to have their value systems challenged. Nevertheless, the openness of Schorch’s methodology, and his insistence that we must allow visitors to narrate their experiences in museums by providing them with enough time to do so and to reflect on it them selves, is instructive. In contrast, Smith’s methodology uses a more conventional survey approach, which, while capturing very great numbers of people, still man aged to remain open in its orientation, seeking to allow interviewees to create their own meanings. Her findings point to the fact that a significant number of people actively put up barriers to stop themselves from having their value systems challenged, though not all do so. It would appear, then, that some combination of the methodologies employed by our two contributors might offer us an insight into why some people respond well to challenges and others do not, as well as into what strategies on the part of museums may or may not encourage such responses.
Museums andthepublic sphere: Regulation, human rights, andactive citizenship
The concern with whether or not museums are spaces of alterity brings us to another central theme in this book–the contribution of museums to the public sphere and their place within it. One line of argument continues to be that represented by the governmentality school of thought in which museums are cultural institutions whose function is the regulation of citizens (Bennett, Chapter 1). The idea of regulation however, does not exhaust the possibilities here, as contributions by Barrett (Chapter 6), Cameron (17), Dahlgren and Hermes (7), and Miller (8) among others all indicate (see also Witcomb, 16, and Radywyl etal., 20, who argue for the need to include affective encounters alongside an understanding of museums as spaces of governmentality in response to the formation of new forms of subjectivity).
Fiona Cameron’s contribution (Chapter 17), heavily influenced by Bennett’s arguments concerning both governmentality and its applicability to a Latourian understanding of networks and assemblages, is a case in point. Cameron argues first of all for recognition that museums are increasingly embedded in a range of networks and assemblages that require them to understand the kinds of relations between the human and the nonhuman world. Her particular application of this argument concerns the ways in which museums need to change how they represent and understand climate change if they are to help people engage with the complexity of what is happening. She goes on to argue that, to do so, museums need to understand climate change from the point of view of the new nature–cultures paradigm–a paradigm that refuses to accept traditional binary oppositions including that between humans and nonhumans. This is a perspective that takes us back into the material and sensorial turn articulated by Dudley and Baker above. Cameron uses her understanding of the nondiscursive to make an argument for the wholesale need for museums to engage in a program of institutional reform so that they may continue their project of remaining relevant to contemporary social needs–which she understands as the ability to respond to an issues-based museological program, mentioning climate change, genetically modified goods, racism, and violence as some of these issues. For her this indicates that museums need to become “liquid” institutions, by which she means they need to become less hierarchical, less positivist, in their epistemology and therefore more able to deal with uncertainty and complexity. This can only be done, she argues, if museums take on the new epistemologies being developed under the rubric of the new nature cultures–a rubric that argues for the significance of material and embodied experiences of the world. Her piece is thus at once a critique of the epistemologies that have underpinned museums’ engagement with scientific knowledge so far, and a call for a new epistemology to guide the institution of the museum into the future so that it can help its audience deal with complexity and uncertainty.
As many of the contributions in this book attest, one of the main ways in which museums understand their public role is the increasing practice of representing and collaborating with culturally and ethnically diverse groups. Practices that support this discourse, argues Jennifer Barrett (Chapter 6), are part of a long history in which museums have contributed to an international public sphere through a universalist philosophy, though they currently take two very different forms–one supported by the Federation of International Human Rights Museums based on a human rights discourse, the other by the so-called universal museums, based on the idea of universalism. Barrett’s chapter is a close analysis of the two competing discourses/practices which teases out the tensions between them as well as their intellectual history.
Political science and cultural studies give us another perspective on the role of museums in the public sphere, one in which theorizing about the changing nature of citizenship offers a new way to think about the ways in which museums enact Theory their “publicity” (being the qualities, characteristics, and obligations they promote in their capacity as places in the public sphere and imagination). As Peter Dahlgren and Joke Hermes’s chapter (7) argues, theories of citizenship open up two alternative ways of thinking about how museums contribute to the process of the formation of citizens. The first concerns the ways in which civic cultures provide pathways for the enactment of citizenship, while the second looks at the ways in which a cultural citizenship perspective opens up an understanding of how culture “offers the possibility to build and reflect on social cohesion.” Their focus is to bring these two perspectives together to identify the different means by which museums can provide spaces for socially inclusive forms of civic participation so as to support strong democracies. Of interest, once again, is their argument that such inclusive practices need to engage both reason and affect or else their idea of subjectivity will be the poorer and their impact lessened.
Toby Miller’s provocation (Chapter 8) provides another way of looking at the relationship between the public role of museums and contemporary political debates, such as those around climate change, while also linking these discus sions to the idea of active citizenship. Like McGuigan, Miller is scathing of those who choose to privilege economic gain over any sense of public responsi bility. In Miller’s case, we have a brilliant critique of the ways in which sponsor ship deals and corporate rhetoric on innovation are preventing more informed, and indeed critical, perspectives on modern technological developments that are positively harmful in terms of the fight against carbon-emitting devices.Rather than leading us into a blind consumerism devoid of any critical insight, Miller argues, museums should be equipping us to become active citizens capa ble of making well-informed choices. But Miller also offers a deeper critique of the present drive to celebrate innovation, suggesting that, unless they adopt the precautionary principle in which the onus is on the drivers of innovation to prove their innovations are not harmful to the environment, museums should not be claiming that they are green institutions. Perhaps ironically, museums, Miller argues, actually need to be reminded that, rather than blindly supporting corporate discourses on innovation, they would do better to traffic on what they have always done well–the production of narratives of continuity and the need for preservation. For Miller, the ability to contribute to public discourse in ways that are ethically responsible as well as critically reflexive is based not on notions of change and innovation but on those of a more guarded response to such changes. Thus the natural conservatism of museums is perhaps something that should not be automatically thrown out, as that may also involve throwing out the ability to maintain a critical distance. Miller makes it quite clear that we need museums both to respond in the moment to the moment but also to think more critically about their involvement in the links between political, eco nomic, and cultural forms of citizenship by pursuing a greener form of politics in terms of both their institutional practices and their politics of representation.
Reflexivity, museum practice, andtheory building
The notion that museums are, or at least ought to be, spaces for critical reflection is also central to a growing number of professionals, who, as James Gardner points out, have to deal with this not only at the level of ideas but at the level of practice and in a context in which community expectations
