We can be what we want nowadays, but just no longer absolument moderne.
We don’t have to be more avant-garde than the world to obtain a total view of it when we follow its orbit. On the contrary, the time has come to be absolutely museum-like to deal with the problem of the world ‘as a totality’. Anybody who wants to understand what it means today to come into the world must realize what it means to visit a museum.
Human beings are creatures that come into the world. Only a subsection of those who come into the world will become museum visitors. Coming into the world and going to a museum are not only very different activities but are also contrasted in terms of very different degrees of general participation. My proposition is that under the logic of modern times these processes – coming into the world and going to a museum – converge. How does this happen? We could begin with arguments from statistics and social sciences: modernized societies are societies in which education is compulsory and, next to schools, museums are becoming increasingly important among the institutions of modern compulsory learning.
It follows that a young person in our civilization has as little chance of avoiding a museum outing as avoiding school sports, learning imperial foreign languages and calculating percentages. Coming into the world ends up with going to school – this is a statement that no longer sounds exaggerated to us. In our part of the world, school has become so inevitable and so ubiquitous that living and going to school have had to develop synonymously. School as a metaphor for the world and life has a directly illuminating effect in a society in which schools stand on every corner as institutions of cognitive capital. When people talk about ‘lifelong learning’, the eternal pupil inside us nods knowingly from personal experience. Something comparable exists nowadays in terms of museums – even if the museum as a metaphor for the world still sounds rather precious and is frowned on as a metaphor for life. Who would ever admit not only that human beings drag themselves through an exhibition now and then but also that the process of coming into the world could resemble a museum visit in the first place? Has historicization left us in such poor shape that museums have advanced in our lifetime to become an absolute metaphor similarly to the way that the labyrinth, the theatre, the house, the book, the school and the spool have become indispensable words in our world picture? In that case, how should I argue if I want to explain that talking about the world as a museum is more than a foam bubble in metropolitan chit-chat, that it actually represents a rhetorical figure of value in the context of the history of civilization?
Let us speak openly: if the museum is accepted as an expression for the totality of the world or a world feeling, it means we are in the terrain of Gnosticism. The museum is a neo-Gnostic world metaphor that first appeared with the concept of necessity during the self-completion of modernity and has consistently gained plausibility since then. People who use this metaphor are infecting our feeling about the world in general with an easily understandable and specific museum nausea and are naming the strange totality they live in after the museum, the best-known model of alienation in the culture. The word ‘museum’ can be used as an attack on most of the content of life today, which is indifferent, half-dead and random. At the same time the word ‘museum’ hints at the tragedy of the ‘objective spirit’ and heightens suspicion that the past is always more powerful than the present and that life never really matches up to what has already been lived. In his brooding thoughts about the problem of museums Paul Valéry says that our heritages smother us; he goes on to say that we necessarily have to give up. What can we do? We become superficial. Generalized criticism of museums is also a final stage of any cultural critique that has blamed existing forms of life since the late eighteenth century for our inability to cast off a particular sense of alienation. The older the culture, the more alien it appears to newcomers – like a Kafkaesque authority and a Hegelian heap of skulls. I once tried to invert the cultural criticism that has become world criticism to find out what happens when alienation from the world stems not from the fallibility of external relationships but from internal dizziness and the absence of a sense of belonging. Could it be that it is not the world that is alien to us but that we are alien to the world?
Is it the world’s fault that it can be seen from the absurd perspective of a museum? Or is it the visitors’ fault that their local history museum suddenly seems foreign? We should probably not ask questions like that. A better solution might be to start from a relationship between the ego and the world that contains the possibility to create otherness from the outset. It seems to me that people estranged from the world blame the strangeness of the world because of a failure of synchronization between the existence of the world and the discovery of the world we make when we enter it. A deep sense of strangeness is an effect of mistakes in our original naturalization. This can lead to many of us acquiring citizenship of being in an incomplete sense. The world becomes a museum if I have to stay in it without knowing how I arrived here. It becomes museum-like, alien, objective, block-like and rebuffing when the joyful energy of the initial arrival and discovery has become rigidified in my existence. When the continuum of permanent birth is broken, it inexorably gives the impression that the world seems to have been there before us forever – as the oldest pre-arranged set-up in the world, a miserable fait accompli devoid of light. Then the world becomes the bedrock of facts which have existed the longest and which will inevitably shatter all those latecomers; it must appear to us as the immense sum of the stored past that has not passed, and our present life, which has arrived much too late and is limping along behind, finds it impossible to keep up.
In this manner, ‘world’ becomes a concept expressing human beings’ resignation at the incredible advance lead of things. When Heidegger speaks of being-in-the-world, the phrase carries echoes of human tardiness in relation to the alien cosmos. It is also impossible to ignore the threat that in competition with the harsh facts that existed before us we have only been given a last chance through death. Only to the extent that our own death means the end of the world do we catch up with the world and become extinct together with it; in other words, it makes us synchronous and on the same level with the world for the first time. Otherwise, to borrow Heidegger’s notorious terminology, we would have no choice but to look bravely into our fateful ‘thrownness’. Thrown into where? Into something that tastes like nothing, or nothing that appears as something, whichever you like – in any case, in a context of older, more powerful, long-established authorities and laws that simply remain to be found.
The older form of Gnosticism used the concept of the world prison symbolically to define this basic sensitivity of human beings. The Gnostic viewpoint says that humans are beings that have fallen into the cosmos, the dazed survivors of a metaphysical crash landing. According to their character, which in this context means their history, human beings are prisoners of matter, and their emotional entanglements, wishes and desires have led to their enchainment to the rock face of existence. It would be a miracle if modernity, which revises everything, had not issued the prison regulations for people imprisoned in being. Modern penitential reform has liberalized ontology, with the result that nowadays the world prison of late Antiquity has evolved into the postmodern world museum. The conditions of imprisonment in the Leads1 of matter have been modified: we are allowed prison leave and sex and television in our cell. Our transcendental homesickness has become a kind of cultural unease, and our hatred against the created and completed world for being full of bad things has turned into a lack of respect for the classics and determination to use new writings against the old established texts, if not to render them unwritten at least to shake them up, distort and parody them. The present form of Gnosticism is trying to break out of the prison of the original text to return to the heaven of the unregulated writing hand. The impatient psychotics among us want to slough off the old skin of the world and risk direct ascension to heaven; cautious and resilient people make do with subsidies and are content when they manage to remodel the straitjacket imposed by the world into a personal item of clothing. If we are already condemned to be in the world like strangers in a museum, then it seems a matter of metaphysical and museological health not to hang around eternally as a lost visitor on the edge of the world. It is advisable, as soon as we have got over the first shock, to change sides and join the museum makers. Museums themselves can even become their own museums to a modest degree, and friendship with museums is a new beginning for the discreet friendship with the world that is part of the cheerful attitude of recuperated Gnostics.
A good example of this comes from Emil Cioran, who reports on one of the most macabre and happiest museum visits of our century in an essay called ‘Palaeontology’:
An unforeseen shower, one autumn day, drove me in the Museum of Natural History for a while. I was to remain there, as a matter of fact, for an hour, two hours, perhaps three. It has been months since this accidental visit and yet I am not about to forget those empty sockets that stare at you more insistently than eyes, that rummage sale of skulls, that automatic sneer on every level of zoology. [. . .] Nowhere is one better served with respect to the past. Here the possible seems inconceivable or cracked. One gets the impression that the flesh was eclipsed on its advent, that in fact it never existed at all, that it could not have been fastened to bones so stately, so imbued with themselves [. . .] the solidity, the seriousness of the skeleton, it seems absurdly provisional and frivolous. It flatters, it gratifies the addict of precariousness I am. That is why I am so comfortable in this museum where everything encourages the euphoria of a universe swept clean of the flesh, the jubilation of an after-life.2
The temptation of the museum has never been so vividly expressed. A person who loves museums rejects the world as a deadly imposition; only somebody who can see the dead as equals can easily accept the world as home. For somebody who feels drawn to the dead, there is no better place in this world. People who feel at home in museums, on the other hand, have found the place in the middle of the world where a person can be present, can be here on the spot as if he or she were already gone. With unerring certainty, Cioran’s Gnostic genius has discovered the natural history museum as the place where being-in-the-world offers an exit from the world of its own accord. Being surrounded by primeval bones lessens the error of coming into the world and the Gnostic feels at home among his or her own kind. But the jubilation ‘after life’ means the pre-cosmic jubilation for an existence that can remain on its own as long as there are no external relationships and no harsh facts, nor any world history and humans that make it. The museum is at its most dead where it most clearly shows the qualities of a pre-existential womb. Close to the calcified bones of primeval animals, the Gnostic spirit feels the mineral mother, the earth. Our museology has to return to that spirit to understand what has been going on for the past two hundred years or so as the princes, the ministers, the grand bourgeoisie and finally the democratic educators set up countless artificial caves of the past and sent whole populations thronging through them.
Before airing some thoughts about the possibility of putting the world on display and looking at the idea of the world exhibition or world’s fair, I cannot resist treating you to a scary digression. Afterwards, I think, we will feel like Schiller’s diver who re-emerged from the underwater depths and was grateful for breath in the rosy light of the world above.3
There is a kind of archetypal fantasy from the bourgeois nineteenth century about museums swallowing and retaining human beings. Patrick McGrath pursued this idea in a sarcastic short story, ‘My Dead Body’, which appeared in a catalogue to the exhibition Permanent Collection – Bogomir Ecker, Raimund Kummer, Hermann Pitz in the Brooklyn Museum in 1988 and is the most radical contribution to imaginary museology yet; once you know this story, you will never think about the term ‘permanent exhibition’ in the same way again.
Imagine awakening in utter darkness and realizing you have been buried alive [. . .] your most terrifying nightmare has become a reality. They have nailed you down in the coffin, they have lowered you to the ground, and shoveled dirt on top of you – and then they have left you. Above you in the thickening light of a gray winter afternoon in a cold North American city, to which you are a stranger, you imagine a soft wind murmuring through bare trees that claw like grotesque hands out of the black earth. You see the dusk creeping over this deserted place, the shadows clustering above the headstones. The gates of the cemetery are locked for the night, and gradually the wind rises, as darkness falls, and howls in the trees like a demon. Below the ground, in impenetrable blackness, in a total and absolute silence, you lie in a box and wait for death.
I had come to this city to catalogue the contents of this museum. For some months I had been ill; perhaps that explains why I was so sensitive to what was going on in the museum – no one else appeared to notice. You see, I had been there less than a week when I realized that a number of items in the African gallery were not, strictly speaking, inanimate. They weren’t actually alive, not in the way that you are alive, or I am (precariously) alive; but the last traces of a decaying spiritual power still somehow clung to them, enough to stimulate movement and occasional sounds. [. . .]
The question soon arose in my mind, what happened when the museum closed for the night? [. . .] I hid in a toilet in the men’s room just off the Grand Lobby and waited until everyone had left. [. . .] A few lights burned, such that a deep gloom pervaded the place, lending it rather a sinister aspect. [. . .] I wandered between the display cases of the African gallery, surprised that these familiar objects should, merely by reason of reduced illumination and the emptiness of the building, now seem so mysterious. [. . .] My mood quickly changed, however, when I began to hear heavy clumping footsteps. I traced the sound to its source: it was a MBamba nail man, from the Kingdom of Kongo, who was stamping his feet. [. . .]
It was at this point that I became truly frightened. I had realized, you see, that the nail man was after one thing only – revenge! – and that he carried within him all of the anger, the pain of betrayal and destruction, that the people of Kongo had suffered at European hands! It was ironic, I reflected as I climbed rapidly to the third floor, that such a vengeful spirit should have been carried back to the Western world entombed in the museum where his malignant powers could grow like a cancer. [. . .]
They were all on the move now, even the limbless Roman torsos were dragging themselves across the floor towards the stairs. [. . .] The black head of Julius Caesar floated through the gloom, a horrible red gleam deep in his dark eyes, and on came the scarab-breasted dummies. [. . .] Up, up they came. [. . .] I could go no higher. But still I could hear it, distinct amid the hideous shuffle and rumble that filled the gloomy building [. . .] and I trembled with terror.
I should be dead by now! By now I should be dead! These insects of the soil – they are in my ears and my eyes, my nose, up my anus, they are eating the soft parts, my earlobes, my penis, my inside thighs. [. . .] Why don’t I die? Why does life go on, even if the body is devoured? This is the curse of the nail man! I have been chosen to suffer for the Kingdom of Kongo!
They cornered me under James Hamilton’s ‘Last Days of Pompeii’, and that is where the nail man laid his curse on me. I was found there the next morning: in the absence of vital signs I was presumed dead. That was three days ago. For three days I have been ‘dead’. They think me ‘dead’ now. But I am not dead, not at all, despite the coffin, the insects. [. . .] Perhaps, like the nail man, I am condemned to live forever and remember the suffering of the people of Kongo. Perhaps, like him, I will rise in the night!4
As I have said, the piece was published in an exhibition catalogue in New York and is quite literally a catalogue story. In the story, death becomes self-referential and finds euphemisms, words to accompany itself. Death is persuaded to speak out of the museum. From now on something speaks that usually lacks speech – thanks to McGrath the cataloguing principle has penetrated not only into the museum at night but also into the coffin, and continuously produces phrases from the innermost silence. The museological horror story relates to a human dream whose ambivalence intimately affects the character of the museum. Our first-person narrator speaks as if while doing cataloguing work he involuntarily discovered the shortest path to immortality: from the city to the museum, from the museum to the grave, from the grave to the eternal inner light of awareness, still present there even post mortem. For him the dream of immortality has turned into a nightmare as though the museum were nothing but an institution to make nightmares come true. McGrath’s hapless curator experiences a death in the first person – he becomes a living buried person, a pure ego without a world. He enters directly from the ethnological collection into immortality – and we feel compelled ourselves to recognize a museological core in the idea of immortality, this basic theme of metaphysics, or, more precisely, to be aware of the idea of the historical metamorphosis of burial caves as essential for the museum of the modern age. The burial cave is, in fact, the imaginary space in which the contradiction between being dead and continuing to live seems to be suspended. The museum as a burial cave functions as a projection screen of imaginary death: it is there for the metaphysical piece of art to become complete and be preserved by the process of us losing ourselves. As our ghostly history shows, we should be cautious about seeing this extension of life after death as entirely positive. Imaginary death may mean immortality for me personally and may allow me to think of myself as going further, even if I have to think myself ‘out of this world’, but the same thing in relation to other people implies something absolutely uncanny: I cannot believe your spirit has more permanence and capacity to return than my own. If I survive physical death, I know myself that it may lead directly to a heavenly high life, but if the others also survive their death, this will lead to even more ghosts, and we have reason to fear them intervening in our present life.
This is why all human cultures are concerned about placating the dead. We have to keep them in a good mood, we have to satisfy their demands for piety, and above all we have to take great care to do everything possible to prevent their return. Such measures have an allotted place in the psychodrama of cultures everywhere. There are points in the imaginary topography of all human communities where the affairs of the living are carried out with their dead – the domestic altars, the temples, tombs, cemeteries, monuments, catacombs, cathedrals, battlefields, war memorials; even national calendars are subject to the requirements for appeasing the dead and keeping them away.
In this light, it is not difficult to argue plausibly that museums of the eighteenth, the nineteenth and particularly the twentieth century can largely be understood in terms of the psychodrama of modern arrangements for the disposal of the dead. As we know, the social status of the dead has fundamentally changed since the eighteenth century. The Enlightenment obstructed their return as spirits, demons and manias. Since then even important, high-ranking dead people have had to give up haunting and submit to enlightened regulation of authors’ rights; the ancient and feudal constitution for ghosts is no longer adequate for processing the remains of terminated life. From now on the great dead who still have an impact can only survive under copyright protection, which means as testators and as authors of works and testaments. Modernity retrospectively sends the geniuses and spirits of earlier times to school and to museums; it tells them they may only live on inside us if they turn into material for lessons or exhibitions. Dead people officially return only on the curriculum. They have to become classics and exhibition pieces, and in famous cases they return as creators of constant or rising values. Think of the ghostly success of Vincent van Gogh, who has been able to live from his paintings since he died.
What I want to say, briefly, is that the conditions of survival for dead persons and dead things are beginning to change dramatically in the modern age, and that aside from cemeteries – the traditional places for housing and disposing of corpses –, schools and museums are the institutions that have to bear the main spiritual responsibility for keeping the dead away. All the same, these institutions are also subject to the rule that keeping away the dead who are still living can only be achieved by cultural compromise – in other words, by invitations that refuse, by despatching what has been fetched, by resuscitation that kills, by destructive preservation, by announcements that black out, by imaginings that distort, and by exhibiting that makes things invisible. The museums of the present achieve extraordinary things in all these disciplines; in many places, in fact, they go far beyond their allotted task and handle living artists as if they are already dead and as if the risk of their return should be eliminated by organizing major exhibitions of their work as a precaution.
In other words, museums, rather like the neurotic symptoms of the Freudians, are compromise constructions between return and defence – raising and finishing off the past at the same time. They are centres for coming to terms with the past in the tenuous sense that they resist our conquest by the dead, by things of the past, former things and decrepit things. Patrick McGrath’s story is the best kind of museology because it explains the crucial function of the museum by assuming its failure. The curator’s psychosis in relation to graves opens the way for inferences about normality in museums. He sees the museum pathologically as something that has become completely and utterly what the regular visitor only glimpses – the cave entrance in the belly of the earth, the initiation site for reunification with the birthing element, the cultic location for visualizing the path the ancestors had to follow to bring our nation to its place and our culture to its present level. Because the narrator remains caught in the museum trap like a model victim, he makes us realize what is important for other visitors: to find their way out as quickly as possible. Museums are the ideal modern institution for playing the game of fast-in-and-out, the game that is vital for life. The museum is our official uterodrome, the circular racing arena of the uterus. Not everybody can embark on extensive underworld journeys and follow in the tracks of Orpheus, Aeneas, Dante and the psychonauts of great psychoanalysis. But our museums are perfectly suited to the average person’s rides through hell. This is why the widespread fear of museums is significant and indispensable to the museum as a place for keeping the dead away. People who enjoy spending time in museums are taking risks with the dead at close range. Maybe they already belong more to the exhibits than to the expounders. Maybe they are already deeply immersed in the undertow of the graves. Those who have not noticed recently that they are suffering from the typical museum syndromes of tiredness, dizziness, weariness with life, nausea, claustrophobia, breathlessness, yawning and the panicked rush for the exit should consult a psychoanalyst or, even better, an analyst of existence as soon as possible. Otherwise the museum may well claim further victims.
Another aspect of a healthy and functioning museum is that we are not haunted by the things preserved there and we are completely convinced they are not alive. McGrath’s museum worker breaks this rule shockingly by acting like a primitive animalist and attributing more life to the exhibits than they legitimately deserve. His most unforgivable failing is that his ears detect something we do not usually hear and that he identifies with the whispered messages of the figures in the museum as if they had spoken to him personally and shared their secrets with him. The curse of the nail man from the Congo is a typical ghost’s voice; although it comes from the sixteenth century, it has managed to slip through the enlightening censorship and can be heard in the inner ear of a thoughtless present-day museum employee. The MBamba nail man is a contemporary of Luther’s writings, Calvin’s sermons, Michelangelo’s sculptures and Dürer’s paintings. It seems, of course, as if we have got rid of these voices and constructs and can assume that the figure from the Congo is just as securely established in museum culture as his European counterparts. McGrath’s story shows the opposite. When the museum fails, our defence against the dead becomes porous at that point and missions, prophecies and curses that are hundreds – indeed, thousands – of years old can speak to us as if there were a breach in the historical wall of time. The museum is where we realize the ghostly element of intellectual history: there is still no history of culture that, however hidden, would not simultaneously be a history of continuing possession by spirits.
Ridiculing the museum means really visiting the museum. It is time for us seriously to ridicule the museum and observe the origins of the process by which the world is made into a museum. What causes modern societies to be flooded with institutions for presenting finished things from bygone work? What is responsible for the results of our ancestors’ work weighing on us today ‘like a nightmare on the brains of the living’? This is no different from Karl Marx’s statement about the ‘tradition of all the dead generations’.5 Why is it necessary that the sum of values created by all previous producers continues to be exploited as if it were global capital? In short, how did the remains of the past come to cause this massive pollution of the present?
Making the world into a museum is a result of the capitalist cultural revolution that increasingly entangled local civilizations in the adventure of synchronization from the eighteenth century onwards. The result of the worldwide spread of capital is that all the traditional communities in which people live together, in Europe and in the other continents, are breaking their ties to the legacies of their ancestors – in other words, their dead. Capital synchronizes the world by giving nearly unconditional priority everywhere to exchange with foreign people who live contemporaneously with us rather than to the bonds with one’s own deceased ancestors and their internalized voices. The ancestors may still speak their languages beyond the grave and perpetually repeat their basic statements about the world and its order, and their descendants will probably still be mindful of the voices and remain bound to the world of their origin through these voices. But the voices of the past are losing their former monopoly and becoming increasingly historical, mediated and relativized; they are being drowned out by a new standardized world language that is only interested in discussing topical and contemporary things. At the same time, things can only come onto the world market wherever the world language, money, relates everything to everything else. It is solely through capital that synchronous relationships triumph over the traditional bonds people have with their origins; the present system of exchange actively suppresses forms of life based on the past. Wherever that occurs, strangers who are living in the same period become more important than one’s own dead. It follows that local cultures allied to the world market become less tied to their traditional ways of being and increasingly oriented to remote partners who live in our own times.
In cultural terms the synchronization of the world through capital produces two new phenomena: the historicizing museum and the topical exhibition. Both realize a new idea of the world, or, more precisely, a new form of presentation and summary of the world as the epitome of values. Museums and exhibitions gather together objects of value in human culture at special collection sites and present them for collective evaluation. Just as world historiography and the lexical encyclopaedia were the main literary media for synchronizing the world from the eighteenth century onwards, in the nineteenth century the museum of culture and the world’s fair were inexorably established as the two most powerful concepts for presenting the values of the world. The museum was erected as a temple of value and the world’s fair as the world emporium. In both cases the idea of the world as exhibitable – as something that could be exhibited – depended directly on the exploitation of values. The term ‘world’ in itself is already seen here as the embodiment of achievements, works and values deriving from human labour, and its presentation or visibility assumes that an audience of people who are thirsting for values and eager for acquisitions is prepared to recognize and welcome these objects. This audience can evolve as an audience of buyers and viewers through the very fact that the objects come onto the market and enter the museum. In this context the notorious remark of the French ‘citizen-king’ Louis Philippe, ‘enrichissez-vous’, is not just a motto for the bourgeoisie of yesteryear. It contains the museological confession of the age that believes in the equivalence of works and values. Once the world has been synchronized by universal exploitation, the unification of values in the museum and in the world’s fair follows of its own accord.
In the age of exploitation of values the relationship to past life often becomes abstract. Although value arises mainly through the expenditure of living labour for the benefit of exchangeable products, we seldom see the past of the product itself, the living atmosphere of the environment in which it was produced and the amount of artistry and effort that went into it. The product’s ‘ancestry’ plays a lesser role in its exchange value. To some extent value is abstract past, neutralized effort, homogenized labour. The form of value of the life products ensures that the legacies of previous producers are transferred to us without making us feel we have any special obligations to them. In the age of value the dead are less likely to consign substantial traditions to us than to leave us with movable convertible property.
If we talk about an inheritance, we inevitably ask ‘how much?’ rather than ‘what?’ From this perspective, Marx’s remark that ‘The revolution of the nineteenth century has to let the dead bury their dead in order to arrive at its own content’6 is factually accurate and linguistically revealing. Marx offers different formulas for the content of this revolution: first, the ‘accelerated power of motion’ of capitalist nations; then ‘unchaining and establishing [of] modern bourgeois society’ and its resulting socialist society; and finally ‘social revolution’ and reformation of the world through the proletariat that produces everything. Looking back at the Marxist era, we must say that it makes more sense to us to describe the nineteenth-century revolution as the establishment of universal exploitation and processing of the world. This process, in fact, can only continue successfully if we let the dead bury their dead so that we can be free for our present-day possessions and obsessions: wealth, topicality, events. The universal revolution consists of cutting ties in all directions to the legacies of our own dead and thus ending the possession of living beings by their ancestors. The synchronization of all living people and things in the common age of the society of universal barter involves the project of splitting off the world as a totality from its earlier epochs and giving it a fresh start as a big company for the whole of society – as a society of the world market, as a factory of humankind. For the first time the spirit of production dares to aim for a definitive victory of present-day life over the addiction to past life. Producing and exchanging becomes messianic – the goal is nothing less than to redeem the living from the weight of the ‘tradition of all dead generations’.
This redemption must fail, however, for one main reason. The synchronized world of capitals remains tied just as closely to dead persons and things as the unsynchronized local worlds of tradition were. Value merely brings the modernization of the dead with it because it is past production, abstract legacy, neutralized tradition. Since the nineteenth century there has not just been ‘labour as such, labour sans phrase’, as Marx wrote, but also legacy as such, legacy sans phrase. Since then we have been concerned with a novelty in world history, a repetitive past purely in the form of value. The trend is for all inheritances to take the form of credit and to be anonymous – pure availability acquired in the past. The dead may not return, but what is dead circulates everywhere as value that wants to preserve itself and continue exploiting itself. The concrete possession of the living by their ancestors has become abstract possession by self-exploitative values. This is why Marx was wrong in believing that the revolution of the nineteenth century could not ‘begin with itself’ until it ‘stripped away all superstition about the past’. In reality the nineteenth and twentieth centuries brought superstition about the past to its highest generalized form – the universal world form. From then on, ‘past’ meant having created values that could be further exploited. ‘Past’ is only another word for the history of creation of value. Value became superstition sans phrase. Wherever values are systematically exploited, the universal standard becomes dominated by ghostliness and the Earth becomes the haunted castle for the gentlemen in grey. The past, acting in the name of values to be exploited, prepares to strike out in revenge on all subsequent life. Owing to the rule of value, the conquest of the present by the abstract past assumes planetary dimensions. Capital uses inexorable power to create an ontological greenhouse effect on Earth, in bank accounts and in our brains.
This is the context in which philological museology could express the essence of its subject for the first time. The museums and world exhibitions of the nineteenth century were nothing but stages, markets and trade fairs for the ‘values’ that humans produced in every time and place. Serving the epiphany of value – that is the real function of the fevered exhibition activities that have played the chorus in recent contemporary history, particularly since the Great Exhibition in London in 1851. From the mid-nineteenth century onwards the synchronization of the worlds of labour and value by means of world’s fairs, expositions universelles or international exhibitions had a special status in the self-creation of a globalized market. In terms of exhibition theory, what Heidegger called ‘the age of the world picture’ corresponds to the age of the world’s fair. For the organizers of these great events, the issue of whether the world can be presented and exhibited is not really a problem. As their work shows, they have faith in assembling all sorts of consumer goods on a large scale – machines, tools, works of art, fashion articles, architecture and ideas – everything, in fact, that makes the world of today the world we know. For the people organizing these shows, the world’s ability to be exhibited depends solely on at least one specimen of everything that belongs to the concrete world of value being represented at the fair – like in a capitalist Noah’s Ark. The world’s fair is a Platonic heaven of thought, a general assembly of values, and anything that can be sent on tour as movable goods can take part in it.
One thing is clear about these gigantic spectacles: it is not the museum that makes the exhibition but the exhibition the museum. In some ways the museum is only what is left standing from the exhibition, as we can see from the example of the megalomaniacal follow-up plans for the Paris Exposition Universelle of 1900. The idea was to leave a dozen pavilions standing on the banks of the Seine and turn them into museums – headed by a museum with a retrospective overview of all previous world’s fairs, followed by a museum of comparative education, a peace museum, a museum of comparative history, a museum of hygiene and experimental sciences, a public museum of fine arts, a museum of sea travel, fishing and Arctic exploration, a museum of scholarly societies, congresses and bibliography, a museum of oceanography and experimental zoology, a museum of sports, artisanship, metallurgy and mineralogy and an archaeological museum. The complacent hubris of these plans, which were launched in a press campaign in Paris, shows that the spread of capitalization and the cataloguing of the world like an inventory are broadly parallel processes. The consumer world casts its shadow over everything else and forces it to accept the mode of being of something worth knowing at the very least. Real value, market value and knowledge value mutually reflect each other. Bouvard and Pécuchet7 celebrate their world citizenship in the museum. They begin the thousand-year empire of the petite bourgeoisie and declare what is worth knowing as national property. It is more than coincidence that patrimoine is the key concept of present-day French museology. The eternal French citizen is a pensioner of humanity for whom world history has shrunk to the National Library and the Earth to a colonial museum. The educated middle-class citizens of the belle époque in Paris knew that the status of their metropolis as a world-class city was closely tied to their role as the city of the World’s Fair.
We experience most clearly what the ‘world’ actually is at the places where people have most strongly believed in and practised the idea that the world as a whole can be exhibited and represented: in the representative world capitals of the modern age in Europe and America.
The twilight of the museum in the past decade has obviously revived at least the first idea from the 1900s that we mentioned. The reflective process of commemorating the World’s Fair that was already suggested at that time inevitably had to return someday. This explains why since the 1970s we have been moving towards the museum to top all museums. Meanwhile – since 1983, to be precise – we have obtained an overview of the series of twenty-seven great economic and artistic events that fall into the category of a world’s fair with the help of an exposition des expositions universelles that was held from July to December 1983 in the Musée des Arts Décoratifs in Paris; it was extensively documented, of course, in the accompanying ‘Book of World Exhibitions’.8 This Expo des Expos was an important recognition that capital’s powerful mechanisms of synchronization form a Gesamtkunstwerk, a total work of art, and are a worthy topic for a museum themselves and can be exploited as exhibition value. Anybody who had believed, however, that this kind of enterprise would bring recognizable progress in the discussion of how far it is possible to exhibit the world would have been bitterly disappointed by the results. Simply applying the exhibition to itself does not clarify the nature of the exhibition, and the problem of exhibiting the world will be even more distorted than previously by a history of world’s fairs flooded with images.
This is hardly surprising, of course. No business wants to be discontinued. Exhibiting valuable objects and highlighting exhibits will continue to be the darkest side of the exhibition business – just as the production of visibility stubbornly persists as the invisible element in the process of photo-technology. The exhibition as an event presenting pieces of evidence is a completion of what Heidegger called modern ‘enframing’, and the time is ripe for considerations on enframing, which will unavoidably lead to questioning the process of exhibiting. What is aletheia in the world of world exhibitions? What does ‘unconcealment’ mean in the age of its technical reproduction? What does exhibiting the world have to do with the beginning of the world itself into which we, as human beings that have come into the world, blink like newborn babies looking into the light? If the world is an exhibition and a museum, what force inside us is pushing us towards the exit as if there were something ‘outside’ that was free from the pressure to be on show and the crush for parking spaces?
There is probably no real ‘outside’ for us. What is left for us is a place on the threshold between inside and outside, between the museum and its opposite, and only at this place, looking back at the world that arose and was exhibited and blinking forward into a nothingness that allows everything, can we see ourselves as inhabitants of something that cannot be exhibited.