12 EXPERIENCE

Anja Schwarz

Participants in popular TV-reenactment shows from the early 2000s frequently alluded to an immediate, corporeal experience of the past when asked to explain what had motivated their involvement.

They described the sensation, sometimes labeled a period rush, in terms of a “complete absorption in the reenacted event” (Agnew, 2004, p. 330), one that let history come alive for them. Such claims might all-too-easily be disregarded as the naive delusions of self-fashioned living historians, and yet the argument here is primarily based on an analysis of the popular programs in which they took part. While not every reenactment relies on the participants’ identification with the historical personas that they embody to the same extent, the assertions made by these hobby reenactors get to the heart of reenactment’s epistemological project at large. Positioning itself in opposition to book learning and dusty historical scholarship, reenactment’s claim to knowledge rests on a different and allegedly more immediate access to the past being revisited. This access, reenactors maintain, is provided by means of the intense and supposedly unfiltered experiences of earlier times that result from immersion in an interactive historical environment. Based on their experiences, reenactors might claim to know what it would have been like to run a middle-class Victorian household, to take part in the class struggle on a Prussian country estate in 1900, or to live on a mid-19th-century Australian sheep station (1900 House; Abenteuer 1900; Outback House).

Intense bodily and mental exertion are at the center ofreenactment’s historiographic methodology (embodiment). After all, it is largely through sensory impressions and psychological challenges that reenactors seek to understand the past, experiencing first-hand what former times would have smelled, sounded, looked, and felt like (Agnew, 2004, p.

330). This fundamental dependence on the senses goes some way to explain reenactment’s antiquarian obsession with the authenticity of props and settings: their materiality is taken to work on the body in a manner not corrupted by retrospective interpretation (authenticity; materialization of the past). The TV-reenactment shows mentioned earlier clearly exhibit this fetishization of material culture when, time and again, they foreground the significance of period clothing in their storylines. In the different incarnations of the popular House format, it was often the body of the female reenactor and its subjection to historical dressing routines that propelled the shows’ narratives. In Australia’s Outback House (ABC, 2005), for instance, voyeuristic images of female participants getting dressed were supported by the voiceover’s claim that “1861 was the age of the tight corset, the crotch-less pantaloon and the looped crinoline. Our wardrobe department has recreated everything down to the finest period detail.” Female undergarments of the Victorian age were presented here as regulatory and disciplining contrivances that impress on 21st-century bodies so as to provide the show’s volunteers with an immediate experience of the past (gender) (Figure 12.1).

In the light of the malleability of reenacting bodies that is foregrounded by such statements, it might be tempting to describe them, with Foucault, as nothing but the “inscribed surface of events” and the attached subjectivities as “totally imprinted by history” (1977, p. 148), produced by the disciplining regime of period clothing and other props. This is hardly the case, as reenactors seem to undergo reenactment’s many psychological hardships as well as the rigid fashioning of their bodies with their fundamental sense of self intact. In spite of the genre’s fixation on moments of crisis (Agnew, 2004, p. 331), reenactors do not become the historical personas they embody. Treating their exposure to staged historical conditions as a means of knowing and bearing witness to the past, reenactors’ subjective experiences rather become “the bedrock of evidence on which explanation is built” (Scott, 1991, p.

777). In Outback House, participants corroborated their insights into historical sheep station life in this vein and spoke of themselves as “very rare people who have actually lived in the past,” adding that “what you’ve got to think about is that we lived it. We actually lived 1861. It was three dimensional for us.”

It is certainly not by chance that these and similar assertions by those professing to know history “from the inside” (Agnew, 2004, p. 331) resemble the testimonial speech acts of eyewitnesses. Testimonials have long been codified in religious and juridical practice, thereby endowing the act of witnessing with extraordinary moral and cultural force. In both of these fields, a witness is an observer who has a privileged proximity to facts, about which the witness is authorized to speak by having been present at the event (Peters, 2009, pp. 25-26). The role assumed by reenactors is often very similar: having “actually” experienced the past as eyewitnesses, Outback House’s participants, as cited earlier, understand themselves as authorized to testify to life in 1861.

Looking at reenactments through the lens of witnessing also throws light on their recurrent privileging of intense experiences. Civil War reenactors are known to seek out physical

Figure 12.1 Female reenactors inVictorian undergarments in Channel 4’s 1900 House. Source: Christopher Ridley.

discomfort, fatigue, and hunger in their quest to become convincing Confederate soldiers. Correspondingly, no production ofTV shows in the House format would have been complete without the exhausted breakdown of at least one of the participants. Clips advertising the series' prototype 1900 House, for instance, enticed viewers to witness a family's exposure to Victorian hardships, culminating with the mother's tearful emotional breakdown on her third day as a Victorian middle-class housewife: “I knew it was going to be tough, but I thought I'd be much better than this.

[...] Everything takes three times as long, like the cooking and everything. It's dirty, hard work.” Only through hardship, it seems, can the veracity gap between history and its reenactment be overcome and the past rendered knowable. Acts of witnessing, similarly, often resort to the body—frequently the body in pain—as a seat of truth (suffering). Religious martyrs testify with their tormented bodies to their belief, and to this day, the body language of witnesses strapped to a lie-detector is taken to vouch for the veracity of their statements (martyr). In reenactment-as-witnessing, the indisputability of intense bodily experiences accordingly becomes the central means by which to persuade others of the truth of one's insights.

However, contrary to their claim to a more immediate understanding of the past, historical reenactments seldom produce new historical insights. After all, they pride themselves in meticulously reproducing events and material conditions that have been recorded in historical sources. At best, this attempted historical realism reaffirms what is already known. Combined with its epistemological dependence on experience, however, reenactment also runs the danger of not so much illuminating as actually hindering a better understanding of historical events and life worlds. One of these dangers is the result of a circular logic according to which the reenactor's experience of the reconstructed historical setting can never do more than validate already accepted, regimented, and institutionally sanctioned assumptions about the historical past. Here, reenacted history runs the risk of becoming nothing but “us in funny clothes” (Dening, 2004, p. 19).

Another problem tied to the foregrounding of experience relates to the observation that, apparently, not every past is there to be embodied by anyone. Reenactment frequently ties its experiential access to historical periods or events to present-day identity markers, and more often than not, the successful embodiment of historical personas is taken to rely on the supposed stability of gender, age, race, or class across the temporal divide.

There is something inherently limiting in assuming that true insights into the past are available only to those who share the same, supposedly ahistorical, bodily features: that only white men can successfully embody Confederate soldiers; that only a middle-class British woman is guaranteed to understand what it was really like to have run the household of a Victorian home; and that only those whose biographies are entangled with Australia's settler-colonial past can come to “actually” experience this period. Such presentist memory practices remain oblivious to the fact that the seemingly stable categories of race, gender, and class are themselves the products of historical processes.

In light of these serious flaws in reenactment's epistemological project and the frequent usage of experience to essentialize identities, what is clearly needed is a critical interrogation of the “evidence of experience” (Scott, 1991) that underpins the genre's historiographical claims (evidence). Raymond Williams has famously questioned the supposed authenticity of experience. Although “taken to be private, idiosyncratic, and even isolating,” he explains that experiences are fundamentally social in nature, located between feelings and structured social formations. As soon as something is experienced, it is therefore always already “a social material process” (1977, p. 132). And Joan W Scott, writing about the category of experience in historiography, cautions that it is “precisely this kind of appeal to experience as incontestable evidence as an originary point of explanation” that weakens the critical thrust of enquiry: “Questions about the constructed nature of experience, about how subjects are constituted [...] are left aside” (1991, p. 777).

From Williams and Scott, we learn that it is vital, therefore, to question the supposed evidence of reenactors’ experiences and to pay attention instead to their role in the production and naturalization of essentialized historical subjectivities.

Seen in this light, their experience “becomes not the origin of our explanation, not the authoritative (because seen or felt) evidence that grounds what is known, but rather that which we seek to explain” (Scott, 1991, p. 780). Returning these insights to the examples of the House format, it might be productive to ask what kind of understanding of the Victorian Age is foregrounded when it becomes knowable solely through the experience of dirty, hard, female middle-class household life (Muller and Schwarz, 2008); what might it mean to see Prussian class conflict mapped onto Germany’s post-unification negotiations of its recent socialist past (Agnew, 2007); and we might come to investigate what it entails to learn about Australia’s settler-colonial past through the psychological strain of having to enact white Australian’s complicity in indigenous dispossession (Schwarz, 2010b). In each of these instances, the reenactors’ experiences would tell us very little about the actual past, but they would grant insights into the memory politics of the present (memory and commemoration).

What, then, remains of reenactment’s experiences? It has been argued that experiences are key to the practice’s claims to knowledge about the past. Their perceived immediacy is the central means by which reenactors persuade themselves and others of the truth of their insights. Museum pedagogy, as one of the variety of fields in which reenactments thrive, frequently draws on this affective force in the attempt to raise learners’ interest for distant pasts and places (emotion). However, here, as in other contexts, this promise of an unmediated experience of the past frequently obscures reenactment’s ideological character: it interpellates practitioners, as well as viewers, in terms of essentialized subjectivities and entrenches teleological interpretations of history. How might reenactment’s ideological underpinnings be better exposed? We might begin by asking whether the persuasive effect of reenactment’s experiences could not also be employed to break with the very notion of a unified history. Attention to the disruptive potential of pasts that defy reproduction or to those experiences of the simulated past that have no historical precedent might encourage more pluralist approaches to history. A focus on these moments in reenactment practice and reception could potentially liberate the past from its reduction to “us in funny clothes,” thereby encouraging reenactors as well as audiences to critically engage with the historical processes that have shaped the present.

12 EXPERIENCE

More on the topic 12 EXPERIENCE: