our editorial contention that a theoretically informed museum studies approach is well suited to this endeavor because its primary sites of research–museums, policy, and collateral activities–sit within and communicate across locations associated with intellectual developments, empirical work, and the wider grassroots politics of indigenous, source, or constituent communities as well as governments. Museum studies has the unique advantage of a focused site of analysis–something which is not so clear in cultural studies–which opens out onto a wide variety of social and epistemological issues. At the same time, however, the argument that museum studies can make this contribution relies on clear disclosure about the methodological tools and approaches employed by its researchers (the how as well as the what). Because museum studies has conventionally, like cultural studies, been unforthcoming when it comes to addressing issues of methodology (despite its privileging of process and its often innovative use of multi-or mixed-methodology approaches), it is necessary to present a compelling argument that centralizes and demonstrates the idea that museum studies is a boundary that is exemplary in its interdisciplinary approaches to defining its field of research. Of course, this point brings us back into conversation with Thomas’s proposition that exploring the museum itself as method enables recognition of the role of contingency–that is, chance and unpredictability–in day-to-day museum work.
Emerging themes
Our organizing idea for this book–that museums are sites of conjuncture where different disciplines, theoretical approaches, and practices meet–means that any attempt to put some order into how we arrange our various contributions will necessarily overlook other ways in which these contributions could be organized in ways that point to other connections between them. The table of contents therefore presents just one way of conceptualizing our book. In choosing this approach, we ordered the chapters in terms of the overarching structure for the book as previously discussed. Part I explores the ways in which museums are use-ful sites for the development of theory precisely because they are sites of conjuncture. It brings together work that attempts to think through what a museum is as well as work that points to the ways in which museums intersect with various cross-currents in contemporary political debate–such as human rights, climate change, and citizenship. Part II is loosely grouped in terms of various disciplinary takes on the museum and contains contributions from sociologists, anthropologists, and cultural studies practitioners as well as museum studies itself. At the same time, we have also sought to continue our coverage of particular thematic issues that have contemporary relevance–this time on postcolonial contexts, nationalism, and the rights of cultural minorities as well as climate change. In the final section we sought to provide a space for museum professionals to reflect on their own practice as a mode of theorizing as well as a space for scholars to think critically about particular practices and museum experiences.
Rather than summarize each of the contributions in relation to this structure at this point, however, we will offer one account of some of the themes and connections that emerge from the experience of actually reading what our contributors wrote–themes which are in themselves responses to specific conjunctures between disciplines and museums, between theory and practice (and the other way round as well), and between disciplines, museums, and particular social, cultural, and political contexts. As we have previously argued, conjunctures are sensitive to temporal contexts and it should thus not be a surprise that there are some recurring themes across the book that cut across our attempts to confine individual contributions to specific disciplines and issues which we considered important in contemporary museological practices and discussion or to divide them into those commentating from outside museums and from within specific discipline formations and those whose starting point is always museums. Indeed, much of the pleasure of editing this book has been the process of discovering those links across the different chapters and the excitement of sensing what marks this particular moment of the encounter between museums and theoretical debates.
When Sharon Macdonald wrote her introduction to this series’ precursor, A Companion to Museum Studies (2006), she argued that the “second wave of museum studies” demonstrated not only its interdisciplinarity and concern with improving the dialogue between theory and practice but also that it had reshaped the earlier concerns with questions of representation and access and the construction of meaning. There was, she argued, much more awareness that meanings were produced in the encounter between visitors and the exhibitions they went to, rather than an exclusive concern with textual readings aimed at revealing the hegemony of particular ideological constructions. For Macdonald, while these interests were not left behind totally, there was a sense in which museum practitioners and scholars were concerned with shifting their discussions away from an almost exclusive concern with the politics of identity toward a more nuanced understanding of museological practices and their effects on society, including a more sympathetic reading of museum work itself, one that was more open to understanding the impact of a range of contexts on those practices.
If the writings we have collected here are any indication, this trend has only intensified. In reading this collection we were struck first of all by the absolute explosion of resources for thinking about museums. These resources come not only from museums themselves, which now, more than ever, resist any attempt to generalize what that they are and what they might mean, so varied is their practice across the globe, but also from disciplines that inform their practice and our critical approaches to them. It is obvious that most people are bower birds in their reading practices, borrowing across disciplines all the time. As a group and as individuals we read in philosophy, anthropology, art history, history, sociology, and political science. We borrow from material culture studies, heritage studies, tourism studies, visual culture studies, film and media studies, memory studies, post-colonial studies, and cultural theory. That most of us read across all of these areas is an indicator not only of the interdisciplinarity of our field but also of the complexity and richness of what museums have to offer as sites through which to think about a whole range of issues.
What then, are some of these issues and themes that cut across our neat schema for thinking about the museum as a site of conjuncture, as a site for the development of theories on the museum, and as a site which is itself generative of theory? What specific themes and concerns has our conjunctural approach revealed as standing out at this particular juncture in time?
Beyond governmentality? Theemergence of thenondiscursive asasite ofinquiry andhow it is being used
Our first two contributions, by Tony Bennett and Kevin Hetherington, open up one of the central conversations that reverberates throughout the book–whether an interest in the governmental function of museums as instruments of civic reform and the production of subjectivity precludes, or is in opposition to, an interest in the role of the figural (Deleuze 1988) or what others call the affective or the nonrational. Bennett’s contribution (Chapter 1), in which we asked him to review his own contribution to the theorization of museums, given that his career has spanned the journey undertaken by the field of the new museology, is a reaffirmation of his central thesis that museums are, at heart, governmental institutions whose role is the regulation of subjectivity through cultural means, operating not only through an exhibitionary complex but also through a network of agents in a constant process of negotiation. He does not see his more recent work, using the writings of Bruno Latour, as disturbing this approach to thinking about museums but as enabling him to also look beyond the practice of exhibition toward that of collecting which, he argues, offers the opportunity to recognize the ways in which museums are one node in a complex assemblage of networks, all of which enact their own agency.
While not disagreeing with Bennett’s claim on the governmental nature of what a museum is, Hetherington’s contribution (Chapter 2) aims to complicate the story through a discussion of the limitations of the ways in which Foucault has been taken up within the new museology by pointing to a period in Foucault’s own writing in which he was concerned with the links between the discursive and the nondiscursive. Hetherington’s aim is to critique the limiting visions of two of the central ways
