Reenactment across the disciplines

The term reenactment is not solely applied to historical events; it is important in the fields of ethnographical and anthropological research as well. Reenactments in their more formal aspect share with rituals a transformative potential arising not from the perfection of an imitation but from the exact and punctual performance of a sequence of actions and gestures as laid down by rule and precedent.

It is not only the disciplinary lens, then, which shapes the definition of reenactment. To a large extent, time is a factor as well, as the definition of reenactment has changed and been widened over the last two decades. Twenty years ago, reenactment was still associated predominantly with the restaging of significant historical events like the American Civil War and World War II battles, and with living history that used first-person performances to recreate past lifeways by simulating modes of dress, recreation, work, transportation, and speech. Although embraced by the public and attracting large numbers of practitioners, it was regarded with skepticism, if not disdain, within the academy. To the extent that reenactment swelled visitor numbers at heritage sites, it constituted a useful augmentation of other forms of heritage and commemorative practice. Australian ethno­historian Greg Dening’s view of reenactment, often cited since, as the “past dressed up in funny clothes” was a register of its slight stature among serious historians but also an index of its popular appeal. Reenactment might have lacked intellectual rigor and seriousness, but at least it was an attractive vehicle for transmitting historical knowledge to the public, and it drew “citizen histori­ans”—to borrow a term from the sciences—to the study and performance of the past.

Claims to authenticity underscore most reenactments—whether through the use of histor­ically accurate techniques, materials, and performance practices or through technological means like CGI, which generates a heightened sense of realism and historical “completeness.” It is for this reason that practitioners and scholars have taken the claim for authenticity to be a defin­ing feature of the practice. Reenactment has what McCalman and Pickering call a “realist aes- thetic.”Yet simulative historical performances need not be constrained by claims to authenticity: non-realist, non-representational modes of reenactment can likewise collapse temporalities and generate an affective engagement with the past. This recognition signals a need for a revision in our understanding of reenactment, one that goes beyond its realist aesthetic to accommodate reenactment’s multifarious character.

In other words, the dominion of imagination in historical reenactment is probably changing. With the advent of virtual reality and digital forms of processing information of events from multi-perspectival points of view, the eyewitness—and the eye and the image it generates—have been dislodged from their ancient angle of authority to be replaced by an algorithm that does with mathematical precision what imagination used to do. A contest is developing between information technology and the eye (and indeed the other four senses) over the object of reenactment that has broad implications for the status of history itself. By means of digital data storage and the release of that processed data as indisputably belonging to whatever historical case is under investigation, it is possible to assemble such a full and coherent three- and even four-dimensional simulacrum from the streams of data that can be trapped from a single phe­nomenon—formerly impossible even to discover, never mind adjudicate—that is so densely corroborative of what happened in that place at that moment of time, that the result cannot be judged otherwise than authentic and even true.

To avoid the blurred boundaries of a relativist approach, it is necessary to situate reenactment inside a contest between Platonism and empiricism that has shaped the intellectual world of the West from its beginning, dividing Plato from Aristotle and, later, Descartes from scientists such as Hooke and Boyle, and Locke from Hume. Platonists are skeptical of the value of representa­tion of any sort, believing that the world intelligible to the mind and soul is supersensible, real but invisible. A visible copy is bound to be infinitely inferior to the original form (MiMESis).The shadows of moving figures flickering on the walls of the cave in The Republic could be construed as an ingenious yet contemptible reenactment of what is going on elsewhere in that space. An idea for Plato then is the repetition in the finite mind of the formal perfection of divine inten­tion, pre-existent and perfect. History, therefore, is not a process of coming into being; it is a record of successive erasures of an idea of truth that we must recollect, not anticipate. An idea for Descartes is what he has when he thinks, and these thoughts owe nothing to sensible impres­sions, although they may validate them.

Platonists use words that will function like ideas, not resembling their referents or casually associated with them, but acting as conventional yet unmistakable signs of meanings, clear and determinate. Empiricist scientists were fond of words that reported facts clearly, “a close, naked and more natural language, so many things in an equal number of words,” as Sprat put it in his History of the Royal Society. Hence the two philosophers in the third book of Gulliver’s Travels who carry round sacks of things which they hold up to each other in order to communicate, getting rid of spoken words altogether. But they are much more immersed in the material world of impressions, and much more liable to equivocal statements, than the Platonic mathematicians of the Flying Island who, with one eye turned inward and the other up to the sky, meditate so deeply on the supersensible forms of geometry and mathematics that they have to be woken up if they need to attend to what is happening around them.

We may not think (as perhaps is usually done) that [ideas] are exactly the Images and Resemblances of something inherent in the subject; most of those Sensations being in the Mind no more the likeness of something existing without us, than the Names, that stand for them, are the likeness of our Ideas.

(1979 [1689], p. 134)

The traces of these two schools of thought are found at all the major intersections of episte­mological innovation down to the present day, or what Otto in his entry to this Handbook calls “the crossroads of memory, performance, and media.” How do the techniques and objectives of reenactment adapt to the current of these two streams? It would seem at first glance that empiricism is the most attractive, since it has enlarged and complicated the equation between experience and experiment as immersive relations with matter negotiated by the five senses. Most reenactments began with the aim not of knowing what history was like but rather feeling what it was like. For those who believe the line separating information from imagination is still porous, the likeness of reenactment to what is reenacted is an important zone of resemblance rather than identity, allowing a necessary degree of play between the prototype and the copy. Explaining how the later Collingwood retreated from his Cartesian assertion that we think our way into the past, and into the characters of those who populated it, Pickering stands up for “the imaginative process at the core of seeking to understand it.” Schwarz reminds us, however, that imagination is not exactly the womb of things, for no matter how keenly we as individu­als experience the past, it is wrong to suppose that because history was, it can be summoned by Faustian reenactors to be once again. The division Benzaquen-Gautier proposes between liveness and experience, mediation and image, in artistic representation sustains a space that performance studies appropriates for tactical maneuver, manipulating mimetic illusions in order to put an end to the “house arrest” of performance (Schneider). Bruzzi, on the other hand, sees it as an arena in which the will of the representer is subject to chance, contingency, and caprice, a context prolific in unplanned excitements. For Holman Jones, as for Edmonds, reenactment's space of performative contingency generates the possibility of new subject positions, political interventions, and historical insights. On the other hand, the space can simply be a blank inten­sified by reenactment: the place in the archive where an expected record or thing is not to be found (Park), or what Schroeder discusses as the absent home that is not where the nostalgist is, and is not anywhere else either, the home “that is impossibly one's own,” “the blind spot of historicism.”

These exercises in pure or applied empiricism pale before the comprehensive novelty of forensic architecture, which is determined to bring to light whatever the nefarious intentions of governmental agencies have been determined to conceal. There is no room for imagination here: the stakes are too high for the inexactitude of play, or for the paradoxical subtleties of a something that is not there, or a nothing that is. Gallanti puts it succinctly: “Forensic Architecture then generates three-dimensional digital models and a complex set of analytical drawings that constitute an accurate depiction of a specific space or building, caught in the precise historical moment of an event.” But no matter how experimentally focused on the space and time of a singular event, over time forensic architecture will develop skill in harnessing multifarious media for these reenactments. As Gallanti says, it will control a “slow accumulation of knowledge from a widening pool of specialized information” and the “development of evidentiary systems.” This would generate an archive of cases that successfully surpassed not only the evidentiary tech­niques of those with an interest in hiding the truth, but also usurped their power. With such an archive, forensic architecture would contemplate a concatenation of moments of truth rather than a dispersion of facts. It would build a narrative of the past from which all shreds of doubt would have been expunged. History would cease to be a matter of conjecture and debate, more a series of indisputable self-evident truths. This is a newer departure for reenactment history than any other proposed within these Keywords, and it demands a rigorous reconception of what we mean by the past, and by its reenactment.

In summary, reenactment is a broad set of practices and genres that tackles the questions of many disciplines. Because it is related to the past, the natural home for its study and analysis could be the history department. Notwithstanding the fact that the gap between popular and academic forms of historiography has narrowed and history itself has come to be less exclusively the preserve of academically trained historians, the study of reenactment is still a marginal part of historical inquiry. This holds true despite the recent institutional changes that history depart­ments are undergoing. As an outcome of these changes, public history, a subfield of history that engages with different forms of historical knowledge and its presence in the public sphere, has gained significance. However, reenactment, which could be at the center of the public historian's attention, remains, at least in the European context, a marginal area of inquiry. The underlying reasons are diverse: reenactment's oscillation between time-then and time-now makes it difficult to categorize reenactment as either a strictly historical phenomenon or a social one related to the present. Further, reenactment is less institutionalized than forms of public history like muse­ums and heritage sites. In many of reenactment's guises, the main protagonists are laypeople who treat the activity as a hobby, albeit a serious one. Engaging with and understanding laypeople, their attitudes and aims regarding history and the past requires not only historical methods but also anthropological and sociological approaches. Understanding reenactment as an element of historical culture and historical consciousness would benefit from a transdisciplinary approach to the subject, one that considers its myriad aspects as a general feature of reenactment.