ABSTRACT
The reenactor’s suffering also functions as a structuring device for the narrative itself—battle reenactors starve themselves to look and feel the part of soldier, crouch cold and wet in fake trenches, and are discombobulated by the fog of simulated war. In a reversal of Theodor W. Adorno’s coupling comes the assertion that truth-telling is anterior to the expression of suffering. The important pendant to this is that without the possibility of articulating suffering, truth and justice cannot exist. New developments in reenactment like high-resolution multidimensional scanning, augmented reality, virtual reality, and forensic architecture offer—or claim to offer—a technologized means of establishing the truth about the past and of uncovering and modeling the material conditions of suffering. The victim’s suffering, for one, seems incidental to an enterprise that asserts an isomorphism between big data, digital reconstruction, reenactment, interpretation, and total knowledge.
