Military Museums, Ways of Seeing, War-Making
The following blog post, written by Kevin Walby and Haley Pauls, explores their article titled: “Representations of Surveillance and Perceptual Technologies at Military Museums,” which appeared in a recent issue of Surveillance & Society.
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Over the years we had both been to many military museums on our own, and we both have an academic interest in studying surveillance such as camera surveillance in cities. We have also long identified in our own ways as against war and against state violence. Antoine Bousquet’s idea of military perception really brought it all together for us. Bousquet’s The Eye of War is a great book. We started to see how curated exhibitions at military museums that depict surveillance are in fact ways of trying to naturalize and legitimate military views of the world. We started to understand how military ideas of combatants and enemies are embedded in museum displays and how the process of curation achieves this.
Curated exhibitions at military museums that depict surveillance are in fact ways of trying to naturalize and legitimate military views of the world.
Curation is a way of materializing abstract ideas and visions of the world using relics and artifacts. It is political, no doubt. For us, this focus on military perception not on the battlefield but in the museum helped to reveal how military museums perform cultural work. The goal of this curation is not just to memorialize but rather legitimate and naturalize a whole way of seeing that war-making relies on. Of course, this way of seeing has changed over time as technology has changed, as Antoine Bousquet shows so well in The Eye of War.
We were able to track how this way of seeing that war-making relies on is communicated in Canadian military museums. The fascinating part of it all is how the displays in these museums encode the same classifications and categorizations that war-making requires. In these ways, communicating these classifications and categorizations to audiences legitimates past and future war, occupation, and state violence. In The Eye of War, Bousquet argues military perception has six core elements. We locate these same six core elements of military perception in Canadian war museums. It has been an exciting project to work on because along the way we have read cultural studies works on surveillance and histories of war and violence that we may not have otherwise. We have been able to show that these exhibitions and displays are far from benign. Rather, they are representations that reinforce and validate war, occupation, and state violence in our world and the form of surveillance that these practices rely on.
