They will not easily do that if they catch ours. We need to perform our texts. We need to perform in our texts Academic history has lost its moral force because it has been subverted by its own reality effects and has lost its sense of theatre. Academic history has come to believe that accuracy is truth and that to represent the past accurately somehow clones the past. But there are also very few academic historians who write history as if what he said were true.
Reflective history ensures that the interpreting is discernible in the interpretation.
In an age which has experienced Picasso, Stravinsky, Mickey Mouse and Dale Carnegie, a sense of the multivalency of things is an expected realism. In an age that has experienced horror beyond measure from the perversions of true believers, we are well educated to the interpretation of signs. A history that is seen to believe its own fictions is a fraud and a bore. It loses moral force on both scores. The brilliance of theatre is that it represents experience and offers us the conventionalities by which the representation can be interpreted.