Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry
Alison Landsberg. Engaging the Past: Mass Culture and the Production of Historical Knowledge. New York: Columbia University Press, 2015. 232 pp.
Review by Marcia Landy
Alison Landsberg’s new study for “engaging the past,” is an amplification of Prosthetic Memory: The Transformations of American Remembrance in the Age of mass Culture (2004) with a shifting from prosthetic memory to history. The recent book explores strategies for confronting the past by a spectatorship of enactment expressed through cinematic, televisual, and digital texts.
In the documentary Milk an affective encounter is not a matter of passive identification with events and persons but through re-mediation by emphasizing “the artificial and interpretive aspects of the film as a whole” (p. 46), making the gay rights struggle visible to an audience that “did not live through the events presented” (p. 41). In addressing the dispossession of the Tutsis “and the world’s neglect of them” (p. 48), Hotel Rwanda, through self-consciously foregrounding the phone as “mediator,” addresses the viewer as part of an international community who have been asked to “listen” (p. 54). Good Night and Good Luck through fiction and documentary makes visible through archival footage how the freedom of the press is compromised “by corporate interests and sponsors” (p. 59) to bring the viewer into a history of the present.
Despite the “overall academic contempt for television” (p. 61), Landsberg enlists its potential for historical sensibility. In her detailed and expressive discussion of Deadwood, focusing on its uses of “crude” language and of physical bodies, aligned to the disjunctive uses of sound, Landsberg argues for a productive tension between sound and visual image, stylization and formalism, distance and proximity that invokes “something more general about the vulnerability of the body and its lack of privacy . . . tied to the experience of a particular place at a particular, definable historical moment” (p. 84). The popular television serial Mad Men similarly evokes a social history of everyday life in which historical events interrupt the lives of the characters through de-idealized visions of marriage, work, sexism, racism, and masculine competitiveness. HBO’s Rome through its length and many subplots allows for complex treatment of daily life.
Landsberg’s emphasis on the affective and potentially active character of historical “knowledge” derives from Walter Benjamin’s observations on distraction and Gilles Deleuze’s emphasis on sensuous perception that challenges familiar common sense (pp. 15, 38, 106); hence reality TV becomes another instance of Landsberg’s quest for mediation exemplified by iconic historical moments in Frontier House, Colonial House, and Texas House that produce “cognitive dissonance” (pp. 127–8) for the participants and viewers. The select participants become acquainted with contingency based on threatening and contradictory bodily and intellectual encounters that form the basis of an “alternate history” (p. 145).
Exhibits of virtual history involving the Holocaust further exemplify “potentially progressive engagements with the past” (p. 147). The Secret Annex Online accessed on the Anne Frank website on the Anne Frank house and Witnessing Kristallnacht—The November 1938 Pogroms are projections of that past onto the present through providing a participant a multifaceted “experience” of people and events derived through movement in the controlled environment. The installations are designed “as a crucial strategy for learning” (p. 167) in which the “viewer” is situated in the “role of a reporter,” invited afterward to provide a commentary on the experience. Thus witnessing, according to Landsberg, is a therapeutic experience that “can create the conditions in which past atrocities can become part of a usable past” (p. 176).
The book is carefully structured, sensitively expressed, and the analysis of the various media a contribution to thinking differently about cinematic uses of past. While some of its claims for novelty in addressing mass culture in relation to history are overstated, in fairness to the manner of the texts it discusses, the book appears designed to reach outside the academy. However, Landsberg’s reiteration of the complex statement from Deleuze continues to haunt me, namely: “Something in the world forces us to think. This something is an object not of recognition, but of a fundamental encounter” (pp. 15, 48, 106, 119, 121). Is the force of Landsberg’s argument then somewhat diminished by invoking “usability” as equivalent to the Deleuzian encounter? My uneasiness derives from a disconnection between the fortuitousness or contingency of a "fundamental encounter” and the pragmatic turn to “usability.” Thus, Landsberg reduces confrontation with the barbarism of the event, returning it to recognition, to a position that is comfortable, safe, and institutional rather than confronting Benjamin’s “moment of danger” (pp. 21, 179) and Deleuze’s “forced and broken connection which traverses the fragments of a dissolved self as it does the borders of a fractured I” (p. 145).
