Considerations for Public History in the Era of Supermodernity

22 Nov, 2024

With the progression of late stage capitalism ravaging the planet into a succession of global crises, frameworks of postmodernism are slowly giving way to discussions of a ‘supermodernity,’ as coined by French anthropologist Marc Auge in his 1992 series Non-Places: Introduction to the Anthropology of Supermodernity. Postmodernism can be characterized as a critical re-examination of the modern world and its institutions, which have naturalized colonial narratives and power dynamics. But more intellectuals and artists alike have been taking interest in the idea of a ‘supermodernity’ as a more apt visualization of our current world. Supermodernity (also described as hypermodernity by some) describes the ways that the recent 21st century world has restructured itself further through the increasing power of instantaneous media technologies, spatial and temporal configurations of hyperindividualism, and more time spent in alienating ‘non-places’ as true public spaces disintegrate. Auge argues that this has created a new distinct phase where our attention and collective memory has reached a point of overstimulation. To this end, public history has an obligation to understand the changing status of the collective in order to create meaningful, sound work. If the postmodern era once coincided with the emergence of historians recognizing that we need to increase public accessibility to historical knowledge, supermodernity should encourage us to recognize the ways in which current practices of practicing public history could adapt to resonate with our new relationships to communal memory, material culture, and the world at large around us.

Public historians have always been sensitive to shifts. In the 1970s, increasing job precarity amidst a series of recessions fostered an attitude of radicalism among many groups. Like other social sciences throughout the 70s and 80s, the philosophy of postmodern thought brought change by challenging historical realism, long held metanarratives, and other problematic traditions of Western historiography. During this time, American historian Howard Zinn’s successful book, “A People’s History of the United States,” published a timeline of the United States presented by regular, marginalized people who are often left out of ‘great man’ historiographies -- representing this shifting demand for a popular form of history that can resonate with the public. Some of the earliest public historians have been multicultural coalitions of grassroots advocates seeking protection of indigenous or culturally significant sites. Meanwhile, for academic historians seeking alternative ways to apply their skills in a desperate job market, this perspective allowed for new innovations for making history relevant and accessible outside of the traditional classroom setting. In 1976, history faculty member, Robert Kelly, at UC Santa Barbara received a grant in order to develop a graduate degree for students interested in serving as trained historians for different public and private sectors. Today, public historians across the world have worked in tandem with psychologists and communication theorists to understand communal memory processing and effective design practices. Some examples of popular formats of public history include museums, exhibits, national parks, historical sites, heritage tourism, archives, and more.

On the other hand, public history as a professional path was met with its own outspoken critics who questioned the field’s ability to produce meaningful work. Historian Howard Green writes “A Critique of the Professional Public History Movement” to describe these shortcomings in carrying out the field’s democratic ideals: “[It] assumes a future dominated by large corporations and state bureaucracies and even seeks to contribute to an historical explanation of the “natural” growth of this world in which events and institutions are beyond the control of the ordinary citizen,” (Green 171). Written in 1981, Green’s observations take place at the early take off of the field. He points out the ways in which professional public history tend to reproduce hierarchies of academic elitism within local history networks, cater to serve power as opposed to public interest by nature of their employment or commission, and overall detract from the potential of what a ‘true’ public history could if it were willing to decenter professionalism and institutional authority. This potential that Green envisions is rooted in a revolutionary love for all people — where historians help others understand their own origins in the world, think critically about their lives through historic context, and connect to the collective’s desire to make sense of the contradictions and struggles of the present.

While many public historians pushed to empower ordinary people to think historically and contest certain traditional truths in new spaces, Green foreshadows how it would be a shame for the field to succumb to serving the very hierarchies and traditional audiences that it originally sought to subvert. And in observing the most popular sites of institutionalized public history, this largely holds to be true, at least within the United States. For instance, many of our most popular monuments and state parks uplift colonial histories and seek to produce an artificial sense of national heritage that erases indigenous life. Today, educators, organizers, and scholars have made strides in changing mainstream discourses and culture — largely through strategic campaigns and localized, grassroots public history. Whether proliferated through social media or in-person and online teach-ins, there has been more interest in how public history imposes ontic racial injustice on marginalized communities. For example, this can be seen in the 21st century grassroots organizing online around police brutality and the widespread destruction of statues of Confederate soldiers after the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and others in 2020. This reflects a growing desire for what Michael Frish described as shared authority, in which historians equally support and acknowledge public community members as valuable producers of historical knowledge.

Moreover, public history constantly has to contend with the unequal priorities of the commercial market. For instance, the practice of historic preservation is one of the most expensive areas of public history due to its entanglements in the housing market, local politics, and local economies. In some cases, the two work hand in hand to further exacerbate the fracturing of neglected communities. In historian Theodore Karamanski’s work on urban public history, he cites Chicago’s Uptown neighborhood as a prime example of how the process of creating historic districts has often displaced communities of working class residents. These examples are both indictments of the broader dynamics between the collective and contemporary public history within late stage racial capitalism, in which their reactions to one another represent a harsh mismatch in needs. Supermodernity is a useful framework for historians to grapple with where we are now, almost 40 years later from public history’s inception. Despite the indictments of postmodernist critique, today, we face an increasing amount of recurring recessions and the continued fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic at the same time as the rise of a profiting billionaire class. Building off of postmodernist critiques of late stage capitalism, supermodernity similarly focuses on the overwhelming orientation of our lives towards work and survival. Postmodern thinkers like Belgian Marxist economist Ernest Mandel would revitalize the concept of a ‘late capitalism,’ characterized by the expansion of the global production and exchange economy. Furthering this argument, Marxist literary critic Frederic Jameson describes late capitalist societies to be more disconnected from history due to an overwhelming focus on consuming needs or desires of the present. In Marc Auge’s work, he provides the spatial and temporal analysis to this same idea of disconnection that makes the framework of supermodernity unique. In Non-Places, he writes that “the space of modernity overwhelms and relativizes” and “the intelligence of time, it seems to us, is more complicated by the overabundance of events in the present.” While Auge acknowledges the radical historical movements that have sought to subvert problematic communal histories and historiographic traditions, the effect is dulled by the space-time arrangement of our daily lives.

There is more time spent than ever in places that foster no real sense of cultural identity or community. Auge coins the idea of non-places to describe how the current makeup of 21st century neoliberal development consequences continually destabilizes the formation of historically significant places — which require a sense of identity and relationships — in favor of liminal places that facilitate global and domestic production, such as airports, highways, and subways. This degradation of third spaces should be seen as dangerous to public historians. The concept of ‘third spaces’ was developed by Ray Oldenburg to describe places outside of work and home that serve as hubs of congregation, community building, and entertainment. Political and economic developments such as euclidean zoning policies, suburban sprawl, and the car oriented nature of the United States are all contributions to which have further alienated more people from public congregation spaces. We can also use supermodernity’s framework of non-places and the loss of public third spaces through the lens of racial capitalism and disability justice, in which policing, vagrancy laws, curfews, inaccessible design, and anti-homeless architecture are all policy decisions historically designed to control marginalized groups by limiting their rights to public space. With historical preservation luring more people into inner cities, the regulating of space through quality of life ordinances to appeal to white affluence has sanitized public space to get rid of undesirables. In San Francisco, one SFPD lieutenant reported in 2016 that 90% of homeless and police interactions are responses to local complaints from business owners or individuals. From the perspective of Auge’s work, this can be attributed to the nature of Western individualism to mirror the increasing excesses of capitalism. As in San Francisco’s case, the logics of late stage racial capitalism embolden citizens to leverage historically proven tactics of policing to preserve their right to consume in peace. In the midst of a housing crisis and the loss of major COVID-19 regulations that have negatively affected Black, disabled, LGBTQ+, and poor people, public historians need to be well-versed in the supermodern tactics that segregate marginalized people into easily historically forgotten non-places (Auge brings to mind the image of shanty towns that constantly face demolition, for example). Furthermore, racial capitalism and supermodernity threaten public history through the continuous exhaustion of taxpayer funds towards imperialism, surveillance, and regional policing; at the expense of local libraries, school districts, subsidized research and museum grants, and other crucial resources necessary for public history infrastructure — which since 9/11 has cost an unprecedented $21 trillion dollars in a mere 20 year time span. This context is necessary in order to determine what kind of philosophical, promotional, or design approach would be the most compelling method of historical engagement with underfunded populations that are largely operating on survival-mode — with less access to free time, physical community, yet more misinformation than ever before.

In addition, supermodernity addresses how the advancement of information technology and the structure of broadcast media consolidation shapes the contemporary expression of our most pressing historical issues. First, the emergence of the internet as a digital space has allowed for local historical collections and historical activism to be published instantaneously to a global audience. Auge describes this as a ‘shift in scale,’ in which we are now able to perceive historical events at an accelerated, overstimulating rate. In fact, it was not very long ago that the idea of historical fatigue was very recently part of popular discourse during the 2020 convergence of the escalating climate crisis, racial hate crimes and uprisings, health inequalities, and multiple labor crises during the outbreak of COVD-19. Take for instance memes that shared versions of the phrase “I’m tired of living through major historical events right now,” or the peaks in google searches results for “doom scrolling” in November 2020 and again in August 2023. With hashtag advocacy and viral social media posts circulating global events, the supermodern digital space becomes an important arena for shared authority over communal memory and historical knowledge production. However, the fate of our internet history collections for public use faces a substantial risk of being completely commodified by the emergence of powerful online aggregators if the history community does not push for open access. The internet will continue to be contested like every other space by multinational corporations and different people alike. The rapid discourses and viral content that facilitate constant historical education should be studied further for both the challenges of overwhelm it poses to public history efforts as a whole and for insights in quickly disseminating history. Outside of social media, public historical knowledge is also deeply affected by the current configuration of national broadcasting monopolies. As of 2016, Pew Research center reported that only 5 media companies owned nearly 40% of local TV news stations. Moreover, the few main mega conglomerates that own most national magazines, news outlets, and television stations are Time Warner, the Walt Disney Company, Murdoch’s News Corporation, Viacom, and Bertelsmann. As put forth by American journalist Ben Bagdikian: “No imperial ruler in past history had multiple media channels that included television and satellite channels that can permeate entire societies with controlled sights and sounds,” (Bagdikian 4). Throughout his book The New Media Monopoly, Bagdikian highlights the unique challenges of the supermodern media apparatus. For instance, historians of all levels can struggle to convey subjects to a population with a limited framework of historical knowledge based on broadcast media. Furthermore, historians may run into difficulties performing keyword based research for primary and secondary sources that may oppose powerful mainstream media narratives. In the same vein, we can look to 2003 widespread reporting of weapons of mass destruction to enable the Iraq War as one cautionary reminder of the power of the American media to set back any potential progress in marginalized historical knowledge building in favor of ideological reproductions of the nation as ‘we’ whenever modernity is in crisis. Even with present day events such as the genocide in the Gaza strip, skepticism towards how our collective historical memory can be manipulated during high emotional overwhelm should be more than welcomed by the historical community. In speaking of these extreme examples of historical events, it is important to look at how supermodernity can affect the material cultures that we will use to construct meaning of the narratives around us. For public historians interested in physical artifacts, supermodernity creates obstacles in translating the not-so-distant past. In 2008, archeologist Alfredo Gonzales-Ruibal wrote “Time to Destroy: an Archeology of Supermodernity” to describe how the interpretation and preservation of material culture is impacted by supermodern processes of collective trauma, mass destruction, and mass consumption. Generally, Gonzales-Ruibal explains how it is already difficult without the additional temporal nuances brought on by supermodernity to reflect on painful events we may have just experienced ourselves or within one to two generations: “The archaeology of supermodernity is the archaeology of us who are alive (no other archaeology can claim that) but also, more than any other, the archaeology of trauma, emotion, and intimate involvement,” (Gonzales-Ruibal 248). What’s more, many destructive historical experiences like wars or genocide leave little to no trace due to sheer physical damage or the concealing of potential historical criminal evidence by Western governments. Under these conditions, it certainly requires more creative argumentation through piecing together limited artifacts to produce a significant enough history that the public can resonate with. Inversely, supermodernity also works in the opposite extreme by producing an exorbitant amount of materials. One example of how archeologists have taken advantage of this to produce a palpable history of excessive consumption is in the field of garbology, pioneered by William Rathje and his students at the University of Arizona who took to the landfills in order to explore the significance of modern waste cycles and the consequences of our commodity lifestyles. Overall, Gonzales-Ruibal envisions archeology’s role in telling supermodern histories as less concerned with narrative constructions that the public are already oversaturated with and more focus towards producing unique manifestations for the public to engage with. This idea of manifesting history for audiences as opposed to using literature is a great possible predictor of how successful public histories at all levels could work around this collective sense of overstimulation. As put by historians Matthew Graves and Elizabeth Rechniewski, “Resort to memory is one form of resistance to the 'utopia' of globalization, a way of re-anchoring ourselves in space and time; the redemptive power of memory is compensation for the social and psychological disruption of 'super modernity' and the 'loss of place,' of rootedness, that accompanies it,” (Graves 1). In the world put forth by Auge and other thinkers of supermodernity, the compression of our available space and time creates a sense of impermanence to the past as many of us struggle to survive in the present. If not directly focused on survival in the present, people are left with choices of lifestyles in which consumption is the main available form of self-soothing and social participation. Authors like Isabell Lorey of State of Insecurity: Government of Precarious (Futures) have also expanded on this idea, timelining the decline of welfare programs and other life-affirming resources that allow for the freedom to congregate and create memorable, significant spaces with others. Under such polarizing conditions, historians have the opportunity to take an equally radical stance against the systems of supermodernity that decontextualize our day to day lives.

As guidance, historians of all sectors should observe and find ways to bring attention to the oral and written history traditions of different grassroots social justice movements. Many of these kinds of organizations have been able to become key sources of information in the digital space, responding to historical events at a rapid pace. Many organizers participate in archival activism, community-led archives, and even DIY museum spaces. This radical form of public history, outside of the bubble of the academy, provides history education that presents how their current community crises are situated in transnational networks of oppression. And importantly, this model of community organizational study frames history as something that we can all intimately take up the task of performing for ourselves and one another to allow a new vision of the world to take root.

If public history seeks to shape new worlds that will resonate with the heart of the average person — to empower them into thinking historically about the patterns and contradictions in our lives, understanding the relevant nuances, challenges, and desires of the current epoch we are in for the foreseeable future is basic, and critical. Supermodernity can support us in understanding the changing goal posts for our objective as public historians. With the current configurations of our public space, our time, the new forms of state sanctioned violence; and the media landscape of the 21st century, there is no future for public history without a radical reassessment of how we can better serve the historical needs of the public in these times.

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