Page 113 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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to Victorian historicism and saw its outcome as a kind of superficiality of
character, for Dewey and Benjamin the problem is to do with a change in the
structure of everyday life brought about by technical, social and economic
forces. For Dewey, a potential solution lies in reintegrating aesthetics with work,
and he contrasts (rather idealized) craft-type production with Fordist mass
production (Imai 2003: 113). For Benjamin overcoming the poverty of experi-
ence meant rethinking aesthetic experience altogether (Highmore 2002: 66;
Imai 2003: 114).
Benjamin associated the poverty of experience with the ‘decay of aura’. In
the first chapter, I mentioned how aura is associated with a kind of animism:
‘To perceive the aura of an object we look at means to invest it with the ability
to look at us in return’ (Benjamin 1992b: 184). This animist or anthro-
pomorphic relationship between people and (especially) art reveals how aes-
thetic experience retains the traces of a pre-modern structure of experience.
Benjamin, along with many avant-garde artists, was interested in the experien-
tial world of so-called primitive people, the insane and children, not for their
own sake but for the way they gave the lie to Western philosophical models of
experience based on a firm division between human subject and the external
world of things (Imai 2003: 111–2; Benjamin 1996: 103). In the eighteenth and
early nineteenth centuries, European art and culture still maintained a link
between ritual and aesthetic experience and elements of this animistic relation
to the world. While for Dewey, aesthetic experience offered an antidote to the
poverty of experience, for Benjamin, the modern split between Erlebnis and
Erfahrung had implications for aesthetics too. The aesthetic forms and genres
which had previously been a means to make sense of and pass on experience
were no longer adequate to the task. Benjamin characterizes modern lived
experience in terms of fragmentation and shock, and addresses the question of
what (popular and avant-garde) forms, practices and materials might be able to
make this communicable as a first stage in a revolutionary transformation of
the everyday. For Benjamin, new forms and techniques corresponding to the
structures of modern experience might address human senses qualitatively
transformed by the onslaught of sensation and shock experiences in modernity
(1992b: 171; Imai 2003: 115). In this view, things still matter, not for their ritual
and auratic value but for their capacity to jolt us out of an intoxicated or
trance-like state, induced by the spectacular phantasmagoria of capitalist
modernity.
Neither Froebelian education theory nor Benjamin’s critical theory are
opposed to mimesis or story-telling. What they have in common is that they
place high value on the transformative power of things. From these perspectives,
the material of the exhibit is not a way of leading visitors to the ‘museum
message’, but is itself the content and substance of the activities which take