Page 18 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

2 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

and they introduced a new complexity and a new theoretical language to
discussions of museums. In my view, what was important about these studies
was not simply the theories they used, but the questions they asked about the
cultural significance of museums. However, they did not seem able to account
for the material specificity of museums and exhibitions, for their experiential
and affective appeal. For these we need to look elsewhere.
This book takes as its starting point a particular understanding of modernity
which sees it as fundamentally, if unevenly, transformative. According to this
theory, the social, economic and technical changes associated with modernity
alter even those things we tend to view as permanent or eternal: the structure of
memory, of the self, of experience. Practices of attention, ways of relating to
the material world, change too. And while museums and exhibitions predate
modernity, they take on a new, public form in the modern period which is
connected to these larger changes in the subjective and objective world. In and
through museums and exhibitions, subject and object are reinvented. Foucault,
Bourdieu and Gramsci show us how this extends and reproduces social differen-
tiation and regulation, subjecting everyday practices to forms of social man-
agement. They allow us to observe how the cultural products of the world are
turned into the material for narratives of progress, which make the present
order of things seem both natural and inevitable. But the objects in museums
are not amenable to being reduced to documents, texts or representations. The
other side of modernity would seem to be the way that things exceed their
designated roles, in which accumulations of ‘stuff’ resist the attempt to
make of them coherent narratives or to marshal them for the purposes of
moulding good citizens (much as the material interferences and ‘noise’ of media
obstinately stand in the way of transparent communication).
If cultural and media studies can help explain the communicative capacity of
museums, we can also find in these disciplines some models for thinking
through their material or sensuous character. In this book I have tried to
assemble a materialist study of the museum as media-form, mainly by piecing
together theories, insights, historical accounts and observations from a wide
range of texts. I try to account for the fact that museum objects are constituted
by the museum and are, at the same time, material things. In the first chapter, I
argue that museum content is not superimposed on things, but embedded in
them, and discuss how things change when they enter the museum, how the
museum transforms the ways people attend to things, how things address us
and act in relation to us. I draw on various texts which attempt to theorize
things to explore how, in the public museum, there emerge new relationships
between people and things.
While the early public museum was rooted in a faith in ‘object lessons’, today
many museums prioritize visitor experience over artefacts. The experiential and