Museum Cultural Difference

Hit and Run--Museums and Cultural DifferenceAuthor(s): Irit RogoffSource: Art Journal, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 63-73Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/778213 .Accessed: 05/08/2013 17:24

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The guide of the English language tour at the Berlin Jewish Museum clearly had been asked to be particularly attentive to the audience's responses and subjectivities. Like a Northern Californian psychotherapist of the Jungian ilk, he would stop every few minutes, look at us with great concern and ask: "And how do you feel about this?"

His audience was a motley crew from about a dozen countries with neither a shared language nor a set of shared historical references. What we did have in common in the summer of 2000 was an immense anxiety about the forthcoming experience of the tour. As a result of various press reportages, this build-

Irit Rogoff

Hit and Run--Museums

and Cultural Difference

ing had been circulating in the media and popular imagination as a Disneyesque horror ride, encompassing loss of orientation, destabilized gravity, claustrophobia, extreme shifts between dark and light, and the specter of the much publicized Holocaust Tower.

I had spent the morning at the museum's curatorial office, called in to discuss a lecture series on space, which the organiz- ers in the education department kept calling "your new space

work." My chronically unruly mind, which was further affected by the prescribed disorientation of the building, was suddenly full of visions of Roger Vadim's luscious lollipop space extravaganza of the i96os, Barbarella. I wondered, would "my space work" allow me to float around the awe- inspiring Berlin museum in a blond wig and leather space suit a la Jane Fonda to the accompaniment of sweet, innocent sixties pop music? The groundlessness of the museum and the conjunctions of gravity loss in outer space collapsed into one another.

Light-headed from these fantasies that had been heightened by the building's absence of displayed objects which might have served

Interior view of the Berlin Jewish Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind. Courtesy of the Berlin Jewish Museum, Germany. Photo Bitter Bredt Photography.

to hold down and anchor the space, I quickly decided to join one of the tour groups going through the building.' In my ethnographic haste I overlooked the visitor's badge that had been pinned on me when I entered the museum's offices, which identified the bearer as part of the building staff, and would pro- vide perfect camouflage. As the tour proceeded, a small dissenting faction among the visitors emerged. Three Israelis were clearly disturbed and agitated by the experience. They had started behaving in a disruptive manner, laughing and talk- ing, while the knowledgeable one among them, probably an architect, lectured the other two about architecture: who had influenced Libeskind in this wall, in that detail, where he had borrowed the overall concept from, etc. When we got to the void known as the Holocaust Tower the dissent turned hostile. "What," exclaimed the knowledgeable visitor, "had this beautiful building to do with the

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I. The Berlin Jewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind, was originally opened when empty, without any of its planned displays. Subsequently it was closed for installation and reopened in Autumn 200 I1 with galleries of objects on display.


Holocaust?" The tour guide panicked; this was not part of the anticipated sce- nario. Like a deer caught in headlights he held the Israelis' eyes throughout the rest of the tour, addressing them exclusively with ever more elaborate explana- tions. The three visitors kept muttering in Hebrew: "These Germans, torturing us with their guilt." At the end of the tour the threesome made a stand. "The museum" they said "was not an attempt to come to terms with Berlin's lost Jewish history or with its Jewish population, largely lost through murder or migration, not a coming to terms with the Holocaust; it was, in fact, an act of disavowal." The other visitors in the group were shocked, the guide pale. Any form of discussion seemed impossible in the face of such accusations and negations and I retreated to the U-bahn to reflect on my latest encounter with the ambivalences and disavowals that always seem to surface when museums engage with issues of cultural difference. Whether that engagement has to do with lost histories, destroyed heritages, the uneasy co-habitations of contemporary culture, the efforts to think through where anyone might belong beyond the legitimation of the state or of inherited rights-it is always an embattled terrain in which those who are being represented and those conceptualizing the representation seem to perform very different claims and vested interests.

Here then is the crux of my question regarding museums' encounters with cultural difference. Moving beyond the supposition that absences need to be compensated for by the constitution of symbolic presences, and beyond the understanding that memory can directly or indirectly be recovered-we are left with the task of working and living with absence.2

Conventionally viewed, the culmination of violent historical acts and the aftermath of void demand to be marked and compensated for. While neither is a very active entity for the next steps of cultural production, they are the driving forces behind any critical inquiry-from the psychoanalytic to the deconstructive. A critical perception of the possibilities for museums to engage with cultural difference must therefore recognize the shift from the compensatory projects of atoning for absences and replacing voids, to a performative one in which loss is not only enacted, but is made manifest from within the culture that has remained a seemingly invulnerable dominant. To some extent I am arguing that museums' engagement with cultural difference cannot deal exclusively with that which has been lost, marginalized, or vilified. It must actually deal with the effects of those histories and dynamics on the cultures that perpetrated these elisions and remained seemingly inviolate in their wake. To put it more simply, I maintain that the encounter with cultural difference cannot be done by representing a loss or an absence, but needs to come about by the museum acknowledging and enacting a loss of some part of itself.

By attempting to perform a lack the Berlin Jewish Museum has entered another structure, that of disavowal-partaking of the pleasure of the museum's unlimited accumulation, acknowledging the danger of attempting to compensate for an absence, and insisting on inhabiting both. The nineteenth-century project of collecting and archiving, the twentieth-century Modernist project of canon formation, and the turn-of-the-twenty-first century's insistence on staging memory, have in this instance given way to a performative mode.

Plenitude, the museum's hallmark, has transformed into lack-a building, performing a museum, performing a plenitude, performing a lack. After the fall

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2. I have dealt with aspects of these arguments at greater length in the following essays: "Body Missing-Uncanny Histories and Cultural Hauntings" in Kunst Als Beute, ed. Sigrid Schade, Vienna 2002; "Moving On-Migration and the Intertextuality of Trauma" in Vera Frenkel ... from the Transit Bar, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and Power Plant, Toronto, 1994; and "The Aesthetics of Post History-A German Perspective," in Vision and Textuality, eds. S. Melville and B. Readings, (London: MacMillan, 1994).


of the Berlin Wall, with great efforts at lessening the discrepancy between two very different German heritages regarding histories of both fascism and anti- Semitism, the Berlin Jewish Museum building functions very differently. Its pleasure is that age-old moralizing panacea of "doing the right thing" and it does so at two levels simultaneously-with displayed objects documenting an absent history and a provocative architecture which insists on the void remaining just that.

The danger of such incompatible dualities is that these forms of historical ownership split off the commemorated or the reinstated from the living and from ongoing histories on every street corner. By fencing in and compensating for a community of victims who have been made invisible, the museum also dis- misses the continuation of those communities in hybridized modes all over the world. There are, of course, large populations of the homeless and unaccepted living a very short distance from the museum, wherever that museum might be situated. By insisting that the events commemorated are part of a historical past, the museum cuts itself off from contemporary parallels and limits the range of our understanding of just how complex and far reaching those continuities might be: whether guest workers, street peddlers, or refugees in every European city; or the New York psychoanalytic culture which became one of Central Europe's greatest diasporas in the 193os and 1940s. Since the Berlin Jewish Museum takes both courses simultaneously, it remains our task to reinscribe its performative disavowal as we now intersect its previously empty/currently full spaces.

I have begun with this ethnography of my recent visit to the Berlin Jewish Museum and the dramas of difference which it staged because it allows me a slightly oblique entry point into the problematic of museums and cultural difference. The obliqueness, as it were, is a move away from the triple confronta- tion of displaced subjects, hegemonic histories, and institutions of display and representation. Those confrontations seem to do little more than assert that the museum is indeed the site of universal plenitude and that its role should be one of re-inscribing the excluded within its staging of more complete, inclusive, and just histories. But other dynamics are also available. At Goldsmiths College a few years ago we had a visit from Chris Dercon, the director of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. Knowing that we are particularly preoccupied with issues of cultural difference in relation to contemporary art and critical theory, he put forward a discussion of a problematic that he and his colleagues were currently preoccupied with-namely how to, in his words, "bring into the museum" the large Surinamese community living in Rotterdam, and how to make them feel that it is their cultural space as well. We were all quite surprised by the terms of the direction of this supposed cultural traffic. Why, asked our students, did the Rotterdam Museum think it needed to "bring in" these cultural presences and make itself more fully culturally representative, rather than go out and slightly unravel its own boundaries, its illusions of infinitely expandable plenitude. The question, posed in very good faith by the director of a major European museum-which has been scrupulous about staging exhibitions that are both inclusive and deconstructive of the European cultural heritage-affords us an opportunity, which museums rarely allow, to share dilemmas in revisiting urgent social issues from the perspectives of displayed culture. Nevertheless there is also the risk of collapsing into what my colleague

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Sarat Maharaj calls "multi-cultural managerialism," which we need to resist with all our might.3

In relation to cultural difference within western cultural institutions, we seem to have made a smooth transition from exclusion to inclusion, from xeno- phobia to xenophilia in one fell swoop and without unravelling ourselves or our institutional practices in the process. The former state was characterized by the complete exclusion of all others except as the raw materials of Western cultural consciousness, as in the concept of primitivism, the development of the science called "anthropology," missionary education or conversion, and markets of global capital based on the raw materials of either local or migrant labor. More currently, the xenophilia prevalent in museums has expressed itself in dozens of exhibitions with the word other in their titles that address neither the sources of the initial exclusion nor their traumatic effects but attempt to redress the balance through strategies of compensatory visibility.

Contrary to its own self-perception as revisionary, this infinitely expansive inclusiveness practiced by so many exhibiting institutions is actually grounded in an unrevised notion of the museum's untroubled ability simply to add others without losing a bit of the self. It is based on a romantic belief that we can simply insert other histories into the grand narratives of Modernism and its various crises and collapses over the past thirty years, an assumption that ignores the conflict between hegemonic and marginally located cultures. What is especially disturbing about this additive model is that it leaves intact the concept of plenitude at the heart of the museum project. Therefore it assumes a possibility of change without loss, without alteration, without remapping the navigational principles that allow us to make judgments about quality, appropriateness, inclusion, and revision.

In trying to locate other models of staging the actual workings of twentieth- century political and cultural encounters, I recently saw the exhibition The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994, which began in

Germany (Villa Stuck, Munich and Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin), continued to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and was, at the time of this writing, at P.S. I in NewYork.4 The opening historical moment of the exhibition is mid-twentieth century with the independence movements and wars of national liberation that were taking place throughout the colonized continent of Africa. The informing notion of Africa in The Short Century was very wide and included parts of North Africa more commonly considered part of the Middle East. This means that beyond a named place, a continent called Africa, we have a world of mutual histories and linked narratives-a sphere of global exchange and circulation that both challenges the hegemonic supremacy of the colonizer's culture and acknowledges the complex internal network of inter-African migrations, circulations, influences, and exchanges. In my reading of the exhibition, it operates through staging a series of losses to various fundamental assumptions that the West has about itself and through which it has traditionally constituted a place named Africa as its quintessential other. Thus, in the first instance, a fundamental Western assumption that has been lost here is one of the prevailing modes of European/African interlocution, namely the constitution of Africa in resistance to Western colonization. African scholars and Africanists from the West have produced a very large body of knowledge about the continent, its histories, and its

66 FALL 2002

3. To give credit to the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum, it has been responsible for some very reflexive exhibitions of late dealing precisely with issues of cultural unraveling, including most recently Unpacking Europe, exhibition and catalogue by Salah Hassan and Iftikar Dadi, 2001. 4. See the catalogue The Short Century: Independence and Liberation Movements in Africa 1945-1994, ed. Okuwi Enwezor (Munich: Prestel, 200 1) and Carol Becker, "A Conversation with Okwui Enwezor," Art ournal, vol. 61, 2 (Summer 2002), 8-27.


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Installation view of the Short Century exhibition at the P.S. I Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NewYork.

cultures. Nevertheless, within much of cultural representation, Africa remains viewed primarily either as a historicist resource or as a zone in conflict with the West, as well as one to which the West can point in terms of "widespread tragedy" utterly divorced from its own imbrications.

Second, we encounter a complex network of mutually informative ideologi- cal articulations and political struggles that extends beyond the continent, with links to African American and African Latin American political and intellectual work. One example is Chinua Achebe's remarkable tribute, "Postscript: James Baldwin." Here an African writer brought up within the cultural prejudices of British colonialism, sets out to travel the world under the aegis of the very inter- national agencies that had invented the concept of development in which they located him. He finally encounters the United States through his pursuit of and meeting with James Baldwin, who himself was shortly to flee for what he hoped would be the more welcoming host-culture of Paris. Similarly, in The Short Century, complex networks of travel and exchange, mutualities enacted largely through

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5. Chinua Achebe, "Postscript: James Baldwin," in Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing, ed. Philomena Mariani (Seattle: Bay Press, 199 1), 278-81.


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Installation view of the Short Century exhibition at the P.S. I Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NewYork.

the back doors of culture, point to the fact that the West is part of a route and a process but hardly the only destination. The divisions of colonialism and more recently of the Cold War do not actually map out the globe as people in the West believe. Such belief structures had been made possible through traditional assumptions which, to quote J. M. Blaut's "Colonizer's Vision of the World," are grounded in "The unique historical advantage of the West-the West makes history, it advances, progresses, modernizes . . . the rest of the world keeps up or it stagnates."' Blaut argues that the entire geographic world system was constructed through a process of "Eurocentric Diffusionism" that created a flow of cultural processes over the world as a whole. This in turn was founded on the myth of "the autonomous rise of Europe" prior to 1492 that persisted up to the advent of colonialism and large-scale European/non-European interaction. In this dimension of The Short Century's concept the loss enacted is of that old understanding of the production of collective identities in relation to space and place constituted through colonial empire, that is based on conquest, oppression, and hegemonic persuasion. Here it is replaced by a connective tissue of mutual influences in

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6. J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the World-Geographical Diffusionism and Eurocentric History (London/New York: Guilford Press, 1993), 28-29.


which models are borrowed, adapted, and changed from neo-Marxisms to cultural resistances to discourses on representation.

Third, we begin to see how these struggles for liberation and independence pierced the fabric of European and American political culture and ruptured the twentieth century in the middle (thus the exhibition's title). Events taking place in Africa did not follow those taking place in the West but preceded them and made them possible. In fact, mid-century radicality, which came out of joint efforts at both liberation and social reform across Africa, actually paved the way for the explosion of anti-Vietnam War, student, and other social resistance movements which took place in the West almost a decade later. Thus, for example, after visiting this exhibition several times, I was astonished to note in revisiting accounts of the lives of radical European thinkers of the mid-century, how many of them single out the Algerian independence struggle to mark their own political awakening and radicalization. Here the loss enacted via the exhibition is akin to what an African friend once said had been his feeling throughout his student days in Paris: "The West is where the future happens first." This belief in the West's ownership of the very concept of innovative progress and radicality is one of western culture's most treasured conceits. Instead we can map a set of impetuses for extreme change that came from elsewhere. They spur the center into critically rethinking itself, not just out of guilt, or a sense of wanting to do justice to atone for the sins of an earlier unreflective past, but actually out of recognition that here was an opportunity for radical reevaluation. It is interesting to revisit the radical movements of the i96os and 197os and to see how their inscription into an autonomous and Eurocentric intellectual and political history has resulted in the shedding of their non-western catalysts and impetuses.

With its metonymically displayed riches of art, film, documentary, and archival materials, the exhibition began to play with an idea that its curator, Okuwi Enwezor, has declared one of his guiding principles for the forthcoming Documenta xI as well, namely to question what happens to culture when you think it from the place of another archive. If the archive of western radicality might be located outside of itself, does this offer the opportunity to rethink the very concept of radicality and to cease perceiving of its location as an index of its significance? The spur against accumulation and expansion and toward a mode of radical questioning of the very concepts that constitute the subject at hand, had always been at the heart of any deconstructive impulse. As I tried to establish earlier, the recognition of an active category of culturally living with and living out loss, as opposed to compensating for it, is central to both psychoanalytic and deconstructive modes of thought. Their contribution towards an active rethinking of museum and exhibition display strategies might allow for the staging of cultural encounters in which the West and all its others are actually insepa- rably entwined and entangled in one another without the recourse of falling back into discrete histories. To some extent, postcolonial theory has been point- ing to this debt and mutual imbrication for some time. If one thinks of the rise in recognition of the thought of Frantz Fanon7 over the past decade, one can trace a strand of alternative history in which a complex set of journeys between the Middle East and North Africa keeps weaving through France but never set- tling in it, always informing it and mobilizing against it at the same time. Fanon, then, is a field of entangled possibilities, informed by Europe and set up against

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7. See Frantz Fanon, Toward the African Revolution: Political Essays, trans. H. Chevalier, New York: Grove Press, 1988). Also see the treatment of Fanon as a field of circulations in Isaac Julien's film Frantz Fanon-Black Skin, White Mask, 1996.


its colonial and racist regimes, rejected by Europe and recognized by North African liberation activists, belatedly recognized by Europe in an attempt to anchor the work and thought to its own radical heritage of mid-century crises. In relegating Europe per se to a hinterland of African radicality, The Short Century project rewrites the dynamic described above and allows for the enactment of a European loss through the recognition of the legitimacy of another entity and its claims to a competing heritage.

Most recently I encountered the museological enactment of another form of loss, a conscious loss. In March 2002 I had the opportunity to visit the newly opened Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg in the company of a group of local artists and curators, largely made up of young black South African curators and museum workers who had taken up public positions in the period of so-called transformation. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, and the museum, which I had expected to be very crowded, was quite empty. It is a very well thought out and executed concept and is probably one of the most harrowing museum experi- ences I have ever had. Although I thought I knew something about South African political history, I was not prepared for the brutal mindlessness of apartheid's institutionalized racism, with its intricate bureaucratic legal structures and its bewildering internal logics in which not a whiff of either sense or humanity seemed to exist. Nor was it easy to visit the museum with these particular colleagues who had been so marked by the horrific histories they and their families had lived through. If you like, the museum is a very accomplished representation of the horrors of racial warfare. It forces you to look it in the face and acknowl- edge it in all its dread. Perhaps one of its most horrific aspects is that it high- lights the degree to which the history of black Africans in South Africa was a by-product of the struggle between the British and the Boers. The struggle and the damage that these two European powers inflicted on one another in Africa and, through their claims, on the continent determined the course of twentieth- century politics in southern Africa.

My colleagues looked at all of this gravely and I can only imagine the memories and traumas that the exhibits dredged up in them. However, the exhibits they gravitated to most eagerly were those in which various Afrikaans Nationalist politicians of previous generations articulated their most virulent theories about the racial inferiority of black Africans and the absolute impossi- bility of an equal co-existence between blacks and whites in South Africa. While life in South Africa has changed a great deal since the collapse of apartheid and the advent of majority rule under the African National Congress (ANC), it has remained very difficult. In many ways life is still extremely discriminatory, so that these exhibits are viewed through the ambivalence of a culture still in the throes of great trauma. It was hard for me to take on board the difference in our responses to these particular exhibits-my cringing, their glee. Perhaps in the sheer ludicrousness of these overblown political statements based in the primitive racial hatred of bigoted fundamentalists, statements made by politicians that history has now designated as irrelevant anachronisms, one could find a slight assurance that things had in fact changed-that a logic that was no logic had been exposed and had been turned in on itself. Throughout the narra- tive set up by the museum, it was the victory of the ANC over the powers of Afrikaans nationalism and apartheid that drove the later part of the story. But in

70 FALL 2002


an odd way the museum staged the loss of the governing logic that had kept everyone terrorized and downtrodden and whose consequences it was trying to document with a meticulous and taxonomic detail. Its workings were remi- niscent of an Afrikaans stand-up comic who had been a very frequent and welcome visitor to London in the years of the struggle against apartheid- instead of writing material he would simply read from local South African news- papers. He would regale his disbelieving audiences with the surreal ludicrousness of fifteen "coloureds" who had applied to be classified as "whites" and seven "blacks" who had applied to be classified as "coloureds" and so on. In the process of this kind of exposure, outside of any complex legitimating order, it was, of course, the very instability of these categories of race on which the regime was impaling itself that became so glaringly obvious. My African colleagues, gathering with evident amusement around the video monitors on which these politicians were spouting yesterday's racial doctrines and the censures they had mobilized in their names were not simply pleased at their downfall but also at the evacuation of meaning which this form of open exposure affected. It was not the collapse of racism but the collapse and the acknowledged unraveling of the notion of the law itself that were being made manifest in these exhibits and in the responses of the local audience. It is "law" in Derrida's sense of that entire gamut of intertwined logic and power, discur- sively formed and disseminated through the juristic system, through grammar, through the establishment of such parameters as racial regulations which sus- tains division between those privileged with rights and those outside of them. The loss staged at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg is the loss of the law in its Derridean sense, and it is that loss rather than the change of specific laws regarding racial discrimination, to which my colleagues were responding with such festive humor.

For myself, because I have long been preoccupied with conjunctions of geographical counter-cartographies and contemporary arts practices, this project of thinking about the possibilities of museums' potential encounters with cultural difference opened a great vista of alternative mappings. What if we took the priv- ilege of mapping away from the nation-state where, entwined with epistemic structures, it had produced one of our most unshakable authorities, and handed it over to the resistance initiatives that the state terms "terror"? What if we attempted to decouple the exclusive relations between each so-called "terrorist" group and the immediate and specific state strictures it was struggling against, and instead traced its numerous links with other groups and their shared theoretical precepts and mutual engagements? What would we see if the Red Army Faction (RAF) and Brigate Rosse, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Basque Fatherland and Liberty Group (ETA), and extreme breakaway groups of Greenpeace ecowarriors were to be linked with slightly older histories of the Front de Lib6ration Nationale (FLP) in Algeria, Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, Mouvement National Congolais, African National Congress (ANC) politics in South Africa, and Black Panthers in the United States, to mention only a very few of the struggles that emerged at mid-century? One of the most interesting points to emerge is a recognition that with hindsight, European radicalism has once again written itself as a form of

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diffusionism, its sources and impetuses exclusive unto itself. In the numerous books on the sixties, only conjunctions of very old and very European histories are acknowledged-state fascisms, proletarian struggles, engaged intellectuals, and mobilized rebellious students-as linking the numerous protest movements and radical resistance actions of the moment. Even the circulation of the Vietnam War-the site of horrific histories of atrocious colonialism from the Indochine of the French colonial empire to the divided nation of postwar superpower struggle between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.-as a catalyst of much local western and nonwestern protest, has been divested of its colonial and race politics and become the floating signifier of unruly, rebellious, and antiauthoritarian youth. But even a very superficial historical investigation reveals that everything was linked through the popular imagination that encountered these links. Everyone with a television in 1977, viewers of what Jean Baudrillard was to call "our Theatre of Cruelty," saw the German tourists cowering in the Lufthansa plane, jointly patrolled by German RAF activists and Palestinian PLO guerrillas on the soil of Mogadishu, Somalia which is, of course, in Africa; or the Japanese mem- bers of radical armed resistance in support of Palestine gunning down Europe- bound travelers in Israel's Ben Gurion Airport. Everyone saw the traces of RAF actions against politicians and financiers in Germany and those of Brigate Rosse actions in Italy, but to speak of the connections between them is to recognize the duality of an unresolved fascist past in both countries. Everyone in 1979 was party to the veiled nuances and cultural shock of the purported suicides of the Baader-Meinhof collective at Stammheim Prison, but to question them would have meant to breach the carefully constructed boundary between the legal state and outlawed terror, viewed from within an exclusively European model. The problem was that not many people at that moment had the tools and reading strategies to link manifestations taking place in Western Europe, the Middle East, Africa, and Japan and locate them within a mutually imbricated politics that extended beyond the hollow and melodramatic jargon of the revo- lutionary romance of the moment or the equally hollow authoritarian discourse of politicians who saw their societies as at the edge of an abyss.

The actions and protagonists of terror have always been positioned by the state as marginal resistances to itself, as murderers and destroyers of the civil order that the state upholds through its institutions, laws, and constant and vigi- lant policing. But what if we, for a moment, tried to read them as a set of geographical ambivalences, as a set of Third Spaces, in which the nation-state is unframed, the histories of colonialism are allowed to break out of their impris- oning legacies of oppression, thought flows in numerous directions, and named spaces are occupied with numerous and contradictory subjectivities?

Looking from the perspective of "another archive" that Enwezor has put into the discussion of exhibited culture, we can no longer indulge in the multi- cultural management of inclusiveness-letting all the others in while remaining with an unchanging concept of ourselves. Museums' encounters with cultural difference are in a sense an opportunity to contract rather than to expand, to contract the staunch belief system that organizes, classifies, locates, and judges everything from the prevailing perspective of the West. At a conference in Sweden on museums and democracy for which I had initially tried to articulate these thoughts, some participants who worked in museums asked how this loss

72 FALL 2002


might be affected in their practice. Others said that the work of inclusion had not yet been achieved, especially not in cultures that had only recently begun to be generally aware of hybridity and cultural difference. Therefore it could not yet be surpassed. At the time I was at a loss for responses because after all this was a theoretical and conceptual inquiry that I had embarked upon-a theoretical inquiry that was in pursuit of change but had no recipe to bring it about, a cultural politics that recognized that the moment had come to also move on from the previously necessary project of inclusiveness, not because those politics had been successfully transformed but because cultural politics always have to exist and run on several parallel planes concurrently, simultaneously doing the current work and thinking the next step. Now having had the opportunity to inhabit some of these thoughts slightly longer and to view a range of displayed cultural politics, I am beginning to perceive of the staging of culture as performatively taking place instead of being represented as a partial step in this direction. It is Giorgio Agamben's Means without End in the making. This in the context of cinema, which Agamben claims,

... has its centre in the gesture and not in the image and thus it belongs essentially to the realm of ethics and politics and not simply to that of aesthetics . . . What characterises gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human. But in what way is an action endured and supported?... In what way does a simple act become an event?... In the distinction between production and action; if producing is a means in view of an end and praxis is an end without means, the gesture then breaks with the false alternative between ends and means that paralyses morality and presents instead means that, as such, evade the orbit of mediality without becoming, for this reason, ends.8

In an illuminating burst of insight Agamben articulates for us the mistaken con- ception at the heart of art masquerading as politics through an assumption of political subject matter and or an investment with clear navigational principles between right and wrong and how to achieve these:

Nothing is more misleading for an understanding of gesture, therefore, than representing, on the one hand, a sphere of means as addressing a goal (for example marching seen as a means of moving the body from point A to point B) and, on the other hand, a separate and superior sphere of gesture as a movement that has its end in itself (for example, dance seen as an aes- thetic dimension) .... The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such.9

The possibility of the museum's enactment of itself as the site of loss, rather than the representation of actual losses and elisions, is the process by which some theoretical thought regarding cultural difference might actually become an event, and as such mark the potential difference that this engagement might affect.

Irit Rogoff holds a university chair in art history and visual culture at Goldsmiths College, London University. She is the author of Terra Infirma-Geography's Visual Culture (Routledge, 2000) and is currently working on a study of participations in visual culture to be titled Looking Away.

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8. Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 55-58. 9. Ibid.


Article Contentsp. 63p. 64p. 65p. 66p. 67p. 68p. 69p. 70p. 71p. 72p. 73

Issue Table of ContentsArt Journal, Vol. 61, No. 3 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 1-104Front Matter [pp. 1-2]In This IssueTransitions [p. 3]

Artist's ProjectHotel & Farm [pp. 4-5+28-31+40-45+74-77+88-91]

Johanna d'Arc of Mongolia: Interview with Ulrike Ottinger [pp. 6-21]Anne Wilson's Feast [pp. 22-27]One Small Step (For Nina Katchadourian) [pp. 32-39]What Did You Eat and When Did You Know It? [pp. 46-62]Hit and Run--Museums and Cultural Difference [pp. 63-73]She May Not Be What She May Seem: Interview with Anne Olofsson [pp. 78-87]ReviewsReview: The Museums of the Moving Image [pp. 92-95]Review: Museums and Multiculturalism [pp. 96-97]Review: The New Order of Information. System: Biomimesis and Violence [pp. 98-100]Review: Marcel en abme [pp. 101-103]Review: Material Worlds [pp. 103-104]

Back Matter

Museum Cultural Difference

Documents

Transcript of Museum Cultural Difference