27 Mediality

Maria Muhle

The question of mediality, which in itself is an ambiguous notion, is at the core of reenactment practices from at least two different perspectives—a duality that reflects back on the polysemy of the notion of mediality itself.

Both these aspects of the mediality of reenactments unfold against the backdrop of another duality that opposes the analysis of historical reenactments to media artistic practices of reenact­ment that exceed the more traditional notion, therefore also putting pressure on it, or directly challenging it (here one might consider the example of the reenactment of the miner strikes in Thatcher’s England by Jeremy Deller, filmed by Mike Figgis, that inverts the roles of the strikers and policemen and tends to re-establish a historical truth obstructed by the official historiog­raphy) (Horn and Arns, 2007). It is precisely this double character of reenactments—historio­graphic as well as media artistic—that will allow us to gain further insights into the mediality of their practices insofar their difference evolves around the mediatedness or unmediatedness of the reality they represent through reenactment. While the classical historiographic reenactments aim at a true and authentic representation of the past, the media artistic reenactments tend to introduce some error, false note, or variation within the reproduction in order to shed light on the fact that authentic reproduction is impossible and that there is always a creative, or subjec­tive, surplus that ultimately deconstructs the conservative understanding of reenactment—and of history (art).

For insofar as reenactment first describes a historiographic practice, it is related to real­ity in a specific manner, and thus needs to negotiate its relationship to truth, which often translates into the vividness of the reenactment and thus poses the question of the mode (the medium) of experiencing history (experience). For insofar secondly it also designates a media artistic practice, the status of aesthetic indefiniteness or openness is negotiated in a specific manner, either in the critical model as a deviation intentionally incorporated into the repetition from the beginning (Deller and Figgis), or as something unsuspected—a chance event or an “accident” within the representation—happening in the course of the perfor­mance of the reenactment. This relates the practices of reenactment to the notion of the “optical unconscious,” as developed by Walter Benjamin for the media of technical reproduc­tion, photography, and film (Benjamin, 2008).

To put it more schematically, while the classical reenactment strategies reconstruct history as a whole—and therefore ensure the continuation of the eternal return of the same—their artistic reformulations deconstruct this very idea of history: such critical reenactments thus highlight the deconstructable character of the historical logic, as well as the fact that the medium by or in which a history is written always participates in the process of making history. And while classical reenactments rely on an aesthetics of immersion (Curtis, 2008) that aims to establish a situation in which the reenacting agent/spectator can relive a non-mediated reality in order to create the possibility of identification with the historical spectacle, the contemporary media artistic reformulation introduces, in contrast, an aesthetics of documentarian mediation that allows for a critical point of view for the spectator, and triggers its ideological-critical awareness as to the construction of a conservative and identitarian history, as well as to the methods of an aesthetic of immersion itself (Muhle, 2013a), see Figure 27.1.

Nevertheless, it seems that most media are reenactments even though they are aimed at criticizing a specific, dominant historiography by deconstructing it (for example, through the inversion of roles), ultimately only re-establishing it from another perspective without problematizing the claim to historical truth and therefore omitting the specifically mediatic dimension of reenactments. This dimension is, however, addressed by those reenactments that do not take a formulated difference between the reality and its representation as their start­ing point but that put forward the idea of a surplus or an excess that is produced within the

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Figure 27.1 Video stills from Chris Marker, The Last Bolshevik, 2003. Marker points to the making of historical documents through reenactment, in this case, the reenactment of the storming of the Winter Palace by N. Evreinov in 1920, and how the images of these representations are incorporated into the historical narratives as “authentic” documents, for example, as a book cover of the French translation of Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution (1967). Source: Documentaire sur grand ecran.

reenactment. In this sense, non-Western popular reenactment practices can be illuminating: first, they are not based on a Western linear concept of history, therefore evading the ques­tion of progress and the idea of considering the reenactment a truthful representation, or fulfillment, of a past event. This leads, secondly, to a different approach to the depicted reality which is precisely not a relation of representation but rather of appropriation: appropriation of the practices of reenactment as well as of the reality that is being reenacted. A most striking example would be Jean Rouch’s Les Maitres Fous (1954), the filming of a Hauka trance ritual in Ghana during which the Hauka appropriate the roles of the colonial masters as well as their technical media, i.e., the camera that Rouch operates under their orders, becoming part of the ritual (Taussig, 1993, p.

As Vanessa Agnew has pointed out, classical popular cultural reenactment practices prevail primarily in the Anglo-Saxon context—the largest and most historically significant reenact­ment is known to be that of the Battle of Gettysburg—and encompass quite diverse his­toriographical media: from theatrical and living history performances to museum exhibits, television programs, films, travelogues, and historiography (Agnew, 2004, p. 327). Nevertheless, their common methodology can be summed up as understanding representation in the mode of immersion, which aims at the production of possibilities of identification with the depicted event by covering up the (aesthetic) rupture between the represented and the representa­tion through an illusion of authenticity. Agnew maintains that while this epistemological claim is problematic, it also conveys an “implicit charge to democratize historical knowledge” and to open up academic historiography to a “history from below” (Agnew, 2004, p. 335). Reenactment thus channels a different, affective historiography that presumes a sympathetic identification with the past that had already been formulated by British philosopher R. G. Collingwood in the 1940s.

Understood from this second, epistemological perspective, the question of mediality is thus also at the core of the first explicit occurrence of the notion of reenactment within a historio­graphic context, namely in Collingwood’s The Idea of History (1946), which develops a philoso­phy of history in terms of “reenactment of past experience.” Reenactment, for Collingwood, means the “rethinking of past thought.” He claims that a satisfying knowledge of history, that is, of historical events, can only be achieved by reenacting these events or rather the situation

in which decisions of historical impact were taken—decisions that resulted in the subsequent events:

When an historian asks “Why did Brutus stab Caesar?” he means “What did Brutus think, which made him decide to stab Caesar?” The cause of the event, for him, means the thought in the mind of the person by whose agency the event came about: and this is not something other than the event, it is the inside of the event itself.

The processes of history are thus not a sequence of mere events but rather “processes of actions that have an inner side, consisting of processes of thought. All history is history of thought” which is “the reenactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind” (Collingwood, 1946, p. 215).

Therefore, philosophy of history understood as reenactment ultimately only allows for the reenactment of an intellectual history, since, for Collingwood, reenacting is nothing other than rethinking historical thoughts. In order to make this rethinking possible, i.e., making thought available for being rethought, Collingwood needs to take refuge in what Paul Ricreur has designated and criticized as an ontological principle that states the identity of thoughts throughout history (Ricreur, 1985)—and that can be reformulated as the belief in a total transparency and therefore unmediatedness between the past and the present. Collingwood introduces the notion of an imagination a priori in order to justify historical representation that bypasses the documentarian paradigm (“sources”) inasmuch as the historical truth ema­nates from the mind of the historian who is “one with his time.” Siegfried Kracauer has criti­cized this understanding for which “the present moment virtually contains all the moments preceding it.” It is, he adds, precisely the immersion of the historian in his present situation that leads him not to acknowledge the necessary mediatedness of the past in the present (Kracauer, 1969, p. 64).

To see reenactment as a process of rethinking past thought thus means to free history from any material, historical or temporal influences and to consider it something atemporal, await­ing its reenactment by which, if accurate enough, the historical event remains unchanged and untouched—the mediation between past and present replaced by its identification. This radical (and rather improbable) belief in the unmediatedness of historical reality, however, resonates with the classical reenactment practices that aim at an authentic, historicist reconstruction of a past event in order to assure its revived and immediate experience.

If, therefore, the epistemological perspective on mediality brought forth by traditional reen­actments seems highly controversial inasmuch it is connected to the belief in history as a mean­ingful whole, it might be more fruitful to turn to those forms of reenactments that directly address the mediatedness of all experience by remediating it—the experience—in different technological milieus or dispositions, such as film, theater, or performance. It is here that the question of mediality becomes more interesting, to the extent that reenactments across different media show how malleable and deconstructable the notion of historical truth ultimately is, and how naive a realism that appears to suppress any mediation between the past and the present experience, and the past and the present subject.

This brings us back to the technological perspective on mediality or to the question of what kind of medium the reenactment itself is. Ifwe think of reenactment as the medium of history, we acknowledge that history is itself always mediated and that it is therefore impossible to directly grasp the historical past. What makes history history is the fact that it needs to be narrated, documented, represented, reenacted—in order to be transmitted or transmittable. But to con­sider reenactment the medium of history also means to reflect on its own ephemeral character,

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insofar as the life situation of the reenactment always depends on several other media—those which transmit the past experience (sources) and those which record, memorize or store the present experience in order for it to become available for future re-experiences. The epistemo­logical negation of mediality that is at the core of classical reenactments is thus the productive misunderstanding that allows us to look at the multiple medial layers—both epistemological and technological—that unfold by challenging the identitarian, conservative, and authenticist aesthetics and historiography of those reenactments.

Further reading

Farocki, H., 2009; Geimer, P., 2005; Koch, G., 2003; Rau, M., 2009.