Wednesday, March 27, 2013

talk Vanderbilt 2004

Katie King | Presentations | Vanderbilt 3 April 04 | Historiography as Reenactment

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

 

a talk presented at the "Extreme and Sentimental History" Conference,
Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, 3 April 2004

 

In my 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. (Haraway, 1997, 2003; Haraway & Goodeve, 2000) 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 (Latour, 1993, 2002a, 2002b).

For a quick, intuitive example, we might look to MacArthur Fellow Gary Urton's experimental and speculative book, Signs of the Inka Khipu, Binary coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records (2003), which draws out an extended analogy between the binary codes of computers and those of pre-conquest Inka strings. His are speculations about what counts as writing, a point of fascination in my own research on what I call "writing technologies." More specifically, he asks what forms of decoding eventually will tell us whether these knots contain not only accountings of empire tribute and maps of Inka colonialism, but also if they contain narratives and histories we cannot yet read. Urton's investigations of the Inka khipu string records are as bits of pastpresents: that is to say, 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 with differing but interconnected investments in reenactment and its pastpresents. The first two are Keith Hopkins' A world full of gods: Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire (1999), and Richard Handler & Eric Gable's The new history in an old museum: creating the past at Colonial Williamsburg (1997), each of which examine implicitly or explicitly knowledge production in commercialized forms. Hopkins in the UK uses the BBC TV documentary as a metaphor and narrative frame--a momentary melding of pastpresents in imaginative reenactment--in which TV figures economic globalizations within academic capitalism. For Hopkins TV's distributed agencies are likened both to scholarly practices of historiography and to shifts in knowledge production under academic capitalism. In contrast, Handler and Gable debunk commercial knowledge production at Colonial Williamsburg. They describe the exploitations of the interpreter/reenactors, who are promised semi-professional recognition within social historical practice but instead end up as engineers of a "feel good" atmosphere for tourism. I contrast these analyses with a preference for Hopkins'--which describes its own conditions of production under academic capitalism in the UK in 1999 in a way that Handler and Gable, two years earlier in the US in 1997, have not yet grasped. Instead, their debunking critique depends upon the assumption that academic scholarship is relatively free from the commercial constraints that they expose at Colonial Williamsburg.

I then turn to two other sites of reenactment and knowledge production in experimental historiographies: 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; and, as chief curator, Arthur P. Molella's Science in American Life exhibition which opened in 1994 at the Smithsonian Institution's National Museum of American History--now with the additional identification of its recent multimillion dollar donor, the Behring Center, in Washington DC. I want to describe these two sites with their bits of pastpresents in order to wonder with Latour how to reframe constructivism in order to critically engage what Latour calls iconoclashes. Latour draws attention to the problems posed by relying heavily on debunking, say, sites of heritage culture as history, nation, science, art, and religion. Consequently, I want to wonder with Haraway how to practice as both culture critics and knowledge producers what she calls "modest witnessing," an alternate epistemology of knowledge making practices.

One beginning for ancient social and economic historian Keith Hopkins' book, A World Full of Gods, describes it as a failed interdisciplinary collaboration, evoking for its structure of pasts, peoples and sensations the metaphor of a "triple helix." The metaphor calls to mind Henry Etzkowitz' work on global knowledge economies--as what he calls "a triple helix of university-industry-government relations." (Etzkowitz & Leydesdorff, 1997) And the failed collaboration that begins Hopkins' book calls to mind both the opportunities and new industrialized requirements of, say, humanities scholars, now enlisted to work in teams in the styles of corporate industrial science. Fruitful and failed collaborations both figure in Hopkins' history, reminiscent of the epistemological consequences feminist technoscience theorist Lucy Suchman discusses 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." (Suchman, 2000) New working relations could open up collaborative possibilities, but alternately failed collaborations might actually signal healthy and vigorous diversity among scholars in terms of politics, training, specialization and reasons for synthesis. "Academic capitalism" in the UK, Australia, the US and Canada according to Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, is the result of the emergence of global markets. Fields "close to the market" require products; fields "peripheral to the market" are pushed to pedagogy and public service. (Slaughter & Leslie, 1997) Audiences for scholarship and markets for research products are increasingly conflated. Impulses to democratize knowledge and to commodify it are sometimes virtually indistinguishable.

Hopkins' second chapter is especially lively and complicated. He experiments, saying "...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. When unable to produce commercial products from research, humanities scholars today are encouraged and flattered into democratizing/commodifying their research in a range of public pedagogies and services. These are "real" democratizations often highly commercialized, but not unlike in kind, although perhaps in degree, all the mediated work of scholarly interpretation for various audiences in classrooms, lecture halls and publications.

One of the fictional academic reports on Hopkins' fabricated BBC documentary, entitled "Dialogues with the Dead," complains about the anachronistic meeting of two of its ancient characters in the documentary since each of them actually lived in adjacent but different centuries, while yet praising the "wonderful" pictures from the TV camera. (75) Hopkins has the director reply: "I was quite aware that Justin lived later; that's half the fun with mixed-time TV--you can mix times. Besides, it's a bit naive to imagine that getting dates right is a guarantee of correctness. Time is only one dimension of truth." (77) 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. "I thought the pictures were wonderful" speaks to the realist pleasures 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 "uses" of history here are alarmingly various in their political, epistemological, commercial, religious and scholarly imports. Nor does history serve only the purposes of the so-called present: also alarmingly the past and present are simultaneous in this screenplay, so intermixed that directions of causation and influence cannot be linear and progressive.

Public histories today are impressed by (stamped by, enlisted into) heritage culture and its appropriations of: national and personal identities, of multiple chronologies in layers of locals and globals, and of converging writing technologies neither simply oral or literate. The kind of consciousness cultivated by global products, created out of commercial intentions but also out of conditions of global production, draw new skills out of such altering pleasures and tastes. Handler and Gable's useful critique of the living history ethos, The New History in an Old Museum, uses ethnographic participation and observation as well as interview and archival materials to examine and produce what I am calling its spectacle of production. Its many critical pleasures emerge from its debunking narrative of corporate assumptions unintentionally derailing the social justice concerns explicit in the "new social history" espoused by enthusiastic historians turned corporate managers. One of its final footnotes acknowledges that "it would be easy to make the kind of criticism of university professors that we here level at scholars and administrators working in museums."

But while Handler and Gable's footnote acknowledges the connections, their main text's criticality depends upon implicit and explicit divisions between "the hybrid corporation" that is Colonial Williamsburg and "a serious educational institution." (234) Debunking assists in such purifications, debunkings which are sometimes politically crucial for both progressives and conservatives. But universities are more and more obviously not immune from governing pressures of heritage culture or the impression of corporate management assumptions, styles, funding requirements and money-making imperatives in enterprise culture. A range of purifications, among them debunking critique, haunts inadequate academic resistances to histories under globalization. Globalization processes create academically uncomfortable and sometimes politically reprehensible forms of hybrid histories, all shadowed by commodifications of various sorts. Pointing to these contexts I use the term "public histories" very deliberately. The kind of hybrid corporation Handler and Gable examine as Colonial Williamsburg, the pressures of corporate fund raising escalating at the Smithsonian Institution, and the impressions of both heritage and enterprise cultures on universities under academic capitalism are not so distinct as the division between "hybrid corporation" and "serious educational institution" makes them sound. 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.

Knowledge is very expensive to make and just how expensive is newly visible as resources shift and burdens are reallocated, with changes in public justifications for and against social investments and for and against building private wealth. Scholars are pressured to take up as their "audiences" those masses of TV viewers, in the name of democratization and to justify use of public money, at a moment when such mass audiences become economically untenable for other culture industries, like television. How different are these "publics"? Processes of knowledge production conflated as "products" make academic capitalism also another culture industry, partially privatized, partially funded by the state. Such richly contaminated hybridities cannot be properly answered by appeals to the purifying critiques of "presentism" that haunt today's history classrooms and association speeches; political refutations of or support for social justice movements; and epistemologically, professionally and commercially embattled disciplinary and interdisciplinary sites for knowledge production, as in the "culture wars," the "science wars," the "history wars." A moment's ironic reflection suggests that the critique of "presentism" is itself presentist: that is to say, it overvalues historically and culturally local constructions of the meaning and importance of a particular set of stories and their conditions of production. It may buy its irreducible (and ironically singular and abstract) historical alterity with the coin of these innumerable other ways to make, mean, value, and tell histories. Indeed, histories under globalization so jumble up in time and space such story-telling processes that purifications are literally impossible.

Consider the BBC's TV shows such as "Surviving the Iron Age," or "The Ship--Retracing Cook's Endeavour Voyage," shown in the U.S. on public television member stations, or in Canada on History Television, and compare them to signature producer Wall To Wall's '<something> House' format shows such as "1900 House," "Frontier House," and "Manor House," some created in production partnerships with PBS in the US. Such historical "reality" shows on TV are one part soap-opera, one part period re-creation. They are animated with folks from our time who invite audience identification as "us": we are the viewers mentally enacting too, playing at, re-enacting, experimenting, speculating, trying to provide evidence for, various understandings of the so-called "past." Their chronological anachronisms interweave pasts and presents, rather like both the time travelers and the TV crew that Hopkins uses to figure scholarly historical labors. Indeed media and viewers often call the participants in these TV shows "time travelers."

Compare them all to my favorite do-it-yourself ancient technologies series, Nova's Secrets of Lost Empires, also shown on PBS. Technologies indeed are lively players in the action in all of these, although defined, displayed, communicated with and emphasized differently. I want to consider what these public histories of technologies display about histories under globalization, what agencies we learn about from them and their conspicuously bundled spectacles of production, variously remediated. First of all, they are mixed commercial products of various sorts: broadcast or cable TV shows, in the US sold largely to public television stations, and sometimes recorded on video tape or DVD along with companion books sold to private viewers. Somewhat like the hybrid corporation of Colonial Williamsburg, they pay for themselves with a mixture of small profits from such products, corporate money and TV station money, private donations, small grants from federal, state or city cultural funding and/or in the UK from BBC licence fees, and supportive relationships with other public history sites and actors. Their web sites, interconnected to the BBC or History Television or PBS and/or Nova, are intended for educational use for schools and viewers, for internet entertainment in a range of forms, and to sell these products.

Secrets of Lost Empires demonstrates knowledge production in teams of experts both academic and non-academic, scholars and craftspeople, collaborating to guess at pastpresents through reenactments. For example, the 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. This reenactment is characterized by partial knowledges imperfectly communicated among the participants, and by the visible limitations of expertise, the contingencies of productive processes, the disruptive agencies of the very materials and conditions. The very requirement for drama as a commercial constraint in this particular case (and we should not generalize from it to all television documentaries and their reenactments) allow for making visible the epistemologies Bruno Latour recasts: "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, 2002 ms., forthcoming publication) Such knowledge "making" in metaphoric and literalized forms is made visible in these NOVA episodes as reenactment.

Reenactment is instrumentalized differently in another context of commercialized knowledge production, the controversial Science in American Life exhibition at the Smithsonian. Examining its "things" as bits of pastpresents requires understanding things as Bruno Latour does "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, 2002b) On the one hand, contemporary controversies at the Smithsonian, including those surrounding SAL, are iconoclashes ("a new reverence for the images of science is taken to be their destruction"; see Latour & Weibel, 2002). On the other hand, many of the exhibits' elements, such as its "Dummy Scientists"--life-sized multicultural photo-figures of contemporary scientists commenting upon historical continuities or interactions among various elements of the exhibit--demonstrate do-it-yourself pastpresents. They model for museum goers, as reenactors, shadows, witnesses, a play at being "there": on set, on site, in that past, in a past: mentally enacting, re-enacting, experimenting, speculating, trying to find evidence for various pastpresents. Witnessing as a root of the experimental life is given a literality in these do-it-yourself pastpresents, and a participation that interconnects it to Latour's "parliament of things." (Latour, 1993;) see also Haraway, 1997)

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.

Varying controversies at the Smithsonian (for example, its new Secretary comes to the job after being CEO of Fannie Mae) locate it in the nexus of economic globalizations and the politics of resistance, refusal, appropriation and differential movement. Imagine that we stand in the anteroom of the Science in American Life exhibition, in order to first recognize and, elsewhere in the exhibit, to examine the life-size freestanding photo-figures of scientists which work to situate and create scales of importance all throughout the exhibit. One can stand next to one of these figures, inhabiting a space together with and also apart from them, simultaneously. They "speak" in exhibit labels written out or in video bits you have to initiate on monitors, commenting and making alliances across spacetime with other figures described or re-enacted in the exhibit. They inhabit recreated spaces set up as scenes in mini-historical dramas. For example, 21st century Harvard chemist Cynthia Friend's label tells me more about 19th c. MIT chemical instructor Ellen Swallow Richards, and allies with her as a woman scientist in the "Laboratory Science Comes to America" section. University of the District of Columbia South Asian biologist Vijaya L. Melnick's label explicates the complexities of the political history of birth control for the well being of women and children in the "Better than Nature" section. The life-sized mannequin of Susan Solomon in its re-enactment of the 1986 National Ozone Expedition site, speaks to us via video soundstick about the work of other women scientists in the "Science in the Public Eye" section. Science Studies critics Lynn Mulkey and William Dougan call these figures "Dummy Scientists" and these processes "shadowing." They debunk these Dummy Scientists as impositions of universalism normalizing science: they say: "Science is important and witnessable against the backdrop of the unimportant attributes that change in relation to what is constant. This one is black and this one is white, this one is female and this one is male, but they all do science. To produce science, we ignore aspects or cues for how to associate--according to gender, race, age, and more." (Mulkey & Dougan, 1996)

But I want to lump together this shadowing with the doing re-enactments of this museum exhibition, and also with the re-enactments of TV shows and documentaries, using alternatively Donna Haraway's idea of "witnessing" in which persons and things have alliances too: "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?" (Haraway, 1997)

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." (Weston, 2002) Shifting scales make it possible for Latour to suggest: "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." (Latour, 2002b)

In the anteroom of the Science in American Life exhibit, where the Dummy Scientists assemble, and where their voices speak into the air without reference to any intention on our parts, Mulkey and Dougan's debunking of the multicultural universalism constructed by figuring scientists in mere accidental variants of age, gender, ethnicity, race and nation makes one kind of sense. But that very sense is mutated elsewhere, when they speak more directly and particularly, echoing Donna Haraway's version of Whitehead, "reaching into each other, through their 'prehensions' or graspings... constitut[ing] each other and themselves"--and us, when we invite their speech. (Haraway, 2003) 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." (Weston, 2002) Salience becomes tangible, literal, and even experimental. 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.

 

References

Barnes, M., Cort, J., Clark, L., & Linde, N. (2000). Secrets of lost empires II [Broadcast as 5 segments of the PBS series Nova]. Boston: NOVA production by WGBH in association with Channel Four and La Cinquième.

Barnes, M., Page, C., & Cort, J. (1992-1997). Secrets of lost empires I [Broadcast as 5 segments of the PBS series Nova]: NOVA production by the WGBH/Boston Science Unit and BBC-TV.

Etzkowitz, H., & Leydesdorff, L. A. (Eds.). (1997). Universities and the global knowledge economy: a triple helix of university-industry-government relations. London & New York: Pinter.

Handler, R., & Gable, E. (1997). The new history in an old museum: creating the past at Colonial Williamsburg. Durham: Duke.

Haraway, D. (1997). Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: feminism and technoscience. New York: Routledge.

Haraway, D. (2003). The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness. Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.

Haraway, D., & Goodeve, T. N. (2000). How like a leaf: an interview with Thyrza Nichols Goodeve. New York: Routledge.

Hopkins, K. (1999). A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews and Christians in the Roman Empire. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Latour, B. (1993, originally published 1991). We have never been modern (C. Porter, Trans.). Cambridge: Harvard.

Latour, B. (2002a). Iconoclash or is there a world beyond the image wars ? In B. Latour & P. Weibel (Eds.), Iconoclash: beyond the image wars in Science, Religion and Art. Cambridge: MIT.

Latour, B. (2002b). War of the worlds: what about peace? Chicago: Prickly Paradigm.

Latour, B. (2002 ms., forthcoming publication). The promises of constructivism. In D. Idhe (Ed.), Chasing Technoscience: Matrix of Materiality: Indiana UP. Available online at: http://www.ensmp.fr/~latour/articles/article/087.html

Latour, B., & Weibel, P. (Eds.). (2002). Iconoclash: beyond the image wars in Science, Religion and Art. Cambridge: MIT.

Slaughter, S., & Leslie, L. L. (1997). Academic capitalism: politics, policies, and the entrepreneurial university. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins.

Smithsonian Institution, & Arthur P. Molella (Chief Curator). (1994 opening). Science in American Life Exhibition. National Museum of American History. Retrieved October 28, 2002, from the World Wide Web: http://americanhistory.si.edu/youmus/ex28sci.htm

Suchman, L. (2000). Located Accountabilities in Technology Production. Sociology Dept., Lancaster University, UK. Retrieved 6/22, 2000, from the World Wide Web: http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/soc039ls.html

Urton, G. (2003). Signs of the Inka Khipu: binary coding in the Andean knotted-string records. Austin: U Texas.

Weston, K. (2002). Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age: Routledge.

King, K. (2004). Historiography as Reenactment: metaphors and literalizations of TV documentaries. Paper presented at the Extreme and Sentimental History Conference, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, 2-3 April 2004. Handout.

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