“EINMAL IST KKEINMAL”. OBSERVATIONS ON RE-ENACTMENT
begins in the orient only to culminate in the occident; the West is not a relative geographical marker but an absolute one that defines progress; the most progressive, Westerners are the most privileged travelers who can buy the most tickets to the past. Since only the West is assumed to be contemporaneous with the present, all other destinations are equated with time traveling in history. Herein lies the violence of the re-enactment: other societies appear as the backward re-enactments of the Western world’s history, or they have been forced to reenact parts of this history in order to “catch up” with the present. Every sunset is not a sign of progress, yet the re-enactment asserts that the West is now’s timekeeper.
6. There is repetition, but not re-enactment, in orality. Of course, oral cultures also use the body as a medium for reproducing the past, but they do not assume the temporal split between now and then, which renders the “re” in re-enactment possible. Instead, the past and the present mingle with each other; they exist in cohabitation because there is no library, no archive, no museum, where the past could be safely stored. The body plays all these roles, juggling new events without dropping any from the past, because dropping one would mean losing it forever. In the ever-expanding archive of oral cultures, accumulation is indistinguishable from distribution. Each new event is “recorded” with an older one in the archive, which consists of portable tales, poems, songs. The wife in a union that has gone sour may slightly alter a poem to address the sad state of affairs. By singing the modified poem, she spreads “news” that everyone can “read”, because they are familiar with the traditional version. While inspired by her life, the woman does not explicitly address her situation but rather transforms an unfortunate turn of events into an opportunity to revive a collective culture through repetition. Here, repetition does not strive for an exact copy of the past. Rather, the past incorporates novelty into itself; the novelty serves to recollect the past; both are bound to each other through the creative interventions of the collectivity. Fahrenheit 451 – François Truffaut’s film based on Ray Bradbury’s novel – offers a close approximation of orality for a literate culture: the characters learn novels by heart from one another, and wander around reciting the tales, because books are forbidden. Relying on the body, the re-enactment – like Fahrenheit 451 – sits oddly between orality and literacy, poised between the book and the body, between learning by rote and living by remembering.
7. The society of the spectacle and its many attendant visual technologies, from photography to television, complicates all re-enactments by transforming them into reproductions. Captured by the camera lens, the re-enactment becomes a reproduction of the past and a reproduction of itself; the re-enactment emerges as yet another original with its own claims to authenticity that are inextricably linked to its reproduction. Indeed, the spectacle is so omnipresent that a re-enactment must be recorded to have an authentic existence, if to exist at all. The camera is the only ticket for traveling on the time machine. Since the reproduced re-enactment can be endlessly circulated, it may seem to come even closer to
21