Ways of (Not) Seeing Guns: Presence and Absence at the Cody Firearms Museum
2011; Routledge; Volume: 8; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1080/14791420.2011.594068
ISSN1479-4233
AutoresBrian L. Ott, Eric Aoki, Greg Dickinson,
Tópico(s)Memory, Trauma, and Commemoration
ResumoAbstract Boasting over 6000 objects, including replicas of a western hardware store, a frontier stage stop, and a late nineteenth-century industrial factory, the Cody Firearms Museum, located at the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody, Wyoming, is "the largest and most important collection of American firearms in the world."Footnote 1 The museum, which creates a decidedly visual space through its near-exclusive engagement with looking, employs an aesthetic of domestication and sterility to frame firearms for museumgoers. Even as it transforms guns into inert objects of visual pleasure, the museum cannot fully erase the history of violence and colonial conquering in which guns played a starring role. The museum's rhetorical effectivity/affectivity, then, turns upon the unique play of presence and absence. Keywords: Cody Firearms MuseumPresenceAbsenceVisual SpaceMateriality Acknowledgement The authors contributed equally to this essay. They wish to thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments and suggestions. An earlier version of the essay was presented at the 2006 Western States Communication Association Annual Convention in Palm Springs, CA. Notes 1. Treasures from Our West (Cody, WY: Buffalo Bill Historical Center, 1992), 44. 2. Victor Burgin, In/Different Spaces: Place and Memory in Visual Culture (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1996). See also Carole Blair and Neil Michel, "Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone: Reading the Astronauts Memorial," in At the Intersection: Cultural Studies and Rhetorical Studies, ed. Thomas Rosteck (New York: Guilford Press, 1999), 59–60. On a related note, one of this essay's authors is named after his father's favorite actor on the television show Rawhide (1951). 3. The CFM is one of five museums that comprise the BBHC. Visitors enter the center through a spacious, well-lit atrium. To the far left, the Draper Museum of Natural History invites visitors to contemplate the surrounding landscape. To the immediate left, the Buffalo Bill Museum honors Buffalo Bill Cody. Straight ahead but down a long hallway, the Plains Indian Museum explores the past and present of Plains Indian culture. To the right, the Whitney Gallery of Western Art showcases well-known Western art. To the far right, the CFM presents its spectacular collection of firearms. The three of us visited the BBHC and the Cody Firearms Museum on two separate occasions, first in 2002 and again in 2003. On both of our extended weekend visits, we toured and photographed the museums of the BBHC, casually observed and listened to visitors, spoke with security guards and other museum personnel, and took extensive field notes. We also spent countless hours sharing and discussing our observations over meals, in the hotel room, and during the long drive home. Though our methods of data collection were many and varied, this essay is specifically a rhetorical analysis of the CFM itself. 4. We believe it is important to be reflexive about the unique set of experiences each of us brings to (and thus potentially reads into) the museum The interpretation of texts such as the CFM is certainly influenced not only by the design and display practices of the museum itself, but also by the history and experience of the critic or visitor (see Blair and Michel, "Commemorating in the Theme Park Zone," 59). Though the focus of this essay is principally on the former (i.e., design and display practices of the museum), we readily acknowledge that our interpretation (as with all interpretations) is colored by our own backgrounds and experiences. It is our intent to one day write a second, more (auto)ethnographic account of the CFM. 5. Ocularcentric describes "the epistemological privileging of vision that begins at least as early as Plato's notion that ethical universals must be accessible to the 'mind's eye' and continue with the Renaissance, the invention of printing, and the development of modern sciences" (Georgia Warnke, "Ocularcentrism and Social Criticism," in Modernity and the Hegemony of Vision, ed. David Michael Levin [Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993], 287). 6. The dialectic between presence and absence is central to what Lawrence J. Prelli has termed "rhetorics of display." According to Prelli, "the meanings manifested rhetorically through display are functions of particular, situated resolutions of the dynamic between revealing and concealing" ("Rhetorics of Display: An Introduction," in Rhetorics of Display, ed. Lawrence J. Prelli. [Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2006], 2). 7. Slavoj Žižek, "Looking Awry," October 50 (1989): 30–55. 8. See, for instance, Marita Sturken and Lisa Cartwright, Practices of Looking: An Introduction to Visual Culture (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 10. 9. Our thinking on this matter was heavily influenced by Dorst's work on the discourse of looking West. The western gaze, as we are using it, refers to the "'scopic regime' (Metz 1982: 61) that coalesced over the course of the nineteenth century in Euro-American culture generally" (John D. Dorst, Looking West [Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1999], 97). We would add that, in keeping with Berger, the surveilling western gaze is a decidedly gendered one in which "men act and women appear. Men look at women. Women watch themselves being looked at … . Thus she [the surveyed female] turns herself into an object—and most particularly an object of vision: a sight" (John Berger, Ways of Seeing [New York: The Viking Press, 1972], 47). 10. According to Dorst, "the mode of Western … visuality … [is a] combination of an objective, scientific rationality and an empirically accessible material world that was embodied in the visual field of Renaissance painting. The rationalized optics of single-point linear perspective is its defining structure" (99). "Paramount among [the features of Western looking]," Dorst further elaborates, "is the assumption of visual objectivity—the transparent or unmediated retinal recording of a stable outside reality that is, in spatial terms, 'geometrically isotropic, rectilinear, abstract, and uniform' (Jay 1988: 6)" (99). 11. "Politics, in other words, lies … in apparently non-political and even minor details, such as the architecture of buildings, the classification and juxtaposition of artefacts in an exhibition, the use of glass cases or interactives, and the presence or lack of voice-over" (Sharon Macdonald, ed., "Exhibitions of Power and Powers of Exhibition: An Introduction to the Politics of Display," in The Politics of Display: Museums, Science, and Culture [New York: Routledge, 1998], 3). 12. The rhetorical character of space has received considerable attention in the field of communication in recent years. See, for instance, Andrew F. Wood, City Ubiquitous: Place, Communication, and the Rise of Omnitopia (Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2009); Jessie Stewart and Greg Dickinson, "Enunciating Locality in the Postmodern Suburb: FlatIron Crossing and the Colorado Lifestyle," Western Journal of Communication 73 (2008): 280–307; Greg Dickinson, "Joe's Rhetoric: Starbucks and the Spatial Rhetoric of Authenticity," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 32 (2002): 5–28; "Memories for Sale: Nostalg ia and the Construction of Identity in Old Pasadena," Quarterly Journal of Speech 83 (1997): 1–27; and Elizabethada A. Wright, "Rhetorical Spaces in Memorial Places: The Cemetery as a Rhetorical Memory Place/Space," Rhetoric Society Quarterly 35 (2005): 51–81. 13. Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). 14. Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). 15. 15. Marshall McLuhan and Eric McLuhan, Laws of Media: The New Science (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1988). 21. 16. Greg Dickinson, Brian L. Ott, and Eric Aoki, "Spaces of Remembering and Forgetting: The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 27–47. 17. The Reverent Eye/I at the Plains Indian Museum," Communication and Critical/Cultural Studies 3 (2006): 29–32. What makes the Cody Firearms Museum unique, especially within the BBHC, is precisely that it does not gesture outside of itself; it does not ask visitors to make intertextual or lateral associations. Indeed, it inhibits them. 18. Displays, notes Prelli, "conceal 'truths' behind whatever they visually reveal" (10). 19. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, "Cody Firearms Museum," http://www.bbhc.org/firearms/index.cfm (accessed May 25, 2010). 20. Initially, the Winchester Collection was on long-term loan from the Olin Company, but the company formally gifted the collection to the BBHC in 1988. Treasures from Our West, 44. 21. Treasures from Our West, 44. 22. Buffalo Bill Historical Center, "Cody Firearms Museum: Collections," http://www.bbhc.org/firearms/collections.cfm (accessed May 25, 2010). 23. The specific US statute reads: "(3) The term 'firearm' means (A) any weapon (including a starter gun) which will or is designed to or may readily be converted to expel a projectile by the action of an explosive." 24. The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language defines firearm as: "A weapon, especially a pistol or rifle, capable of firing a projectile and using an explosive charge as a propellant." http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/firearms (accessed May 26, 2010). 25. Ironically, the gun was central to this "taming" of the West. 26. According to Macdonald, "'Glass-cased' … exhibitions rarely seek to explain their contents in terms of broader social and political context" ("Exhibitions of Power," 2). 27. Though the terms "marksmanship" and "sportsmanship" are obviously gendered, we have chosen to retain them as we believe they reflect the implicit masculine bias of the museum. 28. Sarah Wood-Clark, Beautiful Daring Western Girls: Women of The Wild West Shows, 2nd ed. (Billings, MT: Artcraft Printers, 1991), 17. 29. The term "settlement" also appears in BBHC literature about the CFM. Treasures from Our West, 44. 30. In addition to the video in the theatre, the visitor can also watch a monitor placed near the firearms displays where "Joseph" serves as one of the CFM's few human agents depicted in the museum; in the video, Joseph instructs on the design and artistry involved in the construction of firearms. 31. See Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, "Spaces of Remembering," 28. 32. Treasures from Our West, 52. 33. "Cody Firearms Museum: Collections." 34. Michael A. Bellesiles, Arming America: The Origins of a National Gun Culture (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2000), 443. 35. Stephen Bann, "Shrines, Curiosities, and the Rhetoric of Display," in Visual Display: Culture Beyond Appearances, ed. Lynne Cooke and Peter Wollen (New York: The New Press, 1995), 15. See also Macdonald, "Exhibitions of Power," 6. 36. Tony Bennett, "Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes, and Popular Instruction: On Sensory Regimes and Museum Didactics," Configurations 6 (1998): 349. 37. Tony Bennett, "Pedagogic Objects, Clean Eyes, and Popular Instruction: On Sensory Regimes and Museum Didactics," Configurations 6 (1998): 349. 348. 38. Macdonald, "Exhibitions of Power," 9. See also Bennett, "Pedagogic Objects," 348–9. 39. On this point, see Bennett, "Pedagogic Objects," 350–1. 40. "Cody Firearms Museum: Collections." 41. Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1966), 2. 42. Serge Guilbaut quoted in Bruce Barber, Serge Guilbaut, and John O'Brian, Voices of Fire: Art, Rage, Power, and the State (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1994), 192. 43. Alan Stanbridge, "Display Options: Discourses of Art and Context in the Contemporary Museum," International Journal of Cultural Policy 11 (2005): 164. 44. Explaining the presence/absence dialectic, Lacan notes, "nothing exists except against a supposed background of absence … . In the symbolic order, the empty spaces are as signifying as the full ones" (Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink [New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2006], 327). 45. Žižek, "Looking Awry" 34. 46. Žižek, "Looking Awry" original emphasis. 47. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 163. 48. Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), 95; and "Looking Awry," 34. 49. Joshua Gunn, "Refitting Fantasy: Psychoanalysis, Subjectivity, and Talking to the Dead," Quarterly Journal of Speech 90 (2004): 6. 50. Elizabeth Cowie, Representing the Woman: Cinema and Psychoanalysis (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 143. 51. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press), 13. 52. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press), 10. 53. Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press), 12–3. 54. Despite some personal misgivings we have about the phrase "primitive societies," we have retained it here because it is the phrase Kristeva uses. 55. Stephen Greenblatt, Marvelous Possessions: the Wonder of the New World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 91–2. 56. Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 1. 57. Richard Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier 1600–1860 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1973), 17–8. 58. For an extended discussion of these and other Native American stereotypes in the American mythology, see Slotkin, Regeneration through Violence. 59. Strictly speaking, the "abject" cannot function as objet petit a because the subject has not yet entered the Symbolic. Nevertheless, the abject is a powerful source of desire (and disgust). 60. Gunn, "Refitting Fantasy," 5. 61. Dickinson, Ott, and Aoki, "Spaces of Remembering," 28. 62. As Žižek explains, "fantasy guarantees the consistency of a socio ideological edifice … . That is to say, 'fantasy' designates an element which 'sticks out,' which cannot be integrated into the given symbolic structure, yet which, precisely as such, constitutes its identity" (Slavoj Žižek, Enjoy Your Symptom! Jacques Lacan in Hollywood and Out, rev. ed., [New York: Routledge, 2001], 89). 63. According to Lacan, desire for the symbolic phallus in women is rooted in "being" (or lack of) the phallus, while desire for the phallic signifier in men is based on "having" or more accurately on the threat of "not-having [manqué à avoir]" the phallus (Écrits, 582). With no corresponding female signifier, sexual difference (both the female and male subject) is based upon the symbolic phallus, which neither one can possess. According to Lacan, "strictly speaking there is no symbolization of women's sex as such … . the phallus is a symbol to which there is no correspondent, no equivalent. It's a matter of a dissymmetry in the signifier" (Jacques Lacan, The Psychos es 1955–1956: The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book III, trans. Russell Grigg [New York: W. W. Norton and Company, 1993], 176). 64. Jeffrey A. Brown, "Gender and the Action Heroine: Hardbodies and the 'Point of No Return,'" Cinema Journal 35 (1996): 60–1. 65. Lacan, Écrits 579–83. 66. Indeed, in many museums, noise permeates the exhibit space. 67. "The Springfield Armory: Forge of Innovation," http://www.forgeofinnovation.org/. One can listen to the oral histories online at http://www.forgeofinnovation.org/Springfield_Armory_1892–1945/Themes/People/Oral_Histories/index.html (accessed June 2, 2010). 68. Springfield Armory National Historic Site, "Shays's Rebellion and the Storming of Springfield Arsenal, January 25th, 1787," http://www.nps.gov/spar/historyculture/exhibit_shays_rebellion.htm (accessed June 2, 2010). 69. Springfield Armory National Historic Site, "Springfield Arsenal Artillery in Shays Rebellion," http://www.nps.gov/spar/historyculture/springfield-arsenal-artillery-in-1787.htm (accessed June 2, 2010). 70. Lawrence Grossberg, We Gotta Get Out of this Place: Popular Conservatism and Postmodern Culture (New York: Routledge, 1992), 55–61. 71. This double-objectifying gaze is not unlike the practice of some western magazines such as National Geographic, in which both the photographs and the non-western persons "are objects at which we look" (Catherine A. Lutz and Jane L. Collins, Reading National Geographic [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1993], 188, original emphasis). 72. Nicholas Powers, "Birthers of a Nation," The Indypendent: The Newspaper of the NYC Independent Media Center, January 10, 2010, http://www.indypendent.org/2010/01/10/birthers-of-a-nation/ (accessed June 4, 2010). 73. See Peter Hart and Steve Rendall, "Journalist ♥ Tea Party: At Last a Citizen Movement Corporate Media Can Love," Extra!, May 2010, 7–8. 74. Michael Johnson, "Armed and Civilized: Protesters Rally against Obama Policies," Las Cruces Sun-News, January 3, 2010, accessed via LexisNexis on May 31, 2011. Additional informationNotes on contributorsBrian L. Ott Brian L. Ott (PhD, The Pennsylvania State University) is a teacher–scholar of media and rhetorical studies in the Department of Communication at the University of Colorado Denver Eric Aoki Eric Aoki (PhD, University of Washington) is Associate Profesor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University Greg Dickinson Greg Dickinson (PhD, University of Southern California) is Professor of Communication Studies at Colorado State University
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