One of the many things people do with the past is to “recreate” it. In a piece on “digital humanities”, a project by Heidi Rae Cooley, presented at an NEH symposium on Tuesday, described a game called Desperate Fishwives (see Steve Kolowich, “The promise of digital humanities”, Inside higher ed). The game
“intends to introduce students to the kinds of social and cultural practices that would have been in play in a 17th Century British village,” Cooley explained. Students will be tasked with accumulating resources, completing social rituals, and solving some social ill “before church or state intervene,” she continued. Afterward, students would render a prose account of their experiences — “and thereby learn of the nature and complexities of historiography.”
A second item comes from that esteemed journal The Daily Mail. The headline is: “The amazingly detailed ‘living pictures’ that show how scenes throughout history may really have looked”. The reporter, Lauren Paxman, describes Red Saunders’ “living tableaux” (a genre seldom mentioned, by the way, in the philosophy of art).
At his behest “dozens of actors […] recreate moments from British history including the English Civil War, the Chartist movement and the Peasants' Revolt”. The results are impressive, and whoever wrote the captions for the photos in this story very effectively recreates the responses of certain nineteenth-century critics: “The detail Saunders goes to—and the number of models he uses—is inspiring. […] You could spend hours in front of each photo […] admiring the different characters”. The tableaux resemble historical paintings of 150 years ago, when wall-sized depictions of famous moments were among the staples of academic painting. That’s what history “really looked like” to a nineteenth-century audience, and what it still often looks like now.
You would never know from Saunders’ tableaux alone that the Levellers he depicts wanted to end corruption, introduce religious tolerance, and expand the franchise. Likewise if the students playing Desperate Fishwives merely re-enact village life, they may learn a little bit of “what it was like” to be a seventeenth-century villager. But no more than we do as we enact our village lives will they gain the kind of insight the historian hopes to arrive at concerning the structures underlying the village way of life, or the long-term changes that led to the extinction of many of the characteristic features of rural existence.
The point here isn’t to criticize. Rather I’m interested in re-creation as an instrument of knowledge. It’s clear, first of all, that it is at best a secondary tool. Saunders and Cooley got the information they needed to re-create the past from primary and secondary sources that were not re-creations. Similarly I, in trying to get inside Leibniz's head, read his works along with others, primary and secondary, that help me grasp the intentions with which he wrote the texts I’m studying. Having done so, I sometimes think I can answer questions of the form “What would Leibniz have said in response to X?” I have built a Leibniz simulator in my head with which I can extend his discourse in various ways. Historians of philosophy do this regularly.
Of course my ability to simulate Leibniz is just one application of an ability I use elsewhere, an ability we depend on quite a bit in everyday life. I’ll end with a query, to which I don’t have a definitive (even for me) answer:
- Can the results of a simulation count as knowledge for the historian? as evidence for historical claims?
- Or is re-creation better regarded as a rhetorical device by which to present vividly claims known by, or supported by, other means?
- If so, is it nevertheless the case that a spectator or participant in a simulation can be said to gain knowledge in seeing or taking part in it (so that it might the case that what would not be evidence for me, the historian, on behalf of a claim might nevertheless be evidence for you)?
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