Apprehending Community Outside of the Law

In the last decade, the term "curation" has become commonplace in realms outside of museums and art institutions. Content curation, data curation and cultural curation have become shorthand for processes of managing information performed by experts and non-experts alike. As David Balzer (2014) has noted, there has been an "acceleration of a curatorial impulse to become a dominant mode of thinking and being" (9). The term "curation" is meant to express value between what and who is brought together, ultimately making a statement about how specific things in a specific place have meaning. Stacy Douglas's Curating Community: Museums, Constitutionalism, and the Taming of the Political is an astute reckoning with the proliferation of the curatorial impulse as it exists between museums and constitutions, both of which she considers as institutions that orient subjects and citizens and ultimately teach us "who we are and where we belong" (3).

On first glance, the link between museums and constitutions might appear forced, but Douglas makes a compelling case for their elision based upon theoretical engagements with the idea of community. The common ground between museums and constitutions is found in their ability to narrate compelling ideas about sovereignty: "they both have the potential to tell a myth about community, whether that be on state-based, ethnic, or anthropocentric lines" (13).

In both museums and constitutions, their ordering logics—categories, taxonomies, methods of time-keeping and record-keeping—devalue messiness; communities are best managed with smooth and simple conceptual boundaries. However, where constitutions value sovereignty above all else, museums have the capacity to help us imagine alternative communities, untethered from politics. Informed by the theories of Hannah Arendt and Jean Luc-Nancy, Douglas is careful to make the distinction between "politics" and "the political" as a way to demonstrate how these institutions help to curate community. Whereas "politics" is the scene of everyday concerns and filled with institutional political actors, "the political" is the scene of ethics, thinking and writing that happens at a distance from institutional parameters. Museums, Douglas argues, might resist the suffocation of the political by politics. Ultimately, Curating Community seeks to disrupt the legal subject through its careful consideration of museums as places that have the ability to curate community outside of the law.

Douglas does not assume that creating or curating communities is an inherently good thing. Unchecked community building, whether through museums or through constitutions, stifles diversity and flattens the constituents it is meant to serve. Using the work of Hannah Arendt (1973, 1998), Carl Schmidt (1996, 2008) and Jean-Luc Nancy (1997, 2010), Douglas examines theoretical positions about community building in Chapter 1, dismantling any assumption that community building is a fundamentally positive business. Through these theoretical engagements, Douglas critiques the idea of a community as something bounded, whole or self-contained. She argues instead that communities are relational, exposed and in a constant state of sharing. Douglas's position, as an interdisciplinary scholar working at the juncture of law and culture, allows her to put the work of Schmidt, Arendt and Nancy up against theorists such as Martin Loughlin (2010), Neil Walker (2010) and Emilios Christodoulidis (1998) who are interested in the role of constitutions in building political communities. Despite these theorists' open critique of constitutions, Douglas shows how they nevertheless fall back upon the worth of constitutions without searching for alternate methods of building community. In many ways, Douglas's book is an answer to theorists like Loughlin and Christodoulidis; Douglas herself refuses to let her critique of constitutional community building lead back to a propping up of constitutions. Rather, her critique leads her to museums, institutions outside of the law, as a means of grappling with how to build and support complex and unbounded publics.

Turning to the history of museums in Chapter 2, Douglas weighs how we might begin to see the building of political community outside of constitutions. The line of comparison between museums and constitutions works most influentially as Douglas navigates how museums and museum...