Yesterday I went to a talk by Eyal Weizman, an architect and art historian. His paper was fascinating, to say the least, and I'd like to touch on a few points that he brought up.
First, he wonders how epistemologies of human rights changed in "the
forensic turn." He looks at how in Guatemala a particular case about the remains of the dead went from evidence to a "rights-bearing subject." That's super interesting. He's mostly looking at questions of indigeneity, but I think that his theory has some significant implications in other realms of analysis.
He calls forensics not about science, but about the presentation of a science. In this sense, it's all about rhetoric. How does forensics and rhetorics compare? Well, to Weizman forensics is about how
things say things, or the speech on behalf of inanimate objects. What does the inanimate say?
Part of me wonders if this is simply a reemergence of objectivity by another name. Certainly objectivity isn't entirely bad, but it would certainly be awful if it masks itself under the garb of some sort of "truth."
A word that I loved: Osteobiography, or the study of bones and how they are always haunted by animism. Life gets read from the
bone. Events of our life become material. The bone gets exposed through life
like how photography gets exposed through light. Fascinating.
Much of Weizman's analysis looked at the 2008-2009 Gaza strip attack. Over a thousand people were
killed (in buildings, and sometimes in their own homes) and there is still very little witness and testimony recorded. Weizman turned to some photographic work by Amnesty International, but in doing so he focused on how the photographers were less interested in capturing the human bodies that spoke about the trauma that occurred, and more interested in documenting bullet holes, shell cartridges, and other material markers of warfare.
Does this focus on the material leftover--the forensic datum--equal a type of fetish? He is trying to rethink the fetish as that which embeds us into the materiality of an object. I wonder if that is sufficient to explain how the forensic pathology works in our contemporary world.
