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humanist ethnological project of the nineteenth century became a pedagogic
tool of imperialist ideology.
Penny sees his account as disputing those histories of ethnographic museums
which emphasize their role as a vehicle of ideology and in disciplining a public.
However, I do not find it entirely incompatible. The German museum directors
eventually accepted linear and didactic displays (Penny 2002: 206). Elsewhere
too, worries about visitor behaviour in the museum had led to increasingly
controlled linear and didactic displays and the effacement of the museum’s role
as a ‘liberal’ gentlemanly research institution (see Chapter 2). In Europe, North
America and Australia, the fact that visitors persisted in reading the exhibits as
curiosities or wondrous spectacles was frequently cited as evidence that
museums should reform their display techniques and reduce the number of
objects on display. Penny’s argument is that the audience itself was a significant
factor in changing the museum toward increased control of audience, more
didactic displays and an imperialist message (2002: 13). This view that dem-
ocratization undermines the participatory and open-ended character of the
museum recalls the argument made by the German cultural theorist, Jürgen
Habermas, regarding the public sphere. For Habermas (1989) the price of the
expansion of the public sphere is the loss of its participatory character. An
élitist public sphere was predicated on a shared training in high culture. Lacking
this training, the wider public brings with it cultural expectations and practices
formed in relation to a mass culture and, according to Habermas, becomes a
public of passive consumers rather than active participants.
Both arguments support the widely-held belief that mass culture and everyday
life in modernity address people as consumers. However, it’s worth noting that
those writers who initially characterized modern everyday life in terms of an
excess of stimuli and abrupt shocks did not see it as having a consistently
pacifying effect. For Simmel and Benjamin, the possible responses to the shock
experiences of modernity include an armoured consciousness which allows the
sensory world to impact very little on it, and an intoxicated state resulting from
unprotected exposure to overwhelming sensations. These responses are gen-
dered: armoured consciousness is associated with masculinity and immersion in
sensation is associated with femininity (and viewed in terms of passivity and
vulnerability) (Henning 1999). In the museum, they correspond to the indifferent
stroller and the intoxicated gawper: two figures which occur repeatedly in
museum discourse. In museum discussions of visitors, perhaps the greatest
anxiety is not that visitors might read ‘against the grain’ but that the museum
might be meaningless to its visitors or have no impact at all on them.
According to Benjamin (2002), these responses to the shock experiences of
modernity are addressed by mass media which provide a technical and aesthetic
equivalent to the shock-based experiential world. This can be explained as a