The witness mechanism

Witness

I attach other people to work I could do alone.

It took me a long time to see that as a pattern rather than as a series of reasonable decisions, because each instance had its own reasonable story: this person brings the relationships, that one brings the room, the other one has the clients. All true. None of it was the reason.

The reason, underneath every one of them, was that I wanted somebody there while the work existed. Not to help with it. To be present at it.

I found that out in the middle of an ordinary week, in the middle of an ordinary sentence about why a certain venture had run for years with a person beside me who contributed nothing to it and whom I had never once thought of removing, and the sentence stopped halfway because the answer had arrived before the end of it.

He was the witness. That was his whole function, and it was enough. The work could exist in front of someone, and its existence was confirmed by another person’s presence, and that confirmation was a thing I needed so badly that I would pay for it with a share of everything, year after year, without ever having said the word.

So the word is witness: a person whose presence makes the work real to the person doing it. It is a seat nobody advertises, it is usually filled by someone who does not know they are in it, and it is a costly position to hold, because it is paid for in the currency of everything else.

Trust

The mechanism under it is not complicated once it is said plainly, and saying it plainly cost me something, so here it is.

If a person is invalidated for long enough, told in enough rooms by enough people that what they made is not what they think it is, then at some point their own assessment of their own output stops being trustworthy internally. Not to others. To themselves.

The instrument they would use to check the work is the same instrument that has been told, repeatedly, that it reads wrong. So the valuation gets outsourced. The judgment of whether a thing is real and worth something moves out of the person who made it and into whoever happens to be standing nearby, and from then on the work needs a second pair of eyes not to improve it but to exist.

What that costs is exact. It costs the ability to finish something alone. Every project that has only me in it stalls at the point where it would need to be declared done, because done is a judgment, and I no longer have standing to make it.

Recognition

There is a name for the thing the witness supplies, and it comes from a corner of philosophy rather than from business.

Axel Honneth, the German social philosopher who built what is called recognition theory, argued that a person becomes a subject only by being recognised as one by others: that standing is not something you have and then show, but something granted and confirmed in every exchange. Most of his work is about the forms that granting takes. But he wrote one essay apart from the rest, on what he called invisibility, and it is the one that describes the witness seat from the inside.

Invisibility is not being overlooked. It is being looked through: a person present in the room, physically perceived, and not registered as a subject at all. Honneth was explicit that this is a distinct injury, different from insult and different from exclusion, because those at least treat you as someone who could be insulted or excluded.

Invisibility treats you as a thing in the room. Martha Nussbaum’s account of objectification lists the features of that treatment, and three of them fit exactly: being used as a tool, being treated as having no agency, and having no feelings or position that anyone needs to model.

What I took from it is the mechanism behind the mechanism. The ordinary emotions all assume you were seen. Guilt is a gap between you and your own standard.

Anger is someone failing an expectation you held. Shame is being seen and found lacking. Being looked through produces none of them, which is why a person invalidated for years cannot find the feeling in the ordinary set, and why the injury sits in the head, where the model of another person lives, rather than in the stomach.

The witness is the recognition function, filled by one person and paid for as a seat. Its absence is not disagreement or dislike. It is a room in which the work, and the one who made it, are not registered as being there.

Outsource

Once you have the mechanism, a whole set of behaviour that looked like temperament turns out to be plumbing.

Why does a capable person keep attaching to other people’s ventures instead of building his own? Because the other person’s venture comes with a witness built in. Why do his own projects, the ones with nobody else attached, sit unfinished for months?

Because there is no confirmation, and without confirmation there is no done. Why is the thing he keeps asking for, in every arrangement and every relationship, the same thing in different words? Because the words are always some version of: I want to be seen.

Not admired. Seen. Witnessed at the moment the work exists.

The question I cannot yet answer is whether that function can be brought back inside, or whether a person who has outsourced it for long enough has to find witnesses on purpose for the rest of his life, and simply choose better ones.

Confirmation

I can tell you where mine started, or at least the first place I can find it.

I was still at school. A teacher said to me, in front of nobody in particular: you didn’t say much, but when you did, it mattered. That sentence has run my whole life.

It was a witness statement, delivered once, compressed into a single line, and I have been trying to hear it again ever since, from every room I have worked in and every person I have let stand beside the work.

The venture that ran for years with a silent partner beside it was the same sentence, stretched out and paid for at a premium. He did not need to say anything. He only needed to be there.

And he was, and it was enough, and I have only just understood what I was buying.