Cultural Critique

"Mind the Gap," a common phrase on the London Underground, a phrase so familiar as to usually pass unheard and unseen when it is encountered, a phrase that has attained the invisibility that accompanies any and all familiarity. It is a phrase that has become a gap in experience. It does not promote reflection. It goes unremembered. Stepped over, it passes unnoticed. "Mind the Gap": it is a call to mind, an asking to keep in mind, an entreaty. It is a reminder. It asks the traveler to look out for something, to attend to something, to heed the gap. A warning, it draws attention to a threat, to what should be avoided, to the peril of the unfilled space or interval, to the danger that is the gap. The space between the carriage and the platform signaled by the phrase is necessary. It makes passage possible. The gap is both a way through and an impediment, both a help and a hindrance. Once you have taken a step back and listened to the phrase, the "gaps" within it prove complicated.

There are other gaps we need to mind, gaps that occur in difficult contexts. The "historical gap" that the psychologist Dori Laub suggests was created by the Holocaust (Felman and Laub, 84) transpires in such a context. Laub elaborates on this gap in his essay "An Event without a Witness," which describes a period of time both during and "after" the Holocaust throughout which Laub suggests it was impossible to bear witness. The Holocaust instituted a breach within history. Attesting to the event was not possible for some time because, for Laub, there was nobody in a position to do so. Those who were not interned within the death camps refused to fulfill the role of outsider-witness that was required of them; "most actual or potential witnesses failed one-by-one to occupy their position as a witness" (81). Those [End Page 40] who were within the camps did not possess sufficient detachment to bear witness objectively to the events that were unfolding; they could not escape the trapping roles "either of the victim or the executioner" (81). Laub writes that it was not possible for those inside the event to "step outside of the coercively totalitarian and dehumanizing frame of reference in which the event was taking place, and provide an independent frame of reference through which the event could be observed" (81).

For Laub, the kind of witnessing required from within the event, one that is untainted by the event's structure, is possible only retrospectively. The Holocaust created a world "in which one could not bear witness to oneself" (82). The inmates in the death camps had become convinced of their inhumanity. Laub discounts those testimonies that were produced during the event and in its immediate aftermath, because the "degree to which bearing witness was required entailed such an outstanding measure of awareness and of comprehension of the event—of its dimensions, consequences, and above all, of its radical otherness to all known frames of reference—that it was beyond the limits of human ability (and willingness) to grasp, to transmit, or to imagine" (84). The testimonies that do exist from inside the event do not benefit from the context(s) that become available with hindsight. They are too local. For Laub, testimony only becomes possible retrospectively. The damage to the self sustained by the witness in the death camps must be at least partially undone before the event that has been recorded unconsciously can be recounted. It is through their testimonies that the survivors become rehumanized, become persuaded that they are not, in fact, inhuman. Testimony is therefore as much a restoration of self as a record of the event. The survivor accounts to which Laub refers are like the testimonies produced from inside the event in that each is limited in scope. They differ, however, in that they are produced and situated within a general context. Over the intervening years, the gaps in knowledge that necessarily afflicted those who endeavored to bear witness from inside the event have substantially been...