difference,” is that which is not programmed into humanist knowledge of the world, which, as discussed, is based on an assumption that knowledge of difference is contained in the binary opposition of us and them. Alterity is not the realm of “them,” and thus provides a site of departure from conventional binary forms of knowing. Removing the tree from our head to engage with the concept of that which we cannot know prevents the same story being told over and over. While it may seem paradoxical to claim meaning for that which is apparently without meaning, this is the tenor of what is required to think creatively outside the humanist paradigm. The commonsense opposition that is made between human and nonhuman worlds is the order of things in the humanist-oriented mind-set. In this context the term “is” reflects that something has already occurred and is being repeated. Yet this repetition has to be an illusion because, at a physical molecular level, everything is in constant flux. This state of flux, in a rational Kantian sense, gives expression to the type of engagement or “feeling” known as the sublime. It is outside the scope of this chapter to address the sublime in this context; however, suffice it to say that the tradition known as the sublime is an example of the use of reason to proscribe fixity to flux and to deem the unknowable as irrational (see Baker forthcoming).
Outside reason we venture into the fascination of abjection and monstrosity; into nonconformist spaces where it is perceived that danger lurks, spaces beyond the parameters of the “true” human or nonhuman, outside the binary humanist framing of a subject and object opposition. As soon as we venture into the murky waters of the “true,” we are faced with the problem of morality and another binary opposition between right and wrong. Yet, respect for the unknowable radical other has nothing to do with what is good or evil, although this is difficult to cogitate, given the hegemony of the humanist project. The nineteenth-century philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche observed that truth and morality are a prejudice much like astrology and alchemy. The humanist model of the museum in the academic literature is positioned to accord with the alchemy of truth rather than to venture (adventure) with alterity, and think the unknowable of difference outside reason. This is not a surprise given the sheer difficulty of thinking that which has not yet been thought. If something has not yet been thought, the concept “is” does not register; a situation which explains the Deleuzean project of always seeking to provoke new ways of thinking. This is why the style of Deleuzean writing can seem bewildering; it seeks that which is not yet. Instead of the term “is,” the conjunction “and” provides a connection between things that have neither a beginning nor an end. What this enables are thoughts outside the schemas of common sense, convention, and cliché. If we apply this conjunction of difference to a museum object such as Leonardo da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, we might share a moment with the highway blues. Or we might not. It depends on the line of thought generated by Bob Dylan’s lyric in the epigraph to this chapter, which is drawn from his song “Visions of Johanna.” For always our thoughts are multiple and lyrical; we are constantly forming experiential connections between unlike events taken from affects that may have impressed on us moments, years, or even decades before. These connections resonate beneath our cognitive radar, and yet are pivotal in our ongoing assemblage with things. In terms of meaning-making, that the Mona Lisa is a painting that transfixes some viewers tells us little. What does being transfixed by a smile actually do? That Mona “musta had the highway blues” impresses, at least for the author, with a subtle yet precise melancholy. Giving critical integrity to this type of nonlinear sensorial relation returns us to the difficulty for museums in engaging with the affective quality of cultural material outside the ideological realm.
Theory behaving badly
The need has arisen to complicate the prevailing notion of inclusivity in the context of the museum, and this can be facilitated, as suggested, by rupturing the strict boundaries that operate to define subjectivity. This is why a theoretical reconfiguration of how desire is generated is advantageous. In the ideological framing of critical theory, desire is understood as a lack, a law, and/or a structure of repression. But, as suggested, there is more to understanding desire, just as there are multiple assemblages that may be formed with the Mona Lisa. This is desire understood as an affective connection that operates prior to the emotional response that accords with any extant ideology in a representation, be this representation in an exhibition or any other text. This reconfiguration of desire is a shift from the viewer of an artwork as a knowing being to a state of becoming, a shift that moves analysis of encounters with museum objects from the certainty of “is” to “and … and … and …”
The attention given in museum theory to the rational, inclusive museum does not easily facilitate a critical approach to the rhizomatic museum. In the psychoanalytical and other dramas that are projected onto objects, what are advanced are meanings that are fixed in the past, in a cause-and-effect model of recognition that is based on a repetition of dogmatic images of thought. Unveiling the construction of dogma was the mission of Nietzsche who revealed that dogma or truth is a dominant perspective to explain human experience in a certain way; truth is a fiction with which we think about things in order to make meanings of the world. Gilles Deleuze’s work on difference, desire, and the rhizomatic connections between thoughts is a continuation of the Nietzschean project to reveal the illusory nature of the dogmatic images of our thought be this a thought of time as linear or of identity as fixed. It is this rhizomatic trajectory of thought that offers an expanded approach to encounters with objects of material culture in museums and hence the role of museums in affirming a progressive posthumanism.
In the context of theory on the museum, the chapter has been concerned with the complexity of affecting encounters in generating new ways of imagining interactions between human and nonhuman worlds. The space of new becomings will always benefit from a muting of subjectivity, a possibility affected through encounters with objects that do not operate within human notions of linear history and time. Prepersonal, precognitive affective intelligence is situated outside historical, linear time and is not limited to a common sense past, present, and future. Unfamiliar spaces and times have always been part and parcel of wondrous encounters with museum objects. Notwithstanding the rigor of critical analysis and the large and important body of work in museum studies since the advent of the new museology, the fictional notion of anarchical artifacts that cause havoc in the commonsense, rational museum excites us to the possibilities of our own transformation. After all, who wants a tree in their head?
References
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2 Baker, J. 2008. “Beyond the Rational Museum: Toward a Discourse of Inclusion.” International Journal of the Inclusive Museum 1(2): 23–29.
3 Baker, J. Forthcoming. Sentient Relics: Museums and Cinematic Affect. Farnham, UK: Ashgate.
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