Page 89 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

MEDIA || 73

11–12). McLuhan rejected the notion that use or specific content determines
value, not because there is no meaningful difference between television pro-
grammes, or what is between the pages of one book and another, but because
he believed that the greater impact of each medium was not to be found there.
He argued that media technologies ought to be considered ‘staples or natural
resources’ on which certain economies come to depend, which shape social
organization, and which consequently have effects on ‘the entire psychic life of
the community’ (McLuhan 2002: 22).
McLuhan’s insistence on the shaping role of technologies was also an insist-
ence on the materiality of media. This materialism is shared by Raymond
Williams, one of the founders of British cultural studies and a critic of
McLuhan. Williams opposed the way that McLuhan reduced media to techno-
logy (Williams 1977: 159). McLuhan distinguished the medium and technology
from the social activities and psychic life which they configure. Influenced by the
work of the Soviet linguist Volosinov, Williams emphasized that meanings can-
not be dissociated from the material in which they are produced nor from social
interaction between people. He rejected the separation of human activity and
technology implicit in McLuhan’s work. Media for Williams meant ‘material
social practice’, not an ‘intermediate substance’ (1977: 165). While McLuhan
saw human activity as shaped by media technologies, Williams saw it as both
shaped by and shaping of media, but most importantly, he saw human activity
as sensuous and material.
What are the consequences of these materialist theories of media for a con-
sideration of museums as media? First, they allow for media to be thought of as
more than a means to move messages across space. Second, they suggest that to
consider museums as media would mean paying close attention to their tangible
and experiential aspects. Third, they invite us to attend to how the substantial,
material form of the exhibition circumscribes and delimits both human activ-
ities and ideological content. The media historian Friedrich Kittler (1999)
argues that certain media are oriented towards the production of certain kinds
of knowledge and subjective experiences, and resist others. He shows how
modern media (from around the 1880s) split and differentiate sensory informa-
tion into sound, images and so on. He argues that this shapes the kinds of
knowledge that can be produced. This argument is strongly influenced by the
French historian Michel Foucault’s theory of discourse. While Foucault argued
that a discourse constructs its objects, Kittler sees media as fabricating dis-
courses, according to their own material ‘bias’. In this respect, Kittler’s theory
combines form and content: media transform our reality by shaping both
experience and discourse. One of the most radical contributions Kittler makes
to the way we think about media is that he redefines media to prioritize the
archiving or storage function, which is played down in most media theory.