Technologies of History: Visual Media and the Eccentricity of the Past

Introduction

The look of the past can be retrieved, preserved and disseminated in an unprecedented fashion. But awareness of history as an interpretation of the past succumbs to a faith in history as representation. The viewer is confronted not by historical writing, but by the appearance of history itself. —Allan Sekula1 Introduction Each generation of media technology brings with it the potential to reimagine our relationship to the past. Conventional wisdom holds that visual histories are most effective at bringing the past “to life,” inviting audiences to reexperience events and encounter historical figures as living people. But this rather limited view obscures far broader and more interesting questions about our most basic relationship to history and the diverse contributions of visual and computational media to conceptions of the past. History is now up for grabs in ways that were hitherto unimaginable; the past is routinely being remixed, reimagined, rescripted , and reappropriated in powerful and eccentric ways, often by individuals—fans, geeks, hackers, teens, and artists—who do not necessarily see themselves as engaged in the discourse of history at all. Tempting as it is to view this as a threat to both the order and discipline of history, we may equally see it as a sign of healthy, dynamically contested relations to the past. While historical uncertainty and disputation are sometimes viewed as the enemy of a respectful attitude toward the lived past, consensual histories run an even greater risk of becoming polite fables, the kind of cultural narratives that lead to rituals of remembrance rather than critical thinking and political agency. Media histories are all too easily misapprehended as tools for building passive consensus and foreclosing debate. This is due in no small part to the long shadow cast by Hollywood historical epics, documentary miniseries, and vast digital archives that offer grand visions and narrative closure rather than stubborn resistance, delinquency, and conflict. But this is not the way it has to be. This book seeks out the cracks and fissures in historical consensus— those neglected, indigestible, contrarian imaginings that throw our whole historical sensibility into sharp 2 · Technologies of History relief. Emerging from an increasingly varied media sphere that includes film, television, games, and a whole spectrum of networked and computational media, these widely varied practices of history all see the past as a function of consequential, and above all mutable, materials: images, sounds, and architectures of information that are both expressive representation and tools for thinking and knowing. Simply put, we should not look to media for the truth about the past but instead examine them for clues about the way history is constructed and engaged through cultural products, memories, myths, and politics. The goal of this book is to move beyond the epistemological binaries that have dominated discourses of media and history during the past four decades to instead consider the myriad “technologies of history,” the ways in which media practices broadly conceived help us think about the world, the past, and our potential to act as historical and political agents. It is difficult to talk about what is at stake in the construction and dissemination of history through media without resorting to vague concepts such as “historical consciousness” or “historical awareness.” We may assume that historical consciousness of a much re-created and increasingly distant event such as World War II, for example, is shaped significantly by the war stories repeated continuously in TV shows, movies, and games. But while the combination of anecdotal evidence and intuition supporting this assumption is convincing enough for certain kinds of observations, the actual relationship between these media and what people really know and care about the past should not be taken for granted. Although this book explores how viewers respond to film, video, and digital texts, its focus remains on the production and dissemination of cultural discourse rather than the more ethereal sphere of cultural consciousness. In order to avoid facile assumptions about reception, I will strive, whenever possible, to ground my analysis of media texts and systems in a clearly defined set of historiographical concerns or discursive systems. I will also argue for a rigorously parsed understanding of an equally slippery term: memory. Terms such as “social memory” and “popular memory” are often used to describe what is at stake in a society’s struggles over the construction of history, though efforts to define them precisely are rare. The working presumption for many writers is that the processes of remembering and forgetting that happen in people’s heads...