Page 124 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

108 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

Figure 6 Attendant seated in front of a cross-section display of a house show-
ing the distribution of hot water and electrical services at the Britain Can Make
It Exhibition, 1946. © Design Council and the Design Archives, University of
Brighton.

subjectivity. Indeed, modernity is characterized by its ‘compensatory moves’, its
attempts to remake coherence, as well as by its production of incoherent sensa-
tion (Sandberg 2003: 118). Even where the museum appears unintelligible to
visitors, it can still work to habituate them to certain kinds of modern experience.
In this bodily address to a mixed mass audience, museums and exhibitions
nevertheless privileged certain subject positions, which some bodies could
squeeze into more easily than others. (Bennett 1995: 189). Hornsey reads both
the Abercrombie plans and the Britain Can Make It exhibition as working hard
to suppress the ‘leaking’ in of other kinds of unprescribed and illegitimate