The Sixth Basil Bernstein Symposium, Griffith University, Brisbane June 29th July 3rd, 2010 Friday 2nd

d July, 4.45 5.15 pm

Schooling the Museum: Pedagogy and Display in the Information Age

William Tyler Adjunct Principal Research Fellow School of Social and Policy Research Institute of Advanced Studies Charles Darwin University N.T. Australia 0815 willtyler@msn.com.au bill.tyler@cdu.edu.au Abstract: The public museum in the second half of the 20th Century has taken a departure from the classical collection model of specialized research and exhibition towards webbased access, community outreach and touristic promotion. By locating this transformation within the socio-semiotics of the information age (Tyler, 2004) and Bernsteins (2000) modeling of pedagogic identities in the re-centred state, the paper traces the pedagogy of classical museum from one of a relatively autonomous and insulated textual space to one now defined by market positioning and audience extension through the interactive and visual possibilities of the new media. This account is then formalised in an evolutionary typology of museums position within the field of social and cultural reproduction that draws on: (a) a critical reading of Fyfes historical typology of museum display (b) Caseys (2003) Lacanian analysis of the evolution of museum practices and (c) Tylers (2004;2010) formulation of the socio-semiotic field of pedagogic discourse in the information age. It is argued that pedagogic discourse in this environment exerts an unrecognised (invisible/ unvoiced) mediation between the culture of distinction and the visual culture of distraction (Prior, 2005).

Over the past three decades, the public museum in Western countries has undergone a radical transformation from the collection, conservation and exhibition of specialized forms of elite culture into the an institution of popular cultural outreach that has found its place among tourism, of These changes have been driven by the neo-liberal transformation of the funding basis and definition of cultural institutions by market forces that rely on the mercerization and regionalisation of cultural activity as key indicators of vitality and ultimately, of performance. From this has emerged a series of theoretical perspectives of the social functions of the museum that goes under the general title of the new museology. Central to this transformation has been an explicit attempt to engage and recruit new audiences in which schools, universities and life-long learning projects through the use of globalised technologies, specialized educational roles, sections and positions and an integration into the formal processes of educational processes of curriculum reform and design. in the past ten years of also to the role in the Australian secondary school English syllabus. Together with this interplay with the specialized discourse of schooling has been an equally powerful drive to develop the informal sector in learning as an adult activity with insertion into community life, to open the museum to pubic gaze in the form of chronicled histories or narrative of popular appeal, to explore niche markets through tourism, community events and the engagement of audiences through the globalised media, both academic and social. As Louise Douglas, General Manager Audiences and Programs at the National Museum of Australia, recently stated on the ABCs Future of the Museum series:
Museums actually have been quite responsive in the business of communication, and particularly over the last 30 or 40 years in terms of responding to the growth of communication techniques. So one of the ways we have seen that in museums is the introduction of where there were only curators, they were really the only kind of professionals, now of course there's public programs, there's education, there's public affairs, there's marketers, so the whole idea of communicating with our audiences I think has been there for quite some time, and this is something we looked at very closely in the early years of the museum. And we experimented with a number of programs, some web-based, some in the institution. So for example, we have a broadcast studio which was built around the idea that we would have a two-way communication link with our audiences, now we're reviewing exactly how we use the broadcast studio.

The implications of this transformation resonates with Bernsteins short but evocative final paper in which he outlined in the emergence of the Totally Pedagogised Society (2001). In this new formation, the internal logics of pedagogic discourse both colonizing, and being colonized by, class reproductive processes of late capitalism through a totalizing claim on cultural institutions such as the museum. Pedagogic modes, through the implantation of pedagogic communication in the globalised electronic media were seen to be increasingly constitutive of the stratification of the labour market, the politics of social control and the commodification and regionalization of knowledge. As a result, Bernstein saw society paradoxically situated between the weak state of a globalised economy and the strong state of identity formation and licensed knowledge-brokers:
Today the State through processed of centralized decentralization, with its management strategies of resources following achieved targets, is making and distributing for new pedagogic knowledges

through a range of formal and informal agencies. This a new cadre of pedagogues, with their research projects, recommendations, new discourse and legitimations, are being constructed How will this new diversity of knowledges map on to our present educational institutions? Which institutions are vulnerable to the new claims, to whom will the new knowledge forms be distributed? (Bernstein 2001: 367-8)

What then would such a pedagogy look like-when student bodies are replaced by audiences, coercive attendance replaced by the seduction of display, formal assessment by visitor satisfaction, and a dominance of printed over visual media and relatively passive by interactive and tactile experiences? In this context, the public museum would appear to be well positioned as a test case for examining both the colonizing potential of pedagogic discourse as well as of the vulnerability of the the institutions of social and cultural reproduction to this alleged pedagogic imperialism. This paper will therefore explore the implications of the recent transformation of the public museum within Bernsteins theories of codes and his later writings on pedagogical discourse for the implications of the role of the museum and, by implication, of the state itself. How then might the public museum be positioned within Bernsteins theory of the re-rentred state, weak in its globalised relationships, but strong in its internal regulatory principles? The public museum and the re-centred state In Bernsteins later writings, the fate of cultural institutions in the age of re-organising capitalism is found in the realignment of the relation between the state and the systems of symbolic control whose effectivity is realized in the production of identities that between high and popular cultural forms become indeterminate and unstable. This tension is present in Bernsteins earlier paper (1999) on the official knowledge that emerges from tensions between the internal modes of symbolic control and the external markets of global competition and participation that produce the model of the re-centred state (Bernstein, 1999) whose main functions is the legitimation of official knowledge. In this age, cultural institutions can no longer stand behind the insulations of a hierarchical, bureaucratic age but must adapt to the destabilizing and democratizing forces of globalised media of the information age (Cassells, 1996). In this environment excess on information replaces scarcity just as the boundaries of specialized discourses become infinitely permeable through the interplay of audiences, identities, technologies and official expectations. The contemporary public museum therefore loses much of its traditional authority, a multifunction agency, positioned somewhere between an historical reliquary and a theme park. The pedagogic focus may, however, prove redemptive, in the sense that the formation of identities within such a chaotic environment can act, through the re-centring activities of the state. The logic of identity formation then can act as a force for stability, analogous in many ways to that seen in the reformist agenda of national curricula and testing regimes (Tyler, 1999). The recentring dynamic of these forces and influences are mapped in Fig. 1.

Fig. 1 Museum pedagogies in the re-centred State

Audiences
(Market regularities) Performativity

Imagined futures

New Media
(Informal Modalities)

Re-centred State
(Museum Pedagogic Identities)

Objects
(Textualities)

Cultural transmission

Populations (Inequalities)

Official policy formation

*Adapted from Fig. 9.1 Device, identity and discourse: pedagogy in the re-centred state (Tyler, 2010)

In Fig.1, identity formation, as in Bernsteins modeling of the re-centred state is the pedagogic focus of the contemporary museum. This focus is reflected not only in the construction of visitor markets (audiences), as through aristocratic, bourgeois, age, ethnic and personal narratives, but are embedded in the suite of pedagogic possibilities that Bernstein emerging from the cultural dynamics of reorganising capitalism: de-centred (therapeutic, instrumental), retrospective (fundamentalist, elitist) and prospective (ideologically committed along lines of race, gender and region) (Bernstein, 2000: p.74, Diagram 2). Each of the terminal points of this model represents one of the three sets of interrelated hierarchy of rules governing the realization of the pedagogic device as formulated by Bernstein (2000, pp. 28-37: the distributive (the selection of official texts represented as collectable and exhibitible objects), the recontextualising (the modalities of representation) and the evaluative (in a neo-liberal context, market performance). These terminal points are confronted by the demographic changes of the developed nations (populations), including their ageing profiles and increased cultural diversity (Centre for the Future of Museums, 2008). This model of museum in the re-centred state will then be taken as a heuristic device for exploring the unfolding relations between the public museum and the State. Implied in this model is a generative process in which these identities are realized and maintained through the dynamics of the pedagogic field In this connection, the emphasis in this paper will be on the (dominant) regulative discourse as the three pedagogic components interact with the modern public represented by the state. However, the instructional possibilities of the new media in the museum point to exciting directions for Bernsteins theories of knowledge (Carvalho & Hong, 2008). While the model does not exclude the museums capacity to generate cultural identities outside the pedagogic field, in a sense, it proposes an account

of in museum development that is now being realised in the socio-semiotic environment of a pedagogised society. This problematic may be addressed in terms of responses to the following questions: 1. 2. 3. 4. In what sense can the public museum be seen as an educational institution? How has the pedagogical function been theorized in the contemporary museum? Can Bernsteins model the pedagogic device be a basis for retheorising the museum? Might a socio-semiotic model of the pedagogic field provide a research agenda for the contemporary museum?

1) The public museum as an educational agency: the birth of the museum What is a museum? The public museum as a specialized institution designated for public access and usage emerged in 18th Century Europe (Bennett, 1995). This institution has attracted a number of definitions and covers a range of type, from zoos and aquaria to art and sporting or medical memorablia. The American Association of Museums, for example is quite inclusive:
American museums are infinitely diverse. The AAM Code of Ethics for Museums notes that their common denominator is making a "unique contribution to the public by collecting, preserving, and interpreting the things of this world." The code also acknowledges the variety of sizes and types of museums: "Their numbers include both governmental and private museums of anthropology, art history and natural history, aquariums, arboreta, art centers, botanical gardens, children's museums, historic sites, nature centers, planetariums, science and technology centers, and zoos." (http://www.aamus.org/aboutmuseums/whatsis.cfm)

The AAMs criteria of accreditation, however, are fairly restrictive (although 95% of applications are successful), insisting on legal nonprofit status, a permanent collection, approved mission professional staffing, financial resources and hours of opening to the public (1000 per year). Although criteria for accreditation often includes an educational element among many (as do the AAMs), the majority of definitions do not, with priority given to collection, conservation, research and exhibition (ref. to Encyclopedias and web definitions). The enduring emphasis on the collection, conservation and display of natural objects, art artifacts rather than education appears to be the defining characteristic of the modern museum. However, in both historical chronology and interpretive accounts of the development of the museum, public education appears as a central, if not a constitutive, element in both establishment. In the United Kingdom, for example Charman sees the professional role of curator and educator as indistinguishable:
Museum education as a distinctive endeavour emerged amid the mid-nineteenth century social history context of philanthropy and self-improvement. In 1845 the Museums Act allocated public money to national museums for the first time. This indicated recognition by the state that museums could play a significant role in the life of the nation. The Act enabled local authorities to levy rates to build

museums, and for those museums to charge for admission. Significantly, education and curating were seen as part of the same task. In 1870 the Education Act, which heightened the profile of education nationally by making provision for children up to the age of fourteen to attend school, also raised the profile of museum education and in doing so raised some key questions about the relationship between education and care of collections. By this time the South Kensington (now the Victoria and Albert) Museum and the Natural History Museum had explicit educational aims with special provision for children in which the primary pedagogic experience was the object lesson, i.e. artefact-based learning. (2001, p. 3)

In the USA, the public museum was also deeply implicated in a broad educational project. As Goldfarb writes:
The museums educational policies are implicit but central to its structure. Indeed the museum is an exemplar of the performance of pedagogical work in an institution that is not explicitly devoted to education. This is especially true in the United States. It is no coincidence that in this country the opening of museums to the general public coincided with the institution of public and eventually mandatory schooling. Indeed, in the United States, education was a major motivating factor in the development of the public museum and has remained a core, though in many cases, an understated element of museum policy. (2002, p.146)

The pedagogical function of the museum, however, was not expressed through the disciplinary apparatus of compulsory schooling, attendance registers and panoptical surveillance. While the museum formed a part of the power-knowledge strategies of governmentality characterized by Foucault (1980), Bennett argues that the modern museum employed a different path. Rather than rendering the individual vulnerable to the disciplines of the body, the orientation of the museum is to show and tell that people might learn (1995, p. 98) and to render the power visible to people. In Bennetts account, the museum addressed the populace as subjects of knowledge rather than as objects of administration. While the positioning of subjects as the objects of display may have been altered in this configuration, Bennetts insights prove to be a useful platform for explaining the radical differences in the implementation of pedagogic device between the school and the new informal modes of teaching and learning opened up by the new media. Here the seductive strategies of the market would seem to drive the differentiation of response, rather than the institutional containments of the school, the clinic or the prison. If such an education purpose was so central to the constitution of the modern museum, then how might modalities of display be understood within the recontextualising rules of the pedagogic device? Again, should this aspect be under-theorised, how might a Bernsteinian approach be deployed to fill the gaps between the modalities of audience involvement and the promises of the museums role within a pedagogised society? 2) The contemporary museum: professional pedagogy and social theory While subjectivity, audience response and educational purpose have tended to be neglected in official definitions, in the past two decades these have now emerged as the dominant paradigm for both professional and academic discourse on the future of the museum. This departure, often termed the new museology has been informed by a unifying theme of variety of theoretical attempts from within professional discourse, to develop a unique

museum pedagogy (Hooper-Greenhill, 2000; Kelly, 2005). These have ranged from the discursive insulations of a museum informatics (ref.), In the main, however, the tenor of these attempts emerging from within the institutional discourse have been confined to the practical and prescriptive). In this respect, Bennetts re-reading of Foucaldian genealogies is perhaps a reflection of the prominence that these repressed dimension has achieved since Weils (1990) announcement of the new paradigm in museum thinking two decades ago. As a leading museum educator, Lynda Kelly, Director of Audience Research at the Australian Museum has claimed:
If museums are to take a leading role in providing new and meaningful learning experiences for communities of learners then studying visitor learning needs to be part of an active research program. Through analysing audience research studies that use a variety of approaches to uncover visitor outcomes, we can begin to build pictures of what people are learning from their museum experiences. Stephen Weil has stated "...what difference did it make that your museum was there?" (1994:43). This needs to be the focus for visitor studies in the future - we need to continually ask this question of our users, and of ourselves. If museums are claiming that they are places for learning then they need to become learning organisations through application of the tools, methods and information that visitor studies provides to their internal processes. Through this, visitor research will become truly strategic, actively contributing to the museum's capability for organisational learning and change: making a difference internally and externally. Without this, museums will fail to stay relevant.

As these approaches theoretical, the most have an almost exclusively constructivist. Again Kellys own contribution is typical:
Parents understand that their children have individual learning needs, and often talk about their children's learning in constructivist terms, that is, making meaning and generating new knowledge based on prior knowledge, experience and interests: "They're teaching themselves in their own way basically. They're actually zooming in on something that interests them rather than you saying 'look what about doing this, doing that'. When you go to a museum there's so many different things you can look at and they're actually choosing the bits that interest them. In some areas they stay longer, in other bits forget it. Every child's different if you watch them."

These approaches position the new museology well within the invisible pedagogy identified in one of Bernsteins middle period papers (1975), though without the benefit of his critical reading for class reproduction. In many respects, the emergence of the new museum pedagogy resembles the practitioner versions of professional formation in nursing, police work and, in many ways, reminiscent of the origins of educational sociology from the teacher education faculties and training institutes of the early 20th Century. That is should have found itself in such a narrow intellectual stream may reflect not only the neo-liberal environment of research funding, but the also the marginal position of pedagogical thinking within critical theoretical enclosures of academic sociology. Within critical sociological discourse the museum has been a central object of continuing theoretical speculation from cultural history. As Macdonald and Fyfe point out, however, many of these accounts of the art museum, for example, are concerned with defining art and fixing identities (1996, p x) rather than with communicating their effects, not least of which are those on the cultural processes driving the forces of social mobility and social

reproduction. In this field, however, the dominant sociological interpretation of Bourdieu (Bourdieu, Darbel & Scnapper, 1991) is characterized by an exclusionary version of the museum as a failed instrument of popular education, a vehicle of elite culture, an institutional device better located first in the field of primary field of knowledge production rather than as an agent of knowledge diffusion and social opportunity. As Goldfarb (2002, p.145 argues, the restrictive, pessimistic version of the role of museum in social reproduction is inherited from its royal origins, one that marginalizes the general pedagogical function described by Bennett. In this respect, the critical account tends to ignore the dynamics of pedagogical discourse, what Bernstein (1975), has called the interrupter effect of the invisible pedagogy on the visible celebrations of bourgeois taste. Even when the pedagogic and the political these meet, as in the resistance and redemptive movements which see the museum as a kind of Freirean agent of resistance (Golding, 2009 ) a unique pedagogic space is subsumed within the political domain of wider postcolonial, feminist and multicultural struggle. In stark contrast to the redemptive movement and in opposition to the Bourdieusien formulation of the museum as an agency of symbolic violence against the working class, Fyfe (1998; 2003?) has applied Bernsteins dimensions of classification and framing to develop an historical typology of the art museum as an institution with its own internal patterns of encoded meanings and identity formation .The museum, in other words, both shapes and is shaped by artistic activity, organized around the curating, collection and display. Through a combination of Bernsteins two coding types (collection/integration) and a cultural continuum that runs from the pre-modern patrimonial exhibition to the marketdriven contemporary institution, Fyfe proposes a four-fold historical typology of modes of display. In Fyfes typology, the museum, under the pressures of modernization, emerges as a mediating institution between the art academies of courtly display of the 17th century, through the nation-building institutions of the 19th Century (collection code market (such as the British Museum, the Louvre), to the exhibitions of the of the wealthy savant 20th Century (the Barnes Collection of Philadephia, significantly inspired by the educational philosophy of John Dewey) and the most recent, post-war type (integrated code/ market), where the older hierarchies of display are collapsed and market relationships dominate those of the curator. Each type has its own label and client designation : Princely Display/subject, Modern Museum/citizen; Patrons House/visitor and Interpretive/ consumer). As insightful as Fyfes typology may be in its recognition of the mediating and discursive power of the art museum, its application of Bernsteins coding type is problematic. In this application, the codes appear, not as Durkheimian categories or axes of the social order as they do in Bernsteins formulation (1975), but rather as bridging devices for typifying the structural opportunities available to actors. Bernsteins coding types are in this context subsumed by the distinction made by Lockwood (1964: 245) between system integration (eg conflict or order between institutions) and social integration (the relationships between actors):

Museum classification and framing is (sic) the meeting point of agency and structure, of social integration and system integration. System contradictions arising from new divisions of labour will tend to disrupt odes generating uncertainty and doubt about the application of rules.Classification and framing are actions through which a given order is reproduced in the face of system contradictions. The concepts specify the mechanisms through which uncertainty is or is not resolved as order. (Fyfe, 1998: 334-5)

By relegating the grammar of recontextualisation to the interactive order, Bernsteins codes then become rather less than social facts, modalities of external constraint on the possibilities for action, but rather modes of coping strategies in which higher-level contradictions may be resolved. Institutional autonomy becomes a strategy of situated adaptation to a form of anomie rather than a structural forces in their own right that permeate all levels of social order, the systemic as well as the situational. We are now very much the realm of Goffmans Frame Analysis (1974), rather than of Durkheims Division of Labour in Society (1893) in that the codes are not socially structured features of recontextualisation but emerge from recontextualising practices themselves. If Bourdieu may misrecognise the art world as a mystifying reflex of class power, then Fyfes typology of the museum appears to misrecognise institutional order as an emergent property of situated choice and as such falls well outside the social realist tradition in which the code types were produced. One of the consequences of Fyfes conflation of realist code with adaptive strategy is the lack of insight into the pedagogic properties which the mediating and ultimately the constitutive role inherent in the museums mediating influence between the production and consumption of art. In this connection, the underlying narrative of the increasing significance of the museum as a creator of taste is subsumed under the extra-discursive forces of the market place, rather than as an as a distinctive appropriation of the market into new configurations of the pedagogic device. Is the interpretive museum be taken as the last word in an historical typology of display, when the distinctions between system and social levels of integration are erased by the transformations of the new media? How can the discursive autonomy of the museum identified by Fyfe be preserved under the totalising forces of globalised media and the re-centred state? 3) Pedagogy and performance in the contemporary museum The most common theme of the new museology is the importance of subjective experience, represented in the Fyfes typification interpretative mode of display, where audience response and visitor-centred strategies are to be privileged over the curatorial role. As this new orientation has parallels in the invisible pedagogy of the child-centred curriculum that was the subject of Bernsteins analysis and critique (1975), it may be useful to position this phase within a wider field of socio-semiotic possibilities that Bernstein outlined in his later writings. From this perspective, it may be possible to develop a critical typology of museum pedagogy that can not only bridge the discursive gap between the constructivist and the Bourdieusian traditions in the theoretical literature while perhaps providing a more analytical account of institutional evolution. We may ask: (a) What other analytical models of the relationships between pedagogy/display are available ? How do these might position the present interpretive/

visitor-centred museology in an evolutionary framework? How do these resonate with Bernsteins model of the pedagogic device and of the re-centred state? f One possibility for theorizing the insertion of pedagogic discourse into the general cultural processes was proposed by Tyler (2004; 2010). This framework identified two axes of the pedagogic contexts, one defined by the stability of the signifying chain (semiotic axis), the other by the level of relative autonomy from the socio-economic sphere (contextual dependency). This model, originally proposed as a framework for theorizing the Totally Pedagogised Society (2001) and later applied to internal testing regimes (2010), generated four types of socio-semiotic positions in terms the discursive features of voice (legitimacy of discursive positions and identities) and visibility (explicitness of discursive practice). These four cells were then used to identify the four types of pedatogic discourse: traditional pre-institutional (voiced, visible), content-oriented (unvoiced, visible), studentcentred (voiced, invisible) and information-centred. In this evolutionary typology, the student- or child-centred stage is not an end point as it is in Fyfes model, but rather as a discursive modality that becomes generalized through the diffusion of pedagogic discourse through the de-institutionalised environment of the re-centred state. In museological terms, the physical-visitor-centred model of Fyfes interpretive museum could be contrasted with the audience-centred, information-based model of the virtual museum (ref. to Virtual museum of Canada, Museum 2.00) whose boundaries with schools, touristic destinations and communities are dissolved in the digitalized flux of de-centred identities and social networking (eg Museum 3.00). This fourth type denotes the socio-semiotic space of identifies as Bernsteins poststructuralist turn (Tyler (2004, pp. 20-21) which takes a Lacanian (Lacan, 1977) view of the subject, divided inexhorably between an external world of signifiers and the inner world of meaning and experience, an extension of earlier dislocations between the knower and the known.In this context, Caseys re-positioning of the interpretive mode of display in a typology based on the Lacanian concept of the Gaze is of relevance. This typology takes its starting point as the legislating museum rather than that of the princely display or the traditional pedagogy identified by Tyler typical of pre-modern societies) which is characterized by an unmediated relationship between subject and object. This classical or legislative form has gradually been subsumed by the interpretive museum (very similar to Fyfes of the same designation) in which the visitors gaze is split between the object and the interpreters object (eg in a guided tour), a process in which the object is aestheticised, removed from its cultural context and transformed by the museum pedagogy (2003, p.3). These phases, however, are pre-cursors to the living museum, characterized by performances which may go beyond interactivity and multimedia technologies to recreate narratives in which the interpretation itself becomes the object of display. As ordinary (rather than visually attractive) objects are thematised in display: Storying and sequencing combine with entertaining re-enactments and recreations to execute the museums didactic mission (Casey, 2003, p. 9). Though Caseys nostalgic example (a reconstructed 18th Century Massachusetts village) would fall within the category of the retrospective identity, her use of the Gaze opens up the possibility of its

application to the full suite of pedagogic identities: prospective, therapeutic, marketorieinted, elitist and others in a Bernstein taxonomy. As in both of these versions, the invisible pedagogy of display generates into the visible objects of performance, the museum no longer becomes a warehouse of collectables but something resembling a theme park, supremely tractable to the technologies of virtualization by the new media of the hypertext, computer-generated simulation and social networking. Here the dematerializing of the object in the information age merges with the repositioning of the subject through a pedagogic imaginary (Bernstein, 1990, p. ). Museums in this sense realize their didactic mission but hardly in the sense intended by their founders as the gentle educators of the deserving masses. This poststructuralist turn discernible of the performing museum therefore captures both the evaluative component of the pedagogic device, as it transforms the museum into an informal schoolroom. In this latter instance, however, the socio-semiotic phase in which a progressive pedagogy is generalised, is also one that is concealed in the commodified simulacra by which it is legitimated. As Bernstein has pointed out, such a modality is the purest form of invisibility, a sublime example of the recontexualising principle that renders pedagogic discourse a discourse without discourse, one that seems to have no discourse of its own. If it cannot be identified with the discourses it transmits (2000, p. 32), its internal logic cannot be reduced to its class-reproductive meanings, the media of communication and display or the identities it creates and reproduces. A typology of the evolution of the museum may therefore be developed from these reworking of the Bernsteinian theories of pedagogies that draws on both Fyfes historical the Lacanian concept of the Gaze (Table 1). .Table 1. A Socio-semiotic Typology of Museum Pedagogies* Autonomy (socio-economic) Low
1. Aura-centred (voiced/ visible)

High
2. Object-centred (unvoiced/visible)

High Determinacy (semiotic) Low

4.Identity-centred (unvoiced/ invisible)

3.Visitor-centred (Voiced/ invisible)

*Based on Tyler, 2004 Table 1. A Socio-Semiotic Typology of Pedagogic Discourse (with acknowledgement to Fyfe, 1998, Fig. 2 and Casey, 2003, Figs.1-4)

This table provides an evolutionary framework for positioning the major pedagogic modes of the museum within a two dimensional space whose axes are the determinacy of the semiotic field (ie of the signifying chain; see Jameson, 1984) and the autonomy enjoyed by

the museum from the socio-economic sphere. These types have continuities with typologies of Fyfe and of Casey, but are expressed in pedagogic, rather than museological, terms. The upper left cell is that of the auratic princely display identified by Fyfe, while the upper right is Fyfes modern type and the legislating museum of Casey. The lower right cell is designated the interpretive museum in both of these schemas. The lower left cell, absent in the historical typology of Fyfe, is very close to the performing museum of Casey, though it is perhaps more appropriately seen here in Bernsteinian terms as a re-centring and stabilizing device that generalizes the pedagogic device under the guise of the identities that it produces and sustains. In this sense, the outreach to communities, and identities may act as counter-tendency to the collapse of internal rules of classification, as political and economic relevance compensates for the internal collapse of discursive hierarchies. In this respect, the invisible and indentity-centred pedagogy of the fourth cell forms an important bridge between the historical mission of the museum and the chaos of the marketplace, between Bourdieus auratic culture of distinction and a postmodern culture of distraction (Prior, 2005). In this context, the autonomy of the museum as specialized institution is eroded, while, paradoxically, the colonizing effect of its pedagogic transformation on the social, is increased. What implications does the evolutionary framework in implications of the development of museum reform as they become increasingly appropriated by the logics of pedagogic discourse. Since as the performance and identity formation converges with the logic of pedagogy (Tyler, 2001, one might ask whether this move will bring with it an evaluative of the pedagogic device - along with the distributive rules that govern the selection and creation of texts and the didactic recontextualisation of objects and the re-positioning of the viewer/visitor. In this respect Bernsteins model of the pedagogic device would avoid a conflation of the performative (evaluative) orientation of the post-modern condition (Lyotard, 1984) from the performing mode of recontextualising didacticism in Caseys typology. In Bernsteins evaluative sense, it appears that, while the market criteria (including audience response) of museum performance are well recognized, pedagogic criteria of performance appear to be under-developed. As the school system becomes increasingly assessable and accountable under the national and international testing regimes, it may be predicted that that museums will be more closely integrated into the formal assessment systems of schools. However, unless long-term socio-cultural studies that go beyond visitor surveys are carried out it will be difficult, if not impossible, to estimate the effects of this recent transformation on patterns of cultural and social reproduction. Conclusion: The theoretical understanding of the past and present transformations of the public museum is therefore at something of a cross-roads, divided between a constructivist pedagogy and a sociology of display that has not recognized its pedagogic constitution, whether at the societal or institutional level. The theoretical literature in this brief review that has yet to provide an example a schema, even of the middle range, that might recognize the historical conjunction of transformation in the autonomy of the discursive field of museum practices and the centrality of pedagogic discourse in the reproductive field. Since both of these objectives were the axes on which Bernsteins project was defined, it remains to be seen whether the insights generated by this project for the educational institution might be adapted to the challenges posed by new museology.

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