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Museums, Ethics and Truth: Why Museums' Collecting Policies Must Face up to the Problem of Testimony

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2016

Philip Tonner
Philip Tonner*
Affiliation:
Hutchesons' Grammas School
*
[email protected]
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Abstract

This paper argues that any museum's collecting policy must face up to the problem of vulnerability. Taking as a starting point an item in the collections of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, I argue that the basic responsibility of museums to collect ‘things’, and to communicate information about them in a truthful way brings their collecting practice into the epistemological domain of testimony and into the normative domain of ethics. Museums are public spaces of memory, testimony, representation and interpretation that at once enable humanity to hold to account those who transgress while at the same time holding to account those who witness these transgressions. By virtue of this, museums can be considered spaces of ethics wherein testimonial and hermeneutic injustice can be confronted and challenged.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 79: Philosophy and Museums: Essays in the Philosophy of Museums , October 2016 , pp. 159 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2016 

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References

1 Susan Pearce makes the point that objects like this populate social history collections but also collections of applied art and ethnography. See Pearce, S., ‘Objects as meaning; or narrating the past’, in Pearce, S. (ed), Interpreting Objects and Collections (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 20 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

2 Millar, D., The Comfort of Things (Cambridge and Malden, MA: Polity, 2008), 91 Google Scholar.

3 Ibid., 91.

4 Ibid., 91.

5 Pearce, ‘Objects as meaning; or narrating the past’, op. cit., 20.

6 Susan Stewart argues that souvenirs function by ‘lending authenticity’ to the past. Collections, by contrast, are loaned authenticity by the past itself. In fact, collections are ahistoric and self-enclosed precisely because they have replaced history with a form of classification beyond the temporal. If there is a time to be reckoned with in a collection then it is temporal simultaneity. See Stewart, S., On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham and London: Duke University Press, 1993), 151 Google Scholar.

7 According to UNESCO, tangible cultural heritage includes artefacts such as Louis's ring but also monuments and historically significant places that are deemed valuable enough to preserve for the sake of future generations. http://www.unesco.org/new/en/cairo/culture/tangible-cultural-heritage/.

8 The terminology of ‘majoritarian’ and ‘minoritarian’ was developed by Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari. According to Deleuze and Guattari, unlike ‘major writers’ who seek the development of an expressive authorial voice, ‘minor writers’ are self-effacing: their aim is to give voice to the minorities who are determined by virtue of their reduced position of power in relation to a more powerful majority. Kafka was a minor writer because he created an alien ‘minor’ voice within the ‘major’ German language that it was necessary to write in even while it remained detached from the indigenous Czech Jewish population. See Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F., Kafka: Toward a Minor Literature, translated by Polan, D. (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 1986), 16 Google Scholar. For a discussion see Bogue, Ronald, ‘The Minor’, in Stivale, C. J. (ed), Gilles Deleuze: Key Concepts (Bucks: Acumen, 2005), 110–120 Google Scholar.

9 Pearce, ‘Objects as meaning; or narrating the past’, op. cit., 20. Pearce is drawing on Stewart, On Longing, op. cit. in this regard.

10 Pearce, ‘Objects as meaning; or narrating the past’, op. cit., 20.

11 Deleuze and Guattari, Kafka, op. cit., 86. Deleuze and Guattari depict the notion of deterritorialization as follows: ‘But we must declare…that an assemblage has points of deterritorialization; or that it always has a line of escape by which it escapes itself and makes its enunciations or its expressions take flight and disarticulate…’. Ibid., 86.. In Deleuze and Guattari's social ontology an ‘assemblage’ (agencement) denotes the primary formation within social reality. (See Due, R., Deleuze (Cambridge: Polity, 2007), 132 Google Scholar.) An assemblage is a collection of different elements. J. Macgregor Wise draws on an archaeological example in order to describe this notion (archaeology being the discipline where the notion of assemblage is perhaps deployed most and where it functions to denote a collection of artefacts considered as an analytical unit). The remains of everyday life (cutlery, tools, animal and human remains, portable art. etc.) discovered in a particular site together with their relations express a particular character, ‘Romanness’, for example. The assemblage ‘Romanness’ includes qualities (refined, small, large) and affects/effects: that is, assembleges, for Deleuze and Guattari, function in particular ways, in our example the assemblage might affect or revise our notion of what it meant to be a cultural group within the Classical World. Assemblages are selective and create ‘territories’ (my office, their hotel, his car). Territories are not fixed: the notions of deterritorialisation and reterritorialisation refer to the events when territories are made and disarticulated. For a discussion see J. Macgregor Wise, ‘Assemblage’, in Stivale (ed), Gilles Deleuze, op cit., 77–87.

12 Crane, S. A., ‘Memory, Distortion and History in the Museum’, in Carbonell, B. M. (ed), Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 319 Google Scholar. Article first published 1997.

13 John Sutton, ‘Memory’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2012), Edward N. Zalta (ed). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2012/entries/memory/.

14 Thinking of museums as machines allows us to approach them non-teleologically. Museums, approached mechanistically, are taken to be nothing more than their ‘connections and productions’. See Colebrook, C., Gilles Deleuze, (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 55–56 Google Scholar. Goodchild understands a machine in Deleuze and Guattari to be ‘an assemblage of parts that works and produces’. Goodchild, P., Deleuze and Guattari: An Introduction to the Politics of Desire (London: Sage, 1996), 218 Google Scholar.

15 Sutton, ‘Memory’, op. cit., 1.

16 Crane, ‘Memory, Distortion and History in the Museum’, op. cit., 332.

17 Ibid., 330.

18 Ibid., 330.

19 Ibid., 329.

20 Ibid., 329.

21 Adorno, T., Prisms, translated by Weber, S. and Weber, S. (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1967), 34 Google Scholar.

22 Adorno, T., Metaphysics: Concepts and Problems, edited by Tiedemann, R., translated by Jephcott, E. (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 110 Google Scholar.

23 Ibid., 110.

24 Roudinesco, E., Our Dark Side: A History of Perversion, translated by Macey, D. (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2009), 90 Google Scholar.

25 Ibid., 94.

26 Ibid., 91–94. The violence done to Kant by Eichmann might be intelligible in terms of the disclaimer that, regarding the order that takes the form of an (categorical) imperative, ‘it doesn't matter what I think or feel about an order since, by virtue of its issue, the order must be carried out!’. For Roudinesco, it is the ‘imperative force of the order itself’ that is primary for understanding Eichmann (and others like him) rather than the specific content of the order itself (ibid., 91–92). It is the fact that Eichmann was an agent of an inverted Law that made him so ‘terrifyingly normal’. Eichmann claimed that he was just ‘following orders’ and went so far as to deny that he was anti-Semitic (despite reportedly having said that he would ‘jump into [his] grave laughing’ due to his ‘extraordinary satisfaction’ at having the death of five million Jews on his conscience. See Arendt, H., Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1994), 460 Google Scholar. A chilling echo of the deadly imperative force of an order can be heard in a report issued by the state news agency and published by Roman newspapers on 25th March, 1944. It reported the shooting of ten prisoners (who were un-connected to the event) for every German killed by a bomb attack on a German Police Column that was purportedly intended to sabotage Italo-German cooperation during the Second World War. For the thirty three German casualties three hundred and thirty five prisoners were killed in an abandoned quarry. The report ends with the simple statement that ‘This order has already been carried out’. Portelli, A., The Order Has Been Carried Out: History, Memory, and Meaning of a Nazi Massacre in Rome (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003), 1 Google Scholar.

27 Adorno, Metaphysics, op. cit., 110.

28 Ibid., 111.

29 Parr, A., Deleuze and Memorial Culture: Desire, Singular Memory and the Politics of Trauma (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2008), 2 Google Scholar.

30 Rothberg, T., Traumatic Realism: The Demands of Holocaust Representation (Minneapolis and London: University of Minnesota Press, 2000)Google Scholar. For a discussion see Wilson, R., Theodor Adorno (London and New York: Routledge, 2007), 110 Google Scholar.

31 Adorno, T., Negative Dialectics, trans. Ashton, E. B. (London and New York: Routledge, 1973), 365 Google Scholar.

32 Rothberg, Traumatic Realism, op. cit., 32.

33 http://www.ushmm.org/museum/mission/.

34 Adorno, Prisms, op. cit., 177.

35 Ibid., 175.

36 Ibid., 175.

37 Ibid., 185.

38 Fagan, B. M., People of the Earth: An Introduction to World Prehistory (Upper Saddle River, NJ: Pearson, 2010), 349 Google Scholar.

39 See Tilley, C., ‘Interpreting Material Culture’, in Pearce, S. M. (ed), Interpreting Objects and Collections (London and New York: Routledge, 1994), 67–75 Google Scholar. Tilley points out that since the advent of structuralism in European thought it has been possible to view material culture symbolically as a signifying system and to develop an account of it that draws on Saussure's linguistics.

40 Okita, S., ‘Community, Country, and Commonwealth: The Ethical Responsibility of Museums’, in Edson, G. (ed), Museum Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 139 Google Scholar. Such an aspiration to truthfulness is reflected in the Museums Association's definition of a museum. http://www.museumsassociation.org/about/frequently-asked-questions.

41 Stewart, On Longing, op. cit., 151.

42 Ibid., 151.

43 Ibid., 152.

44 LaCapra, D., History and Memory after Auschwitz (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1998), 11 Google Scholar.

45 Hume, D., An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, edited by Steinberg, E. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1977), 74 Google Scholar.

46 Jonathan Adler, ‘Epistemological Problems of Testimony’, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2013), Edward N. Zalta (ed). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2013/entries/testimony-episprob.

47 Dummett, M., Frege: Philosophy of Language (London: Duckworth, 1973), 298 Google Scholar.

48 Adler, ‘Epistemological Problems of Testimony’, op. cit., 2.

49 Ibid., 3.

50 Okita, ‘Community, Country, and Commonwealth’, op. cit., 139.

51 Dean, D. K., ‘Ethics and Museum Exhibitions’, in Edson, G. (ed), Museum Ethics (London and New York: Routledge, 1997), 218 Google Scholar.

52 Ibid., 218. Italics: my emphasis.

53 Ibid., 218.

54 Ibid., 218.

55 Crane, ‘Memory, Distortion and History in the Museum’, op. cit., 319. See also Lord, B., ‘Philosophy and the Museum: An introduction to the special issue’, Museum Management and Curatorship 21 (2006), 79–87 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

56 Crane, ‘Memory, Distortion and History in the Museum’, op. cit., 319.

57 B. Lord, ‘Philosophy and the Museum’, op. cit, 83.

58 Ibid., 80.

59 Ibid., 83.

60 Crane, ‘Memory, Distortion and History in the Museum’, op. cit., 319.

61 Adler, ‘Epistemological Problems of Testimony’, op. cit., 26.

62 See C. R. Green, ‘Epistemology of Testimony’, The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy. http://www.iep.utm.edu/ep-testi/#SSH2c.v.

63 Adler, ‘Epistemological Problems of Testimony’, op. cit., 26.

64 In the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785), Kant describes the good will as being the only unqualified good. For Kant, a good will is ‘not good because of what it effects or accomplishes…but only because of its volition…it is good in itself and, regarded for itself, is to be valued’. Kant, I., Practical Philosophy, translated by Gregor, M. J. and Wood, A. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996)Google Scholar, 4:394/50. It may prove salutary for the ethical museal imagination that, even if the museum fails in its self-appointed ethical aims, after Kant, we might position ethical appraisal to evaluate the founding volition for the museum and not on its ultimate successes.

65 Fricker, M., Epistemic Injustice: Power and the Ethics of Knowing (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 1 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

66 LaCapra, D., Representing the Holocaust: History, Theory, Trauma (Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 1994), 64 Google Scholar.

67 Roudinesco, Our Dark Side, op. cit., 97.

68 Ibid., 97.

69 Cavani, Liliana (dir.), The Night Porter (USA: Anchor Bay, 1974r)Google Scholar, 44:03. See also, Marrone, G., The Gaze and the Labyrinth: The Cinema of Liliana Cavani (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2000)Google Scholar.

70 This applies not just to Holocaust museums since other museums might have displays dealing with other atrocities. Sadly, museums have plenty of examples to choose from. In other words, it is not necessary that the entire museum be given over to trauma or injustice (as with Holocaust museums) in order to perform this function.

71 LaCapra, Representing the Holocaust, op. cit., 68. LaCapra explores the notion of a public act of memory constituting an act of resistance.

72 I would like to thank Claire Singerman (of Gathering The Voices [gatheringthevoices.com], a digitisation project gathering oral testimony of Holocaust survivors who sought sanctuary in Scotland), William Tonner and Philip Wallace for their helpful comments on an earlier version of this paper. I would like to thank the organisers of ‘Philosophy and Museums: ethics, aesthetics and ontology’ for the invitation to deliver an earlier version of this paper at this conference in 2013.