Page 30 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

14 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

from museum visitors. This was connected to the role of the museum in social
reform, as Bennett argues, but we could also see it as connected to wider
social anxieties regarding attention and inattentiveness which emerged in the
nineteenth century, and consequent attempts to ‘manage’ attention (Crary
1999). New habits and new forms of attention also emerged as an unforeseen
consequence of the new arrangements of objects in the museum.
The museum put objects to work in new ways. Artefacts were able to play
their new roles in the management of attention only by being given a stable
place in a community of objects, with specific rules of access. The public
museum tore them from the previous contexts in which they made sense, and
arranged them in sequences and groups, informed by new understandings of
history and aesthetics. This is not a process peculiar to the museum itself, but
characteristic of the wider nineteenth-century culture that nurtured the public
museum. Using the conventional shorthand, I will refer to this as Victorian,
though it reached far beyond the edges of Britain and of the British Empire.
Victorian society developed a new relationship to the past and to the rest of
the world. European colonial relations enabled colonial powers to view their
own culture as both universally valid and as the peak of civilization. Other
cultures were discussed, sampled, represented in encyclopaedias, periodicals,
and in popular displays as well as in the public museums. It is true that earlier
European cultures had also collected, quoted and revived the artefacts and
practices of other cultures, but usually only where they saw a similarity with
their own, either in actuality or ambition. Victorian bourgeois culture assimi-
lated contemporary and ancient cultures with very different worldviews.
Indeed, the Victorian bourgeoisie was so assured of its own world dominance
that the products of entirely different cultures were judged according to ‘uni-
versal’ criteria, such as the criteria of scientific and aesthetic value (see Chapter
4 for more on this). Museums enabled Victorian society to produce totalizing
accounts of the world by acting as centres for the assembling and reordering of
artefacts and specimens taken from all over the globe (Bennett 2002: 34–5). By
the last decades of the nineteenth century, historical arrangements dominated
many museums. Even museums with geographically organized collections, such
as ethnographic museums, could represent world history. Some ethnologists
believed that evolutionary theory applied to human cultures as well as to the
development of species, and different cultures were thought to be at different
stages in the social evolution toward civilization. This was not the case
universally: the most renowned ethnographic museums were in Germany and,
initially at least, placed an emphasis on comparative study rather than cultural
hierarchy (Penny 2002; see also Chapter 4).
In historically organized collections and comparative ones, the object is sub-
ordinated to the sequence in which it is placed and gains its meaning from its