Page 160 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

144 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

Clifford (1985) has made the case for exhibits which emphasize the marvellous
‘otherness’ of ethnographic objects, rather than explaining them away. He
argues that making such objects strange once more may be crucial in under-
mining ‘a possessive Western subjectivity’. Clifford suggests that we should
accord to things the power to fixate, rather than simply the capacity to edify
and inform. African and Oceanian artifacts could once again be ‘objets
sauvages’, sources of fascination with the power to disconcert. Seen in
their nomadic resistance to classification they could remind us of our lack
of self-possession, of the artifices we employ to gather a world around us.
(1985: 244)
Clifford sees this in terms of fetishism. In other words, and in keeping with
the discussion of fetishism at the very start of this book, he sees the relationship
with things on which the museum is based as rooted in the fetishistic, possessive
relationship to things characteristic of capitalism. This is concealed in the
museum beneath a veneer of instruction. Stripping away this veneer could
reawaken the sense of wonder that these objects initially invoked. Clifford
argues that the objects of Africa and Oceania might be capable of revealing the
Western investment in possessions and the desire for the exotic and other that
underlies it.
Stephen Greenblatt (1991b) defines wonder as ‘the power of the displayed
object to stop the viewer in his or her tracks, to convey an arresting sense of
uniqueness, to evoke an exalted attention’. He opposes it to ‘resonance’, by
which an object may ‘evoke in the viewer the complex, dynamic cultural forces
from which it has emerged and for which it may be taken by a viewer to stand’
(Greenblatt 1991b: 42). Though Greenblatt sees value in resonance too, he
regrets what he sees as the turn toward it in museums at the expense of wonder
(1991b: 53). However, the notion of a ‘return to curiosity’, which the art histor-
ian Stephen Bann (2003) uses, incorporates both wonder and resonance. For
instance in a discussion of contemporary art exhibitions, Bann suggests that
the curiosity cabinet allows us to view objects as ‘a nexus of interrelated mean-
ings – which may be quite discordant – rather than a staging post on a well
trodden route through history’ (2003: 120). Like Clifford, Bann recognizes the
potential of the curious and the marvellous to undo the museum’s claim to
authoritative knowledge, whilst maintaining its potential as a space for contact
and critical understanding. While media and museums attempt to ignore or
conceal contradiction, curiosity actually allows for, and even encourages it.
The aesthetic arrangement of the curiosity cabinet corresponded to an epi-
stemological structure based around ‘sympathies’, analogy and resemblances
(Foucault 1970: 18–37; Hooper-Greenhill 1992: 102–26). The curiosity cabinet
in its original incarnation was a very élite affair (though it had its popular