3 Quantum Leap

Quantum Leap 3 The Postmodern Challenge of Television as History R obert Hanke She said: What is History? And he said: History is an angel Being blown bac kwards into th e furore He said:History is a pileofdebris And the angel wants to go backand fix things To repair the things tha i havebeen broken Bur there is a storm blowing from paradise And the storm keepsblowingthe angel Backwards into the future And the storm, this storm is called Progress Laurie Anderson."The Dream Before" 1heorizing thai onecould orne travel withinhisown lifetime, Dr. Sam Beckett stepped into the Qianturn Leap Accelerator, andvanished .•. H e awoke to find himself trappedin the past, facing mirror images that wen: not hisown and driven byan unknown force to change history for the better. His only guide on thisjourney is AI,an observer from his own time, who appears in the fonn of a hologram that onlySamcanseeand hear. And so Dr. Beckenfinds himsclfleaping from life to life,striving to put right what once went wrong, and hoping each time that his next leap will be the leap home. voice-over from the opening tide sequence of Quantum Ltap Laurie Anderson's "The Dream Before," which recalls one of Walter Benjamin's theses on the philosophy ofhistory, shall serve as a point ofde parture for this essay, just as the "Q uantum Accelerator" serves as Dr. Sam Beckett's point of departure in the television series Quantum uap.l This 60 I Robert Hanke Quantum Leap I 61 essay examines some possibilities for thinking about televisi~n as history. It intertexts, can elevate the past into the participatory position ofbeing a layer considers what television studies could do to address television as remem in the holograph of present history," bered history and how the notion of popular memory works as a supplemen T his intellectual development can, in turn , be treated as part ofa longer tary to the main arguments advanced by histories oftelevision. term history that would reveal how forms of historiography are articulated The agenda of this essay is three-fold . First, it describes the contours of with media and (posn modernity.Following literary critic Richard Terdiman, the study of media history, Mi chel Foucault's remarks on popular memory, Geo rge Lipsitz argues that the study of history took on a new meaning at and the emergence ofcollective memory studies. Second, it suggests the u~e the end of the nineteenth century in response to modernity." Historians fulness of William Palmer's New Hi storicist holographic model offilm his took it upon themselves to reconnect the present to the past at the very tory and criticism and applies it to Quantum Leap.' Moreover,it argues that moment that new media-the telegraph and the daily newspaper-began to this model needs to be revised in light of memory studies and the n se of dissolve previous barriers ofspace and time . In the last decades ofthe twen cultural history as the "study of the construction of the subject." Finally, it tieth century, we began to live within an accelerated modernity, represented briefly presents some theses on the philosophy oftelevision as history. by a new phase of time/space compression that began in the 1970s, and a shift from the mode of production to the "mode of information."" Rather Before the advent of critical historiography in the 1970s, traditional ap than merely recapitulating the modernist crisis of memory, the New His proach es to media history were satisfied to look backward, like the angel in toricism can be read as a response to the postmodern crisis of history. As "T he Dream Before,"only to be blown into the future by visions ofprogress. H ayden White wrote in 1966, "We require a history that will educate us to Communication historians then began to take notice that traditional ap discontinuity more than ever before; for discontinuity, disruption, and chaos proaches produced a great (white, middle-class) man, top -down, press and is our 10t."12 If it is true that we have entered a "second media age" and a artifact-centered version of U.S. media history.' Since then, a growing body "post- television" culture, then it is important to reconsider how "time, his of critical historiography has continued to challenge the traditional view and tory, and memory" are transformed in our shift to a "culture ofreal virtuality" revise the practice ofmedia history.' and to "capitalist postmodernity as a chaotic system."" In his critical history ofthe discipline, Hanno Hardt writes that commu As has also been pointed out, history is not only for historians, nor are nicati on studies must "recover its sense of history" and "recognize the rela historians the only producers of historical discourse and knowledge. His tionship between history and theory." Recovering our sense ofhistory will torical events,"which are inevitably susceptible to interpretation as texts, are entail more than assembling all of the necessary facts and getting the story of expropriated, interpreted, and 'reworked' by mass culture mechani sms (books, U.S. media right. For one thing, it will require us to recognize how standard the print media, television, films) to the point that new levels of the text historical accounts function as cultural myths about the past.James Schwoch, become holographically overlaid atop the original text."14 In this sense, tele Mimi White, and Susan Reilly, for example, argue that television's view of vision has the capacity to produce culturally salient knowledge ofthe past as its own "Golden Age" structures academic accounts of the "origins" of net a category of experience, even as television's production of history is "sub ) work television, valorizing "live"television production and severing television's sumed in an overwhelming 'present text' oftelevision flow."" While television's development from economic, institutional, cultural, and technological fac representation of history may overlap with the knowledge and writing of tors.' For another, television has undergone massive technological and insti historians (as in the public television series E mpire oftheAir: The M en Who tutional changes since the 1980s, becoming part ofthe transnational media M ade Radio, or on The History Channel), live "media events," from Presi industry and a global mediascape. Consequently,"it has become impossible dent Kennedy's funeral to the fall of the Berlin Wall, "are in competition to treat [television] as a unitary phenom enon with a single line ofhistory." with the writing of history in defining the contents of collective memory."" Such acknowledgments, of course, resonate with the New Historicism, In addition, ordinary, everyday television often blurs history and fiction, an intellectual challenge to antiquarianism that began in the 1960s and came conflates historicity and contemporaneity, and is inseparable from popular to more widespread interdisciplinary recognition in the late 1970s and early memory, the active process of remembering and forgetting. Contemporary 1980s. As Palmer aptly puts it, this "type of ,metahistory,' always aware of television culture is therefore a site ofstruggle over the meanings of histori itself as text and of the interrelation between its texts, subtexts, contexts, cal experiences, in the shape of popular memory. Television, as a vehicle of 62 I Robert Hanke Quantum L tap I 63 popular memory, thus becomes an important site within which to examine focus on the relationship between media and history, as in his discussion of the form ation ofcontemporary historical consciousness and/or subjectivity. the 1980s "nostalgia film," he contends th at the "history of aesthetic styles What kind of historiographical practice can we develop to relate to and displaces 'real' hisrory'v' address television as history and popular memory? We might begin with T he noti on of popular memory enables us to approach media as history M ichel Foucault, whose attempt to construct a practice of "effective history" in a way that is perhaps less dismissiveof television's images of history. While that would deconstruct "traditional history" has sparked some of the greatest historical materialist, or culturalist, perspectives enable us to grasp how controversies in contemporary historiography" The relevance and impor relevieual discourse may function to collapse history onto a perpetual present tance ofFoucault's philosophy ofhistory for media studies has already been or misrepresent or abuse history, the se positions presuppose an epistemo explored with particular attention to Foucault's archaeology ofdiscourse and logical realism that usually leads to the conclusion th at popular culrure can his genealogy ofpower.18 Hi s discussion ofthe panopticon, for example, has only fail to represent "real" history." T his is the sort of "historiographical been deployed by comm unication scholars as a metaphor for understanding operation" th at Michel de Certeau has opened up to criticism from a the function of the technological assemblage of computers, databases, and poststructuralis r perspective." In turn, the th eory and politics of th e "de telecommunications networks." scent into discourse" have been examined and criticized from the perspective Also suggestive, however, are Foucault 's remarks about popular memory. ofhistorical materialism." In an interview on the subject of"Film and Popular M emory," he discusses T he point is not to enter into that debate here, but only to acknowledge how popular print media as well as cinema and television have eroded the that the debates that

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