What do a drone, an algorithm, and an ecosystem have in common? According to media studies scholar Michael Richardson, they’re all capable of bearing witness to structural violence. Witnessing has long been central to conceptions of truth, justice, and shared knowledge. Unlike observation, which is passive, witnessing demands response and address—it’s relational, and carries political and ethical stakes. Yet this raises an important question: in our increasingly data-driven world of remote warfare, algorithmic enclosure, and ecological collapse, what constitutes witnessing—and who or what counts as a witness? This is the central question animating Nonhuman Witnessing: War, Data, and Ecology After the End of the World.
In a broad sense, Nonhuman Witnessing inquires into how the nonhuman remakes the human. Through expansive analyses of military-industrial technologies, digital media and algorithms, and literary and creative works, Richardson argues that the capacity for witnessing has become diversified through new technologies, practices, techniques, and theories. The problem is, our traditional understanding of witnessing hasn’t caught up with these potentialities. When we think of a witness, we most likely imagine a human subject—despite the reality that the human sensorium is increasingly insufficient for confronting ongoing humanitarian, military, and ecological crises. This is where Nonhuman Witnessing intervenes. By extending the scope of witnessing to nonhuman forms (drones, satellites, screening systems, nonhuman species, ecosystems), new “ethicopolitical forms” can emerge (4). This is the heart of Richardson’s project: ushering new, more ethical expressions of relationality into meaningful presence.
In Nonhuman Witnessing, “after the end of the world” is both subtitle and refrain, recalling the ongoing catastrophes engendered by Western worldmaking (settler colonialism, racial capitalism, ecocide) while also pointing toward the necessity of alternative forms of worldmaking, to which nonhuman witnessing can contribute. Emerging from a critique of Western humanism—most saliently, Sylvia Wynter’s critique of “Man”—as unexamined universal subject, Richardson’s nonhuman witnessing disrupts the “singular world of the scientific or juridical witness inherited from the Enlightenment” (7). Constellating science and technology studies, critical media studies, and affect theory, Nonhuman Witnessing also thinks alongside Indigenous cosmo-epistemologies and activist praxis. In doing so, Richardson’s book contributes to a growing field of inquiry into connections between aesthetics, materiality, and witnessing. Where Nonhuman Witnessing diverges is its emphasis on witnessing as an experiential relation untethered to a specific practitioner, method, or politics. Indeed, Richardson is careful to note that nonhuman witnessing—or witnessing of any form—is not inherently ethical.
Though the book traverses an impressive and exciting range of subjects, Richardson is most urgently concerned with the immediacies of warfare. The first two chapters address this head-on, focusing on drone warfare and the broadening scope of autonomous martial systems, such as the Agile Condor targeting program, alongside machine-learning algorithms (from Google Maps to more advanced martial technologies). These ubiquitous algorithms constitute their own form of knowledge-making as they forge “worlds of their own design” while concealing their operations, even as they are shaped by the assumptions, values, and objectives of their architects (81). Richardson’s central claim here is that algorithms participate in nonhuman witnessing, such as when a military drone algorithm “sees” a specific activity, “decides” it’s a threat, and “recommends” violence, making such algorithms both witness and perpetrator. Reaching outward to cover everything from deepfakes and video installation art to an analysis of Project Maven (an AI-based Department of Defense initiative that at one time included a partnership with Google), Richardson traces the racializing and oppressive consequences of algorithms, chiming with works such as Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression (2018).
In the chapter titled “Witnessing Ecologies,” Richardson shifts focus from militarized and invisibilized technologies to the media that make nonhuman witnessing “sensible and graspable in ways that bring the constraining frames, structures, politics, and violences of the technoscientific state to the fore” (115). Here, artistic and literary works rise to the surface, offering their own forms of nonhuman witnessing. The archive Richardson marshals is multifaceted and unexpected, spanning Canadian photographer Edward Burtynsky’s “Anthropocene” landscapes through to Cixin Liu’s bestselling novel The Three-Body Problem. Some of the most sustained and fresh analysis involves the legacy of nuclear testing in the First Nations lands of Australia, and the resistant art practices of Kokatha and Nukunu artist Yhonnie Scarce, whose work with glassblowing responds to nuclear legacies while also memorializing ongoing colonial violence. The juxtapositions in this chapter especially enact a shift from the register of technoscience to a critique of this framework as an oppressive Western epistemology.
The final chapter of Nonhuman Witnessing takes a theoretical and formal turn. Staging brief narrative encounters with events including the YouTube-broadcast beheading of American journalist James Foley, the 2014 disappearance of flight MH370, the memorializing of death on Facebook, and the structural invisibility of mining on sacred First Nations lands, Richardson introduces what he terms “radical absences”: attachments to what is no longer present, that nevertheless enable “positive change” (171). Theorizing what is structurally disappeared and invisibilized, particularly in the context of social and viral media, Richardson alternates between discussions of specific phenomena that embody “radical absences” and theoretical explications of radical absence in a world of mass digital mediation. Like much media studies scholarship over the past four years, the book’s coda begins with a reflection on the historical, political, and cultural disjunctures catalyzed by the COVID-19 pandemic. Richardson connects these problems back to the epistemic violence of Enlightenment science and liberal humanism, arguing for the necessity of “pluriversal justice”—“from World to worlds” (176)—and the place of nonhuman witnessing in this shift. Emphasizing opacity over the imperative of transparency, he argues that “nonhuman witnessing—as an ethicopolitical, aesthetic, and epistemic mode of relation— provides the potential for a transversal communicative politics, one that works within and between a pluriverse of worlds” (180).
Nonhuman Witnessing is an exciting contribution to the interdisciplinary study of aesthetics and witnessing. One of its greatest strengths is its capacious archive, in which military surveillance technologies and the artworks that critique them—such as Pakistani American artist Mahwish Chishty’s visual work on drones—share the common cause of nonhuman witnessing. Rather than proffering a technologically deterministic approach that casts all surveilling technologies and practices as inherently violent or oppressive, Richardson participates in a more recent critical turn toward theorizing the flexibility of these forms, showing how civic drones can be “harnessed as witnessing apparatuses” by publics and researchers (59). To this end, all chapters toggle between militarized or state approaches to witnessing and those marshaled by everyday citizens, activists, and artists.
The book also raises important questions. Richardson positions nonhuman witnessing as a rejoinder to the insufficient figure of the modern witness associated with science, the courts, and the media, all of which require verifiable testimony and assume a human subject. He advocates instead for an expansion of the subject of witnessing to the nonhuman, broadening the scope of “what can be known” (176). Yet in an era of fractured mediascapes, misinformation, and disinformation—when the accepted truthfulness of scientific knowledge, legal testimony, and newsmedia is withering—where can witnessing of any kind stake its claim? Richardson notes that nonhuman witnessing is “far from a panacea and by no means a politics in itself” (171). This gestures toward the ambiguous capacity of witnessing to mobilize ethical action—its “latent potential to animate political relations” that might otherwise fail to cohere (149). But this latency and ambiguity are generative. In an era of increasing algorithmic enclosure, ambiguous potential is the terrain of insurgence.
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Delia Byrnes