The Spectacle of History: Speech, Text, and Memory at the Iran-Contra Hearings

by Michael Lynch (Editor), David Bogen (Editor)

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.

368 pages, Hardcover

First published April 5, 1996

Reviews

[Landis Duffett · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lynch and Bogan apply a lot of contemporary critical theory to North's 5 days of testimony in the Iran Contra hearing. They call North an "applied deconstructionist" and analyze a repertoire of maneuvers that made North a fellow traveler of Derrida: taking advantage of "orphaned" written texts, the creation of an apparatus of equivocation in the texts that is built into the texts ahead of time but which, paradoxically, is created at the time of reading (emergent rather than pre-determined), even the act of forgetting itself becomes for the authors a Derridean gesture in severing present testimony from a recollectable past. Methodologically, what makes the authors' reading of North so trenchant is their avoidance of what Ricoeur called the "hermeneutics of suspicion" and what Sontag railed against in "Against Theory," i.e. a theoretical backdrop/grounding from which to launch a normative critique. Lynch and Bogan instead turn to their heroes of ethnomethodology, Sacks and Garfinkel, and offer a reading of North's testimony, as well as the interrogators' questions, as an instance of "folk epistemology," in which everyday examples of people getting at the truth are examined, but one that is at the same time viewed as a political spectacle, subject to a historical context--North's immediate popularity and the rhetorical power this gave him to "deconstruct" the interrogators' questions and turn them into political fodder. The reading the authors present in this book is as illuminating and sensitive to the subtleties of communication as it is--much like the Iran Contra hearings themselves--inconclusive. This lack of conclusivity is indeed its unique power.