School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts Department of Communication and Cultural Studies Affect and Desire: Museums and the Cinematic Janice Baker This thesis is presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Curtin University of Technology April 2010 Contents Acknowledgements Abstract Introduction 1 1 Critical Theory and the New Museology 10 2 Didactic Affect and Traditional History 44 3 Toward Non-discursive Affect 81 4 Delirious Affect 106 5 Show Time! Museums in Film 136 6 Coda 180 Works Cited 194 Bibliography 206 Acknowledgements Thank you to my inspirational supervisors, Dr Ron Blaber and Associate Professor Andrea Witcomb, for the delirious, collaborative line of flight. Thank you Dr Deborah Hunn. Thanks to the graduate community (war-machine) in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University. Special thanks to Lezli-An Barrett and Bruce Finlayson. This doctoral research was achieved with the financial assistance of an Australian Postgraduate Award. Abstract The museum continues to be broadly framed in the critical literature in terms of its Enlightenment legacy and related knowledge/power relations. To contend with this authoritative institutional legacy, critical theory within the new museology operates to ensure museums are inclusive of class, race, gender, creed and identity. Yet this vigilant, didactic focus on inclusivity limits the ability of the museum to engage in transformative, affecting ways with the very idea of alterity that is fundamental to any inclusive agenda. As a theoretical investigation of museums and the cinematic, this thesis considers the potential for museum studies of engaging with affect and desire alongside the rational, inclusive museum. Two modes of affecting encounter are conceptualised to illuminate the resonance of affect in museums; the intentional use of didactic affect and the serendipitous intensity of non-discursive affect. Didactic affect arises from recognition and emotion, and is aligned to common sense notions of time, memory and history. However, affect is also generated outside didactic, discursive intent. This mode of affectivity assumes credibility in fictional museums presented in films; resoundingly these museums are sites of non-conformity, seduction and the irrational. Drawing on Gilles Deleuze’s interest in cinema images and the production of new thought, the thesis appraises fictional museums in films. Deleuze rejects Lacanian- influenced cinema analysis and the axiom that desire is pre-programmed within an already structured and repressed Oedipal unconscious. In the focus on repression and ideology, there is parallel between the limitation of cine-psychoanalytical approaches to museums in films and structuralist approaches to actual museums in the critical literature. An anti-Oedipal approach to the affective museum assembles visitors and artefacts not according to the subject/object dichotomy of structuralist modes of understanding but as desiring-machines capable of unfolding alternative ways of thinking the relation of the human and nonhuman. As such the thesis offers an ethico-aesthetic dimension for critical engagement with the field of museum studies. Introduction As an examination of museums and affect, this study offers a theoretical rather than a practical engagement with the field of museum studies. The project might be thought of as working in a recovery mode, for I argue that within the critical endeavour of the ‘new museology’ certain material things have never been properly understood. Sharon Macdonald and Paul Basu note that ‘in relation to exhibitions, we typically know rather little about how they are received’; they argue that ‘too much research remains rather crude’ (2007:21). My study is not empirical in the sense of collecting data to interpret how exhibitions are received, in the way that Macdonald and Basu seek to do in their excellent study of exhibitions. My intention lies elsewhere, in the ‘reception’ of the idea of the museum in theory through an approach that draws on the philosophical thinking of Gilles Deleuze and his collaborative work with Félix Guattari. The concepts of becoming-animal, desiring-machine, schizoanalysis, the time-image, and difference without repetition, are notions that I seek to adapt into possibilities of thinking about the museum. My aim is not to develop a ‘new’ new museology but to acknowledge the potential of what is already there — the potential of the museum to affect multiple subjectivities and complicate the common sense, binary formation of the human/nonhuman. In engaging with affect, desire and the museum, the study necessarily confronts the delimiting function of linear time. Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago note that ‘the persistence of the museum idea can aid us in not reducing the past to a form of the present and the other to a form of the same’ (2004:8). The essence of their observation, that the potential of the museum lies in temporal concerns, is central to 1 the ethical position I accord the museum. This is an ethic arising through affect to disturb the dogmatic thinking that gives certainty to traditional history, collective memory and the representations that structure the Western concept of time. This affective disturbance is the product of museum assemblages that transform the milieus that structure common sense thought. The product of these un-common milieus is desire; a desiring-machine directly sensing the multiplicity of durations that exist alongside the increasingly complex gauge of what it means to be human. Thus the museum, an institution both extolled and condemned as a bastion of Enlightenment humanism, is nevertheless a space where assemblages of un-reason are constantly formed and reformed, where durations and ‘speeds’ of the nonhuman are integral. In my exploration of the affecting museum, Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari do not provide a formal method of enquiry but instead open avenues for inventing new ways of thinking. With this invention in mind I offer the concepts of didactic and delirious affect to facilitate thinking about a proto museum that participates in transformation and becoming. One of the avenues to assist my stance is Deleuze’s Bergsonian approach to time, linked to the idea of the subject-as-multiple-subjectivities. Deleuze abandons the Kantian ‘passive self in terms of simple receptivity’ because this passive self assumes sensations already formed, ‘then merely relate[s these] to the a priori forms of their representation in space and time’ (1994a:98). Instead of a subject that repeats in linear space and time there is an alternative. In the doubling of time as virtual and actual, there are already two ‘present’ subjectivities. Deleuze writes, ‘the former and the present [time] form two series which coexist in the function of the virtual object which is displaced in them and in relation to itself, neither of these two series can any longer be designated as the original or the derived’. This allows for a 2 complex intersubjectivity ‘in which each subject owes its role and function in the series to the timeless position that it occupies in relation to the virtual object’ (1994a:105). Theorising multiple subjectivities in unfixed time opens lines of flight to the different durations of things; to the action of constantly moving thresholds or milieus of the animate and inanimate, a dynamic that is the specialty of the actual virtual museum. Lines of flight are the vital productions of life, as Claire Colebrook describes they are ‘the event: not another moment within time, but something that allows time to take off on a new path’ (2002a:57). In their call for inventions of thought Deleuze and Guattari, unlike structuralist and poststructuralist theorists, do not focus on ideology or repression. This said, Deleuze recognises it is naïve to pretend that ideological and other structures do not exist; he is aware these structures are the infrastructure of our era. What matters for Deleuze and Deleuze-Guattari is to advance whatever might arise to complicate established modes of being. They are un-fixers of things, interested in the invention of desiring-machines that are an outcome of neither ideology nor repression. The concept of desiring- machine is useful to my affirmation of a productive proto museum as it enables a theoretical shift away from the influence of Michel Foucault in museum studies. Deleuze-Guattari and Foucault differ quite significantly in relation to the concepts of desire and power. They give these concepts a different status; as Deleuze puts it, ‘lines of flight and movements of deterritorialisation, as collective historical determinations, do not seem to have any equivalent in Michel’s work’ (1997:np). For Foucault, desire in relation to power is about normalisation and discipline whereas for Deleuze desire has the ability to re-territorialise thought. Because of its re- territorialising capacity, desire has primacy over power. Desire, for Deleuze, is 3 ‘affect, as opposed to feeling; it is “haecceity” (individuality of a day, a season, a life), as opposed to subjectivity: it is event, as, opposed to thing or person’ (1997:np). Deleuze accords a different status to, or refutes, many of the notions considered axiomatic to critical theory. Given my argument that critical theory has been used in a delimiting way in museum studies, Deleuzean reconfigurations are useful to my stance. Deleuze rejects the implicit presupposition of thought he calls ‘a dogmatic, orthodox or moral image’ as it is in terms of this image