Loafing in the Garden of Knowledge: History TV and Popular Memory

Anderson | Loafing in the Garden of Knowledge: History TV and Popular Memory Steve Anderson Loafing in the Garden of Knowledge: History TV and Popular Memory We need history, but not in the same way a loafer in the garden of knowledge needs it. - Friedrich Nietzsche The past is sometimesvisualized on television in the kinds of narratives thatgive the apearance of not being about history at all 14 I Film & History Television as Historian | Special In-Depth Section There is remarkable consensus among both historians and media critics regarding television's unsuitability for the construction ofhistory. Notwithstanding the History Channel's original promise to provide access to "All of History—All in One Place," TV viewers are often characterized as victims in an epidemic of cultural amnesia for which television is both disease and carrier. TV, so the argument goes, can produce no lasting sense of history; at worst, it actually impedes viewers' ability to receive, process, or remember information about the past. Raymond Williams' theorization of the "flow" of televisual discourse is invoked to argue that the contents of television simply rush by like answers on the Jeopardy! board, without context or opportunity for retention. For Stephen Heath, television produces "forgetfulness, not memory, flow, not history. Ifthere is history, it is congealed, already past and distant and forgotten other than as television archive material, images that can be repeated to be forgotten again."1 And, according to Mary Ann Doane, "Television thrives on its own forgetability."2 The roots of these arguments may be found in Fredric Jameson's contention that, in postmodern culture, TV and other visual media have fostered an increasingly "derealized" sense of presence, identity, and history. One of the casualties of this "derealization " is the ability to engage with or remember history in a meaningful way. Television is seen as overdetermined by its "ideology ofliveness" and therefore dependent upon "the annihilation of memory, and consequently of history, in its continual stress upon the 'nowness' of its own discourse."3 In spite of the old-fashioned, TV-hating prejudices which still underpin much of the writing about television and the widespread persistence of suspicion toward visual media for the construction ofhistory, it is both possible and desirable to think more broadly about TV's place in contemporary historiography. With the erosion of confidence in scientific historiography in recent decades, it has become increasingly acceptable to view history as overdetermined by the needs of the present, the desires of historians, and the ideological contexts ofhistorical research. Once solid borderlines separating empiricist history from the idiosyncratic realms of individual and cultural memory now appear dynamic and permeable. Arguments for the inclusion of visual media (especially film) in historical discourse have developed a certain degree of credibility, even if the precise function and limitations of these media remain open for debate. Television, though still disparaged for its commercialism and reputed "banalization"4 of significant events, is no longer simply dismissable as a bad object which is irrelevant to the development of historical consciousness. This essay proceeds from these conceptions ofTV and history to argue that American television has, virtually since its inception , sustained an extremely active and nuanced engagement with the construction of history. In particular, has modeled highly stylized and creative modes of interaction with the past which, though subversive of many of the implicit goals of academic history, play a significant role in the cultural negotiation of the past. Reconsidering Cultural Amnesia Long a troublesome (or, more frequently, dismissed ) concept for historians, memory—whether individual or collective—provides a key to theorizing the role of television in contemporary historiography . As numerous theorists ofpopular memory have argued, history does not end with the production ofdocuments, narratives, or analyses any more than a film ends with its own theatrical release. People consume and process written, filmed, or televised histories within a web of individual and cultural forces. As Stuart Hall has argued , the intended meanings which are encoded into a particular cultural product may be decoded quite differently when they are received by an audience or reader.5 Further, historical meanings may evolve over time, reflecting, among other things, the extent to which our relation to the past is conditioned...