Page 175 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

GLOSSARY || 159

Cybernetics: This is a term invented by Norbert Weiner in the 1940s in connection with
his work automating anti-aircraft systems in World War II, and is associated
with human–machine communication and with efficient and managed interaction
through controlled feedback systems. Weiner was interested in ‘machine intelligence’
and in the parallels between computers and the human mind.
Department store: The department store is a late nineteenth-century phenomenon. The
Bon Marché and the Magasin du Louvre in Paris both opened in the 1850s.
Among the first in the United States were Macy’s in New York, which opened in
1857, and Marshall Field’s which opened in Chicago in 1879. By the last decade of
the nineteenth century, every big city in the United States had at least one.
Desire: For Freudian psychoanalysis, desire is predicated on lack, and things become
objects of desire by virtue of their absence. Sigmund Freud and later Jacques Lacan
see lack shaping desire in a larger sense too: the sense that, in becoming socialized,
we have lost a sense of wholeness, of oneness with the world of things, that we had
as infants. Ultimately desire is the desire for wholeness, for a return to an infantile
sense of plenitude that we lose in the process of becoming socialized, even of
learning to speak. The promise of the commodity – a promise on which it always
reneges – is to make good that lack.
Discipline: This is used here in the Foucaultian sense. In Discipline and Punish (1979)
Michel Foucault argued that an older regime of government, based in displays of
power and spectacular punishment has become gradually replaced, with a new
‘disciplinary’ regime, characterized by an emphasis on observation, training,
correction and reform. Punishment becomes concealed rather than spectacular, and
citizens are encouraged to regulate themselves through internalizing the corrective
and judgemental gaze. According to Foucault, discipline works to produce ‘docile
bodies’, regimenting behaviour and reproducing norms. Most importantly, discip-
line operates productively – producing knowledge, subjectivity and reality – rather
than censoring or repressing.
Discourse: Now very commonly used in cultural and media studies, this term
encompasses all that which is said, written or communicated within a culture. The
notion of discourse used in these disciplines is influenced by linguistics but also by
the work of Michel Foucault. A discourse is a set of statements that emerge from a
particular social context or attempt to articulate a particular object or phenom-
enon. According to Foucault, the tacit or explicit rules that apply in a given social
and institutional context shape what it is possible to say and a discourse constructs
the very objects it describes. For instance, he showed how a range of institutional
discourses (legal, psychoanalytical and so on) produced ‘homosexuality’ and
‘heterosexuality’, which become lived social realities, with their own effectivity, but
which didn’t exist as such prior to the discourse. One impact of the widespread
use of discourse theory is the tendency to assume that there is nothing outside
discourse. Recent theories that challenge this view include theories of affect and
mimesis, ‘thing theory’ and Bruno Latour’s approach discussed in Chapter 1
(known as ‘actor–network’ theory).
Diorama: The habitat diorama shares its name with the attraction invented by Louis
Daguerre. Daguerre’s dioramas were specially-designed buildings that displayed