The Museum Performance : Reflecting on a Reflexive Museology

This paper analyzes the accepted definitions for the scientific subject of museology conceived by ICOFOM theorists who first questioned the ‘museum’ as an accepted paradigm. It intends to point out some of the inconsistencies in the philosophical stranskyan museology in order to reformulate the notion of its subject of study. This debate will require a revision in such a philosophical perspective through the sociological viewpoint in the light of the actor-network theory proposed by Bruno Latour. Finally, the paper sustains that the man-reality relation forged in the West as a hegemonic museum performance should not define museology’s subject of study. On the contrary, it should consider all kinds of possible associations between the different roles that are performed, evolving from a corpus of reflections on the museum to a reflexive museological discipline. Key wordS: Museum. Museology. Performance. Reflexivity. Scientific discipline.

This debate will require a revision in such a philosophical perspective through the sociological viewpoint, which will lead us to conceive what could be a proper path to a scientific discipline, or, in other words, to a reflexive museology.

Redirecting museology: the configuration of a science of associations
From the 1980s several attempts were made and theoretical essays were written aiming to formulate a single foundation for the study of museums and museology.The contrast between a diverse practice organized according to institutional needs and a possible science with strong foundations is directly addressed in the first issue of the Museological Working Papers, published by ICOFOM, in 1980.The first conclusion presented in this issue, by Villy Toft Jensen considering the opinions of several museum professionals from Eastern Europe in the 1970s, was that "a simple common museology does not exist" (Jensen 1981: 9). 2  Indeed, since 1965, in the former Czechoslovakia, Stránský raised questions on the subject of study of museology, denying, for the first time, the museum as its scientific subject matter (Stránský 1965: 30-33).The museum would be, according to Stránský, "only an instrument to perceive a certain way of cognition of society" (Stránský 2005: 111 apud Baraçal 2008: 70).He would be responsible for the dislocation of the museology subject from the museum, as a historic institution, to museality -understood as a "specific aspect of reality".This notion 3 would lead Stránský to conceive museology's intention as the scientific interpretation of an "attitude of man to reality" (Stránský 1980apud Van Mensch 1992).
This reflection was possibly the mark zero for the development of a systematic thinking on museology and its scientific subject in Central and Eastern Europe.From the late 1970s, ICOFOM 4 would be conceived by Jan Jelínek and Vinoš Sofka and the embryo of a theory for museology would be implanted thanks to the new possibilities for international dialogues within this committee.
In the 1980s, with the first publication that intended to openly discuss museology in a democratic way in the newborn field, Sofka and Jelínek were the first to pose the question: "Museology, science or just practical museum work?" (MU-WOP 1980).And with the attempt to answer the question it was inaugurated possibly the first museological discussion in ICOFOM.Among the

Museology's subject of study: from the foundations to its reassembling
What is the 'museum', the supposed subject of study of museology?A field of studies was born with this very question.In the past 35 years since the creation of the international committee for museology (ICOFOM) and the emergence of the first works discussing "museology" instead of the mere practices related to museums, the quest for a scientific definition has begun -which remained unsuccessful so far.
In fact, until present time, museology has been taught and practiced as a specific disciplinary field intending to become a scientific field.Nevertheless, it has been operating as a particular way of conceiving experiences and relations under the light of a more or less traditional idea of the museum 1 .
It is legitimate to ask why, even after the efforts of ICOFOM and the amount of theoretical studies and interdisciplinary researches published, we are still not able to define museology as a human or social science.As pointed out by Zbyněk Z. Stránský (1980: 44), being a science would imply, firstly, having a defined subject of study recognized by certain peers.Other than that, a science must use specific methods of its own, as well as a specific terminology.These last two points are viscerally connected to the definition of the first.
If museology is not considered an effective science by most of the thinkers and researchers related to this field (who generally resort to the use of interdisciplinary methods and a confused terminology to study diffused objects), this is due to the very inability to define its subject of study.
In the 1970s and 1980s, a specific field of ideas partially related to the social sciences was being developed devoted to museums which was worldly known as the movement of New Museology.The main political actors and intellectuals related to it were confronted with a fundamental paradox: on the one hand, the desire of most thinkers to conceive a unity for the scientific subject of museology, on the other the empirical diversity observed in the different manifestations of the museum.How to solve such an epistemic standoff?
The present paper analyzes the most accepted definitions for the scientific subject of museology conceived by the icofomian theorists who first posed the question here enunciated.We intend to point out some of the inconsistencies in the philosophical stranskyan museology (Baraçal 2008) to reformulate the notion of its subject of study.world as a mind and the objective reality is given.Therefore, as an institution that simply applies specific relations of man to reality, museums are socially and philosophically outdated.
Equally influenced by Stránský's way of thinking, Waldisa Rússio defines, in 1981, the subject of museology as the museum fact, or the museological fact, understood as "the profound relationship between man, the cognizant subject, and the object" (Rússio 1981: 42).This Brazilian theorist separates, once again, the subject of reason -under the clear influence of the cogito -from the object of knowledge, "that part of reality to which man belongs, and over which he has the power to act", both parts considered in the museum fact.
The very definition of the subject of study of museology as a relation between parts that differentiate themselves creating an asymmetry is an error in the sense that it ignores how asymmetries and differences are socially created.There is no such thing as a 'relation' if we conceive the social world as a network of associations that generate constant transformation.The contemporary anthropologist Bruno Latour states that it is precisely because it is so difficult to maintain asymmetries, to durably entrench power relations, or to enforce inequalities, that so much work is being devoted in shifting the weak and fast-decaying ties to other types of links (Latour 2005: 66).'Relations' are a deceiving kind of link that reifies the social reality.In addition, the 'social' in itself is here perceived as "a type of connections between things that are not themselves social" (Latour 2005: 5-7), or as a movement of re-association and reassembling, according to Latour's actor-network theory (ANT).
What we propose in the present text is the dislocation of the epistemological problem of museology from the subject of study to the cognitive frames we use to interpret it.In other words, the museological 'problem' is not having the museum as subject matter, but understanding the museum exclusively by a dated philosophical assumption (the Cartesian cogito) limiting all thinking process.As we will sustain, the subject of museology should not be defined unidimensionally by the subject-object relation forged in the West.Otherwise, it should consider all kinds of possible associations between subjects, objects, relations, subjects behaving as objects, objects behaving as subjects, etc.Because these roles are performed by people and things in reality and are reified in the museum theory produced over the last 50 years.They are simply parts played by the most selected authors, several followers of Stránský's germinal thinking would take the first steps in direction to the definition of museology's scientific subject.Among them, we will contemplate the celebrated views of Anna Gregorová and Waldisa Rússio.
Anna Gregorová, Czech author influenced by the gnosiological references introduced by Stránský 5 , defined the museological subject of study as "specific relations of man to reality" (Gregorová 1980: 19).With this vague definition, that would be quoted by many other theorists in the following years, Gregorová would emphasize different aspects of the museum relation, like, for instance, "structurality" and "differentiatedness".This last one consisting in the fact that the subject in the relation realizes the totality of reality and at the same time differentiates itself from the object of observation, assuming a museum attitude towards the observed reality.
The problem with the definitions presented in the first theoretical approaches to museology is in the cognitive notion of the "relations of man to reality" conceived by Gregorová and Stránský.This philosophical assertion reifies the separation of man from reality and presupposes the existence of a (material) reality that is divorced from society.Two sociological errors that should be adamantly avoided in a museology that should be concerned with a wide range of associations between the different agents of society.
First, we may recall that the breach between subject and object is, in fact, fabricated by a particular appropriation of reality.It was first conceived as an important part of Descartes' cogito, according to which subjects as "minds" exist as completely separated entities from physical reality.This conception of a mind that is even detached from a physical body and that exists beyond any materiality lies in the foundation of idealistic philosophy.It was further explored by Kant, and discussed by Hegel.But it's only since the Enlightenment that Rationalism would translate into politics, becoming a central part of the dominant ideologies in the West.In the case of museums, this breach is a historic phenomenon that distinguishes Modernity and characterizes a certain a priori for the existence of these institutions.
According to the gregorovian assumption, museums are places where this separation between a subject that thinks and conceives the simple mirrors, but rather "magical mirrors of social reality", because they are capable of exaggerating, inverting, re-formatting, magnifying, minimizing and even falsifying the known chronicled events (Turner 1988: 42).By performing culture through drama to a society, museums also enact the very drama of the 'museum', its meaning, its authority, its power.
What we aim here with the dislocation of the museological subject of study from the strict man-reality relation to a broader, sociologically founded, unit of analysis, is to demonstrate that a relation between philosophical entities -man-reality, subject-object-constitutes, in fact, a type of performance.This way we distance ourselves from a science of relations to reach a science of associations that studies actors in their agencies instead of a Cartesian equation.
In that sense, "man" cannot be considered the only actor in a 'relation'.For the ANT, defended by Latour, if we stick to the decision to consider the actors through their agencies, then anything that does modify a state of affairs by making a difference is supposed to be an actor (Latour 2005: 71).Thus, there is no hierarchy established to differentiate subjects from objects.A thing is also studied as an actor in the subject-object equation -or, at least, an actant, if it has no figuration yet.This, of course, does not mean that these participants 'determine' the action, that "hammers `impose' the hitting of the nail".According to Latour: "In addition to `determining' and serving as a 'backdrop for human action', things might authorize, allow, afford, encourage, permit, suggest, influence, block, render possible, forbid, and so on" (Latour 2005: 71).This also does not mean that objects do things 'instead' of human actors.Latour argues that no science of the social can exist if the question of who and what participates in the action is not firstly explored.This primary scientific question could mean -and it certainly does for museology -letting in the so-called "non-humans" (Latour 2005: 71).The human-reality relation, then -limiting museology's subject -could begin to be perceived as a relation between associations, and, in that sense, it could be fully studied by a human science.
In a more realistic sociological perspective we have to accept that the continuity of any course of action or relation will rarely consist of hu-different types of elements, and they can be modified, inverted, transformed or translated in different ways, conforming what we call the museum performance.

The museum performance
Presenting the problem of museum and realityreality as the museum object -Gregorová reaches an ontological problem that is in the core of museology, i.e. the explanation of reality in itself, as a carrier of a gnoseological value and potential (Gregorová 1980: 19), or of a museum value, also known as museality.By dislocating the question from the museum relation to the reality that 'is produced' by it, Gregorová points out the fact that there is something between man and reality, something beyond the object and matter that is worth being studied.This thing that is philosophically presented as a property of the museum object is created by the museum performance (Brulon Soares 2011).
The performance angle has been, until now, almost underexplored in museology, considering its potential to reveal how museums operate and produce cultural meanings.As an intrinsic part of "social dramas" 6 , cultural performance is always connected to 'real' events, but performances are not simple expressions of culture or even of changing culture.Considering some cultural forms as not so much reflective as reflexive, Victor Turner points out that here the analogy is not with a mirror but rather with a reflexive verb.In that sense, culture, like verbs, has, in most languages, at least two "moods", indicative and subjunctive, and these are most hopelessly intermingled.As Turner explained it, when society bends back on itself, it …"meanders, inverts, perhaps lies to itself, and puts everything so to speak into the subjunctive mood as well as the reflexive voice" (Turner 1988: 24-25).
By doing that, society works in a state of supposition, desire and possibility, rather than stating actual facts.This arrangement of things dissolves what were once factual components of reality and instates a more playful spirit.A 'reflex', on the other hand, presupposes 'realism'.But of course, even in the context of a museum, or in art and literature, realism is only a matter of artifice and what is real is a result of cultural definition.For Turner, the genres of cultural performance are not misunderstanding of what is meant.Only then will we be able to have progressive discussion" (Hodge 1983: 61).
In the very moment when social sciences are questioning their fundamental principles and are confronted with the 'truth' that there are no 'truths' in sciences, museology thinkers inside ICOFOM seemed to claim for a single truth capable of providing an immediate systematic theory.
According to Joanna Overing (1985: 2-5), exploring a recent crisis of faith in philosophy over the empiricist's paradigm of rationality, within science the idea of a "single world" is being challenged.Turning the look to themselves and their own actions, social scientists reveal that the world, from the perspective of our knowledge of it, is how we view it through the paradigms we create.These scientists, differently from philosophers who are usually not asking social questions, are asking about "moral universes" -in Overing's terms -their basic duty being to understand the intentions and objectives of actors within particular social worlds.Contrary to the modern Western science and the empiricist's proposition that truth is amoral and facts are autonomous from value, facts and truths can be analyzed as being tied to different sets of social, moral and political values.Thus, all truths have their moral aspect and to hope to find universal and independent criteria of truth has proven to be an unreachable goal that suits only to philosophers who are still defending their control over reality construction.
The task of social sciences is to understand the knowledge actors have of their own moral universe, considering their standards of validation with respect to it (Overing 1985: 5).The cognitive powers of the Western thought in controlling and knowing the material world are in the base of museums, but they cannot be the foundation of contemporary museology.What is being gradually perceived with the possibility of a science of the science is the fact that Rationality works as a limiting tool for the scientist viewpoint over the Others and specially over him/herself.The Western fetishism for epistemological objects such as 'reason', 'truth' and 'knowledge' -or, even, the 'museum'-is little by little demolishing the ways we relate to moralities and epistemologies different from ours.
Throughout most part of the 20 th century, in the first years of the development of museology in the world, the thinkers of the 'museum' were not separated from their supposed subject of study.man-to-human connections or of object-object connections, but will probably zigzag from one to the other (Latour 2005: 75).The simplistic triangulation between man, object and institution, that traveled through all museology theory so far, is sociologically barren.The museum performance, in which the three roles of the 'public', the 'object' and the 'museum' are socially enacted, should no longer be perceived as a true social relation, in order to be systematically studied as a performance of the social -or of the museal.
This new perception implies that if the museum is a thing that performs the man-reality relation, musealization, then, is the action towards which we should direct our interest -as social scientists or scientists of associations.Because associations prevail, we can conceive, for instance, calculation without a calculator, acceleration without a car, or even education without a school.Musealization, then, exists beyond the museum.As well as the hammer does not 'impose' the hitting of the nail, museums do not impose musealization.In fact, museums are the mediators and not the main actors of musealization; they participate on the action, but they cannot configure, in any conceivable way, the sole subject of museology.
As some freedom of movement is granted back to non-humans, the range of agents able to participate in the course of action extends prodigiously and we are, finally, no longer restricted to the limited philosophical equation we are so used to in museology.
Thus, the study of museum performances intends to reach the realization of the fact that objects as well as subjects are made.Objects.Subjects.Reality.Social categories constructed in the museum performance, instead of absolute truths constitutive of this institution.Masks that museums enact in a specific moment of our history.Museology, as a social science, cannot be limited to them in order to define its field of study.

Reflection and reflexivity in Museology
In 1983, in the first ICOFOM symposium, in London, John Hodge exclaimed: …"What we need is someone to outline a theory in finite terms which we all understand.Its philosophy, its statement of propositions used as principles of explanation for phenomena etc. needs to be clearly stated with concrete examples so that there is no Museology has for long been submitted to an epistemology of the information sciences, along with archivology and librarianship.But the 'relation', for this sciences, is a mere informational one -leaving human experiences and performances outside of their scope.For instance, libraries and archives treat information as the main object of the visitor's discovery, while museums, on the other hand, have the visitor as an object in itself.Information centers are supposed to be transparent; museums are allowed to 'play' hide and seek with its objects, using lights, shadows, sounds and theater to engage their visitors in a meaningful performance.Of course museums deal with information too, but in a way that it is impossible for them to be defined by disciplines that study museums solemnly by the informational approach.In other words, the subject of museology cannot be that objective if we intend it to be human.
Instead of developing a comparison with these other institutions in order to establish the place of museology among other sciences it would be more profitable for the present analysis to consider the point of view of the sociality of museums.By using the term "sociality" Marilyn Strathern (1996: 66) evokes the idea of a "society" as a method of investigation that raises more questions about the observers than it presents answers about the ones who are observed.A "society", in that sense, is not an object in itself, it does not implies some kind of organization, instead, it organizes the objects produced by the social scientists themselves.If museology thinkers stopped looking for stability -in museums and societies -to start observing all kinds of performances that can be museological, and the tracing of their associations (Latour 2005: 5), then we may be able to conceive museology as a social science after all.
In the study of performances, the stability of the museum (as a social category museologists are so attached to) vanishes in thin air.When taking into account the actors and its agencies a scientist must consider that the object of a performative definition disappears when it is no longer performed, or, if it stays, then it means that other actors have taken over the relay (Latour 2005: 37).That is how fugitive the object of a science is.
Today we can say that the breach between subject and object is a relative one, and the new sciences should avoid defining their subjects based on a Cartesian reified assertion.This leaves museology -as well as other sciences -with a brand new path to follow (or to invent, if it is the case) in order to achieve any kind of scientific status.
Museum professionals were the ones conceiving 'museology'.The separation between scientists and their subject of study -that is usually constructed by scientific methods-has not been fully accomplished in museology.Perhaps the reason we are still unable to define the subject of museology is that we are so close to museums we remain their faithful hostages.
What differentiates, though, 'museology' from 'museum theory' or 'museum studies' is the desire of the first to be acknowledged as a science in the contexts in which this term is being used.In order for that to happen, a distance must be created between scientists and their subject of study.The theory of museology produced in the past 40 years is neither a product of museum practice nor the mere expression of a few philosophers' ideas disseminated from Eastern Europe.In fact, the theory is the result of a reflection developed by these thinkers confronted with certain museum practices in the different contexts they act.
Methodologically speaking, the agents that make museums and their agencies must be studied by the scientists and researchers of museology today.Nevertheless, when the same people are playing both roles -the scientist that is also the museum professional -the scientific distance will depend on an exercise of reflexivity on his/ hers own museal practice.Here the museal will be clearly separated from the museological with the artifice of performance.
The first works on museology, by icofomian theorists, were just theory and not science because they consisted in mere reflections lacking the reflexivity that is in part the acknowledgement of performance in the constructed truths.The study of the museum performance today allows any scientist to see him/herself as an actor in the stage of the museum representations.Such a reflexivity in the making of science may reveal to be a process that includes self-knowledge and the revision of paradigms.

Museology: a science among others?
As we can acknowledge, the paths chosen by museologists -here understood as the theorists of museology as well as museum professionals (and most of the times, as both) -have not been able to determine a real paradigm for the supposed human science they defended.What we argue in the present paper is the fact that, maybe, most of the explored roads to the subject of museology haven't been human enough.dogmas.For sciences that strongly desire to control its own part of reality -as the human sciences in general -the notion according to which human beings invent their own reality is debated with great difficulty.The apparent solution to supplant it is, in most of the cases, the centrality of empirical work aiming to deconstruct the established truths and the discussion of the methods in this process.
The discussion of a specific method for museology will raise two fundamental questions: first "how museology molds the practice?",and second, "how the practice molds museology?".Certainly, museology cannot be the science that studies the limited and undefined universe of the museum.The very concept of the 'museum' used to explain heterogeneous experiences, to which theorists refer as a "phenomenon" related to the terms "museology", "museography", "theory of museum", "museistic" (Stránský 1980: 43-44), and so on…, is fragrantly an artifice of method, created as such to justify the existence of a scientific museology.
Beyond this tautological conception, the practice that is available for actual research escapes any kind of 'museum' characterization.By considering the study of the mediations that formalize the wide process of musealization -which may be mistaken for the process of declaring heritage, when we accept the viewpoint of a science called "heritology" 7 (Šola 1992) -we have, then, a concrete empirical field for museology.It is clear, thus, that an effective science may conceive musealization as an agency and all the persons and objects involved in it as agents.To find the tracing of these associations would be the work of the museologist (who is not the museum professional but the scientist).As the epistemologist who think about "the meaning of meaning", or the psychologist who think about how people think, the museologist can be seen as the one who think about the museology "thinking" -and in this sense, Stránský wouldn't be wrong by suggesting the existence of "meta-theoretical problems" for this "science" (Stránský 1980: 44).
By focusing on the study of performances and associations, this area of studies becomes less detached to the 'museum' as an absolute object and more concerned with the museums' representations.The museum performance would work as a measurement or a standard representation to be studied in the different contexts in which it is evoked, from the Louvre to the fave-

From reflex to reflexivity: a new paradigm or the emergency of a study field?
The new paths for museology here appointed might generate, at first, a confusion of the commonly used categories and express chaos exposing museology's anti-structure.However, if we look closer, this unstable scenery may represent a new and better order for this field of knowledge.As most of the social sciences today, museology might be confronted to a new epistemic framework in permanent transformation.
Most of the recent transformations in the social sciences were due to a critical debate on its own methods.The methodologically palpable objects of science -which is how they were perceivedare introduced to a reflexive perspective, as the very creations of scientists.
The invention of unilateral relations or realities that can be "touched with a finger" (Bourdieu 1992: 228) has been for long common for social scientists who preferred to deal with these well-defined concepts instead of with the very conception of the concepts.In museology, the invention of philosophical truths has caused a series of misunderstandings among theorists.To this confusion, there could only be an empirical solution.
After the beginning of the 1980s and the first superficial attempts to summarize a theory for museology, some authors (Van Mensch 1992;Teather 1983) pointed a more realistic solution for a scientific museology.Research was the answer.The truth of the matter is that no philosophical magic would create a science or its subject without a considerable amount of empirical and theoretical research.
What substantially prevents the existence of a science called 'museology' today is still the fact that its theoretical production and its methods are marked by the Cartesian idea of the 'museum' designed, as a metaphor and literally, in the rationalist system of knowledge fabricated in Western Modernity.In this 'museum' that organized objects and ideas -or ideas as objects -'things' were created to be put in the shelves of knowledge in order to be observed, organized, counted, weighted and measured by the encyclopedic scientist.Man was very much separated from things, and things were fully dominated as passive objects in the gnosiologic relation.
Museology, born in the interior of museums of this kind, and conceived by the professionals working in these institutions, has inherited their the concept is not realistic.From the gnosiologic paradigm, we depart towards a reflexive paradigm that suppose the reevaluation of the very tools that create our paradigms.
As other human sciences, museology must be reassembled as a science of mediations in order to act on the transition between its own representations and the representations of the actors it studies, evolving from what has been so far a corpus of reflections on the museum to a reflexive museological discipline.las of Rio de Janeiro, that share a belief in this historically idealized categorization.
If the study of museology is museology, thus, the classical rationalist pretension of the museum's absolute objectivity must be left aside making space to a relative objectivity that considers the museum representation according to the agents' agencies.Furthermore, it is mandatory to accept that the museum as a philosophical entity depends on the specific categories and institutions from the West, and the universalization of noteS The Museum Performance: Reflecting on a Reflexive Museology Complutum, 2015, Vol. 26 (2): 49-57