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ahorbinskiBibliographic 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).
Historiographical Engagement: Latour, Harraway, Hayles, the Batesons
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples King is looking at "reenactments" in a broad sense, arguing that they position us within and across "transdisciplines" through various ways of knowing, feeling, and seeing. She identifies "three large social remains of power-knowledge relations" that are relevant to her expanded sense of "reenactments" and to her "long 1990s": knowledge work, which is "work cultures centering knowledge and information systems and technologies as economies themselves and as forces in various economies"; "culture crafts, publics, and industries," which are "public culture sewn up with economic development amid shifts in cultural value, all displaying in varying proportions among old and new technologies of entertainment;" and finally "academic capitalism," which is the "recombinations of national interests, global economies, and ideological shifts…across the Anglophone academies" (6). However, the "long 90s" are not over; King discusses pastpresents, "in which pasts and presents very literally mutually construct each other" and which today "are actually necessary for important forms of knowledge making, not limited to teaching knowledges in entertaining ways. Such making and sharing of knowledges are not properly separated; in use they are brought together" (12). We are in a pastpresent with the 90s.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples King looks at Highlander and Xena as "examples, in telescoping layers of locals and globals, of what I call global gay formations and local homosexualities" (24). King says something very important when she says that
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at various Smithsonian museum controversies of the 90s, so that, in King's words, "interrelations between trust and epistemology are the context for the reenactments of this chapter" (60). She looks at critics and allies of the various exhibits, and "probes the limits of debunking as a critical practice in reflections on scale making, scale shifting, and rescaling in these reenactments under globalization" (61-62). King conceptualizes "those exemplary 'outside' critical voices as well as others engaging in the layered controversies at the Smithsonian," as well as the people involved in making the exhibits, as "parts of the work that the exhibits do and that science (as knowledge) does" (108)--in some cases, the deliberate neglect of these outsides is "black-boxing," the cropping out of various agencies and things for various purposes. For King, "this capacious understanding of such work is essential to my explication of reenactment, as part of an always unevenly realized fantasy in which making, sharing, and teaching to use and using knowledge might be exuberantly managed, intellectually and commercially" (ibid). King concludes that "trust and epistemology are co-constitutive," and argues that "keeping messy many terms in which public history is valued and obvious needs ongoing habitation of many communities of practice simultaneously, by individuals, in seas of actants, among ecologies only partially mapped. Human instrumentalist is only too misleading. We cannot mine the terrors of globalization for possibilities unless we act as modest witnesses for what we are becoming" (127).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the union of TV and the web beginning in the mid 90s. King argues that television and the web together "repurpose" various materials and objects and "take advantage of every possible sensory modality and every prospect for commodification. Cognitive sensation, affective melodrama and remediated commercial products all together create immersive environments embedding spaces and worlds, each within the others" (132). For King, these new TV/web shows are "managing and moving among authoritative and alternative knowledges, in a practice of speaking with things" (133). Furthermore, she argues that "the work of reenaction also always includes those who create the environments for reenaction and its conditions of reception" (ibid). Examining various historical "reality" documentaries "with and as parliaments of things," King offers an important recalibration of Latour's term when she says that they are "assemblages of entities and beings, living and not, conscious and not, individual and not, and their intra-actions among themselves and with worldly processes," in what Haraway calls "naturecultures" and what King calls pastpresents (152). King also discusses spacetimes, in which space and time are envisioned as intersecting layers; in one particular historical documentary, "spacetime in epistemic layers is remediated as reenactments here, not as some originally unity but rather as forms of practice and attention in telescoping and cascading ranges of expertise and interaction" (164). Looking at historical reenactors and the people who consume and support their work, King argues that they are a form of distributed human agency, because they bear "the burden of the transfer of certain meanings," which is "a sort of agential work in which individual humans are either not in control or in very uneven forms of partial control. Indeed this is a form of agency that a transdisciplinary post humanities becomes positioned over and after the nineties to examine and analyze, one in which control and agency exist at different levels of analysis within complex systems" (171). King helps to pin down her core term when she writes that she sees "reeenaction and reenactors as networked nodes in agencies properly attend to in an emergent transdisciplinary post humanities" (175). For King, "reenactment melodramas demonstrated transcisciplinary knowledge practices such as speaking with things as well as the affects and ethics of sifting through and managing authoritative and alternative knowledges in a posthumanities" (201). Moreover, at this point the "boundary work" of pitting cultural criticism or "best" educator practices against "commercial exuberance" or "popular comforts and pleasures," became moot: "academic capitalism made only too explicit what was already historically a complexly interwove and multi systemic layering of public infrastructures for education and entertainment" (ibid).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples King looks at scholars and entrepreneurs, the dual figures of "academic capitalism," in a chapter that is "about how TV becomes a model for, and a simulation and reality of, scholarly activity under global academic restructuring in the 90s and after, as a 'posthumanities' comes into being" (207). This involves "TV drama idiom as a conceptual sensorium--a way of feeling out tacit and half-conscious 'partial connections' among histories bundled with their own historiographies, their own ways of being made" (208). King also argues "that television is a model for distributed cognition across levels of infrastructure among varying systems materially interconnected as that thing, so-called globalization. Responsibilities among ranging networks…position creative actors and agencies not as in control over or perhaps even able to know about all the varied contexts of reception and use of the knowledges they labor to cocreate and communicate, but as themselves elements in these processes" (ibid). She contends, quite simply, that globalization changes who we are, rendering us also "elements in emergence. Effects of this realization and our 'feeling out' within them are deeply personal and deeply impersonal. They register as cognitions, sensations, and affects" (223). Furthermore, "global academic restructuring is a species of globalization process" (ibid). This has produced a disciplining of interdisciplinary, so that within disciplines it "is valued only once it is emptied of anti disciplinary critique," and also at the same time "transdisiciplinary values in communication…provoke experiments in oblique performances or writings or of alternative services or products" (224). Using actor-network theory, which in King's terms "works out how a sea of actants inhabits these sometimes black-boxing and authoritative actor-worlds and those other times un-black-boxing and problematic, alternative and processual actor-networks. All of these actants enliven their multiple realities as they variously flip back and forth among nonlinear trajectories or spacetimes" (271).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples In the conclusion, "Towards a Feminist Trandisciplinary Posthumanities," King lists several suggestions, or fantasies, towards that end. One is an emergence kit in which we learn to be "affected," and "in this learning we work out and feel how it is that we all move around among various networks, together or in spots emergently self-organizing" (275). King also calls for play, and for "the kinds of critique that include myself in non innocent complicity without overvaluing abjection, registering in good faith the frightful and the ordinary, the confusion about what is terror and what is possibility" (281). Articulating academic restructuring as a site of terror and possibility, King wishes for restructuring in good faith, rather than in discipline and control, arguing that one goal of such restructuring should be a "struggled after 'posthumanities" that "tasks itself…to refocus on many projects of decolonization, antiracist politics, feminist transformation, and sensitized transmedia knowledge practices" (298). Thus, a feminist transdisciplinary posthumanities.
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).
Historiographical Engagement: Latour, Harraway, Hayles, the Batesons
Introduction: Argument, Sources, Examples King is looking at "reenactments" in a broad sense, arguing that they position us within and across "transdisciplines" through various ways of knowing, feeling, and seeing. She identifies "three large social remains of power-knowledge relations" that are relevant to her expanded sense of "reenactments" and to her "long 1990s": knowledge work, which is "work cultures centering knowledge and information systems and technologies as economies themselves and as forces in various economies"; "culture crafts, publics, and industries," which are "public culture sewn up with economic development amid shifts in cultural value, all displaying in varying proportions among old and new technologies of entertainment;" and finally "academic capitalism," which is the "recombinations of national interests, global economies, and ideological shifts…across the Anglophone academies" (6). However, the "long 90s" are not over; King discusses pastpresents, "in which pasts and presents very literally mutually construct each other" and which today "are actually necessary for important forms of knowledge making, not limited to teaching knowledges in entertaining ways. Such making and sharing of knowledges are not properly separated; in use they are brought together" (12). We are in a pastpresent with the 90s.
Chapter 1: Argument, Sources, Examples King looks at Highlander and Xena as "examples, in telescoping layers of locals and globals, of what I call global gay formations and local homosexualities" (24). King says something very important when she says that
Fandoms, TV, identity politics, and transnationalisms are sites of and for political contestation, and the many cognitive styles that register such contestation are at stake as examples here. Single-hearted stances of negative critique are only partial registers for our accountabilities among dynamically altering regimes of globalized capital. (25)Moreover, in King's view, the web "facilitates communities of practice among [Highlander] fandoms," which are "'participatory,' creating new and reembodied forms of social interactioninterfaces, literal and liminal (and eroticized" (28). King looks at the "glocalization" of locations in the filming of both shows but telescopes it out to all levels, arguing that "the locals" and the "globals" are always "both relational and relative" (34)--indeed, "telescoping" of the global and local is a central maneuver of the book. For King, these two shows are examples of "global products" that are "created out of commercial intentions but also out of conditions of global production, which hone new skills from such altering pleasures, tastes, and sensations" (56). We might say of these products and of the layerings and formations they create, which "distributively structure that glove of worldwide divisions of labor and production among many migrating populations" and which require "all these new cultural mixings and newly invented traditionalisms, as well as working to proliferate such various forms of sexuality as those I have discussed," that they are "shaped inside global capitalism for its own purposes but hardly exhausted by them" (ibid). Moreover, for King, "the forms of embodied consciousness traced throughout my analysis of the technology ecologies of the global TV shows Highlander and Xena offer venues for understanding who we are becoming, what we can make of ourselves and the ecologies of which we are a part--that is to say, our actual conditions of agency--as well as how we intervene into globalization processes for social justice projects" (57).
Chapter 2: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at various Smithsonian museum controversies of the 90s, so that, in King's words, "interrelations between trust and epistemology are the context for the reenactments of this chapter" (60). She looks at critics and allies of the various exhibits, and "probes the limits of debunking as a critical practice in reflections on scale making, scale shifting, and rescaling in these reenactments under globalization" (61-62). King conceptualizes "those exemplary 'outside' critical voices as well as others engaging in the layered controversies at the Smithsonian," as well as the people involved in making the exhibits, as "parts of the work that the exhibits do and that science (as knowledge) does" (108)--in some cases, the deliberate neglect of these outsides is "black-boxing," the cropping out of various agencies and things for various purposes. For King, "this capacious understanding of such work is essential to my explication of reenactment, as part of an always unevenly realized fantasy in which making, sharing, and teaching to use and using knowledge might be exuberantly managed, intellectually and commercially" (ibid). King concludes that "trust and epistemology are co-constitutive," and argues that "keeping messy many terms in which public history is valued and obvious needs ongoing habitation of many communities of practice simultaneously, by individuals, in seas of actants, among ecologies only partially mapped. Human instrumentalist is only too misleading. We cannot mine the terrors of globalization for possibilities unless we act as modest witnesses for what we are becoming" (127).
Chapter 3: Argument, Sources, Examples This chapter looks at the union of TV and the web beginning in the mid 90s. King argues that television and the web together "repurpose" various materials and objects and "take advantage of every possible sensory modality and every prospect for commodification. Cognitive sensation, affective melodrama and remediated commercial products all together create immersive environments embedding spaces and worlds, each within the others" (132). For King, these new TV/web shows are "managing and moving among authoritative and alternative knowledges, in a practice of speaking with things" (133). Furthermore, she argues that "the work of reenaction also always includes those who create the environments for reenaction and its conditions of reception" (ibid). Examining various historical "reality" documentaries "with and as parliaments of things," King offers an important recalibration of Latour's term when she says that they are "assemblages of entities and beings, living and not, conscious and not, individual and not, and their intra-actions among themselves and with worldly processes," in what Haraway calls "naturecultures" and what King calls pastpresents (152). King also discusses spacetimes, in which space and time are envisioned as intersecting layers; in one particular historical documentary, "spacetime in epistemic layers is remediated as reenactments here, not as some originally unity but rather as forms of practice and attention in telescoping and cascading ranges of expertise and interaction" (164). Looking at historical reenactors and the people who consume and support their work, King argues that they are a form of distributed human agency, because they bear "the burden of the transfer of certain meanings," which is "a sort of agential work in which individual humans are either not in control or in very uneven forms of partial control. Indeed this is a form of agency that a transdisciplinary post humanities becomes positioned over and after the nineties to examine and analyze, one in which control and agency exist at different levels of analysis within complex systems" (171). King helps to pin down her core term when she writes that she sees "reeenaction and reenactors as networked nodes in agencies properly attend to in an emergent transdisciplinary post humanities" (175). For King, "reenactment melodramas demonstrated transcisciplinary knowledge practices such as speaking with things as well as the affects and ethics of sifting through and managing authoritative and alternative knowledges in a posthumanities" (201). Moreover, at this point the "boundary work" of pitting cultural criticism or "best" educator practices against "commercial exuberance" or "popular comforts and pleasures," became moot: "academic capitalism made only too explicit what was already historically a complexly interwove and multi systemic layering of public infrastructures for education and entertainment" (ibid).
Chapter 4: Argument, Sources, Examples King looks at scholars and entrepreneurs, the dual figures of "academic capitalism," in a chapter that is "about how TV becomes a model for, and a simulation and reality of, scholarly activity under global academic restructuring in the 90s and after, as a 'posthumanities' comes into being" (207). This involves "TV drama idiom as a conceptual sensorium--a way of feeling out tacit and half-conscious 'partial connections' among histories bundled with their own historiographies, their own ways of being made" (208). King also argues "that television is a model for distributed cognition across levels of infrastructure among varying systems materially interconnected as that thing, so-called globalization. Responsibilities among ranging networks…position creative actors and agencies not as in control over or perhaps even able to know about all the varied contexts of reception and use of the knowledges they labor to cocreate and communicate, but as themselves elements in these processes" (ibid). She contends, quite simply, that globalization changes who we are, rendering us also "elements in emergence. Effects of this realization and our 'feeling out' within them are deeply personal and deeply impersonal. They register as cognitions, sensations, and affects" (223). Furthermore, "global academic restructuring is a species of globalization process" (ibid). This has produced a disciplining of interdisciplinary, so that within disciplines it "is valued only once it is emptied of anti disciplinary critique," and also at the same time "transdisiciplinary values in communication…provoke experiments in oblique performances or writings or of alternative services or products" (224). Using actor-network theory, which in King's terms "works out how a sea of actants inhabits these sometimes black-boxing and authoritative actor-worlds and those other times un-black-boxing and problematic, alternative and processual actor-networks. All of these actants enliven their multiple realities as they variously flip back and forth among nonlinear trajectories or spacetimes" (271).
Conclusion: Argument, Sources, Examples In the conclusion, "Towards a Feminist Trandisciplinary Posthumanities," King lists several suggestions, or fantasies, towards that end. One is an emergence kit in which we learn to be "affected," and "in this learning we work out and feel how it is that we all move around among various networks, together or in spots emergently self-organizing" (275). King also calls for play, and for "the kinds of critique that include myself in non innocent complicity without overvaluing abjection, registering in good faith the frightful and the ordinary, the confusion about what is terror and what is possibility" (281). Articulating academic restructuring as a site of terror and possibility, King wishes for restructuring in good faith, rather than in discipline and control, arguing that one goal of such restructuring should be a "struggled after 'posthumanities" that "tasks itself…to refocus on many projects of decolonization, antiracist politics, feminist transformation, and sensitized transmedia knowledge practices" (298). Thus, a feminist transdisciplinary posthumanities.
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