now that is evidence: tracking down the evil “whatever” interpretation

8/13/2019 Now THAT is Evidence: Tracking Down the Evil Whatever Interpretation

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Visitor Studies Today Volume 9 Issue 3 200610

Museum Field Trips in Taiwan

Interpretation has been part of themodern museums mandate since itsbirth in the eighteenth century (Bennett,1995), yet it is the least studied of all

aspects of museum work. Recently,the American Association of Museumsinstituted aNational InterpretationProjectto begin the process ofidentifying and disseminatingstandards and best practices (AAMwebsite). This project will undoubtedlycreate a new understanding of howmuseums currently carry out theirinterpretive work. What I have to offeryou today, though, is in a differentregister. It consists of ideas gatheredfrom some of the greatest thinkers of

interpretationpassionate and generouspeople who have made the interrogationof interpretation their lifes work. Ioffer these ideas with the hope thatthrough you, these ideas will take rootin the museum, engendering moreinformed and self-aware interpretivepractices.

Interpretation is a conceptnotunlike experiencethat is highlyambiguous, itself open to wildlydifferent interpretations. Its openness

is both its strength and its weakness:the openness of interpretation iswhat allows cultures to mobilize newideas and practices and to redefinetheir canons, but it also allows thedominant forces of the day to directand eventually colonize interpretation,closing down the very possibilities thatthey claim to open. Therefore, what I

Now THAT is Evidence: Tracking Down

the Evil Whatever InterpretationCheryl Meszaros

want to do today is to establish a littlehavenan international conservationproject, if you willfor the endangeredaspects of interpretation. This is a

haven where interpretation can becanjust be, not in the service of educationor audience development, not for thefinancial health of the museum, or as anoutcome of AAMs strategic planning,however necessary and admirableall of these may be. I want to createa shelter for the endangered aspectsof interpretation precisely becausethey are the most potent forces in ademocratic society. They carry a weightand vigor that nourish thoughts offreedom, of engagement, of civility, and

of responsibility.Building this shelter is a collectivetask: it will take you and me and manyothers many years to complete it. Formy part here today, I offer two things.The first is a brief historical overviewof interpretation, from which I willgather up the endangered aspects ofinterpretationa motley but powerfulcrew of figures, forces, ideas, andeven a few ghoststo inhabit ourshelter. The second is a brief history of

interpretive practices in the museumthat culminate in what I call thewhatever interpretation. In thisnarrative, the whatever interpretationis the villain, the schemer who saysone thing but does the opposite. I willargue that on its way to conqueringthe museum, the evil whatever hasabandoned some of the fundamental

attributes of interpretation, leaving ahost of refugees in its wake. It is tothesethe abandoned and endangeredattributes of interpretation, whichare the very attributes that nurturedemocracy and sustain civil societythat I extend a most hearty welcome,offering them a room in our shelter.

A BRIEF HISTORY OF

INTERPRETATION

At a certain point in the long history ofinterpretationspecifically, in the latterpart of the nineteenth centurytheauthority of interpretation came tobe organized around the author. The

centre comprised his thoughts (and itusually was a he), his style, and theinfluences that affected him. At thistime, the truth or the real meaningof a particular text, artifact, or artworkwas thought to reside in the creatorsintentions, in the origins or the contextof production, or in an objectshuman-like emotional properties andits ability to evoke emotions in itsbeholders. Over time, though, theidea that authorship was the soleinterpretive authority was overruled by

new authorities (about which I will saymore in a moment). What constitutedinterpretive truth or certainty in thenineteenth century became knownin the twentieth century as the threefallacies: the intentional fallacy,which found the real meaning ofthe authors intent; the genetic fallacy,which posited that intent in the context

This paper was presented as part of a Keynote Address at the Visitor Studies Association Conference, July 2006, Grand Rapids, Michigan


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individual. For the early structuralists,interpretation was a procedure, amatter of decodingformally, socially,ideologicallya text, an image, or an

account of history, nature, or society.But try as they might (and structuralismwas a very influential cross-disciplinarymovement in the early to mid-twentiethcentury), they could not stabilize orlock down meaning. They could notexplain how you and I could havedifferent interpretations of the sametext if we share the same languageand decoding tools. What they arrivedat was that meaning was not a stablething inthe text or the object; rather, it

was both the product and producer ofthe discourse and interpretive practicesthat circulate around these texts andimages. In other words, meaningwas indeterminate. It depended onthe needs and circumstances of theindividual reader (Eco, 1979; Bourdieu,1993). By the 1960s and 70s, thisdestabilization of what Lyotard calledthe grand narratives of culture andFoucault called regimes of truth, wasspreading across the western worldin the form of the civil rights and

womens movements, and of post-colonialist theory and identity politics.All of these eruptions affirmed thatage, race, place, class, and gender haveeverything to do with interpretation.Together these movements shifted theauthority of interpretation from thestructure and codes of the text to theindividual reader. This shift gave riseto the whole apparatus of attending toand quantifying reader response, andeventually to one trajectory of visitorstudies.

One of the problems that arose whenthis productive and generative agencywas granted to the interpreter was aloss of any definitive, authoritative, oreven widely shared interpretation ofa given text or work. Once the textsof the world were separated fromtheir authors intent and subsequently

separated from a stable decodingsystem, they could simply float, adrifton the endless sea of innumerableinterpretations. How to cope with

this unwieldy indeterminacy ofmeaning, this politics of pluralism,has to a large extent defined the post-structural projecta project that itis still unfolding. In the museum thisindeterminacy of meaning, whichis the culmination of the histories Ihave recited, provides the theoreticalbackdrop for the evil whatever to takeup residence in the museum. It is to thewhatever that I now turn.

THE WHATEVERINTERPRETATION

The whatever interpretation is anomnivorous force, a raging river,because it is fed by and gathers strengthfrom a wide variety of sources. Havingspent some time with the theoreticalprogenitors that posited interpretationin the huge void of indeterminacy, Iwill now look at trajectories in themuseum that collude to produce thewhatever interpretation.

What does this whatever soundlike? Here is one example from LisaRoberts From Knowledge to Narrative:Educators and the Changing Museum(1997):

At their most basic,museums communicate. Incommunicating they ignitememories, activate emotionsand spark interchange. Whatvisitors do with the possibleresponses is part of the narrativethey craft. What they craft mayor may not have anything to dowith the messages institutionsintend. (p. 137)

Now, in most circles, this would simplybe called a failure! Museums certainlydo not spend billions and billionsof dollars collecting things (objects,stories, histories, ideas), conservingand cataloguing these things, carefully

the forces that shape interpretationwithdraw in the act of interpretation.

I invite these forces to come and stay

awhile in our shelter for the endangeredaspects of interpretation, so that we cancoax them from their retreat. I invitethem in so that we can attend to theirpower over us. Again, our collectivejob is to catch these forces in action.The work that John Falk is doing withPersonal Meaning Mappingif Ive gotthis rightis heading in that direction.It seems to me that he is trying to bringattention to the kinds of repertoires ortheoretical knowledge that underlie andproduce certain interpretations. What

is at issue in Falks method, though, isa persistent paradox: we can only seeand find what we already recognize andknow. In order to meet this paradoxhead on, we, as researchers and museumand culture workers, must be familiarwith many different kinds of meaning-making repertoires, from the intentionalfallacies to Marxist materialism, tosemiotics, to feminist theory and themyriad forms of post-structuralism.This, I suggest, is part of our collectivetask and it is a big one: part professional

development, part lifelong learning,and part re-imagining the work of themuseum. Visitor studies can play agenerative role in this transformation byhelping museum staff become aware ofthe third forces, by tracking them asthey recede in displays and programs,and by attending to how they manifestin visitors interpretations.

If hermeneutics began by positinginterpretation as the interactionbetween text and reader and settled

amidst these withdrawing forces,then structuralism, the counterpartto hermeneutics, took the oppositeroute. It began from the position thatonly in and through the structures ofsignifying systemssocial, semiotic,linguisticcan any kind of meaningbe created, and it ended by depositingmeaning-making in the domain of the

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researching, publishing, craftingmessages, and writing the storylinesfor these things, only to have visitorsmake up whatever stories they please,

stories that have nothing to do withthe things and their stories. Yet themuseum literature is saturated withstatements such as Roberts, in whichthe whatever interpretation is seenas positive (see Xanthoudakis 2005edited volume for a recent exampleof how prevalent this notion is amongpractitioners and theoreticians). Byplacing interpretive authority in thehands of the individual, and further,by championing the whatever

interpretation as the final and desiredoutcome of the museum visit, themuseum not only justifies its failure tocommunicate, but also it absolves itselfof any interpretive responsibility for themeanings it produces and circulates inculture.

This absolution of interpretiveresponsibility produces and is producedby the whatever and is evident in anarray of practices in the museum. Overthe past few decades, for example,

there has been a significant shift inthephysical and perceptualaccessthat the museum offers to the public.This is evident in a dramatic rise inattendance and in the ever-increasingperceptual awareness of the museumin the public realm. Monumentalbuilding projects and more aggressiveadvertising have generated a highawareness of the museum in peoplesminds. But at the same time, there hasbeen no similar shift in the intellectual

and critical accessthat the museumoffers the public. In fact, there is apalatable reluctance on the part of themuseum to engage with its interpretivemandatewhich is in the end anintellectual projectexcept in the mostproblematic sense of the whatever.This reluctance raises some disturbingquestions.

Why, for instance, if the museum isreally interested in interpreting art forthe public, does it spend more moneyprotecting its objects from the public

than it does actively interpreting them?Witness the number of security guardspresent in any museum, compared tothe number of interpreters workingwith visitors. Why do museums payjanitorial, admissions, security, andgift-shop staffthose who attend tothe physical and economic demands ofthe institutionbut turn over much ofthe active interpretation, the intellectualaccess to its collections, to volunteerdocents? Many docents do an excellent

job, but we must question why fewerresources are devoted to the intellectualcare of collections than to physical andeconomic care. Why, in those museumsthat do pay interpretive staff, is there aninverse relationship between the staffsproximity to the public and their skill,knowledge of content, and rate of pay?Many of the most knowledgeable peopleare sequestered in offices, and theirrelationship with the public is highlymediated through the conventions ofdisplay; and many of those who work

directly with the public are students andcontract staff, who get the least supportand very low pay.

The museums reluctance to take up itsinterpretive responsibility is nowheremore evident than in its tenaciousreliance on a pedagogy of display:the arrangements of objects so thatthey both communicate messagesand reinforce the importance of thosemessages. With the birth of the modernmuseum, displays were designed

to deliver more specific bodies ofknowledgethe grand narratives ofWestern cultureto ever larger andmore diverse groups of people whodid not necessarily share interpretivepractices. During this process, twoquite separate publics were formed.The first public was the princely crowdand their privileged descendants, those

who could both seeand see throughthe objects on display. What is seenon display is understood, valuable,and meaningful, according to Pomian

(1994), only because of the access itoffers to a realm of significance thatcannot itself be seen, because it affordsa glimpse beyond the object itself. Thesecond public was constituted as whatStallybrass and White (1986) calledthe low other: those who were bothin need of the kind of lessons thatthe museum could provide (on scienceand nature, on civic virtue and theheroic might of the nation) but alsoneeded to be schooled in the skills ofseeing and seeing throughwhat was ondisplay. Schooling was, at that time,seen as a way to hold off the whateverinterpretation.

But as it turned out, this perceivedneed for schooling was just anotherstream running into the dark riverof the whatever. Once schoolingbecame the rubric through whichthe museum enacted its interpretivemandate and supplemented the lack ofa pedagogy of display, schooling setabout colonizing the interpretive spaces

of the museum. This process took placeon two fronts. The first was financial.Schooling and school programs cameto consume the lions share of resourcesdevoted to interpretation, leaving therest of the public adrift on the sea ofindeterminable meaning, vulnerableprey for the whatever. The secondfront was methodological. Schoolingbegan to infantilize the adult publicby using the discursive frames andpedagogical strategies designed forchildren to configure interpretiveprograms for adults, again leaving theadult mind open to the omnivorouswhatever.

The last and most insidious streamleading to the whatever was a highlyselective uptake of constructivistlearning principles that eventuallyprioritized personal meaning-making


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the social world and personal meaning-making; we can make room in ourshelter for these endangered aspects ofinterpretation, keeping them out of the

clutches of the evil whatever.

The second and more dominant of theflattened notions of constructivism, andthe one that is drowning out all others,is that the whatever of personalmeaning-making is the end productofthe museum episode. I suggest that ifwe look at what the theoreticians havesaid, we will find that the whateverof personal meaning-making is not theend product but rather the beginningof interpretation. It is a beginning of

which you in visitor studiesKnutson,Anderson, Allen, Falk, and manyothershave supplied ample evidence.Personal meaning-making is thebeginning of interpretation that movesinto the world, that acts in the world.It is the very substance of democraticsocietyit changes the world. Hereagain, visitor studies can bring newsources to bear upon the museum,sources such as the might of the criticalpedagogues. From Freire (1972) toGiroux and McLaren (1994), these

intellectual activists have shown againand again that in civil society, engageddemocracy and freedom begin withinterpretation. In order to engage andempower people, the pedagogue needsto beginby making issues meaningful(personal meaning-making) in orderto make people critical (aware of therepertoires of meaning-making thatallow certain interpretations to occur)so that it can be transformative (so thatpeople can take action in the world).The museum often speaks about shapingindividuals, communities and cultures,but stops short of enacting that bysacrificing the withof interpretation tothe whatever of individual meaning.

Just to take that one step further,a whole critique of individualismhas been exiled from the museumby the whatevers occupation of

as the end product of museumencounter rather than the beginning ofinterpretation. Here I will address threeaspects of interpretation that were exiled

and erased by this very selective uptakeof constructivism; then I will call uponvisitor studies to find shelter for thoseaspects of interpretation that have beenbanned from the constructivist museum.

Constructivism, like the wordinterpretation, is a collection ofvarious histories and practices. Manyof its greatest thinkers were mid-twentieth-century educational theoristsconcerned with how children learned.Constructivist ideas made their way into

the museum by way of scholars such asJames Clifford (1988), who forwardedthe idea of the museum as a contactzone, and John Falk and Lynn Dierking(1992), whose descriptions of themuseum experience were drawn directlyfrom constructivism. These ideas werecodified by George Heins (1998)work on the constructivist museum.At its most basic level, constructivismabandoned epistemological certaintyand took up hermeneutic notions ofunderstanding, asserting that there is no

eternal truth outside the knower.

The first of the constructivist ideas thatthe whatever flattens out is the ideathat individuals actively create meaningfrom their experiences. In and of itself,this idea is hardly contestable. We doindeed create meaning from all of ourexperiencesthis is called experientialknowledge. It is developed by usingthe repertoires of meaning-makingone already possessesconsciouslyor unconsciouslyin order to ascribe

meaning to an object or event. Onething that happens to this idea whenit enters into the museum, though, isthat the act of or active creation ofmeaning is pitted against what comesto be seen as the vile demon of passiveconsumption. Museum educationliterature is filled with the dichotomyof bad is the stuffed duck or banking

model of knowledge and good isthe creation of your own meaning.This is reiterated again and againuntil it begins to exile any received or

cultural knowledge, configuring it interms of factoids, authoritative,or academic; this process makesroom for the whatever to move in.What I want to point out here is thatthe exile of received knowledge wasnever part of the constructivist project;it is the work of that evil whatever.The constructivists saw knowledge assituated, yes, but they did not advocatedispensing with cultural knowledge inthe name of personal meaning. In fact,

they insisted that it is always withandin the midst of cultural knowledge thatwe produce any kind of interpretationthat is constructivism, as Vygotsky andBakhtin articulated.

Again, visitor studies can be a strategicresource in loosening the hold thatthe whatever has on the museumby introducing much more robustmodels of constructivist interpretation.For example, the eminently readablephilosopher Cornelius Castoriadis(1987) gives us vivid pictures of arich social imaginary that is filledwith and constituted by receivedknowledge and that shapes our dreams,thoughts, and actions. Castoriadisshows us how it is only withand withinthis social imaginary that each of us isoffered the possibility of autonomousaction. The question, then, becomes:Can visitor studies use its formidableknowledge, tools, and skills to makethis kind of relationship between therobust social imaginary, this public

encyclopedia, and make individualinterpretations visible? Or again, canvisitor studies use its power to fostereducational models that linktheoreticaland disciplinary knowledge to personalinterpretation, such as those developedby Lachapelle, Murray & Neim, (2003)?I believe we can. In this way we canretrieve the complex interplay between

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2006 Volume 9 Issue 3 Visitor Studies Today

Behind the Scenes

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constructivism, and it goes like this.Foucaults (1977) biopower, MichaelApples (1979) hidden curriculum,and more recently Giorgio Agambens

(1998) politicization of bare lifeall ofthese forces produce us as individuals,and in fact produce the very notionof individuality. One of the ways weliberate ourselves from thisif onlypartiallyis by being aware of theseforces as forces, as the retreating thirdforces that play upon us and that shapeour interpretations. As Searls Girouxand Nealon (2003) so aptly put it, yes,we all have opinions, but interpretationbegins when we ask where these

opinions come from. When, in thename of freedom and democracy, themuseum retreats from its interpretiveresponsibility by vesting interpretiveauthority in the autonomous individualand that persons whatever of personalmeaning, what it is doing is reinstatinginterpretive authority in the silentcanons and busy ghosts of the past.

I foster hope that through our collectivework, the museum can take on theburden of interpretive responsibility

which it will never fully be ableto carryby opening, unfoldingand unraveling these reservoirs andrepertoires, and by attending to theways in which they silently and subtlyclose and shape opinion. Together wecan make the invisible, withdrawingforces of the withvisible. That kind ofevidence shelters interpretation from theevil whatever and builds a future forthe museum.

In closing, I will address one last

flattening effect that the whateverhas had on interpretation. If we removedefinitive interpretive authority andtake up postmodernitys indeterminacyof meaning, it does not necessarilyfollow that all interpretations are equalin weight and relevance. As KeithMoxey (1994) so eloquently put it,pluralism fails to acknowledge the role

of power in the process of selecting andpromoting forms of interpretation thatare considered legitimate by a particularculture at a particular time. So again,

the whatever simply disguises andexiles the forces that withdraw in theact of interpretation, and in so doingensures that the most dominant powershave their say over us. This subtle,insidious domination of thinking, ofinterpretation, and of action is notthe stuff of a free and civil society,of a democracy. If the museum hasa role in nurturing democratic waysof being in the worldand I think itmost definitely doesthen it is going

to need your skills and experience inattending to, in making visible theinterpretive repertoires that it createsand circulates in culture. In other words,it is going to need your help to take upits interpretive responsibilities, and howthose responsibilities are shaped andunderstood will be the evidence of yourmaking, and thatis evidence.

REFERENCES

Agamben, G. (1998).Homo Sacer: Sovereign

power and bare life. Stanford: StanfordUniversity Press.

Apple, M. (1979, 2004).Ideology andcurriculum. London and New York:Routledge & Kegan Paul.

Bennett, T. (1995). The birth of the museum:History, theory, politics. London and NewYork: Routledge.

Bourdieu, P. (1993). The field of culturalproduction: essays on art and literature.Cambridge: Polity Press.

Castoriadis, C. (1987). The imaginaryinstitution of society. Cambridge: MITPress and Polity Press.

Clifford, J. (1988). The predicament ofculture: Twentieth-century ethnography,

literature, and art.Cambridge: HarvardUniversity Press.

Eco, U. (1979). The role of the reader.Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Falk, J., & Dierking, L. (1992). The museumexperience. Washington DC: WhalesbackBooks.

Foucault, M. (1977).Discipline and punish:The birth of the prison. London: A. Lane.

Freire, P. (1972) Pedagogy of the oppressed.Harmondsworth: Penguin

Gadamer, H. G. (1975). Truth and method.(G. Barden and J. Cumming, Trans.) NewYork: Seabury Press.

Giroux, H., & McLaren, P. (Eds.) (1994).Between borders: Pedagogy and the

politics of cultural studies. New York:Routledge.

Hein, G. E. (1998).Learning in the museum.London and New York: Routledge.

Lachapelle, R., Murray, D., & Neim,S. (2003). Aesthetic understandingas informed experience: The roleof knowledge in our art viewingexperiences.Journal of Aesthetic

Education 37(3), 7898.Moxey, K. (1994). The practice of theory:

Poststructuralism, cultural politics and

art history.Ithaca and London: CornellUniversity Press.

Pomian, K. (1994). The collection: Betweenthe visible and the invisible. In S. Pearce(Ed.),Interpreting objects and collections(pp. 160174). London and New York:Routledge.

Roberts, L. (1997). From knowledge tonarrative: Educators and the changing

museum. Washington DC: SmithsonianInstitution Press.

Searls Giroux, S., & Nealon, J. T. (2003).The theory toolbox: Critical concepts for

the humanities, arts, and social sciences.Oxford UK: Rowman & LittlefieldPublishers.

Stallybrass, P., & White, A. (1986). Thepolitics and poetics of transgression.London: Methuen.

Xanthoudaki, M. (Ed.) (2005).Researchingvisual arts education in museums and

galleries. Dordrecht: Kluwer AcademicPublishers.

now that is evidence: tracking down the evil “whatever” interpretation

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