Sublime lessons: Education and ambivalence in war exhibitions

Millennium: Journal of International Studies

Volumn 34, Issue 3, 2006, Pages 841-862

  Lisle, Debbie ^a  

^a QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY BELFAST   (United Kingdom)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 33748896096     PISSN: 03058298     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1177/03058298060340031701     Document Type: Article

References (79)

1. For full statistics including a breakdown of visitors for each subsidiary of the IWM (e.g. Lambeth Rd, Manchester, Dulwich), see the Department for Culture, Media and Sport: [www.culture.gov.uk/ museum_and_galleries/monthly_museum_visitor_figures/ b_m_museums_g.htm#imtotal] [08/09/05].
2. Over 20 million people have visited the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in the last 10 years [www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/ Holocaust/ushmm.html];
3. the USS Arizona gets nearly 1.5 million visitors per year (about 30 per cent international and 70 per cent American) [www.nps.gov/usar/ fact_sheet.html];
4. and the Caen Memorial and Peace Museum in Normandy receives over half a million visitors per year, and is the most popular visitor attraction in France outside Paris [www.memorial-caen.fr/portail_gb/decouverte/ quisommes.asp] [08/09/05].
5. While there are many other war exhibitions worthy of critical analysis, these examples were chosen for their popularity, their comparable national and institutional settings, and the fact that they have been debated in the literatures of both Museum Studies and International Politics. This focus is not intended to suggest that war exhibitions function in the same way in other national contexts. Indeed, studies of commemoration in Germany and Japan provide useful counterpoints to the examples under scrutiny her; see P. Gough, 'From Heroes' Groves to Parks of Peace: Landscapes of Remembrance, Protest and Peace', Landscape Research 25, no. 2 (2000): 213-28;
6. Gerd Knischewski and Ulla Spittler, 'Remembering the Berlin Republic: The Debate over the Central Holocaust Memorial in Berlin', Debatte 13, no. 1 (2005): 25-42;
7. Hanno Rauterberg, Holocaust Memorial Berlin (Baden: Lars Müller Publishers, 2005);
8. and K.E. Till, 'Staging the Past: Landscape Designs, Cultural Identity and Erinnerungspolitik at Berlin's Neue Wache', Ecumene 6, no. 3 (1999): 251-83.
9. Kimberly Hutchings, Kant, Critique and Politics (London and New York: Routlege, 1996), 24-5.
10. Hutchings suggests that questions of aesthetics and the sublime have become key political concepts as a 'growing number of theorists, including Arendt and Lyotard, argue that Kant's real political philosophy is to be found in the Critique of Judgment, 8.
11. Notions of scopophilia and voyeurism are developed by Freud in his Three Essays on Sexuality (1905)
12. and 'Instincts and their Vicissitudes' (1915);
13. see Sigmund Freud, The Essentials of Psycho-analysis, selected and introduced by Anna Freud (London: Vintage, 2005), 197-217 and 277-375.
14. For a good analysis of how psychoanalysis is applied to contemporary visual culture, see Gillian Rose, 'Psychoanalysis: Visual Culture, Visual Pleasure, Visual Disruption', ch.5 in Visual Methodologies (London: Sage, 2001), 100-34.
15. Jon Ronson, 'Hotel Auschwitz', Journal of Cultural Research 8, no.1 (2004): 80.
16. George E. Hein, Learning in the Museum (London and New York: Routledge, 1995), 35;
17. Hein is drawing on P. Gourevitch's article, 'What They Saw at the Holocaust Museum', New York Times Sunday Magazine, 2 February 1995, 44-5.
18. Jean-François Lyotard, The Inhuman: Reflections on Time, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1991), 98.
19. Jacques Rancière, 'The Sublime from Lyotard to Schiller: Two Readings of Kant and their Political Significance', Radical Philosophy 126 (2004), [www.radicalphilosophy.com/default.asp?channel_id= 2188&editorial_id=16052] [31/08/05];
20. see also Hutchings, Kant, Critique and Politics, 24-5.
21. Thomas McEvilley, 'Turned Upside Down and Torn Apart, The Sticky Sublime, ed. Bill Beckley (New York: Allworth Press, 2001), 68.
22. Derrida argues that reason enables man to use nature to his advantage and ultimately transcend the 'sensuous' arena: 'Happiness and culture presuppose that man puts to work what nature puts at his disposal', The Truth in Painting, trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 107.
23. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 127.
24. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 122.
25. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London and New York: Verso, 1989), 205 (italics in original). In line with his critique of Kant, Žižek prefers the Hegelian route of immanence (i.e. that there is nothing beyond the field of representation) because it is unconstrained by Kant's notions of transcendence, God and reason.
26. Derrida, The Truth in Painting, 125.
27. Barbara Claire Freeman, 'The Awakening: Waking Up at the End of the Line', in The Sticky Sublime, ed. Bill Beckley, 132.
28. Lyotard's most comprehensive engagement with the Kantian sublime is Lessons on the Analytic of the Sublime (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), but the notion of the sublime emerges in his earlier work as well, especially The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans.
29. Geoff Bennington ad Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984) and The Inhuman.
30. This claim is most famously made by Richard Rorty in Contingency, Irony and Solidarity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989).
31. Lyotard, The Inhuman, 101.
32. Two excellent genealogical studies of museums are Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge (London and New York: Routledge, 1992)
33. and Tony Bennett, The Birth of the Museum: History, Theory, Politics (London and New York, 1995).
34. Peter Vergo, The New Museology (London: Reaktion, 1989);
35. two important collections that trace the development and implementation of the New Museology are Ivan Karp and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Exhibiting Cultures: The Poetics and Politics of Museum Display (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1991)
36. and Ivan Karp, Christine Mullen Kreamer and Steven D. Lavine, eds., Museums and Communities: The Politics of Public Culture (Washington and London: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1992);
37. see also Sharon McDonald and Gordon Fyfe, eds., Theorizing Museums: Representing Identity and Diversity in a Changing World (Oxford: Blackwell and the Sociological Review, 1996).
38. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill, 'Changing Values in the Art Museum: Rethinking Communication and Learning', International Journal of Heritage Studies 6, no. 1 (2000): 27.
39. Hein, Learning in the Museum, 35.
40. Hein, Learning in the Museum, 34.
41. Susan A. Crane, 'Memory, Distortion and History in the Museum', History and Theory 36, no. 4 (1997): 44-63, reprinted in Museum Studies: An Anthology of Contexts, ed. Bettina Messias Carbonell (Oxford: Blackwell, 2004), 330.
42. Hein, Learning in the Museum, 3.
43. Hooper-Greenhill, Museums and the Shaping of Knowledge, 214.
44. 'The Peopling of London Project' traced the diversity of the city's population over a number of centuries; see N. Merriman, 'The The Peopling of London Project', in Cultural Diversity: Developing Museum Audiences in Britain, ed. Eilean Hooper-Greenhill (Leicester: Leicester University Press, 1997), 119-48,
45. and'Hidden History - The Peopling of London Project', Museum International 47, no. 3 (1995).
46. The quotation is from Edward Linenthal's book Preserving Memory: The Struggle to Create America's Holocaust Museum (New York: Viking/Allen Lane, 1995), 122, but is reproduced in Carbonell, ed., Museum Studies, 330.
47. Sybil Milton, quoted in Carbonell, Museum Studies: 329.
48. These critical museum studies include Sharon MacDonald, Behind the Scenes at the Science Museum (Oxford and New York: Berg, 2002),
49. Sharon MacDonald, ed., The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, Culture (London and New York: Routledge, 1998),
50. and Henrietta Riegal, 'Into the Heart of Irony: Ethnographic Exhibitions and the Politics of Difference', 83-104, in Theorizing Museums, ed. Sharon MacDonald and Gordon Fyfe.
51. Paul Cornish, "'Sacred Relics": Objects in the Imperial War Museum 1917-39', in Matters of Conflict, ed. Nicholas J. Saunders (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 35.
52. Andrew Whitmarsh, '"We Will Remember Them;" Memory and Commemoration in War Museums', Journal of Conservation and Museum Studies 7 (2001): 5; accessed at www.jcms.ucl.ac.uk [31/08/05]. Whitmarsh provides an excellent reading of the First and Second World War galleries of the IWM, and contrasts those with the 'In Flanders Fields' museum in Ypres, Belgium.
53. Timothy W. Luke, Museum Politics: Power Plays at the Exhibition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 37-64.
54. Luke, Museum Politics, 37.
55. Luke, Museum Politics, 48.
56. This claim is made most forcefully by 'Apparatus Theory'; see Phillip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)
57. and Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
58. Luke, Museum Politics, 48.
59. This claim is made most forcefully by 'Apparatus Theory'; see Phillip Rosen, ed., Narrative, Apparatus, Ideology: A Film Theory Reader (New York: Columbia University Press, 1986)
60. and Judith Mayne, Cinema and Spectatorship (London and New York: Routledge, 1993).
61. Although the literature about this controversy is vast, some useful academic sources are Steven C. Dubin, 'Battle Royal: The Final Mission of the Enola Gay', 186-226, in Displays of Power: Controversy in the American Museum from the Enola Gay to Sensation (New York and London: New York University Press, 1999);
62. Thomas F. Gieryn, 'Balancing Acts: Science, Enola Gay and History Wars at the Smithsonian', in The Politics of Display, ed. Sharon McDonald;
63. Martin Harwit, An Exhibit Denied: Lobbying the History of the Enola Gay (New York: Springer-Verlag, 1996);
64. a special issue of the Journal of American History, 'History and the Public: What Can We Handle?' 82, no. 3 (1995);
65. Edward T. Linenthal and Tom Engelhardt, History Wars: The Enola Gay and Other Battles for the American Past (New York: Metropolitan Books, 1996);
66. and Vera L. Zolberg, 'Museums as Contested Sites of Remembrance: The Enola Gay Affair' in Theorizing Museums, ed. McDonald and Fyfe, 69-82.
67. Martin Harwit, 'Academic Freedom in "The Last Act"', Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (1995): 1080.
68. Richard H. Kohn, 'History and the Culture Wars', Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (1995): 1046.
69. Congressional Record, 103 Cong., 2 sess., 19th September, 1994, p.S12968; reprinted as 'Senate Resolution 257 - Relating to the 'Enola Gay' Exhibit', Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (1995): 1137.
70. Harwit, 'Academic Freedom in "The Last Act"', 1078-9.
71. Rep. Peter I. Blute of Massachusetts quoted in Andrea Stone, 'Wounds of War Still Colour Enola Gay's Place in History', USA Today, 5 October 1994, reprinted in Edward T. Linenthal, 'Struggling with History and Memory', Journal of American History 82, no. 3 (1995): 1100.
72. Harwit, 'Academic Freedom in "The Last Act"', 1066.
73. The Secretary of the Smithsonian, Robert McCormick Adams, was clear about his intention to 'put on exhibits that make people uncomfortable'; Kohn, 'History and the Culture Wars', 1039.
74. Kohn, 'History and the Culture Wars', 1046.
75. Linenthal, 'Struggling with History and Memory', 1097
76. This concept is developed by J.E. Turnbridge and G.J. Ashworth in Dissonant Heritage: The Management of the Past as a Resource in Conflict (Chichester: John Wiley and Sons, 1996), 94-130.
77. Fabio Gygi, 'Shattered Experiences - Recycled Relics: Strategies of Representation and the Legacy of the Great War', in Matters of Conflict: Material Culture, Memory and the First World War, ed. Saunders, 87.
78. Neil Postman, 'Museum as Dialogue', Museum News, September/October 1990, 58.
79. These ideas are developed further in Donald W. Shriver Jr., Honest Patriots: Loving a Country Enough to Remember its Misdeeds (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005).