5.3. Museums and Sites of Memory in Lithuania that Interpret Occupation and Related Themes
5.3.6 Selectivity and Forgetful Memory: Initial Remarks on Museum Interpretation
narrative in relation to ‘Nazi occupant crimes’ throughout Lithuania (Museums of Lithuania,
2003). In 1960 investigations began to identify the mass graves around the museum building
and an interpretive picture emerged of the events which had taken place at this site and the
identities of the victims. The administrative custodians at the time were the Soviets and the
victims, although later identified as being mostly Jewish, were remembered as Soviet ‘victims
of fascism’. A monument to commemorate ‘the victims of Nazism’ was introduced in 1984. A
memorial for the more than 30 thousands Jews murdered in the Ninth Fort during the years of
the Nazi occupation was unveiled in 1991.
5.3.6
Selectivity and Forgetful Memory: Initial Remarks on Museum
Interpretation
Although each of the museums in the analysis are autonomous entities, they are collectively
delegated the task of remembering and are thus comparable in terms of their role in the
history in the collective archives of these museums might be termed ‘selective interpretation’
(Dominic, 2000; Rowehl, 2003). Also referred to as ‘hot interpretation’ (Uzzell, 1989) this has
been defined as the creation of multiple constructions of the past (Schouten, 1995) whereby
history is never an objective recall of the past, but is rather a selective interpretation, based on
the way in which we view ourselves in the present.
Work I undertook with my colleague some years earlier (Wight and Lennon, 2007) confirmed a
level of selectivity in Lithuanian sites of memory in Vilnius and we suggested at the time that
an accepted ‘national memory’ is authorised through the discourse of genocide at these
museums whilst the moral complexity surrounding the section of history dealing with
collaboration and Jewish Holocaust was a national blind-spot and an absent discourse in
Lithuanian occupation museums. This selective discourse is evident in all of these museums,
with the possible exception of Grutas Park, and, as an object of discourse it has emerged and
been transformed within a common space of fixed norms around knowledge. A museum
rhetoric of a country united in a bloody and prolonged nationalist struggle against the Soviets
is authorised alongside a marginalised rhetoric of ethnic Jewish tragedy. There are therefore
two quite distinct ‘genocides’ at the level of discourse and this observation is developed in the
ensuing chapter which applies the concept of discursive formation to the sites that have been
6
An Archaeology of Occupied Lithuania in
Lithuanian Museums and Sites of Memory:
‘Double Genocide’
6.1.
Introduction
This chapter reflects over the dominant and marginalised narratives of human tragedy
produced in the heritage sites that are introduced in chapter 5 and it suggests that the
interpretive practices within these can be considered ‘statements’, or basic units of discourse,
that belong to a wider ‘discursive formation’. Whilst not always in putative agreement, these
dispersed statements constitute a ‘body of knowledge’. They work together to articulate a
rhetorical discourse of occupation and genocide which is constructed according to a set of
anonymous regularities which at once privilege and marginalise particular subject positions
and particular objects of discourse. Central, therefore to developing an understanding of the
museums and sites of memory introduced above as constructions of culture is Foucault’s
concept of discourse and the formations to which discourses belong as systems of dispersion
which cannot be attributed to a single author but which consist of ‘statements’ deriving from a
range of often anonymous sources. Foucault also argues that that discourses occur not in
isolation, but as formations so that several discursive statements constitute a ‘body of
knowledge’. The museums above can be collectively approached as a ‘grid of specification’
(Foucault, 2002: 46) or an ‘ordering of concepts constructed within the discourse’ to produce a
‘body of knowledge’ which constitutes aspects of society and the people within society
(Powers, 2001: 57). The objects of the discourse are ostensible historical ‘truths’ prescribed by
exhibitions and the subject positions are the often anonymous voices that create and support
these discourses whilst at the same time limiting other ways in which the discursive object
(which is genocide in this case) might be constructed.
When considering these occupation-themed museums as discursive formation it is important
‘agreement’ between the statements that are identified. Indeed, contradictions and debates
certainly exist, yet despite such internal oppositions a discursive formation is defined by
‘regularities’ or ‘rules of formation’ which individuate it and which ‘govern the objects, modes
of enunciation, concepts and thematic choices of the whole’ (O Donnell and Spires, 2012).
Such discursive practices can be located based on a "...delimitation of a field of objects, the
definition of a legitimate perspective for the agent of knowledge and the fixing of norms for
the elaboration of concepts and theories" (Foucault, cited in Bouchard, 1977:199). For
Foucault, these practices order societal procedures and control, select, organise and
redistribute discourse (Letts, 2008: 15) whilst structuring how reality is commonly perceived in
a way that acknowledges particular preferred meanings that establish "regimes of truth"
(Foucault, 1984:74). Based on Foucault’s thinking, any historical context exists based upon a
grid of knowledge that makes possible ‘every discourse and every production of statements’
(Eribon, 1991 cited in Letts, 2008: 16) which authorise the possibilities for the production of
discourse. It is to the identification of these ‘regularities’ that the analysis below turns to first
to establish the ‘cross formulations and... space for coexistence’ (Jansen, 2008 :110) that they
create. The ‘intrinsic’ contradictions (Foucault, 1972) that occur within the partial archive of
discourse that is mapped (such as the articulation of genocide with no single referent) are
viewed not as ‘appearances to overcome (but as) objects (of discourse) that are described’
(Foucault, 1972 cited in Jansen 2008: 110). The aim of the analysis is therefore not a doxic
challenge to the rhetoric that has been encountered, but an attempt to identify some order to
the production of knowledge within a closely defined institutional context.
In terms of the analysis below then, discourse analysis is used to explore what is being
represented as knowledge and how such knowledge is constructed according to the various
kinds of evidence that are used and the various subject positions from which these emerge. I
also explore the narratives and voices that are left out of discourse; those that are
to explore what is made problematic in museum discourse and what is not and to explore
alternative meanings that are ignored or set apart as anomalous or incompatible, such as
exhibitions of holocaust and genocide. I also explore what narratives appear joined together.
For example, Lithuanian Genocide is always an accompaniment, or a ‘reminder’ to narratives
of Jewish Holocaust, but the reverse is never true. The analysis sets out to explore the specific
interests that are being mobilised and those that are not and the subject identities that are
made possible through the various ways in which individuals, groups and cultures are
constructed as realities. Of interest to this analysis are the realities that are normalised and
those that are pathologised, or treated as ‘abnormal’. Discourse is therefore approached in
this section as a culturally constructed representation of reality as opposed to an exact copy.
The aim is to map the ‘periodic persistence’ (Foucault, 1972) of rules that govern the enabling
of discourses through contemporary exhibitions themes around occupation and the genocides
of occupation in Lithuania. Of interest therefore is what it is possible to talk about in museum
rhetoric and what it is not possible to talk about according to the taken for granted rules of
inclusion, such as violence and victimhood as thematic representations of Lithuanian genocide,
and the taken for granted rules of exclusion, such as the ostensible invisibility of Holocaust.
Such discourses construct what it is to know Lithuanian occupation in museum environments
and they can therefore be conceptualised as surfaces of emergence that govern as categories
of knowledge and assemblies of texts that which can and cannot be talked about when
knowing history through the lens of the exhibition. I begin by suggesting how the discursive
formation might be imagined as a binary opposite discourse of genocide, before offering an
analysis of statements at the level of discourse that authorise particular ways of constructing