Remains are not a sign of death but of mystery.
H.P. Jeudy
There are days when our feeling of belonging to the world fades. It is as if an invisible elastic band that normally pulls us along on our daily track suddenly slackens – we may think that part of the emotional equipment that organizes our participation in life has stopped functioning. Albert Camus described states like this to illustrate his ethics of the absurd. In contrast to Heidegger, who described existence as being held out into the nothingness in his inaugural speech as professor in Freiburg in 1929, Camus explained the absurd scent of existence as coming from the shocking experience of being immersed in triviality. A small interruption in the brain activity that we use to make incessant to-do lists and meaningful plans for ourselves is enough to suddenly plunge us into the naked reality of existing. At such moments we may see an otherwise hidden aspect of the world as a totality: briefly, existence means being surrounded by things that have nothing to do with us. You can walk past an open telephone booth and see a man talking into the phone, gesticulating wildly, and suddenly the street and the whole neighbourhood turns into a flat backdrop, the houses stand there like meaningless gestures making big promises, busy passers-by rush on aimlessly with absurd exaggerated motions, posters make disgusting empty gestures, and the trees on the avenue, the traffic lights, the shop window displays and vehicles are merely an assembly of gesticulations boasting of their existence. The world seems like a film with the soundtrack switched off so that nothing remains except the impenetrable and gimmicky mass of facts brimming over with the ridiculous pretence of their presence. The world scene is reduced by everything that language and participation have contributed to it – being has suffered a sensory attack and continues to exist only in resting mode. Observers are surrounded by situations and movements that no longer have binding relevance to anything, they freeze inside, their perception is stuck, they stop believing things, and the world curls up in triviality like a piece of paper in the fire.
When speech returns after the absurd break, people may well remark that the world in its totality looked as if it had turned into a museum. It was like being transported to the border of the totality and seeing the totality from there as an immense exhibition piece, an original-sized copy of itself. As an imitation of itself, the world did not differ from its original state in the slightest detail except for the characteristic of significance – its sudden disappearance turned the same thing into something incomparably different. The same thing in a completely different state turns into a gaping chasm to otherness. A thing we have seen visibly a thousand times and that has grown on us like a shared habit can revert back into something inexcusably strange – I say revert because at such alienating moments the veneer of familiarity that covers things cracks and makes them seem overlaid with an original, aggressive otherness. For anybody who has been through such a mad interlude it is like going to an ontological exhibition opening where the world puts itself on display and glitters at us through the fresh varnish of otherness like a senseless novelty. In the ecstasies of boredom, of the feeling of meaninglessness and over-abundance, the world itself becomes a world’s fair – everything known and visible seems to have moved into a world museum we cannot remember ever having entered.
We should be careful not to interpret this speculation as a symptom of the modern malady of alienation. On second glance, what seems all too familiar is actually an ancient achievement – its appearance marks a threshold in the history of civilization. The birth of philosophical thought out of the astonishment that initially accompanied the adventure of Socratic and Platonic thought is just as important as the birth of subjectivity out of world estrangement. Only great disconcertment about the world as the place of What and That can trigger the monologue of the soul that Plato defined as the medium of philosophy.
We are astonished about the dawning of the world as an event in which everything we know appears once more on the horizon like a sunrise in broad daylight and enters the arena of what is present in reality. It follows that the disconcertment the authors of modern absurdism have articulated is an authentic variation of philosophical astonishment. Both are states that cannot be fixed or professionalized. Disconcertment and astonishment belong to the no man’s land that stretches between science and enlightenment, psychedelics and method.
These considerations reveal a connection between the museum sphere and the alien: museology is a form of xenology, the scientific study of the alien; museum studies are part of the phenomenon of cultural strategies for dealing with strangers. This explains the deep ambivalence of the German word ‘museal’,1 the adjective relating to the museum; if the museum per se is a xenological institution, it is inevitably part of the double meaning of the alien. As a place to encounter beautiful strange things, it communicates experiences on the xenophile spectrum such as desire for the new, acknowledgement, invigoration, exoticism and sympathy with the non-ego; as a place for presenting ugly strange things, the museum is linked to experiences on the xenophobic spectrum, with reactions of rejection against the non-ego, with contempt, antipathy and revulsion towards what is dead, external and dissimilar. This ambivalence makes the modern museum one of the sensitive points for studying the work of culture as simultaneous acquisition and rejection. In contrast to theories such as Nelson Goodman’s that emphasize the didactic functions of museums, or the doctrines that trace the multiplication of museums in the twentieth century to the conservation problems of societies that have become historically accelerated – as in Lewis Mumford’s studies – in the following we shall try to develop a xenological concept of the museum. This integrates the indisputable didactic and conservational aspects of museum practice into the context where we know the world as strange and it looks at us strangely as something we know.
Since the nineteenth century, museums have widely been seen as having an epic function: using art works and everyday objects, they narrate the path of a historical subject up to its present level. This kind of evolutionary idea of the museum was difficult to achieve in practice; it was most successful in the form of a national museum in which a nation represented its history with the aid of national relics – from the bronze sword to the guided missile, from linear pottery culture to the food mixer, from the oxcart to the magnetic levitation train, from the river mill to the nuclear reactor and from Charles Martel to Helmut Kohl.2 The epic design can best be achieved in the area in which ‘history’ can actually be represented as the sum of continuities and renewals: a military museum would have the opportunity to narrate the history of the species of warmongering animal in the context of weapons; a technology museum could unfold the history of the animal laborans and of Homo faber using tools and machines from farming, artisanal and industrial production. The narrative museum is one of the many ideas with which the nineteenth century caused embarrassment for the twentieth. In tasking the museum with a grand narrative, historicism created an institute to implement its preconception of a history to be narrated to us and about us on the level of cultural policy. In this respect the narrative museum and the museum that presents evolution are only materializations of a historical text whose writing can be seen earlier in philosophical and political literature.
The same intellectual authority that writes national, cultural and world history also informs the cultural policy that leads to the construction of national museums, picture galleries, national galleries and museums of applied arts and technology. The history of museums in the nineteenth century shows a remarkable symbiosis of observation and power. For a brief historical moment the victorious forces of the imperial bourgeoisie allowed a compromise with contemplation. The fact that the world had just been constructed as a global factory, a wholesale emporium and a setting for total war did not exclude its simultaneous transformation into an object of educational contemplation. Historicism is the philosophical Sunday of the imperialist week and its museum is the bourgeois temple. This is why all the exhibition pieces in nineteenth-century museums whisper to their visitors: enrichissez-vous, ‘enrich yourselves’. The emotional and intellectual enrichment of the visitors reflects the process of bourgeois acquisition of the world as simultaneous confirmation and marshalling of all stocks.
Nineteenth-century museums are not actually narrative in character. The history they seem to be reviewing and providing testimony for has de facto previously been narrated elsewhere. Treitschke’s historiography is the real Prussian national museum, just as Burckhardt’s morphological vision of Renaissance culture represents the real visit of educated Europeans to the imaginary museum of Italy.3 Museums themselves always remain as mere compilations, storehouses for pieces of cultural war booty, splendid guesthouses for trophies of scientifically camouflaged plundering, archives, treasure houses and stockpiles for objects of bourgeois value. The epic spirit that renders history visible gives them a touch of the great narratives that were composed outside the museum walls in literature and in university chairs of philosophy.
Beat Wyss, an art historian from Zurich, discovered the real origin of philosophical museology in his ingenious interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy of art.4 Although the word ‘museology’ is a neologism that only appeared around the mid-1960s, the idea of museum studies was already immanent in Hegel’s aesthetics and even more in his history of philosophy. In his travels through world history Hegel became the first total museum visitor. Acting as secretary of the world spirit he recorded the developmental phases of the spirit that exists in itself and the spirit that exists for itself. In this perspective, the whole of world time becomes an interior space the spirit has to cross in the process of self-recapitulation. This interior space has already been conceived as the exhibition room of the absolute historical world museum. Phenomenology passes through it on the way towards its present in which the world and the self-acquisition of the spirit are to become accomplished facts. After it has quickly gone through the first room, in which the monstrous sphinx-like early Afro-Asian history is on show, it arrives in the second room, where the exhibits of Antiquity shine beautifully as individual items. Finally it arrives in the room of the Christian world era, the room that, as expected, can only be the third and last one. It smells of prayer and work – it is the integral culture nation as the rational retirement home for humankind.
There is much for the intellect to see in this gigantic room; it proceeds from its medieval bias of faith in the Revelation and feudal tutelage to the modernist autonomy of self-knowledge and of the bourgeois constitutional state. The third hall is enormous – it already includes a Prussian posthistoire and the thousand-year empire of the modernist project. It is the room that houses the Western world civilization of the modern age and which serves as the meeting place for the United Nations composed of the last human beings. Thanks to Hegel’s concept of violence we have an outline of the present-day world as the world’s fair of progress. In his plan the world itself becomes a dynamic museum in which life and memory, exhibition and millennium are the same thing; this is why it does not differentiate between what is staged and the absolute. The fact that what is real here is also rational tells us that the exhibits of the phenomenological world’s fair actually reveal the final truth of the totality. In the constitutional state, in the encyclopaedia of sciences and in romantic art the intellect conclusively revealed what it has always objectively and subjectively harboured. From then on it no longer drifted anarchically where it wanted to but only where it could, which means in the interior of the millennial third hall. This is why Hegelians have never been able to distinguish between the rustle of inspiration and the hum of an air-conditioning system – perhaps this accounts for their fury about so-called false immediacy, because how could a fresh wind from outside get into a Hegelian museum? The only thing that could possibly be blowing there is the ventilator.
The basic concept of Hegelian and historical museology, which is also the key concept of bourgeois society, is acquisition. People who go through the tours of national and world history that museums offer do so to acquire a double kind of ownership, of the world and of themselves. To obtain full possession of its identity the intellect has either to assimilate or to destroy what it is not – at best, to destroy it through assimilation. That is the meaning of historical museum culture: it is designed to portray the entire past as a statement of the becoming self. The alien can no longer be anything but a self that first appeared anonymously but was quickly recognized and incorporated. Hegel’s Absolute Spirit is enthroned in an unusually reconciled fashion above the world-historical scene, which, we are told, is a place of skulls. Hegel sees the world museum at the same time as a world graveyard that already also integrates the living; but the spirit feels quite happy there because each grave houses its own lived possibility and each bone represents an ancestor. The Absolute Spirit is prepared to recognize all previous and simultaneous spirits as relatives on condition that they are willing to be put in a museum and historically buried. But this recognition is ultimately exhausted in acts of incorporation. Conserved in absolute memory, the statements of past alien life become the property of the philosophical museum expert. Because history itself moves on as the accumulation of museum stocks, the museum administration is hardly troubled by the suspicion that in this case property could be theft.
Yet as long as acquisition defines the meaning of history, the alien is destined to be reduced to remains. The foreign remainder is the factor we can neglect in the historical game, the dust of the archive, the intangible breath of a life that should only mean something to us in terms of its statements and results. ‘The life of infamous people’ and the existence of people without any form of expression decay into remnants. In this philosophy, which sees the world itself with all its property owners as immersed in triviality, the shudder we feel at the strangeness of existence is also a trivial leftover.
A new type of museology that has liberated itself from the identity compulsion of the nineteenth century no longer sees the museum simply as a hall of memory of the self. However much curators may talk about ‘functions of identity presentation’, the only possible authentic twentieth-century5 museum is the one in which the theme of strangeness is sharply exposed in a way that fits our age of consternation. Lucius Burckhardt6 was right to claim that the ethnology museum is the most museum-like museum of all. It should be a necessary inspiration for the museum of the twentieth century. Its task is to involve a society that clings to identifications in intelligent cross-border communication and trade with others – and with its ‘own’ members as well. For this reason, too, the authentic museum of today is a museum of interior ethnology. While the fourth generation of our nineteenth-century museum policy is currently being replayed in African and Asian countries, advanced museum practice in the first-generation nation states is beginning to tackle the internal decolonization of culture. Whatever aspect of the past and present world these museums may display, their historical moment will only come when they introduce their audience to an enlightened form of world estrangement.
One of the clichés of the recent discussion in museum studies is the comparison of museums with analogous institutions and places of culture. After definitions by philosophy of history, education, cultural politics, conservational and compensation theory failed to clarify the xenological core of museum practice, some perspicacious authors have approached the problem more indirectly. This has led to museums being compared with graveyards, mortuaries, garbage tips, mausoleums, madhouses, penal institutions, sanatoria and brothels – comparisons that often seem lacking in respect. Such parallels are usually intended less polemically or humorously than serious people may think. What defines the seriousness of such reflections in museum studies is that they do not shrink from referring to suspect places and functions to communicate the specific way in which the museum is different. The other places the museum is associated with have one heterological and xenological – or fundamentally different and alien – factor in common with it: when it comes to suspect places, it is clear that the museum of acquisition itself is an eccentric place, a splendid frame around the strange, reprobate, bizarre, excellent and incomparable things that we would happen upon blindly like owners and users if no museums existed. The association between the museum and the graveyard is the most macabre, but also the most obvious, of those mentioned above. That decrepit things rest in a museum in rather tarnished peace is part of the standard view of popular museology. In reality the museum is less of a graveyard than a heaven on earth for leftover objects, because the day of the exhibition was the dawn of the day of resurrection. In this sense things that have succeeded in being included in a permanent exhibition have really been recorded for posterity. Talking of the resurrection of the body makes more sense for them than for the mortal shell of Christians who, whether buried in the earth or cremated, have the same low odds against preserving a trace of similarity to themselves up to the Day of Judgement.
Seen from a Greek rather than a Christian perspective, for the exhibits the entry into a collection means the journey to Hades, where they gather in dingy cellars with the famous and the unknown and live in the shadows for all eternity. It is true that the collectivization of things in the museum is rather like cities of the dead where simple people ‘reside’ next to the private owners of imposing graves. On the other hand, we can only find a convincing analogy between the permanent exhibition of a thing and the burial of a deceased person if we think of the Egyptian pyramids rather than the Christian churchyard. The tertium comparationis, the third part of the comparison, consists in the passionate effort to conserve the mortal body; if museums and pyramid graves are really the nearest equivalent on earth to metaphysical immortalization, ancient Egyptian undertakers are the objective colleagues of contemporary curators. There are even supposed to be people who don’t like going to museums because they feel that the smell of burial objects clings to all the exhibits. In fact, even today part of the activity of collecting for museums is nothing but a continuation of tomb robbery by other means. One of the significant ways modernity represents itself is that our Egyptologists have taken possession of mummies to turn them into exhibition objects. Anybody who has ever seen the mummies in the Egyptian Collection in Berlin or elsewhere must have instinctively understood how the modern spirit of exhibiting has triumphed over the discreet old-fashioned bond between the living and the dead.
In the process of exhibition, the modern production of posterity as a state of permanent visibility triumphs over the ancient hope of survival through hidden transformation. But when museums exhibit the bog people, mummies and human skulls they have acquired, they come up against the limit beyond which the things assert their own interests against the exhibition. Wherever the heaven of things becomes a morgue itself, the xenological core of the museum is exposed to view. The dead exhibit communicates the main message of the modern museum: there is something insolubly strange in the world. At the same time, museum routines, by their very nature, make what is frightening and indigestible tame and staid, and give us a deceptive feeling of familiarity with the most extreme and the strangest things.
In his reflections on ‘Museums and Other Houses’, Nelson Goodman emphasized the comparison between the penitentiary and the madhouse.7 He thought that the common factor of these institutions is generally that they have a specially designed security system to prevent the inmates from breaking out or to protect over-sensitive subjects from the environment. This tells us that once things are delivered to museums they hardly ever find their way out again. At most they are transferred to more modern institutions or sent on leave from jail as part of a prison reform – heavily insured, of course. The fact that some well-funded museums operate ‘an elaborate intelligence network to capture the wanted’ also seems to fit the picture.8
In our context the extra-territorial character of Goodman’s two comparative institutions is striking; both are destined to isolate individuals who have become alien to their environment because of law-breaking and psychological anomalies. This applies in a similar way to the sanatorium comparison, which is also designed to make people aware of the ‘institutional monstrosity’ of the museum.9
In the brothel comparison, the opportunity for some moments of careless pleasure is the characteristic that makes both museum and bordello seem like places of abreaction and relaxation away from the general hustle and bustle. For those whose professional affiliations require them to see museums mainly as didactic institutions, this definition of the brothel may overstep the permissible limit. For the same reasons, the same people should start encouraging museums and German football league stadiums to emulate each other because both places are very eager to describe success in terms of audience figures.
The comparison of the museum with graveyards, Hades and the city of the dead takes us into macabre territory, and the comparison with the garbage tip leads us into cynicism. Just as thanatology touches on the mysteries of conscious life, cynicism opens a channel to the moral treasure centres of civilization. Anyone who argues a priori against art and garbage being comparable, of things fit for the museum and things fit for the garbage dump, is refusing to use the analytic power of cynical indifference to differences in value for his or her own benefit. From the perspective of cultural ecology the analogy between museology and garbage theory is certainly striking: museums are establishments for processing cultural problems of waste disposal – depots for the exemplary preservation of special waste from civilization, permanent disposal sites for weak radioactive substances and the combustion residue of creative processes. Whereas garbage dumps dispose of the material leftovers of life processes anonymously and downwards, museums provide disposal upwards and into memory. They are dedicated to the special waste category called the ‘objective spirit’ that they select as the recyclable result of earlier life processes and make available for subsequent productions. Insofar as values conserved in museums and preserved cultural items can be likened more to a compost heap than to a permanent disposal site for household and industrial waste, the old gardening culture of composting actually anticipated modern recycling ideas on the level of organic transformation. If we look at material results of civilization from the garbage perspective, it is very clear that the accumulation of knowledge about production gives the subject only a semblance of self-acquisition and power over the outside world. We are gradually beginning to understand that the primary accumulation occurs on the waste side, where dysfunctional and unintended results and by-products of the civilization process are growing faster than our ability to control waste. Since the piled-up garbage and accumulated side-effects of social reproduction are increasing more rapidly than the heap of skills, things that are alien and cannot be acquired as such are erupting in the very centre of the modern process of world acquisition, in the midst of self-empowerment through production. Garbage as a heterologous category par excellence is a sign of the non-ego’s revenge on the subjectivity that insatiably produces and consumes. Garbage conserved in a museum is an expression of the self-pity of the subject that can foresee the threat of its destruction when the stranger hits back. Exhibited garbage objects are only partly created out of identification with the counter-attacker; what they express more strongly is the rebellious subject’s belated impulse to focus on the part that has been disregarded, even if it is objectively clear that civilization must gird itself for another battle against Nature as waste.
If the museum were primarily an educational establishment, it could be content with illustrating the history of human forms of expression and life for posterity with the aid of art objects and trivia. But because it is essentially concerned with studying what is alien, we can also use it to assess how far the world is becoming estranged from its inhabitants.