Theatres of Memory: Past and Present in Contemporary Culture

574 Pages·2012·7.32 MB·English

by  Raphael Samuel

Theatres of Memory
Theatres of Memory
Past and Present in
Contemporary Culture
RAPHAEL SAMUEL
This revised paperback edition first published by Verso 2012
© Alison Light 2012
First published by Verso 1994
First published in paperback by Verso 1996
Foreword © Bill Schwarz 2012
All rights reserved
The moral rights of the authors have been asserted 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
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Contents
Foreword by Bill Schwarz
Preface: Memory Work
Acknowledgements for Illustrations
INTRODUCTION
Unofficial Knowledge
PART I Retrochic
Retrofitting
Retrochic
The Return to Brick
PART II Resurrectionism
Resurrectionism
Living History
PART III Heritage
Semantics
Genealogies
Sociology
PART IV Flogging a Dead Horse
Heritage-baiting
Pedagogies
Politics
PART V Old Photographs
The Eye of History
The Discovery of Old Photographs
Dreamscapes
Scopophilia
PART VI Costume Drama
Modern Gothic: The Elephant Man
Doing the Lambeth Walk
Docklands Dickens
‘Who Calls So Loud?’ Dickens on Stage and Screen
AFTERWORD
Hybrids
Index
Foreword
‘At Camden Lock…the past has almost caught up with the present.’ RAPHAEL
SAMUEL, THEATRES OF MEMORY
Theatres of Memory, at once labyrinthine and circuitous yet crafted as a self-
consciously ‘open text’, sets out with determination to reanimate the historical
imagination for our own times. In doing so the book is punctuated by periodic
broadsides and many hostages are taken, from both the right and the left. The
text endeavours to subvert closure, even if it is not quite so open as it seeks to
proclaim. It appears to assume a life of its own, impelled by the enthusiasms and
diatribes that jump across its pages.
This is a book that works to minimize, at every point, the gap between the
author and the printed word and between the printed word and the reader. Page
by page the reader is exhorted to participate in the dramas it enacts: the writing
dazzles and cajoles, explains and reveals, denounces and condemns, proffering
tantalizing glimpses of the author’s own self-hood that historians are so often
determined to conceal. It’s difficult to imagine anyone emerging unscathed from
the experience of reading this book, such is the force of its argumentation, the
vibrancy of the prose and the passions that drive it. There is an indefatigable
quality that serves in equal measure to seduce and to mesmerize. And the tempo
is so fast-paced – notwithstanding the various repetitions, detours and false trails
– it is little wonder that, despite the vigilance of the writing, curious paradoxes
lurk in its undergrowth.
Raphael Samuel devoted Promethean energies to revitalizing the practice of
history and, as is evident from Theatres of Memory, he represented something
akin to a permanent revolution in the field: whenever he sensed an orthodoxy
settling, or when he believed that professional norms prevailed, he felt
compelled to set in train a counteroffensive, commanding the resources, not of
the big battalions, but of the guerrilla.
It’s thus entirely appropriate that the project is launched with a sustained
critique of the conventional production of historical knowledge. ‘The starting
point of Theatres of Memory…is that history is not the prerogative of the
historian, nor even, as postmodernism contends, a historian’s “invention”.’ The
argument is thereafter powerfully mobilized, deriving from an acute appreciation
of the social relations that underwrite the constitution of historical knowledge.
To suppose that history is the product only of the socially accredited elites
who write the academic articles and monographs, who compose the reviews and
who are installed in the university departments and research institutes, is to
ignore the greater mass who labour to make the past known: the ranks of
librarians, archivists and schoolteachers, and the sizeable if shifting and
relatively inchoate gatherings of amateurs. It’s a book about history in which
historians, or the fortunate amongst them, feature only in walk-on roles, as
subaltern spear-carriers for those who make history, as an imaginative enterprise,
happen.
Samuel believed it necessary to understand the forms of knowledge which
this social division of intellectual labour generates. Professional history, in this
schema, is – exactly that – a discipline, a species of intellectual life bequeathed
by the forces of modernity. In its own particular way, it is an embodiment of
social and epistemological authority. Samuel contends, however, that history,
more broadly conceived, is a discursive field riven by antagonism. In addition,
he argues, the intellectual procedures of what passes as history, tout court, create
a way of knowing that is predisposed to the ‘occult’ and is driven as much by
professional interests as by an open, overriding spirit of inquiry. In laying bare
the contradictory forces that underwrite the modern practice of history the author
reveals a paradox. Samuel himself was drawn to the lure of the occult. The
footnote, for example, that defining sign of professional mastery of the
discipline, was also for him – as for many of us – a technique to be cherished, a
means by which secondary, subtextual sorties on many fronts, could be
conducted. Yet this ambivalence on his part only attests further to the essentially
contradictory forms of historical knowledge that imprint themselves deep in our
own collective mentalities.
In an elegant, radical rendition, Theatres of Memory reverses the protocols of
mainstream historiography and implores us to consider the degree of artifice that
allows historical narrative to work, even as it masquerades as supremely
Rankean. In the introduction, in a rare engagement with Freud, Samuel delivers
the provocation that the discipline of history subjects itself to all manner of
repression such that it functions as a screen memory, displacing what is
significant and divesting itself of all that is dynamic. The finished product of the
academic historical imagination, even as it is polished and with all potential
loose ends cut and tied, resembles nothing more than Freud’s ‘dream-thoughts’,
the chaos of the lived condensed and displaced into a unitary narrative of
explanation.
Whatever claims may be made on its behalf, historical narrative indulges in
all manner of ‘make-believe’, and is given to a genteel ‘dressing up’. Even when
truest to its own protocols it nonetheless is vulnerable to the ‘interception of
meaning’ (pp. 434–5). Turning inside-out the entire tradition of modern
historiography, Samuel avers that it is not history that can grasp all that is most
distinctively human about the social world but its putatively disreputable
counterparts: memory and those modes of thought which stay close to the lived
relations of the everyday.
He presents these framing arguments with verve. Looking back across the
interval of time since the manuscript was drafted his position has now, perhaps,
become more readily accepted in the common currency of intellectual debate.
History is inescapably subject to the imperatives of narrativization, for good and
ill. Yet Samuel signals a recognition of the complex conceptual and ethical
dilemmas that necessarily accompany the commitment to producing public
stories and that seek to uncover the connections between the past and the
present.
As readers of Theatres of Memory will know, or will discover if they come to it
for the first time, Samuel is less preoccupied with the procedures of mainstream
or professional history. Rather he is engaged by the ‘unofficial knowledges’ that
give form to the popular articulations of the past and the present. And this is
precisely where the ‘memory’ of the title operates most forcefully.
Since his break from official communism in 1956, Raphael Samuel
consistently strove to situate himself as a figure who listened to the voice of the
oppressed (of ‘the people’), as the tireless agent for the democratization of
historical practice, in every department, and as a thinker who harboured deep
suspicions of the legitimacy of all external sources of authority. This
commitment to the democratization of the historical imagination required that he
attend both to the forms of knowledge that comprised the complex, varied and