Bordieuan [Dis]positions: Locations of Responsibility

This chapter will finish the theoretical underpinnings by discussing an archaeology of discourse and how it manifests in physicalised binary positions in museums. The author looks to Bourdieu’s Field of Cultural Production (Bourdieu, P. (1993). The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed. Poetics, 12(4–5), 311. Elsevier BV.). His work can help contextualise where museums find themselves in a position between letting go of power and their responsibilities to govern, somewhat straddling two opposing dispositions. Bourdieu’s fields of cultural production can be helpful in locating how dispositions are informed also by the location of museums. His ‘fields of cultural production’ have opposite understandings of value and value formation as heteronomous or conversely autonomous. The heteronomous field of cultural production has a ‘value’ base grounded in economic motivations—in the case of the museum what productions will produce greater footfall into the museum by the public and create a societal need for the museum to exist in the first place. This chapter will therefore examine this confusing location, existing in the impossibility of being heteronomous while attempting autonomous decision-making within co-curatorial and participatory practices. This discussion will also consider how the language of the funder can also compound these issues through a lack of clarity with variable caveats to what constitutes as best practice.