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Public Representations of
STUDIES IN DISCOURSE
POSTDISCIPLINARY
Immigrants in Museums
Exhibition and Exposure in
France and Germany
Yannik Porsché
Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse
Series editor
Johannes Angermuller
University of Warwick
Coventry, UK
Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse engages in the exchange between
discourse theory and analysis while putting emphasis on the intellectual
challenges in discourse research. Moving beyond disciplinary divisions in
today’s social sciences, the contributions deal with critical issues at the
intersections between language and society.
More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14534
Yannik Porsché
Public
Representations
of Immigrants
in Museums
Exhibition and Exposure in France
and Germany
Yannik Porsché
Institute of Sociology
Bundeswehr University Munich
Neubiberg, Germany
Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse

ISBN 978-3-319-66356-2 ISBN 978-3-319-66357-9 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66357-9
Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955671
© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether
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Cover illustration: Katharina Mayer, Photograph “Getürkt”, 1991-1997
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
Acknowledgements
I would very much like to thank the museum staff and visitors for allowing
me to listen in on their conversations, to scrutinise details of their talk and
writing, and to breathe down their necks while following their working
routines and guided tours through the museums’ exhibitions. I appreciate
your time and openness. I am grateful to you for granting me access to the
backstages of your museums and sharing your personal thoughts and insights
with me. I also acknowledge that recordings of social interactions can be
perceived as very exposing. The fact that you allowed me to work with these
shows a tremendous amount of trust, for which I am sincerely grateful.
This study would not have been completed without the discussions with
my colleagues and their comments and advice. In particular, I wish to thank
Johannes Angermuller and Jean-Louis Tornatore for supporting this study at
the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz and the University of Burgundy
in Dijon, respectively. I also found a great source of inspiration in the follow-
ing working groups and would like to thank their members for helpful criti-
cism and ideas: the discourse research network DiscourseNet—here especially
Ronny Scholz, Jaspal Singh, Paul Sarazin, Jan Zienkowski, Martin Reisigl,
Felicitas Macgilchrist, Martin Nonhoff, Jens Maeße, Adrian Staudacher,
Christian Meyer, and Alexander Ziem; the Politische Ethnographie
working group at the Humboldt University, Berlin and the Goethe
University Frankfurt for valuable exchanges with, among others, Thomas
v
vi Acknowledgements
Scheffer, Martina Kolanoski, Dörte Negnal, Endre Dányi, David Adler, Jan
Schank, and Christiane Howe; the Museumslabor at the HU Berlin; the
Gutenberg-Akademie at the Johannes Gutenberg University Mainz; the
working group Migration at the Centre Marc Bloch; the Deutsch-
Französisches Doktorandenkolleg Mainz-Dijon of the Deutsch-
Französische Hochschule—Université franco-allemande; and the
Laboratoire en Sciences de l’Information et de la Communication at the
University of Burgundy. For very helpful comments, corrections, and dis-
cussions I am also indebted to Alina Enzensberger, Yaqub Hilal, Vivien
Sommer, Patricia Deuser, Nadine Pippel, Jochen Hung, Camille Butcher,
Stefan Hirschauer, François Mairesse, Tobias Boll, Marielle Partaix,
Mélina Germes, Miguel Souza, Adam Wood, Jennifer Cheng, Peter
Dennis, Jules and Nathan Villard, Andrea Mezza Torres, and my parents
Don and Elfi Porsché. Last but not least, I am grateful to Nicole Standen-
Mills for her thorough proofreading and I thank Katharina Mayer for
granting me the rights to use the photograph on the cover of this book.
This study was generously funded by the Otto-von-Guericke-
Universität Magdeburg, the FAZIT foundation, the Deutsch-Französische
Hochschule—Université franco-allemande, the Gutenberg-Akademie,
the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst e.V., and the International
Graduate Centre for the Study of Culture. I also wish to thank the Cité
Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, the Deutsches Historisches
Museum, the Bezirksmuseum Friedrichshain–Kreuzberg, and the Goethe
Institute Paris for supporting this study.
Contents
1 Introduction: Staging Public Representations in the Cité

Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration, the Deutsches
Historisches Museum, and the Friedrichshain–Kreuzberg
Museum 1
2 Museums, the Public, and Immigration 13

2.1 Public Representations and Encounters in Exhibitions
on Immigration 14
2.1.1 Museum Space and Immigration 14
2.1.2 Representing the Public in Public 25
2.2 Epistemic Territories in Museums 37
2.2.1 Epistemic Cultures and Remembrance 38
2.2.2 Museums at the Crossroads of Academia,
Schools, and the Mass Media 49
References 60
3 Microsociological Contextualisation Analysis 81

3.1 Ethnomethodological Conversation Analysis 84
3.1.1 Referencing and Pointing in Social Interactions 86
3.1.2 Territories of Knowledge in Institutional
Contexts 96
vii
viii Contents
3.2 Poststructural Discourse Analysis 102

3.2.1 Enunciation and Polyphony in Texts 103
3.2.2 Metapragmatics and Preconstructs in Society 111
3.3 Analytic Ethnography 117
3.3.1 Shifting Perspectives and Materiality in
Empirical Theory 118
3.3.2 Trans-sequentiality in Ritual and Media
Practices124
References 130
4 Epistemic Production Behind the Museum Scenes

in France and Germany 147
4.1 Stage Set: Envisioning an Exhibition Between
Disciplines, Expectations and Pragmatic Concerns 151
4.1.1 Museums as Symbolic Stages 152
4.1.2 The Exhibition Project’s Conceptual
Evolution161
4.2 The Making-of: Institutional Othering and Political
Struggles in Museum Collaboration 168
4.2.1 Exhibiting Historic Artefacts, Writing Migrants’
History, or Facilitating Debate? 168
4.2.2 Chains of Exhibition Making 178
4.3 Museum Publications: Scope, Pedagogy, and Stance
of Project Presentation 190
4.3.1 Introduction of Case Studies Versus
Compendium of National Cases 192
4.3.2 Critical Reflection Versus Academic Portrayal 205
References 216
5 Public Interactions on the Museum Stages 223

5.1 Introductions: Situating the Exhibition in the
Museums and “Fortress Europe” 225
5.1.1 Opening Exhibitions in the European
Context225
Contents
ix
5.1.2 Opening Guided Tours in the Museum

Context234
5.2 Guided Tours: Exhibits in Different Lights 248
5.2.1 Ways of (Not) Making Exhibits Relevant 248
5.2.2 Variation in Personal Involvement 267
5.3 Guestbooks and the Mass Media: Public Reviews 287
5.3.1 Museum and Migration Politics in the Press 289
5.3.2 From the Museum Space to the Mass Media 302
Press References 313
General References 315
6 Conclusion: Exhibiting Immigrants—Exposing the Public 321
Appendix: Transcription Notation 340

Conversation Analysis 340
Multimodality in Interaction 341
References 342
Press References 343
General References 347
Index 383
List of Figures
Fig. 4.1 Cité and DHM museum buildings, photography: Yannik Porsché 153
Fig. 4.2 Cité version of the exhibition (photograph in Werquet and
Beier-de Haan 2009: 13) and DHM version of the exhibition
(photograph in Werquet 2009a: 10) 158
Fig. 4.3 DHM—Portrait of women wearing headscarves. Artist:
Angelika Kampfer, 2009 (edited video still) 177
Fig. 4.4 Cité and DHM catalogues (2009, front and back covers) 193
Fig. 4.5 Cité and Kreuzbergmuseum—installation “Identikit,”
artists: Aisha Ronniger and Roland Piltz, 2007,
photography: Ellen Röhner/FHXB Museum 213
Fig. 5.1 Cité—Colonial images on the exterior façade of the Palais
de la Porte Dorée, photography: Yannik Porsché 237
Fig. 5.2 Cité and DHM—Banania advertisement (edited video still) 248
Fig. 5.3 Phonetic programme Praat (screenshot) 266
Fig. 5.4 Cité—“Getürkt,” artist: Katharina Mayer, 1991–1997
(edited video still) 271
Fig. 5.5 Cité and DHM—Magazine cover “Le Figaro” (26/10/1985)
(edited video still) 273
Fig. 5.6 DHM—Plea against government speech (guestbook) 295
Fig. 5.7 DHM—Confronting the museum with press accusations of
censorship (guestbook) 296
Fig. 6.1 Participants’ hierarchical and material contextualisation of the
exhibition and versions of the catalogue 327
xi
1
Introduction: Staging Public
Representations in the Cité Nationale
de l’Histoire de l’Immigration,
the Deutsches Historisches Museum,
and the Friedrichshain–Kreuzberg
Museum
History museums are places in which we attempt to grasp and touch his-
tory or distil the Zeitgeist of a century. Museums are often seen as an
opportunity for visitors to take a break from everyday life to learn some-
thing or simply let themselves drift through exhibitions without think-
ing. Upon entering the museum, visitors can step back in order to relax
and be entertained by, quietly reflect on, or heatedly debate something
that has been taken from the outside world and is presented in the
museum. Curators rearrange artefacts that are understood to represent an
outside reality in a way that makes that reality tangible, visible, or audible
from a perspective that is different from viewing them in their previous
settings or “natural habitats.” In this book, the portrayed referent is noth-
ing less than the history of how two nations, from their founding until
today, have represented foreigners. This portrayal is a highly contested
one, regarding both images of foreigners and the pictures museums paint
of the two nations. More generally, in times in which definitions of the
nation state are questioned due to global phenomena of migration, exhi-
bitions on migration and identity are in demand. Exhibitions and entire
museums devoted to this topic have existed in other parts of the world
for some time. The temporary exhibition project that is the focus of the
© The Author(s) 2018 1

Y. Porsché, Public Representations of Immigrants in Museums, Postdisciplinary
Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66357-9_1
2 Y. Porsché
present study represents one of the first attempts to present this topic
from a bi-national perspective in the European context. In a collabora-
tion, three museums in France and Germany produced the exhibition:
the Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (the “Cité”), the
Deutsches Historisches Musuem (“DHM”), and the Friedrichshain-
Kreuzbergmuseum (“Kreuzbergmuseum”). The exhibition travelled from
Paris to Berlin. In the Cité it was entitled “À chacun ses étrangers ?
France—Allemagne 1871 à aujourd’hui”; in the DHM “Fremde ? Bilder
von den Anderen in Deutschland und Frankreich seit 1871,” and in the
Kreuzbergmuseum “Baustelle Identität/Identités en Chantier.”1
I became acquainted with this exhibition project while doing a six-
month internship in its early preparation phase at the Cité. To me, muse-
ums of this kind were fascinating venues in which cultural theory and
political questions on migration were introduced to, and discussed with,
a larger public. Following staff from the Cité—in collaboration with the
other museums, as well as immigrant associations and the Goethe
Institute Paris—who worked on the exhibition concept, debated its
questions in the context of a preparatory conference, and discussed what
sort of exhibits to find, I became interested in the following questions:
How did the project evolve? How did discourse change depending on
where it was carried out and which artefacts were selected for presenta-
tion? I was intrigued by the possibility of following the same objects’
public presentation in different institutional contexts. Did their mean-
ing change when moved from the museum in France to the ones in
Germany? In fact, in addition to exhibition rooms, each museum
appeared to contain multiple dramaturgical stages. These included cata-
logues, conferences, and mass media reviews, to give some examples. On
these stages, museum directors, curators, and guides interacted with vis-
iting students, journalists, and politicians. These interactions raised a
1
The literal translation of the main exhibition’s titles would be “To Each Their Own Foreigners?
France–Germany from 1871 until today” and “Foreigners? Images of the other in Germany and
France since 1871.” It was shown from 16.12.2008 to 19.04.2009 and from 15.10.2009 to
21.02.2010 in Paris and in Berlin, respectively. At the same time as the main exhibition, the Cité
also presented an associated exhibition, “Baustelle Identität/Identités en Chantier” (Construction
site identity/Constructing identities), which was shown in Berlin in the Kreuzbergmuseum from
28.11.2009 to 14.02.2010. I have translated quotes from all other languages into English. In my
analysis, excerpts are additionally presented in the original language.
Introduction: Staging Public Representations in the Cité Nationale… 3
number of theoretical, methodological, and political issues: Put gener-

ally, how do a variety of practices in museums, which stand at the cross-
roads of academia and the larger public, produce knowledge on a
politically contentious topic such as migration? How do specific institu-
tional perspectives differ in the way they publicly represent public repre-
sentations? What makes up an institutional perspective, if the museums
in question largely showed the same exhibits? In other words, I aimed to
find out how this museum project tied public discourse on migration
from outside the museum space to material objects and specific contexts
of social interaction in the exhibition spaces. I thus set out to explore the
following questions: To what extent did portrayals of public representa-
tions depend on institutional perspectives? How did this exhibition proj-
ect shape the visitors’ image of the museums? Finally, how did the
exhibition versions themselves contribute to public discourse and the
way people represent foreigners?
The exhibition showed photographs such as the one on this book’s
cover.2 Is this a typical immigrant? What is wrong with this image? Are
the patterns on the woman’s dress incongruous with the wallpaper? With
which culture do we associate this way of dressing? The patterns and
colours seem to have different ethnic origins. Are the patterns and colours
not too modern for the traditional clothing? Why is the woman wearing
a headscarf and an apron that we might associate with farm or kitchen
labour, in combination with a festive dress and necklace? Is she wearing
make-up on her eyes and lips to fit the background? Has she positioned
herself in front of the wallpaper for the purpose of the photograph? Does
her motionless gaze indicate that she is uncomfortable in this pose? Is the
photograph a fabrication, playing with our preconceptions? In short,
does this picture exhibit an immigrant or do contradictions in it expose
stereotypes? Whose stereotypes does an exhibit such as this expose? The
people’s or yours? The exhibition of public representations of immigrants
in museums raises many questions, concerning both the selection of
2
The photograph is one of a series of a hundred by Katharina Mayer, which she took between 1991
and 1997, and which is entitled “Getürkt.” The German title refers to a politically incorrect way of
saying something “has been faked.” This colloquial saying discriminates against people from Turkey
because it associates faking with its literal meaning that something “has been made Turkish.”
4 Y. Porsché
exhibits and the discussion of those exhibits with visitors. In this book, I
examine how interactions over such questions were carried out in the
production and reception of the temporary exhibition.
I do so to shed light on how ways of selecting, presenting, and discuss-
ing themselves contribute to the exhibition’s topic of the public represen-
tations of immigrants. This study analyses the peculiarities, functions,
and relevancies of interactions in museum spaces. In this exhibition proj-
ect, curators, visitors, journalists, and politicians, to give one example,
discussed whether the term “Fortress Europe” (on a text panel) best
described the outcome of the way people have represented and treated
immigrants over one hundred and forty years. Exhibition guides, in their
introductions to school tours, asked: Where do we stand in relation to
collective images, racism, and propaganda about foreigners and our own
nation that circulate in public? How does our knowledge on these issues
compare to that of the general publics of both nations? In other words,
museum exhibits used in teaching, for reflection and discussion, here
served to mediate between individual people and discourse about collec-
tive bodies of people.
The exhibition was first shown 2008/2009 at the Cité Nationale de
l’Histoire de l’Immigration in Paris, France—Europe’s first national his-
tory museum of immigration, which opened a year before the temporary
exhibition. In Paris, an accompanying programme was organised by the
Goethe Institute association. At the same time, on another floor of the
Cité, a smaller, complementary exhibition was shown, which had been
organised in parallel by a network of immigrant associations run by the
Cité. Half a year later the exhibition travelled to Berlin, Germany, where
it was presented at two different museum institutions—the main exhibi-
tion was shown in the established national history museum, the Deutsches
Historisches Museum, and the smaller one was presented independently
at the more alternative neighbourhood museum, Friedrichshain-
Kreuzberg. The more prestigious main exhibition focused on an academi-
cally curated chronology of German and French nation-building. In the
Cité, historical exhibits at the centre of the exhibition had been sur-
rounded by pieces of contemporary art, such as photographs from a series
by Katharina Mayer, one of which is shown on this book’s cover. In the
DHM, only a few pieces of contemporary art were shown at the end of
the exhibition. The smaller exhibition by the immigrant network dis-

played students’ artwork and exchange projects. The exhibits’ move from
Paris to Berlin did not change them physically. Did the move, however,
alter their meaning? How did people make sense of them in their new
national, cultural, political, and institutional context?
Where are public representations of foreigners generated? Does it suf-
fice to turn on the television or read the newspaper to find out about
them? Alternatively, should we analyse election campaigns? That museum
institutions are seen as symbolically important venues that deserve atten-
tion becomes apparent in this study—for example, when the existence of
a museum or official speeches at an exhibition opening are read as politi-
cal statements or when modifications are called instances of governmen-
tal censorship. In this study, I thus take the view that cultural portrayals
of foreigners, or immigrants in particular, are not only made up of mass
media images of Muslim women wearing headscarves, refugees in over-
crowded boats or trying to climb walls of “Fortress Europe”; nor is the
political representation of immigrants only decided in political assemblies
and elections. Moreover, debates that merge political and cultural issues
such as those about an identité nationale (national identity), a Leitkultur
(leading culture), Parallelgesellschaften (parallel societies) or a Islamisierung
des Abendlandes (Islamisation of the occident) are also not only carried
out in the mass media. In addition, museum exhibitions such as those I
analyse here confront visitors with publicly circulating images and
debates, which—due to the symbolic meaning attributed to the museum
context—have considerable political relevance.
The exhibition in question illustrates that not only do museum visitors
meet exhibits that represent an outside world, its people, or politicised
public discourses; museums are also spaces in which visitors, museum
staff, academics, politicians, and journalists engage in public discussion.
The complex of an exhibition designed by academics, its authorisation by
elected politicians, and its coverage in the mass media make visitors
believe that an exhibition does, or at least should, address issues of public
relevance and speak the “truth” from an objective and balanced position.
Many museum practitioners and visitors hope that exhibitions constitute
a more entertaining and memorable venue for teaching than classrooms.
Moreover, it is often assumed that museum activities and experiences can
6 Y. Porsché
potentially change public opinion or facilitate social inclusion. In order

to distinguish different yet interrelated perspectives on museum dis-
course, we can note that much has been said about museums in research
and in the press; that some things have been expressed through museums,
for example when national museums on immigration symbolically
include or exclude immigrants from the nation; and finally, that how
much is said in national museums ranges from complete silence in empty
exhibition halls or the sounds of projectors and audio installations, occa-
sional whispering in pondering groups of visitors, to busy chatting on the
part of school classes pushing through the exhibition or heated debates in
the museum’s auditorium.
This book explores how, in their interactions, museum staff and visi-
tors in different ways contributed to generating public images of both
foreigners and the two national publics. The aim of the analysis is to
examine how expectations, conversations, buildings, exhibits, etc. shape
the particular institutional museum contexts and how these as educa-
tional institutions themselves contribute to the topic that is explored in
the exhibition. Fascinated by the infinite regress that occurs in reproduc-
ing representations when speaking about them, I ask what pictures of the
relation between the public and immigrants are painted in the museums
and what impact this has on the inclusion or exclusion of immigrants in/
from the national public. However, in this analysis I am less concerned
with describing exhibits, namely public representations of immigrants as
the most emblematic figure of foreigners and the stereotypes they suppos-
edly expose. Instead, I analyse minute details, and look at the modalities
of how social and mediated interaction works, which produce and ques-
tion these.
The collaborative and multi-sited production and reception of the
exhibition allows for the identification of conceptually very different
institutional approaches to museum work. The present study describes a
number of paradigmatic ways in which the topic of the exhibition can be
dealt with. Whereas interaction in some museum contexts was thought
to occur between the government and the (inter)national public, in oth-
ers visitors and museum staff saw interaction as occurring merely between
residents of the same neighbourhood. During my fieldwork, I came to
understand museums as dispersed dramaturgical stages, some of which
remained hidden from the public, whereas others were designed for pub-
lic presentation and negotiation. In my analysis, I offer a round-tour of
the diversity of stages within one museum institution: This includes, on
the one hand, exhibition planning on the back stage of the offices, which
I followed doing extensive ethnographic fieldwork during the two-year
preparation of the exhibition in the three museums. On the other hand,
my analysis covers the exhibition presentation in the French and German
catalogues, speeches on the opening nights, and interactions between
guides and visitors in the exhibition spaces, as well as guestbook entries
and mass media coverage in newspapers, on the radio, and on television.
Within each institution, the picture of collectives is thus not drawn on a
single canvas but is distributed over various different sites of interaction.
In the second chapter of this book, I review theoretical work on muse-
ums, the public, and immigration. A simplified conceptualisation of
interaction on museum stages describes it in terms of diverse discursive
and materialised “speech acts.” Although speech act theory misses the
dynamics of social interaction, it usefully disentangles the performative
functions of utterances in communication, which in museums are sig-
nificant on the level of face-to-face interaction between individuals as
well as in terms of collective cultural and political representations in soci-
ety. Museums generate meaning in three quite different ways: first,
according to some research, the press, or other media broadcasts on
museums, their function consists in displaying artefacts in which cultural
knowledge and memory is stored. Second, an institution’s mere existence
in cases such as immigration museums is thought to be a symbol through
which political statements are made. And third, in reading text panels
and engaging in conversations with museum staff or other people during
and after the visit, the visitor gains academic as well as practical, embod-
ied knowledge. Museums are thus involved as passive reference entities,
as themselves actively making a statement, or as containers or infrastruc-
tures in which interactions take place. Museum studies usually choose
one of these three ways of generating meaning as a perspective for in-
depth analyses of museums and their exhibitions. They seem to suggest
either that artefacts say something independently of what has been said
about them and how they are presented, that the existence of museums
has political connotations no matter what goes on within them, or else
8 Y. Porsché
that face-to-face interactions function according to some logic, which is

largely independent from the context in which it occurs. My thesis is that
these three dimensions of discourse are, however, highly interdependent.
A suitable m ethodology thus needs to focus on how they intertwine.
Moreover, approaches that only take one of these perspectives often rely
on problematic theoretical notions of museums as material stores of
knowledge and memory. Studies that analyse only the concept and con-
tent of an exhibition or a museum do not tell us how visitors actually
perceive them. And visitor studies that look at how (many) people move
and talk in the exhibition space do not consider the symbolic or political
meaning of exhibitions. Only by attending to various contextualisation
practices in, for instance, the work of a journalist reviewing the exhibi-
tion does one shed light on the complexity of speech acts carried out in
and through museums. A journalist, for example, might engage in inter-
actions in the museum, based on which she writes an article. In articles,
journalists typically construct an image of the exhibition, the visitors,
and the general public, and encourage the audience to take a certain
perspective on the museum, the exhibition, or particular exhibits.
The second chapter also focuses on concepts of the public and repre-
sentation as a theoretical grounding for analysing the interaction between
the museum as an institution and the general public. This allows us to
understand what issues are at stake in the case of representing public rep-
resentations of immigrants. In this book, my analysis confronts different
meanings of the term ‘public.’ National history museums frequently pres-
ent transformations of the public sphere over time. For this purpose they
distinguish between developmental stages of the public sphere (for exam-
ple, from feudal-representational to the decline of an ideal bourgeois
Öffentlichkeit) or between different public cultures (for example, rational
debate in salons, coffee houses, the daily newspapers, or the mass media
in different countries). Further, in museums more or less institutionalised
rhetorical conventions and practices are established for different occa-
sions of presentation to, and debate with, the public (for example, vari-
ous kinds of guided tours, workshops, vernissages, or press conferences).
This exhibition project offers a chance to consider how “the publics” rep-
resent foreigners as their counterparts, how museum practice constructs
images of the representing publics, and to what extent and in what ways
museum practices themselves enable, stimulate, and gear public debate,

that is, instantiate public spheres. The study of how public representa-
tions of foreigners are staged in museums also acknowledges a question
that museum practitioners, visitors, and researchers alike raised, regard-
ing whether foreigners in museums are always only talked about or
whether they are also spoken for or themselves speak.
The second chapter further makes a suggestion regarding how to con-
ceptualise knowledge and memory construction in museums. Combining
ethnomethodological work on institutional interaction with ethno-
graphic perspectives on epistemic cultures, I propose an approach called
‘institutional epistemics’ to analyse institutional cultures that are geared
towards knowledge production. I present typical ways in which museum
staff and visitors in talk-in-interaction and other practices—that is,
through displaying their understanding of prior talk, conduct, or publi-
cations and designing their activities to fit the particular audience and
task at hand—instantiate different institutional cultures. Instead of
notions of the museum as a neutral “store” of knowledge (about the past),
which experts diffuse to the lay audience, museums, on this view, are bet-
ter described as particular ‘epistemic cultures’ that frame what counts as
knowledge and actively construct territories of knowledge. Since muse-
ums are situated at the intersection of academia, school, and the mass
media this chapter mobilises research on the relations between academia
and the public, face-to-face interaction in schools, and the role of the
mass media. This is helpful in understanding how museum education
gains academic legitimacy in negotiating and passing on knowledge, and
is seen to be a symbolically important stage on which voices are publicly
heard. The fact that we believe museums are the right venues to teach
knowledge and negotiate political recognition itself appears remarkable.
When confronted with the question of how, and where, to study
knowledge construction in museums, my fieldwork made clear that
museum interaction in fact happens in numerous places that serve as
different kinds of dramaturgical stages. In this study, I observed how
museum staff worked in the offices, and I asked them for copies of
their working documents at different stages—temporally speaking—in
the progress of the project. Retrospectively, I consulted the documen-
tation of their work in the museums’ archives. I also collected museum
10 Y. Porsché
publications, witnessed and recorded lectures and debates in auditori-

ums, and followed numerous guided tours in temporary and perma-
nent exhibition spaces with a camera. Further, I participated in events
that accompanied the exhibition outside the museum and collected
reviews and comments from the mass media, guest books, and the
Internet. This meant that I had to use a mixed methodology that could
pay attention to diverse kinds of data, institutional contexts, and
developments of the exhibition project. Chapter 3 assembles ethno-
methodological interaction analysis, poststructural discourse analysis,
and analytic ethnography in a microsociological contextualisation
analysis in order to confront the following circular distinction. On the
one hand, an interactionist perspective emphasises how participants’
‘contextualisation’—understood as referencing, attributing, orienting,
and making relevant in face-to-face conversation, written text, embod-
ied ritual practices, and mass media communication—generates what
they considered macro-societal phenomena and contexts such as insti-
tutional stages. On the other hand, discourse analysis and ethnogra-
phy pay attention to the way in which ‘contexts’—such as material
surroundings, social participant frameworks, discursive positioning, or
styles of interaction—allow for certain forms of conduct, which again
generate enabling and constraining conditions, or stages, for subse-
quent contextualisation.
In the analysis in Chaps. 4 and 5, I follow how the exhibition, similar
to a play that is being restaged in different theatres, travelled from Paris
to Berlin. Since the temporary exhibition project shown in one museum
in Paris was split into two exhibitions in Berlin, a comparison of different
“moments” of the exhibition project makes visible the impact of these
different contextual dimensions. Although the exhibition project was
largely “the same,” that is, mostly consisting of the same exhibits address-
ing how “the French” and “the Germans,” both in the past and today,
have represented foreigners, perspectives varied. A complex of the
museum buildings’ symbolism, disciplinary constellations, different mis-
sions, and allegations of political censorship contributed to defining the
institutions and explains struggles that occurred during the exhibition’s
conceptual evolution. In guided tours, systematic differences in the way
participants selected different exhibits and contextualised them charac-
terised the specific institutional approach of each museum.
I show how the institutional contexts differ in terms of whether

museum staff and visitors, in their interaction with exhibits, focus on
drawing abstract portrayals of societal relations between public majori-
ties and foreign minorities from a distant and rational perspective, or
whether they make their own embodied participation and their own
everyday life in a multicultural neighbourhood a topic. In so doing, I do
not attempt to develop a singular model of today’s museums or to evalu-
ate them. Instead, I describe different (political) practices found in dif-
ferent moments of the exhibition project. This raises the general question
of both the functions of different kinds of (political) participation, as
well as which roles museums and immigrants play in these types of
participation.
In the concluding Chap. 6, I compare different instances of interaction
in the different versions of the museum exhibition and argue that it is
most importantly a hierarchical and material contextualisation that
defines the museums’ contributions to knowledge and memory construc-
tion. Museum staff and visitors make exhibits relevant either in relation
to the abstract nation or the collective public, or in terms of concrete
cases and individual lives, perspectives, and visions. In connection with
this, guides either teach historical facts about the public or the museum
provides an infrastructure for public interaction and exploring ideas that
makes relevant operational, embodied, implicit, and practical compe-
tence. This implies that, depending on the institutional approach, muse-
ums can give rise to different kinds of social critique and political
participation. Depending on the particular museum stage, museum staff
offer visitors a map of national history—on which they draw lines around
collective actors; where politicians, staff, and journalists speak up for
immigrant recognition; or where you get the chance to get to know your
neighbours.
2
Museums, the Public, and Immigration
Museums are strange places. Why should people go and see a selection of
old posters, photographs, and so on that someone has decided are worth
keeping? Why would you, one might ask in the case of the exhibition at
issue here, attempt to fit a history of two countries into one room? More
precisely, yet no less strange, is the fact that in the exhibition on the his-
tory of public representations of immigrants, visitors are looking at how
curators look at past and present publics looking at immigrants. This
raises the question: Who has the right to paint a picture of how the public
represents immigrants?
In this chapter, I explore the potentials and risks of such an exhibition
by presenting theoretical notions of museums in general and exhibitions
on immigration in particular. I begin by noting that museums constitute
public institutions in several ways. Most museums today aim to be acces-
sible to a diverse audience. In addition, visitors to an exhibition space not
only focus on the exhibits on display, but also observe each other. Opening
nights of exhibitions are also occasions “to see and to be seen.” In an
exhibition about public representations of immigrants, the subject matter
concerns the public, which holds certain views about immigrants and
may or may not include immigrants within it. Finally, yet importantly,
© The Author(s) 2018 13

Y. Porsché, Public Representations of Immigrants in Museums, Postdisciplinary
Studies in Discourse, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-66357-9_2
14 Y. Porsché
symbolic museum exhibitions and activities in the museum context can

themselves be understood as constituting different kinds of public
spheres.
2.1 ublic Representations and Encounters

P
in Exhibitions on Immigration
2.1.1 Museum Space and Immigration
Academics as well as museum practitioners, such as Adorno (1977: 181),

Bennett (1995), Nederveen-Pieterse (1997: 124), and Simon (2010),
offer criticism of traditional museums as old-fashioned, lifeless, and static
shrines of nostalgia, as irrelevant to people’s lives, as authoritative and
disciplining, or as uncomfortable and not suitable for facilitating public
discussion. Nevertheless, the number and variety of museums is rising.
This observation has led to the term ‘museum phenomenon’ or ‘museum
boom,’ not least regarding museum exhibitions on immigration. Both
the criticism and the boom have led to an emergence of new kinds of
museums, such as the local ‘neighbourhood museum,’ alongside an
increase of so-called big ‘superstar-museums’ with ‘blockbuster exhibi-
tions’ (Baur 2009: 55 f.; Frey and Meier 2006; Fyfe 2006; Gogos 2011).
The museum thus constitutes both an object of heated debate and a
growing infrastructure for communication. Debates on museums illus-
trate that in comparison to other communicative settings the museum is
seen to be a particularly symbolic space. In contrast to some of the critics
mentioned above, many consider the issues represented here—cultural
heritage, history and society, or life and the world—to be relevant to
people of and beyond the current audience. Other modes of communica-
tion such as newspaper articles that reach an even wider public also dis-
cuss issues of broader concern, yet, in contrast to such publications, many
consider the act of representation in museum institutions to carry more
symbolic weight. Choosing something to be displayed in the museum is
comparable to immortalising something in the history books or to men-
tioning a group of people in a political speech; that is, it does “more” than
constitute an utterance that is only locally relevant.
Museums, the Public, and Immigration 15
What a museum is seems pretty evident to us in everyday talk, yet it is

difficult to pin down the museum’s status and function theoretically
(Fliedl and Posh 2002); numerous alternative versions of what the
museum should be have been suggested (for example, Baur 2009:
358–363; Fehr 2004). The size, age, and disciplinary and topical focus of
museums vary and their contextual frame ranges from the local, regional,
and national to the supranational or universal; they are run by the state,
by private initiatives, or by corporations; they do not always have their
own collection or building; in some cases their focus is on research, in
others on education or on entertainment, and so on. Some museums do
not even call themselves museums, yet others might consider them as
such; or they call themselves museums but to some people seem more like
community centres or halls of remembrance. The etymology of the word
‘museum,’ deriving from the Latin ‘space of scholarly activity’ and the
Greek ‘space of the muse’ (cf. Findlen 2004), does not help us much in
determining its meaning, since it has changed considerably over time. In
antiquity, for example, it depicted a mythical meeting place for the gods
presiding over the arts, whereas in the Renaissance it referred to a collec-
tion of knowledge. In contrast to late-Renaissance and Baroque-era cabi-
nets of curiosities (Wunderkammern), which encouraged interpretation of
the entire world through an all-embracing (divine) analogy, the encyclo-
paedic collections of the modern museum focus on differentiating the
world as exhaustively as possible (cf. Beßler 2009; Laube 2011).
In the modern museum, a visible distinction became crucial and show-
cases, barriers, and museum attendants accomplished an observing dis-
tance (Doering and Hirschauer 1997; Hirschauer 2002; Wonisch 2002).
According to Blank and Debelts (2002: 176 f.), the now common con-
ception of museums as collecting, preserving, and displaying institutions
is a relatively recent one that was preceded by conceptions of the museum
as a place for social gatherings for a wider range of activities, for example,
to discuss political or academic matters as well as to sell, borrow, or dis-
play things. In addition, the conception of an entirely private space of
solitary contemplation and study gradually changed into a public, yet
often elitist, display of public goods and academic knowledge. Unlike in
the past, when only scientific apparatuses that transcended the immedi-
ately visible were demonstrated in front of an audience, nowadays the
16 Y. Porsché
educating, entertaining, or disciplining—that is, regulating and subjecti-

fying (Foucault 1992b: 38)—mediation between all kinds of research
and a broader public constitutes an important function of the museum
(Kravagna 1997: 8; Wonisch 2002). The relation between academia and
the museum is, however, not simply a display of academic disciplines, but
itself plays an active role in the development of academic disciplines and
knowledge. With reference to Foucault, Bennett (1995: 96) argues: “The
birth of the museum is coincident with, and supplied a primary institu-
tional condition for, the emergence of a new set of knowledges.” In
Bennett’s view, the spatial order in the museum and the suggested path
that a visit would take played an important role in legitimating theories
of evolutionary processes, for example, the evolution of humankind,
civilisation, or the Earth.1 But it also contributed to creating the aca-
demic disciplines themselves, making them visible and making it possible
to experience them. In Bennett’s view the museum is first and foremost a
disciplining institution because it sanctions and rewards certain forms of
conduct, presents certain forms of knowledge and taste as desirable, and
finally represents the practice of being a public—constantly looking at
and being seen by others.
A number of models have been suggested for the museum—headed by
the university and the theatre2—and various metaphors have been used
to describe and evaluate the museum. A model by van Mensch depicts
the proportional importance different aspects of the museum have over
time. Through a historical comparison, we see that museums accord dif-
ferent weight to the central functions of ‘preservation’ (involving acquisi-
tion, maintenance, and conservation of the collection), ‘research,’ and
‘communication’ (involving education and presentation), as well as the
institution’s administration. In particular, the kind and importance of
research in the institution varied significantly over time—from the
1
In addition to Bennett’s suggestion for the natural and cultural sciences, Preziosi (2006: 50 f.)
illustrates the institutional genesis of art history and the art museum.
2
Nederveen-Pieterse (1997: 140), for instance, formulates the “unresolved question: what is the
model for the museum, the university or the theatre?” and mentions proponents of the former
(Harris 1990) as well as the latter view (Gurian 1991: 188). Nederveen-Pieterse (1997) himself
takes the integrating view that “[m]useums may be sites where the university and the theatre meet.
Better still, they may be intermediaries and laboratories for experimenting with new cultural com-
binations and encounters.”
‘cabinets of curiosities’ of the late Renaissance to a restriction of research

to the preparation of temporary exhibitions today. Instead, the aspects of
‘preservation’ and ‘communication’ as well as the institution’s administra-
tion, have continuously become more important (van Mensch 1992; cf.
Mairesse 2002: 154 f.).
A general approach to the question of how to conceive of the museum
stage, what happens on it, and between whom, is offered by Bal (1996: 3
f.; with reference to the Cité Neef 2011), who conceptualises the museum
as a discursive, yet materialised, ‘speech act situation.’ This includes as the
first person the subject of the “text”—including in the broadest sense
printed labels, exhibits, or talk. In this connection, curators and other
staff who produce these texts are only minor subjects in a long chain of
others. Conceptually speaking, the first person tells the second person,
who is the visitor, about the third person. The third person is present yet
mute and as a sign gains meaning through being placed in a narrative. In
the view of Clifford (1990: 91), speech acts in the museum characteristi-
cally veil the authority of the first person, who creates an image. According
to Clifford, museums instead shift the authority to the third person, and
in doing so mystify classifications and presentations in the museum as
adequate representations of the outside world. Underlined by experts’
authority and tangible objects, in Macdonald’s view too museums tradi-
tionally “helped to instantiate a ‘scientific,’ ‘objective’ way of seeing—a
gaze which could ‘forget’ its own positionedness” (Macdonald 2003: 5).
Unlike other interactions, those on the museum stage, in Macdonald’s
view, “entailed a detachment of the viewer—thinking of themselves as
outside or above that which was represented” (Macdonald 2003: 3). In
fact, however:
Any exhibition, explicitly or implicitly, seeks to position the visitor. In

other words, it sets up a particular relationship between the exhibits or
knowledge displayed and the audience. Sometimes, for example, the visitor
is imagined as serious, sometimes as playful; sometimes as lacking in
knowledge, sometimes as possessing critical analytical skills. Of course, the
actual visitor will not necessarily behave in the way that the exhibition-
makers had hoped or that the exhibition form and content encourage.
Nevertheless, different exhibitions afford—or offer up—different possibili-
ties to audiences. (Macdonald 2010: 195)
18 Y. Porsché
From this relational perspective, the speakers (first and second person)
and the object on display (the third person) constitute the context for
each other. If we assume that the first, second, and third person—both
on an individual and an institutional level—are not stable entities but
dynamically reproduce each other through speech acts, we need to ask
the following questions: Is the museum simply telling the visitor one
story about the world in the way that reviews of exhibitions or some
research on museums make us believe?3 If this were so, why then do state-
ments by museum staff at the exhibition opening, in the catalogue, the
press conference, and in guided tours differ? Moreover, why do we find
conflicting reviews and debates in the press or among visitors in their
guestbook entries? Looking empirically at what happens in different
interactions in the spaces of the museum shows, for instance, that the
significance attributed to interactions between people and objects varies
enormously: a student’s comment on an exhibit does not have the same
weight as the curator’s or a minister’s when referring to exhibits in making
a statement about the nation. Who then is the first person talking? Is the
student, for instance, genuinely talking herself, or is she simply regurgitat-
ing the words of the guide, the curator, her parents, or the mass media? In
this book, I take the view that we in fact never speak with a single voice.
I also consider how the story changes depending on who the second person
is. We can also ask what happens if the perception of the people and objects
involved change within a single interaction. In addition, we should con-
sider what role the present yet mute third person plays in different speech
acts. In the present study what was exhibited turned into a matter of
debate, for instance, when a text panel was modified on the demand of the
cultural minister. Journalists called this a scandal of censorship and pointed
out that the audio guide remained untouched. To what extent does the
visitor know about the history of the artefacts, the production process of
the exhibition, and what has been said about both? What role do the
materiality of objects and the modalities of the interaction format play?
A close analysis of interactions in the museum space based on discourse
3
Research often reduces museums either to instruments of democratisation (Clifford 1997) or of
social disciplining (Bennett 1995); while the press celebrates them as enlightening or condemns
them as instruments of propaganda.
t heory4 turns the simplified schema of the museum telling the visitor
about the world into a caricature. Unravelling the polyphonic layers of
utterances5 and analysing the dynamics between the participants and
exhibits involved raises the question of how the different speakers can be
kept separate. The autonomy, unity, and intentionality of the first person
are questioned; the second person appears to be largely constituted by
contextualisation, attribution, and positioning by the first person; and
the third person turns entirely into a matter of debate.
Museums typically decontextualise objects, taking them out of their
life-world in order to recontextualise them in the museum’s collection
(Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 1998: 18 ff.). Although complexity is necessarily
reduced when positing an object in a museum, a “loss of life” is said to be
compensated by a “gain of experience” (Korff 2005: 7). Museum objects
enable an encounter with condensed experiences, which Korff considers
important for the interplay between social integration and cultural iden-
tity claims across generations. Curators aim to transcend the lived and
fleeting instances of everyday life by contextualising them in structures,
processes, and symbolic orders.
Desvallées and Mairesse (2010: 36) and Pomian (1988: 42–52) define
museum collections as mediators between the perceiver and the absent and
invisible. According to Pomian, collections represent some objects being
taken out of economic circulation and being attributed “significance”
instead of practical “use.” The result is a hierarchical continuum between
the invisible but significant and the tangible and useful. On this contin-
uum, people are also positioned with respect to the extent to which they
understand, appreciate, and represent the invisible or else orient them-
selves towards the practical use of things. In Pomian’s (1988: 69 f.) view,
the museum takes on the role of establishing a consensus for this hierarchi-
cal opposition, whereby it replaces the church in its claim to mediate
between the visible and the invisible. Most notably, the museum celebrates
the invisible nation, which is why it is frequently considered a ‘mirror’ of
the nation or else humankind, the past, or Europe (for example, Raffler
2008). Due to problems in thinking the museum presents an accurate
4
See Chap. 4 and, for example, Howarth and Torfing (2005) on discourse theory.
5
See Sect. 3.2 in Chap. 3 and, for example, Angermüller (2011) for a discourse-analysis approach
based on Bakhtin’s (1979) theory of polyphony.
20 Y. Porsché
portrayal of reality, it is also seen to be a ‘distorted mirror’ (Arnoldi 1992;

Crane 1997). This metaphor underlines that the image depends both on
the mirror and who holds it, which is why museums are also depicted as
‘mirrors of power’ (Davison 1999: 145 f.) and sites of ideology reproduc-
tion (Wallach and Duncan 2004: 53; Kaplan 1994: 3).
Bennett (1995: 66 f.) builds on Foucault’s work to describe the
museum as one institution among several (including department stores,
for example) in the ‘exhibitionary complex,’ which functions to establish
consensus and reduce deviance by displaying the civic nation in relation
to which the individual needs to position herself. In Bennett’s (1995: 67)
words, the exhibitionary complex has an “ability to organize and coordi-
nate an order of things and to produce place for the people in relation to
that order” (see also Mairesse and Hurley 2012: 5). According to
Macdonald (2003: 2), museums are particularly “appropriate agencies for
culturing ‘the public’ and for ‘thinking’ nation states” because solidarity
with an imagined collective nation-state (Anderson 1983) cannot be
established through social relations alone. Interactions between individ-
ual people on the museum stage therefore cannot be reduced to ad hoc
and isolated interactions solely in the museum. Interactions on the stage
of the museum also involve cultural identification, which Macdonald
(2003: 2) describes as “a matter of shared knowledge and practice, of
representation, ritual and symbolism.” Museums traditionally consti-
tuted pertinent venues for this purpose, that is, a common view exists
that something is said through museums: on the one hand by presenting
artefacts or pieces of art that are considered national and, on the other
hand, “just ‘having a museum’ [is] itself a performative utterance of hav-
ing an identity” (Macdonald 2003: 3).
Davallon (1992: 106 f.) argues that museums are moreover an element
of a Habermasian public space. The individual museum visitor who pub-
licly engages with an exhibit is on this account confronted with a social
cultural product and provided with a communicative space to critically
discuss and form an opinion. Davallon (1992: 116) maintains that the
museum at the same time complements and relativises a Habermasian
“mediated public space.” In Davallon’s view, the museum provides a space
that is less tightly governed by a presentation of events than the media—
in this sense it constitutes a calmer space for reflection—and thereby
offers a non-elite mass public the opportunity to adopt a position and

form an opinion on societal issues.
It is in an interaction between architecture, the media, and the physi-
cal conduct of visitors in the museum space that museums contribute
to bringing about a public sphere (Macdonald 1993). Several recent
approaches to museums focus on the agency of visitors when they par-
ticipate in and critically consume exhibitions. In contrast to notions of
the museum as a top-down ‘(identity-) factory’ (Korff and Roth 1990a),
recent approaches term the museum a ‘theatrical stage’ (Davallon 1992:
116; Desvallées and Mairesse 2010: 36; Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2000),
an ‘arena’ (Latour 2005), or a ‘contested terrain’ (Lavine and Karp
1991). Some exhibitions attempt to present the diversity of perspec-
tives and voices on objects and topics, including the institution’s per-
spectives, in ‘multi-vocal’ exhibitions (cf. Bal’s (1996) concept of the
exhibition as a speech act, above). Finally, the museum can be seen as a
‘utopia’ (Kirshenblatt-Gimblett 2004) or ‘heterotopia’ (Foucault
1992a), involving representations, contestations, transformations, and
instrumentalisations of ideal visions of society. According to the notion
of heterotopic, mirror-like counter-spaces, today’s museums aim to
accumulate and capture all of time in an archive, without themselves
being subjected to, or part of, time. Visions of the ideal museum often
consider it to be a ‘forum’ or ‘laboratory’ for experiment, innovation,
dialogue, and participatory democracy between different cultures, the
museum institution, and diverse publics (Cameron 2004; Korff 1985;
Merriman 1992: 138; Nederveen-Pieterse 1997; von Stieglitz and
Brune 2014; the Kreuzbergmuseum’s director: Düspohl 2007; on the
Cité: Naguib 2010).
Several waves of a ‘new museology’ (cf. ICOM 2009; Rivière 1992;
Varine 1978; Vergo 1989) and concepts of the ‘ecomuseum’ or Clifford’s
(1997) ‘Contact Zone’ conceive of the museum as a (potential) agent of
social inclusion and social change (Kamel and Gerbich 2014; Sandell
1998, 2003). With a focus on local communities or a reconceptualisation
of colonial encounters in the museum, curators frequently aim to include
visitors in a participatory museum format (Simon 2010). The movement
understands museums as a public sphere in which identity politics about
recognition are fought out, and which criticises a marginalisation of
22 Y. Porsché
voices in the public sphere (Karp et al. 1992; Lavine and Karp 1991; but
also see Boast 2011).
There are ongoing debates about how migration museums should be
conceptualised and evaluated. Whereas migration has been dealt with for
a long time in American museums (for example, the Ellis Island and the
Lower Eastside Tenement Museums) and in Anglo-American research
(Steen 2005: 31), discussion in the European context is still relatively
recent (Hampe 2005; Kraus and Münzel 2000, 2003; Macdonald 2013:
182–187). There is no consensus concerning the question of who should
talk about migration, for whom exhibitions are designed, where they
should be located, and how the topics should be dealt with. Conceptions
differ across countries (Bräunlein and Lauser 1997: II), as well as within
countries, and ideas change over time (Niedermüller 2004: 38 f.). Finally,
the present study will show that even within museum institutions staff
often do not agree upon a single conceptual line.
For instance Korff (2005: 5) makes clear that the terms migration and
museum can mean a migration museum as a separate institution or else
as a topic, a perspective for problematisation, as a general assignment for
museums or as a special exhibition task for certain target audiences.6
Another question is whether one adheres to a singular or a pluralistic
understanding of the museum. A pluralistic concept can either address
different migrant groups within a country or different concepts of migra-
tion. Finally, it often remains unclear whether the museum is meant to be
for migrants, designed by them, or about them. Most frequently designed
as exhibitions about migration, Nederveen-Pieterse (1997: 124 f.)
describes the traditional classification formulated by Karp (1991: 375),
which says that some exhibitions follow assimilative approaches of dis-
playing ethnographic objects as art (emphasising similarities), while other
in situ exhibitions exoticise the Other (emphasising differences) by
attempting to reconstruct habitats. Finally, encyclopaedic exhibitions
constitute a mixed format. Taking up insights from poststructuralism and
6
Korff (2005: 5) distinguishes between rival exhibition concepts either drawing on classical con-
cepts of migration, which are in his view established in disciplines such as history, sociology, and
demography, or on the newer and more abstract theories of transnationality and globalisation used
in ethnology or cultural studies (see Sect. 4.1 in Chap. 4 on discussions carried out in this case
study’s exhibition project about which disciplines and concepts to work with).
polyphony (see Sect. 3.2 in Chap. 3), Nederveen-Pieterse (1997: 129)

argues that all of these strategies are ultimately hegemonic in that they are
discourses formulated from the centre about the Other; and alternatively
suggests that acknowledging difference not only between but also within
the self and the Other can pave the way to representing others while
avoiding exoticism.
Regarding the relationship among migration, museums, and the pub-
lic, mechanisms of inclusion and exclusion are at stake: first in terms of
access to museums and second concerning representation within muse-
ums. This can be paraphrased in the leading question of “Who speaks in
the museum, about whom, and with which legitimation?” (Baur 2009:
53). Exhibiting migration can be problematic, for instance, if images of
migrants are based on ethnic categorisation, on distinguishing between
causes of migration, or on a chronological approach—all of these choices
run the risk of positively or negatively stereotyping migrant groups (Baur
2009: 337 f.). In addition, most depictions of migration tend to focus
strongly on travel and boundaries. These notions are problematic since
they reduce the migrant to a traveller and ignore other facets of her exis-
tence (Bielefeld 2004: 397). Moreover, the notion of boundaries fre-
quently implies a distinction between wanted and unwanted migration
(Baur 2009: 338 f.). Interestingly, whereas museum institutions in the
past served to simulate travel to foreign places, today’s mass tourism
museums become hubs of tourism themselves. In Chaps. 4 and 5, we will
therefore not only look at what is represented in the exhibitions of the
museum but also how this ‘doing’ of museums itself constitutes a signifi-
cant event.
The relation between what is exhibited in museums and how it is under-
taken represents a particular challenge in the case of migration (Steen
2005: 37 ff.). Migration concerns cultural diversity and changes in a life-
world, yet museums are usually geared towards objects or referents which
are—based on convention or secured through academic reputation—
deemed valuable for all time. For instance, in the planning process of one
of the cases of the present study, the Deutsches Historisches Museum
(DHM), views differed on whether the museum should primarily concen-
trate on the traditional triad of collecting, storing, and exhibiting in order
to keep a memory culture alive—thus merely portraying reality—or
24 Y. Porsché
whether it should itself constitute a laboratory, an arena for debate and a

venue in which to encounter the Other. Whereas in the paradigm of por-
trayal the museum’s function consists in traditional building, educating,
and disciplining (Bennett 1995: 66 f.; see Foucault 1992b: 38) the public
according to a pre-defined curriculum and from a secure distance, the out-
come of the experimental laboratory is more interactive and open (Baur
2009: 359; Eryılmaz and Rapp 2005: 584 f.). On the second line of
thought, Korff and colleagues (2005: 13; Korff and Roth 1990b) argue
that conventional museums could additionally serve as “xenological insti-
tutions” (Sloterdijk 1989), if they conceptualise society as constantly trans-
forming, moving and thus characterised by constant plurality and
unsettling experiences of contact, foreignness, and contrast. Korff (1988)
pleads for a concept that would have made the DHM precisely such a labo-
ratory for contested and dynamic views on history—a forum with ever
changing exhibitions. In the end, designers disregarded this concept in
favour of a traditional permanent exhibition with additional temporary
exhibitions, in which the latter would provide a laboratory space (Mälzer
2005: 47–125; see also Heuser 1990; Maier 1992; Ohliger 2002; Stölzl
1988 for studies on the DHM). A second case in the present study, the
Cité Nationale de l’Histoire de l’Immigration (Cité), in contrast included
some elements of an experimental realm by (sometimes partially or reluc-
tantly) including a network of immigrant associations in the planning pro-
cesses of the permanent and temporary exhibitions (on the Cité’s approach
to migration see Deuser 2016; Dixon 2012; Meza Torres 2011; Naguib
2010; Pippel 2013: 171–237; Stevens 2008; cf. also DOMiT/DOMiD7 in
Germany, initiated by immigrant intellectuals). Finally, the third case of
this study, the neighbourhood format of the Friedrichshain-Kreuzberg
Museum (Kreuzbergmuseum), comes closest to the participatory and
experimental approach of a ‘new museology’ (the Kreuzbergmuseum’s
director Düspohl 2007, 2014).
7
DOMiT—Dokumentationszentrum und Museum über die Emigranten aus der Türkei, since 2005
enlarged to the DOMiD—Dokumentationszentrum und Museum über die Migration in Deutschland
to also include other groups of migrants (Eryılmaz 2004: 319; Motte 2004: 285; Motte and
Ohliger 2004; Jamin 2005: 47); http://www.domid.org/. For a study on emigration museums and
projects on immigration in Germany see Schlutow (2012).
In the present study, I do not aim to determine whether the exhibition

that these three museums produced and which travelled from one to the
others predominantly fits the characterisation of museums as shrines of
the past, as spaces for studying, as contact zones, or as laboratories for
participation and new encounters. I propose that none of these meta-
phors fits all museums, nor can the exhibition project be filed in one of
these categories. Not only do museums differ and change over time but
we will see that a single museum houses multiple spaces and presents dif-
ferent occasions for interaction, which means that the travelling exhibi-
tion between and within institutions takes on different forms. This study
thus conceptualises the multiple geographical and temporal spaces in
terms of the different stages of a theatre production. I approach the exhi-
bition project as a play with changing degrees and kinds of audience
participation, and with various occasions for different actors to meet. The
analysis of different stages and positions aims to understand how the
exhibition project creates a public sphere and how this contributes to
including or excluding immigrants from French and German society.
Pertaining to the question of how museum activities themselves shape
and are shaped by public spaces (and in the case of exhibitions on immi-
gration entail claims about, and contributions to, the inclusion and
exclusion of immigrants), I will in the following section turn to concepts
of the public, publicness and representation. In Sect. 2.2 of this chapter I
will discuss how museums constitute spaces of knowledge and memory
construction and how this makes relevant questions of power, identity,
and status. However, exactly how far the museums that produced this
case study’s exhibition project realised a public participatory laboratory
for encounters with collective publics will remain an empirical question,
and is approached in Chaps. 4–6.
2.1.2 Representing the Public in Public
The way in which the French and German national publics represented
immigrants in this case study paints a picture not only of immigrants but
also of the French and German people themselves. In other words, the
national publics are themselves discussed and objectified in the museum
26 Y. Porsché
context. The carefully selected and arranged exhibit—for example, a por-

trait of an immigrant—is in this exhibition deemed to be representative
of how the general public in the past perceived, and continues to per-
ceive, immigrants. (National) museums are thus public spaces in two fun-
damental ways: they present history with reference to the public and they
do this publicly in an exhibition space. In addition to museum exhibi-
tions, which usually involve the public as a referential societal
Öffentlichkeit, exhibitions are themselves public settings in the sense that
they present this topic publicly to an audience.
Different usages of the term ‘public’ have been distinguished by Warner
(2002), who describes (1) the Public (often in capital letters) as an inclu-
sive social totality of “the people.”8 The Public can refer to various kinds
of communities, such as a nation, a state, a democratic public sphere, a
religion, or humanity—as an entity that one can speak about. Warner’s
main concern is (2) a public such as a readership, which exists “by virtue
of being addressed” (Warner 2002: 20). This particular yet indefinite pub-
lic can be, for instance, a political camp that a speaker or author addresses,
possibly claims to be speaking for, and which she might hope to enlarge.
This kind of public only exists if the addressed respond in some way, at
least by giving the speaker/author some attention. Finally, focused social
interactions—that is, Goffman’s (1961: 7 f.) ‘encounters’—occur (3) in
public, which implies a concrete, more or less known audience to a
speaker in a shared physical space.
This section asks how references to the Public as an entity, as well as
addressing a public, are connected to the locus from which the references
are voiced in public. In other words, I assemble theoretical approaches
that can be of help in conceptualising how people in the condition of
‘publicness’ found in museums talk about a nation’s people or mobilise a
particular audience. We can formulate this in terms of a more general
question: What role does the particular interaction play in defining
referenced entities or politically motivating audiences? Conversely, in
what way do the referencing and addressing define the communicative
8
I write ‘Public’ with a capital ‘P’ especially in cases with no preface, such as ‘general public’ or
‘societal public,’ so as to make clear that I refer to ‘the Public’ in terms of an imagined entity or
totality.
space? I want to argue that the referenced Publics and the public audi-
ences do not exist a priori but are shaped in temporally unfolding public
interactions. Equally, the communicative space of public interactions is,
among other things, defined by the performed references to the Public
and the design for, and interaction with, an audience.
How are definitions of the societal Public, the audience, and situations
of interaction in museums related to issues of representation? Museums
usually attempt to represent absent objects, people, points of view, con-
flicts and debates, or experiences by presenting, arranging, and com-
menting on selected artefacts. Curators physically place these in front of
an audience. In addition, written texts and exhibits or speakers refer to or
imagine associated objects, ideas, places, individuals, and collectives that
are not present. Mitchell (1988: 21) argues that museums assume an
“imaginary structure” of a preceding “external reality,” which in exhibi-
tions makes “structures of meaning” visible. Presenting the imaginary
structures in museums, “the world would appear as ordered and com-
plete” (Macdonald 2003: 3 f.). In this attempt to put the world into
order, for example, when placing an object in the corresponding histori-
cal section of the exhibition or talking about stereotypes, discrimination,
and exclusion from a societal public as implied in the mass media or in
propaganda, a whole array of subject positions and voices is mobilised.
This calls the simple relationship between a museum object ‘a’ represent-
ing a societal fact ‘b’—be it an absent person, institution, or discourse—
into question. Similarly, considering how visitors in an exhibition
psychologically deal with images that curators present and which they
discuss with others, work in discursive psychology (see Porsché and
Macgilchrist 2014) has shown that notions of mental representations are
problematic if conceptualised as “cognitive structures or grids which
make sense of information” (Potter and Edwards 1999: 449). Potter and
colleagues criticise approaches to representation that treat them as “ways
of understanding the world which influence action, but are not them-
selves parts of action” (Potter 1996: 168; see also Howarth 2006: 74). If
we instead conceptualise representation as an interactive practice, it is not
surprising that objects can be understood and used in very different ways
depending on who talks to whom, in what way, and in which context.
28 Y. Porsché
Cassirer (1990: 50) explains that representations imply specific points

of view and maintains that people do not have immediate access to the
world, and nor do representations conceal the real world from them.
Hoffmann (2009: 26–54; cf. also Sandkühler 2007, 2009) explains that
representational practices always involve directionality, and that the rela-
tion between subject and object is articulated or interpreted in a particu-
lar epistemic context—an insight that had been discussed as a ‘crisis of
representation.’ Cultural anthropology therefore recognises that neither
academia nor museums innocently transpose things they talk about into
a new context (Bendix and Welz 2002: 28; Lidchi 1997). Instead, these
recontextualisations are political and contingent, in the sense that these
decisions are not based on reasons that are inherent to the transposed;
they pertain to the question of whose voices are recognised on what kinds
of public stages (see Rancière 2008, ‘représentation indécidable’).
Since a museum audience frequently understands a single exhibit as a
prototypical example of a more general phenomenon or a political posi-
tion, this, particularly in the case of immigration, implies political recog-
nition.9 Museums dealing with immigration thus make representation
relevant in the sense of (a) someone or an exhibit portraying people,
things, or phenomena that are not present, that is, physically or symboli-
cally standing for absent individuals, collectives, or phenomena; or of
(b) politically speaking in the name of someone else as a proxy (Coppet
1992: 65; H. Hofmann 2004; M. Hoffmann 2009: 24 ff.). This exempli-
fies a distinction introduced by Marx10 and drawn on by Spivak (1988:
9
See Trebbe (2009) or San Martín (2009) for empirical studies dealing with the question of how
ethnic minorities are represented in the mass media and how this affects processes of political inte-
gration, for example, how underrepresentation, stereotypical portrayals, and negative framing of
immigrants disadvantages their participation in public discourse.
10
Although considering representation to be universal, Marx and Engels (1962: 86 f.) worked out
the particular character of commodity-representation in the social conditions of a capitalist world
economy. People attribute value to products that is independent from their specific use or sensual
characteristics. For instance, a picture displays something absent, someone or something can
embody authority, the value of something can increase without the producer being present, and a
printed text is written or read without the author or the reader being present, respectively (cf.
Weimann and Zimmermann 1997: 13). With reference to questions of class, the importance of not
conflating the related notions of re-presentation and representation becomes apparent: the descrip-
tive re-presentation (Darstellung), that is, the differential definition of class regarding different eco-
nomic conditions, does not necessarily generate a transformative class with a class-consciousness
that is politically represented (vertreten).
275 ff.) between aesthetic-philosophical ‘re-presentation’ (Darstellung)

on the one hand, and political ‘representation’ (Vertretung) on the other.
Whereas the former refers to portrayals of something absent, the latter
means politically standing in for someone through representation (por-
trait or rhetoric-as-trope versus proxy or rhetoric-as-persuasion).
Cassirer (1990: 50) underlines the importance of re-presentation, as it
enables perception, and only shared re-presentations make communica-
tion possible. Communication in conditions of publicness in turn is nec-
essary for political representation. Waśkiewicz (2010: 315) illustrates this
by giving the example of “participants [who] in all meetings feel obliged
to speak up even if they know that by so doing they will not contribute
substantively.” They do so because “‘[t]o speak in one’s own name’ is
much more than ‘to speak for oneself ’ because to speak for oneself is to
speak in one’s own private voice whereas to speak in someone’s name is to
elevate that voice to the public forum.” Kaelble (2008: 68) focuses on
representations and shows that “[w]ithout communication and the pub-
lic no representations are generated.” He points out that “[b]ecause
debates and the publics are so important for representations, practically
never one single representation of the Other is found, but always several
competing or mixed representations of the Other, more influential ones
and less successful ones, behind which stand actors, interests and con-
flicts” (Kaelble 2008: 68). Contested representations of Others and the
self both enable and constrain what options we can envision for future
actions. When confronted with competing representations, individuals
often take a stance towards them. In cases in which people—or even
transnational, institutional actors beyond face-to-face interaction—do
not stand for people but for discourses, Dryzek and Niemeyer (2008:
481) suggest speaking of “discursive representation.” In this connection,
the accepted institutional order—which is formed by and brings about
representations—can be reinforced or modified. Yet not every confronta-
tion with different representations, for example, in a brief encounter,
leads to a change of social order—it is through institutions that experiences
are repeatedly communicated in social practices and are thus stabilised.
Focusing on the political consequences of representations, work on
postcolonial theory in particular emphasises that the act of representing
involves more than merely describing differences. Instead, it (re)produces
30 Y. Porsché
differences and thereby performs processes of inclusion and exclusion.

Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari’s view that all acts of fixation necessar-
ily have power implications or pointing out that all expression excludes
that which is not said, some authors conclude that every act of represen-
tation or expression constitutes an act of repression (Durrheim et al.
2011: 176). Spivak (1988) argues that avoiding representation, however,
is not a viable alternative. She builds on Derrida’s criticism of logocen-
trism, that is, abandoning the idea that meaning could be traced back to
an originary source, which itself does not rely on representation. Instead,
she understands representation as a never ending game of differentiating
and deferring references and argues that we cannot in fact escape repre-
sentation. In Spivak’s view, trying to do so would deny the subaltern any
voice. We are caught in the following dilemma: Considering the Other to
be an authentically speaking subject assimilates the Other to dominant
understandings of an enlightened subject, which is responsible for silenc-
ing the Other in the first place (cf. Angermüller and Bellina 2011).
However, when refusing to do so, those voices that are truly foreign can-
not be understood (Waldenfels 2006: 113–118). Museum practitioners
informed by postcolonial and deconstructive theory are taking on these
challenges, for instance, in repatriation debates (that is, discussing
whether museums should return artefacts from colonial collections, cf.
Simpson 1996), when figuring out how exhibitions can deconstruct nar-
ratives or stereotypes, and when debating whether or how they can func-
tion as ‘Contact Zones’ or as critical institutions of a public sphere.
What is this thing called a public sphere? The public as a theoretical,
political, and often normative notion commonly refers either to the gen-
eral public, for example, the common good or public opinion, or to the
sociological concept of the public sphere—going back to Habermas’s
‘Öffentlichkeit,’ which in turn is seen as the space where public opinion is
formulated (Habermas 1974: 49, 1990: 38). Habermas regrets the sup-
posed decline of the public sphere in capitalist mass democracy up to the
nineteenth century. In his view, instead of rational-critical argument, laws
of commodity exchange and consumption increasingly govern the sphere
(Habermas 2008: 137). In Habermas’s view, a capitalist ‘rationalisation of
the life-world’ (Kolonialisierung der Lebenswelt), which enabled the public
sphere in the first place, now interferes with cultural reproduction and
turns the public into a passive, uncritical consumer. Habermas’s portrayal

of the past and current public sphere has been disputed; alternative depic-
tions of the past pay more attention to effects of exclusion, ‘counter-
publics,’ ‘counter-discourses,’ or underground movements (for example,
Fraser 1990: 62, 67; Hauser 1994: 75 f.; Negt and Kluge 1972). Few
concepts of the public sphere avoid reducing it to the daily press and
other mass media. Hauser (1998: 32) takes into account different sites of
public debate and pays attention to the rhetorical skills that are necessary
to persuade others in a condition of publicness. According to Hauser, the
public sphere is at work both in representative institutional discourse and
in everyday vernacular exchange.11 Criteria for pertinent arguments are
not defined universally or a priori but emerge in use. Hauser understands
the post-Enlightenment public sphere not as a single discursive domain
striving towards consensus, but as a nested plurality of arenas. It is frag-
mented across many dialogues, which are subsequently merged and
imagined in discussion no matter whether they directly interact with each
other or not. In addition, in instances when we are confronted with com-
munication that is alien to us, “its status in a given public sphere is more
akin to an object of discussion—a datum to be interpreted—than a dialo-
gizing intersection; it is something interacted about rather than interacted
with” (Hauser 1998: 33). In this connection, analysis should in my view
address not only the questions of which topics people talk about using
which rhetorical devices and to what extent they understand each other,
but also what impact differences between talking in person, being talked
about, being cited, or being talked for have on inclusion or exclusion
from a political public sphere.
Abstract approaches to the public that see it as a rational sphere, which
is seen to stand for the people, rarely get down to the question of where
debates referred to by this metaphor take place: In public between indi-
vidual people employing different media and modes of communication.
A range of praxeological approaches to publicness, or the condition of
people being ‘in public’ (Goffman 1963: 3, 22, 1982: 10 ff.), have been
11
Similarly, from the point of view of social representation theory in social psychology, Jovchelovitch
(1996) suggests equating social representations with the public sphere. In her view, social represen-
tations involve objects, subjects, and activities and constitute the link between the individual and
society.
32 Y. Porsché
reviewed by Schmidt and Volbers (2011) as a methodological principle.

Social practices are from this perspective not implementations of prior
structures or rules, but emerge in social interactions that contain rules of
the game, transsituational contexts, or external influences. Schmidt and
Volbers point out that practice-theoretical approaches concentrate on
what is publicly visible and are therefore frequently seen as disregarding
macro-sociological phenomena or questions that are not directly observ-
able. In defence of practice-theoretical accounts they explain that, for
example, Latour’s Actor-Network-Theory (ANT) precisely rejects the
micro–macro dichotomy on the grounds that, first, every observation is
necessarily mediated, and, second, advocators of practice theory are con-
vinced that empirical analysis can explain so-called macro-sociological
phenomena. Latour (1994) does away with the micro–macro distinction
by rejecting varying levels of depth of society. Instead, human and non-
human actors (or ‘actants’) both produce the ‘local’ through techniques
of canalisation, distinctions, focussing, and reduction; as well as the
‘global’ through culminating, compiling, or condensing on the same level
of social and situated practices. According to Schmidt and Volbers, refer-
ence to objects can draw ‘joint-attention’ to, as well as call for diverging
perspectives on, something absent, since observers often understand what
the object was designed for. Schmidt and Volbers (2011: 28–31) reinter-
pret Arendt’s (2008: 72) concept of a visible (versus private) public sphere
that retains its identity despite being seen from a plurality of perspectives.
The authors describe ‘publicness’ (Öffentlichkeit) as the participants’ con-
viction that other participants with different points of view have access to
the same symbols, artefacts, and practices. Though it may obscure the
distinction, the German term Öffentlichkeit points to the connections,
referring to the political object that is observed, and constituted by, dif-
ferent perspectives on it.
A relatively rare example of microanalytic work which looks at local
public interaction while attending to the question of which global public
sphere this generates is Knorr-Cetina and Bruegger’s (2002, cf. also
Scheffer 2010) ethnographic work in the finance sector. In their approach
‘epistemic cultures’—which I will turn to in more detail in the next
section—describe the microsocial order, which, thanks to technological
communication media, establishes a ‘global’ public. Schatzki’s (2002; cf.
also Reckwitz 2003: 289) praxeology is useful to conceptualise how

micropractices can constitute the “building blocks” of larger activities.
He distinguishes between ‘dispersed practices’ (describing, asking,
explaining, arranging, reporting, etc.) and ‘integrative practices’ for more
complex aspects of our social life (religious practices, teaching, etc.).
Some studies analyse complex practices—going beyond physical co-
presence in mediated interaction—using audio and video recordings (for
example, Broth 2008) or by analysing styles of writing, for instance in
letters to newspaper editors (for example, Perrin and Vaisey 2008). Perrin
and Vaisey find that citizens who enact a public sphere by contributing to
newspapers write differently depending on the scope of the audience
addressed: in the case of larger issues that have relevance beyond the local
context, they write with a more emotional, confrontational tone of voice
that is geared towards recognition. Perrin and Vaisey (2008: 782) thus
suggest that the public sphere is “constituted by a specific location, tech-
nology, or forum … [but is] also in part a set of cultural norms and ideals,
part ‘styles, skills, and habits’ (Swidler 2001), part normative expecta-
tions of democratic practice (Perrin 2006).”
How is it possible to participate in a public sphere in the context of
public museums? And what would adequate political representation in a
public sphere look like? A classic definition of political representation is:
“the making present in some sense of something which is nevertheless not
present literally or in fact” (Pitkin 1967: 8 f.). This definition, which in
short would encompass all sorts of representation, in Pitkin’s theory
focuses on the political by taking into account institutional arrangements
and representatives’ values, characteristics, interests, or experiences,
which should ideally generate the “will of the people.” Concerned with
the question of what capabilities are needed to participate in a discursive
political public, Bußhoff (2000) points out that claims of representing
others need to be acknowledged by an audience. In his view, ‘representa-
tivity’ refers to a metapragmatic attribution of competences and accom-
plishments to participants in public political processes. Politicians and
citizens here have different possibilities at their disposal: In addition to
voting, the citizen can act politically, for instance, as a spokesperson of a
citizens’ initiative. Politicians are usually assigned to a certain political
class. The possibilities that individuals can exploit rely on the collectively
34 Y. Porsché
acknowledged rules of the game of how publicity can be used. For

instance, journalists are allowed to make use of publicity and politicians
are expected to do so. As politicians, they are moreover expected to
employ a different way of speaking compared to when they speak
privately.
Regarding political representation in museums, Chakrabarty (2002)
distinguishes between the following two notions of the political. According
to a pedagogical logic, humans only become political when educated; they
imagine entities such as the public, nation, or class through abstract rea-
soning. In the performative logic of mass democracies, however, humans
are inherently political—for example, a consumer has rights to choose or
refuse a product, whether she knows about her rights or not. Due to the
pressures of mass democracy, which questions the primacy of the analytical
over the lived, for instance, universities had to accept the student demand
for education to be entertaining; yet academia continues to marginalise the
senses. Instead, it was the contested museum space that was more sensitive
to these demands. In Chakrabarty’s view, the senses become increasingly
powerful in the media of late democracies as they embody knowledge of
memory and experience, for instance in “the politics of identity—the ques-
tion of who can speak for whom” (Chakrabarty 2002: 9). The media of late
democracies works not only according to a pedagogical logic designed for
training the abstract, analytical reasoning and imagination of the educated,
but also takes performative, lived, bodily and sensual experience on board.
Although the performative view was, in the early days of the museum, still
regarded as only allowing access to the local and the particular in the pres-
ent (versus the abstract, cognitive, representational knowledge of cultural
entities or history), “museums have gradually moved away from the
archives, a modern institution with which they once shared paradigms of
knowledge. … [Today the museum] provides as much ‘experience’ as
abstract knowledge” (Chakrabarty 2002: 9). Chakrabarty argues that
memory can never be separated from bodily experience. In identity poli-
tics, this often turns into the claim that only people with the necessary
experience can or have the right to represent a group. Latour’s (2005) work
on the “parliament of things” finally goes so far as to include material
things in the public network of political decision making.
Concerned with the affective dimension of culture and the relevance

of material things, Lash and Lury (2007) argue that today cultural
products are increasingly part of more or less inclusive or exclusive
‘brands’ (Lury 2004). The exhibition space, for instance, is a part of the
museum brand. On this view, today’s exhibitions constitute dynamic
(art) spaces or contexts, not only for decoding and interpretation, as was
the case in Horkheimer and Adorno’s ‘culture industry,’ but for a de-
and recontextualisation of whole environments in a ‘global culture
industry.’ Brands are not tangible objects or matters of certainty, but
informational and dynamic objects to which observers can direct affect
and action. They are defined as a space of possibility, “a platform for the
patterning of activity,” or “a set of relations between products and ser-
vices” (Lury 2004: 1) involving an asymmetrical exchange between pro-
ducers and consumers (Lury 2004: 7). In contrast to the logics of
‘culture industry’ in which products constitute cultural goods and the
mediation of meaning is worked through representation, according to
Lash and Lury’s concept of a ‘global culture industry,’ the mediation of
informational cultural artefacts works through the modus of operation-
ality. In Lash and Lury’s view, “[i]mages and other cultural forms from
the superstructure collapse into the materiality of the infrastructure.
The image, previously separated in the superstructure, is thingified, it
becomes matter-image (Deleuze 1986)” (Lash and Lury 2007: 7). The
authors argue that Horkheimer and Adorno’s industrialisation was in
fact only the “commodification of representation,” whereas the “global
cultural industry” designates the age of “culturification of industry”: the
“mediation of things.” Here, meaning does not have to be interpreted
according to the culture industry’s structures, which produce meaning
through concrete perception in “the Symbolic”; rather, meaning works
in the global culture industry through immediate and multimodal expe-
rience and sensation. Meaning then is “doing” or “impact.” In “the
Real,” the exhibition experience is part of the museum and does not
have to be decoded as such—it is the actualisation or icon12 of the signi-
fied without having to be explicitly attached to it.
12
See footnote 6 in Chap. 3 for a definition of ‘icon.’
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Gli scherzi allora, il conversar, le risa
Scoppiettavan graditi in mezzo a loro;
Però che onor l’agreste musa avesse.
22.
Non per colpa s’immola a Bacco il capro

Sovra l’are dovunque e i ludi antichi
Sulle scene compajono, solenni
Della Tesea città [23] gli abitatori
Immaginaron premj intorno ai grandi
Popolosi villaggi e nelle vie,
E fra le colme coppe in su gli erbosi
Prati danzâr fra l’untüose pelli
Degli immolati capri. Istessamente
Gli Ausonj pur dalla trojana gente
Qui derivati con incolto verso
E irrefrenato riso han passatempo
E di cave corteccie orrendi visi
Assumono, e ne’ loro allegri carmi
Te invocan, Bacco, e sul gigante pino
Ti sospendon votive immaginette.
Mia traduzione.
23. Gli Ateniesi sono così dal Poeta chiamati Thesidæ da Teseo re, che
primo ridusse dagli sparsi villaggi entro la città che circondò di mura.
24. «I primi ludi teatrali nacquero dalle feste di Bacco.»
25.
Grecia già doma il vincitor feroce

Giunse a domar, e nell’agreste Lazio
L’arti guidò per man; indi quell’irto
Cadde saturnio ritmo, e fu respinto
Dal fior d’ogni eleganza il grave lezzo.
Ma rimasero ancor lungh’anni, e ancora
Rimangon oggi le salvatich’orme
Chè tardo acuti su le greche carte
Sguardi volse il Roman, e alfin deposte
Le punich’arme, cominciò tranquillo
Quella ad investigar, ch’Eschilo e Tespi
E Sofocle apprestava util dottrina.
Trad. Gargallo.
26. Storia degli Italiani, Vol. I, cap. XXXI.
27.
Ma però se grecizza il mio subbietto,

Non atticizza, ma piuttosto in vero
Sicilizza.
28.
Che d’altri personaggi ora non lice

Valersi, e ch’altro scriver si costuma
Che di schiavi correnti e di pietose
Matrone o di malvagie cortigiane,
Di parassito crapulon, ovvero
Di spavaldo soldato e di supposto
Fanciullo; o pur da vecchio servitore
Venir tradito; amare, odiar, gelosi
Restar in scena? Oh! nulla cosa insomma
Scriver si può che non sia stato scritto.
Mia trad.
29.
Molti incerti restar abbiam veduto

Cui conceder di comico poeta
La palma; a te, col mio giudizio adesso
Il dubbio solverò, sì che tu possa
Altra sentenza rigettar contraria.
Prima a Cecilio Stazio io la concedo,
Plauto di poi ogn’altro certo avvanza;
Quindi l’ardito Nevio ha il terzo posto;
E se il quarto, ad alcun dar lo si deve,
A Licinio è dovuto, ed a lui presso
Attilio viene; il sesto loco ottiene
Publio Terenzio, e il settimo Turpilio;
Ha Trabëa l’ottavo e il nono a Luscio
Giustamente si dee; Ennio, in ragione
Solo di vetustà, decimo venga.
Tr. id.
30. Traduco:
Vi avran di quei che mi diran: che è questo

Matrimonio di schiavi? E quando mai
Torran moglie gli schiavi? Ecco una cosa
Strana così che in nessun luogo è vista.
Ma io v’accerto che ciò s’usa in Grecia,
A Cartagin, qui nella terra nostra,
In Apulia, ove più che i cittadini
Soglion gli schiavi andar tra loro a nozze.
31.
Tutto ciò che piace

Potè ai mimi concedere la scena.
Lib. 2.
32. Apologia. XV.
33. «Il capo e la faccia coperti colla maschera.»
34. Le Maschere Sceniche e le Figure Comiche d’antichi Romani descritte

brevemente da Francesco De Ficoroni. — Roma. Nella stamperia dei
Bernabò e Lazzarini MDCCXLVIII. I versi di Fedro così tradurrei:
Gli occhi in maschera tragica

Un dì la volpe affisse;
Oh quanto è bella, disse,
Ma ahimè! cervel non ha.
35. Se taluno avrà cantato innanzi al popolo, o avrà fatto carme che rechi
infamia o offesa altrui, venga punito di bastone.
36.
Fescennina licenza, a cui ben questo

Costume aprì la via, con versi alterni
Rustici prese a dardeggiar motteggi,
E omai l’ammessa libertà, cogli anni
Rinnovandosi ognor, piacevolmente
Folleggiò, sinchè poi l’inferocito
Scherzo scosso ogni fren, cangiato in rabbia,
Già minaccioso gli onorati Lari
Impunemente penetrare ardio.
Quei che sentiro i sanguinosi morsi,
Muggir di duolo, e quegli ancor non tocchi
Su la sorte comun stetter pensosi:
Ch’anzi legge e castigo allor fu imposto,
Perchè descritto in petulanti versi
Alcun non fosse. Ecco littor temuto
Cangiar fe’ metro, e sol diletto e lode
Ormai risuona su le aonie corde.
Trad. Gargallo.
37.
Magno tu sei per la miseria nostra....

E di codesta tua virtute alfine
Giorno verrà che te’ n dorrai tu forte,
Se legge non l’infrena, oppur costume.
38. Ad Atticum, II, 19.
39.
Quiriti, ahimè, la libertà perdemmo.
40.
È da fatal necessità voluto

Che i molti tema chi è da lor temuto.
41. «E che? colui che soccorse la Republica, la sostenne e rassodò tra gli
Argivi.... dubbia l’impresa, non dubitò però espor la sua vita, nè curarsi
del capo suo.... d’animo sommo in somma guerra e di sommo ingegno
adornato.... o Padre! queste cose vidi io ardere. O ingrati Argivi, o Greci
inconseguenti, immemori del beneficio!... Lo lasciate esulare, lo lasciate
espellere, ed espulso, il sopportate.»
42.
Io son Talia, che a’ comici presiede

Poemi e il vizio sferza
Per genial via di teatrali scede.
43.
Nè la nostra Talia dentro le selve

Vergognò soggiornar.
44. Tom. II. pl. 3 nella nota 7. Vedi anche Plutarco Simp. IX 14.
45.
Di Melpomene aver l’ignoto carme

Tespi inventato, è fama, e aver su plaustri
Tratti gli attor, di feccia il volto intrisi,
Che adattassero al carme il gesto e il canto.
Trad. Gargallo.
46. Costui è quell’Eraclide, che Diogene Laerzio e Suida dicono essere

stato uomo grave, cantore di opere ottime ed elegantissime, e liberatore
della sua patria oppressa, emulo di Platone, che nel partire per la Sicilia
lo incaricò di presiedere alla sua scuola. Egli ne’ frammenti dell’opera
Delle Republiche, ci lasciò testimonianza che Omero sè dicesse, in un
componimento andato perduto, di patria toscano: Omero attesta dalla
Tirrenia esser egli venuto in Cefallenia ed Itaca, ove per malattia perdè
la vista, onde il nostro Manzoni il chiamasse:
«Cieco d’occhi, divin raggio di mente.»
47.
Chi per vil capro in tragico certame

Pria gareggiò.
Trad. Gargallo.
48.
Vien la truce Tragedia a grande passo,

Torva la fronte d’arruffata chioma
E il lungo peplo che le casca in basso.
Ovid., 3. Amor. I. II. Mia trad.
49.
De la maschera autor, e del decente

Sirma, appo lui Eschilo il palco stese
Su poche travi, e ad innalzar lo stile,
E a poggiar sul coturno ei fu maestro.
Trad. Gargallo.
50. Chi poi abbia introdotto le maschere, i prologhi, la moltitudine degli attori
ed altrettali cose, si ignora. — Della Poetica, cap. V.
51.
Se dì solenne a festeggiar talvolta,
D’erbe un teatro si compone e nota
Una commedia [52] recitar si ascolta,
In cui l’attor pallida al volto e immota
Maschera tien dalla beante bocca,
Il bimbo, di terror pinta la gota,
Nel sen materno si nasconde.
52. Ho tradotto la parola exodium per Commedia; ma l’exodium era

propriamente una farsa licenziosa che d’ordinario si rappresentava in
seguito ad una tragedia e più spesso ancora in seguito ad un’atellana,
qualche volta pure tra un atto e l’altro di quest’ultima. Il più delle volte
l’esodio non aveva che un solo attore, chiamato per ciò exodiarus.
53. «Laddove un oratore convien che abbia l’acutezza de’ dialetti e i

sentimenti de’ filosofi e quasi il parlar de’ poeti, e la memoria de’ giuristi
e la voce de’ tragici e poco meno che il gesto de’ più applauditi attori di
teatro.» — Cicerone, De Oratore, lib. I, c. XXVIII, Trad. di Gius. Ant.
Cantova.
54.
Queste son l’opre e queste l’arti invero

Del generoso prence: ei s’abbandona
A oscene danze su palco straniero;
Beato allor che la nemea corona
D’appio mertò [55]. Del tuo trillo sonante
Alle immagin’ degli avi i trofei dona;
E di Domizio al più la trascinante
Sirma di Tieste o Antigone e la cetra
A quel gran marmo tu deponi innante.
Mia trad.
55. Plinio, Nat. Hist. lib. 19. 5. 46, fa sapere che ne’ grandi spettacoli della
Grecia Nemea venisse data al vincitore una corona di appio, erba
palustre, detta anche, helioselinum.
56. Egloga VIII. 10.
Che sol del sofocleo coturno degni

Sono i tuoi carmi.
57. Lib. VII. 2.

58. Hist. Nat. 35. 12. 46.
59. Id. 57. 2. 6.
60. Saturnaliorum. Lib. III. C. XIV.
61.
Mentre il tosco tibicine strimpella

Muove il ludio il suo piè a grottesca danza.
V. 112. Mia trad.
62.
Non grave d’oricalco e de la tromba

Qual oggi è omai, la tibia emulatrice,
Ma semplice e sottil per pochi fori
Spirando, al coro utile accordo univa,
E del suo fiato empiea gli ancor non troppo
Spesso sedili.
Tr. Gargallo.
63. Flacco di Claudio suonò colle tibie pari.
64. «Il Tibicine intanto or vi diverta.»
65. «Non comprendo di che abbia egli a temere, da che sì bei settenari egli
reciti al suono della tibia.»
66. Lo Scoliaste d’Apollonio, Argonaut. III V. I., e lo Scoliaste dell’Antologia,

lib. I. cap. 57.
67.
Co’ suoi tragici giambi reboante

S’accalora Melpomene.
68. Martorio Primo, liberto di Marco, architetto.
69.
E del nudo teatro e del coperto

Il gemino edificio.
70. Lib. II. c. 45. 6. «Quinto Catulo, imitando l’effeminatezza della
Campania, primo coprì dell’ombra del velario gli spettatori.»
71. Cap. XXVI.
72.
«Sederò teco al pompejan teatro,

Quando il vento contende
Di spiegar sovra al popolo le tende.»
Lib. XVI. 29. Trad. di Magenta.
73.
Sovente ancora
Il medesmo color diffuso intorno
È dal sommo de’ corpi; e l’aureo velo,
E le purpuree e le sanguigne spesso
Ciò fanno, allor che ne’ teatri augusti
Son tese, o sventolando in su l’antenne
Ondeggian fra le travi: ivi il consesso
Degli ascoltanti; ivi la scena e tutte
Le immagini de’ padri e delle madri
E degli dei di color vario ornate
Veggonsi fluttuare, e quanto più
Han d’ogni intorno le muraglie chiuse,
Sicchè da’ lati del teatro alcuna
Luce non passi, tanto più cosperse
Di grazia e di lepor ridon le cose
Di dentro, ecc.
Trad. Marchetti.
74. «Avanti tutti, Gneo Pompeo col far iscorrere le acque per le vie, temperò
l’ardore estivo.» Lib. II. c. 496.
75. «Oggi per avventura credi più sapiente quegli che trovò come con latenti
condotti si porti a immensa altezza e si sprizzi acqua profumata di
zafferano.»
76.
Non ondeggiava sulla curva arena

Pompa di veli, nè odoroso croco
Spirava intorno ognor la molle scena.
Lib. IV, el. I Trad. di M. Vismara.
77.
Non si stendean sulla marmorea arena

Le vele allor, nè s’era vista ancora
D’acqua di croco rosseggiar la scena.
Lib. I. v. 103-104. Mia versione.
78.
Testè, solo fra tutti, Orazio in bruno

Mantello agli spettacoli assistea,
Mentre la plebe, il maggior duce, e l’uno
Ordine e l’altro in bianco vi sedea.
Spessa neve dal ciel cadde repente:
In mantel bianco Orazio ecco sedente.
Lib. IV. 2. Trad. Magenta.
79. «Un giorno (Augusto) avendo in un’assemblea di popolo veduto una

gran turba in mantelli neri, pieno di corruccio si diè a gridare: Ecco son
questi
I togati Romani arbitri in tutto?
e commise agli edili che quind’innanzi più alcun cittadino non

comparisse nel foro o nel circo, se non deposto prima il mantello.» C.
XL.
80. «A Marco Olconio Rufo, figlio di Marco, duumviro incaricato per la quinta
volta dell’amministrazione della giustizia, quinqueviro per la seconda
volta, tribuno dei soldati eletto dal popolo, flamine d’Augusto, patrono
della colonia, per decreto de’ decurioni.»
81. «Marco Olconio Rufo e Marco Olconio Celere a propria spesa eressero
una cripta, un tribunale, un teatro a lustro della Colonia.»
82. «A Marco Olconio Celere duumviro di giustizia, cinque volte designato

sacerdote d’Augusto.»
83. De Rich, Diz. d’Antichità, voce Thymele.
84. Parte I, cap. I, p. 6.
85. Lib. cap. 13. 2.

86. Epist. Ex Ponto. Epist XVI.
87.
Indi fidai con gravi accenti al tragico

Coturno, qual dovea, regal subbietto.
Trad. dell’ab. Paolo Mistrorigo.
88.
Io salvarti potei e mi domandi

Se struggerti non possa?...
Instit. Orat. VIII. 5.
89.
Quasi invasa da un Dio, qua e là son tratta.
90.
Le pugne de’ centimani

Sacrileghi giganti
Cantar tentai: ho cetera
Pe’ carmi altisonanti.
91. Tristium, lib. II. 519.
92. Id. lib. V. 7. 25.
93. Inst. Orat. X. I. «che può essere paragonata a qualunque tragedia

greca.»
94.
LA NUTRICE.
Partiro i Colchi; nulla fu la fede

Del tuo consorte e di dovizie tante
Più nulla resta a te.
MEDEA.
Resta Medea.
Atto II. Sc. I.

95.
TESEO.
Di’, qual delitto colla morte intendi

D’espiar?
FEDRA.
Quello ch’io vivo.
96.
Tempo vegg’io propizio

In avvenir lontano,
In cui torrà gli ostacoli
Fremente l’oceano,
Ed ingente una terra apparirà;
Nè Tile fia più l’ultima;
Ma nuovi mondi Teti scoprirà.
Mia trad.
97. Lipsia, 1822.
98. Lipsia, 1852.
99. Antichità di Pompei. Vol. IV.
100.
Ecco d’eroici sensi menar vampo

Cianciator grecizzante.
Sat. I. v. 69. Trad. V. Monti.
101. Le publicai tradotte in un volume: Publio Siro — I Mimiambi. — Pagnoni,

1871.
102. Nat. Hist., IX. 59.
103.
Quei cui parrà tuo genio al suo conforme

Con l’un pollice e l’altro avvien che innalzi
Fautor suoi plausi a’ marzïal tuoi ludi.
Epist. lib. 1. ep. XIX 66. Trad. Gargallo.
Vedi anche Plinio Nat. Hist. XXVIII, II. 3.
104.
Nè l’opra tua puoi vendere a cotesta

Gente nel foro o nel teatro.
Epig. Lib. VII. 64.
105. Lib. IV. 15.
106. Paradox. III, 2. De Orat. III.
107. Pag. 46.
108. In Pericle 13.
109. Lib. V. 9. 10.
110. Cap. V.
111. «Egualmente sono a lui dovuti e il tempio della gente Flavia e uno stadio
e un odeum ed una naumachia, delle cui pietre di poi valsero alla
riparazione del gran circo, i due lati del quale erano stati incendiati.»
112. I giuochi di Achille in onor di Patroclo sono narrati nel libro XXIII
dell’Iliade.
113.
Questi torneamenti, e queste giostre

Rinnovò poscia Ascanio, allor ch’eresse
Alba la lunga; appresegli i Latini;
Gli mantenner gli Albani; e d’Alba a Roma
Fur trasportati, e vi son oggi; e come
E l’uso e Roma e i giochi derivati
Son dai Trojani, hanno or di Troja il nome.
Æneid. Lib. V. 596-601. Trad. Annib. Caro.
114. Annales. Lib. XI. C. XV.
115. Da αμφι, da ambe le parti, e da θεατρον, teatro.
116. Nat. Hist. Lib. XXXVI.
117. «Ciò che non fecero i Barbari fecero i Barbarini.»

118. Narra a tal proposito Dione che Nerone accolse benignamente e
onorevolmente quel re, facendo, oltre altre solennità, anche ludi
gladiatorj in Pozzuoli. Fu prefetto di essi Patrobio Liberto, e ne fu tanta
la magnificenza, che nessuno nello spazio d’un sol giorno potesse
entrar nell’anfiteatro all’infuori degli uomini, delle donne e dei fanciulli
Etiopi; onde Patrobio ne riportasse onore. Ivi il Re Tiridate, sedendo in
luogo principale, con dardo colpiva le fiere e con un solo colpo ferì due
tori ed uccise. Queste feste compiute, Nerone lo condusse a Roma e
gl’impose la corona.
119. «Cajo Quinzio Valgo figlio e Marco Porcio figlio di Marco Duumviri
Quinquennali, hanno per onore della Colonia costruito col proprio
denaro l’anfiteatro, concedendone ai Coloni il posto in perpetuità.»
120. Cajo Cuspio Pansa figlio di Cajo, pontefice Duumviro incaricato di

rendere giustizia.
121. Cajo Cuspio Pansa figlio di Cajo, padre, Duumviro per la giustizia,
quattroviro quinquennale, prefetto, per decreto de’ Decurioni, al
mantenimento della legge Petronia.
122. Gli scavi ripresi nel 1813 e durati fino al 1816 lo misero interamente alla
luce, come trovasi di presente.
123. «Il Patrono del sobborgo Augusto Felice sopra i ludi per decreto de’
decurioni — T. Atullio Celere figlio di Cajo Duumviro sopra i ludi, le porte
e la costruzione de’ cunei, per decreto de’ Decurioni. — Lucio Saginio,
Duumviro, incaricato dalla giustizia fece, per Decreto de’ Decurioni, gli
aditi. — Nonio Istacidio figlio di Nonio, cilice, Duumviro sopra i ludi fe’ gli
aditi. — Aulo Audio Rufo figlio di Aulo Duumviro sopra i ludi, e fe’ gli
aditi. — Marco Cantrio Marcello figlio di Marco Duumviro sopra i ludi e
fece tre cunei, per decreto de’ Decurioni.»
124. Io ho creduto di tradurre sopra i ludi e non pour les jeux, come tradusse
Bréton, e la parola lumina, non come il Garrucci e il Mommsen e altri per
illuminazione, ma per aditi, cioè i vomitorj, porte e spiragli de’
sotterranei, perchè mi parve più naturale e probabile che coi cunei si
facessero i relativi aditi, androni ecc., e nel diritto romano si trovi sempre
usata la parola lumina per indicare le finestre. Così anche l’abate
Romanelli.
125. Pompeja p. 227 e 228 seguendo la lezione di Rénier: la ragione ne è

fornita dopo la lettera di Rénier.
126. Lib. 5, 24:
Ermete de’ Locarii arricchimento.

Trad. Magenta.
127.
All’alte file io giunsi, ove la turba,

Dalla bruna e vil veste, spettatrice
Tra le femminee cattedre sedea;
Però che tutto quanto era all’aperto
Di cavalieri e di tribuni in bianco
Abbigliamento si vedea stipato.
Mia trad.
128. La famiglia gladiatoria di Numerio Popidio a 28 ottobre darà in Pompei

una caccia, e a’ 20 di aprile si metteranno le antenne ed i velarj.
129. La famiglia gladiatoria di Numerio Festo Ampliato giostrerà di nuovo a’

sedici maggio e vi sarà la venazione e si metteranno i velarii.
130. Senec. Epist. 95 e Lamprid. Commod. 18 e 19.
131.
Scorpo son io, del circo onor solenne,

Tuo plauso, o Roma, e breve tuo contento.
Morte al ventisettesmo anno m’ha spento;
Contò mie palme, e già vecchio mi tenne.
Lib. X, ep. 57. Trad. Magenta
132.
Oggi.... il solo Circo

Tutta nel suo giron comprende Roma....
Sì, dal fragor che intronami l’orecchio,
Vincitor ne argomento il verde panno.
Sat. XI. v. 195-96. Trad. Gargallo
133.
De’ vincenti ronzon proclamatore,

Siede il Pretor in trionfal corredo.
Sat. XI. 191-93. Trad. Gargallo.
134. «Abbia contro sè irata Venere pompejana chi a questa insegna porterà
offesa.»
135.
Gli abbattimenti
Colla sinopia, e col carbon dipinti,
Quand’io talor di Rutuba, di Flavio,
O di Placideian, a gamba tesa
Stommi a guatar, qual se verace fosse,
Di que’ prodi il pugnare, il mover l’arme,
Lo schermirsi, il ferir....
Trad. Gargallo.
136. Hist. Lib. 11. 88.
137. «Giurammo fede ad Eumolpione, sotto pena di essere abbruciati, legati,

battuti, ammazzati, e quant’altro fosse esatto da lui, consecrandogli
religiosamente, come i veri gladiatori consacrano a’ loro padroni, i corpi
nostri e la vita.» Satyricon. Cap. XXVII, trad. Vinc. Lancetti.
138.
Di peggio che si può, tranne l’arena?

E ancor qui trovi il disonor di Roma.
Eccoti un Gracco: mirmillonic’arme
Egli non veste: non impugna scudo,
O adunca falce: arnesi son cotesti
Ch’egli condanna; anzi condanna e abborre.
Nè il volto asconde sotto l’elmo; il mira:
Squassa il tridente, e poi che mal librata
La mano scaglia le sospese reti,
Dassi a fronte scoperta e a gambe alzate
Spettacolo a l’intorno. — È desso, è Gracco!
(Gridan tutti); la tunica l’attesta,
E l’aurea nappa che gli fascia il collo
E avvolta al pileo sventolando ondeggia.
Ond’è che il seguitor, vistosi astretto
Con un Gracco a pugnare, in sè ne freme
Qual d’un’onta peggior d’ogni ferita.
Sat. VIII. Trad. Gargallo.
139. «I Campani, per odio de’ Sanniti, armarono di quelle ricche spoglie i
gladiatori, che appellarono col nome di Sanniti.»
140.
Chi non le ha viste impalandrate e d’unto

Atletico incerate; e chi non vide
Lor colpi, bagordando a la quintana?
Con l’asta in pugno e con lo scudo in braccio
Assal, ferisce, martella, disbarba,
Tutte osservando del giostrar le leggi....
O matrona arcidegna de la tromba
Che di Flora all’agon le prodi invita!
Se non che, a maggior opra il cor rivolto,
Già s’apparecchia a la verace arena.
Qual vuoi trovar pudor in una donna,
Che il biondo crin in lucid’elmo accolga;
Che, schiva al sesso, a vigor maschio aneli?
Sat. VI, 218 e segg. Trad. di T. Gargallo.
141. Atto III.
142.
Cogniti a tutti i borghi un di costoro

Cornette e trombettier, de’ gladiatori
Girovaghi compagni, indivisibili;
Questi già un dì spettacolo, son ora
Que’ che danno spettacoli; e del popolo
Adulatori, a un suo volger di pollice,
Uccidon chi si sia popolarmente.
Trad. Gargallo.
143.
...... il pollice chinato,

La pudibonda vergine commanda
Che sia trafitto del giacente il petto.
144. Atto V.
145. Nat. hist. lib. XXXIV. «Fece un ferito morente, in cui si potesse
comprendere quanto in lui restasse ancora di anima.»
146. Byron. Pellegrinaggio di Childe Harold c. IV. st. CXL., CXLI.
147. «Stima (il popolo) ingiuria, perchè non periscano volontieri.»

148. «Il cadavere del gladiatore venga trascinato coll’uncino e lo si ponga
nello spoliario.»
149. Bond, scoliaste d’Orazio, le vuol dette Ambubaje dall’essere per ebrietà
balbuzienti.
150.
Or qual mai sia la razza prediletta

A’ nostri maggiorenti, e che mi sprona
A fuggir come lepre, in brevi detti
(Nè pudor men ritiene) io ti confesso
Roma, o Romani, divenuta greca
(Benchè la feccia achea qual può formarne
Picciola quota?) digerir non posso.
Pria di questa nel Tebro il siro Oronte
Era sboccato; e già sermon, costumi,
E flauti e cetre da le corde oblique
Seco tratti vi avea, frigi timballi,
E merce di fanciulle al Circo esposta.
Voi, cui fan gola barbare lupatte
Vario-mitrate, itene pure a loro.
Trad. Gargallo.
151.
E truppe d’ambubaje e speziali,

Mimi, accattoni e zanni, afflitta è tutta
Questa bordaglia dell’estremo fato
Di Tigellio cantor, poichè per essa
Generoso fu sempre.
Mia trad. [152]
152. A Gargallo mi sono sostituito, non avendo egli serbato fedeltà al primo
verso d’Orazio, che tradusse:
Troppo di canterine e vendi-empiastri.
La citazione, mettendo in disparte la parola ambubaje, sarebbe stata

perfettamente inutile.
153.
Ditelo voi di Lepido nepoti,

Di Fabio il ghiotto e di Metello il cieco,
Qual gladiatrice (ludia) mai vestì tai vesti.
Trad. Gargallo.
154. Svetonio, in Neronem. Cap. XII.
Vedemmo Pasifae dal toro coperta

E la prisca favola or fede ha più certa.
Gli antichi più, o Cesare, non vantin lor gesta:
Checchè fama celebra l’arena ci appresta.
Trad. Magenta.
155. In Claud. c. XXI.
156. Id. In Neron. 12.
157. Id. In Tit. c. VII.
158. In Domitianum, c. V.
159.
Checchè ti mostrano di più preclaro

L’Anfiteatro e il Circo i splendidi
Flutti di Cesare qui ti mostraro.
Il lago scordinsi Fucin le genti,
E di Nerone gli stagni: ai posteri
Questo spettacolo sol si rammenti.
Trad. Magenta.
160. In August. c. XLIII.
161. Ad V. Æneid. 114.
162. Epist. VII, ep. 1.
163. Hist. Lib. XXXIX, c. 22.
164.
Quel toro, che già poco

Scorrea, punto dal fuoco,
Nell’arena i bersagli a rovesciar,
Cadde alfin, dal suo tratto
Cieco furor, nell’atto
Che credea l’elefante in aria alzar.
De Spectaculis. Ep. 21. Tr. Magenta.
165. In Cæsar. c. 39.
166. Nat. Hist. Lib. VIII, c. 2.
167. In Galbam, c. 6.
168. Lib. LXI. c. 17, anche Svetonio il riporta In Neronem, c. XI.
169. Epig. lib. 1. 7.
L’aquila, onde su l’etere

Recare il putto illeso,
Al sen con l’ugne timide
Si strinse il caro peso.
Tr. Magenta.
170. Id. Lib. V. 55.
Dimmi, o regina degli augei, chi porti?

Il Tonante.
Trad. id.
171. In Domit. c. 4.
172.
Che il Dio belligero

Per te distinguasi
Nell’armi ognor,
Non basta, o Cesare,
Per te distinguesi
Venere ancor.
La fama d’Ercole
Vantava l’inclita
Nobil tenzon,
Quando nell’ampia
Nemea boscaglia
Spense il lion.
Taccian le favole,
Chè fatti simili
Per tuo favor
Oprarsi, o Cesare,
Da man femminea
Vedemmo or or.
Epigr. 8. Trad. Magenta.
173.
Come al scizio ciglion Prometeo stretto

Nutre l’augel col rinascente petto,
Laureol così da vera croce pende,
E ad orso caledonio il fianco stende.
Palpitavan sue viscere, grondanti,
Lacere, e a corpo uman più non sembianti.
La pena alfin scontò del parricidio,
Del fero nel padron commesso eccidio,
Del rapito nei templi oro nascosto,
O dell’iniquo fuoco a Roma posto.
Nei delitti costui gli antichi ha vinti;
Ma fur gli strazj suoi veri e non finti.
Lib. De Spectæ. Epig. 9. Trad. Magenta.
174. Storia della Prostituzione, Vol. I. Cap. XVIII.
175. Ode, La Ghigliottina.
176. Schroek: Christliche Kirchengeschichte. Vol. VII, p. 254.
177. Storia degli Italiani, vol. I, pag. 277.
178. In Ner., c. XI.
179. Diz. delle Antichità.
180. Varr. 8 L. L. 41.
181. Delle antiche Terme di Firenze, pp. 67 e 68.
182. La camicia di tela che usiamo noi, imitò l’uso ed il nome dal camiss
persiano, e pare introdotta verso la metà del xii secolo.
183.
L’ottava ora tien fissa:

Di Stefano sai quanto ha i bagni accosto.
Ci laverem tantosto:
Tr. Magenta.

Public Representations of Immigrants in Museums Exhibition and Exposure in France and Germany 1St Edition Yannik Porsche Full Chapter PDF

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Public Representations of Immigrants

in Museums : Exhibition and Exposure

Careers of the Professoriate: Academic Pathways of the

Museums, Modernity and Conflict: Museums and

Holocaust Memory and National Museums in Britain

France and Germany in the South China Sea, c.

1 st International Congress and Exhibition on

Why Neo-Liberalism Failed In France: Political

Essentials of Management and Leadership in Public

Heat Exposure and Human Health in the Context of

More information about this series at

Postdisciplinary Studies in Discourse

Library of Congress Control Number: 2017955671

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

Cover illustration: Katharina Mayer, Photograph “Getürkt”, 1991-1997

Printed on acid-free paper

This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature

1 Introduction: Staging Public Representations in the Cité

2 Museums, the Public, and Immigration 13

3 Microsociological Contextualisation Analysis 81

3.2 Poststructural Discourse Analysis 102

4 Epistemic Production Behind the Museum Scenes

5 Public Interactions on the Museum Stages 223

5.1.2 Opening Guided Tours in the Museum

6 Conclusion: Exhibiting Immigrants—Exposing the Public 321

Appendix: Transcription Notation 340

Press References 343

General References 347

© The Author(s) 2018 1

number of theoretical, methodological, and political issues: Put gener-

the exhibition. The smaller exhibition by the immigrant network dis-

potentially change public opinion or facilitate social inclusion. In order

that face-to-face interactions function according to some logic, which is

museum practices themselves enable, stimulate, and gear public debate,

publications, witnessed and recorded lectures and debates in auditori-

I show how the institutional contexts differ in terms of whether

© The Author(s) 2018 13

symbolic museum exhibitions and activities in the museum context can

2.1  ublic Representations and Encounters

Academics as well as museum practitioners, such as Adorno (1977: 181),

What a museum is seems pretty evident to us in everyday talk, yet it is

educating, entertaining, or disciplining—that is, regulating and subjecti-

‘­cabinets of curiosities’ of the late Renaissance to a restriction of research

Any exhibition, explicitly or implicitly, seeks to position the visitor. In

portrayal of reality, it is also seen to be a ‘distorted mirror’ (Arnoldi 1992;

offers a non-elite mass public the opportunity to adopt a position and

polyphony (see Sect. 3.2 in Chap. 3), Nederveen-Pieterse (1997: 129)

whether it should itself constitute a laboratory, an arena for debate and a

In the present study, I do not aim to determine whether the exhibition

2.1.2 Representing the Public in Public

context. The carefully selected and arranged exhibit—for example, a por-

Cassirer (1990: 50) explains that representations imply specific points

275 ff.) between aesthetic-philosophical ‘re-presentation’ (Darstellung)

differences and thereby performs processes of inclusion and exclusion.

turns the public into a passive, uncritical consumer. Habermas’s portrayal

reviewed by Schmidt and Volbers (2011) as a methodological principle.

also Reckwitz 2003: 289) praxeology is useful to conceptualise how

acknowledged rules of the game of how publicity can be used. For

Concerned with the affective dimension of culture and the relevance

Non per colpa s’immola a Bacco il capro

24. «I primi ludi teatrali nacquero dalle feste di Bacco.»

Grecia già doma il vincitor feroce

Ma però se grecizza il mio subbietto,

1 Introduction: Staging Public Representations in the Cité

2 Museums, the Public, and Immigration 13

3 Microsociological Contextualisation Analysis 81

3.2 Poststructural Discourse Analysis 102

4 Epistemic Production Behind the Museum Scenes

5 Public Interactions on the Museum Stages 223

5.1.2 Opening Guided Tours in the Museum

6 Conclusion: Exhibiting Immigrants—Exposing the Public 321

Appendix: Transcription Notation 340

Press References 343

General References 347

2.1 ublic Representations and Encounters

‘cabinets of curiosities’ of the late Renaissance to a restriction of research

2.1.2 Representing the Public in Public