Sentient Relics explores museums through cinema and challenges the dominant focus of museum theory as an inclusion–exclusion debate. The author responds to the Enlightenment, ‘rational’ museum of reason contrasting this with the museum of affect and reveals these ‘two museums’ operating alongside one another in a productive paradox. In structuralist-orientated museum theory the affective realm is often subsumed within the imperatives of Marxist theory and practice, identity politics, semiology and psychoanalysis. Sentient Relics, while valuing the insights of ideologically focused meaning-making, turns to the capacity of the affective realm of experience to transform the passive subject and object relation. The author uses museum encounters and cinematic affect to engage with problems of difference, temporality, emotion and the sublime. In so doing the book advances research in museum studies by demonstrating what is at stake in pragmatically working toward a deeper understanding of the museum socially, culturally and philosophically.
Acknowledgements
Illustrations
Introduction
1 Museum Trouble: Complicating the ‘new’ inclusion
Reading the gallery in silent film
The inclusion dilemma
A difficult heritage
The ‘new’ museology
Demanding objects
Museum ‘blockbusters’
2 Fissures and Cracks: Unfettering identity from the ‘new’ inclusion
Object autopoeisis
‘The crack’
Institutional autotelicity and rhizomatic objects
Re-invigorating the fetish
Actually, virtually becoming-animal
Curiously resistant
3 Outcasting Oedipus: The autonomy of affecting experience
The sublime as a discourse of loss
Ekstasis: From Longinus to Lyotard
What about the body!
Affectus: One unfolding substance
Cultural objects and the transmission of affect
The duality of affect
4 Show Time! Psychoanalysing the museum to death
Ghostbusters: Green slime and a dangerous portrait
Viewing pleasures: Phantasy or lines of flight
The Topkapi imaginary: The museum as phallic (m)other
Night at the Museum: The museum as object a
Horror museums: Beyond abjection
Post Lacan: Restoring affect to cinema
5 Dangerous Identity: Museums in Vertigo and the ‘truth’ of false objects
The mental-image: Inside the deceived self
The abyss or the power of eternal return
Signs of time: Escaping dusty semiology
The fatal spiral: Identity and obsession
6 Museums and cinematic time
Mischievous dream worlds: musicals in the gallery
Moving stillness: A thinking cinema
Marking time in La Jetée
Night and Fog: Difficult heritage and the time-image
Russian Ark: In any moment
The storm we call progress
Filmography
Bibliography
Index
Biography
Janice Baker is a lecturer in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia.
Sentient Relics is an astonishing book: a veritable crystalline artifact endlessly refracting countless impressions. Not only does every phenomenon she considers, whether cinematic or museological, foreground the theatricalities of affect, but Baker makes extraordinarily clear exactly why Plato was right about why mimetic artistry of any kind is deeply dangerous to the souls of citizens: precisely because it calls attention to the artifice, fabricatedness, and contingency of what any hegemonic power projects, promotes, and enforces as social, cultural or theological truth.
- Donald Preziosi, Professor Emeritus, UCLA, USA
