Plato ’s dilemma

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the planet through its extensions, imitations, and recapitulations everywhere.Art history is no less a factory for the production of the fictions that make upthe load-bearing walls of that modernity – the phantasms of ethnicity, race,gender, nation, sex, indigeneity, and otherness.All of this has to be thought of in relation to that key enabling fiction,that phantasmagoric black hole around which all our modernities circulate,the aesthetic idea of ‘art’ itself. The Crystal Palace was the first complete mate-rialization, the first encyclopedic vision, of what that astonishing EuropeanEnlightenment invention, the ‘art’ of aesthetic philosophy and of art historyand museology, was to be for in modernity. It may be seen, along with Hegel’stheoretical apparatus, as one variant, one allomorph, of a modern answer to thefundamental question of what defines the human. Hegel’s response to Aristotle’sanswer as to what distinguishes humans from other animals, namely their self-conscious artistic capacity, was the idea of a pan-human capacity for symbol-izing; for the Symbolic, albeit differentially, manifested itself in different nationsand races: a time-factored capacity articulated by ecumenically linking togetherall peoples and times into a common evolutionary thread or episodic chainfrom the primitive to the civilized. In radically seeing all humans as relatedmembers of the same species, Hegel at the same time articulated this universalsystem of kinship not only horizontally but vertically, with Europe, of course, asthe leading edge of the evolution of this World Spirit.

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The Crystal Palace engendered a masquerade of utopian egalitarianism .Yet its embod-ying of the Enlightenment dream of commensurability was belied, first, bythe hierarchical order distinguishing the British nave of the building, repletewith the massive new instruments and powerful heavy metal of the (British)Industrial Revolution; the successor to the charming crafts and exotic productsof all others, grouped together in the other,‘foreign’ nave; the site of a feminizedand domesticated Other. It was belied, secondly, by the material and virtualpresence of Victoria as the royal Being that actively ‘read’; that gazed; that gavecorporeal voice to this object-world; simultaneously its perspectival vanishingpoint and its hegemonic articulating source. The Crystal Palace was in essencean anamorphic optical device – like photography itself.Where are we today if not living out our lives in an even more intenselyuniversalized phantasmagoria than that staged in and by the Crystal Palace? Itwas the ‘degree zero’ of a newly globalized vision of the embodiment of a fairyworld of labour, its cosmos the descendant of a Platonic ideal polis ; a world-picturecrafted to disremember the artifice of its own fabrication; the anticipation of ourown more fully materialized and militarized globalization. Today, the masquerade of a utopian egalitarianism is even more grotesquely pronounced, and the roleof Victoria has been assumed by corporate elites for whom whole populations,not to mention whole nations, have become permanently indentured to service