The Ethics of the Implicated Spectator and the Relational Viewer in Artists' Moving Image

In this conference paper, I examined Michael Rothberg’s concept of the implicated spectator as he applies it to artists’ moving image in The Implicated Subject: Beyond Victims and Perpetrators (2019). The ethics of the implicated subject he derives from films by artists such as William Kentridge and Hito Steyerl is a shifting ‘position that we occupy in particular dynamic and at times clashing structures and histories of power’. I put his argument that confronting our own implication in difficult histories can lead to a sense of political responsibility in relation to social injustice in dialogue with relational psychoanalyst Jessica Benjamin’s concept of a space of thirdness in which co-implication is less certain. Rather than a morally implicated spectator, which can be ethically satisfying, in the spectatorial space of thirdness, doubt is played with and solidarity is less clear cut, the spectator being incorporated into scenarios that oscillate between identification and dream in relation to social issues such as sexism, racism and neoliberal capitalist extractivism. I propose an ethic in which one becomes cognisant of ones’ own vulnerabilities as well as one’s own capacity for harm, which may sensitise the viewer’s capacity to act in ethical ways outside the screening room.