Nicole Deufel's Blog

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.