is not made easier by the fact that today's culture has placed its bet on

candour. The topics of speech seem wondrously enlarged compared to those of the

past, and our modern heroes are just as likely to go through the trials of confession

as those of endurance and conflict. We can either watch programmes in which

contestants undergo tests of physical endurance and competition, or soaps in which

people talk about their worries, joys and despairs with the kind of compulsive

candour that characterises the modern subject.

Truth here takes on two forms. On the one hand, with fly on the wall

realism, on the other with the confessional style of trying to say everything. What

fly on the wall shows us is that when people do not know that a camera is there,

they still behave as if they are being watched. Their actions and words will be

addressed to an unseen spectator. Confessional style, with its spectator beyond the

camera, is not so different. And both styles have one further thing in common:

that the relation to the unseen spectator is always to deceive. Probably, to deceive

this spectator that one is lovable.

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Being lovable can mean being lovable as a saint or as a sinner, depending

on the specificity of one's own childhood constructions. If we expend our efforts

in making some other interested in an image we offer to them, what we think will

interest them will vary from one subject to another. It could take on the form of

the image of a sweet, docile child, or, on the contrary, of a dropout. But whatever the

image, it is there to captivate someone else's desire; in other words, to deceive.

This nuances today's obsession with confession. We assume that revealing

how one has sinned, how one has been bad, is a road to truth. Truth is always grim,

so the more we show our grimness, the more we show our true self. Yet the image

we offer in doing this is still an image and it is still addressed to an other we are

probably not conscious of. Civilisation is not so interested in this aspect of confession,

and boasts an increasing number of stages in which we are obliged, and invited,

to reveal all.

If Truth has always clamoured to be known, does this mean that it now

no longer blushes to be seen? We might hesitate before answering this question if

we consider the link between telling the truth and truth. Heine was suspicious of

Rousseau's so-called confessions, and in particular the admission of Jean-Jacques'

theft of a ribbon, which supposedly caused the unjust dismissal of a chambermaid.

Beyond this appeal to truth, Heine supposed another crime which was not mentioned.

In a psychoanalysis, we often find that the patient's revelation of an

embarrassing and unpleasant detail is functioning to draw attention away from some

other significant and disturbing detail. That's why, in an analysis, there is no real

confession: each admission evokes the point where something is not being said, or

sometimes, cannot be said. When George Washington told his dad that he had cut down

the fruit tree, perhaps he made his confession because there was something he felt far

guiltier about. Perhapy afterwards he could have continued masturbating in peace.

Curiously, a deliberate lie might be a finer vehicle of truth than confession.

Questioned as to his whereabouts the previous night, a teenager admits to his

parents that he had been in the company of a woman, yet wishing consciously to

withhold her identity, he invents a name for her. This baptism would become

troubling for him when, in speaking about the deception, he realises suddenly that he

had chosen the middle name of his mother. The unconscious desire thus finds a niche

in the space opened up by deception. The lie is the privileged home of truth here.

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This might persuade us to reinterpret a famous vignette related by Michael

Balint. He receives a patient who tells him a long and complicated story about his

life. By the end of the first consultation, Balint admits that he needs more time to

form a picture of the case, and so a further session is scheduled. As the man continues

his story, Balint interrupts him and tells him that he is still clueless. The patient takes

a deep breath, and says 'At last- a sincere man'. His entire story, from his name to

the list of his symptoms, had been fabricated as a test, he claims, to find a truthful

interlocutor to whom he could then reveal his secrets. Balint observes that this method

must have been a bit tiresome and certainly expensive, but we might suppose that in

fact this man's invention vehicled his unconscious truth. The distance between him

and his story was perhaps alibi.

If lying gives a form of truth, can truth be a lie? Confessing in order not

to confess something else may be one example, and that might explain the feeling

of guilt which remains after the act of candour. But isn't there also a lie - more

structural- in the effort to be honest, to say everything? Since everything cannot

be said, the claim to say it is a false one, and will always leave a margin. And, in

confessing, in revealing to the other the most heart-felt emotions, the deepest secrets,

isn't there always the terrible fact that articulating what seems to be our very sense

of self still leaves something out. If we tell everything, in an act of love or hate,

there is the confrontation with the unreality of what we have said. The feeling of

emptiness, that there must be more to our sense of self than what we have confessed,

may then take on the form of a sense of guilt. Even if we don't know consciously

what this guilt is about.

Children often show us the value of avoiding confession. In not even

trying to say everything, they might withhold some thought or information which

has a special value. Not a value in terms of its content but as something to make

one separate. At what moment, in fact, can a human being truely be said to speak?

Machines can be built that replicate sounds and even reproduce them at appropriate

moments. But replication and simple articulation are not the same as speech.

Something more is necessary, and many of the scholars who have turned their

attention to this problem have agreed on what it is: lying.

Children sometimes have the idea that the adults around them know their

thoughts. They know this for the simple reason that the thoughts, being words, come

from the adults before they come from the infant. Language is there before we are,

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and is, in this sense, the property of others . It is imposed on us, and we have to take

up our positions in relation to it. Now, if human subjectivity is always defined by

refusals - the refusal to look where the parent wants you to look, to eat what they

want you to eat, to shit when they want you to shit, etc - to inhabit language must

be linked to the moment when one can refuse it: in the sense of a property coming

from the other.

If words come from the other, it is only when it becomes possible to separate

words from the other that the dimension of subjectivity is realised. By withholding

a thought, a child can demonstrate that he or she is separate from his or her words.

Which is the first lie, the barrier between what one says and how one is different

from one's words .

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Biographies

Kate Love is Senior Lecturer in Critical Theory in the Department of Fine Art at Central Saint

Martins College of Art and Design. She recently organised an international conference at the ICA entitled

Understanding Experience, and is currently developing this subject area in a PhD, also at Central St Martins.

David Wolchover and Anthony Heaton-Armstrong are both practicing barristers who have worked

collaboratively for a number of years, focusing on evidence gathering methods used by police investigators.

They are the authors of Confession Evidence and co-editors and contributors to Analysing Witness Testimony:

a guide for Legal Practitioners.

Susan Morris is an artist working with both the moving and the still image, using video and

computer. Her interests are in exploring how technology, through structuring time, organises desire in looking.

She is currently working with this theme on a research bursary at Goldsmiths' College, University of London.

Her publications include On Boredom and United in Death .

Darian Leader is a practicing psychoanalyst and was a founder member for the Centre for

Freudian Analysis and Research in London. He is the author of Lacan for Beginners, Why Do Women Write

more Letters than they Post?, Promises Lovers Make When it gets Late and, most recently, Freud's Footnotes.

32

Footnotes for EXPERIENCE

Kate Love, Experience Preferred. pp. 1-8.

2 Darian Leader, Some Thoughts On Telling The Truth. pp . 27-31.

Susan Morris, On Looking, Now. pp. 17-26.

David Wolchover and Anthony Heaton-Armstrong, Testing the Evidence of Witnesses. pp. 9-16.

Footnotes for EXPERIENCE PREFERRED

Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method. Sheed & Ward 1975. p. 355.

For example, in 1993 people found it hard to make sense of Tracy Emin's first show at White Cube

- 'why was she making work about her everyday experience and not about her experience of a particularly

weighty issue or grand theme or content?'

The recognition that legitimated the possibility of making work about your own experience,

whichever subject position you might occupy or were attempting to occupy.

4 For example, Roland Barthes text the Death of the Author (1967) had suggested that 'the author

(or artist) ought at least to know that that the "inner" thing he thinks to "translate" is itself only

a ready-formed dictionary, its words only explainable through other words, and so on indefinitely. '

In Image, Music, Text. Fontana 1977. p.146 .

5 Joan W. Scott has written, 'Experience is at once always already an interpretation and something that

needs to be interpreted. What counts as experience is neither self-evident nor straight-forward; it is

always contested and always therefore political.' The Evidence of Experience, Critical Enquiry 1986.

pp. 397-415.

6 This feeling was so similar to how Peggy Phelan describes the active acceptance of the inevitability

of misunderstanding 'It is in the attempt to walk (and live) on the rackety bridge between self and

other- and not the attempt to arrive at one side or the other- that we discover real hope.'

Peggy Phelan, Unmarked. Routledge 1993 . p. 174.

Footnotes for ON LOOKING, NOW

Benjamin W, The Image of Proust, Illuminations, Fontana, 1977, p. 211

Peraldi F, The Crane Child, Psychoanalysis, Creativity and Literature: A French-American Inquiry,

New York: Columbia University Press, 1978, p. 59

Bowie M, Lacan, Fontana Press, 1991, p. 30

Benjamin W, The Image of Proust, Illuminations , Fontana, 1977, p. 205

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Published by Loose-leaf

15 Micawber Street· London N1 7TB

Volume 1 · Number 1

Edition of 500

Second Edition

Designed by Frank Schroder London

Printed in London by Tadberry Evedale

© All photography and texts the authors · 2000

This publication has been financially supported by

the Visual Arts Department of Goldsmiths College,

University of London. It owes its existence, however,

to the generosity of its contributors.

ISBN 0-9538076-0-6

34