HANDOUT
FOR: Historiography as Reenactment: metaphors and literalizations of TV documentaries
Katie King, Women's Studies, University of Maryland, College Park
katking@umd.edu
& http://www.womensstudies.umd.edu/wmstfac/kking
presented
at the annual meetings of the Society for Literature, Science and the Arts,
Durham NC, 15 October 2004
MY TALK TODAY:
- pastpresents: Urton on Inka Khipu
- TV Documentary and Academic Captitalism: Hopkins' experiment with TV as historiography; Handler debunks Williamsburg
- Iconoclashes & Modest Witnessing: NOVA's Secrets of Lost Empires; Smithsonian's Science in American Life
From Katie's new book Flexible Knowledges: histories under globalization
I examine what I call "bits of pastpresents" in experimental historiographies. Pastpresents (one word), similar to Donna Haraway's naturecultures (also one word), are the visible evidences that the past and the present cannot be purified each from the other. Naming pastpresents is both a critique of the critique of presentism and also shares a feminist epistemology in which, along with Haraway and Bruno Latour, we "break the Enlightenment Contract" that requires us to keep separate our purifications and our hybridities as the condition for practicing both.
Thinking of Gary Urton's Signs of the Inka Khipu: we know more about khipu in their past precisely as we learn to connect them to the computers of our present, and the way we know how to make such connections is intimately related to our experiences with the products and processes of contemporary globalization.
In this talk I will make reference to four experimental historiographies
- Keith Hopkins' A world full of gods: Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire (1999)
- Richard Handler & Eric Gable's The new history in an old museum: creating the past at Colonial Williamsburg (1997)
- Michael Barnes' two television series Secrets of Lost Empires I & II, broadcast each in five segments of the PBS series NOVA over the course of the 90s
- Arthur P. Molella's Science in American Life exhibition which opened in 1994 at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History
I will focus on the TV documentaries with a bare mention of Science in American Life. If you are interested in the longer argument including it you can find it written up at http://www.womensstudies.umd.edu/wmstfac/kking/present/vanderbilt04.html
Morley and Robins: heritage culture--Prince Charles-like exploitations of nostalgia and invented traditions intended to make places attractive locations for global investment and tourism; enterprise culture--Thatcher-like political promotions of national capital and local labor in pursuit of strategic alliances and joint ventures, the price of admission to a global club of flexible transnationals.
Lucy Suchman on when knowledge production is conflated with creating "products": "we came to see that...the discontinuities across our intellectual and professional traditions and associated discursive practices meant that we could not simply produce 'results' that could be handed off to our colleagues."
Hopkins' second chapter experiments: "...here I try to capture both the intensity of [the] religious passion [of Qumran, the site of the Dead Sea Scrolls] and the difficulty of reporting it now, by using a quintessentially modern idiom, a TV drama, in which all that we see/read is mediated by a simplifying process, of (mis)interpretation. This TV play is set partly in ancient Rome, partly in the modern world. The Qumran myth is replayed, as all old myths should be, with ancient and modern players, and with authentic words. But in the modern medium, much is also changed; there are, for example, slippages of time and character. That too is unlikely to please my critical colleagues. So they too are given a voice, though only after the show is over. For me, the hero of this play is the TV camera itself, which, like a historical source, arbitrarily selects what it chooses to show, never lies and never understands."
Illustration
by way of TV drama and documentary is a richly contaminated set of metaphors
and realities.
Anachronism, or what Hopkins calls "slippages in time," within the past
as well as between "us" and the past, can counter that whiggish desire for tales
of progress that wind up with some particular "us" on top. It both mixes up
who counts as "us," as well as refuses chronology as essential origin, evolution
or fulfillment.
The realist pleasures of "I thought the pictures were wonderful" speaks
to that sources appear to offer, the local details that animate generalizations,
the archival labors dramatized and experienced as immediacy, the transparency
of the material limitations of selection.
The commercial productions of television are helpful in remediating histories under globalization--that is to say, imaginatively modeling a range of media and sensory modes within and through writing technologies. What TV documentaries as metaphor and literality remediate are structural shifts that the word "globalization" short-hands: shifts that are not only economic, but cultural at levels of interaction in which agencies cannot be understood as instrumentally individual.
Bolter
& Grusin:
"...we call the representation of one medium in another remediation....
The contemporary entertainment industry calls such borrowing 'repurposing':
to make a 'property' from one medium and reuse it in another. With reuse comes
a necessary redefinition, but there may be no conscious interplay between media.
The interplay happens, if at all, only for the reader or viewer who happens
to know both versions and can compare them."
Secrets of Lost Empires episode "Roman Bath" brings together from three different countries:
- a historian of Roman baths,
- an archeologist with expertise in ancient baths,
- an architect and building materials specialist,
- an engineer and excavator, and
- a heating engineer, who,
- near Sardis, Turkey, design a Roman Bath, actually built by local workers.
Bruno Latour: "Any constructivists worth their salt should be ashamed to see that everywhere things have been gypped their due….if the word constructivist has any sort of meaning, it is because it leads us to agencies …. Yes, [things] act, yes they order, yes they resist, yes, they are plastic, but what has proved interesting are all the intermediary positions they are able to simultaneously occupy.… I have never met scientists at the bench who were content to chose between 'realism' and 'constructivism', except of course when giving science war pep talks. … Show me one single programmer who would think herself in full command of the software she is writing.... Everywhere, building, creating, constructing, laboring means to learn how to become sensitive to the contrary requirements, to the exigencies, to the pressures of conflicting agencies where none of them is really in command. Especially not the 'maker' who spends nights and days trying to live up to his or her responsibility."
Latour on things: "in the sense of the mixture of assemblies, issues,
causes for concerns, data, law suits, controversies which the words res,
causa, chose, aitia, ding have designated in all
the European languages."
Latour on iconoclashes: "a new reverence for the images of science
is taken to be their destruction.")
I argue that debunking critiques of academic capitalism and other forms of commercialized production depend upon modernist purifications that are unable to account for our knowledge making practices in complex layers of locals and globals. I prefer to analyze globalization processes from the perspective of what Chela Sandoval calls "differential movement." Such a perspective examines both terror and possibility simultaneously: it works to recognize agencies in new forms. I am especially interested in the problems and possibilities of distributed agencies as reflected in television documentaries, real and imagined.
Donna Haraway's on"witnessing": "Witnessing is seeing; attesting; standing publicly accountable for, and psychically vulnerable to, one's visions and representations. Witnessing is a collective, limited practice that depends on the constructed and never finished credibility of those who do it, all of whom are mortal, fallible, and fraught with the consequences of unconscious and disowned desires and fears. A child of Robert Boyle's Royal Society of the English Restoration and of the experimental way of life, I remain attached to the figure of the modest witness. I still inhabit stories of scientific revolution as earthshaking mutations in the apparatuses of production of what may count as knowledge. A child of antiracist, feminist, multicultural, and radical science movements, I want a mutated modest witness to live in worlds of technoscience, to yearn for knowledge, freedom, and justice in the world of consequential facts...." "What will count as modesty now is a good part of what is at issue. Whose agencies will revised forms of 'modest witness' enhance, and whose will it displace?"
These
do-it-yourself pastpresents invite forms of identification and dis-identification:
communities brought together and also pushed apart as the "us" moves around.
Chronology becomes a tool for scale-making which allows for grained historical
analyses of varying degrees, creating layers of "locals": the day, the year,
the decade, the century; for example each describe a different grain for assessing
the level of detail, particularity, locality. Scale-making and chronology are
engaging partners. Together they make what anthropologist Kath Weston calls
"time claims."
Kath
Weston on"time claims": "There can be no time claim without a time
frame: history, infinity, chronology, generation, era, future/past. Implicit
in these claims are modes of temporality (regressing, moving ahead, modern
traditions, coming back around) and morality (stolen futures, lost generation,
better days). In relativizing fashion, time claims tether me, you, and our brother's
keeper to our respective timespots .... Time claims can even naturalize
or denaturalize the very modes of reckoning embedded within them."
Latour: "The relevant question...would no longer be, 'Is it or isn't
it constructed?' but rather: 'How do you manufacture them?' And, above all,
'How do you verify that they are well constructed?' Here is where the negotiations
could begin: with the question of the right ways to build."
These flexible knowledges, create, depend upon, intra-act in what I call "audience polyphony." Audiences and markets shift and converge in that complex address of multiple audiences, in that contradictory nest of niche political and epistemological "markets." Rich contradictory nestings permit and require visitors to select among possible salient narratives by animating differently layers of locals and globals. By implication the "Dummy Scientists" and we associate and dissociate these only sometimes "accidentals" with other interests, situated knowledges and spacetimes; they offer commentary less amenable to such flattening out, and one feels more and less inclined to ally with particular folks on the basis of their differing implicit and explicit social and epistemological politics. Calling them and oneself in and out of alliance and its classifications, that momentary universalism shades into other ranges of affiliation and disfiliation, such momentary universalisms occasionally, as Kath Weston says, holding "open a place for regrouping in the wake of those moments when things come undone.".
We desperately need sometimes thoughtful sometimes extravagant strategies for resisting, refusing, altering, mutating academic capitalism, and I look to histories under globalization to help us understand and imagine them.
Materials refered to in my talk today:
Barnes,
Page, & Cort. 1992-1997. Barnes, Cort, Clark, & Linde. 2000. Secrets
of lost empires I & II. NOVA: WGBH/Boston Science Unit & BBC-TV;
NOVA: WGBH, Channel Four & La Cinquième.
Bolter,
J. D., & Grusin, R. (1999). Remediation. MIT Press.
Handler & Gable. 1997. The new history in an old museum: creating
the past at Colonial Williamsburg. Duke.
Haraway. 1997. Modest_Witness. Routledge.
Haraway 2003. The Companion Species Manifesto. Prickly Paradigm.
Haraway & Goodeve. 2000. How like a leaf. Routledge.
Hopkins. 1999. A World Full of Gods. Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Latour. 1993. We have never been modern. Harvard.
Latour & Weibel. 2002. Iconoclash: beyond the image wars in Science,
Religion and Art. MIT.
Latour. 2002. War of the worlds: what about peace? Prickly Paradigm.
Latour. Forthcoming. "The promises of constructivism." In Idhe.
Chasing Technoscience. Indiana. Online at: http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/articles/article/087.html
Morley,
D., & Robins, K. (1995). Spaces of identity. Routledge.
Sandoval,
C. (2000). Methodology of the oppressed. U Minnesota.
Slaughter
& Leslie.1997. Academic capitalism. Johns Hopkins.
Smithsonian Institution & Arthur P. Molella. 1994. Science in American
Life Exhibition. National Museum of American History. Online description:
http://americanhistory.si.edu/youmus/ex28sci.htm
Suchman. 2000. "Located Accountabilities in Technology Production."
Lancaster University, UK. Online: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc039ls.html
Urton. 2003. Signs of the Inka Khipu: binary coding in the Andean knotted-string
records. Texas.
Weston. 2002. Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age.
Routledge.
No comments:
Post a Comment