Mediality

The question of mediality, which in itself is an ambiguous notion, is at the core of reenactment practices from at least two different perspectives—a duality that reflects back on the polysemy of the notion of mediality itself. The first, rather technical and more restricted perspective, concerns the mediality of reenactments, i.e., the complex question of what kind of medium a reenactment is (e.g., theater, performance, or film) and to what extent it relies on other media in order to be transmitted, accessed, archived, and re-reenacted (Lütticken, 2005). Considering classical historiographical reenactments (i.e., the authentic recreations of the pivotal events of Western history, such as decisive battles—Gettysburg, revolutions, the storming of the Winter Palace—or symbolic acts such as the planting of the American Flag in Iwo Jima), reenactments are to be understood as live mass media spectacles addressed to a wide public in order to transmit a specific understanding of historical events and therefore of history (battle; living history). Thus, the question of transmission becomes crucial: if reenactment is meant to function as a (mass) medium of history, it necessarily relies on the historiographical operations of reception, storage, and transmission (archive). To consider reenactment a medium of history means then to tackle the question of mediality itself and to widen the scope of the term beyond its purely technical dimension: mediality not only refers to the technical dispositif of representation (TV, video, painting, sculpture, etc.) but also addresses the idea of mediation, mediacy, or intermediation itself. Here, the relation between reality and an image needs to confront its necessary mediatedness—in other words, the fact that the medial reality of reenactment can only be understood if we analyze the way it mediates (represents) a historical subject, which is in itself already very specific since it refers most commonly to historical battles or other “great events” involving mostly white male heroes, considered as crucial turning points in Western history (realism). That is, we need to ask how it has gained access to the event that is being reenacted (through source study, oral transmission, analysis of historical documents, etc.) and in what way it tries to conceal its own representative character (often by means of over-authentic representation that pays attention even to minor details) (evidence). Therefore, the second perspective on mediality is epistemological, inasmuch as it concerns the claim to truth that historiographical practices of reenactment often imply. Moreover, it is a negative understanding of mediality that is at stake here, since the practices of reenactment precisely tend to abolish the mediation between 134the present and the past, and therefore the mediatedness—or mediality—of all past experience within the present.