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kind of mastery of trauma through repetition, which is how Freud (1984) char-
acterizes the infant’s game of Fort-da. Benjamin writes of how narrative film,
for instance, marshals a chopped and repetitive structure into a coherent repre-
sentation. In doing so, it achieves what older cultural forms (such as the epic,
the bourgeois novel, oral storytelling) could no longer achieve: the translation
of lived experience (Erlebnis) into an aesthetic form appropriate to a distracted
and intoxicated audience (Benjamin 2002). Perhaps the unintelligibility of
ethnographic museums was related to the outmoding of the narrative forms
they deployed. Yet curiously, in their illegible state, they actually come to cor-
respond to everyday urban experience – in their excess of stimuli, their collaps-
ing of geographical distance, the juxtapositions and jumps between apparently
disconnected things, the sudden encounters with the different and the ‘other’.
This kind of overcrowded museum mirrors the experience of modernity but
does not allow for mastery. By contrast, Hornsey reads the popular Furnished
Rooms of the Britain Can Make It exhibition as a Fort-da game, in which the
trauma of the Blitz – when homes were literally ripped open by the bombing – is
re-enacted and domesticated through the public display of domestic interiors
viewed through a missing fourth wall (Hornsey 2004: 62–3).
One way the history of museum display techniques could be told is in terms
of a turn to visitor choreography, and to an increasingly bodily and affective
address. This is a process of uneven development, happening earlier in some
countries and some types of museums than others. Other kinds of exhibitions
and exhibitionary spaces, such as world’s fairs, though they have a different
relationship to popular culture and commerce, also develop exhibitionary tech-
nologies which control the movement of visitors. Indeed, the display techniques
used in twentieth-century world’s fairs are often much more obviously
addressed to the bodies of visitors, transporting them on moving walkways and
seats, and producing affects and sensations close to those of the ride and the
roller-coaster (Highmore 2003). A common thread emerges across Sandberg’s
notion of the folk museum refiguring the experience of modern mobility, dis-
cussed in Chapter 2, through Highmore’s reading of the IBM Information
Machine as recoding traumatic experiences of machinic modernity into a thrill-
ing taste of what it might be like to be processed by a machine (see Chapter 3),
through Hornsey’s reading of Britain Can Make It as reworking the trauma of
war and anticipating the social-spatial control in the post-war reconstruction
plans. In each of these examples, the affective content goes beyond the narrative
content of the exhibit. They show us how increasingly controlled and affective
exhibitionary environments are more than a means to hammer home ‘museum
messages’. Instead these environments work to resolve and make coherent
everyday experiences of technology, which take different forms at different
historical moments, through the production and reproduction of new forms of