Mediating Memory in the Museum

Trauma, Empathy, Nostalgia

S. Arnold-de-Simine,Kenneth A. Loparo

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137352644
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Cultural & Social Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

Mediating Memory in the Museum is a contribution to an emerging field of research that is situated at the interface between memory studies and museum studies. It highlights the role of museums in the proliferation of the so-called memory boom as well as the influence of memory discourses on international trends in museum cultures.

Part I

Museum – Memory – Medium

1

A New Type of Museum?

The institution of the museum is a product of the Enlightenment and as such it took on an instrumental role in the politics of identity of the modern nation-state: its function was not only to organize knowledge and educate the public in questions of manners and taste, but also to have a civilizing effect and produce self-regulating and proud citizens who would identify with their nation and heritage (Duncan 1995). During the nineteenth century, museums helped to stabilize what Benedict Anderson describes as ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson 2006), in which individuals are connected by the knowledge, self-perception, rules and values they hold in common and by the memory of a shared past. It has been argued that the museum in the modern sense, instigated by the opening of the collections of absolutist monarchs and princes to the public, was accompanied by an epistemic shift in the forms of representation and structures of knowing (cf. Pomian 1990; Hooper-Greenhill 1992; Bennett 1995). It established a museum-form that is defined through its role as an apparatus of the modern nation-state. The question raised here is whether the recent memory boom and its major consequences for the institution of the museum have resulted in equally far-reaching changes in museological paradigms.

The museum is still considered ‘a site of the production of knowledge and cultural sensibilities’ (Rogoff 1994: 231), but over the course of the last century it has been heavily criticized for petrifying and decontextualizing living traditions, alienating people from their past, disseminating hegemonic national narratives and ideologically instrumentalizing bodies of knowledge as part of new disciplines of power (Bennett 1995). In response to that, the role of the museum itself has been radically questioned, not only by feminist, (post)modern and post-colonial critiques (Macdonald 1996: 4), but also by funding politics which try to make museums ‘accountable’, in both capitalist and in social terms. However, what started out as a crisis of the museum has actually resulted in a museum boom,¹ not least because the museum has come to be seen as a sort of panacea for social exclusion and discrimination. It promises to offer democratic and inclusive approaches to difficult pasts, to preserve the collective memory of a generation of first-hand witnesses, to channel public debates and to regenerate urban and rural areas. The exponential spread of local, ‘communitarian’ and ‘memorial’ museums and ‘heritage sites’, as well as virtual and digital forms of collection and representation, lends weight to Andreas Huyssen’s claim that the centrality of the museum in cultural debates, social activity and capital investment represents an anxiety peculiar to our own time (1995: 34).

The idea that the museum functions as a public educator and a catalyst of social reform can still be maintained; what has changed are the aims and the means. Museums show growing evidence of a shift in politics and aesthetics by adopting new missions and new representational strategies. Curatorial and outreach practice is simultaneously to empower visitors, engage them emotionally and entertain them (Roberts 1997). The role of the new museums is to open up spaces of contestation in which controversial viewpoints can be voiced (Karp, Kraemer and Lavine 1992; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998). By giving a voice to what has been left out of the dominant discourses of history, diversified and sometimes even incompatible narratives have supposedly been granted a place in the museum that seems no longer to aspire to any totalizing synthesis (Hooper-Greenhill 1992; Ames 2004). Even though museums might try to avoid providing a grand or master narrative, the different small narratives of and from the people are often selected so that they add up to an uncontested account of the past.

The new museology and the debate it has sparked have emphasized the responsibility of museums to reflect on current social issues and facilitate public debate (Vergo 1989; Witcomb 2003). But many visitors still seek emotional affirmation and reinforcement of ‘known knowns’ in the museum rather than expect to be confronted with uncomfortable or indigestible home truths. Some commentators have suggested that museums need to be ‘safe’ places that provide a secure base from which visitors can confront and engage with risky or dissonant topics (Janes 2007). Others have argued that this sense of ‘safeness’ can only be provided if museums remain institutions of authority which promise to offer ‘unbiased’ and ‘balanced’ accounts of the past (Cameron 2007). James Cuno reports that, according to a survey undertaken by the American Association of Museums in 2001, ‘museums were judged trustworthy by 87 percent of the respondents, while books were judged trustworthy by only 61 percent and television news by only 50 percent’ (Cuno 2004: 18).

What becomes painfully obvious is that conflicting interests are at play in the revitalization and redefinition of the institution of the museum. Museums are not only essential to a nation’s or region’s politics of identity; they have also become major players in the marketization of culture and history and in the regeneration of economically struggling regions through tourism (Urry 1990). They are expected to provide a service to society by being inclusive, engaging diverse audiences and offering opportunities for participation, often by showcasing personal stories and portraying the effects of historical forces on the individual. But they are also expected to be innovative, respond to current issues and debates and remodel their exhibitions constantly in order to engage meaningfully and ethically with society’s changing perceptions of history. They are tasked with the balancing act of providing a secure environment in which people can encounter difficult histories, of passing on marginalized memories without alienating their visitors and of reflecting a flux of identities but nevertheless distilling the heterogeneity of their visitors’ experiences and attitudes into a consensual discourse around discernible core values and sensibilities.

New museums are hybrids, the product of collaborative efforts by architects, historians and artists. As such they have to negotiate the conflicting interests of (memory) communities and cultural policy-makers and respond to governmental initiatives and requirements of funding. More often than not, they have to coalesce commercial, political, ideological and emotional interests and investments, a process that results in compromises and contradictions, for example, between mission statements and exhibition practices.

This is why [the museum’s] institutional and political frame of enunciation is of necessity more limited than that of the artwork or the historical monograph: the museum, as an educational apparatus, cannot but be a space of negotiated representations, a ‘commonplace’ or ‘lowest common denominator’ among numerous actors including the state, human rights organizations and the wider public it seeks to interpellate.

(Andermann 2012: 90)

But despite its limitations, a discernible global trend has led to the emergence of a new type of museum (Message 2006). Notwithstanding their geographical and historical diversity, a range of museums can be seen to react to shifts in remembrance and heritage cultures, historiography and museology. What unites them is not so much their content – even though many deal with so-called ‘difficult’ or ‘traumatic histories’ – as similar paradigms of representation. While the International Council of Museums’ (ICOM’s) definition of a museum still highlights the tasks of collection, conservation, classification and communication,² many of these new museums are not based on collections but focus on crucial historical events which are deemed essential for interpreting the present and envisaging the future. The histories of persecution, migration and violence on which they concentrate are usually object-poor because the people, whose plight is exhibited, were dispossessed and the traces of their existence have been eradicated. Therefore, these museums produce highly visualized, multimedia-based narratives, what Hayden White described as ‘historiophoty’, that is, ‘the representation of history and our thought about it in visual images and filmic discourse’ (White 1988: 1199). In this context the few authentic objects on display risk acquiring the aura of icons or even relics but they also function as material anchors and as proofs of historical events. Digital recording and presentation technologies are important as narrative devices which draw visitors into an imaginative encounter with the past, helping them to gain access to a time they have not experienced themselves by identifying with individuals and their personal stories, a task that was for a long time exclusive to the arts, especially the novel and fiction film.

For my case studies I prefer to use the term ‘memory museums’ rather than ‘memorial museums’ because they have not been chosen on the basis of the historical events they present or been grouped in sub-genres such as migration or war museums. While Paul Williams defines the memorial museum as ‘a specific kind of museum dedicated to a historic event commemorating mass suffering of some kind’ (Williams 2007: 8), I would like to concentrate instead on the specific forms of narration and presentation and the display tactics which ‘memory museums’ have in common, whatever historical event they focus on. These forms of representation are determined by the crucial fact that the chosen museums relate to the past through the framework of ‘memory’. There is significant overlap with what Alison Landsberg and Hilde Hein refer to as ‘experiential museums’ (Landsberg 2004: 33; Hein 2006: 3), in which visitors are supposed to gain access to the past through the eyes of individuals and their personal memories, by ‘stepping into their shoes’, empathizing and emotionally investing in their experiences, (re-)living a past they have not experienced first-hand and thereby acquiring ‘vicarious memories’ (Climo 1995: 177).

In her essay ‘Regarding the Pain of Others’, Susan Sontag uses the term ‘memory museum’ as a generic term for the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington (founded 1993), the Jewish Museum in Berlin (founded 2001) and the Holocaust History Museum which opened in 2005 on the Yad Vashem memorial site: ‘the memory museum in its current proliferation is a product of a way of thinking about, and mourning, the destruction of European Jewry in the 1930s and 1940s’ (Sontag 2003: 77). However, I would argue that the genre of the memory museum is by no means restricted to Holocaust museums anymore, but addresses very different historical events and periods. What characterizes the global phenomenon of the ‘memory museum’ most strikingly is the postmodern shift from ‘history’ as the authoritative master discourse on the past to the paradigm of memory. To define these museums as spaces of memory means that both ‘memory’ and ‘memories’ become relevant on different levels.

The museum as an institution has acquired the role of society’s memory: according to Cubitt ‘the long-established habit of imagining memory as a storehouse has been transmuted into the reverse suggestion that storage systems [such as the museum] might be understood as forms of memory’ (Cubitt 2007: 8). Memorials and museums are the main contemporary institutions in which the rituals of remembrance and commemoration are performed in public and where the collective nature of the activity of remembering is acted out. However, this development has been paralleled by a shift in the way individual as well as collective memory is defined: rather than reducing memory to a storehouse, it has become inseparable from social consciousness, as members of communities are increasingly asked to recall violent pasts. Because this is deemed to make them into better people it becomes a moral duty. According to Landsberg, ‘with memory comes a sense of obligation and responsibility: remembering is a moral injunction’ (Landsberg 2007: 628). This is interesting because in the past the same was said about knowledge: knowledge brings responsibility. So why is it necessary to replace the concept of ‘knowledge’ with ‘memory’? Since the generation who experienced the First and Second World Wars and the Holocaust in person has almost died off, it is becoming ever more obvious that societies which have an investment in these events are reluctant to let go of that living memory. This fear of disappearing memories is closely tied to a feeling of loss of identity. Therefore, solutions have to be found to ensure that personal recollections are passed on to the next generations that follow, not just within families and over three generations but in the long term and in mediated form.

Increasingly, museums are being transformed into forums for memory communities and for the communicative memory of eyewitnesses to historical events: in these spaces significance is attributed to individual life-stories beyond the purely private. In the effort to deal with difficult pasts, accounts of personal recollections are not only seen as more engaging, but also as a more fitting and ethically responsible way of approaching the past. Autobiographical storytelling is part of the museum’s newly perceived function of providing a forum for an individual fate, for victims of atrocities and for minorities who find it difficult to make themselves heard. This means that the museum cannot simply rely on the aura of the authentic object as a window onto the past, but must deploy interactive multimedia technologies and strategies of narrativization associated with art forms such as literature or fiction film – what Williams describes as the ‘performing museum’:

Over traditional interpretive museum practices, the performing museum layers theatrical tropes based on reality effects. […] In the performing museum, the total physical environment becomes the attraction as the visitor is encouraged to reenact the drama in a kind of empathetic walk-through. Hence, rather than viewing museum spaces in principally intellectual terms, as theatrical environments they are as equally concerned with the visceral, kinaesthetic, haptic and intimate qualities of bodily experience.

(Williams 2011: 223)

Strategies of applied theatrics are supposed to facilitate experiential learning, elicit emotional responses from visitors and make them empathize and identify with people from the past. One way to encourage visitors to engage with the past is to transform it into ‘their’ past, even if they did not live actually through it. The museum’s representation of the past is intended to generate a sense of belonging which requires emotional investment and identification (Cubitt 2007: 11), sometimes to the extent that it suggests the imaginative living through events in order to develop strong forms of affective engagement. These new museums do not simply change their narratives by including a variety of individual stories; they renegotiate the processes of representation and narration and rethink the museal codes of communication with the public. The aim is not only to pass on mediated memories of eyewitnesses to future generations, but to encourage visitors to experience the past vicariously and supply them with ‘prosthetic memories’ (Landsberg 2004).

In a world which is increasingly defined by experiential and immersive technologies, traditional ways of producing and disseminating knowledge are no longer sufficient to equip contemporary citizens. Rather than analytical didactic approaches to representation […] it is embodied forms of knowledge apprehended by the senses rather than through analytical processes that we need to understand.

(Gregory/Witcomb 2007: 263)

The very optimistic hope is not only that the visitors’ affective, corporeal and imaginative engagement with the exhibitions will foster a better historical understanding but that embodied forms of knowledge – ‘postmemory’ (Marianne Hirsch) or ‘prosthetic memory’ (Alison Landsberg) – will lead to active political engagement.

2

Memory Boom, Memory Wars and Memory Crises

The ‘memory boom’ refers to a development in which, over the last few decades, the prominence and significance of memory has risen within both the academy and society. While western societies seem increasingly obsessed with relating to the past through the framework of memory, there is no shortage of criticism of what is seen by some as an excessive preoccupation. For others the current concern with memory is best understood in relation to its increasing fragility. The ‘memory boom’ has been tied to the idea of a crisis in which the abundance of memory can be attributed to a very real fear of social amnesia or forgetfulness. According to critics such as Pierre Nora, ‘we speak so much of memory because there is so little of it left’ (Nora 1989: 7). Nora sees the discursive inflation of memory as a reaction to a perceived acceleration of historical change but not as the genuine article, which could only be found in the ‘milieux de mémoire’. Rather, it is some kind of artificial substitute, belonging to what Nora terms ‘lieux de mémoire’; modern society has become cut off from its past, traditions are not ‘organically’ passed on, but have to be ‘artificially’ recreated to be remembered, for example, in museums or memorials. For these critics memory is not only a precious good but has to be distinguished from ‘inauthentic fakes’: false, mistaken or implanted memories, prosthetic, second-hand, mediated or virtual memories, trivial or nostalgic memories, or simply memory scenarios whose veracity or relationship to the real is dubious. The so-called ‘memory wars’ were fought over recovered memories of abuse: indeed, in 1992 a foundation was established to fight an alleged epidemic of ‘false memories’, and the term has since been extended to encompass memories of a variety of events, from alien abduction to identity theft. While there seem to be many forms of pseudo-memories, it is much more difficult to define what makes a memory genuine.

In the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries embodied and involuntary memories were considered to be the most genuine. Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust and Walter Benjamin were interested in involuntary memory – a term coined by Proust in Du côté de chez Swann (1913) – because it is not based on the conscious effort of recollection but comes to mind unbidden and through association, often triggered by the most inconspicuous and everyday sensations which evoke something that may not even have been consciously experienced at the time. This idea goes back to the Romantic writers of the early nineteenth century (Whitehead 2009: 7, 84ff.) but can be seen to reverberate in modern theories of trauma and the concept of unassimilated ‘deep memory’ (Faye 2001: 526). Cathy Caruth’s belief that a traumatic event is ‘engraved’ on the mind (1995: 153) relates to the idea of embodied memories which is based on theories of nineteenth-century evolutionists such as Jean-Baptiste Lamarck and his law of the inheritance of acquired characteristics (Bennett 2002: 46). It reflects a now widely discredited organicist understanding of hereditary memory which assumed that memories leave traces on the brain which can be passed on to later generations. According to contemporary neurophysiologists, memory is not (only) a capacity to retrieve stored information, but relies on re-imaginings. It is elusive, highly selective and can be repressed, distorted or dissociated (Loftus 1995: 47ff.). Neurophysiologists distinguish between episodic memory, which is based on personal experiences and the feelings associated with them, and semantic memory as a more structured record of knowledge that has been acquired. As they are reworked by unconscious desires and defensive strategies, personal or episodic memories have both veridical and fantastic elements.

While recent history has been figured in relation to a series of losses, corruptions and decimations of memory (Terdiman 1993), the engagement with memory speculates on the possibilities for retrieval and redemption. Memory is seen as a redemptive force that can unlock a moment from the past. According to some scholars, Walter Benjamin, whose work has had a profound influence on recent memory scholarship (Leslie 2010), attributed a redemptive force to memory (Wolin 1994). Others, such as Peter Osborne, reject this reading:

redemption itself, in the strict, absolute or Messianic sense, is not at stake. In this, Benjamin’s later work remains steadfastly at one with his earlier writings, and with Scholem’s nihilistic understanding of the Messianic idea. There is no redemption within historical time, only the redemption of history a...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Glossary
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Part I: Museum – Memory – Medium
• Part II: The Deaths of Others: Representing Trauma in War Museums
• Part III: Screen Memories and the ‘Moving’ Image: Empathy and Projection in ISM, Liverpool and IWM North, Manchester
• Part IV: The Paradoxes of Nostalgia in Museums and Heritage Sites
• Part V: Uncanny Objects, Uncanny Technologies
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index