museum–Eilean Hooper-Greenhill’s notion of the museum as an institution concerned above all with the production of knowledge and Tony Bennett’s continued affiliation to Foucault’s theories on governmentality. Both, Hetherington argues, are narrow in their understanding of Foucault and miss out on Foucault’s own awareness, in the middle years of his work, of the tension between, as well as the entanglement of, discursive and nondiscursive forms of the production of meaning.
In many ways, Hetherington’s critique is a useful entry into one of the key questions motivating a significant number of our contributors–the need to understand museum experiences as involving nondiscursive modes of knowledge production. Thus we have a number of contributions concerned with identifying and discussing what is variously called emotion, feelings, and affect, which lead us to wonder whether we could identify a third phase of the new museology. If so, we think that the word “feeling” might well encapsulate what it might be about, as opposed to the word “meaning,” which was so important in the second wave described by Macdonald (2006; also see Phillips 2005 on the “second museum age”). While contributions differ in their response to questions including whether or not affect is different from emotion, whether or not its effects connect with reason, and whether or not they contribute to the governmental effects of museums, all of these contributors are concerned with discussing the significance of the nondiscursive for the ways in which we understand the work of museums and the experience of visitors while in them.
Sheila Watson takes up this theme when she posits the need to understand the ways in which emotion is used in history museums (Chapter 14). Aware that the majority of history curators, like their counterparts in history departments in universities, would be averse to the idea that emotions are embedded in the ways in which we write or curate historical narratives, she nevertheless sets out to use insights drawn from the literature on the theory of emotions to think through various uses of emotion in exhibitions dealing with the past. Her point is not only to make the argument that emotions are historically and culturally specific phenomena, but that understanding how they work is necessary to understanding the role museums can play in reinforcing established collective memories and national identities as well as in understanding how to destabilize these.
Elsa Peralta gives us a stunning example of the way in which these emotional experiences can be based on collective material experiences, enabled by a complex network of ideas that have an affective hold on national imaginations (Chapter 15). In contrast to other contributions which emphasize the potential of affect to disrupt received narratives and understandings (Chapters 3 by Sandra Dudley, 4 by Janice Baker, and 16 by Andrea Witcomb), Peralta reminds us that the experience of materiality can in fact be one of the ways in which alternative ways of understanding the past and its relationship to the present are prevented by producing deep affective attachments to particular narratives. In her case study, which concerns the representation of empire in Portugal, what is precluded from attention by the deep collective attachment to a material embodiment of Portugal’s past as the nation of the “Discoveries” is any working through of the legacy of colonialism. Peralta looks in detail at one museum, the Museu do Oriente in Lisbon, to analyze how this particular form of attachment to the past is produced through the presence of objects. The result is a valuable contribution to understanding how affect works in museums and its role in the production of identity narratives.
Witcomb’s contribution to these discussions (Chapter 16) is the suggestion that attention to the nondiscursive on the part of curators and designers, what she calls the exhibition’s poetics, is in fact resulting in the emergence of a new form of museum pedagogy–one she calls a “pedagogy of feeling”–a notion that clearly engages with the idea that emotional experiences play a significant role in what visitors take home from their visit to museums. This is the idea that exhibitions that aim to win the hearts and minds of visitors, in order to enlist them in revisionist agendas and political activism, work by activating a sensorial rather than an informational landscape that promotes the production of empathy for the plight of others and a request to act on that empathy. Like Dudley and Baker (discussed below), Witcomb is interested in the potential that a greater understanding of people’s encounters with objects–including multimedia–might have for destabilizing received ideas but, unlike them, she is interested in the ways these forms of knowledge production can be harnessed for particular pedagogical programs. In responding to the idea of conjuncture, she also situates the emergence of this pedagogical form within a particular historical context and as a strategy for dealing with contested or difficult histories rather than claiming any universality for it.
The possibility, however, that the prevalence of a more sensorially attuned methodology of exhibition is now in play is also explored by Natalia Radywyl, Amelia Barikin, Nikos Papastergiadis, and Scott McQuire in Chapter 20. The piece, itself a masterpiece of interdisciplinary collaboration, argues for a parallel history of display to that of the governmentality approach to thinking about museum spaces as spaces of regulation, arguing–alongside Kavanagh (2000), Witcomb (2003), Henning (2006), and Message (2006)–that museums were also spaces in which visitors could enact both pleasure and divertissement, sensibilities that opened up the role of museums as also involving the imaginary in the production of alternative and political sensibilities. In their chapter, therefore, Radywyl etal. identify and document, through a discussion of the design strategies at the Centre for the Moving Image in Melbourne, Australia, a sensory environment which they describe as possessing the qualities of an “ambient aesthetic” which makes it possible to tune in to the spatial, visual, and aural contingencies at play in any one exhibition–a process which requires active attention on the part of the visitor and which is embodied in sensorial responses, and which has similarities with the process Witcomb identifies under the notion of a pedagogy of feeling. Like her (see also Witcomb 2010), they are interested in the ways in which contemporary forms of exhibition design enable visitors to produce their own subjectivity and constitute their own narratives through such sensorial responses. As they put it, the constitution of the museum subject has changed and visitors now produce their subjectivity through a range of modalities of “personalized encounters” in con- texts as varied as those of the cultural tourist, the consumer, the producer, and the cosmopolitan citizen (see also Chapter 21 by Philipp Schorch). A hint of the way in which visitors experience these strategies is provided, based on a visitor study undertaken by the group, though that study does not frame the piece as a whole.
Another set of discussions around the role of the nondiscursive in museum exhibitions has quite a different emphasis to the chapters discussed above which, with the exception of Radywyl etal., have a distinct interest in how affect is used in the interpretation of the past for present-day purposes. Instead, this other set of contributions to the role of the nondiscursive is more concerned with understanding the nature of the human–nonhuman encounter and what this might mean for how we understand the nature of people’s experiences in museums. For Sandra Dudley (Chapter 3), for example, attention to the nondiscursive is an opportunity to turn established ways of understanding the relationship between subjects and objects upside down in order to open up the ways in which the material world of objects might impact on our perceptions of the ways things are. Taking her cue from the way in which colonial relations have been reinterpreted so as to recognize the agency of colonized subjects, she argues for the importance of at least imagining the possibility that objects might also have agency on us, even though, in the museum context, it would appear that they are mute and that it is we who give them meaning. The significance of doing so, for her, lies in the notion that objects can potentially shake us from our established ways of viewing things, because of their potential to “fascinate, awe, shock, irritate, or puzzle.” She is interested, therefore, in the ways in which the materiality of objects can potentially provoke unsettlement and open up meaning rather than being used
