TEORIE VĚDY / THEORY OF SCIENCE / XXXVI / 2014 / 1 ////// tematická studie / thematic article /////////////////////// THE MUSEUM ON THE EDGE OF FOREVER Abstract: Th is article argues that understanding any space or site relies on a knowledge of its fourth dimension – the timescape. It will explore this by situating the investigation in the museum – a place of heightened contrivance which could easily be shallowly interpreted as "mere style". It will defend a new method of investigating museum temporality which combines both phenomenology and literary theory, and will replace the idea of geo-epistemology with geochronic epistemology: an understanding of context and situation which takes on time as well as spatial location. In so doing, it moves on from notions of the museum as a place out of time, situating it in the networks of meaning, power and politics in which we have lived and are living. Th us, "the whole space of the exhibition" as Lyotard said, "becomes the remains of all time": the Museum on the Edge of Forever. Keywords: museum; time; literary phenomenology; geochronic epistemology Muzeum na okraji věčnosti Abstrakt: Tento článek pracuje s argumentem, že porozumění jakémukoliv prostoru či místu se odvíjí od znalosti jeho čtvrtého rozměru – krajiny času. Toto tvrzení probádává tak, že zasazuje výzkum do muzea – místa se zvýšenou mírou machinace, již by bylo snadno povrchně interpretovat jako „pouhý styl". Článek obhajuje novou metodu zkoumání temporality muzea, jež v sobě kombinuje fenomenologii i literární teorii a nahrazuje myšlenku geoepistemologie geochronickou epistemologií: porozuměním kontextu a situaci, jež je umístěno jak v čase, tak v prostoru. Tím, že tak činí, se článek posunuje od pojetí muzea jakožto místa mimo čas a zasazuje jej do sítí významů, moci a politiky, v nichž jsme žili a stále žijeme. Takto se „veškerý prostor výstavy", jak poznamenal Lyotard, „stává pozůstatkem všeho času: muzeem na okraji věčnosti. Klíčová slova: muzeum; čas; literární fenomenologie; geochronická epistemologie JENNIFER WALKLATE 95 Halstead Road, Mountsorrel, Loughborough Leicestershire, LE12 7HE, United Kingdom email / jenny.walklate@gmail.com 50 Jennifer Walklate Introduction Museums are sites of epistemological complexity and contestation. Th ey are both materially arranged spaces located in geographic place, and spaces of memory and cultural cognition, existing in the minds of the designers and viewers, and depicting lifeworlds disparate in space and time. In a museum, a spatial encounter is both corporeal and cognitive, and that cognitive element is bound up in the remembrance of things past and the personal production of new knowledge. Museums have been called sites of memory, ruins, traces, dreamscapes, and heterotopias. Th e following paper will use these sites to argue for the value of a particular method of reading, investigating and analysing sites which exist in both space and time. It will begin by defi ning geochronic epistemology and the concept of the timescape, commenting upon the complexity of museum timescapes in particular and critiquing the theoretical stances which have already been deployed in attempts to analyse the ontological status of, and construct an epistemological framework for, the museum site. It will then use and critically refl ect upon some of the analytical tools of literary phenomenology, which this paper will promote as an alternative to these limited analyses. Th e fi nal part of the paper will make a general statement about the value of the method and how it does not, in fact, merely make recourse to "styles and lingering preconceptions." Secondly, it will consider the implications of these new methods, in particular how they argue for the importance of temporality as a perspective from which to explore the museum and, by extension, any site in space. Context: Academic Background Geoepistemology is that philosophy and understanding which is produced when a geographical location becomes the organizing perspective for the production and framing of knowledge, environments, subjectivities and narratives.1 Geochronic epistemology requires the addition of a time-based 1 Claudio CANAPARO, Geo-epistemology: Latin America and the Location of Knowledge. Bern: Peter Lang AG – International Academic Publishers 2009, p. 21. I would like to thank my anonymous reviewers for their kind words and help, my supervisor, Simon J. Knell, for his input on my thesis, my examiners, Jonathan Hale and Ross Parry for their time and eff ort, and the museums I use here for putting up with me wandering around them. 51 The Museum on the Edge of Forever element: a temporal situation which functions similarly and in parallel to the emplaced geographic frame. Th is temporal situation has two forms. Th e fi rst we shall term the "historical": that is, a defi nitive era characterised by consistent dominant attitudes in culture and fashion or similarly aff ected by political events. Th is "historical place" may well, but need not, precisely align with specifi c geographical areas, and the idea of such a place adds a new level of complexity to the idea of a geographically situated epistemology. Th e second we shall term the "contextual and located". Th is temporal situation is produced in the interactions between the corporeal objects within an environment and the minds which encounter and interpret it. Another name for this temporal situation is the "timescape", and we shall explore the nature of timescapes, and how and where they are made manifest and defi ned, in a following section. Sites of Four Dimensions: Time in Space Why is temporality so important to the understanding of place and space? Because it is a fundamental element of every part of human life and creation,2 being the glue which binds together physical phenomena.3 It is particularly important now that there are increasing numbers of "virtual" places, and geographical distances are more easily surmounted than those of diff erent time zones. Th e time or moment of a meeting or encounter is equally, though diff erently, as important as the place. In philosophical, scientifi c and cultural study, ideas regarding time have long been related in spatial terms. Th e way in which we understand space also infl uences the way in which we conceptualize the nature and structure of time – with a beginning and ending, or being comprised of a particular shape.4 For Immanuel Kant, both space and time were forms of human sensibility5: therefore, both must be interrogated if we are to understand the epistemologies of site and place. But there is also a deeply political and ethical element in this. Temporality and time are also means of exercising control over others. In Revolution2 Barbara ADAM, Time and Social Th eory. Cambridge: Polity Press 1990, p. 5. 3 John URRY, Global Complexity. Cambridge: Polity Press 2003, p. 7. 4 Robin LE POIDEVIN, Travels in Four Dimensions: Th e Enigmas of Space and Time. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2003, pp. 73–88. 5 Paul GUYER and Allen W. WOOD, "Introduction." In: Immanuel KANT, Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 1998. 52 ary France, for instance, traditional time was obliterated in law, replaced with a Republican system which decimalised calendars and clocks.6 Th is politically motivated attempt to cleanse and regenerate the order of things, to totally break from what was perceived as the corruption of the past, attempted to control the social body and became closely associated with the Terror and secularisation. It had many active opponents, and its twelve year reign came to an end when Napoleon reinstated the traditional Gregorian calendar in 1806.7 Time, then, is political. It is also culturally signifi cant. Temporal conceits drastically infl uence the ability of humans to understand each other: Evans Pritchard found it diffi cult to communicate with the Nuer, whom he studied, largely because their temporal ontology was very diff erent than his own.8 In anthropological and ethnographic terms, time is also representational: the idea of the ethnographic present, in which writings of anthropologists depict an unchanging inviolable and oft en apparently backward culture as it would have been prior to contact, is part of a project of exoticisation and even demonization of the Other, historically undertaken by anthropologists from the Western world.9 Th e tense used to describe a culture determines how active, and how real, that culture appears to a reader or observer. Time and space are fundamentally allied. Both are culturally signifi cant and politically powerful. Th at is why, in any epistemological conception of environment, one cannot be understood without recognition of the other. Four Dimensional Landscape: Th e Timescape Given the fundamental twinning of time and space, each and every spatial environment is geochronic: that is, the scape which it produces is not just one of land, sound or sensory experience, but one of time – a timescape. For Barbara Adam, the timescape is a "temporary temporal environment, built from the shift ing interactions of entities and matter".10 Yet the timescape 6 Eviatar ZERUBAVEL, "Th e French Republican Calendar: A Case Study in the Sociology of Time." American Sociology Review, vol. 42, 1977, no. 6, pp. 868–877. 7 Matthew SHAW, French Revolution: Th e Republican Calendar, 1789 Year XIV. Woodbridge: Royal Historical Society – Th e Boydell Press 2011, pp. 52–56. 8 E.E. EVANS-PRITCHARD, "Nuer Time-Reckoning." Africa: Journal of the International African Institute, vol. 12, 1939, no. 2, pp. 189–216. 9 Johannes FABIAN, Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press 1983, p. 80. 10 Barbara ADAM, Timescapes of Modernity: Th e Environment and Invisible Hazards. London: Routledge 1998, p. 10. Jennifer Walklate 53 is no passive emergent thing, but something productive, manipulating the physical world and the human imaginings of it. Like place, the timescape is that which arises alongside and within the shift ing relationships between consciousnesses and the experiential world. Holy and Enchanted: Eulogising Museum Temporality Th e Museum and its timescape have been conceptualized within many disciplines of thought and equally numerous ideological frames. In general, they have been understood as sites of temporal peculiarity, but the methods by which this conceptualization has come to pass, and indeed the conceptualization itself, are fraught with presumption and lack in subtlety. Th ese explorations oft en eulogise the Museum and make it, and its informational and social authority, inviolate, so relying on "lingering preconceptions" about the position of museums in a social hierarchy. Th e presumption that museums occupy an honorifi c position in the hierarchy of spaces should not go unquestioned, and we cannot assume that they are any more special than other socially produced sites. Works which touch upon the idea of museum temporality fall roughly into two broad categories – the "historic" or "memorial", and the "Othering" or "heterotopic". Both are limiting and have problematic philosophical and ethical implications, and if the museum timescape is to be understood on its own terms, the assumptions each of these categories brings must be interrogated and, if necessary, dispensed with. Museums may be understood as historic or memorial on both personal and collectively social levels. In Gaynor Kavanagh's Dream Spaces, they are presented as sites of provocation in which personal pasts are recalled as a result of encounter.11 Th ey have also been framed as storehouses of memory and history by writers such as Susan A. Crane, who understood the museum as an archive of sorts.12 For Huyssen, such an archive is crucial to provide a temporal anchor in a world increasingly complex and mercurial, as well as sites for the resurrection of stories and selves.13 11 Gaynor KAVANAGH, Dream Spaces: Memory and the Museum. Leicester: Leicester University Press 2000. 12 Susan A. CRANE, Museums and Memory. Stanford: Stanford University Press 2000. 13 Andreas HUYSSEN, Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia. London – New York: Routledge 1995. The Museum on the Edge of Forever 54 Yet to understand museums as simply "temporally retroactive"14 is to ignore the richness of their relationship to temporality and their powerful intertextualities. It is also to confuse time with history. More problematically, however, the focus on the past suggests an absolutism – that the truth of history is fi xed. Th is can reinforce the stories we tell to make ourselves feel safe and special, but it stops us recognising that human history is not a planned teleology, but a sequence of related, yet ultimately arbitrary accidents. If the museum is to become more of a forum than a preacher, then the academic discourse around it must cease to talk as if it were the dogmatic arbiter of an absolute and objective historic truth. In itself this is enough to support a call for the reconsideration of museum temporality. But it is by no means the only reason to do so. Equally morally and philosophically problematic is the Othering of the museum site. Museum theorists have long designated museums as special sites, as places diff erent from the outside world, encouraged in part by Foucauldian ideas of heterotopic spaces. Heterotopias are "eff ectively enacted utopias",15 real sites which are, nonetheless, outside and refl ective of reality, areas with physical presence which, from their position of removal, comment upon and throw into sharp relief aspects of the everyday world in which human beings live out their lives. In terms of their temporal characteristics, these fall into two broad types. First, there are heterotopias of transience and the ephemeral, those of holiday and festival, where time is irrelevant. Secondly there are those in which time lies heavy, accrues and mounts up, adding layer upon layer to an indefi nitely increasing pile. It is this second kind which, Foucault argues, museums have become.16 Th ere is some justifi cation for Foucault's designation and it has certainly been widely taken up in museological theory: Tony Bennet uses the concept extensively in his canonical text Th e Birth of the Museum.17 Nonetheless, to accept this kind of Foucauldian position uncritically would be academic laziness. Just how valid is it as a concept? 14 Jean-Louis DEOTTE, "Rome, the Archetypal Museum, and the Louvre, the Negation of Division." In: PREZIOSI, D. – FARAGO, C., (eds.), Grasping the World: Th e Idea of the Museum. Aldershot: Ashgate 2004, p. 59 (51–65). 15 Michel FOUCAULT – Jay MISKOWIEC, "Of Other Spaces." Diacritics, vol. 16, 1986, no. 1, p. 24 (22–27). 16 Ibid., p. 26. 17 Tony BENNET, Th e Birth of the Museum: History, Th eory, Politics. Abingdon: Routledge 1995. Jennifer Walklate 55 Th e word museaum has its etymological origins in the Classical world, as a place consecrated to the Muses, somewhere private to go to contemplate and gain insight into the mysteries of existence.18 Th ese contemplative heterotopias are very varied in kind and use and with developing technologies they are becoming varied in form as well. Places of spiritual signifi cance, churches, mosques, temples, sacred and ancient sites; mausolea, graveyards, memorials; urban sites such as department stores; books and DVDs; even the internet. All these, alongside museums and libraries, are experiential phenomena somehow removed from the quotidian. In museological literature too, museums are set apart, accorded special positions, and this is made manifest both practically and theoretically. So oft en in museum publicity visitors are asked to "come on a journey", or "step back in time", to step into a physical building in which objects from diverse times and origins are brought together in a sequence and layout which is unlike that encountered in the outside world. Much scholarship has been devoted to this subject, one notable publication being David Carr's A Place Not A Place.19 In this work, the disjunction between the museums and other places is made explicit. However, overemphasising the heterotopia fl attens the complexities and unique characters of the multifarious institutions that exist around the world. For museums come in many forms and are part of many academic fi elds, oft en inextricably linked to the history and existence of particular disciplines. Th ere are anthropological and ethnographic museums, art museums, natural history museums, geological museums, technological museums, local history museums and more. On a basic level the subject matter and mission of each discipline varies, and each individual museum has unique characteristics based on such independent variables as location, staff culture, local community and fi nancial status. Museums vary in age, in architecture, in policy, in political standing and in geography. Beth Lord demonstrated that it is reductive to lump all of these museum-forms under one noun, and even more so to place them unthinkingly alongside other in18 Paula FINDLE, "Th e Museum: Its Classical Etymology and Renaissance Genealogy." In: PREZIOSI, D. FARAGO, C., (eds.), Grasping the World: Th e Idea of the Museum. Aldershot: Ashgate 2004, p. 161 (159–191). 19 David CARR, A Place Not A Place: Refl ection and Possibility in Museums and Libraries. Oxford: Alta Mira Press 2006. The Museum on the Edge of Forever 56 stitutions and constructs with diff erent social purposes and values without questioning the aspects which make them alike and distinct.20 Assuming a complete disassociation between the museum and the outside world is impossible. Visitors do not come into the museum as tabula rasa; they bring with them their own social backgrounds and implicit assumptions. While a museum experience may indeed change the mental confi guration of a visitor, the institution does not hold total power. Th e idea of the museum as a dissociative space cannot be maintained in the face of contemporary conceptions of the museum as a place of inclusion, cohesion, and identity creation, nor in a world where the boundaries between the real and the virtual are becoming ever more blurred. Th e plethora of places in which one might step outside physical reality is vast in number: in regard to stepping outside of the mundane, museums are no more special than videogames. Foucault was wrong in his statement that museums were "immune to [... the] ravages" of time.21 Th ey are fi lled with progression and change. Buildings suff er structural damage. Collections are subject to pests and natural physical deterioration. Th e people within an institution come and go, and they themselves age and change. Fashion fl uctuates in design, technology and theory, exhibitions close and change: museums are just as bound to temporal considerations as the rest of the world. Th ese are not timeless institutions, but living, breathing and dynamic. To attempt to understand the temporality of museum space without resorting to history or to a sense of Otherness and uncritical Foucauldianism, my PhD thesis proposed a new analytical methodology, and tested it upon three museums: the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology, the Pitt Rivers Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography, and the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. It is this method which is outlined below. Literary Phenomenology in the Abstract Literary phenomenology is based upon two complementary investigative methods: phenomenology and literature. Th e fi rst, an immersive, embodied approach to spatial analysis, provides the actuality of experience. Th e second, taken from various methods of studying literature, provides the 20 Beth LORD, "Foucault's Museum: Diff erence, Representation, and Genealogy." Museum and Society, vol.4, 2006, no. 1, p. 4 (1–14). 21 FOUCAULT – MISKOWEIC, "Other Spaces," p. 26. Jennifer Walklate 57 abstract, but solidly intellectual frames for the structuring and communication of that very experience. Both elements were vital in the performance of temporal analysis. One cannot analyse a space in which one has not been, but neither can analysis occur without a frame to produce communicable knowledge from physical experience. To combine the literary with the embodied is, in the interpretation of time and space, to fold the self into a relationship with the object of analysis to produce a reading which is grounded, powerful, and unique to that site, at that time. Th ere has long been a relationship between spatial phenomena and literature. Henri Bergson recognized the importance of rhythm in architecture,22 and Gaston Bachelard's spatial poetics took this idea to a new, far more abstract phenomenological level.23 Th ere are those who consider the worlds of literary and cultural theory to have taken a spatial turn in the middle of the twentieth century, producing notions of "literary geography" and "geocriticism" as well as an increased focus upon the spatialised aspects of writing, reading, and theorising:24 Maurice Blanchot's seminal text Th e Space of Literature is exemplary of the last.25 Th is relationship of texts to space has played out in studies of material culture, including Tilley's analysis of prehistoric art as textual form,26 and increasingly in those of museums and heritage sites: Sophia Psarra uses narrative ideas to explore a diverse multitude of heritage sites and museums27 and the recently published Museum Making explores the relationship between spatial design and a loosely defi ned idea of narrative.28 Th e methodology presented in this paper takes the use of literature further, using its very strategies and creative techniques to build a much more concrete mesh of page and place. 22 Henri BERGSON, Time and Free Will. New York: Macmillian 1959 [1910], pp. 15–16. 23 Gaston BACHELARD, Th e Poetics of Space. Boston: Beacon Press 1994 [1964]. 24 Robert T. TALLY JR., Spatiality. London: Routledge 2013. 25 Maurice BLANCHOT, Th e Space of Literature. Lincoln – London: University of Nebraska Press 1982. 26 Christopher TILLEY, Material Culture and Text: Th e Art of Ambiguity. London: Routledge 1991. 27 Sophia PSARRA, Architecture and Narrative: Th e Formation of Space and Cultural Meaning. Abingdon: Routledge 2009. 28 Suzanne MACLEOD – Laura HOURSTON HANKS – Jonathan HALE, Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions. London: Routledge 2012. The Museum on the Edge of Forever 58 Aspect One: Phenomenological Investigation Phenomenology is a philosophical discipline whose central concern is the study of the structures of consciousness and experience. It allows for us to explore and describe subjective experience in a critically introspective manner, and has produced seminal works on both time and space. Heidegger's Being and Time and Bachelard's Poetics of Space were particularly infl uential foundations for the development of this methodology. Time, like space, is part of our immediate experience, but whilst we have sensory organs with which to encounter the physical world, we have no equivalent organ for the temporal. So we must rely upon a combination of all modes of bodily and cognitive perception29 mind and body fully enmeshed, and situated in place. For Heidegger, time and temporal experience is revealed in the actions of the everyday,30 and to explore a place, human beings tend to walk. Th e walk as cultural and anthropological investigative technique has a long history – Ingold and Vergunst claim that it has provenance stretching back to Mauss' 1934 essay "Techniques of the Body".31 Th e "phenomenological walk", however, is an active process in which the walker attempts to strip away the mediated, representative aspects of landscape, and describe perception from fi rst principles, noting the experience as they go through writing, recorded speech, or fi lm.32 It is also considered to be an artistic and enunciative practice, a way of "tactically remaking" space. 33 It thus takes into account the continuously mutable nature of temporal environments, the naturally peripatetic museum encounter, and the critical use of the body to mediate between thought and the physical world34 in a highly temporal way. For my PhD, I tested the phenomenological walk as a method of reading the museum timescape throughout the summer of 2010 at New Walk Museum and Newarke Houses in Leicester in the United Kingdom. But the results lacked any kind of structural consistency, notes being taken on different days, in diff erent bodily and mental states, and contingent physical 29 ADAM, Timescapes, p.55. 30 Martin HEIDEGGER, Being and Time, London: SCM Press Ltd 1962, p. 277. 31 Tim INGOLD – Jo Lee VERGUNST, (eds.) Ways of Walking: Ethnography and Practice on Foot. Aldershot: Ashgate 2008, p. 1. 32 Christopher TILLEY, Body and Image: Explorations in Landscape Phenomenology 2. Walnut Creek: Left Coast Press 2008, p. 269. 33 Sarah PINK – Phil HUBBARD – Maggie O'NEILL – Alan RADLEY, "Walking Across Disciplines: From Ethnography to Arts Practice." Visual Studies, vol. 25, 2010, no. 1, p. 4 (1–7). 34 TILLEY, Body and Image, pp. 13–14. Jennifer Walklate 59 and social circumstances. Th us, comparison between the walks was made diffi cult. To make the research data for such a project wholly reliant upon such a mercurial method would have severely limited the research's ability to theorize about wider applications and issues. Th is period of research produced data which did indeed reduce itself to a description of "mere style". Whilst the phenomenological walk was a particularly practical way of encountering the temporal in space, something more formal was required for the description and analysis of that embodied experience itself. Th at more formal thing was literature. Aspect Two: Literary Investigation Th e study and production of literature and museums might at fi rst appear to have very little to do with each other. But although they are not wholly analogous, they have a great deal in common. In fact, literature has a great deal to off er to other forms of human cultural performance and critical theory, and this has, in one way or another, been explored in the critical discourse for a number of years. Both a work of literature and a museum are forms of temporal art which unfold and progress over an extended period of time, rather than making their entire content visible in one moment of immanent apprehension.35 Museums and literary works are both curators of times and spaces, real and imagined, both expressive media which frame objects and ideas and make them communicable. Both are also, as a result of this, entangled in sets of social relationships between author, work and audience, and thus face similar structural and ethical issues of representation and expression. Literature has long been a driving force for the development of philosophy, cultural theory, and the anthropocentric disciplines. Both Ferdinand de Saussure and Ludwig Wittgenstein produced new conceptions of language in which words became central to the ways in which human beings produced and communicated their world, and in which meanings changed dependent upon context.36 Th eir ideas of shift ing and relational meaning-making 35 Gotthold Ephraim LESSING, Laocoön: As Essay upon the Limits of Painting and Poetry. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications 2005 [1898], p. 2. 36 Ludwig WITTGENSTEIN, Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Basil Blackwell Ltd 2009, pp. 31–39. The Museum on the Edge of Forever 60 infl uenced wider cultural theory – notably providing some inspiration for Lyotard's Postmodern Condition.37 Language and literature sat at the heart of theoretical movements throughout the twentieth century, infl uencing most, if not all, disciplines in the arts, humanities and social sciences, including museology. Semiology and ideas of narrative had particular power: Mieke Bal used them to comment upon the problematic representational approach of the American Museum of Natural History,38 and Paul Basu used the idea of the labyrinthine aesthetic to express how MOMA produces a reifi ed and inaccessible environment.39 What is particularly interesting, however, and more directly related to museology and museum production, is the rising infl uence of narrative. In April 2010, a conference called "Narrative Space" was hosted at the Universities of Leicester and Nottingham. Th e resultant edited book, Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions, was published in 2012, and is indicative of the current fashion for the creation of "narrative experience", that is: Experiences which integrate objects and spaces – and stories of people and places – as part of a process of storytelling that speaks of the experience of the everyday and our sense of self, as well as the special and unique.40 In the context of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries' turbulent relationship with narrative as an ideology,41 this recovery and return to narrative is interesting, potentially powerful, but also potentially problematic, particularly in that it suggests the creation of singular meanings, epiphanies, even.42 All of these works, however problematic, provide a precedent for literary phenomenology. Th is methodology does not align itself with any particular theoretical stance. It is based upon the practical and conceptual exploration 37 Jean-Francois LYOTARD, Th e Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press 1984. 38 Mieke BAL, "Telling, Showing, Showing Off ." Critical Inquiry, vol. 18, 1992, no. 3, pp. 556–594. 39 Paul BASU, "Th e Labyrinthine Aesthetic in Contemporary Museum Design." In: BASU, P. – MACDONALD, S. (eds.), Exhibition Experiments. Oxford: Blackwell 2007, pp. 47–70. 40 MACLEOD et al, Museum Making, p. xix. 41 TALLY JR., Spatialities, p. 13. 42 Lee H. SKOLNICK, "Beyond Narrative: Designing Epiphanies." In: MACLEOD, S. – HOURSTON HANKS, L. – HALE, J. (eds.), Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions. London: Routledge 2012, pp. 83–94. Jennifer Walklate 61 of literary strategies with the intention of following their implications, both empirical and ideological, as far as possible. Th us open, it deliberately seeks to be something more than an appropriative and shallow "reading" of "mere styles". To achieve this depth and make full use of literature's diverse modes of analysis and creation, four sets of questions were developed during the ground work for my thesis. Th ese focussed on four diff erent literary areas pertinent to the study of temporal spaces – plot, perspectives, language and prosody. Th ese were combined with the "phenomenological walk" in a series of visits to each of the three museums, each lasting, in the fi rst instance, a week. Using both the methods allowed for a direct and embodied reading of space and produced extensive transcripts for each museum which are reminiscent of interviews. In each individual museum space, whether small galleries devoted to single subjects as in the Ashmolean, or courts or fl oors of mixed topics, as in the Pitt Rivers and Natural History Museum, these questions were asked and answered to produce an intense, experiential, close reading of space – and of self. Th e design of the questions was based upon four main strategies for the analysis of literature – narratology, grammar, semantics and prosody. In what follows, each of these four categories will be explored using a single museum, to provide a coherent example of what the techniques and concepts they provide can off er to the analysis of individual sites, and the power of some of the results and implications they provide. Literary Phenomenology: In Practice Narratology Narratology is the study of the form and functioning of narrative: the various parts of the discourse, the shape of their arrangement, and the position of the individuals involved in its creation. Narrative is not simply a coherent and linear structure, but the representation of events or of a series of events.43 Th is representation may occur in any media, and need not be presented in a linear order. Narratology is the study of the constituent parts of this form of complex representation of reality. Th is section will use the fundamental elements of narrative which are story and discourse, anachronies, events and 43 H. PORTER-ABBOT, Th e Cambridge Introduction to Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press 2002, p. 13. The Museum on the Edge of Forever 62 narrative posture to move far beyond limited notions of "narrative space". To provide concrete examples, it will turn to the Ashmolean, which, with its multiple galleries and overarching design strategy, has a great deal of scope for a narratological reading. Th e author recognises that, being a more social activity than reading, the museum experience for any single visitor is contingent upon more unreliable and uncontrolled variables. Yet the reading of a book may still be interrupted, or be as mercurial as the reader. Th e basic constructions and tools of narrative, then, remain equally important in the construction of experience in both the textual and physical realm. Th ere are in narratives two distinct levels: the actual chronology of events related, and the way that they are represented in the telling, known as "story" and "discourse" respectively. Th e Russian Formalists would use the terms fabula and sjuizet to mean the same thing. In the case of a museum, the actual ordering of historic events may oft en be matched by the spatial arrangement of objects and ideas, but this need not necessarily be the case. Th e Ashmolean as a whole is centred on the "Crossing Cultures Crossing Time" display strategy, a narrative structure which is largely linear. But objects, and even galleries, do not always accord to this teleological structure: one of the most dramatic examples is the pair of Japanese galleries on the second fl oor, West Meets East. Th e fi rst gallery aft er the Orientation space is named Japan from 1850, and the one which follows it Japan 1600–1850. Chronology has jumped backwards, and the placement of events in the discourse no longer aligns with that of the story. Th is indicates the distinction between fabula and sjuizet, and unintentionally gives an indication as to how the disjunction between the two might be used to create dramatic, puzzling, disorienting and aff ective narrative structures. Linear, cyclical and fragmented forms of discourse can provoke very diff erent responses and give stories a very diff erent tone and focus. Using these structures with awareness is also to know that their eff ects are only partially predictable, and that they lead not to the whole truth, but only to a version of it. Th ese forms of discourse are produced with the help of certain devices that disorder linear chronological structure. Th ese are called anachronies.44 Th e French narratologist Gerard Genette identifi ed four kinds – analepsis, prolepsis, ellipsis and paralepsis. Analepsis and its opposite, the fl ashforward prolepsis, are powerful tools for creating layered and rich discourse. Because both pitch the audience into a time beyond the ostensible present, 44 Gerard GENETTE, Narrative Discourse. Oxford: Basil Blackwell 1980 [1972], p. 36. Jennifer Walklate 63 they allow for refl ection and speculation, thus off ering insight into character or cause. But because they are situated outside of the immediate now, they permit, and indeed imply, that the insight off ered by refl ection and speculation might be partial and biased. Th us for the museum maker, analepsis is fraught with ethical issues. Because it can be used to legitimate a current situation – say, the presence of an object in the gallery or the reasons for the demise of a culture or species – there is a responsibility on the part of the maker to ensure that the limitations of the story this tells are overtly recognised. For without this recognition, analepsis can enhance an idea of singular, teleological causality, and restrict the chaos of happening to a preordained structure of events. Sometimes analepses tell a complete story, bringing things up to date, but sometimes they do not. When complete and partial analepsis are displayed side by side, cultural politics are put on display. In the Ashmolean's Money gallery, there are a series of cases devoted to the currencies of the world. Whilst those of Europe and the Middle and Near East are brought up to the present, that of China displays only ancient coins, the latest dated to around 220AD. Th ere is, however unintended, an exoticisation at play here, a temporal distancing and social Othering of the Orient. Th e research indicated that prolepses are more infrequent, at least in the museums it studied. Th is is perhaps unsurprising, given their typically historic focus. But it is problematic, for without any proleptic features to indicate an awareness of future time, the museum and its displays are stuck in the Now, fi xed and unchanging for all time. Many objects in the Ashmolean are displayed in cases inset into the walls, diffi cult to remove and change. Yet there is a more abstract problem: because the permanent galleries of the museum are so highly orchestrated, to alter these objects would be to change the whole character of the space. Without prolepsis to express possibility, there appears to be no expectation of a labile future here, but instead a static and eternal now. Without prolepsis, a museum is indeed a mausoleum. Anachronies manipulate the things common to fabula and sjuizet: the events which are the heart of narrative tellings. Roland Barthes identifi ed two forms of event: cardinal and catalystic.45 Th e former are central to the progression of the narrative, the latter merely time fi llers, used for decompression and delay. Such a designation of things that happen can of course 45 Roland BARTHES, "An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative." New Literary History vol. 6, 1975, no. 2, On Narrative and Narratives, pp. 247–248 (237–272). The Museum on the Edge of Forever 64 only arise in manipulations such as narrative, whether fi ctive or historic. Th e designation of cardinal events is therefore always a biased action: the selection of events of importance for a museum similarly so. In a museum, cardinal events may occur in two forms. Either they are parts of the museum's content displayed as signifi cant in the story they tell – oft en, human history – or are a signifi cant moment in the personal experience during the museum visit. Th e Ashmolean cleverly combines these two forms in the Orientation galleries which appear on every fl oor of the Mather extension. Th e purpose of these galleries is to act as a starting point and an introduction to what the rest of the space will have to off er – particularly the Ancient Worlds Orientation Gallery, which is also the fi rst gallery encountered by most people who enter through the main façade. Th ey oft en contain objects that are iconic of the themes of the fl oor itself: the trading objects such as jars and model boats. Th ese are sometimes labelled "Connections Objects". Like a cardinal event, these galleries and objects are used to orient the visitor, and their absence could lead to confusion regarding the relationships between the rest of the galleries on the same fl oor. Th e placement and quantity of cardinal and catalystic events has a large eff ect upon how fast or slow the museum experience appears to be. With a short, but visible space between cardinal events, the discourse moves at a brisk pace, skipping on from crux to crux without disorienting the audience. Th e Ashmolean's Islamic Middle East gallery lays its objects out in long, clearly structured narrative rows, the space between the objects a brief catalystic break between the cardinal artefacts. Museums, however, can also produce solid, turgid discourse, using sets of objects and ideas undiff erentiated in their narrative importance. One gallery which stands out in the Ashmolean is European Ceramics, which packs as many objects as it can into its cases, and as many cases as it can into the room in an impenetrable block of pottery which makes it impossible to see the wall at the other end. Th e deep physical layering of items means that it is impossible to state which are cardinal and which catalystic – relative to each other, all might be both. Because most objects are equally important in the procession of the gallery's discourse, the temporal movement of that discourse seems to cease, seized in a single moment. Th is discussion of anachronies and events has highlighted something crucial about the nature of a museum's narrative performance: that its layering is far more complex than a singular storyworld and discourse. Any museum is in fact a nexus point for a multitude of these event worlds, from the ones it overtly displays to the ones it implies within its own built strucJennifer Walklate 65 ture. Th is multiplicity is one of the most valuable things a nuanced use of narratology can off er the museum analyst. Genette also highlighted the importance of narrative posture.46 Able to cope with the subtle perspectives and positions which narrative actants – generally the narrator or focalisor (the consciousness through which the story is related) – hold towards a text, it is useful for describing the degrees of involvement a viewer or commentator might hold to the series of events being related. Th e heterodiegetic focalisor sits outside the represented storyworld, the homodiegetic narrator within it, and there are granular degrees in between. Each provoke diff erent eff ects in the audience, allowing them to relate to the text or the museum in a variety of ways. Heterodiegetic stances are not restricted to a singular identifi able and bounded perspective. Th ey can oft en appear abstract and omniscient, and allow for a wealth of historical detail to be presented which would be invisible to a stance much more enmeshed in the action. Hence perhaps why museum texts are oft en written from such perspectives, for anonymity confers a kind of scientifi c authority. But the visitor can also take a heterodiegetic perspective, when the architecture of the building allows them to refl ect upon their experience. In the Ashmolean, when a visitor stops on the bridge gallery of Italy Before Rome, they can look down onto the Human Image gallery in the basement, where many of them will already have been. Th is juxtaposition of then and now may remove them from their homodiegetic immersion in their own personal experience of the visit, making them more distanced and refl ective. A museum can also play host to homodiegetic positions. Th ey can actively permit a visitor to become directly engaged with and immersed in perspectives other than their own natural one. In the Ashmolean's Conservation galleries, a table is set up in a simplifi ed representation of a conservator's workshop as an interactive that the visitor can sit at and engage with. Th us they gain a homodiegetic perspective upon the back of house storyworld for which the museum is also a form of discourse. A museum itself can also be overtly homodiegetic, a character in its own discourse. Th is is most evident in its texts, in particular on the Welcome board of the Ashmolean, which frequently uses the word "we". Using this personal pronoun, the Welcome panel defi nes the institution as a living breathing collection of individuals, involved in the ongoing discourse of the museum. Th e institution is as much a part of the fabula as the collections 46 GENETTE, Narrative, p. 244. The Museum on the Edge of Forever 66 which it displays, a manipulative but involved narrator. Narrative posture permits the museum analyst to understand the sets of relationships which are always, in every museum, implied between museum and stakeholder, and gain some notion of the museum's self-ontology. It is, thereby, a useful and politically signifi cant tool. Grammar Grammar, at a basic level, has to do with structure – that of words is known as morphology, that of phrases and clauses is known as syntax.47 For this research, it was most crucial to understand the functions of words, and thereaft er tense, aspect and mood, for each of these, in a more or less concrete fashion, are useful analogies for understanding the operation of museums both temporally and more generally. Th e exemplary museum for this section will be the Pitt Rivers, for the morphology of its objects and the syntactical arrangements between them are complex, and it also has a deeply moral stake in the use of tense as a tool of representation. Th e link between word classes and the museum may not be immediately obvious. But the analogy is actually a very useful one to draw, for it off ers to the museum analyst a corpus of terms and concepts with which to draw a nuanced picture of the sets of relationships in which all extants within a museum space are involved. Of course, one cannot draw direct parallels and designate certain objects as nouns and certain doors or staircases as conjunctions for all time – if at all. But yet again, another grammatical precedent appears – "distributional analysis", which defi nes the class or function of any particular word by "looking at the company which [those] words keep".48 Th is same principle can be put into eff ect to understand the unique function of each part of any individual museum timescape. Th is research was, unfortunately, restricted to using the English grammatical system, due to a limited knowledge of other languages. Th e basic principal, however, holds true, and many other languages may have a lot of subtle tools to off er – particularly in regard to tense. Concrete nouns refer to tangible, observable things – table, cat, William. Abstract nouns, conversely, refer to non-physical things, to concepts, qualities, or states, such as love. Th e semantic connotations of nouns can be used to aff ect how the moving action of a text is understood. Cramming nouns 47 Bas AARTS, Oxford Modern English Grammar. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2011, p. 3. 48 AARTS, Grammar, p.42. Jennifer Walklate 67 together, particularly if their semantic connotations reek of the turgid or the static, can bring a whole discourse to a halt. Th e opposite is also true – nouns can be limited such that a breathlessly quick, intensely unplaced and impossible to locate text can be built. Concrete nouns create a strong, sensorial reality, abstract nouns something far more elusive. Similarly, proper nouns, which refer to the names of specifi c people or things – William, Helsinki, November – are much more precise in their time-space location than the more generic common nouns – table and cat could refer to any cat, on any table in any place or time. Noun functions occur in a number of ways throughout the Pitt Rivers Museum, dependent less upon the material nature of the "nouned" item itself, than upon the position of the observer. Th e objects in the cases, of course, provide powerful noun functions, and indeed people, photographs, and imagery, as well as the Museum itself, can also provide this function. Th e elements of display which operate as nouns, therefore, can be concepts and emotions, as well as concrete embodied things. In the Pitt Rivers, there are both concrete and abstract nouns on display: cases displaying "Musical Instruments" sit next to those covering the more intangible notions of "Magic, Ritual, Religion and Belief", and in this case the objects, rather than being the nouns themselves, are rather more adjectival, used to describe and illustrate the concept rather than directly embody it. Determiners, which limit the referents of nouns, also aff ect how specifi cally these can be located in time and space. Defi nite articles mark nouns out as identifi able and specifi c things – "the cat" or "that cat" for instance. Indefi nite articles, on the other hand, refer to "a cat" or "any cat". Determiners specify identity, particularity or generality in time, place and ontology. Th us, acquisition numbers, which accord to a single object a determinate self, an identifying number, contribute to the particularity of the noun. Lighting, which points out and identifi es particular objects of note, or defi nes the independence or collectivity of objects, also functions as a determiner. Most obviously, perhaps, in the case of the Haida Totem, which as an iconic and large object is very brightly lit. In much of the rest of the museum, the lighting is consistently dim. Th e Haida Totem, already highlighted through lighting, but also its position and inherent size and colour, is given extra textual contextual information and a specifi c biography on the gallery labels. Th is totem, as a result, is less an exemplar of a type than it is an individual being it its own right: "that" totem pole, and no other – no generic representation of its form. When other objects, no matter how small and visually inconsequential they appear to be, The Museum on the Edge of Forever 68 are accorded such unique identities, they have also been subject to a defi nite article. For Roland Barthes, adjectives were "those doors of language through which the ideological and the imaginary come fl owing in",49 for they modify and add description to nouns. In describing and adding colour and brilliance to the concepts for which nouns are the bare bones, they give scope for the understanding of beauty and ugliness in the world. Labels, photographs and images, when used in conjunction with other objects to describe their use or their process of creation, perform a descriptive, contextualizing, and thus adjectival role. But descriptive activity can also be performed by the more environmental, decorative aspects of the museum space. At the back of the Great Court a large wooden case has its glass front covered by two deep red velvet curtains, hiding a Hawaiian Feather Cloak. Th ese curtains add to the ambiance surrounding this object – they give it mystique, marking it out as something dramatic and theatrical, a special object to be revealed. In this sense, the curtains are inherently adjectival. Tense is central to the temporality of a text and the timescape of a museum, and it has important implications with regard to cultural attitudes and hierarchical schema. Tense is used to locate situations in time, and in most languages, it is communicated through infl ection – that is, slightly altering the morphology of a verb so that they indicate the temporal locale. In most languages, systems of tense are complex, in English certainly, and there are a fi ne gamut of tools which they can off er to the analyst of any communicative space, including the museum, and signifi cantly, its written texts. Th ough all tenses, past, present and future are important, and can be deployed to good eff ect in museum creation, our example will focus only on the present, for in the context of ethnography, the present has very particular connotations. In English, there are four forms of the present. Th e simple present expresses things as they are – "I walk", "William walks". Th e present continuous, as noted above, expresses ongoing activity – "I am walking", "William is walking". Th e present perfect expresses a state which is ended, but whose eff ects remain – "I have walked", "William has walked". Th e present perfect continuous, more commonly used to express the past, is formed thus - "William has been walking". Th e present can be used to express a situation which pertains now and is permanent – "Th e ball is red", "William has long hair". Such statements make these states appear achronic and eternal, and this 49 BARTHES, "Structural Analysis", p. 14. Jennifer Walklate 69 is crucial to our understanding of the political implications of something expressed in the Pitt Rivers Museum: the ethnographic present. On the Upper Gallery of the Pitt Rivers, there is a case displaying the weaponry and artefacts of an African culture known as the Nuer. Th e texts which discuss them are written entirely in the present, and describe the Nuer from a removed perspective, positioning them as they were prior to contact with white Western anthropologists such as Sir Edward Evans-Pritchard. Th is is known as the "ethnographic present", and it is problematic because it eternalises a single moment in the development of a culture, depicting them as though they are unable to progress and change. Th e texts in the Nuer case are also problematic because these ethnographic descriptions are overlaid with references to other anthropological works on the Nuer – and thus are a people objectifi ed. Semiology, Semantics and Style Semantics is the linguistic study of signifi ers and their connections to the things that they signify. Semiology, the study of signs in society, was proposed by de Saussure in the Course. In 1979, Umberto Eco proposed that "every phenomenon of signifi cation and/or communication" – and thus by implication all cultural forms – could be studied under a "general semiotic theory".50 Th ese ideas apply in the context of the museum and here we shall use them as the basis for understanding two abstract emanations of the museum timescape, which are built in the relationships between signifi er and signifi ed – the chronotope and the aura. A museum with an almost paradoxically chronotopic and deeply auratic character is the Oxford University Natural History Museum, and it is this institution which will form the basis for the examples given here. In his essay, "Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel", Russian semiotician and literary theorist Mikhail Bakhtin defi ned the chronotope as the "intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature".51 It is the temporally characterised locale in which action takes place, expressed through features of style, structure, content and genre. It expresses "the inseparability of space and time", and 50 Umberto ECO, A Th eory of Semiotics. Milan: Indiana University Press 1979, p. 3. 51 Mikhail M. BAKHTIN, "Forms of Time and Of the Chronotope in the Novel." In: HOLQUIST, M. (ed.), Th e Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays by M. M. Bakhtin. Austin: University of Texas 1984, p. 84. The Museum on the Edge of Forever 70 thus is crucial for any conceptualisation of museum spatiality.52 Bakhtin claimed that to some extent it was the chronotope that defi ned genre.53 In the essay he presents a number of diff erent chronotopic generic forms, from the Greek Romance to the Rabelasian novel. Chronotopes exist in all museums, for each has their own entanglements and characteristics of space and time. Th e chronotopic appearance of the Oxford University Museum of Natural History signifi cantly belies its content and ideology. Built in the form of a Gothic church, its ecclesiastical architecture – decorative brickwork, rosette windows, vaulted ceiling, tall, graceful columns – is somewhat at odds with the evolutionary, scientifi c collection, and is representative of the complex relationships which existed between science and faith at the time of its foundation, in the University and in the world at large. Whilst it appears to be a cathedral, this is not a place of faith, but of science, and learning and discovery still goes on within its walls. Unlike a cathedral, which invokes the eternal on Earth and is predicated upon the idea of a heavenly life everlasting, the OUMNH is not a reifi ed or reifying space – there are no inviolable icons here, and it is open to change. In its taxidermy and preserved specimens, it displays objects which are dead and which are decaying. All parts of a museum, then, from the vault of its architectural body to the tiniest object, are fundamental constituents of its chronotope. And chronotopes aid in the production of aura. Walter Benjamin defi ned aura as "the unique phenomenon of distance" which surrounds or emanates from an object or location.54 It is an abstract quality, experiential, emergent, something generated in the interactions between objects, environments, and consciousnesses. It can be said that a museum's act of acceptance confers an aura on an object. Th is is known as the "museum eff ect",55 and it is akin to the "making strange" of language that characterises certain forms of literature. Th e defamiliarisation that results can enhance the auratic qualities of objects. Small shrivelled, pickled things which would mean nothing in the outside world are elevated to the status of specimens, of things of import and interest by their placement in museum cases. 52 Ibid. 53 Ibid. p. 85. 54 Walter BENJAMIN, "Th e Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction." In ARENDT, H. (ed.), Illuminations. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World 1968, p. 216 (211–244). 55 Svetlana ALPERS, "Th e Museum as a Way of Seeing." In: KARP, I., – LAVINE, S.D., (eds.), Exhibiting Cultures: Th e Poetics and Politics of Museum Display. Washington: Smithsonian Institution Press 1991, p. 26 (25–32). Jennifer Walklate 71 In his discussion of the phenomenon of antaeic magic, Mattias Ekman pointed out that auratic sites are oft en "strange", "unapproachable" and "alienated",56 these qualities cyclically and reciprocally feeding back into the aura emerging around a place or thing. Something rare, unusual, hidden, even grotesque, has an auratic lure. Anonymous objects are particularly strange and politically powerful, for they defy singular authority and shimmer with a kind of achronic auracity. In the OUMNH, unidentifi ed specimens are surrounded by what Eco termed a "halo of indefi niteness",57 a blank space in which many interpretations may play, but in which none may settle and be supreme. One specimen, a fossil shell of some kind, has no label, and is located in an unprepossessing position at the base of a case. Th e Museum has no fi nal authority over this and similar objects, and they become far more open to the speculation of the audience, who suddenly fi nd themselves in a much more powerful position. Th is is where aura takes on its more political cast. Style then, is no simple and shallow thing – it is, in fact, what allows us to see the world. Prosody Rhythm is a basic phenomenon of temporal existence. Language sits on top of rhythm, and those who can wield this underlying device have access to an astonishingly aff ective tool. In poetry, rhythm is crucial – and prosody its study. Th e following section will defi ne and then explore how its central concerns of punctuation, stress and echoic features can be used to understand the museum and its timescape. For our examples, we will return to the complex and highly varied prosodic space of the Ashmolean. Punctuation, in prose or poetry, is a powerful tool: it aff ects the communicative effi cacy of a set of words, delicately aff ecting their meaning. It is always there, and ranges from the smallest mark to the setting out of pagination. In his analysis of poetic punctuation, John Lennard included not only conventional marks (stops, tonal indicators, dis/aggregators, signs of omission, rules and signes de renvoi), but also stanzaic structure, lineation, pagination and interword spacing.58 Using all these devices, an author can 56 Mattias EKMAN, "Architecture for the Nation's Memory: History, Art and the Halls of Norway's National Gallery." In: MACLEOD, S. – HOURSTON HANKS, L. – HALE, J. (eds.), Museum Making: Narratives, Architectures, Exhibitions. London: Routledge 2012, p. 148, (114–156). 57 Umberto ECO, Th e Open Work. Harvard: Harvard College 1989, p. 9. 58 John LENNARD, Th e Poetry Handbook. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2005, pp. 105–152. The Museum on the Edge of Forever 72 incite shift s in focus and time, pauses, commencement, cessation, continuance, fl ow and recursion. How cases are laid out is vital not only to the way in which the visitor moves around the gallery, but to the meanings that space produces or implies. In the Ashmolean's Rome gallery, large freestanding cases stand in a square just smaller than that made by the walls of the room. Th is creates a four-cornered corridor, which surrounds a smaller interior square lying on the other side of the corridor cases. Th ese cases bracket off that part of the gallery, diff erentiating it from the corridors and allowing for a shift in tone. In the surrounding corridors, the objects and histories displayed are public – of communal activities such as farming and war, and of the general long term history of Rome and its lands. But in the inner square, the ambiance, tone and content are much more private – sacred objects are on display here, jewellery, homewares. Th is is a personal and domestic space. Th e diff erentiation between the sections of the gallery is eff ective precisely because of the punctuative function of the cases. It is also worth noting that doors, and certain arrangements of walls, can also act in this fashion. Th ey are reminiscent of caesura, the medial pause in a line of poetry that permits one sentence, or one line, to hold multiple diff erent foci and tones.59 A punctuation mark of particular interest to museums is the signes de renvoi. Known also as "signs of sending back", these are used to associate matter in the text with other material. Th is can be used to good eff ect in a museum space, which relies on contextual matter to create or enhance meaning. In the Ashmolean, certain objects are labelled as "Connections Objects", and the purpose of these is to highlight the relationships between diff erent parts of the museum and the diff erent cultures on display within it. Th e label that marks these out as "Connections Objects" acts as a signes de renvoi by forcing the prescience or recall of other objects along the journey through the museum – in the past or in the future. Th ese signs of sending "elsewhen" encourage active and refl ective reading by breaking the smooth fl ow of the text, and indicate how the text is always limited and biased in its perspective. Th ese markers show the limitations of labels, the limitations of the discourse within the museum space, and they imply that about any object, there is always the potential to learn more. Punctuation helps to create patterns of stress, and metrics is the study of the stress patterns of poetry. In English, it is based on an accentual-syllabic system, which is concerned not with the length of syllables but on the way 59Ibid. p. 188. Jennifer Walklate 73 in which emphatic stress is or is not placed upon them.60 Its basic unit is the line, and this is further broken down into a repeated unit called a foot. How many feet make up a line determines the metre of the poem, and the diff erent lengths of foot – two, three or four syllables – and the diff erent stress patterns in which they are arranged, all have diff erent names, and serve diff erent functions in a poem. A two syllable foot with an unstressedstressed pattern is called an iamb. Five of these together in a line make an iambic pentameter – a line very close to the rhythm of English speech. If the pattern of the foot ends on a stressed beat, this creates a rising rhythm. If it ends on an unstressed or elided beat, it is produces a falling rhythm. Th ese features can be used in a museum setting to produce experiences of smooth, progressive continuity and sudden wonder. In the Ashmolean's basement, there is a gallery focussed upon textiles. It is a long, narrow gallery, with evenly spaced freestanding fl oor cases in a line down the middle of the space and smoothly continuous wall cases, all oriented towards the archway which leads to the next gallery, Reading and Writing. Th e wall cases produce a sense of fl ow, smooth and unbroken, in which the central fl oor cases sit. If these cases are seen as the ictic, or stressed, syllable in a foot, and the fl oor space between them the unstressed syllable, then they produce a rising rhythm, moving towards Reading and Writing, directed by the pointing fi nger of the manikin in a case which begins the metrical sequence. Whilst the positioning of objects can enhance or undermine their icticity, many objects across the three museums are ictic in their own right, through their size, patterning or colour. Th e placement of these ictic objects is central to the resulting rhythm of the gallery, and can be used to generate intense experiences of wonder, and powerful museological mise-en-scene. Th e Battle of the Animals tapestry is immediately visible on entrance to the West Meets East orientation gallery. Its size, intricate and bold images and bright colours make it an inherently ictic object which immediately draws the attention of the visitor, and provokes an intense experience of wonder that overwhelms the tiny gallery in which it sits. Ictic objects such as this twist space about themselves, rather than being manipulated and positioned to fi t the metrical ideal of the curator. But the structures and forms of poetry in English are not based upon patterns of stress alone, but also on rhyme and echoes. Echoic devices come in many forms, including rhyme, alliteration, assonance and consonance, 60 Ibid. p. 2. The Museum on the Edge of Forever 74 and each form can be used to create very particular results. Perhaps the most important function of echoes in the museum are to produce a sense of institutional cohesion, or a sense of recall and refl ection in the visitor. In the Ashmolean, the Laocoön is a perfect example. It appears twice – once as a cast of the full statue, and once as the cast of the bust. Th e fi rst is situated in the Cast Gallery in the new Mather extension, the bust in the Britain and Italy gallery of the old Western Art wing. Th us the Laocoön unites not just two geographically disparate galleries in one museum, but two very diff erent halves of the Ashmolean, disparate in content, ambiance and social culture. Th is echo also produces refl ection upon the nature of museal framing, and how limited singular interpretations can be. In the Cast Gallery, Laocoön is presented as an archaeological piece, occasionally used to teach drawing and sculpture. In Britain and Italy, it is presented as a commercial object of decorative art. Rhymes might be recollective, but they are not always identical. Danielewski once wrote that, "Since objects always muffl e or impede acoustic refl ection, only empty places can create echoes of lasting clarity."61 Like the temporal space between experiences of the same thing, the Ashmolean is in no way empty. Conclusion Literary phenomenology has much to recommend it. It is built on conceptual ancestors from two disciplines, and endeavours to bring the methodological strengths of both to the table: the potential arbitrariness and incoherence of the unstructured phenomenological walk eliminated by the literary frame, and the abstraction of that frame grounded in immersion in the material world. It moves beyond previous attempts to theorise the temporality of museum spaces, because it does not eulogise or reify them. It also moves beyond the historicising approaches towards museum temporality, which concentrate on the relationship between museums and the past, by taking a much more contextual and located perspective which assumes nothing about the temporal focus nor the general ontological status of any museum. It leaves behind "lingering preconceptions" that suggest a museum has a social position more powerful, legitimate and special than other spaces, and positions it as equal alongside the other spatially and temporally complex sites inhabited by human beings. It proves, too, that style is not necessarily 61 Mark Z. DANIELEWSKI, House of Leaves. London: Doubleday 2001, p. 46. Jennifer Walklate 75 just "mere style", but that it can be something meaningful when looked at in depth, and always has something to contribute to analysis. Th e purpose of this conclusion, however, is not just to defend the method and prove its value, but to explore its potential implications for museums, their study and their production, and what eff ect it might have on other fi elds of culture and academia. To begin, we will look at the importance of temporality itself. Temporality is an important frame for the analysis of museums and existence in general, because it is tied inextricably to space and one cannot be fully understood independently of the other. Time is also a tool of political control and cultural representation, and it is particularly crucial to remember this when creating museum displays. But it is also relevant to other cultural performances, and the diplomatic and social relationships of the everyday. It is vital, then, that all studies of place and society move beyond pure geographical location and geoepistemology, to a form of understanding that accounts for the temporal element of being and becoming – a geochronic epistemology. Literary phenomenology is particularly signifi cant for the design and creation of museum space, the making of new buildings, the designing of new exhibitions and the writing of interpretive material. What possible exhibitions might be inspired by the techniques and styles of Modernism? What changes might be made in architectural design based on Russian Formalism? How might case labelling and text panels be altered by the study of grammar and the chronotope? What has prosody to say about the arrangement of cases? Th e potential is great; it is up to those who design and create museum spaces to take it on. Th is method also has signifi cant implications for the ontology of the museum itself. It presents new ways of investigating the political and ethical issues which may be hidden and yet still at play within the museum space – the Othering of China in the Ashmolean being a case in point. Narratology in particular, when used in a subtle fashion, can undermine as well as support dogmatic narratives authored by museums with the intention of creating particular experiences. Narrative posture in particular allows for nuanced and critical refl ection upon the relationships between the actants involved in the museum experience. Ultimately, however, this method shows that the Museum in general is no more extraordinary than other cultural sites, and that any particular museum is less signifi cant, yet far more complex, than its previous analysts have dared to show. For them, a museum was a site focussed on the past, or The Museum on the Edge of Forever 76 a place out of time. Literary phenomenology invites all tenses and all subtle possibilities into the museum, making it a fully intertextual site, potentially of everywhere and everywhen. Th en it can be, as Lyotard once wrote, the "remains of all time" – more truly a Museum on the Edge of Forever. Jennifer Walklate