The museum as screen
Deleuze engages with film images for their ability to move viewers affectively beyond their fixed self. This he considers an emancipatory experience, a new relation with thought that shifts the viewer outside the parameters of passive subjectivity. Given this power, it is interesting to consider what museums and their collections do, as affect images on the screen.
The “on-screen” museum that we encounter in feature films is a complex institution, a site of illicit and uncontrollable desires, and nonhuman becomings. It is a space characterized by excess, a kind of un-museum in that it undoes the rational institution of the critical literature. Museums in movies often become time machines, with artifacts from their collections acting as catalysts for conjunctions between people and the world that are neither linear nor reasonable, but complicating and desirable (Baker forthcoming). The cinematic museum complicates the model of the museum as a mausoleum frozen in time. We see this museum recur across a variety of film genres, for example, in psychological thrillers like Vertigo (dir. Alfred Hitchcock, 1958) and The Stendhal Syndrome (dir. Dario Argento, 1996), in Hollywood blockbusters, and in art house cinema, notably Alexander Sokurov’s Russian Ark (2002), filmed entirely in St. Petersburg’s State Hermitage Museum. Insuch films, museum objects are frequently responsive, or seem to be responsive, to the surrounding environment and, as a consequence of this “sentient” awareness, all manner of unexpected assemblages are formed. In Night at the Museum artifacts come to life each night and, by doing so, eventually restore to visitors the museum’s sense of wonder, while in L.A. Story (dir. Mick Jackson, 1991) iconic artworks in the Los Angeles County Museum of Art acknowledge Harris Telemacher’s (Steve Martin) performance art with sage-like approval as he rollerblades with gravitas and panache through the museum’s galleries.
There is object anarchy at work in museums. The reciprocity between artifacts and people can be considered to overcome what Deleuze and Guattari conceive as the deadening stasis that is associated with arboreal fixity. This is another biological analogy in which the passive acceptance of common sense clichés and conventions is likened to being “root bound.” They express this state of “stunted growth” via the rather startling concept that “many people have a tree growing in their head” (2004, 17). The interconnectivity between people and objects in museums in movies tacitly acknowledges the possibilities that arise from unexpected encounters. In actual museums the result is obviously not a tangible event such as a painting that speaks, a dinosaur that walks, or an Egyptian mummy that suffers from acute melancholia, but moments of otherness that reflect our myriad interactions with nonhuman worlds.
In considering affective interaction, I am reminded of visiting an Australian industrial whaling museum with its exhibits of whaling artifacts and implements. Although the dreadful stench of flensing and boiling blubber had ceased with the end of whaling, the site, known as Whale World, pungently and sensorially imparts that, in order to become more human, we somehow need to become less so. Interaction with art can also generate affects that take us outside normative understandings through new becomings that move us beyond the boundaries and limits of self-fixation. The nonhuman world is within us. In considering the various deformations of bodies in a recent (2013) exhibition of Francis Bacon paintings, for example, we see that Bacon made his paintings to affect our sense organs and sense experiences. Ernst van Alphen explains how bodies in Bacon’s paintings exhibit the kind of responses that the viewer is also intended to have. “The dynamics materialised on the canvas demonstrate perception not as a process by which the subject controls his world, but as a process in which the body disintegrates” (van Alphen 2012, 73).
It is an exciting time for museum theory. Museums are poised to participate in critical engagements about just what it is that constitutes and differentiates Homo sapiens, opening avenues for thinking beyond the fixed schemas of traditional humanism and affirming nonhuman becomings and radical otherness. This is not an argument for a wild relativism or a corporeal disembodiment of the human from its body; rather, it looks toward a discourse that acknowledges the productive potential of desire. The view that desire is a productive force returns the discussion to the limitation that arises if affective intelligence is considered to be fixed within the ideological realm. Within the frameworks of ideology, desire is understood as deriving from a repression or an unconscious lack rather than being autonomous and hence a force for change. This is why opening a theoretical space where the transference of affects can be critically examined can only really become thinkable once the relationship between subjectivity and desire, as currently defined, is rethought. A qualification may be useful here, provided in Lawrence Grossberg’s proviso that “The deconstruction of the subject does not deny that we experience ourselves as subjects but rather that this experience can be taken at face value” (1997, 62). There will probably always be a need to acknowledge the operation of some kind of symbolic order to avoid what Julia Kristeva (1986) views as a seemingly subjectless field of signifying play that relativizes all things, and that extolls an undesirable psychotic realm. This unhealthy cognitive realm is not the space of affective intelligence. The mutual space of transference outside fixed subjectivity accommodates a rhizomatic approach to history, time, and identity and a theoretical space from which to accept radical otherness. The crux of this engagement is to think the possibility of difference without repetition, a difference that is utterly unfamiliar in that it has not yet been thought.
There is a paradigmatic gulf between this affective approach to desire and difference in relation to museum objects, and critical voices that seek to transcend modern and postmodern modes of address. The latter is exemplified in Marcia Brennan’s (2010) study of mysticism and the modern museum which suggests there may be a lack of spiritual awareness in contemporary curatorship. The affective museum veers from such calls for a return to traditional humanism as this approach cannot accommodate the potential of radical change. Traditional humanism remains fixed to a binary relation in which the human spirit is elevated over nonhuman entities. It is unable to theorize a posthuman subject or a postanthropocentricm that is based on nondualistic understandings of human and nonhuman relations. Posthumanism is described by Rosi Braidotti as “the historical moment that marks the end of opposition between Humanism and anti-humanism and traces a different discursive framework, looking more affirmatively toward new alternatives” (2013, 37). Within this different discursive framing, a posthuman museum can be productively theorized via the affective turn that has occurred within theory. This turn registers the merging of boundaries between categories known as “natural” and “cultural” as a result of scientific and technological advances. The museum is an institution poised to respond to the sway of lives that are increasingly influenced by screens, sensory design, and the “science” of neuromarketing. These phenomena increasingly pace consumer moods through a politics of the body that is based in the realm of virtual affectivity. It is this virtual consumption of affective experience that makes engagement at a theoretical level with the serendipitous, “delirious” impact of actual material culture in museums a particularly timely realm of inquiry.
Beyond the