Revisiting Collingwood on Reenactment
My initial invocation of Collingwood in 2005 was mainly to say that what he famously called “re-enactment” in The Idea of History was, in many ways, precisely not what we are talking about in contemporary reenactment exercises.
The sorts of performances that have most preoccupied the project of contemporary reenactment have to do with affect and materiality, normally indeed with some kind of physical going-through-the-motions of a historical event or a quotidian way of life. Collingwood’s theory of history, however, pointedly proscribed just this dimension of the historiographical process: “The historian... makes a distinction between what may be called the outside and the inside of an event. By the outside of the event I mean everything belonging to it which can be described in terms of bodies and their movements” (Collingwood, 1946, p. 213). For Collingwood, the historian’s peculiar form of reenactment was a mental exercise, in relation to both its subjective process and its object of study. On the one hand, that is, the act of historical identification is itself “mental” for Collingwood, and, on the other hand, his historian identifies only with the mental aspect of the events that he (always “he” for Collingwood) reenacted in his vicarious projection of himself onto the past. “All history is the history of thought,” Collingwood argues, and, further, “the history of thought... is the reenactment of past thought in the historian’s own mind” (Collingwood, 1946, p. 215). By contrast, reenactors of the sort that engage our attention in, say, the BBC’s restaging of a voyage of Cook’s Endeavour normally have their bodies and feelings in play in the most physical ways possible. That is a big part of what provokes our fascination with such exercises.There is, however, a dimension of Collingwood’s argument in The Idea of History that is very relevant to contemporary reenactment studies.
I mean his emphasis on history (in its development from the late 18th century onward) as both the overturning and the fulfillment of an earlier dream of a science of human nature, identified by Collingwood with the philosophical work of David Hume. The argument is now a familiar one, especially in the light of Reinhart Koselleck’s Futures Past (1985), which identified certain key elements of modern historicism: the sense of historical periods as more than casually differentiated one from another, the recognition thatReenacting 9/11 on Screen 19 generalization between historical cultures cannot produce “examples” to enable history to be a “teacher for life,” and the idea that historical study requires a peculiar kind of recursivity not found (ex hypothesi) in the natural sciences. Such developments constituted the new sense of the past that, on Collingwood’s account, led to the breakdown of the Humean quest for a science of human nature toward the end of the very decades over which Hume himself was pursuing it (Collingwood, 1946, p. 207).One might say that the last decades of the 18th century, the so-called age of sensibility, helped to produce the twofold notion of a historical sensibility: on the one hand, the idea that each historical period has a different “feel” and, on the other, the idea that it is incumbent on a historian to develop the capacity to respond to the affective/cognitive alterity of his subject in the past. This sense of historical alterity was itself linked with a new sense of cultural alterity in a way that could lead to a formula such as we find at the start of L. P. Hartley’s throwback neo-Victorian novel, The Go-Between: “The past is a foreign country: they do things differently there” (Hartley, 2002, p. 1).
The notion of historical sensibility and even some of the associated language of reenactment can be found at the heart of the single most influential literary invention to have emerged from the age of sensibility and historicism: Sir Walter Scott’s formula for making the lived experience of the past powerfully available to readers in the Waverley novels.
It was a form that would itself be replicated across Europe, in America, and around the world through much of the 19th century. Georg Lukacs wrote long ago that the power of Scott’s invention derived precisely from its recognition of the otherness of the past worlds that it attempted to make newly intelligible—newly sensible—to contemporary readers (Lukacs, 1962, pp. 18-45). Scott himself played endless variations on these themes in a dizzying array of nested prefaces and introductions, most memorably perhaps in the witty “Dedicatory Epistle” to Ivanhoe (1820), a letter involving characters spun off from an earlier novel, The Antiquary (1818), where many of the relevant issues had been explored. To figure the relation of present to past, Scott tended to invoke the figures of reanimation, survival, and translation—not so much that of reenactment. But his larger fictional program was decidedly about “affective knowing” by way of a new experimental practice for engaging the world gone by.2 Not that Scott was fully consistent across the Waverley novels in just how he represented his practice, or in his account of its relation to these figures. Sometimes he even lapsed back into the older notion of a common human nature that Collingwood would later reject categorically, figured as the same book throughout the ages but issued in different editions from one age to another.Although Scott produced a literary form that led him to explore a number of the issues that we now associate with reenactment history, in the Waverley novels themselves, these issues remained in the realm of readerly reenactment. It was virtual activity, much as Laurance Sterne’s inventionof the sentimental-journey form of the age of sensibility staged its narrative action as virtual travel. Scott’s own new model for fiction in Britain had its distinguished emulators well into the 19 th century—George Eliot among them—but by the 1840s and 1850s, Charles Dickens had begun to recreate readers’ taste for fiction in his own image, and it is not far-fetched to see a novel such as A Tale of Two Cities (1859) as Dickens’s attempt to dismantle the historical sociology undergirding Scott’s romances in order to produce a different relation to the past, one in which sentiment is universalized and moral allegory trumps the sort of historical typology that Lukacs identifies in Scott.
That novel’s narrative reinhabitation of the age of the French Revolution as “the worst of times” and “best of times” (Dickens, 1867, p. 1) is decidedly not a historicizing gesture of the kind that Scott had made in the Waverley novels. And Dickens’s own tropes of reanimation— Jerry Cruncher as a “Resurrection-Man” or Lucie Manette’s father raised from the dead—no longer carry their syncretist associations from Scott’s “Dedicatory Epistle” to Ivanhoe (including Lucan’s Erichtho and the biblical Valley of Jehoshaphat) but instead acquire a decidedly Christian, even apocalyptic cast (Dickens, 1867, p. 162). Sydney Carton’s act of selfsacrifice enables his transcendent vision of Christian judgment at the close of the novel. In spite of the appearance of these tropes in a novel set in the past, Dickens’s foray into historical fiction is not about knowing history affectively.My suggestion, then, is that some of the epistemological architecture for reenactment exercises was furnished by literary exercises in the 19th century, and no doubt as well by the theatrical exhibitions that often followed from them.3 Distinctions of the sort I have been outlining between Scott’s and Dickens’s forms of “literary reenactments” of the past can prove helpful, as I try to indicate below, in distinguishing between the two most widely viewed reenactment films about 9/11: Greengrass’s United 93 (2006) and Oliver Stone’s World Trade Center (2006). But a number of other distinctions also need to be made, and some of them also have to do, at least indirectly, with Collingwood, the age of sensibility, Scott, and Dickens.
One such distinction marks the difference between reenacting historical events and reinhabiting historical conditions: between reenactments of the Battles of Gettysburg or Culloden on the one hand, and reenactments of life in a colonial settlement or a Georgian country house (so-called Living History) on the other. To be sure, the former often involves something of the latter, insofar as the particular participates in the general.
And in some cases, the line blurs. Thus, when Vanessa Agnew, Iain McCalman, and Jonathan Lamb sailed on the new Endeavour for the BBC’s reenactment of one of Captain Cook’s voyages—a catalytic experience for establishing a new mode of reenactment studies—they were in one sense reenacting some punctual events of 1770, but in another sense, they were reenacting the general conditions of seafaring in the late 18th century.4 Another related distinction lies in the difference between reenacting roles that have been fullyReenacting 9/11 on Screen 21 scripted in a historical record—descriptions and speeches documented for a legal trial, for example—and reenacting roles for which the documentary record is spotty. The work of extrapolation in reenactment is thus a matter that comes in for extended discussion in Collingwood’s account of the “constructive” dimension of history in relation to his account of history as reenactment.5 This is related to, but not quite the same as, the distinction between individual and collective objects of historical reenactment.Two further distinctions are in order. One is the distinction between reenactment motivated primarily by spectacle, in the broad sense, and reenactment, which is primarily for the sake of the reenactors. And finally, there is the distinction between reenactment by second-party actors and reenactment by the agents themselves. This last distinction emerges only when one can think of an event or an era as decidedly “past,” though it actually falls within very recent history (usually just on the other side of some epoch-making event). The fall of the Berlin Wall would be an example of this phenomenon, and it was registered as such by the reenactment motifs in Wolfgang Becker’s Goodbye, Lenin! (2003): a son recreates the conditions of the former East Germany to avoid shocking his ardently socialist mother when she wakes from a coma in an East Berlin apartment soon after reunification. Becker’s film belongs to the subgenre of Ostalgie—nostalgia for East Germany—in which questions of affect are obviously central, and it was released about 13 years after the historical events it represents. In North America, the attacks of September 11, 2001, created a sense of epochal change in an even more proximate past. My interest in Greengrass’s United 93 lies partly in how his work on this film, which he both wrote and directed, depends upon and elaborates precisely the affective dimension of a major epochal change in the very recent past.