The Utopics of Social Ordering – Stonehenge as a Museum without Walls

Abstract

This chapter takes up Malraux's discussion of the museum without walls and asks the question ‘how might we think of the space of such a “museum”?’ To answer this question the chapter draws on Foucault's analysis of heterotopia together with Marin's analysis of utopics. My aim is to show that the museum has always been a site of otherness that expresses a utopic practice that comes to shape a vision of the ordering of the social. Having made this argument in relation to the ‘classical’ museum, I then turn to the space of the museum without walls and suggest that it is also heterotopic but, in relation to particular sites, characterized by many different utopics that make the meaning of such a space uncertain, ambivalent and ultimately not representable in any unified way. To illustrate this I use the example of Stonehenge as a museum without walls. It is an impossible, unrepre-sentable space but one that also means a great deal to many different groups of people. Stonehenge is imbued with a myriad of different utopics all of which express different visions of the ordering of the social that are often expressed through forms of resistance to ways in which society, through the prism of such a site, is seen to be currently ordered. What monstrous place is this? ( Tess of the D'Urbervilles.)

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