THE PROMISE OF THE INDEX IN CONTEMPORARY DOCUMENTARY PERFORMANCE

ABSTRACT This essay investigates the troubled status of the concept of the index and its concomitant notion of evidence within the context of a global, visual culture. Specifically, the essay centres on the notion of the index in an era, where the use of digital images claiming to truthfully represent war and conflict has become an increasingly important part of warfare. Focusing on two documentary works by respectively performance artist Rabih Mroué and visual artist Abu Lawrence Hamdan (Forensic Architecture), the article shows that whilst both artists rely on material documents, which in each their way index back to conflictual events, the crucial point is not so much the status of the evidentiary material per se. Instead, enabled by fictitious strategies, the artists invite us to pay attention to the differing statuses and meanings assigned to documents depending on the particular knowledge systems and spaces of appearance within which they are perceived. In this way, the essay argues, the works of Mroué and Hamdan help us move beyond the discourses within documentary theory, which tend to conform to either a postmodernist relativist position or a realist epistemology.

In my analysis, the concepts of document, index and archive will hold a central position. As for the two former, I would like to focus on the indicative, evidentiary function typically ascribed to them as well as their assumed ability to point truthfully back to reality. The concept of the archive, in turn, will be instrumental in discussing the ways in which the act of interpreting and ultimately controlling documents are and have always been deeply entangled with operations of power. The first part of the article will provide a definition of these three key concepts and the ways in which they have been negotiated in varying historical contexts. For this purpose, I will be drawing on the work of Charles Sanders Peirce's writings on the index as well as Philip Rosen's work on the document and Jacques Derrida's seminal observations on the archive. Furthermore, I will be situating the works of Mroué and French document, the noun "document", Rosen explains, entered the English language by the mid-fifteenth century, where it came to imply two meanings; one related to teaching and/or learning and one denoting evidence or proof. By the eighteenth century, documents were primarily associated with written accounts such as manuscripts or title-deeds, but could also encompass artefacts, including tombstones, coins and pictures. However, according to Rosen, with the rise in the nineteenth century of new indexical technologies, such as the photograph and the phonograph, as well as the emergence of the documentary genre in twentieth century film, theatre, and visual art, the concept of the document increasingly came to be associated with its authenticating, proof-like quality rather than its educative aspect. "The authority of documenting," Rosen contends, "was first drawn from the power implicit in its denotations, that is warning, admonishing, or teaching; it then became an evidentiary element in an argument or rhetoric; and currently, within a semantic history that seems linked to film, this authority can exceed even its modes of inscription, as a claim that achieves the authority of the real itself." 7 In other words, when deployed in, say, a documentary film, documents function, by way of their indexical relation to reality, as authenticating elements, which work to reinforce the credibility of the documentary and the reality claims it brings to the fore.
This brings us to the notion of the index, and in turn, to Charles Sanders Peirce, one of the founding fathers of semiotics. As part of the comprehensive sign system conceived by Peirce, the so-called second trichotomy attends to three overall different ways in which the sign may refer to its object. Whereas the icon refers to its object through similarity, and the symbol through interpretive habit or norm of reference, the index is defined by its factual, causal relation to its object. Because of its real connection to the object, the index, say, in the shape of an old-fashioned hygrometer, gets directly affected by the object and may thus afford "evidence from which positive assurance as to truth of fact may be drawn." 8 To further explain and elaborate his point about the direct, physical relation between the sign and the object, Peirce turns to photography and argues that whilst one might assume that photographs are iconic, they are in fact indexical. "Photographs," he writes, "especially instantaneous photographs, are very instructive, because we know that they are in certain respects exactly like the objects they represent. But this resemblance is due to the photographs having been produced under such circumstances that they were physically forced to correspond point by point to nature. In that aspect, then, they belong to the second class of signs, those by physical connection." 9 Below, I will return to Peirce's view on the photograph as a physical trace of the reality it purports to represent. But for now, I wish to point to the indicative, evidentiary function shared by the document and the index. Accordingly, in twentieth century discourses on documentary the concepts of document and index have often been conceived of as two sides of the same coin.
Moving on to the figure of the documentary artist, his or her acts of selecting and editing documents, which ostensibly hold an indexical link to reality can be-and have been (Rosen 2001)compared to the operations of the historian. Like the historian, the documentarist holds, or perhaps rather usurps, the power to organize the past through "controlling documents, indexical traces of the real past." 10 The ways in which the act of interpreting documents is deeply entangled with the exercise of power has been thoroughly investigated by Jacques Derrida in his seminal Archive Fever. In the book, Derrida reminds us that the meaning of the noun archive is derived from the Greek arkheion, initially meaning the house of the archons, those who command. In this house, as a matter of fact this home, official documents were filed and guarded by the archons to whom the authority to access and interpret the archive was bestowed. The archons performed and affirmed their power to rule by giving voice to scriptural documents, but in order to take place, in order to speak and impose the law, the documents themselves were conversely dependent on the speech acts of the archons.
The politics of the archive could thus be said to play itself out in an ongoing negotiation between the document and those interpreting and speaking it, thereby ensuring future enactments of the law and the particular social order implied by the archive. The archive is thus, as Derrida points out, not relegated to the past, but is very much a token of the future: "the question of the archive (…) is not the question of a concept dealing with the past that might already be at our disposal or not at our disposal, an archivable concept of the archive. It is a question of the future, the question of the future itself, the question of a response, of a promise and of a responsibility for tomorrow." 11 The license to access and interpret documents, the license to conduct processes of archiving in the sense of deciding what should be archived and handed over to posterity in order to be re-enacted once again, is, in other words, a deeply political affair.

TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY THEATRE
In twenty century documentary theatre, that is a strand of theatre which to a great extent has self-identified as political, or perhaps rather as oppositional to the politics pursued by those in power, playwrights and directors have consistently sought to intervene in and challenge the archive. That is to say, they have attempted to counter prevailing ideologies and ways of archiving by confronting audiences with-and inviting them to reflect critically upon official documents ranging from photographs, to film and statistics to Conceived this way, the document may be understood as something which is incomplete in itself, but which may nevertheless provide an indexical link to reality, corroborating "that something happened, that events took place." 19 At first sight, the realist approach suggested above comes across as sensible, as it seemingly allows us to combine a poststructuralist approach with a pragmatic take on reality. At a closer look, however, it raises a number of questions. For how can we decide on something as being "objectively there"? For whom does it appear to be "objectively there", and when? And finally, who gets to decide when something is "objectively there", and when it is not?
In the ensuing, I will seek to think through the implications of these questions through a reading of first, The Pixelated Revolution by Rabih Mroué, and second, Earshot by Lawrence Abu Hamdan.
As I will attempt to show, these works invite us to move beyond discussions focusing on the ontological status (and the validity of the truth claims) of documents, and to focus instead on the underlying conditions and non-transparent power structures, which could be said to shape our epistemological approach to reality. Therefore, even though Mroué initially claims to be looking for "facts" and "evidence" 25 about the conflict, the spectator gradually realizes that more than anything, Mroué is exploring how diverse forms of knowledge formations shape our view on and approach to phenomena, sometimes referred to as "facts" and "evidence".

THE NEW WEAPON OF THE TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY
As for the first position, that of the aesthetically informed academic, it is enacted through the undertaking of an aesthetic analysis of the images of the protesters. 26 Plotted against the Syrian news channels' use of the three-legged tripod, which is taken to discretely serve "as a reminder that the solidity of the state is The provocative juxtaposition of, on the one hand, privileged Scandinavian fiction film directors, who wanted to distance themselves from the illusion of mainstream Hollywood film, and, on the other, Syrian protesters seeking to document their struggle to the international community, could be read as a selfconscious, ironic comment on the pitfalls of a purely formalistic and de-contextualizing approach to images of conflict. At the same time, however, one could argue that the juxtaposition makes visible how fiction and documentary do rely on a set of shared formal techniques, such as the use of handheld camera, for creating the authenticity effect 30 desired by both the Dogme film directors and the Syrian protesters. Likewise, it could be argued that the juxtaposition brings to the fore the fact that the recipient's perception of the recorded reality is inevitably informed by the frame or perspective chosen by the camera man. In effect, the juxtaposition could be said to address the increasing blurring of boundaries between documentation and participation, which currently takes place in contemporary conflict coverage relying on eyewitness images. 31 Differently put, the juxtaposition discretely points to how the notion of the non-biased witness has become increasingly complicated and hard to maintain as a result of the ubiquitous use of images as documents, as evidence, and ultimately, also as weapons, within the context of contemporary conflict and warfare.
In the performance, the pixelated, often hardly discernible images snapped on the fly by protesters thus represent the kind of eyewitness images in which the cameraman is pushed to the fore as an active engineer of reality. To capture better the quality of the blurry images of the protesters we could, with media artist and theorist Hito Steyerl, define them as poor images. That is, bad quality and low-resolution digital images circulating on the Internet, constantly exposed to manipulation and re-contextualisation. Mroué as crime scene investigator, turns to Optography and the belief held by some scientists in the late nineteenth century that the retina of the eye is capable of recording the last series of images seen before death. Within certain fields of crime investigation, it was consequently believed that through gaining access to the last images seen by a victim of murder, one would be able to identify the perpetrator. Suggesting that the cell phone camera could be seen as an extension of the camera man's eyes and thus-through its recording of the last images seen by the camera man-help establish the identity of the sniper, Mroué engages in an obsessive forensic analysis of the video. He plays it in slow motion, he breaks it into different frames, he zooms in on the pictures.
His hope is that this may help him establish the identity of the killer, who can then, at some future point in history, be taken to court. As Mroué has it: "It was my attempt to sketch a picture of the murderers and divulge their personal identities; a desire to know the surname and the family name of the murderers, for they could walk among us tomorrow." 33 But for all Mroué's efforts, the image remains blurry, refusing to provide him with the certainty that could be used to identify the sniper and ultimately hold him accountable for his deeds. "There is nothing to see," Mroué thus concludes, "but a face with no eyes and no features. But why are we not able to see the face? Is it because murderers hide behind a collective identity, a diluted identity, one that is referred to as the 'regime'?" 34 Finally, towards the end of the performance, Mroué assumes the shape of a somewhat speculative philosopher, who ponders whether the cameraman did actually die, when his cell phone fell to the ground. Claiming that we never actually witness the moment of death of the cameraman, Mroué posits that it is never possible to record the moment of death, because this crucial moment "is To conclude, then, in spite of their indexical representations of violent events and cold-blooded murderers, the poor technical quality of the videos means that it is rather unlikely that they could ever be used as evidence against individual persons within a legal setting. Yet, the pixelated images taken and distributed by the protesters-indeed, the precarious archive that they seek to build to counter the tripod-enabled visual archive of the Syrian state channels-do work as a testament to the conditions and the reality endured by Syrian citizens and protesters. As far as Mroué's lecture performance is concerned, through its transference of the videos found on YouTube to the discursive space of the art institution, it could be said to help maintain the continued circulation of the videos and, ultimately, the memory of the anonymous mass of Syrian citizen, who recorded the videos.

THE POLITICS OF LISTENING
The second case study of this article will focus on the video In expansion, Weizman distinguishes between police forensics, which according to him should be understood as a disciplinary tool meant to affirm the power of the state, and a "new forensics" or Forensis aimed at challenging received forensic practices. Whereas the former could be said to rely on a notion of the ability of facts and evidence to provide a scientifically approved account of truth, as it were, the ladder pays just as much attention to the in-transparent, inherently political processes which determine when something is assigned the status as evidence, and when it is not, as it does to the piece of evidence itself. "Forensis," Weizman explains, "should thus be understood as something akin to a 'critical forensic practice' that introduces both the production of evidence and the querying of the practices of evidence making." 37 Just as importantly, a "critical forensic practice" would include a presentation of such queries and findings across a number of public fora.
Turning to Hamdan's Earshot, the work could be said to build on exactly the kind of critical forensic analysis referred to above. In This point is emphasised in the last scene of the video, in which the prosecutor calls on the Palestinian youths present in the audience to step forward. In their capacity as both eye witnesses to the murderous event and real experts when it comes to instinctively telling the sound of live ammunition from rubber-coated steel, the prosecution calls on them to testify to the killing sounds of the recording. Their response is "inaudible", as it says in the transcript.
An interpreter is summoned, but the response of the youths remains "inaudible". "Do you hear me?", the prosecutor, and later the judge, ask. "It doesn't seem there is anything medically wrong with their hearing," 42 the witness remarks. But the youths remain at the back of the room, inaudible.
As pointed out by Anika Marschall, unlike a great deal of verbatim theatre Hamdan's works are not so much about giving "voice to the voiceless" as they are about producing a "new sensibility for the act of listening." 43 This also applies to Earshot, which through amplifying the silence of the victims could be said to draw attention to the politics of listening, but also, I would contend, to the politics of choosing to remain silent. 44 The politics of refusing to respond verbally to someone who does not listen anyway. However, it is not only the Israeli legal system's lack of listening skills that is on trial, as it were. The spectator's listening skills are also questioned. Seated on the bench in the exhibition space, which had been transformed into a combination of firing range and courtroom during the video, I as a spectator gradually became aware of my own role as a witness, perhaps even a juror, and not least an accomplice. To me the sounds of the Palestinian witnesses were also inaudible. Nevertheless, by pointing this out, Hamdan's work may teach us to be attentive to our own acts of (not) listening and to how we as subjects are inevitably embedded in a larger politics of listening. Architecture. What is common to the approach to the documents of the two artists, however, is that neither of them fundamentally doubts their legitimacy. In fact, they both appear to assume that the documents do indeed provide a kind of indexical link to reality and may therefore serve as proof "that something happened, that events took place," as Reinelt has it. However, as I have tried to show above, it is not so much the truthfulness, legitimacy, or ontological status of the document, which typically comes with discourses on the index that preoccupies Mroué and Hamdan. On the contrary: in his work, Mroué performs a veritable mocking exercise of the idea that through the use of forensic analysis resembling those used in crime scene movies, we should be able to establish what happened, identify the perpetrator and ultimately secure justice. In the same vein, in Earshot it is not so much the proof (embodied by the audio recording) that live ammunition was fired at unarmed Palestinian teenagers that plays the main role. Instead, the focus is placed on the possible journey and treatment of this piece of evidence through the Israeli legal system. For both artists, then, it seems that the lure of the document consists in its ability to provide a point of departure for critically investigating prevailing epistemological frameworks, which could be said to determine the appearance of bodies, things, and lived events and, by implication, whether or not documents indexing back to them are assigned the status of evidence.

UNSETTLING KNOWLEDGE SYSTEMS
Returning to the question raised at the outset of this article- Such ways of merging fact and fiction do, of course, create a fundamental uncertainty with respect to the status of the material at hand: Can the documents be trusted at all? However, this strategy of assembling might also be seen as a way of unsettling both the forms of knowledge and the underlying power structures to which we more or less unwittingly conform when engaging with mediated accounts of war and conflict. Ultimately, then, the works draw our attention to the various systems of knowledge and meaning making through which evidence is produced, processed, and validated.
Concurrently, however, the works also create temporary spaces for us to go beyond, challenge, and perhaps even re-imagine these systems and the prevailing distributions of the sensible. Therein, I contend, lies the potential and the promise of the notion of the index in contemporary artistic documentary.