All the world's a stage...

In his seminal essay on the debate surrounding a controversial World War Two documentary The Valour and the Horror historian Graham Carr noted that historians shy away from referring to the act of creating and maintaining history (or, more specifically, public history) as ‘performance.’ The problem, as noted by another historian, is that the word carries the connotation of conceit or deception. Regardless of post-modern critiques of history historians are a relatively honest bunch, and any agenda within a body of historical work tends to be stated, not subversive.

Yet the idea of performance remains an important sociological/anthropological concept that has been introduced into history that has allowed us to explore how people expressed themselves through their customs, cultures and rituals. When I first heard the word ‘performance’ I thought of it in terms of what you would expect from a car, or what we expect from a high-caliber athlete: performance as an act of excellence. Having read into the subject, I recognize that performance is more situated on the act itself than the sense that the subject is living up to some kind of intrinsic value.

I wonder though, if every person has many parts to play – as Shakespeare might say – who plays the audience? Certainly ‘performance’ is usually an unconscious act. But wouldn’t many acts of performance be under scrutiny? A society creates a flexible set of rules to provide some guidance as to how to act in almost any situation, which varies in innumerable ways. Historians usually establish this kind of social context so that the reader understands how the performance is perceived and understood in its particular context.

People perform in different social situations and we must admit that every performance could be an act or an expression of something. Who is the historian to judge what is admissible and what is not? But people in the past did judge what an acceptable performance was and what was not. The RCMP based their ideas about proper ‘Canadian’ conduct based on a set of ideas that included certain qualities, especially those surrounding heterosexuality. Performance of hetero and homosexuality in the Cold War was very much contested and defined by the ideas of others, and many people concerned themselves over this particular idea of performance: it was deemed to be a matter of national security, after all.

Performances have an actor and an audience, and works that only consider one half of the theatre risk stifling the full breadth of the performance. Even in the debate over The Valour and the Horror and the contested public history over the Second World War, each group – historians, veterans, and the Canadian public – performed its part to one another. Debates about society and history tend to bring out lively performances in which historians are inevitably drawn into. Bringing in the audience brings in the praise, critiques and other judgments of the performance, and recognizes the innate human desire to respond to the actions of others.

After all, what else are blog comments for?

A Safe Gambit

I created my first blog back in my first year of university, when I thought I could write much better than I do. Looking back, however, it was a pretty useful exercise: even if every post was my attempt to 'creatively' describe some horrifically some pseudo-intellectual thought that entered my virgin mind, it got me writing.

One of those 'deep' thoughts was the idea of a one-sided dice. For some reason I always thought the idea was neat, ignoring the laws of physics and the fact that a dice has to at least be two-dimensional to work. One thing I've come to appreciate in history is that no one is ever going to give you an objective point of view. That seems as self-evident as the sun being "bright" and giant boulders being "heavy," but if we accept that, we have to realize that not everyone agrees.

Still, one thing I sometimes find troublesome in historical writing is that we don't allow our subjects the chance to grow. Textual archives don't lend themselves well to demonstrating the organic growth of an individual, and try as biographers might, human beings given life through historical narrative seem to travel from one event to the next. (With some exceptions, of course.)

With better archival documents, pictures, and even audio and visual evidence for contemporary individuals, it has become much easier to document a person's life. But they're still stuck in that infuriating historical limbo, growing only at the writer's command. I blame it on the retrospective approach: looking for clues in a human being's childhood to explain why they were grumpy somedays, or said something rude to a nice old lady another day. We don't let them be human. Somedays we're just grumpy. Somedays we just don't feel like leaving the house. The pseudo-psychological analysis is whittling away history's agents - humans - into autonomous of behavioural psychology. It's a problem that isn't easy to fix.

It's not what interests me, either. I celebrate that we aren't rational. I celebrate our mistakes, our faults and our lies. We are not always bound to deep-seated memories of childhood, or a traumatic event that might explain our actions. We live and we grow and we change. Some people less than others.

This blog is document my own thinking and writing. Hopefully it will develop and evolve over time - even if, as some people believe, we can't really change who we are.

If that's true, then, while the results might always be the same, at least we can change the rules.