07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 459

!
K A T I E K I N G

Historiography as Reenactment:
Metaphors and Literalizations of
TV Documentaries

Reenactments and Pastpresents; Examples of What?

M Y FORTHCOMING BOOK , Flexible Knowledges: Histories under Globalization, is

about reenactments, a term I use inclusively to examine the currently experi-
mental historiographies of African transnational radio oralities, global action-
adventure television, living-history sites, heritage Web sites, time traveling
documentary television, and museum installations in order to think about
changes in the materialities that write histories of technologies under globaliza-
tion. Along with Sharon Traweek, an anthropologist of particle physics commu-
nities in the United States and Japan, I have become interested in how these
massive shifts in political economy affect the kinds of questions intellectuals begin
to find interesting . . . , the kinds of resources assessed to investigate their ques-
tions, the kinds of curricular and pedagogical changes generated, and the new
modes of investigation. That is, what else is going on when there is a change in
what counts as a good question, an interesting mode of inquiry, way of teaching
and learning, and the infrastructure needed for pursuing these emerging forms of
knowledge making.1 In Flexible Knowledges I examine both authoritative and
alternate sites for what I call writing technologies, for productions of knowledge
and the crossing and moving of boundaries between them. I do this by looking at
what I call bits of pastpresents in these experimental historiographies. Pastpre-
sents (one word), similar to feminist technoscience historian and theorist Donna
Haraways naturecultures (also one word), are implosions across discursive and
other realms.2 I think of pastpresents as quite palpable evidences that the past and
the present cannot be purified each from the other: they confront me in each
experimental historiography with interruptions, obstacles, new/old forms of
organization, bridges, shifts in direction, and spinning dynamics. Neither nature

Criticism, Summer 2004, Vol. 46, No. 3, pp. 459475

Copyright 2005 Waye State University Press, Detroit, MI 48201

459
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 460

460 Katie King

and culture or past and present are actually easy to separate, and properly we may
repeatedly question such separations. I do this so that we can think about how
technologies and their histories, in Haraways words, might have been otherwise,
and might yet be.3 Naming pastpresents is a critique of the critique of presentism
and also shares a feminist epistemology in which, along with Haraway and science
anthropologist Bruno Latour, we break the Enlightenment Contract that
requires us to keep separate our purifications and our hybridities as the condition
for practicing both.4
As Haraway reminds us, globalization is that travelogue of distributed, het-
erogeneous, linked, sociotechnical circulations that craft the world as a net called
the global.5 Flexible work processes were lauded in the 1990s but also were
understood as the hallmark of the superexploitations of which globalized capital
is capable. Flexible knowledges are sometimes the very commercialized versions
of these processes and products across communities of practice.6 Those of us who
are now immersed, perhaps drowning, in flexible knowledges are paradoxically
both willing and required to become beginners, over and over, to give up mastery
and to open up to risk, connection, and sometimes enthusiasm. I have come to
prefer this inevitably already dated term flexible knowledges to interdiscipli-
narity in the timescale realized under academic capitalisms colonization of more
and more universities as sites of knowledge production, and as universities
become less and less the most valued centers making knowledge.7
Globalization processes are also accompanied by their companions, glocal-
izations. Glocalization assumes first that globalization processes are responsible
for the power and mobility of media, money, politics, sexualities, and knowledge
practices. But it also, and very importantly, demonstrates that these meanings
and powers can be glocalized, that is, altered, filled in, indigenized, and reun-
derstood within local agencies, people, art forms, and other practices of everyday
life.8 Use itself matters in glocalization, even though such use takes place within
and through shifting and sometimes unanticipated limits and strangely distrib-
uted agencies. I find the term glocalization valuable because it does not assume
that it is obvious when such localized, or indeed globalized, practices and uses
are liberatory and when they are not. I am skeptical of those who are quick to
draw clear lines between analyses that are celebratory and those that are critical,
because I value my own and others surprise and confusion at the unexpected
turns cultural politics take. I do not begin from the stance of negative critique or
debunking, although I am perfectly capable of doing both at urgent moments. I
wonder myself, How do we know liberatory practices when we see them? It is in
practice that we find out where we do go, how we engage those interventions cre-
ated by unanticipated agencies, and, thinking otherwise, how our visions of pasts
and futures create our presents.
Examining flexible knowledges requires working within layers of locals
and globals, noting, teaching, and learning movement across discourses, disci-
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 461

Historiography as Reenactment 461

plines, politics, and knowledges, across communities of practice, movement
always working with great and sometimes beautiful difficulty, with gains and
losses of importance. Translations that acknowledge knowledge/power relations
are not transparent, easy ones. To understand them requires that all of those in
communities involved in reading, writing, viewing, and creating struggle for
understanding; the sole or even the primary responsibility cannot rest upon
authors.9 Definitions of critical terms in this essay, such as reenactment, past-
presents, debunking, naturalization, and so on, even with the best of intentions, are
misleading; each of them properly carries too much surplus meaning. I offer here
explorations among their examples, explorations in which we all do the work of
worrying about what these are examples of. We all are members in these com-
munities struggling for understanding.
Pastpresents can be odd glocalizations. For example, we might look to eth-
nomathematician, ancient historian, current ethnographer of Peru, and
MacArthur Fellow Gary Urtons experimental and speculative book Signs of the
Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records, which draws out
an extended analogy between the binary codes of computers and those of pre-
conquest Inka strings.10 His are speculations about what counts as writing, a
point of fascination in my own research on what I call writing technologies.
More specifically, he asks what forms of decoding eventually will tell us whether
these knots contain not only the accountings of empire tribute and maps of Inka
colonialism about which we already know but also narratives and histories we
cannot yet read. Urtons investigations of the Inka khipu string records are as bits
of pastpresents, and they are glocalized: that is to say, we know more about khipu
in their past precisely as we learn to connect them to the computers of our present, and
the way we know how to make such connections today is intimately related to our expe-
riences with the products and processes of contemporary globalization.
For example, the discovery of possible transcriptions of khipu (some khipu
Rosetta stone) by colonials and colonialized descendants after the conquest in
Spanish-language archives cannot guarantee translation. Even if found, such tran-
scriptions would have to be used indirectly (as I say, decompiled), as Urton
demonstrates, to gather ethnocategories, nouns and verbs, since a direct one-to-
one correspondence is dubious given the incommensurability of this binary sys-
tem with Colombian Spanish language and culture.11 (Between machine
language in 0/1s and high-level language, a decompiler produces a finite set of
transformations, beginning with one and ending with the othereither compil-
ing or decompiling.) Urton believes an alternate set of transformations, paying
attention to all these decompiling intermediary positions between so-called read-
ing and writingcontrasting with those analogic ones that translate string records
into numerical accounts or into mapsmight reveal histories and narratives.
Thus the seven-bit binary codes of the khipu could not be read directly, not
even if we had a code book to the meanings of the 0/1 choices of material (cotton
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 462

462 Katie King

or wool), color class (red or dark rainbow), spin/ply relations (z-clockwise/
s-counterclockwise or s/z), pendant attachment (recto or verso ties), knot direc-
tionality (z or s), number class (chulla-odd or chiullantin-even), and information
type (decimal or nondecimal) (120). Binary coding is culturally salient because
Andean social organization and conceptual systems are primarily structured in
dualisms. And khipu could contain at least 1,536 unique units, Urton calculates,
comparable to the sign capacities of early cuneiform, Shang Chinese ideograms,
and Egyptian and Mayan hieroglyphs (118). How could one write using
strings, knots, and colors, rather than pen, paper, and graphemes? (37). These
newly glocalized khipu pastpresents help us imagine to what new uses we put our
own writing technologies today, disassembling and reordering those classifica-
tions we use to access pasts, by way of imaginatively inhabiting globalization
processes and products.

Shifting Debunking as Critical Analysis into Modest Witnessing

This essay makes references to four experimental historiographies with dif-

fering but interconnected investments in a large field one might call reenact-
ment and investigates a set of its pastpresents. The first two experimental
historiographies are Keith Hopkinss A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews, and Chris-
tians in the Roman Empire and Richard Handler and Eric Gables The New History
in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg, each of which exam-
ine implicitly or explicitly knowledge production in commercialized forms.12
Hopkins, in the United Kingdom, uses the BBC TV documentary as a metaphor
and narrative framea momentary melding of pastpresents in imaginative reen-
actmentin which TV figures economic globalizations within academic capital-
ism. For Hopkins, TVs distributed agencies are likened both to scholarly practices
of historiography and to shifts in knowledge production under academic capi-
talism. In contrast, Handler and Gable debunk commercial knowledge pro-
duction at Colonial Williamsburg. They describe the exploitations of the
interpreter/reenactors, who are promised semiprofessional recognition within
social historical practice but instead end up as engineers of a feel good atmos-
phere for tourism. I contrast these analyses with a preference for Hopkinss,
which describes its own conditions of production under academic capitalism in
the United Kingdom in 1999 in a way that Handler and Gable, two years earlier
in the United States in 1997, have not yet grasped. Instead, their debunking cri-
tique depends upon the assumption that academic scholarship is relatively free
from the commercial constraints that they expose at Colonial Williamsburg.
I then turn to two other sites of reenactment and knowledge production in
experimental historiographies: Michael Barness two television series, Secrets of
Lost Empires I and II, each broadcast in five segments of the PBS series Nova over
the course of the 1990s; and the Science in American Life Smithsonian exhibi-
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 463

Historiography as Reenactment 463

tion, which opened in 1994.13 In Washington, D.C., the exhibit is located in the
lower levels of the National Museum of American History, which has recently
acquired an addition to its name, the Behring Center, following California land
developer Kenneth E. Behrings gift to the Smithsonian of $100 million.14 I want
to describe these two sites with their bits of pastpresents in order to wonder with
Latour how to reframe constructivism so as to critically engage what he calls icon-
oclashes. Latour draws attention to the problems posed by criticism and analysis
that rely heavily on debunking, say, sites of heritage culture as promoting partic-
ular versions of history, nation, science, art, and religion.15 Debunking critique
depends upon upsetting the processes of naturalization that create, authorize,
and empower the very things that affiliate members within and across com-
munities of practice. Latour suggests the significance of sometimes wanting to
practice and to communicate the possibility of denaturalizing without immedi-
ately deauthorizing or debunking. Consequently, I wonder with Haraway how to
practice, as both culture critics and knowledge producers, what she calls mod-
est witnessing, an alternate epistemology of knowledge-making practices.

The Commerce with Global Knowledge Production:

Collaboration, Working Relations, Distributed Agencies

One beginning for ancient social and economic historian Keith Hopkinss
book A World Full of Gods describes it as a failed interdisciplinary collaboration,
evoking for its structure of pasts, peoples, and sensations the metaphor of a
triple helix. This metaphor also recalls Henry Etzkowitzs work on global
knowledge economiesas what he designates a triple helix of university-
industry-government relations.16 The failed collaboration that begins Hopkinss
book calls to mind both the opportunities and new industrialized requirements
of, say, humanities scholars, now enlisted to work in teams in the style of corpo-
rate industrial science. Fruitful and failed collaborations both figure in Hopkinss
history, reminiscent of the epistemological consequences that feminist techno-
science theorist Lucy Suchman discusses when knowledge production is con-
flated with creating products:
we came to see that . . . the discontinuities across our intellectual and
professional traditions and associated discursive practices meant that
we could not simply produce results that could be handed off to our
colleagues. . . . In place of the model of knowledge as a product that can
be assembled through hand-offs in some neutral or universal language,
we began to argue the need for mutual learning and partial translations.
This in turn required new working relations not then in place.17
New working relations could open up collaborative possibilities, but alternately
failed collaborations might actually signal healthy and vigorous diversity among
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 464

464 Katie King

scholars in terms of politics, training, specialization, and reasons for synthesis.
Academic capitalism in the United Kingdom, Australia, the United States, and
Canada, according to Sheila Slaughter and Larry Leslie, is the result of the emer-
gence of global markets. Fields close to the market require products; fields
peripheral to the market are pushed to pedagogy and public service.18 Audi-
ences for scholarship and markets for research products are increasingly con-
flated. Impulses to democratize knowledge and to commodify it are sometimes
virtually indistinguishable.
Hopkinss second chapter is especially lively and complicated. He experi-
ments, saying,
[H]ere I try to capture both the intensity of [the] religious passion [of
Qumran, the community of the Dead Sea Scrolls] and the difficulty of
reporting it now, by using a quintessentially modern idiom, a TV drama,
in which all that we see/read is mediated by a simplifying process, of
(mis)interpretation. This TV play is set partly in ancient Rome, partly in
the modern world. The Qumran myth is replayed, as all old myths
should be, with ancient and modern players, and with authentic words.
But in the modern medium, much is also changed; there are, for exam-
ple, slippages of time and character. That too is unlikely to please my
critical colleagues. So they too are given a voice, though only after the
show is over. For me, the hero of this play is the TV camera itself, which,
like a historical source, arbitrarily selects what it chooses to show, never
lies and never understands.19
Such illustration by way of TV drama and documentary is a richly contaminated
set of metaphors and realities. When unable to produce commercial products
from research, humanities scholars today are encouraged and flattered into
democratizing/commodifying their research in a range of public pedagogies and
services. These are real democratizations, often highly commercialized but
not unlike in kind, although perhaps in degree, all the mediated work of
scholarly interpretation for various audiences in classrooms, lecture halls, and
publications.
TV is thus an especially crafty metaphor for Hopkinss sly conflation of com-
mercial and scholarly forms of knowledge production, and this because of TVs
necessarily distributed agencies. That is to say, in TV production there can be
no clear single author creating its products; neither director nor screenwriter
can claim priority without warping a description of these productive processes,
and neither can make (let alone distribute, display, or use) the TV product with-
out the essential interaction of many peoples hands, minds, tools, skills, tasks,
objects, and infrastructures. Hopkinss metaphor suggests that these distributed
agencies are also necessary in scholarly knowledge production, even though we
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 465

Historiography as Reenactment 465

do prioritize the scholar as an autonomous professional. Failed collaborations
switch us back and forth between visions, one an industrial model of distributed
production and the other a vision of the responsibilities and pleasures of profes-
sional and intellectual autonomy.
Hopkinss switching back and forth between these visions has something in
common with the conceptual process and ethic that Haraway describes with the
term diffraction in her own work:
[W]hen light passes through slits, the light rays that pass through are
broken up. And if you have a screen at one end to register what happens,
what you get is a record of the passage of the light rays onto the screen.
This record shows the history of their passage through the slits. So what
you get is not a reflection; its the record of a passage. . . . As a metaphor
it drops the metaphysics of identity and the metaphysics of representa-
tion and says optics is full of a whole other potent way of thinking about
light, which is about history. . . . You have to register the interference.
So I feel like that is the way I work, and the way I enjoy working. Its sim-
ply to make visible all those things that have been lost in an object; not
in order to make the other meanings disappear, but rather to make it
impossible for the bottom line to be one single statement.20
When I use the term distributed agencies, I mean to recall the material pro-
ductive processes figured here by TV, as well as a method for making visible all
those things that have been lost in an object, while nevertheless honoring and
making visible the objects. I also mean, with Lucy Suchman, to resist the idea that
there is some common, neutral, or universal language or process in which knowl-
edge products can be handed off from one community to anotherpainlessly,
without difficulty, transparentlyand when such effects seem to appear, I argue
that such effects obscure working relations.

Pastpresents: Making the Past Is Always Dialogues with the Dead

Hopkinss fabricated BBC documentary is titled Dialogues with the Dead.

One of the fictional academic consulting reports written for its production peo-
ple simultaneously complains about the anachronistic meeting of two of its
ancient characters in the documentaryeach of them actually lived in adjacent
but different centuriesat the same time that it praises the wonderful pictures
from the TV camera (75). Hopkins has the director respond: I was quite aware
that Justin lived later; thats half the fun with mixed-time TVyou can mix times.
Besides, its a bit naive to imagine that getting dates right is a guarantee of cor-
rectness. Time is only one dimension of truth (77). Anachronism, or what Hop-
kins calls slippages in time, within the past as well as between us and the past,
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 466

466 Katie King

can counter that whiggish desire for tales of progress that wind up with some par-
ticular us on top. It both mixes up who counts as us and refuses chronology
as essential origin, evolution, or fulfillment, and offers different timescales. I
thought the pictures were wonderful speaks to the realist pleasures that sources
appear to offer, the local details that animate generalizations, the archival labors
dramatized and experienced as immediacy, the transparency of the material lim-
itations of selection. The uses of history here are alarmingly various in their
political, epistemological, commercial, religious, and scholarly imports. Nor
does history serve only the purposes of the so-called present: also, alarmingly, the
past and present are simultaneous in this screenplay, so intermixed that direc-
tions of causation and influence cannot be linear and progressive.
Public histories today are impressed by (stamped by, enlisted into) heritage
culture and its appropriations of national and personal identities, of multiple
chronologies in layers of locals and globals, and of converging writing technolo-
gies neither simply oral or literate.21 The kind of consciousness cultivated by
global products, created out of commercial intentions but also out of conditions
of global production, draw new skills out of such altering pleasures and tastes.22
Handler and Gables useful critique of the living-history ethos, The New History
in an Old Museum, uses ethnographic participation and observation as well as
interview and archival materials to examine and produce what I am calling its
spectacle of production. Its many critical pleasures emerge from its debunking
narrative of corporate assumptions, unintentionally derailing the social justice
concerns that are explicit in the new social history espoused by enthusiastic his-
torians turned corporate managers. One of its final footnotes acknowledges that
it would be easy to make the kind of criticism of university professors that we
here level at scholars and administrators working in museums.23
But while Handler and Gables footnote acknowledges the connections, their
main texts criticality depends upon implicit and explicit divisions between the
hybrid corporation that is Colonial Williamsburg and a serious educational
institution (234). Debunking assists in such purifications, debunkings that are
sometimes politically crucial for both progressives and conservatives. But uni-
versities are more and more obviously not immune from governing pressures of
heritage culture or the impression of corporate management assumptions, styles,
funding requirements, and money-making imperatives in enterprise culture.24 A
range of purifications, among them debunking critique, haunts inadequate aca-
demic resistances to histories under globalization. Globalization processes cre-
ate academically uncomfortable and sometimes politically reprehensible forms
of hybrid histories, all shadowed by commodifications of various sorts. Pointing
to these contexts I use the term public histories very deliberately. The kind of
hybrid corporation Handler and Gable examinesuch as Colonial Williams-
burg, the pressures of corporate fund-raising escalating at the Smithsonian Insti-
tution, and the impressions of both heritage and enterprise cultures on
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 467

Historiography as Reenactment 467

universities under academic capitalismare not so distinct as the division
between hybrid corporation and serious educational institution makes them
sound.

Time-Traveling Presentisms Remake Constructivism

Knowledge is very expensive to make, and just how expensive is newly vis-
ible as resources shift and burdens are reallocated, with changes in public justi-
fications for and against social investments and for and against building private
wealth. Scholars are pressured to take up as their audiences those masses of TV
viewers, in the name of democratization and to justify use of public money, at a
moment when such mass audiences become economically untenable for other
culture industries, like television, which move instead to niche markets. How
different are these publics? Processes of knowledge production conflated as
products make academic capitalism another culture industry, partially priva-
tized, partially funded by the state.
Such richly contaminated hybridities cannot be properly answered by
appeals to the purifying critiques of presentism that haunt todays history class-
rooms and association speeches; political refutations of or support for social jus-
tice movements; and epistemologically, professionally, and commercially
embattled disciplinary and interdisciplinary sites for knowledge production, as
in the culture wars, the science wars, the history wars.25 A moments ironic
reflection suggests that the critique of presentism is itself presentist; that is to
say, it overvalues historically and culturally local constructions of the meaning
and importance of a particular set of stories and their conditions of production
(ours). It may buy its presuming alterity with the coin of innumerable other
ways to make, mean, value, and tell histories, and without being able to describe
dynamically how such pasts and othernesses are necessarily mediated within
various relative and relational presentisms and their processes: what Traweek
calls the infrastructure needed for pursuing these emerging forms of knowledge
making. In any event, histories under globalization are so jumbled up in time
and space that purifications are literally impossible.
Consider BBC TV shows such as Surviving the Iron Age or The ShipRetrac-
ing Cooks Endeavour Voyage, shown on U.S. public television stations, or in
Canada on History Television, and compare them to signature producer Wall To
Walls House format shows, such as 1900 House, Frontier House, or Colonial
House, some of which were created in production partnerships with PBS in the
United States. Such historical reality shows on TV are one part soap opera, one
part period re-creation. They are animated with folks from our time who invite
audience identification as us: we are the viewers mentally enacting tooplay-
ing at, reenacting, experimenting, speculating, trying to provide evidence for
various understandings of the so-called past. Their chronological anachronisms
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 468

468 Katie King

interweave pasts and presents, rather like the time travelers and the TV crew that
Hopkins uses to figure scholarly historical labors. Indeed media and viewers
often call the participants in these TV shows time travelers.
Compare them all to my favorite do-it-yourself ancient technologies series,
Novas Secrets of Lost Empires, also shown on PBS. Technologies indeed are lively
players in the action in all of these, although defined, displayed, communicated
with, and emphasized differently. I want to consider what these public histories
of technologies display about histories under globalization, what agencies we
learn about from them, and their conspicuously bundled spectacles of produc-
tion. First of all, they are mixed commercial products of various sorts: broadcast
or cable TV shows, in the United States sold largely to public television stations,
and sometimes recorded on video tape or DVD along with companion books sold
to private viewers. Somewhat like the hybrid corporation of Colonial Williams-
burg, they pay for themselves with a mixture of small profits from such products,
corporate and TV station money, private donations, small grants from federal,
state, or city cultural funding, and/or, in the United Kingdom, from BBC license
fees and supportive relationships with other public history sites and actors. Their
Web sites, interconnected to the BBC or History Television from Canada or PBS
and/or Nova in the United States, are intended for educational use for schools and
viewers, for Internet entertainment in a range of forms, and to sell these products.
As with the other episodes of the Secrets series, Roman Bath is peopled with
folks from a variety of communities of practice: academics and professionals,
craftspeople and archeologistsindeed, adjacent communitiesnot to men-
tion the camera crew and production people making the documentary. This
episode brings together from three different countries a historian of Roman
baths, an archeologist with expertise in ancient baths, an architect and building
materials specialist, an engineer and excavator, and a heating engineer, who, near
Sardis, Turkey, design a Roman bath that is simultaneously actually built by local
workers. BBC producer Robin Brightwell describes the set of programs as a
series of experiments on screen in which the disagreements among experts pro-
vide the drama: Our archeological experts did not always agree with the histor-
ical accuracy of the stonemasons or engineers schemes. The engineers, it turned
out, were often less practically minded than they liked to admit. We . . . always
brought along as close as a modern equivalent as we could find to an ancient fore-
man. The result was not welcomed by our building teams, but was a bonus for us
film-makers: disagreement is always a good ingredient in a documentary.26
So the drama of each episode of Secretsits soap-opera hookis created
by the incommensurability of knowledges, worlds, languages, forms of evi-
dence, emotional valances, and cultural meanings across these communities of
practice. Expertise is valued in many forms, and its hierarchies in the TV show
are often more dependent on good TV (i.e., melodrama) than on conventional
academic standards. What might trouble academic participants? Distributed
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 469

Historiography as Reenactment 469

agencies characterize not only the production of each documentary itself but
also, at the next level, each spectacle of productionthat is to say, their dra-
mas contrived from setting communities of practice together in both staged and
unexpected ways, with the lines of authoritative and alternate knowledges
played out and recombined. Professional knowledges are elevated, while their
boundaries are threatened; they are valorized and even democratized, but
within melodramas of reenactment and experimentation. They are opened up
for inspection by those not sharing their professional objects and values, lan-
guages, and rules for membership. Professionals both long for and fear acces-
sibility and the concomitant (mis)understandings of their others. In Roman
Bath the reenactment is characterized by partial knowledges imperfectly com-
municated among the participants, and by the visible limitations of expertise,
the contingencies of productive processes, and the disruptive agencies of the
very materials and conditions.
The very requirement for drama as a commercial constraint in this particu-
lar case allows for making visible the epistemologies Latour recasts:
Any constructivists worth their salt should be ashamed to see that
everywhere things have been gypped their due . . . if the word con-
structivist has any sort of meaning, it is because it leads us to agen-
cies. . . . Yes, [things] act, yes they order, yes they resist, yes, they are
plastic, but what has proved interesting are all the intermediary positions
they are able to simultaneously occupy. . . . I have never met scientists
at the bench who were content to chose between realism and con-
structivism, except of course when giving science war pep talks. . . .
Show me one single programmer who would think herself in full com-
mand of the software she is writing. . . . Everywhere, building, creating,
constructing, laboring means to learn how to become sensitive to the
contrary requirements, to the exigencies, to the pressures of conflicting
agencies where none of them is really in command. Especially not the
maker who spends nights and days trying to live up to his or her
responsibility.27
Such knowledge making in metaphoric and literalized forms is made visible in
these Nova episodes as reenactment.

Iconoclashing Public Histories: Our Things Witnessing

Reenactment is instrumentalized differently in another context of commer-

cialized knowledge production, the controversial Science in American Life
exhibition at the Smithsonian. Examining its things as bits of pastpresents
requires understanding things as Latour does in the sense of the mixture of
assemblies, issues, causes for concerns, data, law suits, controversies which the
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 470

470 Katie King

words res, causa, chose, aitia, ding have designated in all the European lan-
guages.28 On the one hand, contemporary controversies at the Smithsonian,
including those surrounding Science in American Life, are iconoclashes (a
new reverence for the images of science is taken to be their destruction).29 On the
other hand, many of the exhibits elements, such as its Dummy Scientistslife-
sized multicultural photo-figures of contemporary scientists commenting upon
historical continuities or interactions among various elements of the exhibit
demonstrate do-it-yourself pastpresents. They model for museum goers as reen-
actors, shadows, witnesses, a play at being there: on set, on site, in that past, in
a pastmentally enacting, reenacting, experimenting, speculating, trying to
find evidence for various pastpresents. What Haraway calls witnessing as a
root of the experimental life is given a literality in these do-it-yourself pastpre-
sents and a participation that interconnects it to Latours parliament of things.30
Varying controversies at the Smithsonian (for example, its new Secretary
comes to the job after being CEO of Fannie Mae) locate it in the nexus of eco-
nomic globalizations and the politics of resistance, refusal, appropriation, and
differential movement. Imagine that we stand in the anteroom of the Science in
American Life exhibition, first to recognize and, elsewhere in the exhibit, to
examine the freestanding photo-figures of scientists that work to situate and cre-
ate scales of importance all throughout the exhibit. You can stand next to these fig-
ures, inhabiting a space together with and also apart from them, simultaneously.
They speak in exhibit labels written out or in video bits you have to initiate on
monitors, commenting and making alliances across space-time with other fig-
ures described or reenacted in the exhibit. They inhabit recreated spaces set up
as scenes in minihistorical dramas.
For example, twenty-first-century Harvard chemist Cynthia Friends label
tells me more about and creates an alliance with the nineteenth-century MIT
chemical instructor Ellen Swallow Richards, a woman scientist in the Labora-
tory Science Comes to America section. University of the District of Columbia
South Asian biologist Vijaya L. Melnicks label explicates the complexities of the
political history of birth control for the well-being of women and children in the
Better than Nature section. The life-sized mannequin of Susan Solomon in its
reenactment of the 1986 National Ozone Expedition site speaks to us via video
sound stick about the work of other women scientists in the Science in the Pub-
lic Eye section.
Science Studies critics Lynn Mulkey and William Dougan call these figures
Dummy Scientists and these processes shadowing. They debunk these
Dummy Scientists as impositions of universalism normalizing science:
Science is important and witnessable against the backdrop of the unim-
portant attributes that change in relation to what is constant. This one
is black and this one is white, this one is female and this one is male, but
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 471

Historiography as Reenactment 471

they all do science. To produce science, we ignore aspects or cues for
how to associateaccording to gender, race, age, and more. . . . Partic-
ularly, the three-dimensional exhibits confront the observer with stark,
life-sized scientist proxies. Viewers, in this case, unlike in television
communication and in other forms of pictorial representation, are
closely aligned with models of the subjects communicating. One bla-
tant example is the Laboratory Science Comes to America exhibit in
which Reinsen and Fahlberg appear as life-sized three-dimensional
models.31
But I want to lump together this shadowing with the reenactments of this
museum exhibition and those of TV shows and documentaries, using alterna-
tively Haraways idea of witnessing in which persons and things have alliances
too:
Witnessing is seeing; attesting; standing publicly accountable for, and
psychically vulnerable to, ones visions and representations. Witnessing
is a collective, limited practice that depends on the constructed and
never finished credibility of those who do it, all of whom are mortal, fal-
lible, and fraught with the consequences of unconscious and disowned
desires and fears. A child of Robert Boyles Royal Society of the English
Restoration and of the experimental way of life, I remain attached to the
figure of the modest witness. I still inhabit stories of scientific revolution
as earthshaking mutations in the apparatuses of production of what
may count as knowledge. A child of antiracist, feminist, multicultural,
and radical science movements, I want a mutated modest witness to live
in worlds of technoscience, to yearn for knowledge, freedom, and justice in
the world of consequential facts. . . . What will count as modesty now is a
good part of what is at issue. Whose agencies will revised forms of
modest witness enhance, and whose will it displace?32

Do-it-Yourself Pastpresents, Tools for Scale Making, and Time Claims

These do-it-yourself pastpresents invite forms of identification and dis-

identification: communities brought together and also pushed apart as the us
moves around. Chronology becomes a tool for scale making, which allows for
grained historical analyses of varying degrees, creating layers of locals: the day,
the year, the decade, the century; for example, each describe a different grain for
assessing the level of detail, particularity, locality.33 Scale making and chronology
are engaging partners. Together they make what anthropologist Kath Weston
calls time claims.34 Shifting scales make it possible for Latour to suggest: The
relevant question . . . would no longer be, Is it or isnt it constructed? but rather:
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 472

472 Katie King

How do you manufacture them? And, above all, How do you verify that they are
well constructed? Here is where the negotiations could begin: with the question
of the right ways to build.35
In the anteroom of the Science in American Life exhibit, where the Dummy
Scientists assemble and their voices speak into the air without reference to any
intention on our parts, Mulkey and Dougans debunking of the multicultural uni-
versalism constructed by figuring scientists in mere accidental variants of age,
gender, ethnicity, race, and nation makes one kind of sense. But that very sense is
mutated elsewhere when they speak more directly and particularly, echoing Har-
aways version of Alfred North Whitehead, reaching into each other, through
their prehensions or graspings . . . constitut[ing] each other and themselves
and us, when we invite their speech.36
I argue that debunking critiques of academic capitalism and other forms of
commercialized production depend upon modernist purifications that are
unable to account for our knowledge-making practices in complex layers of
locals and globals. I prefer to analyze globalization processes from the perspec-
tive of what Chela Sandoval calls differential movement.37 I also take seriously
her claim that it is inside the great exploitations under globalization that we must
look for the very adaptations that permit not only survival but also new distrib-
uted creativities.38 Such a perspective examines both terror and possibility
simultaneously: it works to recognize agencies in new forms. I am especially
interested in the problems and possibilities of distributed agencies as reflected in
television documentaries, real and imagined or used figuratively, as in my analy-
sis of Science in American Life, using mixtures of antiracist cultural studies,
transnational knowledge-making activisms, and feminist technoscience studies.
These flexible knowledges in Science in American Life create, depend
upon, and intra-act in what I call audience polyphony.39 Audiences and mar-
kets shift and converge in that complex address of multiple audiences, in that
contradictory nest of niche political and epistemological markets. Rich contra-
dictory nestings permit and require visitors to select among possible salient nar-
ratives by animating differently layers of locals and globals. By implication the
Dummy Scientists and we visitors associate and dissociate these only some-
times accidentals with other interests, situated knowledges, and space-times.
These Dummy Scientists offer commentary less amenable to such flattening
out, and we visitors feel more and less inclined to ally with particular folks on the
basis of their differing implicit and explicit social and epistemological politics.
Calling them and oneself in and out of alliance and its classifications, that
momentary universalism shades into other ranges of affiliation and disaffiliation.
Modest witnessing instead, as Kath Weston says, holds open a place for regroup-
ing in the wake of those moments when things come undone.40 Salience
becomes tangible, literal, and even experimental. We desperately need some-
times thoughtful and sometimes extravagant strategies for resisting, refusing,
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 473

Historiography as Reenactment 473

altering, and mutating academic capitalism, and I look to histories under global-
ization to help us understand and imagine them.

University of Maryland

Notes
This material was first written as a talk for the Extreme and Sentimental History Con-
ference, Vanderbilt University, Nashville TN, April 3, 2004.
1. Sharon Traweek, Faultlines, in Doing Science + Culture, ed. Sharon Traweek and
Roddey Reid (New York: Routledge, 2000), 39.
2. Donna Haraway and Thyrza Nichols Goodeve, How Like a Leaf: An Interview with
Thyrza Nichols Goodeve (New York: Routledge, 2000), 105. See also Donna Haraway,
The Companion Species Manifesto: Dogs, People, and Significant Otherness (Chicago:
Prickly Paradigm, 2003), and Modest Witness@Second Millennium.Femaleman
MeetsOncoMouse: Feminism and Technoscience (New York: Routledge, 1997).
3. Haraway and Goodeve, How Like a Leaf, 171.
4. Bruno Latour, Iconoclash or Is There a World Beyond the Image Wars? in Iconoclash:
Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Religion and Art, ed. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel
(Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2002); and War of the Worlds: What About Peace?
(Chicago: Prickly Paradigm, 2002).
5. Haraway, Modest Witness@Second Millennium, 12.
6. Marc Bousquet, The Informal and the Informational, Workplace 5, no. 1 (2002); Sue
Stafford, Epistemology for Sale, Social Epistemology 15, no. 3 (2001).
7. Sheila Slaughter and Larry L. Leslie, Academic Capitalism: Politics, Policies, and the
Entrepreneurial University (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
8. Chris Berry, Fran Martin, and Audrey Yue, Introduction: Beep-Click-Link, in Mobile
Cultures: New Media in Queer Asia (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2003), 7.
9. Geoffrey C. Bowker and Susan Leigh Star, Sorting Things Out: Classification and Its Con-
sequences (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1999); Jonathan D. Culler and Kevin Lamb,
eds., Just Being Difficult? Academic Writing in the Public Arena (Stanford, CA: Stanford
University Press, 2003); Lucy Suchman, Located Accountabilities in Technology
Production, published by the Centre for Science Studies, Lancaster University, Lan-
caster, UK, at <http://www.comp.lancs.ac.uk/sociology/papers/suchman-located-
accountabilities.pdf>; Traweek, Faultlines.
10. Gary Urton, Signs of the Inka Khipu: Binary Coding in the Andean Knotted-String Records
(Austin: University of Texas Press, 2003).
11. Ibid. See also Urtons From Knots to Narratives: Reconstructing the Art of Historical
Record Keeping in the Andes from Spanish Transcriptions of Inka Khipus, Ethnohis-
tory 45, no. 3 (1998).
12. Keith Hopkins, A World Full of Gods: Pagans, Jews, and Christians in the Roman Empire
(London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1999); Richard Handler and Eric Gable, The New
History in an Old Museum: Creating the Past at Colonial Williamsburg (Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 1997).
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 474

474 Katie King

13. Michael Barnes et al., Secrets of Lost Empires II (Boston: Nova production by WGBH in
association with Channel Four and La Cinquime, 2000), broadcast as five segments
of the PBS series Nova; Michael Barnes, Cynthia Page, and Julia Cort, Secrets of Lost
Empires I (Nova production by the WGBH/Boston Science Unit and BBC-TV,
19921997), broadcast as five segments of the PBS series Nova; Smithsonian Institu-
tion and Arthur P. Molella (Chief Curator), Science in American Life Exhibition
(National Museum of American History, 1994 opening), available from
<http://americanhistory.si.edu/youmus/ex28sci.htm>.
14. News Smithsonian InstitutionOffice of Public Affairs, Smithsonian Institution
Announces Biggest Single Donation in Its 154-Year History (September 19, 2000)
available from <http://americanhistory.si.edu/media/pr000919.htm>; Smithsonian
Institution, Engaging America: Let the Campaign Begin, Report of the Office of Cap-
ital Campaign, External Relations, and Board Liaison (National Museum of American
HistoryOffice of External Relations, 2000), available from <http://americanhistory
.si.edu/youmus/2000annualreport/PDF/Campaign.pdf>; Smithsonian Institution,
Smithsonian Year 2000, Annual Report for the Smithsonian Institution (2000),
available from http://www.si.edu/opa/annualrpts/00report/08financial.pdf.
15. For the terms heritage culture and enterprise culture, see David Morley and Kevin
Robins, Spaces of Identity: Global Media, Electronic Landscapes, and Cultural Boundaries
(London: Routledge, 1995). In a British context they refer on the one handenter-
prise cultureto Thatcher-like political promotions of national capital and local labor
in pursuit of strategic alliances and joint ventures, the price of admission to a global
club of flexible transnationals; and on the other handheritage cultureto Prince
Charleslike exploitations of nostalgia and invented traditions intended to make
places attractive locations for global investment and tourism.
16. Henry Etzkowitz and L. A. Leydesdorff, eds., Universities and the Global Knowledge
Economy: A Triple Helix of University-Industry-Government Relations (London: Pinter,
1997).
17. Suchman, Located Accountabilities in Technology Production.
18. Slaughter and Leslie, Academic Capitalism, 208.
19. Hopkins, World Full of Gods, 3, 4. Other page numbers supplied in the text.
20. Haraway and Goodeve, How Like a Leaf, 103, 105.
21. For extended discussion of these points, see my forthcoming book, Speaking of Things:
An Introduction to Writing Technologies.
22. See my essay for a more detailed version of this argument: Globalization, TV Tech-
nologies, and the Re-Production of Sexual Identities: Researching and Teaching Lay-
ers of Locals and Globals in Highlander and Xena, in Encompassing Gender: Integrating
International Studies and Womens Studies, ed. Mary M. Lay, Janice J. Monk, and Debo-
rah Silverton Rosenfelt (New York: Feminist Press, 2002).
23. Handler and Gable, New History in an Old Museum, 231. Other page numbers sup-
plied in the text.
24. For the terms heritage culture and enterprise culture, see David Morley and Kevin
Robins, Spaces of Identity.
25. See Lynn Hunt, Against Presentism, Perspectives Online: The Presidents Column (May
2002); Jon Klancher, Presentism and the Archives (Romantic Circles Praxis Series, last
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 475

Historiography as Reenactment 475

update February 2002), available from <http://www.rc.umd.edu/praxis/contemporary/
klancher/klancher.html>; Barbara Watson Andaya, Area Studies: A Victim of Glob-
alism and the Hegemony of Presentism? (Moving Cultures, a project of the School
of Hawaiian, Asian, and Pacific Studies, University of Hawaii at Manoa, funded by the
Ford Foundations Crossing Borders Initiative, SHAPS Forum 1998), available from
<http://www.hawaii.edu/movingcultures/stage1_forum_barbara
.htm>; Paul McFedries, Presentism (Logophilia Word Spy, Posted on November 3,
1997; 19912002), available from <http://www.wordspy.com/words/presentism
.asp>; Casey Nelson Blake, The Usable Past, the Comfortable Past, and the Civic Past:
Memory in Contemporary America, Cultural Anthropology 14, no. 3 (1999); Edward
Tabor Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, eds., History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Bat-
tles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan, 1996). See also Terence Hawkes,
Shakespeare in the Present (London: Routledge, 2002).
26. Robin Brightwell, Introduction, in Secrets of Lost Empires: Reconstructing the Glories
of Ages Past, ed. Michael Barnes (New York: Sterling, 1997), 4, 7.
27. Bruno Latour, The Promises of Constructivism, in Chasing Technoscience: Matrix for
Materiality, ed. Don Idhe and Evan Selinger (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,
2003).
28. Latour, War of the Worlds, 21.
29. Bruno Latour and Peter Weibel, eds., Iconoclash: Beyond the Image Wars in Science, Reli-
gion, and Art (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002).
30. Haraway, Modest Witness@Second Millennium, 267. Bruno Latour, We Have Never Been
Modern, trans. Catherine Porter (1991; Cambridge: Harvard, 1993), 14445.
31. Lynn M. Mulkey and William Dougan, The Smithsonian Institution Exhibition of
Science in American Life: Science as It Consists of Normalized Practices, American
Sociologist 27, no. 2 (1996).
32. Haraway, Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium, 267. My emphasis.
33. Anna Tsing, Inside the Economy of Appearances, Public Culture 12, no. 1 (2000).
34. Kath Weston, Gender in Real Time: Power and Transience in a Visual Age (New York:
Routledge, 2002), 122.
35. Latour, The Promises of Constructivism. See also his War of the Worlds.
36. Haraway, Companion Species Manifesto, 6.
37. Chela Sandoval, Methodology of the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2000), 82ff.
38. Ibid.
39. King, Globalization.
40. Weston, Gender in Real Time, 138.
07 king 46-3 (459-476) 3/24/05 11:36 AM Page 476