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Bibliographic Data: King, Katie. Networked Reenactments: Stories Transdisciplinary Knowledges Tell. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012.
Main Argument: "…in the nineties, science-styled television documentary forms, internet repurposings, museum exhibitions, and academic historiographies worked hard to shape an array of cognitive sensations accessed, skilled, and displayed by new technologies. These emergent embodiments became experiments in communication and offered epistemological melodramas of identity, national interests, and global restructuring" (8). In her view, "reenactments are not a way to keep pasts and presents apart--or a way to keep authorities and alternative knowledges, metaphors and referents, materialities and abstractions, forms of academic expertise and cultural entertainment, or affects and cognitions separated, managed, or delimited by membership. Flexible knowledges, transdisciplinarities, new media, all plunge us into uncertainties, risk, collusion, and collaboration; all conditions that--as with responsibilities to multiple audiences from painfully limited authorships--we do not control and in which we are elemental 'bits' in emergent reorganizations of knowledge economies and among altering evaluations" (18).
( Networked reenactments )
Critical assessment: This is an excellent, really dense book. The four chapters could just as easily have been six, especially because King is a very dense writer. She says many things that are interesting and thought-provoking, though I think at times the fact that what she is talking about is still inchoate gets in the way of her pinning things down explicitly. In a word, it's still kind of hard to understand what she means by "reenactments" at times, though I think the idea of pastpresents is important to understanding it. Still, this is an excellent book, and I think she really understands the current dilemma of post-post-modernity in a way that other writers aren't willing to even fully acknowledge.
Further reading: Fembot interview with Katie King; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval; Hopkins, A World Full of Gods; Haraway; Latour; Manovich
Main Argument: "…in the nineties, science-styled television documentary forms, internet repurposings, museum exhibitions, and academic historiographies worked hard to shape an array of cognitive sensations accessed, skilled, and displayed by new technologies. These emergent embodiments became experiments in communication and offered epistemological melodramas of identity, national interests, and global restructuring" (8). In her view, "reenactments are not a way to keep pasts and presents apart--or a way to keep authorities and alternative knowledges, metaphors and referents, materialities and abstractions, forms of academic expertise and cultural entertainment, or affects and cognitions separated, managed, or delimited by membership. Flexible knowledges, transdisciplinarities, new media, all plunge us into uncertainties, risk, collusion, and collaboration; all conditions that--as with responsibilities to multiple audiences from painfully limited authorships--we do not control and in which we are elemental 'bits' in emergent reorganizations of knowledge economies and among altering evaluations" (18).
( Networked reenactments )
Critical assessment: This is an excellent, really dense book. The four chapters could just as easily have been six, especially because King is a very dense writer. She says many things that are interesting and thought-provoking, though I think at times the fact that what she is talking about is still inchoate gets in the way of her pinning things down explicitly. In a word, it's still kind of hard to understand what she means by "reenactments" at times, though I think the idea of pastpresents is important to understanding it. Still, this is an excellent book, and I think she really understands the current dilemma of post-post-modernity in a way that other writers aren't willing to even fully acknowledge.
Further reading: Fembot interview with Katie King; Dinshaw, Getting Medieval; Hopkins, A World Full of Gods; Haraway; Latour; Manovich