Another way of thinking about the role of the nondiscursive in museums comes from Russell Staiff, who was asked to contribute a piece theorizing museums from the perspective of tourism studies (Chapter 5). There, as we know from the work of theorists like Barbara Kirschenblatt-Gimblett (1998) and Coleman and Crang (2002), notions of performance and embodiment have become a strong focus of discussion which, when put together with work on mobilities (Urry 2007), articulates a similar interest in questions about the role of affect in people’s experiences of space and place. Staiff brings this body of work to thinking about museums, using it to displace commonsense notions of museums as places that pre-exist the encounter of visitors (tourists) with them. As in Witcomb’s discussion of the First Peoples exhibition, or Schorch’s description of the way in which his informants’ experiences in the museum changed their relation to the other (see below), meaning is produced as part of a process of encounter and is embodied in experience. For Staiff, these embodied experiences are best explained by what Liz Grosz (2001) calls “excess”–a term she uses to explain the way in which objects are always something more than their physical materiality–but also to point to the ways in which this aspect of their existence cannot be controlled–a point that brings us back to Dudley’s and Baker’s concerns. Museums, as both places and containers for objects, hold the promise of multiple connections waiting to be made, the majority of which cannot be predetermined as they rely on the specific conjunctures brought by those who, in viewing them, bring them to life.
Museums asagents forpromoting reflexive understanding
As a suite of ideas and discussions, these contributions also take our understanding of what museums are and what they can do in two important and related directions. The first is the idea that a visitor’s experience in a museum can be transformational rather than simply reinforcing established ideas. As a proposition this idea challenges the kinds of narratives first proposed in the new museology, all of which understood museums as playing a reinforcing role in the formation of identities–whether those of dominant groups or, under narratives of greater social inclusion, those of minority groups. This does not mean that questions concerning the relationship between display and the formation of subjectivity have disappeared, however, even if our interest in questions of access and representation have become more muted or have changed in their orientation. What is perhaps clearer now is that our questions are no longer simply about who is or is not represented in museums but more about how particular historical processes and experiences, which reverberate into present-day political debates, are dealt with in museums and, as we shall see in Laurajane Smith’s contribution (Chapter 22), are engaged with by visitors. Thus, rather than gender, race, or class, what predominates are questions concerning how we deal with difficult histories such as those of colonialism (Witcomb, Chapter 16; Geismar 10; Butler, 9); slavery (Smith, 22); contemporary issues such as human rights (Barrett, 6) and climate change (Cameron, 17; Dale-Hallett, Carland, and Fraser, 25; and Miller, 8); and whether or not museums should be involved in such attempts to contribute to public debate and, if so, whether they are successful.
In many ways, Shelley Butler’s chapter (9) is an account of the influence of theory, alongside specific historical conjunctures, on our arrival at this point. Asked by us to review the influence of a particular historical moment in the encounter between theory and museum practice–the critical reception of the Out of Africa exhibition–Butler provides us with a history of the attempt to develop a reflexive museological practice that was aimed at transforming people’s attitudes toward the other and, in the process, their own past. What she traces from the Out of Africa moment is the normalization of theoretical perspectives that were once regarded as alienating and confusing, though she argues that reflexive museological practices are more successful when closely aligned with specific movements and forms of activism, such as postcolonialism, urban diversity, and participatory models of democratic citizenship. While we have learned quite a bit from various experiments in reflexive museology about what works and what doesn’t, particularly in terms of the use of irony, what we now need are visitor studies that enable us to understand the extent to which this normalization has an afterlife in the lives of those who experience these exhibitions.
Visitor studies that might demonstrate whether or not such transformations occur, however, are only just emerging. As Smith (Chapter 22) puts it, we need to have far more understanding of visitors’ critical acuity than we currently do, a problem that she locates in our tendency to frame visitor studies with a concern with finding out what visitors learn rather than asking what meanings they create during their visit to the museum. For Smith, most visitors come to museums to “feel”–a desire that may express itself in a process of self-transformation or, more likely, in a process where they reinforce the feelings and beliefs they already have. Learning something new is, in most cases, not top of the list. In this context, the discussions by Witcomb on the emergence of a pedagogy of feeling and the emergence of an ambient aesthetics discussed by Radywyl, Barikin, Papastergiadis, and McQuire in Chapter 20 should also be kept in mind.
In this book we have two examples of possible methodologies and theoreticalapproaches for capturing what visitors feel–Philipp Schorch’s study and that of Laurajane Smith herself (Chapters 21 and 22 respectively). Both start from the premise, as do all of the contributions discussed so far, that any meanings produced in a museum are part of a process that occurs in the moment, that is embodied, and that is produced out of an encounter. Nothing is predetermined. Both pieces also point to the need to engage with the emotional aspects of this encounter and both argue that the result is an expression of a sense of self in relation to others. They differ, however, in their readings of the potential of museums to provide spaces that enable visitors to have transformative experiences in which their established sense of self in relation to others is questioned.
Schorch, who uses a narrative-hermeneutic approach and interviews only a few people at one museum but in much greater depth than Smith, and over a length of time, is interested not only in what meanings people produce out of their visit to museums but in how these meanings are produced through their encounter with the museum. In his reading of his informants’ accounts, people use museums to challenge themselves and question their values and belief systems. His findings need to be contextualized by the fact that he only interviewed “tourists,” and therefore those who were traveling to have experiences they could not have at home and were perhaps in a state where they were more prepared 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