ABSTRACT
One way or another, reenactment attempts to copy the past. As the past does not exist any longer, access to it is limited and shaped mostly by remains (physical and archival) and by traditions. Thus, if reenactment is to take place it must to some extent be imagined. That is, reenactment must be pictured in the mind, and then—accompanied by as many alibis as documents, tradition, and material remains will allow—incarnated. If the incarnation works well, then sufficient energy is released to fuel belief in the being of the past, for it has just this minute become present to our senses as a living and moving phenomenon. Therefore, reenactment requires affect in its performers and aims to elicit affect in its audience. In proportion to its success, the experience is immersive for a subject who is struck by the singular and original appearance of the past, with all sense of a copy eliminated. As for the spectators, they are exposed to a view of the past whose authenticity is proportionate to the community and extent of their own aroused feelings. Reenactment, then, breaks with grand narratives and tendentious explanations. Its interests may be focused on local, cultural, political, or national affiliations, but its success relies on the surprise of the moment when what was imagined takes shape, and not always as imagination had anticipated. However, there is at the other end of the spectrum a species of reenactment much cooler, more efficient, and not reliant upon imagination or afflatus. Largely enabled by technology, it is capable of reproducing the past as datasets so densely arranged and cross-referenced in a virtual space that it is not passion which fetches the past into being, but proof. In between these two extremes, dividing (on the one hand) the excited subject facing an imaginatively reconstructed historical object from (on the other) a jury of witnesses inspecting a virtual site replete with information, there are degrees of involvement variously reliant upon differing investments of imagination, affect, spectatorship, accident, evidence, and objectivity. While it may be that the excited subject is moved by mere likeness, resemblance, or verisimilitude, the jury is much stricter in applying standards of representation. As opposed to those who are content merely to be present “as it were” at the reproduced event, the jury demands a simulacrum indistinguishable from what really happened there and then (mimesis).
