I've been meaning to follow up on something from The Blogora. I've been waiting until I had clear sense of how to get after it, and today after doing some writing, I sat down with Latour's Introduction to the "Making Things Public" collection and worked my way through it.
Here's my starting point from Reid's post: "It means asking how we create technologies that allow us to see and compose arguments differently, with a cautionary eye toward a nonmodern, object-oriented democracy."
My initial reaction is "Oh, museums could do this!" A thought quickly followed by the realization, "museums, right, perhaps the most modern of institutions..."
Yet the museum is exactly the space where Latour is trying to work through these ideas. His essay is the introduction to an exhibit catalogue. His advantage in curating a genre-defying show is that he gets free reign to do what he wishes, drawing in heaps of scholars to help shape his "assembly of assemblies." But it's a start, a provocation. And my task is to return to those first two thoughts and take seriously Latour's ideas for this ever expanding project of mine.
First, a summary, always a necessary task with Latour. In this essay (and in the exhibit), Latour seeks to explore the possibility of what he calls an object-oriented democracy, one where we realize that objects aren't just objects, they are things. This distinction requires us to see the social and political inside the objects and facts that surround us. One of his examples makes this distinction very well: when Columbia sat on the launching pad, it sat like a real, factual, solid objective object. We knew what it was and what it was going to do. But once it exploded, it exploded that initial conception of its objective status; Columbia was, in fact, thoroughly infused with NASA's bureaucracy.
Taking the social life of things seriously is the starting point for a call to arms where we see in things the significance of the political. It means that assertions about those things must be met with other assertions; they can't be taken on faith or at face value. But this isn't simply a call for renewed critical thinking; it's really a dramatic shift in the way that issues get framed, explored, and negotiated. It requires a new rhetoric -- a new way of organizing, assembling, and thinking. The shape this will take is unclear, but I want to use Latour's notion of "cohabitation" to re-explore the question about how natural history museums might respond to the challenge posed by the Creation Museum.
We'll start with the confusing: By cohabitation, Latour means that we've replaced "the time of Time" with "the time of Space." Clarification: time (i.e., progress) no longer orders things, space does. In Latour's rendering it, under "the time of Time," we could wait for things like creationism to go away. It was, mind the expression, just a matter of time. But the object-oriented democracy means that space is the new ordering principle, which means things are contemporaneous, they cohabit, they won't disappear. And since they don't go away, the challenge then is how to combine as much as possible together so that comparisons are possible. In Latour's exhibit, this occurs through the assembly (collection and display) of assemblies (those institutions and places where the public becomes political).
Latour's exhibition works on a meta-level. Almost every exhibit I've encountered does something different: they make specific arguments, focus on one side of the issue, employ traditional rhetorical moves. They do not take the stance that Latour is advocating. Nothing surprising there. But that's modern museum practice. In their early days, museums were simple cabinets of collections. They were crowded with objects, hardly curated, and not rhetorically framed to make points. Instead, they were idiosyncratic representations of one collector's construction of the natural world. Museum visitors to these spaces didn't read them; they participated in thinking about the relationships among the assembly. After visiting, things in the museum might change, both inside and outside, for the representation of the natural world that was constructed inside the museum helped to shape our understanding of the world outside the museum's walls. So long as we remember their social core, this is what Latour wants us to do with modern things.
Now we can talk about the Creation Museum and the Natural History Museum. I concluded earlier that taking seriously the challenge posed by the Creation Museum would mean alienating audiences and stirring up controversy. But that conclusion was based upon an imagined exhibit that tried to take down the creationist standpoint. Latour's notion of cohabitation implies a different kind of exhibit. The mindset that creates my imagined exhibit helps along someone who says (and this is Latour's language), "Don't worry, all of that will soon disappear; they're too archaeic and irrational." Instead, Latour offers a new voice, one that says, "You have to cohabit even with those monsters, because don't indulge yourself in the naive belief that they will soon fade away; space is the series of simultaneities, all of that has to be taken into account at once."
In short, my imagined exhibit (and its imagined failures) remain wedded to the old paradigm. So, can we imagine what this would look like under Latour's new paradigm where everything is contemporaneous? This is where it becomes difficult, because if anything, I am a person of the old paradigm -- I like outlines, topic sentences, arguments, narratives, structure, conclusions, etc. Knowing all of that will only get in the way of my attempt to truly make things public, I'll take a stab at it.
It's an exhibit that takes no global critical stance on evolution -- it's not an evolution exhibit, and it's not a creation exhibit. It illuminates the thinking and argument on both sides, but not simply in order to achieve a rapprochement of viewpoints. Rather, it's an exhibit that brings together the things we use to think about our origins, our development, and our relationship to nature. It lets no one off the hook. It does so to illuminate the way things work in a democracy. It assembles those things and the arguments that each of these frameworks use. It's a space where both audiences would feel welcome, where they are assembled so that both sides can cohabit the space and experience the politics of evolutionary things. It's a space where an evolution exhibit or a creation exhibit would themselves be put on display as things. It's an exhibit that displays other creation stories, other narratives of our origins and development. It would allow visitors to compare different types of representations. It would seek to convey "an eloquence much more indirect, distorted, inconclusive" (Latour 20). It would convey the human struggle to make sense of both the natural and moral universes. And in this way, it'd be a very human exhibition of things.
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