“Reenactment”?

How to begin? Let us plunge first into possible examples of what we might mean by this term “reenactment,” working out its habitations within globalizing processes, “probing” for example the global action adventure television shows Highlander and Xena. Why could we call these reenactments? How does examining them as such open paths to other inclusively defined reenactments? In other words, where do these television shows and the other globalized products we will examine in this course fall on some continuum of naming under this term “reenactment”?

 

Understandably differing communities of practice are likely to center their own practices or explanations of reenactment, and there are more and more such communities and practices. Each understands its version of reenactment as properly the most significant, real, or central one. Each has a history and/or taxonomy through which its version of reenactment is vitally produced. Each may feel that reenactments are objects that they, perhaps alone, are uniquely qualified to address.

 

For some the term “reenactment” narrowly describes hobbyists meeting together on the battlefields of, say, Manassas, recreating in their persons and material objects and actions perhaps a Civil War confrontation. These reenactments are usually military in focus although they also include concerns about the material culture of everyday life during the time periods depicted, perhaps even more especially as they have come to include more women playing a variety of parts. These reenactments produce their own hobby cultures in which research into historical events and objects, community building in person and on the internet, and volunteer work for living history sites might be generated.

 

For some the term “reenactment” might range among such hobby recreations not only in person, but adding also war game simulations of varying degrees of impersonation: from board games with dice and cards reenacting a specific military battle, to graphically sophisticated computer simulations also with military-style objectives and movements, to the newly under construction war games simulations produced by Hollywood for the U.S. military for training purposes.

 

And to this mix might also be added other similarly constructed simulations with less or without obvious “military” significance. These are often multi-media fantasy games modeled upon versions of Dungeons and Dragons, which over time have come to include sometimes more or sometimes less media in their multi-sensory creativities, from drawing, playacting, game board making, costuming, event celebration, and so on, as well as including, or limited to, sophisticated computer graphic versions. The “military” elements here have shifted into various styles of contestation or fighting, from individual combat to street style gang encounters to apprehending criminals and beyond these, merging with other tournament games, like baseball or golf.

 

Then there are new television versions of reenactments, some of them included within the scope of so-called “reality TV,” others are variations on various documentary television techniques. They range from historical documentaries with mini-reenactments positioned to illustrate various historical points, to documentary TV in which the whole show is somehow a reenactment. Sometimes they actually include hobbyist reenactors, sometimes they include a range of professionals, semi-professionals and volunteers, doing first- or second-person impersonations or role playing as for living history sites. Other times, inside the “reality TV” rubric, people chosen in a contest of admission are engaged to “time travel” to another period and try to take up life within the constraints that count as “authenticity” for that program.

 

 

Of course film and television might also be understood as always having been kinds of reenactments anyway (as indeed are fictions of many varieties). Modeling “reality” in simultaneous media is culturally powerful: the play between realities, and things clearly not whatever that thing “reality” is, and things only too closely like “reality,” are pivotally entertaining with varying degrees of cultural value. Which differences between these make a difference—sharply drawn differences or only too shaded transitional meanings, all embracing and even ritualizing constraints—these matter enormously in knowledge production. Validity, objectivity, rigor, standardization, explanation—all these and other essentials of knowledge production including transmission are at stake.

 

 

Possibly the most academically valued forms of reenactment, still only too suspect for some of these very reasons, take place in living history sites. The combinations of entertainment subordinated to pedagogical purposes, and the transmission of consensus histories, nationalisms, research new and old, are controversial. Where entertainment figures in pedagogical transmission is increasingly impressive in all venues of such transmission: museums, collections, libraries, websites, historical places and monuments, commemorations of many kinds, even excavation sites. And, of course, universities.

 

No pure types. I have deliberately not chosen to examine relatively “pure types” of reenactment, for which I would have to invest in specific taxonomies of definition. (Although willy-nilly I have produced a taxonomy here in this very description.) Rather what I am interested in is how a more inclusive reenactment-aesthetic-of-transmission now inhabits many forms of knowledge production, authoritative and alternative. I care about strange “flexible knowledges” on the edge of validity, authority, membership, as they border communities of practice. I want to think about what is at stake in the only too strangely variant invocations of “authenticity” modeling “reality” that reenactments aspire to and only too obviously can never encompass.

 

Reenactment here is an example of a large “lumping” category. Such lumping allows us to wonder about rather than assume some of these critical divisions. Splitting is an equally important conceptual practice. Lumping and splitting are mutually constitutive. They open and close black boxes, making arguments relatively more complex or elegant, creating new objects for study, or normalizing such new objects by drawing apart their interiors. All the versions of reenactment are in play as new historiographies re-aggregate, that is, lump and split such terms, recombining them in order to access new re-representations and new constituencies producing and using such pasts.

 

The notion of reenactment here brings together, or lumps, many products counterintuitively. I value such learning and writing myself. However, this kind of thinking does make many demands. The most important demand it makes has to do with becoming self-conscious about the rules of one’s own communities of practice. It means being willing to allow for other standards of validity, vocabularies of description, examples of interest, rhetorics of persuasion. Not to undercut one’s own, perhaps the contrary—one’s own may become only too wonderfully coherent and valued by contrast—but to practice telescoping relativisms that do not necessarily require us to give up our situated (”local” in a very positive sense) values by which we are trained, taught, and laboring.
While it is true that making one’s own communities’ values explicit may feel and even be estranging, it may also enrich them. Making these concerns explicit can honor them in a form that is not merely celebratory. This is the point Bruno Latour makes when he laments while examining misunderstandings produced in the “science wars,” “history wars,” “image wars”: “a new reverence for the images of science is taken to be their destruction.” It is to engage in this far from innocent practice that so-called “interdisciplinarities” might be abandoned for “flexible knowledges.”
So, perhaps counterintuitively, I will begin an examination of globalization processes and products, specifically histories under globalization, with the action adventure television shows Highlander and Xena, whose reenactment elements are evidenced within their historical fantasies and depictions. I want to frame these within a current narrative of globalization, that of media incursions in economic contestations between the U.S. and Europe. However, a wider “globe” necessarily ends up included here as well. National images are at stake in the reenactments that inhabit the writing technology ecologies of Highlander and Xena. And so are niche markets, pivotal to producing the transmission effects of so-called “accessibility.” They are one current material form in which that paradoxical longing to speak to “everyone” is broadly cast, that longing that can only be satisfied by strategically, sometimes unconsciously, often commercially constraining who “everyone” is.