The Spectacle of History: Speech, Text, and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings
The Spectacle of History: Speech, Text, and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings
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历史奇观：伊朗门听证会上的言论、文本和记忆
DOI：
10.1215/9780822398677
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发表时间：
1998
期刊：
影响因子：
--
通讯作者：
D. Bogen
中科院分区：
文献类型：
--
作者：
M. Lynch;D. Bogen
历史是如何产生的？在从事历史生产的同时，个人如何写--或改写--自己的角色？迈克尔·林奇(Michael Lynch)和大卫·博根(David Bogen)以伊朗反政府听证会为例，探讨了这些问题。这些听证会由参众两院秘密军事援助伊朗特别委员会和尼加拉瓜反对党于1987年举行，为该国提供了一个媒体奇观，并提供了一个难得的机会，让人们看到围绕撰写历史的斗争。奥利弗·诺斯，头号嫌疑人和指定的替罪羊，在全国人民面前变成了美国权利的英雄。在媒体和公众的合谋下，这种转变是如何发生的，在历史的奇观中变得令人不安地清晰。
林奇和博根详细介绍了处于听证会中心的历史代理人如何撰写、确认、使用、删除和否认历史记录的做法。它们展示了围绕披露记录和证词的党派小规模冲突如何导致了分裂和犹豫不决的结果，而朝鲜及其盟友部署的“应用解构主义”进一步推动了这一结果。历史的奇观让读者沉浸在拥挤的文本、话语、视觉展示和媒体评论的领域中，但它不仅仅是一个案例研究，它还发展了对社会和社会理论核心问题的独特洞察力-谎言和可信度，公民奇观的产生，证词和历史之间的关系，记忆的使用，以及言语和写作之间的相互作用。
林奇和博根借鉴了社会学、文学理论和民族方法论的主题，挑战了当代传播学和文化研究的主流观念，从这一特定而令人不安的历史事件中提取了宝贵的理论教训。
How is history produced? How do individuals write—or rewrite—their parts while engaged in the production of history? Michael Lynch and David Bogen take the example of the Iran-contra hearings to explore these questions. These hearings, held in 1987 by the Joint House-Senate Select Committee on Secret Military Assistance to Iran and the Nicaragua Opposition, provided the nation with a media spectacle and a rare chance to see a struggle over the writing of history. There was Oliver North, prime suspect and designated scapegoat, turning into a hero of the American Right before the very eyes of the nation. How this transformation occurred, with the complicity of the press and the public, becomes disturbingly clear in The Spectacle of History.
Lynch and Bogen detail the practices through which the historical agents at the center of the hearings composed, confirmed, used, erased, and denied the historical record. They show how partisan skirmishes over the disclosure of records and testimony led to a divided and irresolute outcome, an outcome further facilitated by the “applied deconstruction” deployed by North and his allies. The Spectacle of History immerses the reader in a crowded field of texts, utterances, visual displays, and media commentaries, but, more than a case study, it develops unique insight into problems at the heart of society and social theory—lying and credibility, the production of civic spectacle, the relationship between testimony and history, the uses of memory, and the interplay between speech and writing.
Drawing on themes from sociology, literary theory, and ethnomethodology and challenging prevailing concepts held by contemporary communication and cultural studies, Lynch and Bogen extract valuable theoretical lessons from this specific and troubling historical episode.