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Examining the object’s purview allows two important areas to be explored: first, it permits fuller consideration of the role of the characteristics of things – physicality, tangibility, and other sensual qualities – in how we perceive and respond to them; second, as will be outlined later, it enables reflection on different ways of knowing and the relative balance of power between them. The former area, as we shall see, leads into discussion of the effects and what is sometimes – and not uncontentiously – referred to as the agency of objects. It is clear in everyday encounters with artifacts in any cultural domain that the physicality of things has an impact on how persons sense, interpret, and interact with them. An individual’s personal, cultural, social, and historical contexts may strongly influence the meanings and values they attribute to a particular item, but that piece’s material characteristics will nonetheless also have significant effect. Thus an artifact with the form of a bowl or cup and composed of metal or ceramic, for instance, in its very shape and solidity, indicates something quite different to (and indeed may elicit different behaviors from) any observer than, say, a flat rectangular item made of woven cloth.

Indeed, objects’ physical qualities can stimulate potent effects in those who encounter them. When I visited the Francis Bacon: In Camera (March 27–June 20) exhibition at Compton Verney, England, in 2010, for example, among the most powerful objects for me were not the completed iconic paintings central to the show but two large damaged canvases displayed in the last room. I found them highly moving, initially solely because of their size and the sheer physicality of their mutilated state: the central, visceral gash in the canvas, the flopping forward of part of the ripped material, and the hanging threads, like filaments of skin casting shadows onto the white, gallery wall visible behind what should have been the middle of the picture, rendered a piece of visual art into a very poignant, raw, gut-torn, three-dimensional tactile object, even though I could not touch it. Subsequently I read in the accompanying texts that they had been torn by Bacon himself, presumably because he had decided, for whatever reason, that he did not wish them to form part of his extant legacy of paintings. This information added to their pathos and impact, but also, in tying the paintings’ materiality to the specificity of one person and his actions, both reified and constrained them.

Affective responses to museum objects can, then, be very powerful, even though the items in question cannot usually be picked up and used and even (or sometimes especially) if nothing is known about their provenance or use (as I have written elsewhere: Dudley 2012). This is not only because of the overall visual impact of the object or its content but also, as my brief exploration of different elements of the torn Bacon paintings illustrates, as a result of the optical examination of details in the artifact. Furthermore, even when sight is the only sense we can directly utilize, we nonetheless activate our memory and imagination in order to bring other sensory modalities into the perception we create. That is, when our eyes rove over the details of something, we build in our minds an idea not only of what it looks like but also, for example, of its three-dimensional form and texture, thus developing an imagined sense of what the object feels like too. Recent scientific research is helpful here, not only evidencing the claim that engaging with art and other objects can have significant effects on affect and well-being (Chatterjee, Vreeland, and Nobel 2009; Binnie 2013), but also demonstrating that viewers of authentic material objects will look at them for longer and in different ways to digital reproductions, their eyes exploring more of the whole artifact and looking more closely at physical details (Binnie 2013; see also Quian Quiroga, Dudley, and Binnie 2011).

Yet the physical qualities of objects in museum contexts or elsewhere remain inadequately explored in the material culture literature as a factor in the relationships between people and things. There are of course many exceptions, just one example of which might be Keane’s semiotic investigation of the role of materiality in causation, in which he explores the “bundling” of qualities in a particular object and “the historicity inherent to signs in their very materiality” (2005, 183; emphasis original). Others have written extensively on the “agency” of objects. For some this can be a useful notion, when agency is understood as not necessarily implying intentionality (e.g., Gell 1998; Gosden 2005), but for others it remains problematic, with true agency attributable only to human subjects (e.g., Morphy 2009; Knell 2012). Conversely, the agentive actants of actor network theory may be human, animal, or object (e.g., Latour 1993; Law and Hassard 1999). Thus, it seems we have yet to find a satisfactory theoretical alternative that adequately or convincingly accounts for the reality that perception, cognition, and emotional and physical responses are actively affected by the real-world characteristics of objects (see Ingold 2010), notwithstanding that individuals may see, interpret, and react differently depending on the cultural experiences they bring with them.

Extending the colonized metaphor, there are potentially useful insights to bring to bear from postcolonial and subaltern studies. Extensive scholarship in these areas reminds us of the considerable difficulties in constructing a nuanced picture of the subaltern’s history, identity, and perspectives on the colonizers and colonial experience, despite the presumed desirability of doing so. O’Hanlon cautions that this is a particularly hazardous task because of the tendency of scholars originating in cultures wherein “the free and autonomous individual represents the highest value” to slip back into an essentialist and reductive focus on “the idea of the self-constituting human subject” (1988, 197), leading to culturally and methodologically inappropriate assumptions about a particular “nature” or “essence” among both subordinate and colonizers. Instead, she urges, we need to focus on practice: on what is done to and by them (1988, 197). Such a focus still relies on a dichotomy “between those on top and those underneath.” The split is simplistic but remains rhetorically powerful and valuable if we make clear that it operates on two distinct levels, which O’Hanlon terms the “theoretical” and the “substantive.” The former is concerned not “with categorizing actually existing … groups … but with making a point about power,” with making unambiguous the fact that the relationship between the dominant and the subordinate is based on a fundamental imbalance (O’Hanlon 1988, 199; see also Chatterjee 1983, 59). This is important, even though in the reality of everyday life (the “substantive”) neither the dominant nor the subordinate is a homogeneous, clearly bounded, identifiable single group that can or should be easily reduced or essentialized to a simple category. Thus, having established a theoretical position, in later analysis “the categories which we must employ to understand [the] workings [of power and domination] must be as multifarious and nuanced as the courses and ligaments through which power itself runs” (O’Hanlon 1988, 200). In other words – and this is a point directly applicable to the museum – we must first make clear the real imbalance of power characterizing the relationships in the context in question, but then ensure considerable subtlety and dexterity in our studies of the complex machinations at work within it.

The colonized, then, were on the poorer side of a relationship of power, but the processes by which dominance operated were complex, not only in their workings but also in the ways in and degrees to which their effects were experienced. And, importantly, the colonized did not just passively “receive.” As Fanon, for example, realized, even if silenced, the subaltern is not entirely mute (Fanon [1961] 1990; Gibson 2003). The colonized’s characteristics, behavior, and very existence had significant impacts on the colonizers, albeit that they often found themselves having to communicate using the language and ideas of those in power rather than directly via means of their own. (Notably, the production and exchange of objects, however, while still enmeshed within complex and unequal webs of power, were areas in which the colonized were more often able to express themselves, as writers such as Thomas (1991) and Harrison (2011) have shown.) Yet, as interdisciplinary subaltern studies have demonstrated, hearing what the colonized subaltern have to say, recognizing their subjectivity and agency in the traces of the past, and writing their (rather than dominant) histories are tasks of great difficulty and intricacy. Historical records are largely written from the perspective of the elite and there are often few if any other textual, material, or even oral sources to which one can turn for the subaltern’s view. Some groups, in particular, may have undergone so many repeated displacements (conceptually if not physically), continually constructed, even in supposedly sympathetic contemporaneous texts, as belonging to others and, concomitantly, being without agency (e.g., girls and women in nineteenth-century India: see Lal 2010). Recovering any sense of those subjects’ perspectives on their experiences, and actions and impacts on their lives, is thus very difficult; nonetheless, the arduousness of the task implies neither that the influences in the webs of relationships and practices in which both colonizers and colonized were enmeshed went only in one direction, nor that the colonized had no views.

There are significant potential applications of these insights from postcolonial studies to the museum encounter. At O’Hanlon’s (1988, 199) theoretical level, the imbalance of power inherent in the encounter relationship is reinforced, but then immediately we are reminded of the need to avoid generalities and to heed the real complexities involved. Utilizing the colonial metaphor enables us to be aware of the severe difficulties in trying to “see” things from the object’s perspective and prompts us to look beyond our established sources, methods, theories, and concerns in order to seek out alternative ways of trying to understand the viewpoints of things in museums. We are also reminded that subject/object categories, connections, or distinctions can be profitable at the theoretical level but need to be avoided – in fixed and essentialist forms, at any rate – on the substantive plane, where we should focus instead on what actually happens in person–thing engagements. Furthermore, just as it is extraordinarily difficult to see things from the colonized’s perspective, so may it be almost impossible to comprehend the object’s point of view – and it will certainly remain impossible if we fail to look beyond our established sources, methods, theories, and concerns in order to seek out alternative modes of perception and cognition.

So, continuing the metaphor, as the colonized gazed back at the colonizers and formed their own opinions of them just as much as the other way around, let us suppose that this is indeed also what museum objects do. Let us imagine that they too have points of view, and that they look on the visitor just as much as she peers at them. This is not in itself an original suggestion. In encountering “startling” pieces, Knappett says, we find not only ourselves looking at them, but them looking back (2007, 136). This is the reciprocal contemplatory regard in which, as Knappett describes in commenting on Garrow and Shove’s (2007) experiment with a rock and a toothbrush, the “strange” can become “ordinary,” or vice versa. Knappett, citing Oppenheim’s Objet, Duchamp’s Bottle Rack, and Dali’s Lobster Telephone, finds in this experiment an echo of “the surrealist practice of taking familiar objects and making them unreal and fantastical” (2007, 136). Elkins, before him, also wrote of the object staring back and, after Heidegger, of there being

ultimately no such thing as an observer or an object, only a foggy ground between the two … what I have been calling the observer evaporates, and what really takes place is a “betweenness” …: part of me is the object, and part of the object is me. (1996, 44)

Recently, Fisher has explored the space in between as the “focus of energy and connection [and] … locus of ‘presence,’” manifested by “not only the reciprocal gaze, but also haptic aesthetic engagement perceived as tangible forces, feelings and relationships” (2012, 156). She is writing about a performative artwork at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, in which members of the public took turns to sit opposite the artist Marina Abramović. Clearly the “haptic aesthetic engagement” about which she writes involves two human beings, rather than one person and an inanimate object; it thus differs from the encounters on which this chapter focuses. Nonetheless, her explorations of the space in between the two participants, and of the reciprocal gaze, have interesting parallels with my own reflections here. Her (and Abramović’s) use of the Sanskrit concept of darshan, a special kind of sight that entails not only both seeing and being seen, but also, metaphorically at least, a sort of touching and being touched, is also of some interest in wider thinking on the relationships between persons and things. Others, too, have written of the gap between subject and object (e.g., Pearce 1994; Severs 2001). Mitchell puts it slightly differently, discussing what things (pictures, in his case) want but essentially writing of the same effect of objects on us in his discussion of what he calls the “double consciousness” surrounding images or objects, in which we talk of them as if they were or could come alive while at the same time insisting that we do not believe any such thing (2005, 11). Earlier still, Lacan famously argued that a sardine could see him, despite his companion’s statement to the contrary (1986, 95). Lacan’s attempt to take the sardine can’s perspective and to decenter himself in his discussion has been sharply criticized; Connor, for example, observes wryly that the sardine can “does not not see Lacan merely because it is unequipped with optical apparatus, since, even if this deficiency were made good, it would continue not to see Lacan … for the same reason that my guitar does not in fact gently weep and my iPod is ineligible to vote in general elections, namely, that a sardine-can just doesn’t do seeing” (Connor n.d.). He adds that “Lacan’s not-mattering remains a matter essentially for him, ensuring that human being stays bang in the bullseye of its own decentring.”

Yet it seems to me that, in the terms of my colonial metaphor, within which visitors and museum objects are from different worlds but now operating within one hegemonic assemblage in which visitors have – or appear to have – dominion, we cannot be sure whether or not sardine cans or any other kinds of things see. That is, we are unable to perceive, from where we are standing, how things work and appear from where objects are; and, in turn, they are unable to comprehend how things seem to us. There will, of course, be some readers objecting at this point that not only do objects not see, but they don’t comprehend, either. I am more reticent than Lacan (1986, 95) to claim that I am not speaking metaphorically, as the gaze here must, I think, be construed as figurative rather than literal: I do not, for example, claim that pots or fossils physically see in the way that I do with my eyes. But “the gaze” is a useful idiom in which to cast how things appear from positions other than or additional to that of the human subject, to take in the picture of the material world as a whole from the outside looking in, or from another perspective than ours alone.