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Chapter 4
The Time That Binds: Investigating Chronological Time as Progress at the Museum
1.1 INTRODUCTION: MUSEUMS AS CONSTITUTIONS
National public museums tell stories about humans, about customs and traditions
associated with particular groups of humans, and about the lives of humans across time
and space. They are popular and authoritative sites for the public to visit to learn about
themselves and others. Indeed, the British Museum functions as a definitive source for
historical knowledge not only of “British culture,” but, as they themselves claim, “what it
means to be human” (British Museum website). These self-proclaimed descriptors, in
addition to the museum’s annual visitor rate of approximately 5.5 million and frequent
use by educational institutions as a site for “class visits,” establish it as a popular site of
national identity and transnational historical meaning-making. National constitutions, as a
body of customs and practices, also tell a story about groups of humans, about legal
customs and traditions associated with particular groups of humans, and about the lives of
humans across time and space.
This project investigates the museum as a constituent site of the political, community,
and the subject – or rather, interrogates the museum as constitution of sociality.
Obviously, ‘museum’ and ‘constitution’ are very broad concepts which have particular
meanings depending on how they appear in their respective times and places. However, I
will begin here by briefly investigating some resonances found between the two sites,
especially as is found in contemporary theory on the museum and contemporary anglowestern constitutional theory1 with a view to looking at more specific instances in future.
Specifically, I will begin by reviewing some contemporary constitutional theory that
attempts to rethink constitutionalism beyond the “text” of a written legal document.
1
This term is meant to describe the constitutional theory as it is articulated by “mainstream”
constitutional theorists writing in the English-speaking European and North American scholarly
traditions over the past forty years. However, in some cases it also included theorists speaking to
these constitutional traditions and theoretical articulations from former European colonies around
the world. As I invoke the term “constitution” and “constitutions” throughout my project, I am
referring to this tradition of theory as opposed to any particular “constitution”.
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Much current contemporary theory conceives of constitutionalism in broader terms but,
as I will argue, remains largely within a project that is imbedded in the grammar of
constitutionalism. In other words, the discussion remains within a “conventional”
framework of thinking about law and political community.
My aim in exploring this literature is to argue that the museum is a site at which
imaginations of political community take place.2 In so doing, these imaginations both
draw from and constitute imaginings of the subject and community that are intimately
connected to legal constitutions. As a result, any clear line demarcating the “museum”
and the “constitution” is thus much more porous than conventional constitutional theory
would assert. In order to make this argument I will draw on two, somewhat
interconnected, arguments. Firstly, I claim that there are similarities between the site of
the museum and the sites of the constitution. These similarities are rendered visible by
looking at both sites through dominant frameworks that are in operation at each. These
paradigms include chronological time as progress, the aesthetics of justice, the search for
universal representation, archival foundations, and androcentric relations. The first
concept – that of chronological time as progress - will be investigated herein, while the
others will be elaborated on in future chapters. The second argument is that “the
museum” and “the constitution” operate symbiotically in their construction of symbolic
imaginations of political community. This symbiotic relationship can most clearly be
seen through the mutual constitution of three significant concepts – the political project,
the community (or “the people”), and the (legal) subject.
2
There is an obvious conceptual link here to Benedict Anderson’s work Imagined Communities.
It is worth noting that although Anderson’s work complexly explores the production of “imagined
communities” through the nation state, this is not my focus here. Rather, I wish to highlight how
this imagining both happens through and across nations. As I will argue further in this project,
these imaginings constitute the very category of the “political”, “community”, and the “subject”.
Though Anderson’s work is concerned with thinking about how different communities are
imagined, his project remains predicated on existing categories of individual humans as agents in
the formation of such communities (Anderson 6). My project differs in that I wish to interrogate
presumptions about self-authorized agents as subjects, communities as knowable by their human
constituencies, and the political as tied to the nation-state.
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In his book Strange Multiplicity, James Tully employs Ludwig Wittgenstein to
demonstrate the problematic assumption made by constitutional theorists and others, that
law has a direct causal effect on the subjects whom it purports to effect. Tully criticizes
the constitutional approach taken by both Thomas Hobbes and John Rawls as one that
assumes a general condition in which subjects universally interpret the rules laid out
before them. “If I am in doubt about how to interpret and follow the rule, or if I can
interpret it in endless ways, then the rule and its interpretation ‘do not determine
meaning’” (Tully SM106, quoting Wittgenstein). For Tully, this characterization of the
force and interpretation of rules does not account for the various ways in which the
practice of “following rules” is “too various, tangled, contested and creative to be
governed by rules” (Tully SM 107).
Further chastising particularly popular traditions of constitutionalism, Tully takes
issue with practices of theorizing that, working on the causal assumption above, seek to
illuminate the “hidden rules” of a community. According to him, this approach to
understanding practices, rules, or community, hinges on a monolithic conception of
culture as “homogenous wholes”. Tully associates these practices with a long-standing
tradition of imperial epistemology in constitutional theory which exalts the monological
power of law. Consequently, Tully advocates for a method of study and theorization that
cannot be ascertained by the investigation of rules and how they shape “culture,” for this
is both a false conception of the causality of the force of law, and an assertion of
imperialist methods, which he is trying to undo. Instead he calls for a dialogical
constitutionalism, which takes seriously “mutual recognition, consent, and continuity.”
Against a universalist, rationalist approach (like that taken by Hobbes), Tully’s suggested
approach centers on a “willingness to exchange and negotiate alternative descriptions”
that, in the legacy of Wittgenstien, mirrors a tennis match (Tully SM 113, 115). For
Tully, constitutionalism is not simply about the word of the law and should recognize the
complex processes of meaning-making that go into constitutional creation and
interpretation.
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Neil Walker is another prominent constitutional theorist who writes explicitly on the
idea of constitutions beyond the nation state. In his recent, and aptly titled, article
“Taking Constitutionalism Beyond the State” (2009), Walker sets out to think of
constitutions as they are playing out trans-nationally through institutions like the United
Nations (UN) and the European Union (EU). While Walker is interested in thinking
beyond the state, in this piece he is not thinking beyond the legal boundaries of
constitutionalism. Indeed, the goal of Walker’s project in this particular piece is actually
to advocate for an alternate conception of constitutions. My project differs in that it is less
a call for a different conception of thinking about constitutionalism and more an attempt
to flesh out how this “alternate” constitutionalism is already at work in sites beyond the
state. In other words, that “constitutionalism” was always already beyond the legal text.
My project demands a rethinking of what a “constitution” is – where we draw the
limits of its borders, or determine what effects it has. I propose that the “constitution” as
we currently conceive of it does not remain within the confines of state-based, or even
extra-state, legal actors. For example, I argue that the category of “the people”, the
conceptual stronghold of constitutionalism, is not constituted solely by legal text.
National museums, as sites of national and transnational meaning-making, are primary
candidates for investigating the construction of a body politic that might articulate itself
as “the people”. As Peter Fitzpatrick notes, “there is a contradiction between law as a
simple command of a sovereign and law as a project, model and obligation, dependent on
popular support and adherence” (Fitzpatrick Mythology 87). It is this contradiction that I
wish to tease out in this investigation. Furthermore, this is one example of the ways in
which I will argue that museums and constitutions have a symbiotic relationship,
mutually constituting each other. In this way my argument is more akin to that of Gavin
Anderson who in Globalisation and Constitutional Rights argues that it is legal pluralism
which presents the major confrontation to constitutional theory. Anderson claims that,
Legal pluralism presents three challenges to the dominant knowledge of
law: first, to the centralist notion that law only emanates from the state;
secondly, to monist ideas of the systematic coherence and singularity of
law; and thirdly, to the positivist view that we can trace a legal order as
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something ‘out there’ apart from the agents who created it. (Anderson
Constitutional Rights 39)
I aim to take up Anderson’s trajectory here to consider how the boundaries of the legal
order are infiltrated by concepts and imaginings that are in operation at the museum.
However, in order to do so, I must first trace the ideas as they circulate at the site of the
museum. In the chapter that follows I will explore the concept of chronological time as
progress as it is deployed at three museum sites. This exploration does not directly point
to the connections between the function of chronological time between museums and
specific national constitutions. However, the chapter aims to elucidate how the thinking
of the categories of the political, the community, and the subject, through evolutionary
time (or not) at the museum, is related to constitutional issues regarding the same
categories. As Fitzpatrick claims, “these stories of the progression of society are
intimately tied to and even told in terms of the progression of law” (Fitzpatrick
Mythology 101). It is the aim of this chapter to unravel some of these intricate knots.
1. 2 TIME FOR THE MUSEUM
Time is a significant motif for thinking about the political at the museum as it is such a
widely deployed concept in the construction of a political project, community, and the
subject. This chapter will investigate these “imaginations” at the three sites of my project:
the British Museum (London, UK), Constitution Hill (Johannesburg, SA), and the
District Six Museum (Cape Town, SA). In this exploration I will draw from the work of
Tony Bennett, Michel Foucault, Donald Presiozi and Didier Maleuvre from my literature
review3, to consider the deployment of “time” both as an anamorphic technology4 and as
subject to the anamorphic technologies of the museum. In other words, I will consider the
use of time in constructing a clear, transparent, and knowable history, as well as the
construction of time itself as a smooth teleological narrative from which political
projects, communities, and subjects are imagined through and from.
3
4
Submitted for review as a part of my upgrade package. For supplementary reading only.
This term will be defined and elaborated on in the following section.
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The work investigated in my literature review characterized these technologies as
limiting or foreclosing possible conceptions of time, communities, and subjects. The
chapter argues that the museum is comprised of what Donald Preziosi calls “a family of
institutions housing multiple anamorphic orientations” (Preziosi 2003: 34). These
orientations render the “messiness” of the museum into a coherent and ordered whole that
narrativizes relations between objects and subjects that concretize the idea of an authorial
selfhood and sacralize notions of “culture”. I will begin this chapter here to think about
how a temporal logic that characterizes chronological time as progress works as an
anamorphic technique that orders and locates a political project, a community, and a
subject.
Certainly there is a strong semblance of an under-lying thrust of chronological time as
progress at all three sites. I am curious about how this thrust shapes political
subjectivities and in so doing relegates a conception of a political project to a particular
temporal logic that limits other possibilities, especially ones that might more adequately
consider the life force of subjects, the past, and the present. However, it is clearly
dangerous to posit that any such conception of time is dominant or operating coherently
at the museum. Consequently, I will investigate the narratives of chronological time as
they are put forth by museum staff, and reiterated, refused, or ignored by the participants.
My study here is limited in that it cannot possibly account for the insights of participants
(or staff for that matter) who outright rejected participation in the learning program or the
subsequent interview. Significantly however, since my project is not to determine any
empirical truth about the operation of political subjectivities at the museum, these
absences, though unfortunate, are not detrimental to my overall aims. To reiterate, this
chapter takes as its focus the circulation of narratives of sequential time as a place from
which to think about the formation of political community at the museum.
This chapter utilizes primary data collected at each of the three museums as its main
source. The transnational sites were chosen out of an interest in exploring how
museological practices may serve as technologies of political community formation both
through and across national boundaries. Further, the choice of these sites in particular
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stems from an interest in comparing these formations between a society having recently
undergone transformative constitutionalism (South Africa) and one that, although without
a formal “constitution”, has a long-standing constitutional culture composed during and
after many years of being at the heart of the world’s largest empire (the United
Kingdom).
My research draws from semi-structured qualitative interviews with museum
participants and museum staff, ethnographic research of the interactive programs, and
applies a discursive analysis to these interviews alongside teaching materials and
workshop resources from the museum’s programs. I have completed interviews with
approximately 50 participants and staff at Adult Learning workshops held by the British
Museum in June 2009 as well as at Constitution Hill, and the District Six Museum.5 This
research was approved by the Ethics Review Board at the University of Kent, the Head of
Research at the British Museum, as well as staff at Constitution Hill and the District Six
Museum.
I have compared the various interviews from participants and staff, as well as my own
notes after having attended various “hands-on” workshops. I have deployed my own
anamorphic technology here by organizing the information into three general themes –
the time of the political, time of community6, and time of the subject. Of course, these are
not neat or fixed categories; indeed, they are inherently mutually constitutive. It is my
aim that future drafts of this chapter will employ a method of framing this material that
better resonates with my theoretical aims. I acknowledge that the separation of these three
“times” is a false one and may present its own problems of thinking through various
5
A skeletal outline of questions asked to students, staff, and language tutors is attached. See
Appendix A, B, C, and D.
6
Here I have shifted from talking about “political community” to “the political” and “the
community”. This is an intentional move because, although my overall project maintains an
interest in the imaginings of political community, here I wish to draw out what might be
embedded in both of these concepts. In other words, I want to think about how “political
community” is comprised of both a political project and particular ways of thinking about
community.
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notions of time. However, in order to begin the work of sifting through the complex and,
at times, contradictory discourses, I have chosen to arrange them as such.
The naturalization of chronological time also appears in other areas at the site of the
museum such as in the architectural aesthetics of the museum buildings or in institutional
curatorial practices. It is also found in the relationships that are produced between
humans and objects in the educational programming, and through “hands-on” activities.
In these places, evolutionary time is again the structure from which political projects,
community and subjects can be thought through and from. These areas will be more fully
explored in the subsequent chapters investigating “aesthetics”, “human/object relations”,
and “interactivity” found within this larger project.
1. 3 DECIPHERING “LIFE” THROUGH TIME
As was explored in my literature review, conceptions of “time”, especially of
chronological time as evolutionary progress, have changed significantly at the museum
throughout the past six hundred years.7 Indeed, the common contemporary technique of
narrating the relationship of objects at the museum through the progression of
chronological time is a relatively new phenomenon. It is attributed by Tony Bennett,
Donna Haraway and Krzysztof Pomian, to the emergence in the eighteenth century of a
scientific classification system that established relations between objects in the museum
that were fundamentally based on the passage of time (Bennett 2006: 270; Haraway
1989: 30; Pomian 1990: 77-78).
Significantly, in his book The Order of Things, Michel Foucault notes that until the
middle of the seventeenth century, historians focused on deciphering the history of a
being not through its relation to other things, but from an investigation of the thing itself.
However, this method should not be confused with a meticulous examination of the
internal workings of the being in question – that form of investigation would come later.
7
Obviously conceptions of time have altered significantly in and through cultures for longer than six
hundred years, however my research in my literature review pertains only to those changes experienced
from the transformation of monarchical studiolos into national public museums (i.e., the Renaissance until
today).
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Rather, this practice of historicism maintained the life form in its immanent place in
“history”. As Foucault writes, until the middle of the seventeenth century:
History was the inextricable and completely unitary fabric of all that was
visible of things and of the signs that had been discovered or lodged in
them: to write the history of a plant or an animal was as much a matter of
describing its elements or organs as of describing the resemblances that
could be found in it, the virtues that it was thought to possess, the legends
and stories with which it had been involved, its place in heraldry, the
medicaments that were concocted from its substance, the foods it provided,
what the ancients recorded of it, and what travellers [sic.] might have said of
it. The history of a living being was that being itself, within the whole
semantic network that connected it to the world. (Foucault 140)
According to Foucault, this form of historicism gave way under the influence of the
botanist Carolus Linnaeus, to a method that was less interested in compiling information
on the being, and more interested in systematically synthesizing the information. In so
doing, this lead to a classification system that allowed the “structure” of the plant (and
later animals) to be “seen”. This method was predicated on a newly emerging
epistemological thrust that sought to uncover hidden meanings and hidden relations in
and between beings, which was notably different from sixteenth and early seventeenth
century conceptions of historical technique. Significantly, this transformation caused a
corresponding shift in the role of language in describing what is seen. In other words, the
semiotics of categorization became the primary form with which to convey meaning
about the object. In so doing, the being became knowable as and through these
categories. Whereas the previous method of historiography compiled any and all
information on the subject, Foucault argues that Linnaeus’ procedure filtered this
information into a visible structure. This structure could then be communicated easily
between multiple people as a shared understanding of the subject at hand. What may have
been a complex of networks of meaning comprised of legends, applications, use-values,
ancient meanings, etc… was thus tamed into a smooth, coherent description of the being.
“By limiting and filtering the visible, structure enables it to be transcribed into language.
It permits the visibility of the animal or plant to pass over in its entirety into the discourse
that receives it” (Foucault Order of Things 147). This technique of transforming a
complicated, fragmented life form into a fluid, consistent, or seamless image or structure
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is what Donald Preziosi refers to as an anamorphic technology, and, he argues, what lays
at the foundations of the museum.
Preziosi argues that museums are comprised of a number of competing and
overlapping institutions that are anamorphically oriented. Similar to Foucault’s reading of
Linnaeus’ structure, Preziosi claims that these systems of categorization shape the way
people then engage with the subject that is being described. In Preziosi’s case, these
technologies shape the imaginations of museum visitors. Specifically, he claims that the
anamorphic techniques of museology create a discernible coherence about the museum
objects, the visitor, and the relationship between the two. This coherence both legitimizes
these relations as they are purported to unfold over chronological time, and
simultaneously domesticates other possibilities (Preziosi 1989: 33).
Following Preziosi’s line, I argue that chronological time is deployed at the three sites
of my investigation as a narrative of evolutionary progress. Moreover, it is this sequential
notion of time that forms the basis for the emergence of the museum’s political project,
constructed community, and desirable subject. In this context, evolutionary time is the
“structure” which “limits and filters the visible” to produce coherent and knowable
categories such as “history”, “culture”, “community”, and “the subject.” Time as progress
is utilized both as an anamorphic technology while simultaneously, it itself is “tamed”
into a smooth, coherent framework. As these techniques play out at the museums,
museum staff naturalize the evolutionary thrust of their temporal logics, and, because the
categories are considered apriori, self-legitimate their own projects. Moreover, the
temporal structures at the museums foreclose other possible conceptions of political
projects, community, and the subject that may stray from this “naturalized” conception of
time.
Significantly, this temporality is also woven throughout contemporary anglo-western
constitutional theory. Indeed, Tully’s project hinges on the “progress” of constitutional
theory which he seems to be driving “forward” an unknown force. Tully emphatically
suggests that as this force progresses, the imperialism of the historical constitutionalism
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will reveal an “undergrowth of diversity” and come to the fore (Tully SM 99). Tully’s
temporal logic is indeed one of naturalized chronological time driven forward by an
unseen chauffer. Similarly, Walker deploys concepts of “past” and “future” which
function on as assumed fixed understanding of the terms (Walker Past and Future 2008).
As these theorists naturalize these logics, they self-legitimate their own projects of
constitutionalism that are predicated on concretized conceptions of the past, present, and
future.
1.4 TIME AS (RESTRAINED) PROGRESS
Beyond the deployment of time as an anamorphic technology, I will also argue that time
itself is smoothed into a teleological trajectory of progress at the three sites. Certainly,
the evolutionary thrust of time as progress has had much play at the site of the museum.
As was discussed in my literature review, the introduction of evolutionary thought lead to
a renewed interest in the project of human perfectibility.
Darwin’s account of evolution as the incremental outcome of countless
unintended minor variations provided a template for late Victorian
liberalism in its concern to manage progress by both encouraging and
stimulating it, while simultaneously restraining it within the pre-established
limits of a capitalist and patriarchal – and, of course, colonial – social order.
(Bennett, 2006: 269-270)
Bennett argues that such a template was in operation at the museum. The management of
restrained progress was occurring both at the level of the museum populations (i.e., the
visitors), as well as in and through the collections. As the evolutionary push, cum
Victorian liberalism, made its way into the curatorial practices of the national public
museum, it told a story of the human as being the result of those processes of reform
(Bennett 39). As stated earlier, the museum visitor was to be seen as standing at the end –
and consequence – of the history that they were experiencing at the public museum.
Such a conception of life – the life of “man” – at the museum was dramatically shaped
through this particular form of temporality. The structure of evolutionary time called or
hailed the life of the museum visitor. The life form of the subject became visible through
the narrative of time as progress. Didier Maleuvre argues that this technique, keeping in
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line with the goals of the national public museum, is a form of repressive identification
whereby a fragmented and limitless subject is compelled to seek identification through a
political constituency (Maleuvre 1999: 29, 110). He refers to this process as compulsive
identity formation. The political constituency in this case is membership in a collective of
humans who are connected through their shared position on an evolutionary temporality.
They are able to reflect on the past, to see themselves as emerging out of that past, and to
concur that a future will lead to an improved form of human life. In this way, “the
museum constitutes a formidable model of civic membership, a ritual of social
identification” or what Maleuvre describes as an ecumenical mission to reconcile the
polis (Maleuvre 1999: 3, 10).
Indeed, the theme of “reconciliation”, taken in one sense from the Oxford English
Dictionary as “to make one consistent with another”, is at work both in the constitution of
a political community and of the subject through the disciplinary force of evolutionary
time at the museum. As was explored in my literature review through the work of
Preziosi, museological techniques work to cohere a subject. Rather than the museum
being a site at which one’s sense of self is intentionally shaken or disturbed, Preziosi
argues that it is a site at which selfhood is attempted to be made concrete and locatable.
The structure of classification and evolutionary time, are techniques that bring order to
the chaos of the site of the museum and allow for the emergence of an identifiable self
that can glean meaning from the order. For Preziosi, museology “…works towards the
legitimization and naturalization of an idealist, integral, authorial Selfhood without which
the entire disciplinary and commodity system could not function” (Preziosi 1989: 33). In
this sense there is a project of making the order of the subject consistent with the order of
the museum’s prescribed temporality.
Walter Benjamin’s decries of “progress” echo the sentiments of Preziosi here. Indeed,
Benjamin calls the authoritative weight of chronological history the “strongest narcotic of
the nineteenth century” (Benjamin, Arcades, First Sketches, Oo71, 863). As I will draw
out further below, Benjamin weighs a heavy critique against a form of historiography that
recounts chronological events in a teleological narrative of “progress”. In place of this
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concept of history, Benjamin claims that historical materialism, with its capacity for
constructing through a kind of method of “montage”, has the capacity to radically alter
our conception of history, and consequently, our conception of our selves. Moreover,
Benjamin’s work offers a way of thinking about the past, present, and future, while
avoiding teleological propulsion to a redemptive future (Marx), or an eternal return
(Blanqui/Nietzsche).8 Benjamin’s conception of history, thought through messianic time,
offers a possibility for a politics rooted in a “new” temporality. Heeding the calls of
postcolonial and anti-colonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha, Anne McClintock, and
David Scott, I will turn to Benjamin’s work as a way of thinking a different time of the
political, community, and the subject.
2.1 TIME OF THE POLITICAL
The time of the political is the time in which the “political” projects of the learning
programs are imagined at their respective museological sites. By “political” here I mean
the project of political inclusion that the museums are attempting to implement through
their interactive adult learning programs. As mentioned above, it is these particular
programs and their pedagogical aims that are the main focus of my research and analysis.
Although the specifics of the imagined political project differ between each museum,
they all share a common theme of redemption through the unfolding of chronological
time. The time of each of the educational projects rely on a knowable past, present, and
future, that can be modified through the pedagogical work of the museum. I will attempt
to explore these relating themes at the three sites without conflating their conceptions of
the political project with the creation of political community and the political subject,
which I will return to later.
The “political” that is imagined at the three sites is articulated at all three sites as a
project of “democratization.” In other words, staff that are in charge of the learning
programs at all three institutions situate their pedagogical work within a larger project of
working towards “democracy”. The meaning of “democracy” changes drastically within
and between sites yet, as mentioned above, it continuously operates upon a temporal
8
See Benjamin’s Conclusion in his Expose of 1939, Arcades Project, 25. Needs elaboration.
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logic of evolutionary time and redemptive promise. Indeed, it is only through the
operation of chronological time as progress (the structure) that the political project can
emerge. Here I will explore the role of evolutionary time as a structure that makes the
political “visible”, and consequently legitimizes what is conceivable to think of as a
political project at the site of the museum.
a) British Museum
The first site that informs this research is a set of workshops run at the British Museum in
June 2009 as a part of “Adult Learners Week”. In their efforts to “educate,” staff that ran
these workshops consistently deployed discourses of humanism, universality, and
democracy, often interchangeably. These concepts were used as central points from
which to narrate connections between the objects in the museum and workshop
participants. Moreover, participants were asked to engage in shared physical activities in
order to translate historical meaning amongst humans across time and space. In
interviews, some participants described their experience at the museum as one that made
them feel thankful for their current place on a teleological line of evolutionary human
development.
Though they are closely related, the political project is articulated by learning program
staff at the British Museum in two different ways. On the one hand there is the
deployment of the concept of “democracy” which is a clear state-endorsed project with
the ultimate aim of social cohesion. Significantly, this aim is only articulated by senior
staff who deal directly with the planning, implementing, and funding of the programs.
This state-directed project of democratization is largely oriented around adult literacy for
individuals whose first language is not English. It came in response to the “Skills for
Life” program, which was introduced by the UK government in 2001. According to staff,
“it was in response to a report done on Adult Learning…which basically worked out that
across the board, looking primarily at the areas of Adult literacy, adult numeracy, there
was quite a large fundamental failing with adult learning, and learning and skills” (BMJS
6). Both UK wide and specifically at the museum, the program targeted “immigrant
communities” both new and old, who had “stuck” within their own communities and as a
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result, not learned English (BMJ 6). However, it was also imagined to go beyond projects
of literacy for ESL students. It also encompassed a larger project of social cohesion by
attempting to draw in various “excluded audiences” to the museum. As one staff member
noted, one of the aims of the programming was to get participants to return to the
museum with their friends and family.
We do also value the need to diversify our audience and to create a diversity
within our audiences. Because, as with a lot of museums, our representation
of audiences is predominantly white European and yet we have a collection
that represents two million years of humanity…[Hopefully participants will]
tell their friends, that they’ll share with their friends. So there’s a wider
engagement aspect to it which also more relates more to targeting excluded
audiences – so black and ethnic minorities and refugees and asylum seekers,
people with mental health, homeless people, of which, you know, sort of
being in the centre of a large metropolis, all these kinds of groups are on our
doorstep. (BMJS 13)
Here we see the invocation of the temporal order of the political project. It is one that
reflects on an unfortunate past (a museum audience that lacks “diversity”), with a view of
modifying the audience in the present in the hopes of redeeming the museum (in the
name of an unspoken assumption about universal representation) in the future.
Significantly, this modification seems to happen for this staff member, through the
presence of audiences that are under-represented at the museum, first, before, or perhaps
rather than, an examination of museological techniques that may have excluded those
populations in the first place.
In the second discourse of “democracy” that circulates amongst educational staff at
the British Museum, contract staff who play almost no role in the administrative
operation of the program articulate a project of democratization that seems synonymous
with a strain of universal humanism. For at least one staff member, the political project
being carried out at the museum was one of making people understand that humans are
all similar. For her, this pedagogical project was of the utmost ethical importance for
resolving conflict and maintaining peace amongst human beings. The museum was
essential in this project as it allowed individuals to recognize consistencies amongst
humanity across time: “It makes people recognize their similarities...that we’re all people,
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you know?” (InterviewBMJ). The time of the political in this project of democratizaton
also centres on concretized notions of the past, present, and future. Further, it invokes an
idealized future of humanistic reconciliation through the pedagogic devices – especially,
the deployment of the past – of the museum.
While the more senior staff member’s political time played out through a more nationstate centered paradigm, the latter’s extended to a more “global” project. However, both
hinged on a shared concept of chronological time as progress which through its
deployment of a concretized past, present, and future, narrativized a political project of
democracy that would carry with it a redeemed future of universality and cohesion.
Many students also took up a narrative of redemption through time in subsequent
interviews about their experiences at the museum. The vast majority of students
interviewed (the total was over 50 either through one-on-one or group interview)
proclaimed the value of learning about the past in order to “improve” the future. “This is
clue for new generation and we have to understand behind, past. Exactly we have to
understand because we will loose now and we will improve now. If we don’t know
behind if we don’t know past we cant improve now” (Hackney Interview 3).
“Improvements” ranged from avoiding war to dealing with environmental catastrophe
(WestminsterO) In these cases, the past was a tool which could be put to service in
imaginings of a better world for “us” and significantly, for future generations.
“Everybody have to think about the future. To think how you can be in the future.
Everybody need to think about the future” (WestminsterA).
This naturalized narrative of emancipation that is in circulation at the British Museum
legitimizes its own political project. The project of “democracy” is imagined here to rest
fundamentally on a temporal logic that is about working towards (i.e., in the future)
universal inclusion. As this narrative of time becomes normalized, to think outside this
temporality means combating the authoritative weight of the museum.
b) Constitution Hill
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Constitution Hill, located in central Johannesburg, officially opened in 2004 with
ongoing construction until 2007. As the new site of South Africa’s Constitutional Court,
it is becoming one of central Johannesburg’s most popular tourist sites. Constitution Hill
is built on the foundations of the city’s Old Fort Prison Complex, the former site of
detention for thousands of black and coloured men and women during apartheid, as well
as poor Boer and indigenous men under British colonial rule at the end of the nineteenth
century.
The political project at Constitution Hill is also articulated as a democratic one, and
plays out in a chronological narrative of redemption from a “dark past” (CH7). Notably,
the word “apartheid” is never uttered by the museum staff at Constitution Hill during this
interview. It is only ever referred to through the deployment of euphemisms such as “our
dark past”, “our dark days”, and “a history” (CH). It is contrasted with imaginations of
“lighter” futures that South Africa is “moving towards”. Consequently, the time of the
political project at Constitution Hill is twofold. Though it is consistently about moving
away from the past (the unnamed specter of apartheid), it is at once a project of educating
participants about the contemporary liberal-democratic institution of South Africa, as
well as one of responsibilizing individuals to achieve a great future. In fact these two
competing goals are often conflated and collapsed in on each other so that it is unclear
whether they are conceived as separate goals or one in the same (CH). In either case, the
past is not to be dwelt on, but not forgotten either. The political project is fundamentally
built on a structured temporal framework.
According to staff, the most significant part of the educational programs is “heritage
and history awareness”. For this senior staff member, awareness of the past is deeply
connected to a present-day awareness of the new constitution of South Africa and the
laws contained in it (CH6). Further, the museum’s educative role is to teach individuals
who visit the museum about their rights and responsibilities as they have become so
important after “the past”.
We have a history to learn from and a lot of people aren’t aware of what’s
expected and what their rights and responsibilities are, and it’s very
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important to us to move on and to learn from our past, and move with it. Not
harp on it, just learn from it. It’s as simple as that (CH 6).
The political project hinges on a logic of chronological time as progress, alongside a
narrative of redemption in the future. “Every single country, every single continent has its
dark past and its, and its lighter past, and the two need to sort of work together to find a
way forward. And that’s why heritage – that’s, that’s how we grow, that’s how we
develop” (CH 7). Chronological time is invoked here as a naturalized category from
which the truth of history can be read and learned from. The past, the present, and the
future are all knowable categories which can be wielded in service of the political project
of “democratization”. In this way, time itself is smoothed over into a clear and consistent
framework, and then deployed as a force which smoothes the political into a clear and
consistent project.
Moreover, the staff at Constitution Hill deal explicitly in the language of redemption
through law. The political project of democracy building is conceived in much less global
and humanistic terms than was presented at the BM. At Constitution Hill, there is no
state-directed project of social cohesion that aims to bring “marginalized groups” into the
hegemonic cultural centre. Rather, the staff is clear and concise in their aims of using the
past to make a more democratic9 future, and that will come through “learning about their
constitutional rights as entrenched in our law books” (CH 6). Here, the evolutionary
thrust of chronological time is intimately connected to a discourse of law and democracy
as also part of this evolutionary chain. The naturalization of both evolutionary time and
of state-based liberal-democracy as at the end of that evolutionary line accords a
significant amount of power to these forces. Jacques Ranciere refers to this confluence of
utopic visioning with the force of law as a desire for “absolute guarantee” which results
in the production of overlegitimated power:
“The whole point of the site is the lack of democracy back in our past. And this whole site revolves
around democratic rights and, and democracy itself….this is a very democratic site [laughs], in terms of
what wasn’t here and what now is based on our highest democratic institution here, which is the
Constitutional Court. So, what do I mean by democracy? Democracy is equality for all, and equal say for
all” (CH7-8).
9
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…the discourse about the end of utopias has instituted a new kind of utopia,
the utopia of an ideal correspondence or of a pre-established harmony
between the interests of equilibrium and the exigencies of law. Everything
transpires as though the law could be read in the open book of a society's
statistics or on a world map…What is imposed in this concordance between
the legal, the legitimate and the necessary is the utopia of absolute
guarantee, that is, of overlegitimated power. (Ranciere Overlegitimation
253)
Moreover, such imaginings offer a narrow conception of political projects that must take
naturalized time as progress, as well as law as their two determining, and limiting,
factors. As Ranciere states here, this temporal logic and this automatic turn to law as
redeeming forces “overlegitimate” both time and law. In other words, these factors
become all-powerful tools which are deployed as apriori, or naturalized categories that
then self-legitimate the claims that are made in their name. Time as chronological
progress is invoked as a naturalized category and then aggrandized through multiple and
various invocations of it as an all-determining factor. This theme runs throughout the
sites of the museums, as well as contemporary constitutional theory.
c) District Six
The District Six Museum Foundation launched as a museum in 1994 to “keep alive the
memories of District Six and displaced people everywhere” (District Six website, About).
The most popularly cited focus of the museum is to commemorate the more than 60,000
people that were forcibly uprooted and relocated onto the barren plains of the Cape Flats
in 1965. However, the museum also resists this unidimensional understanding by actively
citing the history of the location as one with a long history of removals and
marginalization. The idea of the museum emerged out of the anti-apartheid movement in
Cape Town during the 1980’s and in collaboration with the District Six Beneficiary
Trust, committed to a project of quote “rebuilding the apartheid city with an aim to
change land-ownership patterns, while preserving memory as part of the project”
(LeGrange 8).
The time of the political at the District Six Museum also operates on an imagined
future of emancipation. The pedagogical thrust is explicitly stated as one of creating a
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post-apartheid city (Cape Town) and post-apartheid subjectivities. This conception of a
political project, like the other museums, also hinges on a temporal logic of imagining a
“new world” beyond the “present”. This conception of the political project unfolding in
chronological time is explained here as museum staff describes a recent interactive
workshop:
‘Re-imagining the city’ workshop and that cuts across all subject areas. It
involves literature, it involves oral history, it involves um, the human rights
elements, so how you’d re-imagine cities along um, non-racist, um, anticapitalist, all those lines. You know, how do you create a city that is friendly
for everybody – doesn’t forcibly remove people. (D6 5)
In operation here is a knowable future. This “future” is imagined as “friendly for
everybody” and operates explicitly on “anti-racist”, “anti-capitalist” principles. It departs
from apartheid legacies, which continue to linger from the past into the present. In this
way, the District Six Museum does not seem to invoke clear notions of past and present.
For this staff member, the present is ravaged with the legacies of racism through the
continued operation of historical structures of power and privilege. Indeed, much of the
educational programming at the museum is dedicated to creating awareness about the
inheritance of material wealth. As museum staff indicate, they see their role as helping to
articulate these historical differences so that the “hidden” power of historical privilege
can be destroyed.
So, we also try to bring to the surface the kind of, what we call the hidden
curriculum that operates as hidden. It’s where people engage with each other
and the differences that are unstated becomes the most dangerous
differences… So what we try to do is surface that and let them live
democracy, by, by kind of, thinking about the power that comes from people
who don’t have access to all the material benefits the world gives them. And
how do you engage in a real collaborative program that begins to, to raise
awareness about the un-, the inequality of cultural capital. (D6 10)10
10
See also:
“…where they come from matters, does matter. There’s a, there’s a huge kind of post-apartheid mentality
(37:38) that encourages, that says we bring people together who are different, particularly when it comes to
class differences, then let’s pretend that people aren’t different” (D6 12).
On “white lament”
“…that’s big, that’s become a very big thing about how white people feel there’s a lot of racism towards
them, and in a lot of the work I’ve done, and a lot of the kind of situations I’ve seen, what gets interpreted
as racism is a mere questioning of power…the hidden power that people still have. So when that gets
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For staff then, the past bleeds into the present; the two are not separate. However, the
goal of the museum’s political project is to make a distinct future. Such a project involves
making a break from the historical chains of apartheid and capitalism in a newly
imagined, inclusive future.
Significantly however, what is “hidden” here, and what for staff is of the utmost
importance to articulate, is made “visible” through the structure of chronological time.
The political project, both of “surfacing” historical differences in the present and of
creating a universally inclusive city in the future, is predicated on an assumption of
sequential time and a redemptive future. Of course, this too is the basis of the method of
historical materialism. This “structure” of time has a disciplining force, which coheres
and smoothes the contours of the political project, as well as “time” itself. In so doing, it
legislates what is “seen” as the political and self-legitimizes the pedagogical project of
the museum.
3.1 TIME OF COMMUNITY
The time of community is the concept of time that is deployed to constitute an idea of a
knowable political community at the museum. In all three sites chronological time is used
to explain an important relationship between the present, the past, and the future which
tells “us” about “our” community. The form that this community takes shifts from being
a subject of property (i.e., “our” culture), to other well-trodden community formations
organized around the nation-state, or “humanity” more generally.
Similar to the “time of the political” explored above, “community” here is found to
operate on and through concretized notions of the past, present, and future. Once again
“time” is deployed both as an anamorphic technology in the constitution of a smooth,
coherent “community” and itself is “tamed” and naturalized into a chronologically
unfolding truth. Moreover, this exploration draws direct connections to Maleuvre’s
questioned, then it’s seen as racist. Because we’re meant to be now in this new situation where there’s no
unfair advantage, so the legacy of apartheid is something that one doesn’t have to address” (D6 15).
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insights about compulsive identity formation. To reiterate, Maleuvre takes aim at any
mode of identification that collapses being-ness into identification through a political
constituencies. I am not arguing here that subjects are necessarily compulsively drawn
into particular community formations but that there is a strong discourse of community
formation based on chronological time in circulation at the three sites. This near
indiscernible narrative of time works to garner the tacit oath of allegiance to a
collectivity, in these three sites, a collectivity of bounded human subjects with
concretized notions of past, present, and future.
a) British Museum
There are two dominant ways that a temporal community is conceived of by staff and
students at the British Museum. The first is a present community of humans that have
inherited the creations of a community of humans from the past. In this sense, the present
community is thought to be the defenders of the past. The past is valuable in order to
know more about the present, and for some interviewees, the future as well. One staff
member claims that all of the things that are in the museum are made by “people”. For
them this reflects an inherent connection between the people that made the objects and
the people who view them. She claims that this connection means that these collections
are “ours” (BMK 11). In another similar comment a student insinuates that we are the
inheritors of these objects. Consequently, we have a duty to protect them. “[My country
has] a lot of historical things but they’re not protect them. But in this country there is a lot
of opportunity to go and visit…encourage to go and visit to understand and to know, how
live, how our ancestors, what they did” (Hackney Interview 1). For this student
intergenerational inheritance transcends national borders.11 The museum, at least in
Britain, is a place to see how “our ancestors” lived. The construction of the “our” in both
cases is a present community that is formulated from a relationship with an imagined
community of humans from the “past”. Here it is the temporal structure of chronological
time, which allows this formulation of community to emerge. In this way, time is
11
It is noteable that they invoke a distinction between the museological practices in their country
and “this” country [Britain], in line with the civilizational thrust of the British Museum itself. See
article on reasons why BM keeps Parthenon Marbles.
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deployed as an anamorphic technology, which results in the construction of a defined,
and therefore limited, community.
The second is a community of humans who are directly connected to a community of
humans from the past by our everyday similarities. In these conceptions, we are not
necessarily the inheritors of the past (as above), but are one in the same. Though the
specific details of our daily activities differ, the functions are largely the same.
Consequently, though time has “evolved,” we know ourselves precisely through the
similarities that occur across time. One staff member claims that it is important to get
participants to think about the “everyday thousands of years ago” so that they can
recognize that we are all human (BMJ 2). They state that making connections between
astrolabes12 and modern day horoscopes is one way of making that connection across
time – “that’s the link to the past” (BMJ 1, 2).
Students too echoed this sentiment. One student expressed feelings of awe and
gratitude to those humans who went before “us”. They first spoke about the importance
of learning about objects in the museum with particular emphasis on the astrolabe.13
When pressed to explain why, they stated, “Because its about the universe and how the
time…why we have this watch. Just very curious…wondering why so many years ago
people can do such things. Just really amazing. And you just feel you know maybe a little
bit about this world. This make you feel really tiny” (Hackney Interview 4, similar
sentiment expressed in Hackney interview 7). The community is forged around the
sharing of information and resources throughout time. The work of humans in the past is
inherited through the tools that we use today, and that concretizes a notion of a
12
“Calculating time and place has been important for centuries. This workshop will look at
objects from across Europe and the Middle East that were used to calculate times, dates, and even
make horoscopes. It will focus on shared knowledge and offer the students opportunity to create
an instrument and take measurements” (British Museum, Astrolabes Pre-workshop Package,
2009, 1).
13
Astrolabes are ancient tools that were used to tell time and for navigation. “Calculating time
and place has been important for centuries. This workshop will look at objects from across
Europe and the Middle East that were used to calculate times, dates, and even make horoscopes.
It will focus on shared knowledge and offer the students opportunity to create an instrument and
take measurements” (British Museum, Astrolabes Pre‐ workshop Package, 2009, 1).
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continuous human community throughout time as well as an androcentric conception of
history. Though these students may not ascribe to this historical worldview tout court, the
significance is that the discourse is in circulation at the museum.14
b) Constitution Hill
The time of community at Constitution Hill, like the time of the political, is much more
nation-focused than at the British Museum. The “we” that is continually expressed by
senior museum staff is a national community that has experienced a dark past but must
move on to a brighter future. “We have a history to learn from and a lot of people aren’t
aware of what’s expected and what their rights and responsibilities are, and it’s very
important to us to, to move on and to learn from our past, and move with it” (CH 5). Here
a teleologic line is drawn between a bad past and a future which “we” are certain to arrive
at. Significantly however, the community that is articulated here is not simply a national
community. It is also a community that has experienced the movement of time, the
weight of historical events, and that can change in the future by learning from the past.
Indeed, as the senior staff member interchangeably deploys “nation”, “culture”, and
“South Africa” to describe the community that is central to the museum, the evolutionary
temporality remains the same. It is the consistent structure within which the imagined
community is rendered visible (Anderson 6).15 “Obviously our past is very dark. Which
I’m, in all fairness and, and defense of South Africa, it’s, it’s, I think every culture has
had their dark past, it’s just at different phases of their life. And it’s just ah, some cycle of
development, we just happened to have ours a lot later than others” (CH 4-5).
Indeed, here, the memory practices at Constitution Hill allow visitors to experience
themselves as possessing identity across time as it proffers a narrative, which allows them
to re-collect themselves in the imagined space of a particular national time (Sayer 2004:
79).
14
Though seemingly interested in building a global humanitarian community, the discourse of
this temporal community at the British Museum also functions as a civilizing force. It speaks to
the world through a purported language of universalism but which is actually coded civilizational
tongue. This needs elaboration.
15
Here Anderson is employed because this is a particularly nationally-focused imaginary (see
footnote number two).
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c) District Six
The time of community at the District Six Museum is also one that unfolds over
chronological time. This community is largely discursively comprised of
intergenerational connections between former residents of District Six and younger
members of the community. As I was interviewing one staff member at the museum,
there was a rehearsal going on outside of her office door.
This program that’s happening today [we can hear noise in the background
of people rehearsing], it’s rehearsals but it’s very much an educational
development program. New poets, musicians, or artists are working with
some of the older, iconic type of Cape Town performers and they engage
and learning from each other and collaborating. And what emerges is not the
product of one person. So it’s pretty much emblematic I suppose, of the way
in which our programming happens. (D6 3)
Here the staff member explains that the community at the District Six Museum is
intergenerational. This form of community is constitutive of the ‘democratic’ ethos of the
museum itself as it reflects the collective interactive participation that staff claim is
essential to the ongoing creation of the museum itself. The imagined community at
District Six is comprised of humans who have a temporal connection to the community.
This community is primarily formed through the excavation and sharing of memories of
the past.
In a second example of the focus on intergenerational community at District Six, the
museum launched a campaign called the Hands Off Prestwich Campaign in 2003. The
campaign revolved around private contractor’s accidental unearthing of approximately
800 human skeletons in Cape Town in 2003. The identity of those found in the mass
grave was and continues to be in dispute but due to the high density of bodies in a small
unmarked space are though to be either the remains of former slaves and paupers, all
members who were not members of the only established church at the time and including
paupers and slaves, or victims of an outbreak or epidemic such as smallpox (Soudien 49).
The heritage arm of the state desired to use the remains for scientific research but in
accordance with heritage policy was required to open a 60-day consultation period in
order for possible descendents to come forward to claim biological kin status. Although
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the museum wished for the remains to be left where they were out of respect for the dead,
they refused to interact with the state in ways that reinforced racialised narratives of
affiliation. The Hands Off Prestwich Campaign articulated a position against the state in
solidarity with the dead on the basis that they both shared – although in very different
ways - the experience of dispossession. This position was fundamentally humanist as
they argued that the proposed scientific experiments dispossessed these people of their
human identity and rendered them as scientific objects of inspection.
Although this stance required the museum to think of solidarity inter-generationally,
and in ways that extended beyond the limits of apartheid pasts, it seemed that the
museum’s practice of thinking outside of historical modes of self-description ended with
the concept of the human. The remains found at Prestwich Street were only knowable, as
former human beings, and marked as either male or female. The museum took an
organizational offence to the treatment of these findings as objects, thereby exposing
their own veneration of the essence of the human. In their campaign of solidarity with the
dead, the museum articulated a strong stance against what was perceived as the
‘reduction’ of human beings to objects, reified through state-directed memorializing
practices or ivory tower research projects. The construction of this intergenerational
community of humans exposes what might be a monumentalisation of an “essence” of
the human individual, which contradicts earlier stated approaches to interrogate the
historically produced boundaries of subjectivity. Here at the site of District Six, we see
the boundaries of the time of community foreclose other possibilities of thinking about
being and belonging.
4.1 TIME OF THE (DEMOCRATIC) SUBJECT
The time of the subject as explored above and in my literature review is the experience of
the unfolding of chronological time that puts the subject “in place”. As Preziosi and
Maleuvre argue, the museum is a place that helps forestall the terror of chaos and of
transcendent contingency by naturalizing authorial Selfhood. Similar to the time of the
political and the time of community explored above, the force of this chronologically
narrativized subject legitimizes what kinds of subjects are imaginable at the site of the
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museum. This section will investigate the practices of constitutions of the subject that
occur at all three museological sites.
The time of the subject here is more aptly termed the time of the democratic subject,
as the project of democratization runs as a current through all of the pedagogical practices
of subject formation at the three sites of my inquiry. Importantly, the idea of
“democracy” changes drastically in each setting, but is still characterized as such by each
respective institution. I will argue that it is indeed temporality that is key here because, as
with the categories above (Time of the Political and Time of Community), there is a
deployment of chronological time that the emergence of the democratic subject hinges
on. As I will elaborate below, the development (loaded word intended) of this particular
subject at each three sites is driven by the myth of redemption explored above. The time
of the (democratic) subject is one that is predicated on leaving a past self behind in the
service of the longer-term project of creating a democratic future. This production –
mirroring that of a Christian confessional where sins are left behind with the acting priest
– is of course mediated and made possible by the pedagogical services of the museum.
a) British Museum
The subject at the British Museum is overwhelmingly one determined by discourses of
evolutionary time. Museum staff as well as language tutors repeatedly discuss the
importance of developing subjects – that is “teaching” students particular skills and/or
traits for what is purported to be a better future person. Granted, if it was not obvious in
the title “Adult Learner’s Week,” the pedagogic agenda of the museum overdetermines
the possibilities of the adult participants. Preziosi claims that the museum is about the
production and retrieval of a concretized selfhood, however in the case of the adult
learning programs at the British Museum it was about the development of particular
subjects.
The metaphor of “stepping stones” and “finding one’s own voice” was deployed
repeatedly when speaking with museum staff about the programs. Staff stated that the
programs were about “…driving down and drilling down much more into personal
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responses and personal experiences and developing students’ ideas” (BMJS 11). Another
staff member claimed that they thought “it works best if people are made to feel that they
can contribute something…you know, to allow people to feel that they have a voice”
(BMK 7). Although a seemingly benevolent gesture, this programming resonates with a
broader agenda of neoliberal strategies aimed at responsibilizing individuals, especially
those receiving or likely to receive social service funding. The strong outcome-oriented
tone of the programs came through interviews with senior staff at the museum who
repeatedly mentioned that the program’s impetus was to have adult participants return to
the museum, significantly, with their families (BMJS 12, 13). In this way, individual
participants’ repeated visits were seen as the site from which to make the museum more
diverse.
Because, as with a lot of museums, our representation of audiences is
predominantly white European and yet we have a collection that represents
two million years of humanity…but not necessarily the audience that
experiences that. So it’s kind of two fold, so there’s the high level of
London audiences and actually in a good way, if people come for a class,
under the guidance of a tutor they meet someone who’s welcome who’s
friendly, then on that very level, hopefully that’s a stepping stone to make
them feel confident to come back. (BMJS 13, emphasis mine)
Moreover, teachers from the language centers themselves also engaged in this discourse.
In an interview with one language tutor, they too claimed that returning with friends
and/or family was the ultimate goal of the program.
SD: Can I ask you about what you just said…that the ultimate goal is to
return with families and friends - why do you think that should be an
ultimate goal?
NQ: Rather than as an individual, maybe?
SD: Or return at all?
NQ: Because the return itself is the whole idea of being self-motivated.
Because the courses we run are 10 hours and that isn't enough for their
learning to go forward. They have to take responsibility to do stuff outside
the classroom themselves to make any real progress…that which we would
like them to make. They have to take responsibility outside the classroom,
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manage their own time so it’s sort of symbolic of that.” (Interview Hackney
Tutor 4)
The responsibilizing tone of the programming is hardly surprising given the basis for the
adult learning course was initiated due to a New Labour directive called “Skills for Life”.
However, my aim here is not to engage in a critique of neoliberal pedagogical reforms at
the museum but to draw out the way in which the development of the subject – whether
neoliberal or not – is contingent on a temporality that is the basis for the emergence of
that subject in the first place. In other words, that the subject is only conceivable as it fits
into the narrative of chronological time that is unfolding.
The discourse of subject development was not only linked to an instrumentalist
governmental policy however. Students too spoke about the museum as a site from which
they could personally learn. One student claimed “For me its good to go to the museum
to learn everything about the history. All the different countries all the different
nationalities. Around the picture you can discover the many different aspect, the different
life of the countries” (Hackney Interview 2). This student articulates that the museum is a
site for developing historical knowledge about the world. The museum is the place from
which this authoritative information can be gleaned for personal knowledge. Another
student stated that, “Museum is necessary for me because I can understand and I can
search everything there. I can feel I am living that time. Because past is necessary to our
now and future. That’s important we have to carry past in the future and now” (Hackney
Interview 3). The subject at the British Museum is one that experiences not just a “putting
in place”, but also a “putting in time”; a self-legibility through the structure of
evolutionary time.
b) Constitution Hill
The subject at Constitution Hill is one that heeds the call of “heritage” and responds by
carrying it forward into the future. Museum staff made a clear distinction between
“history” and “heritage”, the latter being of great significance for the enhancement of the
future. For staff at the museum, history is “dead” and of no use because nothing can be
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“learned from it”. Heritage, on the other hand, can be put to work in the service of a
brighter future.
History is dead. History is something on a piece of paper that, that nobody
learns from. They kinda read it then forget about it ten minutes later…but,
um, heritage is something very important, and um…like you said, you used
the word cultural…one of your questions was…“how do you identify your
cultural and ethnic background?” – that to me, that’s heritage. That’s, that’s
what you choose to carry with you forward. (CH 7)
Subjects, as they are imagined here, are individuals that have learned about the past (at
the museum), and have chosen to take the “new” knowledge with them into the future.
The good and desirable subject here is intrinsically predicated on an evolutionary
temporality that moves from a dark past into a redeemed future. The pedagogic thrust at
the museum is to encourage subjects to embrace this temporal logic and follow it
through. This project is essential for “democracy”. As senior staff claim,
…we need to sort of guard our heritage quite, quite close. Not so much our
history but our heritage because to me history is something that’s, that’s
happened and we don’t learn from it. Heritage is something we, we carry
with us and we move forward. And that’s why I think it’s more important.
(CH 7)
This imagined temporal subject is quite striking for the context of Constitution Hill in
contemporary Johannesburg, South Africa. Although the past is to be learned from, it is
not to be taken forward. Only the lessons from the past are to move with the subject into
the future. This was a common theme I found amongst white South Africans during my
research trip. The dominant theme was that the past was awful and it should not be
forgotten, but it should not hinder us in our forging of a new democracy. For some, this
response is typical of a “white South African” mentality that is defensive at the
questioning of continued “white privilege” even after the fall of official apartheid (D6
15). When I asked the senior staff member at Constitution Hill, as I asked all
interviewees, what their “cultural or ethic background” was, they responded by saying
“I’m an African. I identify as being African…Born and bred. No other way to see
it…Simple as that. My forefathers, three or four generations weren’t South African but
that’s a little too far back for me to care [laughs]” (CH 2). The museum staff exemplifies
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the time of the subject as it is intended to be experienced at Constitution Hill. The past
happened (in this case, the staff members colonial background), but it should be left
where it is (in the past) as South Africa is re-imagined (presently) as a democratic,
universally equal place. In this newly imagined place, and in stark contrast to the
practices of the District Six Museum, colonial roots do not matter in the present.
Significantly, time has dispelled the validity of their present-day meaning. This mirrors
the framing of apartheid at the museum; the claim of the memory of apartheid floats as an
empty memory of the past. It is there, but can have no claim on the present. This
temporality, with a uniquely weighted past, present, and future, acts as the defining
constituency within which the subject can be rendered legible.
c) District Six
The subject at District Six is also one that is responsibilized through a temporal logic.
This subject is one that is sensitive to the oppressed of the past, and especially to material
differences between people that have been accrued through history. One of the most
important objectives of the pedagogic programming is to impart this sensibility onto the
participants of the educational programming. “We try to then teach them to reflect on the
very many different things that make human beings uncomfortable when they come into
a situation with people they perceive as different” (D6 8). Individuals who participate in
this program are transformed into a more truly democratic subject. Staff note that though
people purport to be living in a democratic age, they continue to engage in undemocratic
practices of racism, classism, sexism and homophobia. The true democratic future will be
comprised of individual subjects who know what it means to live democracy, that is, as
universally inclusive.
People have learned not to use racist concepts because there’s legislation
that protects people. But what we find is that for us, that’s not democracy,
learning to sanitize your language. What you really have to do is deeply
embrace people who are different to you. And so uh, our programs that deal
with democracy, and that’s really everything, is sometimes a deeply painful
process for many, many people, but once people learn to work with it, um,
they, they begin to really understand and live democracy. (D6 9)
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As explored also in the time of community, the subject at District Six is asked to take up
a temporal task. Similar to that found at Constitution Hill, this task is a project of learning
something and carrying it forward into the future. It is then carried into the future in the
name of an ethical project and one that is universally applicable. In this way, the
naturalized temporality is imbued with an ethical force that is then, like a sermon,
delivered (preached) to others. The responsibilized subject is donned with the task of
imparting the truth of the temporality, and are themselves produced by its logic. In this
way the time of the subject at District Six is embedded in a circular logic that selflegitimates the production of an authorial selfhood through chronological time, and the
narrative of sequential time itself.
As explored above, this theme runs throughout the museological sites and operates
similarly to produce concretized conceptions of the political and of community. In so
doing, time as a structure becomes a limiting force on conceptions that might otherwise
be conceived of differently. Specifically, and as elucidated by Maleuvre above, these
categories work as techniques of compulsive identification that produce the very category
of the subject and the political constituency which it must identify both to and through. It
is an attempt to think outside of these practices of compulsive identity formation, which
is at the heart of this project. In light of the centrality of chronological time in the
production of these limiting techniques, I turn now to consider the possibility of
conceiving of a new temporality at the site of the museum. I argue that a new temporality
may offer conceptions of the political, the community, and the subject that defy the
demand to concretize and demarcate these very categories. At the very least, this
exploration of a “different temporality” may help elucidate the effects of a structure of
chronological time as progress, which shape – and as I have argued, limit - the educative
work at the site of the museum and of contemporary constitutional theory. The
possibilities for different conceptions of the political, community, and the subject are
possible through a different temporality.
5.1 A DIFFERENT TEMPORALITY?
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Critiques of the evolutionary thrust of chronological time as progress come from various
places along the political spectrum. Anti-colonial critique is lodged at the civilizing force
of evolutionary time. Marxists and anti-marxists alike critique the redemptive threads of
Marx’s revolutionary thought. Anthropologist and cultural theorist David Scott is critical
of the anticolonial narrative that takes on an epic Romanticism, telling a progressive story
of revolutionary events that lead to the triumph of the marginalized and dispossessed.
Drawing on the work of George Steiner and Hayden White, Scott sees productive value
in deflating this “redemptive mythology” (Scott Conscripts 134-5).
Where the epic revolutionary narrative charts a steadily rising curve in
which the end is already foreclosed by a horizon available through an act of
rational, self-transparent will, in the tragic narrative the rhythm is more
tentative, its direction less determinative, more recursive, and its meaning
less transparent. (Scott Conscripts 135)
For Scott, this rethinking of the relationship between past, present, and future, offers
particular help for what he sees as the pitfalls of contemporary anti-colonial critique.
Anti-colonial feminist Anne McClintock too claims that there is an urgency for the task
of rethinking history and the politics of memory. For McClintock, the postcolonial
agenda has not sufficiently grappled with the issue of time and too easily united around
the concept of “a common past” (McClintock Angel 87). These authors castigate the
fetishization of time that political projects hinge upon. While eager to interrogate internal
group difference based on identity markers, the temporal logics of these political projects
are largely under-theorized. Homi Bhabha also shares a concern with the thrust of
progress in political imaginings, and finds a way of undermining the self-assuredness of
the evolutionary emplotment through the work of Walter Benjamin (Bhabha 1992).
Benjamin famously took as his intellectual aim, a critique of history as “progress,”
propelled forward by a chronological series of events, unfolding as a neat and tidy
teleological narrative (Benjamin Thesis XIII; Arcades, First Sketches, Oo71, 863). For
Benjamin, this way of thinking about the past erases the histories of the oppressed who
have been written out of the dominant historical narrative. Although the remembrance of
the past is important, he made a significant distinction between
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“historiography/historicism” and “historical materialism.” While the former asserts a
narrative of the way “it really was”, the latter is a way of remembering the oppressed past
that is neglected (and therefore further oppressed) in order for the stories of the victors to
be asserted. His distinction and hostility to the violence of one over the other, is heavily
linked to his interest in surrealist art forms and specifically, in thinking through a
surrealist historical methodology (Benjamin, Surrealism; Osborne, Small-Scale, 61).
Benjamin’s emergent concept of history is bound up with his formulation of a new time
and new subjectivities, but it begins with a critique of “progress” as such.
Benjamin’s critique of historicism is found most famously in the theses that he
develops in ‘On the Concept of History’. At the outset he makes the distinction between
the form of history, which he is critical of and, through an enigmatic preview, the method
of historiography that he is attempting to explicate. He claims in Thesis VI,
To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it “the way it
really was” (Ranke). It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a
moment of danger…Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the
spark of hope in the past who is firmly convinced that even the dead will not
be safe from the enemy if he wins. And this enemy has not ceased to be
victorious. (Benjamin, Thesis VI)
Before unpacking some of the important and cryptic elements from this thesis of what
history “isn’t”, this critique should first be juxtaposed with a later thesis that points
instead to what history “is”. In Thesis XVI Benjamin claims that, “History is the subject
of a structure whose site is not homogenous, empty time, but time filled by the presence
of the now [Jetztzeit]” (Benjamin, Thesis XIV).
His critique is twofold then. Firstly, Benjamin asserts a conceptual difference
distinguishing history mastered by a telos and history that resists the oppressive force of
this command. In other words, history is not a narrative of ‘the way it really was’ (what
he claims is always the story of the victors). Instead, history’s foundations (following the
architectural metaphor that he began above in Thesis XIV) are based on the temporality
of Jetztzeit. History is the subject of a structure, and that structure rests on this temporal
modality. At once there is a clear emphasis on temporality in both Benjamin’s critique
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and postulation. He is at once after the destruction of thinking of time as what he calls in
a later thesis, “homogenous, empty time,” while simultaneously invoking another mode
of thinking history16. This other temporality is what he calls the “presence of the now
[Jetztzeit]” (Benjamin, Thesis XIV). This alternative mode of temporality will be
elaborated upon below.
Secondly, and in addition to the distinction between the concepts of historicisim and
historical materialism, Benjamin postulates a method of historiography. For Benjamin,
the dutiful historian is one that seizes and holds a memory as it “flashes up at a moment
of danger.” What does he mean when he calls for these somewhat abrasive actions?
Again in Thesis V, as in Thesis XIV explored above, Benjamin deploys the concept of
“seizing” to explain his alternative method of historical remembering.
The true picture of the past flits by. The past can be seized only as an image
which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen
again…For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as
one if its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good
tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be
lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth). (Benjamin, Thesis V)
The seizing is temporary – it can only be temporary as the image of the past has a life
force of its own and flits away, out of control of the historian. It (what Benjamin will
refer to as a “monad” in Thesis XVII) must be recognized in that moment or else lost
forever. The historian’s job is both to recognize the moment and to fan it, as fanning an
ember to create a fire, a fire of hope that the past will be remembered. Indeed, the fire
must ward off the figure of “the enemy” present in Thesis VI. In the context of
Benjamin’s condemnation of history as progress, I read the enemy to be the “force” or
weight that “historians” give to teleological progress. More fully articulated in Thesis IX,
“progress” is imagined as a storm pushing the angel of history backwards, wings
outstretched, into the future. Benjamin says, “the angel would like to stay, awaken the
16
“Historical knowledge of the truth is possible only as overcoming the illusory appearance <Aufhebung
des Scheins>. Yet this overcoming should not signify sublimation, actualization of the object but rather
assume, for its part, the configuration of a rapid image…This configuration of a rapid image goes together
with the recognition of the “now” in things. But not the future…The illusion overcome here is that an
earlier time is in the now. In truth: the now <is> the inmost image of what has been” (Benjamin, Arcades,
First Sketches, Oo 81, p. 865)
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dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise;…”
(Benjamin, Thesis IX).
Significantly, Benjamin’s project is not as a lament for a lost past that must be
restored and made right, but instead it is a resistance to the forces of narrative – all of
them - that hinder the potentialities of the past and the present. As Benjamin might say,
this involves resisting the strongest narcotic of the nineteenth century – the authoritative
weight of chronological history (Benjamin, Arcades, First Sketches, Oo71, 863). This is
not to posit a “true” past that will replace the story of the victors, but instead is to think
history ontologically, as something that has a force of its own and cannot be contained by
the limits of linear time, or even human consciousness. Giorgio Agamben explains,
In every instant, the measure of forgetting and ruin, the ontological
squandering of what we bear within ourselves far exceeds the piety of our
memories and consciences. But the shapeless chaos of the forgotten is
neither inert nor ineffective…Forgetting has a force and a way of operating
that cannot be measured in the same terms as those of conscious memory,
nor can it be accumulated like knowledge. Its persistence determines the
status of all knowledge and understanding. (Agamben, Time That Remains,
40)
In this way Benjamin’s project is a radical re-conception of how we think of history and
indeed what history is. As Agamben elucidates here, it is a force that lays outside of
consciousness, or in other words, that cannot be contained within the limits of
consciousness. This force is all round us and yet escapes the confines of the limited, static
categories of time that we attempt to impose on it. It is Benjamin’s aim, like the project
of atomic fission, to blast open these energies and release them from the restrictive
temporality which suffocates them.
Benjamin’s political project resonated best with Surrealism. It is in his essay on the
avant-garde art movement, written in 1929 that Benjamin proposes a “…dialectical way
of seeing things that recognizes the everyday as impenetrable and the impenetrable as
everyday” (Benjamin Surrealism 157). He claims that the Surrealist Andre Breton has
redeemed the ephemeral by “causing the mighty forces of ‘atmosphere’ that lie hidden in
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these things to explode” (Benjamin Surrealism, 148). For Benjamin, it is the Surrealists
and their “secular illuminations” of the everyday (without dreams, opium, or hashish)
which have thus far allowed for political materialism and the physical body to
interpenetrate so deeply that “…all revolutionary tension becomes bodily collective
innervation and all bodily innervations [sic.] of the collective become revolutionary
discharge,” and thus adhered to the call of The Communist Manifesto (Benjamin
Surrealism 160). Indeed, Peter Osborne asserts that “Surrealism represented the potential
of a potentially radical form of historical consciousness; Surrealist experience as
historical experience” (Osborne, Small-Scale, 65). Surrealism offered the potential to
shock and interrupt (a methodology that Benjamin adopts in his own writing of the
Arcades project), as well as to experience the interconnection of the material and the
physical. However, it must be stressed that this “illumination” does not mean that “true”
experiences of history will begin to flow into the present. To reiterate from above, the
illumination ruptures an experience of past, present and future so as to create “…an eddy
in the stream of becoming” (Benjamin Epistemo-Critical Prologue). “Experience of the
past is blocked, producing a disturbance or “eddy” that has consequences for the future.
Thus with respect both to past and future, the incomplete experience of the past with the
present ‘explodes the continuum of history’” (Caygill, CCWB Concept of Cultural
History, 90-1). Indeed, Benjamin seems to contend that surrealist montage – in the name
of historical materialism - offers a method of historiography that will dislodge the
established faith in “progress” that according to him, has dominated the nineteenth
century.
According to Benjamin, historical materialism supplies a unique experience of the
past. Formulated in opposition to the “additive” method of historicism, historical
materialism operates on a constructive principle – one that can arrest and “…blast open
the continuum of history (Benjamin, Thesis XVI, XVII). Indeed, Benjamin’s call is a
destructive one - blasting open the continuum of history – but only in so far as this
destruction will allow for more open possibilities. As Howard Caygill emphasizes, “the
‘destructive element’ does not refer to the destruction of the past by the present but rather
the possibility that the reserve of the past will destroy aspects of the present and open it to
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the future” (Caygill, CCWB, Concept of Cultural History, 93). The destruction is of the
idea that the past, present, and future are separate and autonomous objects, which can be
thought of within the present, but as distinct from the present. As we blow apart the
continuum of history we are creating a consciousness of the present (Benjamin “Fuchs”
SW III, 262).
Benjamin’s work has profound meaning for the site of the museum and
constitutionalism. His critique of the nineteenth century’s incessant reliance on history as
chronological time upsets the foundations of models of time and history that are found at
the museums contained in this study. Benjamin’s project strives to undermine the force of
the idea of “progress” in the nineteenth century and in so doing demands reconceptualizations of temporal logics that do not foreclose or limit the categories of the
political, community, or the subject. Rather, a new time would blast open these categories
and doing so would service justice for their great potentialities.
6.1 CONCLUSION
The task of thinking new temporal logics at the museum carries the project of thinking
different political projects, different notions of community, and different conceptions of
the subject. I have attempted to demonstrate how the thrust of chronological time as
progress at the three museological sites explored above works to cohere and “tame” these
categories, which might otherwise be happily unwieldy. In so doing, the temporal logic
limits what kinds of political projects, community, and subjects can be thought at the site
of the museum, and arguably elsewhere as well. Indeed, Walter Benjamin saw the
ruinous notion of time as “past”, “present” and “future” as endemic to capitalist
modernity. And so this critique of the foreclosing faculties of a naturalized evolutionary
time is also of significance to constitutional theory.
Significantly, new frameworks of time have been thought through constitutionalism in
the past, most memorably by the General Assembly of the French Revolution. In their reimagining of a revolutionary France, Robespierre and his comrades rejected the modern
Western standard temporal reference framework in an attempt at a total symbolic
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transformation for the new nation. In place of the calendar of the Ancien Regime, “the
Revolutionary Calendar was introduced in an age which advocated the total obliteration
of the old order in the name of progress and modernity: the beginning of the new
Republican Era marked the total discontinuity between past and present” (Zerubavel
871). Of course, this nationalist project carried with it the zest of a righteously secular
and modernist agenda that merely replaced the person whose birthday time was
chronologically progressing from. In the old calendar it was the birthday of Jesus that
stood as the marker of the passing of time, whereas the revolutionary calendar used the
birth of the republic as its symbol for commemoration. The thrust of progress remained in
the new temporal order.
In its somewhat staggered format, this chapter has attempted to foreground the
function of the naturalization of chronological time as progress at three museological
sites. I argue that it is this temporal structure that allows for, and consequently shapes, the
emergence of particular forms of life. Here I have claimed that three notable categories
are that of the political, community, and the subject. As this naturalized temporality is
invoked through these categories at the site of the museum, it carries with it the
authoritative weight of the institutions of historical meaning-making. As such, the
museum has a role in shaping popular conceptions of discourses of the political, the
community, and the individual that are all intrinsic to constitutionalism. The following
chapters will be more in-depth explorations of the resonances between these categories
within Anglo-American and European constitutional theory. They will focus on the
shared quest for universal representation, the common centralization of human
constituencies, similar aesthetic practices of political articulations, and the prevailing role
of archival practices at both sites. These chapters aims to further explore the symbiotic
relationship between museums and constitutions with a view to advance my claim that
the boundaries separating these two sites are more porous than is conventionally thought.
The objective of such a project is to rethink what is included within the parameters of
discussions regarding law and political community, and how new imaginings of these
parameters might be opened up through the site of the museum.
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Works Cited
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Press, 2005.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of
Nationalism. New York: Verso, 1983.
Anderson, Gavin. Human Rights After Globalisation. Oxford, Hart. 2005.
Benjamin, Walter. The Arcades Project. Trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLoughlin.
London: Belknap Press, 1999.
-- "Eduard Fuchs: Collector and Historian”. The Essential Frankfurt School Reader. Eds.
A. Arato and Eike Gebhardt, NY: Urizen Books, 1978. 225 - 253.
-- “Epistemo-Critical Prologue”. The Origin of German Tragic Drama. Trans. John
Osborne. New York: Verso, 1977.
-- “Surrealism”. One-way Street and Other Writings. Trans. Edmund Jephcot and
Kingsley Shorter. London: Verso, 1979.
-- “Theses on the Philosophy of History”. Illuminations. Trans. H. Zohn. FontanaCollins, 1973.
Bennett, Tony. The Birth of the Museum. London: Routledge, 2002.
Bennett, Tony. “Civic Seeing: Museums and the Organization of Vision“. In A
Companion to Museum Studies. Ed. Sharon MacDonald. 2006.
Bhabha, Homi. “Freedom’s Basis in the Indeterminate”. October, Vol. 61. Summer,
1992. 46-57.
Caygill, Howard. "Walter Benjamin’s Concept of Cultural History". The Cambridge
Companion to Walter Benjamin. Ed. David S. Ferris. Cambridge University Press,
2004.
Fitzpatrick, Peter. The Mythology of Modern Law. London: New York : Routledge, 1992.
Foucault, Michel. The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. London:
Routledge, 2002.
Haraway, Donna. “Teddy Bear Patriarchy in the Garden of Eden, New York City, 19081936”. Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the World of Modern
Science. London: Routledge, 1989. 26-58.
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Maleuvre, Didier. Museum Memories: History, Technology, Art. California: Stanford,
1999.
McClintock, Anne. “The Angel of Progress: Pitfalls of the Term ‘Post-Colonialism’”.
Social Text, No. 31/32, 1992. 84-98.
Osborne, Peter. “Small-scale Victories, Large-scale Defeats: Walter Benjamin’s Politics
of Time.” Walter Benjamin’s Philosophy: Destruction and Experience. Eds.
Andrew Benjamin and Peter Osborne. New York: Routledge. 59-109
Pomian, Krzysztof. Collectors and Curiosities: Paris and Venice, 1500-1800. Origins of
the Museum. 1990.*
Preziosi, Donald and Claire Farrago. “General introduction: what are museums for?” In
Grasping the World: The Idea of the Museum. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2004. pp. 1-21.
Preziosi, Donald. Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums, and the Phantasms of
Modernity. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2003.
-- Rethinking Art History: Meditations on a Coy Science. London: Yale University Press,
1989.
Ranciere, Jacques. “Overlegitimation”. Trans. Kristin Ross. Social Text, No. 31/32, 1992.
252-257.
Sayer, Derek. “Incognito Ergo Sum: Language, Memory and the Subject”. Theory,
Culture & Society. Vol. 21, No. 6. 2004. 67-89.
Scott, David. Conscripts of Modernity. Durham, North Carolina: Duke University
Press, 2004.
Snyman, John. “Interpretation and the Politics of Memory”. Acta Juridica. 1997. 312337.
Soudien, Crain. “Memory and Critical Education: Approaches in the District Six
Museum”. City-Site-Museum: Reviewing Memory Practices at the District Six
Museum. Eds. Bonita Bennett, Julius Chrischené, and Crain Soudien. Cape Town:
District Six Museum, 2008. 40-55.
Tully, James. Strange Multiplicity: Constitutionalism in an Age of Diversity. Cambridge:
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Walker, Neil. The Past and Future of the European Constitution. Oxford: Oxford
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-- “Taking Constitutionalism Beyond the State”. Political Studies. 2008. Vol. 56. 519543.
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LIST OF APPENDICES
Appendix “A”
Adult Learner’s Questionnaire
Background
1. Are you from the UK? If not, where are you from?
2. How long have you lived or been in the UK?
3. How do you identify your cultural or ethnic background?
Questionnaire for Adult Learning Week Participants
1. What did you remember about your trip to the museum?
2. How do you remember it (the thing you remember)? Is it an image, a sound, a feeling,
etc…?
3. Did you find that the Learning Program gave you insight into different cultures?
4. Why or why not? If so, how?
5. Is there one word that you feel adequately describes your experience at the museum
this week?
6. Please look at this list of words. Do any of the following words describe your experience
at the museum this week:
diversity
exchange
learn
experience
Why or why not?
7. Is memory or remembering an important part of this program?
8. Do you have any final comments you wish to share?
feel
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Appendix “B”
British Museum Staff Questionnaire
Background
1.
2.
3.
4.
How long have you worked at the museum?
How long have you worked on the Learning Programs?
Are you from the UK? If not, where are you from?
How do you identify your cultural or ethnic background?
Questionnaire for British Museum Staff
1. What kinds of activities take place during the Adult Learners Week?
2. How have they changed from programs delivered in the past?
3. Is memory or remembering an important part of this program?
4. Do you think “exchange” is a good word to describe the Adult Learners Week?
Why or why not?
5. Is there one word that you feel adequately describes Adult Learners week? Why?
6. Please look at this list of words. Do any of the following words describe Adult
Learners week:
diversity exchange
learn
experience
feel
Why or why not?
7. Do you have any final comments you wish to share?
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Appendix “C”
Questionnaire for Tutors
Background
1. Do you teach in the UK?
2. Do you teach in a state, private, public, or other type of school?
3. How long have you been teaching?
Questionnaire for Tutors
1. Do you find the museum is a good place to take students? Why or why not?
2. Is memory an important part of your trip to the museum?
3. Is there one word that you feel adequately describes your experience at the museum
this week?
4. Please look at this list of words. Do any of the following words describe your experience
at the museum this week:
diversity
exchange
learn
Why or why not?
5. Do you have any final comments you wish to share?
experience
feel
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Appendix “D”
Questionnaire for District Six Museum and Constitution Hill Staff
Background
1.
2.
3.
4.
How long have you worked at the museum/constitutional court?
How long have you worked on the interactive programs?
Are you from South Africa? If not, where are you from?
How do you identify your cultural or ethnic background?
Questionnaire
1. Can you tell me a little bit about the programs you run at the museum/constitutional
court?
2. How long have they been running?
3. Who participates in these programs?
4. Who doesn’t participate in these programs?
5. What do you think is the most important aspect of these programs?
6. What do you think is the least important aspect (i.e., if you had to get rid of one
element)?
7. In your opinion, have they been “successful” and what do you mean by “successful”?
8. Would you like to see more of these kinds of programs at this museum/constitutional
court? Elsewhere in South Africa? Elsewhere in the world?
9. Do the programs you run have anything to do with “democracy”? Can you explain what
you mean by “democracy”?
10. Do you have any final comments you wish to share?