Nicole Deufel's Blog

Last December, I finally took the opportunity to travel to Washington, DC with the specific purpose of visiting its museums. I was particularly looking forward to seeing the National Museum of African American History and Culture (NMAAHC) which opened in 2016. Here are some thoughts and observations that I’ve had during and since my visit.

There is something immensely powerful to have such an architecturally impressive building dedicated exclusively to a story that in my time in the United States almost 15 years ago felt largely absent from the public narrative. Its position on the National Mall, right across from the Washington Monument with open space all around that increases the building’s visiblity, gives the museum further prominence. I was really struck by how much this combination – the location, the architecture, the thematic focus – seemed to signal the importance of the African American perspective.

It goes without saying that simply opening a museum does not change anything about the on-going racism and discrimination experienced by black Americans today. And quite possibly there are issues too with how the story of African American history and culture is told within the museum.

Nevertheless, to me – and I write here purely as a white, foreign visitor with only limited prior knowledge – the sheer existence of the NMAAHC felt like an important acknowledgment in and of itself. Personally, I did feel the interpretation went far beyond a simplistic reduction of African American history and culture to slavery. The sheer fact that the exhibition begins with a look at African society beyond its relationship to Europe raises the story above a narrative of European  exploitation and African pain, of master and slave. The exhibition for me gave a deep sense of black dignity and power while not ever shying away from showing the inhumane treatment black Americans have faced and are still facing, from lynchings to segregation to police violence.

I do not see how any white European or white American can walk through the NMAAHC without having their own identity and heritage narratives challenged. And that, too, is a powerful outcome of having an entire museum dedicated to a story that lies outside the dominant hegemony. Going through the NMAAHC forces you to compare what you see with what you may have been thinking about your people, your country and your history for your entire life. You cannot help but realize that here, you are the other, and an other who is (the descendent of) a perpetrator whose actions reverberate into your present.

That, too, was a humbling experience. Not the perpetrator part – as a German, sadly, I’ve had that experience several times before. I mean the experience of being ‘the other’. How sobering to feel so acutely that this wasn’t my space. From the history and culture on the wall to the truly noticeable increase in the number of black people within the museum: that I as a white person should be so aware of that just shows how much black history and experience, even black presence is usually absent from my life, both personally and professionally. That’s truly shocking to me.

One of the messages of the NMAAHC as I perceived it was that the history of black Americans in all its complexity is an intrinsic part of wider American history. Slaves built much of the United States. Black soldiers fought in the country’s wars. This message is now clearly part if not of the official discourse of the United States – I don’t know – but certainly of the narrative given in the (Smithsonian) museums, be it in the National Museum of American History or even the American Art Museum. I wasn’t too sure what to make of the other aspect of this message, that of course slavery was a contradiction to the claim in the Declaration of Independence that ‘all men are created equal’ and that this contradiction is still an element and representation of the nation’s complicated and faulty endeavour to live up to the ideals of its founding fathers today. This is true, no doubt, and yet it felt too much like an excuse rather than the call for change that is needed.

All in all, my visit to the NMAAHC has once again convinced me that museums have a significant role to play in increasing awareness and acknowledgement of those groups within society whose stories and experiences are suppressed or muted. Every museum has that task, including those who are not exclusively dedicated to the topic.

Earlier this year I reported on The Promised Land project of which I am part. [1] At the end of September, the steering group met to reflect on the project to date and also to discuss and prepare the training that we will host in Germany at the beginning of next year.

I am so pleased to be part of this project. Here are some reasons why.

1. The importance of looking beyond our own discourses and methods

One external criticism that I’ve heard frequently and forcefully of this project is that ‘a theatre/university/business consultancy has nothing to do with museum work’. The argument is that we – museums – cannot learn from these other sectors.

In reality, I have learnt loads. What is more, I have learnt entirely unexpected things, precisely because the work of the partners is rooted in a different way of thinking about culture, its socio-political position, and the role that people play in all of this. That all partners are also from different countries adds another critical layer to this. So, for example, activism is a natural part of theatre practice, where in our sector this is still to a large degree theoretical, leading to much head-scratching and questioning. The Turkish perspective, too, is sufficiently different to give flesh to the notion of ‘eurocentrism’.

In consequence, seriously challenging questions are posed of all of our practices. In being open to discussing these questions, and probing deep into our discursive framings, I find that supposedly self-evident constellations are beginning to unravel. This is the prerequisite to developing a discipline and field of practice further into the future. Otherwise, we are simply staying in our own echo chambers. Let that bubble burst.

2. The privilege to explore some painful truths in a supportive environment

On the second day of our two-day committee meeting, we focused on discussing the training week in Germany. This meant it was all about the German context, and some of the things we will look at while the group is here. This quickly and unexpectedly became really personal. For example, I described the #MeTwo movement to the committee, in which Germans born to migrant parents share their experiences of not being regarded as ‘real’ Germans. I tried to relate a story of speaking to a friend, and – lo and behold – I had to stop when I realized that I was just about to describe him as ‘Italian’. Yes, I had critically examined my own position as a majority German in all of this for some time, but it was through the questions of the group, and the actual participation of the Italian partners, that I realized just how much further I still have to travel, not the least in dealing with language and the concepts it forces on us.

How necessary this confrontation with our own positioning and limitations is, is also captured in a brief exchange, when the group explored a particularly sensitive issue in the German context. I found myself saying, “I’m becoming really uncomfortable with this discussion”, to which another partner replied, “But that is what it is all about.” And it is. It gives us a different perspective, which in turn makes it possible for us to gain a different insight altogether, and perhaps a different appreciation for another’s position – even if we do not espouse that position ourselves. Of particular note was that all of us together by now have managed to create an environment that is as supportive and caring as it is critical and challenging. In so many ways, this is precisely what the agonistic exchange is all about, and what I am advocating in agonistic interpretive practice.

3. Letting a project take you places

Undoubtedly one of the most immediate impacts of the project on me personally, but I think also on our institution, is that we have reached out to partners locally that we wouldn’t normally have reached out to. Through seeing the work of the partners, but also through engaging with the topics that have come up through the project, and thinking about how we can move these conversations forward when the group comes to Germany, we have been motivated to search out institutions and organisations locally that deal with some of these issues. Each time, we have had new and interesting conversations, which have brought insights and ideas that we could not have anticipated beforehand. At the moment, it looks like this will lead to follow-on projects, too, which gives The Promised Land project a rather nice sustainability.

4. And why not do things differently?

There is an undoubted challenge in applying to museums the different methods we have seen in use at the partners’ organisations. The easy thing would be to say it’s not possible, or worse, not relevant. However, the more fitting approach is to consider how some of these methods could be adapted to change our own practice for the better. I am thinking for example of the exercises we did at the beginning of the training in Bologna, hosted by the theatre company Teatro dell’Argine. Their intention was to help people get to know each other – which surely is what we want to do at museums and heritage sites too. We ‘performed’ our own names to each other, each time with a different emotion; we, as a group, moved closely together as we ‘looked’ through a window, trying to see what the person in front described. It worked fantastically well to quickly establish an emotional connection between us. Why shouldn’t we do something similar at the start of a guided tour or a workshop in a museum? Wouldn’t this help us create the agonistic public space in which people trust and respect one another? We always talk about museums and heritage sites being places for connecting with and meeting others. The methods used in theatre practice to me are definitely worth a shot.

As regular readers of this blog will know, it is my very firm belief that in heritage interpretation we must strive to tell a balanced story. This concept is also known as ‘multivocality’: presenting multiple perspectives on something.

When I discussed multivocality in interpretation with my peers in the past, I have sometimes been accused of relativism. In this line of argument, there exists an objective truth which provides legitimacy to a certain set of perspectives but not to others. To insist on the legitimacy of multiple perspectives consequently must mean to deny truth: it means to deny facts.

A few years ago, I simply dismissed such views. Study after study shows that heritage is not a clean-cut thing. We cannot pretend that heritage is always homogenous, nor can we continue to insist that it is determined by scientific values and nothing else. From post-colonial to feminist critiques, from discourse analysis and representational theory to the challenges to the Authorized Heritage Discourse coming out of critical heritage studies: we know that heritage is personal, emotional, dissonant and contested. In other words, more often than not, it is made up of multiple perspectives. And it is not, in general, based purely on facts. This is not because of any denial of facts. Rather, facts are appropriated, reinterpreted and recontextualized to acquire new meaning.

A few years ago, I would have stopped there. The studies are clear, and so is my interpretive answer. Full stop.

Except, today we are well into the post-factual age. The sector has been grappling with this for some time, and so have I. So when, a few months ago, Michiko Kakutani’s book The Death of Truth was published, I immediately read it in search for further input to help me formulate my new answer to the challenge of relativism.

It didn’t disappoint. The book provides an excellent overview of the Culture Wars in which people broke free of the unquestioned dominance of science. It also traces the development from well-founded critique of ideas of universal truth to the extreme rejection of any verifiable fact, or, as Kakutani writes, ‘the celebration of opinion over knowledge, feelings over facts’ (p. 63). From here, she steps right into a description of the post-factual age: the ‘sheer shamelessness and decibel level’ of right-wing media (p. 111) and our existence ‘sealed in impermeable filter bubbles by Facebook news and Google search data’ (p. 105). She reviews the historical strategy of propaganda based on lies and concludes that, this strategy was ‘to distract and exhaust [a nation’s] own people…to wear them down through such a profusion of lies that they cease to resist and retreat back into their private lives’ (p. 141). She sees a similar strategy applied in modern contexts, where lies are joined by bombast and sheer outrageousness, which equally wear people down until they retreat.

The sane person’s gut reaction is to insist on facts. There are facts. There are standards. There is a way to behave accordingly. And then there is everything else. Kakutani herself presents a cautionary tale when she cites a 2011 BBC Trust report which concluded that on climate change ‘the network’s science coverage paid “undue attention to marginal opinion”’ (p. 75) in the very effort to present a balanced story.

So, out with multivocality because it is incompatible with facts? After some reflection, I still say: no. First of all, we know from recent experience (and the review in Kakutani’s book makes this painfully obvious as well) that simply insisting on facts doesn’t make people accept them. Secondly, facts can be and actually are interpreted differently by different people. Facts do change according to a changing context, for example when further facts emerge. It is how science has evolved over centuries, and with it our understanding of the world. The key point to note is that a different interpretation of facts is not the same as ‘alternative facts’ or more bluntly, lies. We can have, and should promote, verifiable facts as our common ground. But we cannot insist that our interpretation of a certain fact is the only acceptable interpretation. We must not force others to adopt our attribution of meaning. We cannot ignore what we have learnt in recent decades about the influence that discourse and power relations have on reality and our perception of it. Particularly not in heritage, which is the subject that interpretation deals with.

This is where I still reject the charge of relativism against multivocality. Facts do have a place in multivocal interpretation. But to present them in an unassailable interpretation as ‘truth’ is to go backwards. And the BBC’s findings on telling a balanced story? If this were heritage, they would have been guided by heritage values of the relevant communities. The ‘marginal opinions’ would have consequently be presented as just that. Full stop.

#MeTwo was launched on 24th July in Germany, two days after Mesut Özil had announced his retirement from the German National Football Team due to racism. I am wondering if this could be the Ferguson moment for German museums.

Why Ferguson? Because Ferguson kicked something loose. On one hand, it shone a light on continued institutional racism in the United States. It wasn’t as if we didn’t know there was racism in the US, of course. And yet with Ferguson there seemed a palpable change, with people refusing to remain silent. Not only that – there was a demand, and this demand was directed at White Americans to take responsibility and take action. And then, of course, there was the movement that it brought to the museum sector: the very thoughtful Joint Statement of Museum Bloggers, the #museumsrespondtoferguson Twitter chats, the MASS action project.

I think – I hope – that #MeTwo can have the same calvanizing effect for German museums. At the moment, I believe German museums, or more accurately the professionals that work there, are almost philosophically encumbered when it comes to acknowledging and thus dealing with racism. There is a strong self-image of enlightened liberalism based on thorough education, combined with a memory culture centred on the country’s Nazi past. Aleida Assmann wrote that this focus on the Nazis provides a type of “safety distance” which suggests that “we” are different and safe from similar behaviours. This conviction is so all-encompassing, that Fatima El-Tayeb in her book Undeutsch. Die Konstruktion des Anderen in der Post-Migrantischen Gesellschaft observes that whenever anything happens which might dent the liberal-enlightened view of German society – like racism, for example – this is laid squarely at the door of a supposed „faulty” German: from the former GDR, or Russia, or the less-educated, or, yes, the second-generation immigrant-Germans. In other words, it is constructed as not actually a German problem at all [1].

This touches on a second issue. Aleida Assman asserts that (German) historians reject the idea of a “German collective identity”, which in many ways they hold responsible for the rise of the Nazis and the Holocaust. And it is certainly true that in the cultural sector, any discussion of a German identity is viewed with suspicion, and therefore generally avoided [2]. However, this very rejection of identity in relation to the dominant memory culture is, in fact, itself fundamentally about identity. This is not made visible though. Like any discourse, it has practical effects on behaviours, attitudes and people, yet these are allowed to continue to work hidden in the background without neither proper examination nor challenge.

This is where we’re beginning to come back to Mesut Özil and #MeTwo. Özil observed that whenever he is successful, he is German; when he is not, he is an immigrant. He questioned why in German discourse he cannot be both – German and Turkish; why his identification with his Turkish heritage should make his commitment to “German” values questionable and require him to continually reaffirm them. Basically, he is not only calling out a racist bias in German culture, he is raising a challenge to how we define – and live – Germanness.

These questions should be visible and debated in museums. And I am certain that this will require far more from us than just giving assurances of our (liberal, enlightened, educated) support to Germans with a migrant background, and staging exhibitions about Turkish guest workers in the 1960s. It requires rattling our own self-image and having a critical look at how our thinking, quite likely unintentionally, contributes to structural racism in Germany – or at the very least, does nothing to end it.

I take heart from the fact that a large number of publications, and in fact many mainstream politicians, too, are paying attention to #MeTwo and apparently listening. What comes of it is not yet clear, particularly in the museum sector. It is a chance, however, and one that I hope we’ll take.

Notes

[1] This, it must be emphasised, of course excludes and judges not only the people in question, but everyone else who belongs to that group.

[2] Politicians have less of an issue, as the recurring, and somewhat infamous discussion of a German Leitkultur, or guiding culture shows. What is lamentable is that this suggestion of a “German” culture and identity in many ways is just the kind of narrow and exclusive notion of identity that many in the cultural sector have in mind when they, in consequence, reject identity altogether as divisive and dangerous.

Whenever I have presented on my vision for agonistic interpretation, that is, interpretation that strives to include all relevant views on a heritage aspect, there was at least one person in the room who challenged me: was I really proposing to include all views? Even those that are “objectionable”? What I have never once been challenged on, however, is whether positioning the museum, which I consider an equally important element of agonistic interpretation, is compatible with presenting a multivocal, somewhat balanced story. So I’m going to challenge myself here and explore this point further in this post.

To do so, I must first go back to discussing ‘neutrality’ in museums. Broadly speaking, the sector as a whole is coming to accept that museums (and heritage sites) are not neutral spaces [1]. Through curatorial selection and the very act of interpretation museums are making a statement. There is a misconception, however, that now sometimes arises: it is the idea that multivocality means an approximation of neutrality. In other words, it can seem to some that including multiple voices equates to being, at the very least, “as neutral as possible”. The underlying notion, of course, is still that neutrality is the goal we are trying to achieve in museums in the first place.

It is not. It cannot be our goal, for two reasons. For one, neutrality in any guise is an illusion. We as individuals and institutions always have a bias, period. Our bias may not be intentional, it may be an inescapable fact about ourselves like class, race or anything else that, at least for the time being, puts us in a different and likely privileged position in relation to other people in our society. Pretending that we can achieve neutrality through including other voices is therefore to deny the reality of inequality and the inherent power relations, and the very existence of the hegemonic struggle [2].

The second reason why neutrality, if it did exist, could not and should not be our goal is because as cultural institutions we have a duty to be agents in our societies. That museums do and should make an impact on society has been part of the idea of museums since they first opened their doors to ‘educate’ the public. Now we’ve taken this further, to aim for and claim impacts such as social inclusion and justice. These impacts, however, cannot be achieved through an assumed neutrality, as I have argued here. They require action, and action requires taking a stand.

Which brings me back to my question of whether we can reconcile agonistic interpretation with museums positioning themselves with regard to a certain topic. For all I have laid out above, my answer must be a resounding Yes. In fact, I’ll go one step further and argue that it is a prerequisite for successful agonistic interpretation.

By positioning our institution at the beginning (or end) of an intervention of any kind, we achieve several important outcomes: firstly, we are taking that stand necessary to take action within society and to create impact. We express our values as institutions and make it very clear what it is we believe in, what we support, and what changes in society we are seeking to affect.

This, secondly, creates much needed transparency. Transparency is about being honest and taking the agonistic exchange seriously by not pretending that our own views, biases and positions within society do not exist and did not influence our selection and presentation. Rather, this transparency goes some way to acknowledging our bias and opening ourselves to being challenged in turn.

This brings me to the third outcome, which is that by positioning ourselves we also give more credit to all other perspectives that are being presented. I believe that by taking away the usually hidden claim to and assertion of authority we create a better environment for debate. Positioning our institution signals that much of what people see, read and hear in our interpretive offer are expressions of different perspectives on reality. Our institutional perspective is but one of these. And this, fundamentally, is the core of the theory of agonistics.

Notes
[1] With notable exceptions, and a delightfully frank comment here.
[2] The hegemonic struggle, i.e. the struggle to win dominance over other views, is at the heart of the idea of agonistics.