MONUMENTS AND COMMEMORATIONS: A CONSIDERATION · in the grip of ‘Monument Mania’.3 Referring to the capital in particular, the conservative Examiner had similarly worried that

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MONUMENTS AND COMMEMORATIONS:A CONSIDERATION

PAUL A. PICKERING & ROBYN WESTCOTT

When William Charles Wentworth,the leading conservative politician

Sydney. The irascible colonist, however,was actually more in touch with the trendin the wider British world than either hisopponents or his supporters. After all, ithad only been three years previously thatThe Times had declared that Britain wasin the grip of ‘Monument Mania’.3

Referring to the capital in particular, theconservative Examiner had similarlyworried that statues were ‘now rising inevery quarter of our metropolis’.4 Theproliferation of ‘sacro-secular’ sites in thepublic sphere was debated in parliamentand the columns of the press, as well asin lecture rooms, church halls, coffeehouses and pubs; it caught theimagination of artists from scurrilouscaricaturists to eminent sculptors; and itexercised the minds of some of the greatthinkers of the day.5

None greater than Jeremy Bentham.It is well known that in 1769, at the age oftwenty-one, Bentham decided to leave hisbody to science. At a time when awidespread fear of dissection and legalimpediments denied surgeons corpses forstudy, Bentham’s gesture of rationalistfaith was intended as both a contributionto anatomical science in an ethereal senseand as an attempt to sway public opinion.According to his own account, however,the subject of his own death was a‘favourite’ at Bentham’s table for ‘manyyears’ afterwards, and, by the early 1830s

in the colony of New South Wales, retiredfrom public life in order to travel toBritain in 1853, he informed his devotedfollowers that he would ‘accept notestimonial except in the form of a colossalstatue of his person to be placed in somevery conspicuous part of Sydney’.According to the report in a hostilenewspaper, Wentworth issued thisdemand so that ‘his countrymen mighthave an opportunity of perceiving how agrateful community could appreciate,reward and honour the services of anyindividual who devoted sincerely histalents and his leisure to the services ofhis fellow citizens’.1 ‘It is really adebasement and a degradation for anycommunity claiming to be of Britishorigin and descent’, commented theeditor of the colony’s only Chartistnewspaper, ‘to be called on to erect amonument for a tyrant slave-monger, afoul-mouthed declaimer; at one time arebel to the government, and at anothertime a sycophant and a governmentcrawler’.2

Wentworth’s supporters too shiedaway from the idea of a ‘colossal statue’that might glower over the city inperpetuity and they decided, instead, toendow a chair in Wentworth’s name atthe recently established University of

Humanities Research Vol. 10 No. 2, 2003

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he had imagined his fate beyond thesurgeon’s knife on the cold dissectiontable. ‘I have disposed of my own bodyafter death’, he boasted, and by ‘thatdisposal I shall have made to the fund ofhuman happiness a contribution, more orless considerable’.6

Bentham’s final instructions for thetreatment of his mortal remains representthe ne plus ultra (or perhaps the reductioad absurdum) of the utilitarian system ofphilosophy that he founded. Three daysafter his death in June 1832, in accordancewith his instructions, an anatomicaloration was given over Bentham’s corpseby his friend, Southwood Smith, at theWebb Street School of Anatomy inLondon. In the audience to witness thedissection of the great philosopher werestudents, disciples, friends andphilosophical luminaries such as JamesMill (father of John Stuart) and LordBrougham, the father of the Mechanics’Institute movement. Smith’s lecture wasrushed into print as a seventy-three pagepamphlet replete with a lithograph of theprostrate corpse on the cover.7

Following the dissection, Bentham’sbones were re-assembled to make askeleton that could be posed ‘in such amanner as that the whole figure may beseated in a Chair usually occupied by mewhen living in the attitude in which I amsitting when engaged in thought’.According to his wishes, the skeleton wasdressed in one of Bentham’s black suits,stuffed with straw and sealed in a displaycase. Bentham’s head had been preserved‘untouched’ in an air-tight jar, but havinglost its expression, a wax model wascommissioned from a noted French artist,Jacques Tarlich. The wax head was addedto the skeleton to complete what Benthamhimself had called his ‘Auto-Icon’. In thisway, he wrote, he would become ‘his ownimage’.8

Visitors to University College Londontoday can see Bentham’s Auto-Icon sittingin its display case, cane in hand, yellowstraw hat upon its wax head, his gazefixed in eternal contemplation. The jarcontaining his head, with its unearthlyvisage, is never far away – often it isplaced on the floor between his feet –except when it is taken to occupy prideof place at University meetings andundergraduate ceremonies. Benthamwanted it that way, as his Will made clear:‘If it should so happen that my personalfriends and other Disciples should bedisposed to meet together on some dayor days of the year for the purpose ofcommemorating the Founder of thegreatest happiness system of morals andlegislation’, then the Auto-Icon should bebrought to the room.9 When ‘Benthamhas ceased to live’, he mused, ‘whom shallthe Bentham Club have for its chairman?Whom but Bentham himself? On him will

Jeremy Bentham’s ‘Auto-Icon’, UniversityCollege London. Source: Photograph 2003

PAUL A. PICKERING & ROBYN WESTCOTT Monuments and Commemoration

3

all eyes be turned – to him will allspeeches be addressed’.10

What might ostensibly seem like amacabre self-indulgence was, in fact, partof an elaborate plan for a national systemof education and commemoration. Thisis not well known. Bentham’s last –unpublished – tract, Auto-Icon, Or, FartherUses of the Dead for the Living, pennedshortly before his death in 1832, wasnothing less than a manifesto for the ageof monuments. Although exhibitions ofwax figures were not new – MadameTussaud had been touring Britain with acollection of wax models since 1802 andBentham was aware of other waxmuseums in London11 – galleries of‘Auto-Icons’ (he did not envisage theneed for wax heads) went far beyondanything then in existence, either inBritain or on the continent.

Bentham’s vision was breathtaking inits scope. The benefits of Auto-Icons,Bentham enthused, ranged from moral,political and honorific, to commem-orational, genealogical and phrenological.Soon statues of stone and marble, as wellas grave yards filled with dangerouslyunhealthy corpses, would be things of thepast. Education was never far fromBentham’s considerations. Lords,Spiritual and Temporal, ‘in their Auto-Icon state’, ‘their robes on their back –their coronets on their head’, would bedisplayed ‘in their own most HonourableHouse’. History might be ‘forged’, but notAuto-Icons, the truth of the past everpresent among the living. ‘Out of Auto-Icons, a selection might be made for aTemple of Fame’, he continued, ‘a templewith a population of illustrious Auto-Icons’. ‘In every church – in every chapel– in a word, in every repository for theAuto-Iconized dead, a phrenologistwould behold a lecture-room, repletewith subjects for the anatomico-moral

instruction which it belongs to him toadminister’. The Auto-Icons of thevirtuous, Bentham argued, would ‘setcuriosity in motion, virtuous curiosity’:‘There would be pilgrimages to Auto-Icons, who had been living benefactorsof the human race – not to see miracles –not for the purposes of imposture – butto gather from the study of individuals,benefits for mankind’.12

Recognising the spirit of the age,Bentham was clear that the manufactureof Auto-Icons should be an act ofegalitarianism. ‘So now may every man behis own statue’, Bentham wrote, even if thisnecessitated public funding. ‘If, atcommon expense poor and rich wereIconized, the beautiful commandment ofJesus would be obeyed; they wouldindeed “meet together”, they would beplaced on the same level’.13 Nor wouldthe galleries of figures be the exclusivepreserve of men; Bentham imaginedAuto-Icons of the two sexes ‘alternatingwith one another’.

Even if Bentham had lived longenough to published his pamphlet and tocommence a public agitation in favour ofits contents, it is doubtful that the idea ofAuto-Icons would have caught the publicimagination. Some of his ‘disciples’ wereuncomfortable with his plans for his ownremains, let alone supportive of thepractise as a social system. The age ofmonuments was unlikely to have becomethe age of Auto-Icons. Nevertheless,Madame Tussaud’s gallery of waxfigures, dressed as they would haveappeared in life, was transformed in theyears following Bentham’s death from atravelling side-show curiosity to a majorcultural industry that combinedcommemoration and entertainment.After moving to premises in Baker Streetin 1835 Tussaud’s gallery quickly becamea popular London attraction. As early as


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1842 one commentator suggested thatTussaud had amassed a fortune ‘uponcommon sympathies’: ‘thousands crowdher rooms; princes, merchants, priests,scholars, peasants, schoolboys, babies, inone common medley’. By 1859, accordingto Dickens, Tussaud’s had become‘something more than an exhibition; it isan institution’.14

As the contributions to this specialissue of Humanities Research make clear,the study of monuments andcommemorations is increasingly findingits way onto the agenda of socialhistorians, taking its place as part of theburgeoning field of ‘memory studies’.Nevertheless, the study of monumentstends to be energised primarily in themoment of empirical engagement, inteasing out the inter-relation between themonument and the historical context inwhich it is embedded. Although theoryhas sometimes helped to illuminate thistask, an attempt to produce a theo-retically-based analysis of monumentshas not tended to be seen as an interestingtask in and of itself. Reflecting on theweevil-infested corpse in UniversityCollege London a number of theoreticalissues can at least be placed on the table.

In a essay entitled ‘Present Pasts:Media, Politics, Amnesia’, AndreasHuyssen explores the compulsion toremember in recent academic work andinvites consideration of the notion of ‘self-musealization’. Arguing that this drive toproduce ‘mnemohistory’15 constitutes asignificant deviation from the modernistagenda which privileged a teleologicalpursuit of the future, Huyssenproblematises any easy positioning of thepast as a repository of recoverablemeaning.16 Memory, he asserts, isintimately connected to cultural andpsychic processes that threaten tooverwrite remembering with forgetting,

and entangle both inclinations withimaginative recreations of the past thatare neither politically or commerciallydisinterested.17 ‘Self-musealization’ – aterm worthy of Bentham himself – isdiscussed as a response to postmodernindeterminacy whereby an individualstrives to acquire a degree of ontologicalstability through the conscious posi-tioning of him/herself as an archive.‘Musealization’, the extension ofinstitutional practices of collecting andcollating to artefacts and behaviourslocated in the quotidian, was firstproposed by the German philosopherHermann Lübbe more than two decadesago.18 Lübbe posited that thisfetishization of the past evidenced in actsof musealization compensated for ‘theatrophy of valid traditions, the loss ofrationality, and the entropy of stable andlasting life experiences’ that hadaccompanied the collapse of theEnlightenment project after Auschwitz. 19

Thus, the subject’s experience of thepresent (circa 1983) was conditioned bythe production of ever tightening cyclesof ‘innovation’ and ‘obsolescence’ thateffected a contraction of the synchronic,thus ‘shrinking the chronological expanseof what can be considered the (cuttingedge) present at any given time’.20

The addition of the prefix ‘self’ toLübbe’s conception is Huyssen’sinnovation. ‘Self-musealization’ ispresented as a millennial phenomena,enabled by technological advances suchas the video camera, but accompanied bya resurgence of interest in its historicalprecedents, ‘memoir writing andconfessional literature’.21 This co-optionof memory work into the private domain(and the implicit suggestion that thecultural productions of an ‘unmarked’individual could conceivably be regardedas deserving of the ‘material per-


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sistence’22 accorded to monumentsoccupying civic space) is related byHuyssen to the emergence of whatGerman sociologists have termed theErlebnisgsellschaft or, literally, ‘society ofexperience’.23 A society of experience‘privileges intense but superficialexperiences oriented toward instanthappiness in the present and quickconsumption of goods, cultural eventsand mass-marketed lifestyles’.24 Surely aparallel can be invoked between the riseof ‘self-musealization’ in the face of theexigencies of the postmodern world andthe historical circumstances in whichBentham conceived of the Auto-Icon. Inboth cases, the air was charged with thepossibility and uncertainty generated byrapid socio-economic and politicalchange.

Intrinsically monuments, at least inthe eyes of some of those who petitionfor, finance or create them, are designedto last: they are meant to be permanentstatements of a particular nexus in thenarrative of a nation, a community or acause. Their ostensible permanenceinevitably stands in contradistinction toother, more spontaneous, forms ofcommemoration: ephemeral scatteringsof candles and flowers; the impromptuwash of crowds through public spaces;or the apparent candour of eventsarchived through the lens of modernphotojournalism. Realising what MichaelGarval has called the ‘rêve de pierre’ or‘dream of stone’,25 a monument bulwarksthe temporal mutability of spoken rituals– staying the breath in which an oath isuttered, fixing citations of praise andremembrance, reiterating the con-secration of the dead. This rendering ofthe past as ambient authorises thecontinuous resolution of moral andcultural ambiguities that mightpotentially destabilise hegemonic

discourses of national or communitycohesion. Such continuity is, however,produced at the expense of inclusiverepresentation. Any metanarrative ofgroup experience is enabled only throughthe artificial erasure of radical social,political or cultural schisms. AlthoughBentham conceived of Auto-Iconographyas initiating a civic project combining botheducation and commemoration that wasinnately inclusive, it is hard to see how itmight have worked in practice. Indeed itis well nigh impossible to think of amonument that is beyond criticism forbeing partial if not partisan. For example,critics have pointed out that the LincolnMemorial in Washington makes noreference, artistic or textual, to eitherslavery or secession.26 The VietnamVeterans’ Memorial, also situated on theMall in Washington, has a mandate thatprohibits the individual citation of thoseservicemen who died outside the theatreof engagement in South-East Asia. Thusveterans who later succumbed to theeffects of Agent Orange or, devastated bypost-traumatic stress disorder, took theirown lives are not accorded recognitionequivalent to that extended to combatvictims.27 Similarly, the US-based AIDSMemorial Quilt Project has attractedcriticism from interest groups forvariously: privileging the experience ofloss and mourning in the gay community;failing in its assumed didactic functionof educating communities about theprevention of HIV transmission;28 and, ina final irony, for becoming ‘de-gay[ed]’as a result of the extension of the projectto ‘accommodate racial and sexualdiversity’.29

Bentham’s assertion that the Auto-Icon’s would ‘set curiosity in motion,virtuous curiosity’, was based on the ideathat Auto-Icons would initiate andultimately be accessed through a process


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of constructive engagement with theiraudience. As these examples show,erecting monuments to perform the civicwork of thinking is problematic. StevenJohnson notes a paradox fundamental tothe pedagogical or didactic functionrelated to monuments – that in the veryact of concretising, and therefore‘eternalising’, a particular truth (not anunproblematic notion), the citizen-vieweris removed from the requirement that s/he understand the social or political fluxthat produced it. Johnson argues that thedecoupling of historical processes fromcommemorative outcomes has renderedmonuments ‘self-defeating’ to the pointof ‘inhibit[ing] the formation of the ethicthey are meant to induce’.30 This isreminiscent of Robert Musil’s bluntconclusion that a statue is a ‘carefullycalculated insult’ to its subject: ‘there isnothing in this world as invisible as amonument’.31 Johnson further contendsthat most forms of public memorialisationstand in for ‘the civic work that onlycitizens themselves can do to lastingeffect’.32 A monument can only ever besupplementary to the complexities of thehistorical circumstance that gave rise toit. It can never substitute for them. Thisis of particular significance in an erawhere fictive recreations of historicalevents are more easily accessed by a massaudience than primary or secondarysource materials. This has led, forexample, to the commissioning of a recentstatute at the William Wallace Monumentin Scotland that takes as its primaryreference Mel Gibson’s depiction ofWallace in the film Braveheart.33 If theBentham’s Auto-Icon was the reductio adabsurdum of utilitarianism, a Gibson-likeWallace is surely the ne plus ultra ofpostmodernism. As Jean Baudrillard haswritten of simulacra, ‘It is no longer a

question of imitation, nor of redup-lication, nor even of parody’. ‘It is rather’,he continued, ‘a question of substitutingsigns of the real for the real itself; that is,an operation to deter every real processby an operational double, a metastable,programmatic, perfect descriptivemachine which provides all the signs ofthe real and short-circuits all itsvicissitudes’.34 What is really real?

Both the empirical and the theoreticalagendas are advanced by thecontributions to this special edition ofHumanities Research. Marc Serge Rivièregives a detailed account of themonuments to Lapérouse, erected inMauitius and at Botany Bay, that crossedthe boundaries of nationality, war andempire to honour the passion of discoverythat united sea-farers. A decade after theend of the long revolutionary warsbetween France and Britain (and wellbefore the erection of the first officialstatue in New South Wales in 184235 ),Rivière shows that Governor Brisbane notonly permitted but actively encouragedthe construction of Bougainville’smonument to his fellow French explorerat Botany Bay in 1825. Ken Taylor’sdiscussion of one of the wonders of theworld, the Candi Borobudur monumentin central Java, highlights critical issuesof significance, intangible heritage andconservation. The contrast between thevenerable spirituality of the monumentand the cacophonous bustle and chaos ofthe surrounding tourist precinctdescribed in this paper is striking andconcerning. In her contribution, AnaCarden-Coyne reflects on theembodiment of gender in the memorialarchitecture of the First World War. Byshowing how memorials reflect ‘widerdebates about the status of the returnedsoldier, as well as women’s claims to


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citizenship in postwar societies’, Carden-Coyne goes beyond the familiar tropes –war/death as masculine and peace/renewal as feminine – to explore genderedarchitecture in new and subtle ways.

Both Alex Tyrrell and Tony Taylorhighlight the ways that commemorationcan become the subject of acute politicalcontest. By examining the death andafterlife of Ernest Jones, the last nationalleader of Britain’s Chartist campaign fordemocratic reform, Taylor traces incrucially important ways what he calls the‘fracture-lines dividing the competingradical and Liberal interpretations of thenational narrative of liberty and reform’.This was a contest between sometimesallies and fellow-travellers who werenever all that far apart on the spectrumof nineteenth century British politics. Thesame can not be said of the disputediscussed by Alex Tyrrell. In thiswonderful essay we are given a front rowseat to a (literally) monumental battleover the fate of a statue to the perpetratorof the Sutherland Clearances in theScottish Highlands. Following PierreNora, Tyrrell points to the advantages ofdistinguishing between history andpublic memory as a way of recon-ceptualising ‘history wars’ in Scotlandand elsewhere. Students of Australia’s‘history wars’ will learn a lot from thisapproach. Towards the conclusion of histract Bentham looked forward to the daywhen Auto-Icons ‘in their silence wouldbe eloquent preachers’. Taken togetherthe contributions to this issue ofHumanities Research show that social,cultural and political historians havebegun to listen.

ENDNOTES

1 Wentworth cited in People’s Advocate, 24December 1853.

2 People’s Advocate, 31 December 1853.

3 The committee spent £300 on a portraitbut applied the remainder of thesubscription (£2640-17-6d) to theestablishment of the chair of ‘modernhistory’. See People’s Advocate,8 September 1855. For ‘monumentmania’ see The Times, 12 August 1850.We are grateful to Alex Tyrrell for thisreference.

4 Cited in Glasgow Examiner, 19 October1850.

5 For a discussion of the rise of‘monument mania’ in Britain see Paul A.Pickering and Alex Tyrrell, ContestedSites: Commemoration, Memorial andPopular Politics in Nineteenth CenturyBritain, Aldershot, 2004.

6 Auto-Icon; Or, Farther Uses of the Dead tothe Living. A Fragment. From the Mss. OfJeremy Bentham [1832], Essen, 1995, p. 14.

7 See C.F.A. Marmoy, ‘The Auto-Icon ofJeremy Bentham at University College,London’, Medical History, vol. 2, no. 2,April 1958, pp. 77–86 (reproduced onhttp://www.ucl.ac.uk/Bentham-Project/info/marmoy.htm [accessed19.12.2003]). See also Ruth Richardson,Death, Dissection and the Destitute,London, 1987, pp. 159–60.

8 Bentham, Auto-Icon, p. 16. Bentham’sWill is quoted by Marmoy.

9 See Marmoy, ‘The Auto-Icon’.

10 Bentham, Auto-Icon, p. 21.

11 E. V. Gatacre, Madame Tussaud’s,London, 1977, p. 38, Bentham, Auto-Icon,p. 18.


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12 Bentham, Auto-Icon, passim.

13 Bentham, Auto-Icon, p. 17.

14 Cited in Gatacre, Madame Tussaud’s,p. 38.

15 Andreas Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts: Media,Politics, Amnesia’, Public Culture, vol. 12no. 1, 2000, p. 33.

16 Huyssen, ‘Present Pasts’, p. 21.






22 Hartmut Winkler, ‘Discourses.Schemata, Technology, Monuments:Outline for a Theory of CulturalContinuity’, Configurations, vol. 10, 2002,p. 95.



25 Michael Garval, ‘“A Dream of Stone”:Fame, Vision and the Monument inNineteenth-Century French LiteraryCulture’, College Literature, vol. 30 no. 2,2003, p. 83.

26 Steven Johnston, ‘Political Not Patriotic:Democracy, Civic Space, and theAmerican Memorial/MonumentComplex’, Theory and Event [online] vol.5(2), 2002, paragraph 16. Available fromhttp://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.2johnston.html [Accessed 07/03/2004]

27 Johnston, ‘Political Not Patriotic’,paragraph 39.

28 Christopher Capozzola, ‘A VeryAmerican Epidemic: Memory Politics

and Identity Politics in the AIDSMemorial Quilt, 1985–1993’, RadicalHistory Review, no. 82, Winter 2002,p. 101.

29 Capozzola, ‘A Very AmericanEpidemic’, p. 100.


31 Cited in Katharine Hodgkin andSusannah Radstone (eds), ContestedPasts: The politics of memory, London,2003, p. 195.


33 Andrew Ross, ‘Wallace’s Monumentand the Resumption of Scotland’, SocialText, vol. 18 no. 4, 2000, p. 101.

34 Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra andSimulation (trans. Sheila Glaser), AnnArbour, Michigan, 1995, p. 2.

35 See S. K. Inglis, Sacred Places: WarMemorials in the Australian Landscape,Melbourne 1998, p. 27.

Documents

MONUMENTS AND COMMEMORATIONS: A CONSIDERATION · in the grip of ‘Monument Mania’.3 Referring to the capital in particular, the conservative Examiner had similarly worried that