The museum is a political institution that mediates our relationship with the past – a political relationship in which what appears as the past informs our present and the possibilities for our future. Here I am reminded of Orwell’s well known quote from his novel 1984 “Who controls the past, controls the future; who controls the present controls the past”. It is through the past (not to mention other forms of life in the present) that we are aware of alternative possibilities for being, ordering the social world and relating to one another. The past can thus be used to reproduce the present in the future or offer alternatives, which nourish the hope that another future is possible, and provide lessons on how to affect change, learning from both past successes and failures.

Roger Simon lists two forms of public history that “attempt to address the problem of maintaining social coherence and cohesion” (115) – essentially reproducing the present in the future. One form attempts to “mobilize corporate commitments based on the dynamics of recognition, identification, and affirmation (114) while the other “is more overtly interpretive and didactic” (115). Both, however, “attempt to put forward representations of the past that might be integrated into the social practices of everyday life by underwriting the enduring values and social forms which organize and regulate these practices” (115). The predominant top-down and interpretive approaches may differ in their means but they both aim to reproduce the present in the future by inculcating the present’s “enduring values and social forms” (115).

In one approach the values and social forms are presented in fixed form for the viewer and in the other they are the object of conversation aimed at “rationally” reconstruction. In the first model we have what Paulo Freire refers to as “banking education” and in the other a slightly more complex model involving dialogue and debate but one in which the subjectivities, forms of life and the past are fixed prior to deliberation – the topic of conversation is reduced to discerning within the given parameters what we can learn from the past as it is for the present as it is. Rather than fostering a ‘reading of the world’ that brings out the socially-constructed, unjust character of the “social practices of everyday life” and the “‘enduring’ values and social forms which organize and regulate these practices” (115), the aim is to improve and understand the world better as it is. Historical public works are to support the technical or hermeneutical citizen1 better understand and work within constraints that, if noticed, appear enduring.

Further complicating his account, Simon writes that both practices have a “prospective orientation that seeks to legitimate and secure particular social relations, making normative claims on the conduct of human behaviour” (115). With this broader normative aim in mind – one which does not necessarily attempt to reproduce the present world but any particular world – we can also include more critical historical practices as sharing a similarity with those expressed above (e.g. EP Thompson’s The Making of the English Working Class or Howard Zinn’s A People’s History of the United States). While differing from the forms that attempt to reproduce the present in the future, critical historians have a particular normative vision of what the present ought to be and what the future should look like. They are highly critical of particular events of the past, particularly those that support and/or have created present injustices. They also seek to recover the history of those who have been written out, highlighting their opposition to

1 See Giroux on the technical or hermeneutic citizen.

events which have led to the present order. The aim of critical, civic historical practice in this sense is to foster a justice-oriented citizen who can “question, debate, and change established systems and structures that reproduce patterns of injustice over time” (K and W, 240). There is a clear normative vision of what is morally unjust and must be changed.

From this perspective, the past can be, if we make it one, a resource for supporting justice-oriented citizens who can affect change by offering both hope and strategies for challenging the present. The past in this critical historical practice does not contain timeless truths, morals or forms of life but heterogeneous and hierarchical values and social forms that were and are the result of ongoing, contingent struggle. The past is not a graveyard of failed experiments or lower forms of life that have been superseded on an evolutionary journey towards the best of all possible worlds. A critical, justice-oriented historical practice emphasizes history’s radical contingency, which replaces the unilinear notion of progress so that past ways of being can become viable alternative vantage points from which to rethink the present and inform action aimed at building a different future. This does not mean we accept wholly all aspects of past forms of life or subjectivities but that we do use those aspects that are helpful in illuminating present injustices and that might be useful to think with while creating alternatives in the present.

Roger Simon adds another form of public history, necessary for the “never-ending democratic project” (115), which supplements, rather than replaces, the uses of history given above. I would go further than this though and highlight that democracy requires, a critical, justice-oriented public historical practice alongside Simon’s more open Levinasian inspired form. That is, we require an open-ended deconstructive practice that does not offer solutions but supports a continual questioning of received assumptions, narratives and ways of being, even those resources we use to come to partial answers or through which we form the questions, we attempt to answer. However, we also require museums to be places, which stage confrontations “between conflicting positions” (Mouffe, last paragraph). Both approaches have some common goals. They each aim to mobilize “various practices of remembrance so as to provoke and inform competing visions of our present and future civic life” (pg. 114) and they share “a sensibility that disavows timeless meanings recognizing instead the need for a critical consciousness of one’s historically contingent relation to others in time and across space” (119). Both are also borne from a desire to “open up existing relations and practices to continual critique and the difficult (and often conflict ridden) work of repair, renewal, and reinvention of desirable institutions” (115).

However, despite these similarities they differ in their means for achieving these goals. Simon stresses that democracy requires more open-ended, partially sublime acts of remembrance that cannot be immediately captured by our present ways of knowing. He writes,

If museums are to participate in this “holding open the present,” they need to put forward practices of public memory in which a horizon of future possibilities is accessible in thought inaugurated through what comes toward the self that is not totally apprehensible, offering astonishment and puzzlement that complicate existing self and communal definitions (pg. 120)

Simon’s approach signals a shift from the critical account I have given above, emphasizing a concern to keep open the particular, irreducible singularity of the lives of those in the historical past. He wishes to use the museum as a space where a group “created by an attentiveness and shared reference” to particular historical artefacts can, through dialogue with others, rethink how they see the world and themselves (pg. 11) but without an a priori agenda. He is particularly concerned that if “engaged primarily on the terms of contemporary collective and social ethno-cultural identifications or to advance current social agendas, the stories of past lives risk being robbed of their specificity, their complexity, their richness, and their pedagogical power” (pg. 14). This seems to point to an antagonism with the critical, justice-oriented account given above, which is primarily concerned with advancing a particular “social agenda” that supports the enactment of particular conceptions of liberty and equality, presented as more socially just or even democratic.

Perhaps Gert Biesta’s distinction between an archic and anarchic democratic politics is of use in seeing this seeming antagonism as a productive tension rather than an incommensurable conflict or simple issue of addition (i.e. we need both the critical and open-ended form but they are separate rather than mutually informing). I refer to the archic here as a field or loosely defined space within which political contestation occurs. This political struggle is not without certain rules and frames of reference, which are themselves open to contestation – though they do exist, making up the terrain within which one attempts to affect political change and providing the resources one must use to do so. Simon signals that his open-ended form of public historical education is both archic and anarchic, providing an experience which is “not totally apprehensible” (120) but nor is it incomprehensible. It is archic rather than completely anarchic; there is an attempt to disrupt mediating discourses (holding open the past and the present) alongside an acknowledgment that these discourses, or some of them, must also be the basis for mediation on the past with others. There is an attempt to bring forth the anarchic as that which resists codification but at the same time exists within the archic. As a museum exhibit of artefacts from the holocaust, it is necessarily structured and able to be captured or mediated by existing discourses – it is not in itself the incomprehensible event itself that shakes our very core such that we are left speechless.

In fact, in creating the exhibit as a space in which civic thought and deliberation are encouraged there is already a limiting of certain discourses and support for others. By framing the exhibit as a project for democracy the “horizon of future possibilities” is a political horizon, and the subject who attempts to remake these possibilities is a citizen. These may be significantly underdetermined forms of life and subjectivities but they still act as reference points supporting our understanding of the historical artefacts – signally the range of discursive resources upon which we are expected to draw. The space within which we are to wonder and the present forms of life we are to question are those that are framed as political (i.e. involve relations of power and could be otherwise) though what is political is a contested issue.

As Biesta writes, it is not the case that “any interruption of the existing order is an instance of democracy” (152) and with regards to Simon’s project, it is not the case that any appearance of the past, disruption of the present or reinvention of desirable

institutions is necessarily supportive of democracy. Even in an open-ended project that promotes wonder, anxiety and calls into question our usual ways of apprehending and even being in the world, there must be ways of apprehending and being that are not called into question. We must have somewhere to stand as we question how we know and who we are, or ought to be in light of a demand to be responsible for the other that we can never fulfil. To shift this questioning of the present in a direction supportive of democracy, a loose archic structure concerned with promoting and extending forms of liberty and equality should frame the demand. “The democratic project, in other words, is not without ‘reference points’ but the very ‘essence’ of democracy is that these reference points engender a process that is fundamentally open and undetermined” (Biesta, 152).

We should be wary of the inescapable fact that all spaces and practices are framed to support certain discourses over others, even as they disrupt aspects of those they call up. The problems this poses for opening up spaces for wonder, thought and creating the new are not erased through the hegemonization of these spaces as offering a place to renew democracy, equality and liberty – empty terms who only have a meaning through their linkage with other signifiers (though one which is quite sedimented such that in the present democracy is synonymous with capitalism and elections). Simon highlights the difficulty of creating openings for wonder within the museum, the best of which exhibit artefacts that carry the promise of “an absolute immediacy, a particular understood without recourse to conceptual abstraction, the promise of pure singularity which language, bound inextricably to the generality of the concept, must always betray” (cohen, pg. 53) (pg. 202). Given the inability to reach the Real, stuck as we are in the symbolic, we should “enact practices of public history that recognize both this promise and its betrayal” (202-203). For me, this links with the project of radical democracy, which is at once both an enactment of freedom and equality and at the same time an attempt to get citizens to see any enactment as a betrayal or as not complete. Democracy requires that there must always be an opening within the present order and the past in which stabilized and institutionalized conceptions of liberty and equality can be questioned.

The adherence to the unceasing reproduction of particular conditions supporting liberty and equality does not guarantee increasingly socially just outcomes but provides a common, underdetermined (hopefully) archic structure within which competing visions of the social world can be enacted and challenged. There are of course no guarantees that the outcome of this open and underdetermined process will lead to more democratic citizens. Simon points to the variety of possible outcomes from taking on the inheritance of the past as one’s own and defining oneself through loss, not all of which are supportive of democracy. These include: “retribution, revenge, a traumatic repetition that enacts the desire for the recognition of oneself as wounded, melancholic memory, but also the working through of the possibilities of mourning and social transformation, including taking action towards establishing a more just world” (13). What Simon points to though is the need to keep open a space within which we can question, think and deliberate with others about how we relate to others, who we ought to be and what forms of life we should reproduce.

Simon’s open-ended project supports radical democracy’s agonistic distinctions by creating a space where we can not simply enact subject positions supportive of certain conceptions of liberty and democracy but where we can think with others about the present range of agonistic conceptions of liberty and equality – conceptions which both enact but also betray liberty and equality as empty signifiers we cannot definitively link with concrete signifieds. There is a tension though in that in the radical democratic tradition we have competing visions of liberty and equality attempting to become hegemonic while in the open-ended project the surety our own vision might offer is itself called into question. Not only are competing alternatives to our cherished vision of liberty and equality insufficient but we are encouraged to see our own as insufficient as well. While we must have somewhere to stand in order to make sense of the world and communicate with others (i.e. we must use the discursive resources we have), the open-ended project stresses that this place is one ought to be seen as necessarily insufficient to the task.

Any vision of liberty and equality necessarily excludes other conceptions (e.g. the freedom to privately own the means of production vs. the freedom to collectively be free from scarcity) or subjectivities (proletariat vs. individual free from waged labour and the coercion of abstract labour and capital) but at the same time any particular conception also includes within itself alternative possibilities as either a trace or less developed form that can be the “basis for new political work toward instituting democratic change” (Todd, pg. 224). A less developed form would be one that was relegated to a particular sphere or time or was partially expressed but was at odds with the hegemonic forms of liberty and equality (e.g. forms of social commons in a time when neoliberalism is hegemonic: Paris Commune, public healthcare, schooling and public pensions). Traces of inchoate alternative conceptions of liberty and equality resist complete assimilation to any particular form, which is momentarily hegemonic. These traces do not have to have been enacted to be sensed but can be the mark of an absence of what must be disavowed to render one’s conception of freedom and equality ‘universal’ – e.g. seeing others with less freedom not as fully human. These traces represent a “terrible gift” – a gift and demand from the other – that Simon encourages us to accept and use to think with others to inhabit an “anxious and ambivalent state” (2006a, pg. 119) that “may unsettle the present and leave one less secure in negotiating daily life [but] can also instantiate hope in holding the present open and thus as being unfinished” (Benjamin in Simon, 2006b, pg. 203).

Reiterating again the view that an open-ended form of history requires a critical element, one I have married here to radical democracy, I wish to stress that it is not enough to create a space that unsettles the past and present without analyzing the ways in which our necessary failures to fully be responsible towards the “terrible gift” we have accepted are influenced. To my earlier concern about the need for loose coordinates that guide discussion within a democratic frame, I add here a concern for, not the meaning we make, but for the way in which we understand our inability to make an event or artefact make sense. The terrible gift may present an aporia that refuses to be fully captured by the discursive resources we bring to bear upon it but as Ariella Azoulay notes this refusal or failure could be constrained in advance so as to more likely support the renewal of a field, practice and horizon of subjective possibilities than their reformation or renewal. In

her account the art museum is a place where wonder, failure and anxiety are contrived, trapped within the museum’s truth game where failure to achieve meaning is part of the reproduction of the game and its participants (280).

While Simon’s exhibit may deflate this fear by providing “both an introductory framing of the exhibition and a conceptual geography that articulates the various story spaces in relation to each other” (Simon, 2006b, pg. 202), Mouffe’s call for recovering the museum as a civic space by staging “a confrontation between conflicting positions” provides participants with a necessary and necessarily incomplete range of discourses and subjectivities through which to trouble with others as one takes up the terrible gifts offered from the past. “Resistance against a dominant tradition cannot come from a blank space; it can only be generated from oppositional traditions” (pg. 150 radical democracy). If our goal is to support a civic-minded citizenry, which will take up the responsibility the other demands, we must be aware of the discourses that confront our attempts to open up and remake the past and present and challenge them. Part of this must be to provide a range of positions from which to view the present, past and the hegemonic discourses through which we understand both. The point is not to further constrain thought so that “it no longer dares take flight unless it can fly straight to the haven of victory” (Levinas in Simon, 2006a, pg. 116) but to ensure that subjects have a range of democratic resources through which to analyse artefacts with others. An additional aim is to remake the field of the museum so that it is more hospitable to democratic discourses concerned with reinventing equality and liberty for the betterment of all – a debt we owe both those who came before, exist with us now and come after. In this, both a critical, radical democratic historical practice and one aiming at wonder and thought can provide spaces in which we fulfil this debt by continually accepting and rethinking what it means to be responsible for the other without guarantees.

Why genocidal state violence? Does this shake us from our enactments of daily structural violence?It can’t just be an acknowledging of the void at the heart of all decisions. There must be some political work too.

The present and the past do not appear in themselves but through sedimented discourses that are the result of past and ongoing struggle.

ways in which the present and past have been constructed and

and take actions to challenge dominant discourses

Levinas - Thought no longer dares take flight unless it can fly straight to the haven of victory 116

is one which I think enriches

within the museum between various forms of equality and liberty alongside artefacts that are meant to provoke uneasiness and resist uncritical appropriation.

One can always be more responsible but what is also needed are alternative ways of framing the failure to be responsible built upon an account of what the dominant frames or hegemonic discourses are within a given field. Simon remarks that it is important that his exhibit contains an introduction and that alternative holocaust discourses are necessary.

Moving outside the museum, when we pass a homeless person on the street we can ignore them, we can give them money or we can join with others and attempt to learn about why we have homelessness and how we can restructure our society so as to eliminate it. There is a range of responses. The hope is that the confrontation with the homeless person will produce a response that takes the form of learning more about homelessness with others and attempting to affect political change – rather than charity or dismissal. However, there is nothing in the situation itself that lends itself to this outcome. There can be an element that resists all attempts to respond fully to the other’s demand but this does not in itself lead to my working unsuccessfully towards one outcome over another. Failure and even recognizing one’s failure to be fully responsible

to the other does not necessarily result in a search for ways to be responsible outside the present paradigm. One could, for example, always give more money or food or even join with others to build cheap housing.

Everyday, structural violence. Not just state genocide but the issues raised by Burtynsky in his manufactured landscapes or Wasteland Vik Muniz (people involved in making art that tells their story but cannot tell their story (it is just a picture) but gets them to think about their lives).

Mouffe, in a short article in Art Forum, argues for a similar type of practice in art museums. Rather than abandoning the museum, we must combat the apolitical individualism that pervades them

, an artistic work appears as a particular object that necessarily eludes full meaning, generating discussion and informing what we take to be art but never

but is part of a field that has been hegemonized by an empty master signifier (Art), which derives its meaning from the particular works which count as art and a practice defined as artistic expression.

So yes open up but also provide a range of conflicting discourses

When I fail to be fully responsible, the failure to be fully responsible is already accounted for

It is not simply success but also failure that is

What is of concern is how the element that resists shows up. My failure to be fully responsible could simply lead to

I fail to be fully responsible in the way demanded of me, how does this failure present itself? Is

Did I not given enough money, should I have given more food, should I not have given anything or given less, should I offer up my home

the way in which the failure to take up the terrible gift and be responsible for the other presents itself.

Simon’s exhibit attempts to produce the same political outcome by initiating in the participant “a desire to know more, to become more certain and to form more conclusive judgments about what occurred. While such a desire is not satiable, it can lead to historical humility that requires further study, thought, and discussion” (2006b, pg. 202).

qualitative, quantitative

We need to see that even the attempts at closure also create particular openings (governmentality) – do not see the real but see the symbolic representation of the real

The space cannot be empty. IT cannot just be disruptive. We cannot be left to make the links with what we have.

We need a staging of agonism or dissensus to challenge alternatives to the present.

We have not learned from the holocaust. Well what should we have learned? What are some possibilities? Yes it is a neverending quest but in the absence of alternative offerings how do we combat the reformation of answers by the dominant discourse or the instantiation of a neverending discussion that is framed in individualist terms (me personally could have done more, given more to charity, worked harder to be less of a burden on others)

Need something incomprehensible to create with others something new. Violence challenging ways of knowing.

Need to think about how we keep open though because Azoulay

Additionally,

In fact, making explicit the ‘reference points’ of the democratic project (equality and liberty) and that all such stabilizations are the result of hegemonic struggle and necessarily partial limits a possible danger

in advocating for a practice in which the past, even if only a discernable trace, informs the present.

Paradoxically, hope requires a public history that refuses to disavow despair, resisting the allure of inscribing events with consoling transcendent meanings that erase a complex and contradictory finitude, one that can neither be escaped nor overcome. On such terms, hope inheres in the preservation of the historically particular through practices that both accept and resist the actualities of classification and enumeration. Such practices

Azoulay on how we hold open the present (as a transcendental defined as “art”), which can never be reached but which some share in. A reference point that is defined in individualist, aesthetic, apolitical terms. It operates exactly as does the example cohen offers

He says this – define through loss

For there to be thinking and communication with others about the historical artefacts, some shared sense must be made of them such that we can communicate with others. Perhaps the “reference points” Biesta borrows from Rancierre and Mouffe can provide a shared schema through which

between a subjectification and socialisation conception of civic learning and the difference.

Subject comes to be in the act of interpreting with others.

Already if it is a civic concern Simon is limiting what shows up.

They also arrive in the public realm making an unanticipated claim that may interrupt one’s self-sufficiency, demanding attentiveness to another’s life without reducing that life to a version of one’s own stories (117).

Focussing on state sponsored genocide, Simon

I argue below that these differences in ways that are, I think, less antagonistic than though both are needed.

Simon does not present his form as

Ignorant citizen

Our broadest goals are the inculcation not only of a historical sensibility but indeed a socio-philosophic one.

Kant – noumena – phenomena

State violence – everyday violence [does the work on the holocaust transfer or just affect the categories or ways in which we see the holocaust or state violence more generally]

Need space to trouble categories – to see that we make decisions without guarantees (what guarantees is created).

Here the doc on Indonesian genocide seems more shocking than the parataxis example. How do the victims and perpetrators live after this? Side by side?

But in addition to breaking down ways of being, we need to protect them and build them up. Look at what neoliberalism does – here we have a breaking down of past ways of being. A living on (see book on people that blame themselves and cruel optimism). Or radical hope – living after things stop happening.

If you breakdown, you still see through discourse (it is discourse all the way down) but are open to alternative discourses. You need some way of understanding the world --- refer to Simon’s jab at grand narratives (perhaps not a unity but a coalition or hegemonic bloc)

In these practices of remembrance there is a prospective orientation that seeks to legitimate and secure particular social relations, making normative claims on the conduct of human behaviour (115)

Simon on USE (shuts down meaning – collapse past to present)

As such, what appears as the past and is displayed in the museum is of great political interest.

The museum can also be a resource (Mouffe and Simon) but also presents challenges (Azoulay, Mouffe, Simon)

Marx’s

This would be a sphere of remembrance in which remnants of the past are put forward not as instances or illustrations of pre-established themes that define in advance what is to be learned, but rather as complex sets of testamentary material whose study contains the possibilities of fascination, surprise and perplexity (120).

Much then depends upon the substance of our practices of remembrance, practices that constitute which traces of the past are possible for us to encounter, how these traces are inscribed and reproduced for presentation, and with what interest, epistemological framing, and structure of reflexivity we might engage in these inscriptions (114).

Something else is required (115).

This work of inheritance can help open up existing relations and practices to continual critique and the difficult (and often conflict ridden) work of repair, renewal, and reinvention of desirable institutions (115).

Not only by opening the question to what and to whom I must be accountable, but also by considering what attention, learning, and actions such accountability requires (117).

Our exhibition begins with the premise that we have not yet understood how to face the realities of a genocidal fascism in a way that makes possible a hopeful relation between the past and future bearing possibilities for social and self transformation (118).

Help us re-see and rethink past events through provoking critical thought on the representations we currently have about them (190)

A responsible and responsive relation with lives lived in times and places other than our own. Such a relation carries specific demands on exhibition visitors. It asks that they enter into thought attentive to a threefold constellation of:

1. the ‘pastness’ of existence and our own position in the made world2. the immediacy of the testamentary address of historical remnants offered to us as

both demand and gift within the moment of engaging the exhibition3. the ways in which material traces of the past are bound up with one’s future world

as sources of meaning and commitment (190)

The presentation of the various materials in our exhibition must attempt to make evident the non-hierarchical interrelation of these aspects of the human experience in which there is no final lesson that would subsume these separate elements into an overarching unity (190).

This ‘us’ is that plurality which is created by an attentiveness and shared reference to this testament (195).

This difficult gift, demanding non-indifference, may open questions, interrupt conventions, and through dialogue and debate set thought the task of transforming the inadequate character of the terms on which I grasp myself and my world (196).

Possible in this situation is a loss in which one’s ego become bereft of what has previously offered much in the way of existential significance. As correlative to this, it is possible that practices of inheritance required by Kruk’s testament lead one to begin to define oneself within and through the very experience of loss. In situations when this happens, there is an abundant set of ambivalent possibilities and problems that accrue from accepting testament on such terms. These include: retribution, revenge, a traumatic repetition that enacts the desire for the recognition of oneself as wounded, melancholic

memory, but also the working through of the possibilities of mourning and social transformation, including taking action towards establishing a more just world (197).

Furthermore, even if one welcomes the address of Kruk’s testament as a demand and gift, it is clear that one can only reciprocate the giver through the work of claiming it as an inheritance and making of it some enduring legacy – a legacy that manifests itself in thoughts and actions, altering one’s way of being with others. (198)

Fidelity to the Event

Revolt against the brutal untruth of a subsuming form forced from above on the myriad facets of everyday life (200).

Our interest is in public histories of state sponsored (or tolerated) violence that accomplish something besides the enactment of moral dismay and/or the provision of solace indissolubly tied to the rearticulation of personal and/or social identifications (202).

You think it is it (the real – the absolute immediacy) but alas it is not. It is discourse all the way down.

The beginning of such thought resides in the experience of being faced by traces of the past not totally apprehensible through the internalized discourse that sets the terms on which I navigate everyday life and narrate my identity (203)

Museums. Civic life and the educative force of remembrance – R. Simon

Public practices of remembrance are always about the future.

Museums provoke and inform competing visions of our present and future civic life (114)

Democracy requires forms of remembrance that help open-up existing relations to public appraisal and possible transformation (114)

Museums are to hold open the present (119)

Questions:

1. Which traces of the past are possible for us to encounter?2. How are these traces inscribed and reproduced for presentation?3. With what interest, epistemological framing and structure of reflexivity might we

engage these inscriptions?

Two basic forms of public history

1. Reiterate iconic images and narratives to reinforce established frameworks of social cohesiveness (114)

2. Overtly interpretive and didactic form that makes possible conversations about “lessons of history”, providing grounds for a mutual understanding of communal life (115)

Both seek to legitimate and secure “particular social relations, making normative claims on the conduct of human behaviour” (115)

Democracy needs more that this!

Need forms of public history that require commitment and thought to open up existing relations and practices to continual critique and the work of repair, renewal and reinvention of desirable institutions.

We need to avoid creating a form of public history whose value is based on assumed transparent utility, a self-evident and measurable usefulness (116)

Levinasian analysis – documentary words and images arrive in the public realm making an unanticipated claim that may interrupt one’s self-sufficiency, demanding attentiveness to another’s life without reducing that life to a version of one’s own stories (117).

Terrible Gift [that nourishes a viable community of the living and the dead (pg. 120]– offers an opportunity to reconsider what it might mean to relate to and with the past, opening us to a reconsideration of the terms of our lives now as well as in the future (117)

Rather than a theatre of conscience or emotion, the exhibit begins with the premise that we have not yet understood how to face the realities of genocidal fascism in a way that makes possible a hopeful relation between the past and future bearing possibilities for social and self transformation.

Thought should be attentive to a threefold constellation:

1. The ‘pastness’ of existence and our own position in the made world2. The immediacy of an exhibition’s address as both a gift and demand3. The ways in which the past is bound up with one’s future as a source of meaning

and commitment (Form of life in which we structure our lives)

Wonder and Thought

Levinas- thought begins the very moment consciousness becomes conscious of its particularity…when thought becomes conscious of itself and at the same time conscious of the exteriority that goes beyond its nature” (119)

Letourneau’s question:

What does it mean, in light of the experience of the past, to be what we are now?

Thinking is not done alone but is done with others whose questions guide me (119)

Thought about history is not simply reminiscence but always the consciousness of something new

This newness unsettles the present, leaving us both insecure and possibly hopeful.

This hope is not a wishful consolation but an anxious ambivalent state in which one resides in a predisposition to actions not yet conceived and taken.

There is no futurity (no break from the endless repetition of a violent past) without memories that are not one’s own but nevertheless are accepted as one’s though-provoking inheritance (120)

Azoulay – [Art] Museum

Point of the article:

Reconstruct a general framework of interplay and exchange between the object of the gaze and its subject, conditions of visibility, and limits of the sayable (including traces of silences and concealment, of the unsayable and the invisible), and to understand how such a framework makes possible and delimits interventions in this complex web of interrelations.

Foucault and Bourdieu

Learning to see art – to become a subject of art

Training for art gives rise to the assumption of the transcendency of art (that art exists outside of and prior to learning it) (268)

The artistic object is produced by means of the discourse of its institutions and speakers, who acknowledge it as a distinctive object that ‘points to’ (270)

Acts in the public space reduced to freedom of expression

Distinction between:

1. the political position that may ostensibly express itself in an artist’s work2. the artist’s work as an act of pointing to a phenomenon

Argument revolves around, not the content, but the artist’s unequivocal, unlimited right to express whatever he desires because his work doesn’t constitute a political act or statement but a form of artistic expression (270)

Two axis in debate on the museum

1. relativist value2. universal value

Both believe the object has immanent value.

The museum is a temple; the curator, sometimes the critic, and sometimes the artist are the high priests; art itself, the idea governing the act, is the sanctity that is hidden from the eye, which all expect the exhibited work to reveal (274)

Each time one agent assumes the position of the final arbiter authorized to interpret the object’s will and who can determine the conditions for its authentic existence (274)

A supervisory, selective and deliminiting apparatus inside the museum classifies the candidates for inclusion in the game played on the field of art and chooses from among them those authorized to assume speaker positions in the artistic discourses (276) [Bourdieu].

Museal exchange relations (279) producing objects injected into the bloodstream of the art world [these objects change from signifier to signified]

In the framework of these exchange relations, each of those occupying the different positions acknowledges and affirms the other’s position and thus also affirms the essence and character of the exchange relations and the exchange currency traded in their framework (the work of art) (277).

“Art” = absent signified – objects of art are signifiers

The image is not a statement. From the moment they enter the museum they are presented as statements about what is external to them (“art”), to which they point (279).

Key point: it is the museum as a field that, along with its subjects, objects, discourses, practices and material construction, imbues the image with meaning.

They can succeed only if they fail (280). They have succeeded in providing additional testimony to the eternal gap between the viewer’s work and the artist’s work, which is the justification of them both.

The arts of governing have promised freedom in return for control over the arts (Foucault – governmentality)

Critics are responsible, then, on behalf of the discursive police, for creating the existence of the truth of the individual and turning it into a secret that will always exceed the words that seek to expose it (282).

This supervision is not a restriction of art (for art has chosen, in any event, to act in a restricted framework) but is the defense of an entire array of demarcations that make it possible, in a world that is poor in differences, to produce differences that have a transcendent status (283).

These are historic conditions that are anchored in the logic of capitalist consumer society and the logic of the museum site (283).

That gaze and that interpretation are constrained and enabled by a set of discursive rules that guarantee the inner depth or deep interiority of both the subject and object of art and that block that inner quality’s way to the surface (284).

Creates lack (empty signified) and offers the means with which to fill this but the means always fails. And through this failure succeeds in keeping open the lack (the empty transcendental signified ‘Art’).

Historicizes lack. It is a result of the museum field.

Keep open space of anxiety – space of not knowing – space of contemplation – conversation – openness to the other. But in the Azul piece this space (gap between discourse or knowledge and the object or other) is taken over by strategic interests (it is part of the field of art – Bourdieu). It is kept open so that everyone can remain in their spaces, fulfil their roles, exchange their symbolic capital. It is kept open but the lack is a particular lack (transcendental, infinite, apolitical aesthetic)

Another discursive regime (photography) undermines and shakes the rules of the artistic game (284-285)

Depth is unfolded as another surface

Repetition takes the place of singularity and uniqueness

Demarcated location for the appearance of the image becomes the network’s terminals and links

Time lapse makes present the gap between a seemingly stabilized object and the photographer’s apparently external point of view (285).

The eye is connected to one network, the hand to another (287)

Everyone doesn’t see, just as everyone sees.

The murderer becomes an accomplice to the photographic act.

Then the photographer would regain his glory by illuminating this judiciary work and supervising it. On whose behalf?

The last section highlights the ethical responsibility we have. Our implication in what is happening and need to do something. We cannot pretend that art is for “art’s sake” – no neutrality.

Holocaust education – angry at German teacher. What division, what hegemonic vision and division of the social is at play here? Germany as defined by the Nazi (the Volk) vs. Jewish people. Why is this the division that we want to recreate?

Israel – Palestine. But are these the boundaries? There are divisions within these groups.

History is part of the hegemonic struggle. What appears in history is a matter of politics.

What appears also as absence, lack or transcendental signifier is also important. Yes all attempts to fill it fall short but what is important is the way in which these falling short are constructed.

Foucault – governmentality – empower people to work towards goals (a lack) that is given.

Look at the paper on hospitality. Unlimited hospitality is limited because of national citizenship constraints. We could always do more. Give more people full citizenship. Include more but there will always be some who are outside. What about how unlimited hospitality is hegemonized here? As inclusion in the nation state?

Mouffe and simon

Simon – creates/holds open the empty space for discussion (for agonism) by shocking us and breaking down our barriers (person must receive the terrible gift – be disposed) --- space gives us the tools to create narratives

Mouffe – need to treat the space as agonistic (enact certain divisions of us v. them)

Azoulay – Empty space is hegemonized – it is left open for a discussion that is already framed

The space cannot simply be open. It is never simply open but is always itself hegemonized. The example of elections is a particular type of suspension or creation of an empty space. Russel Brand is criticized for not voting but he is dismayed at how this particular space has been hegmonized. Mouffe – you need to re-hegemonize it.

The ‘people’ is the empty space (volk discussion)

The empty space itself is a historical creation (democratic revolution – equality and liberty)

Read Todd on Levinas with Mouffe