Page 177 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

GLOSSARY || 161

Fordism and Taylorism: New modes of production and work, but also social organiza-
tion, which emerged out of the introduction of the assembly line by Henry Ford and
the time-motion studies of Frederick Winslow Taylor. The standardization and
rationalization associated with mechanization and automation proved attractive to
capitalists and socialists alike, and shaped the Soviet Union just as much as it did
the United States.
Heterotopia: In a lecture given in 1967, Michel Foucault used this word to describe
places in which a society reflects itself back to itself, or which are both inside and set
outside everyday social existence. Foucault included sacred spaces, psychiatric hos-
pitals and retirement homes, cemeteries and theatres in this category. He described
museums and libraries as ‘heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time’, epitom-
izing the nineteenth-century idea of ‘constituting a place of all times that is itself
outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages’ (Foucault 1986: 23).
Intermedia: This word, coined by the Fluxus artist Dick Higgins in the mid-1960s,
described the way in which new art practices were overcoming the traditional separ-
ation between media. Higgins saw the hierarchy of artforms and media as paralleling
social hierarchies and class distinctions. For him, intermedia was the appropriate
response to an increasingly populist society. Intermedia practices occupied the
ground between media usually considered as art and those considered outside its
boundaries, and was about abolishing the separation between art (or performance)
and audience. Intermedia could describe both Marcel Duchamp’s ‘ready-mades’ as
well as Higgin’s own work with ‘happenings’ and event art.
Interpellation: This term is taken from the French Marxist philosopher, Louis Althusser.
It is the process whereby ideology ‘hails’ an individual as its subject, constructing a
‘subject–position’ for him/her.
Mass culture: This is a controversial term associated with the negative view of popular
culture espoused by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer (sometimes called
‘mass culture theorists’) and also with a middle-class fear of the working-class
‘masses’. It is sometimes seen as necessarily implying a derogatory view. However,
‘mass culture’ can also be a narrower and more precise term than ‘popular culture’,
because it specifically refers to culture which is mass-produced and experienced
en masse. In these respects it is distinguished from more traditional, craft-based or
‘folk’ forms of popular culture.
Museum effect: This term comes from André Malraux and refers to the way that just
placing an object in a museum gives it importance and value. Svetlana Alpers has
given it a specifically aesthetic inflection – the museum turns objects into things to
be looked at attentively, and requires them to have a primarily ‘visual interest’.
Museum set: This phrase is used by Michael Baxandall to refer to the cultural com-
petences required and tacitly acquired which enable visitors to interpret museums.
Visitors acquire the ‘museum set’ through frequent visits to a range of museums,
and as Glenn Penny explains, they thus acquire ‘a similar set of standards, a certain
degree of shared subjectivity and, ideally the same goals of communication’ as
those who author the museums (2002: 119).
Mimesis: The term usually refers to imitations, or simulations, especially the mimicry
of nature through artifice. However mimesis also refers to the entangled world of