Re-Echoing the Scream: Rod Dickinson’s Shock Machine and the Re-Emergence of Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ Experiments

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Buckley, Bernadette. 2024. Re-Echoing the Scream: Rod Dickinson’s Shock Machine and the Re-Emergence of Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ Experiments. In: Frederico Dinis, ed. Performativity and the Representation of Memory: Resignification, Appropriation, and Embodiment. Hershey, Pennsylvania: IGI Global. ISBN 9798369322642 [Book Section]

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Abstract or Description

This chapter considers the power of art to capture the dynamism of memory as it bounces between past, present and emergent future. In so doing, it focuses centrally on Rod Dickinson’s The Milgram Re-enactment, 2002 – a performative and video re-enactment of Stanley Milgram’s ‘Obedience to Authority’ experiments of 1962, in which “participants were asked to give apparently lethal electric shocks to an unwilling victim to test how far they would be prepared to obey an authoritative scientist and inflict pain on a protesting person” (Dickinson, n.d.). What matters, the chapter argues, is less what memory ‘remembers’, but how it is put to work as an inventive force in another time and context. Foreshadowing Weizman’s interpretation of the Siege of Gaza, 2007 as an “inverse Milgram experiment”, Dickinson’s work is thus positioned as both re-enactment and pre-enactment of procedural Holocausts to come and memory is explored as an active operant condition that continues to influence perspectives on, as well as policy and conduct in the continuing and current conflict in the Gaza Strip.

Item Type:

Book Section

Identification Number (DOI):

https://doi.org/10.4018/979-8-3693-2264-2

Keywords:

Rod Dickinson; The Milgram Re-enactment; Stanley Milgram; Obedience to Authority experiments; Holocaust memory; anti-memory; collective punishment; dehumanisation; compliance; the aesthetics of memory; Eyal Weizman; Siege of Gaza; Israel-Gaza War.

Departments, Centres and Research Units:

Politics

Dates: