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.
By:
Janice Baker
Imprint: Routledge
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions:
Height: 234mm,
Width: 156mm,
Spine: 13mm
Weight: 340g
ISBN: 9781472438980
ISBN 10: 1472438981
Pages: 152
Publication Date: 06 September 2016
Audience:
College/higher education
,
General/trade
,
Primary
,
ELT Advanced
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active
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
Janice Baker is a lecturer in the School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia.
Reviews for Sentient Relics: Museums and Cinematic Affect
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
