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Museums and the Nostalgic Self

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 October 2016

Michael P. Levine*
Affiliation:
University of Western Australia

Abstract

The first part of this essay asks: What is the function, purpose and value of a museum? Has any museologist or philosopher given a credible account of philosophical problems associated with museums? Is there any set of properties shared by the diverse entities called museums? Overgeneralization is the principal problem here. The essay then examines a central kind of museum experience; one that invokes and relies upon nostalgia. I argue that the attraction of museums are varied but are best explained affectively and in terms of the orectic (appetitive, desiderative, wishing) rather than cognitively conatively (willing, deciding). Although this need not be taken as conflicting with the idea that museums are focused on scholarship, it is more consonant with the claim that exhibitions are central. Museums may at times both pique and satisfy our curiosity. However it is a mistake to see ‘curiosity’ as merely, or even primarily, a matter of cognition.

Type
Papers
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2016 

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References

1 Boym, Svetlana, ‘Nostalgia and Its Discontents’, The Hedgehog Review (2007), 18Google Scholar.

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5 Some support for this may be found in the fact that efforts to bring such organizations under some umbrella organization (Museums Victoria in Australia) directed by even broad common interests have at times failed.

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7 Ibid., 3.

8 Ibid., 9.

9 Beth Lord writes: ‘What are we to make of Michel Foucault's claim that the museum is a heterotopia? When reading Foucault's description of the heterotopia in his 1967 essay “Different Spaces”, we are left with the impression of something negative, uncanny, and disturbing: a heterotopia is a space of difference, a space that is absolutely central to a culture but in which the relations between elements of a culture are suspended, neutralized, or reversed’. Lord, Beth, ‘Foucault's Museum: Difference, Representation, and Genealogy’, Museum and Society 4/1 (2006), 1Google Scholar.

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11 Maleuvre, Museum Memories, op. cit., 3–4.

12 Silver, ‘Review of Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century’, op. cit., 269.

13 Ibid., 269.

14 My thanks to Gary Kemp here, and for comments throughout.

15 Ibid., 271.

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17 Silver, ‘Review of Museum Philosophy for the Twenty-First Century’, op. cit., 268.

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19 My thanks to Amy Barrett-Lennard, director of PICA (Perth Institute of Contemporary Art) for this point.

20 Ibid., 91.

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22 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, The Primacy of Perception, translated by Edie, James M. (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 1516 Google Scholar, quoted in Carrier, ‘Remembering the Past’, op. cit., 63.

23 Carrier, ‘Remembering the Past’, op. cit., 63–64.

24 Ibid., 64.

25 http://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/nostalgia. ‘1: the state of being homesick: homesickness. 2: a wistful or excessively sentimental yearning for return to or of some past period or irrecoverable condition; also: something that evokes nostalgia’. Tamas Pataki (correspondence) usefully distinguishes between the affective (emotion, feeling etc.), the orectic (appetitive, desiderative, wishing) and conative (willing, deciding etc.).

26 In the Freudian scheme of things there are three general ways in which the ego copes with and deflects the instinctual drives of the id (drives that demand satisfaction in one way or another): by repression (blocking); by substitutive satisfaction or wish-fulfilment (which involves distortion); and by sublimation. Melanie Klein's notion of reparation can also be added here. My thanks to Tamas Pataki (correspondence).

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31 See Levine, Michael, ‘Freud's Aesthetics: Artists, art and psychoanalysis’, in Boag, Simon (ed), Psychoanalysis and Philosophy of Mind (London: Karnac, 2015), 137162 Google Scholar.

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33 Freud, S. (1916–1917), ‘The Paths to the Formation of Symptoms’, in Strachey, J. (ed), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Volume 16) Google Scholar, op. cit., 377.

34 Segal, Dream, Phantasy and Art, op. cit., 63.

35 For example, in Fry, R., The Artist and Psychoanalysis (London: Hogarth Press, 1924)Google Scholar.

36 Fraiberg, ‘Freud's Writings on Art’, op. cit., 94–95. [Cf. Freud, S., A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis (Garden City, NY: Garden City, 1943), 328Google Scholar.]

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38 ‘Neurosis is not a condition of artistic creativity.… In Freud's view the artistic gift is as likely to be used for the purpose of avoiding neurosis as it is for augmenting it’. Ibid., 94.

39 See Pataki, Tamas, ‘Introduction’, in Levine, Michael and Pataki, Tamas (eds), Racism in Mind (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2004), 17Google Scholar. In very general terms racism is a defensive reaction of some sort, related to denial, repression, guilt, self-hatred, narcissism, sexual frustration and rooted further still in problematic aspects associated with specific character types. As Young-Breuhl argues, all character types have some predominant form of prejudice associated with them. See Young-Bruehl, Elisabeth, The Anatomy of Prejudices (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1996), 200252 Google Scholar.

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41 Fraiberg, ‘Freud's Writings on Art’, op. cit., 95.

42 Ibid., 82.

43 Sterba, R., ‘The Problem of Art in Freud's Writings’, in The Psychoanalytic Quarterly 9/25 (1940), 263Google Scholar. See Freud, S. (1907), ‘Creative Writers and Day-Dreaming’, Strachey, J. (ed), The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud (Volume 9), op cit., 141154 Google Scholar. Sterba says ‘The possibility offered by the work of art of an identification with the hallucinatory wish fulfilment – on the basis of kindred wishes – one can even say, the urge of the work of art to this identification, must be considered as a condition of the work of art.’ Sterba, ‘The Problem of Art in Freud's Writings’, op. cit., 264.

44 Ibid., 261.

45 Ibid., 268.