Page 27 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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consumption of electricity in Britain, as millions of viewers switch on their
electric kettles at the end of an episode. Of course, the programme is delib-
erately scheduled to fit around the eating and drinking habits of the nation too.
Television watching introduces us to new modes of attention, schools us in new
habits, and works to socially differentiate us.
Museums, and the things in them, also prescribe certain kinds of behaviour.
Fisher (1991) makes this argument, though he does not write of the object as an
actor in the way that Latour does. Fisher shows how, at each stage in its life (or
each life of its many lives), an object prescribes and sets limits on human
activity. The museum’s rules of access limit what people do within the walls of
the museum, what they may touch, and even who may enter the museum. This
aspect of the museum has been discussed in relation to it as a ritual space, in
terms of the disciplining of audience behaviour and as performance (Duncan
1995; Bennett 1995). My emphasis here is on the role of the object (not just the
visitor) as an actor, which performs in a given network or community. The
forms of behaviour and activities enabled by the community of objects in the
museum include how visitors conduct themselves and attend to the objects
within the museum, and practices of curatorship. The place of the object in the
community of objects affects how we approach it, where we stand or sit in
relation to it, and how much time we spend in its company. It shapes not just
how we interpret it but how we see it: making us blind to certain aspects and
drawing attention to others. Fisher elaborates:
When we think of an object as having a fixed set of traits we leave out the
fact that only within social scripts are those traits, and not others, visible
or even real. It is not only that in a museum we do not notice or even know
about the balance of the sword. Once it is bolted down in a display and not
swung in a certain way we cannot say that balance or imbalance is even a
fact about it. Without a class of warriors, trained to fight in certain ways,
even the permission to lift and swing the sword could tell us nothing . . .
Our access assembles and disassembles what the object is.
(1991: 18–9)
As Fisher says, the museum is more than a place. It is a network of relation-
ships between objects and people. The museum is constituted in part by the
activities of visitors and museum staff, which are themselves enabled by and
enacted through the material objects that make up the museum collection.
These objects make possible the various practices involved in museum visiting
and curatorship. The museum object is shaped by and shaping of visitors’
attention. At the same time, these objects are animated by the museum, its
practices and procedures, its classifications and its display techniques.
In the rest of this chapter, we consider the historical circumstances in which