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world of objects’. Collecting keeps company with ‘ennui’, ‘neurasthenia’ and
‘artiﬁcial passions’ (Watson 1999: 25). Bourget saw the bibelot as a sign of the
displacement of human agency onto objects and of a passive and submissive
attitude to the world of things. The immersion of dandies and aesthetes in this
world seemed to indicate a loss or absence of subjectivity, echoing the earlier
view which linked aristocratic collecting and display, and homosexuality with a
kind of empty or contentless selfhood.
A similar dangerous immersion in the thing-world was seen by critics
as symptomatic of French nineteenth-century realist writing such as that of
Flaubert, Balzac, and Zola where the cult of the detail threatened to destroy
narrative coherence. Didier Maleuvre reads Balzac’s mania for descriptive
detail, lists and inventories as betraying ‘a desire for panoptic totalization’ but
also as ordering ‘the subject to surrender to objectivity’ (Maleuvre 1999: 198).
Maleuvre sees realist literature as responding to, or mirroring, the way in which
the immense accumulation of goods in the era of mass production and
museums threatens the subject. Overaccumulation cannot be accommodated,
cannot be pieced together, though there is a constant attempt to do so. The aim
of realism is to reduce the author to a recording device, and as in an analogue
recording, everything that can be registered is recorded – regardless of its sig-
niﬁcance (see Chapters 3 and 5; Maleuvre 1999: 197–8).
In the editors’ introduction to a collection of critical writings on the
museums, Donald Preziosi and Clare Farago argue that ‘museums are essential
sites for the fabrication and perpetuation of our conception of ourselves as
autonomous individuals with unique subjectivities’ (Preziosi and Farago 2004:
3). This chapter has suggested something of this process, considering how the
museum operates as an instrument of power concerned with forming identities
and subjectivities, with fashioning selves. However, I want to emphasize that the
museum simultaneously reveals and even exempliﬁes the limits of this modern
activity – the inability of the bourgeois model of selfhood (the depth model) to
cover all ground. The association of certain collecting and consumption prac-
tices with women and with homosexuality in men points to the way in which
overaccumulation, the madness of museums, has been historically regarded as a
kind of deviation, a threat to normative identity.