it seems to me that, in the terms of my colonial metaphor, within which visitors and museum objects are from different worlds but now operating within one hegemonic assemblage in which visitors have – or appear to have – dominion, we cannot be sure whether or not sardine cans or any other kinds of things see. That is, we are unable to perceive, from where we are standing, how things work and appear from where objects are; and, in turn, they are unable to comprehend how things seem to us. There will, of course, be some readers objecting at this point that not only do objects not see, but they don’t comprehend, either. I am more reticent than Lacan (1986, 95) to claim that I am not speaking metaphorically, as the gaze here must, I think, be construed as figurative rather than literal: I do not, for example, claim that pots or fossils physically see in the way that I do with my eyes. But “the gaze” is a useful idiom in which to cast how things appear from positions other than or additional to that of the human subject, to take in the picture of the material world as a whole from the outside looking in, or from another perspective than ours alone.
Prosopopoeia: The object’s point of view
Of course, in reality, to see either a full god’s-eye view of the world or another partial perspective from a different viewpoint is impossible: we can neither fully escape our own modes of perception and cognition nor wholly take on those of others as if they were our own. In the colony, through mutual encounter, colonizer and colonized in a sense came into being each for the other, noticing particular characteristics, functions, habits, details previously unnoticed, and future possibilities. Nonetheless, the view on both sides remained partial, restricted, and imbalanced. One of the effects was for the more powerful side, the colonizer, to dominate the ways in which knowledge was articulated and understood, so that the subordinate’s ways of describing and understanding things were rendered weak and ineffective (e.g., Said 1978; Spivak 1988); indeed, in politics and in other areas of life, Guha (1983) claims, they operated according to a wholly different, “autonomous,” “grammar,” incomprehensible and untranslatable in the terms of the elite.
The ways in which things act on us are similarly incomprehensible or untranslatable. The colonial metaphor, however, provides a means of conceptualizing their effects and the processes by which those effects come about. In the colonies, it was those in power who named, defined, described, confined, controlled, and worked the people, places, and things of annexed regions, setting up a hegemonic us-and-them set of structures and discourses, in the process taking agency away from the colonized. Historically, collecting and museums were part of this process. On another, metaphorical level, in our very gaze at the things confined and categorized in display cases, we turn them into passive colonized objects in their museological realm today. Yet, in those moments when we are intrigued, surprised, stirred, or shaken by them, we feel their gaze looking back at us – though we might not wish to articulate it in such terms. In those transitory, discombobulating experiences, we are aware that, even in their captivity, they retain at least some power to affect us. Moreover, as it was in such fleeting engagements in the colony, it is in these fugitive instants that dominant ways of knowing and established relations between (our) center and (the object) periphery as (we) the colonizer/visitor perceive them, are destabilized. What Fanon ([1952] 2008) described as the long-term pathologizing effects of colonialism on both sides, and the relationships of dependency created as a result, are also momentarily knocked off course. That is, in these brief but powerful encounters, the artifact is no longer exclusively an inert, submissive representation of facts or stories, but becomes wayward and recalcitrant, refusing wholly to submit to the hegemony and conscious expectations of the museum and the visitor, and instead provoking surprising and potent reactions.
Such destabilization of the status quo can be exciting, liberating, comforting, or frightening; it offers creative but risky possibilities to visitor, object, and museum alike. Some of the most powerful of these effects of objects on those who encounter them can seem noncontentive and non-narrative, like Barthes’s now classic discussion of the photograph’s punctum appearing magically to resist description and explanation (1981, 75). Nonetheless, it often seems that the preoccupation of both museum and visitor with the explication of meaning largely forecloses the potential for creative disturbance of the viewers’ assumptions or equilibrium. Moreover, this fettering, cessation even, of the unpredictable possibilities of encounters with objects is more often than not completed with the common assumption – again, by museum and visitor alike – that objects themselves have no power or effect. Yet why should this be? There will be those who do not disagree that such moments happen, but who balk at its characterization as unruliness on the part of the object rather than as something determined by the mental state of the subject, perhaps, combined with other prevailing conditions. Inevitably, the visitor’s condition of mind and other factors will play a significant part; but to emphasize these alone and ignore the impact of the qualities of a particular object on a particular person, for example, is to pay attention to only part of the equation, and to ignore the reality that if this object were not on view and not what it was, the effects would not be what they were. It seems surprising that the possibility that the artifact could actively be having effects is so unacceptable. It is true that it is human beings who attribute to objects the meanings and values they are supposed to have. Furthermore, people similarly attribute meanings and values to animals and other persons. Yet we do not suppose that this human-created web of meaning renders those other living beings incapable of action or, in the case of other people, intention, leaving them without agency of their own and unable to impact significantly on us. Why, then, should and do we make such an assumption about all the other constituents of the material world (of which we too, of course, are parts)? There is no difference between my child, my dog, or my favorite chair, insofar as my awareness of them and their qualities and actions comes via my senses, and their impacts on me come in physical ways via the same routes. Of course they each differ in the meanings and values I attribute to them, and in the kinds of relationships I have with them, but as components of the material world within which we all exist, each one has particular material qualities that define a capacity to influence me in physically, sensorially impactful ways. The same is true of objects on display in museums, and here, as with any other constituent parts of the material world, their effects on me via my senses may occasionally be very significant indeed.
It is in such powerful encounters, however momentary they may be, that the object seems, in Elkins’s (1996) terms, to stare back. In literal terms, the phrase is obviously a rhetorical shorthand: we cannot say that objects gaze or have points of view in the way that we do. However, beyond the philosophical counter that, equally, we cannot say that in some sense incomprehensible to us they do not, the concept has utility. The colony’s subalterns and their historiographers found that they had to put their views and ways of knowing and acting into the vocabulary of the dominant other, the colonizers, if there were to be any hope of it being understood beyond the boundaries of their own group. Objects’ effects and influences, if their workings are to be comprehended from their position, similarly have to be rendered into an idiom we can understand (for which we could do worse than metaphor). Furthermore, the motif of the returned gaze, the two-way stare of curiosity and wonderment or disbelief, is one which readily conjures up a sense of being discomposed, bewildered, or perturbed. Even at a metaphorical level, however, some will balk at the idea of the object’s gaze or point of view as anthropomorphic and thus, ultimately, anthropocentric. To use such person-oriented language in an attempt to decenter the human subject and see how the nexus of relationships in the material world works from where the object is positioned, objectors may argue, seems, contradictorily, to bring people right back to the center because of its apparent emphasis on human processes. Yet why should it be any more anthropocentric to think of objects as having points of view than not having them, given that, for an object and, say, a museum visitor, just as for colonized and colonizer, precisely how “point of view” is characterized will differ? The colonizer who considered the colonized to have no point of view, even where the latter was not easily rendered or understood in the colonizer’s idiom, was guilty of cultural superiority and ignorance; are we perhaps also guilty, if we fail to consider person–object encounters from multiple perspectives? Prosopopoeia is the ascription
