Two views at the Museum from its process: heterotopia and apparatus-dispositive

Abstract

Based on the general thesis that shows it is not possible to build a unique and universal definition of the Museum concept, this paper proposes an examination of the museum phenomenon from two of its technical processes, like paradigmatic cases. The first one is to characterize the Museum as heterotopia, insofar as a place that makes compatible the heterogeneous, the discontinuity and the fragment from the past with an encyclopedist impetus, namely, the technique of taxonomy. The second case is to describe the Museum like an apparatus-dispositive, developing the difference and distance between the museum place as a dispositive, ergo, an associative network of heterogeneous elements that composing a regulation, according to a historical problem, and the apparatus, a transformation in the conditions of the perception.