Exhibition, difference and the logic of culture

Abstract

A good deal of contemporary museum theory and practice has concerned itself with the ways in which museum environments - and the social and symbolic exchanges that take place within them - might be refashioned so as to transform museums into “differencing machines” committed to the promotion of cross-cultural understanding, especially across divisions that have been racialized. The question I want to pose here is whether this aspiration involves a series of collateral changes that, taken together, add up to a more general change in how museums operate and their situation within the cultural field. To put the point more rhetorically, does the conception of the museum as a “differencing machine” aspire to new forms of dialogism that place earlier notions of exhibition into question? I want also to review, and qualify, the concept of the “exhibitionary complex” by arguing the need to view the operations of this complex in the broader perspective of what, for the purposes of my argument here, I shall call the “logic of culture.” Before I come to either of these questions, however, I want to worry away a little at what is involved in pursuing these concerns in a context defined by a conjunction of “public cultures” and “global transformations” and the ways in which these evoke the concepts of globalization and the public sphere (or spheres) even while distancing themselves from such concepts. The consequences for how we engage with the changing role of museums can vary significantly depending on how each of these terms is interpreted and how the relations between them are viewed. And each has the potential to significantly misdirect inquiry