Museums and the ‘Death of Experience’: singularity, interiority and the outside

Abstract

This paper discusses a number of well-known critiques of the museum that seek to identify it as a problematic space for experience. The key argument put forward is that we can find within that analysis a critical geography around the museum that help us to understand the work that it does in relation to experience. Three spatial motifs are drawn from this analysis and discussed: the singular, the interior and the outside. The paper argues that museums since the nineteenth century have established a topos for experience based on a mimetic realism around the experience of both culture and history through the first two of these spatial expressions. Through them museums produces a fabulation of culture and history that supplements for the lack of topos for experience found within modern society as a whole. The latter spatiality – that of the outside – is found in the form of the absent–presence of the event in relation to the archiving principle of the museum, thereby continually unsettling the first two expressions and calling them into question. This dynamic reveals the museum as a space to critically think about what it does with experience and the importance of spatial analysis for that.

Keywords:

• museum
• archive
• experience
• social space

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank Gordon Fyfe, John Law, Rodney Harrison, Laurajane Smith, Graham Gilloch, Anne Cronin, John Urry, Beatriz Jaguaribe and three anonymous referees for their comments on drafts of this paper. This paper draws on sections in an earlier paper translated in Portuguese as O Tempo do Arquivo: a Decadência do Museu e a Poéticada História. Revista Eco-Pos 14(1): 268–290, It is been substantially revised and changed here as to constitute a new paper but acknowledgement is made to elements that appeared in that earlier work.