THE MUSEUM AS EXCESS (2007)
Excerpt:Reading Georges Bataille’s article on the subject of the “museum”, published in 1930 in the journal Documents, one cannot help but be disappointed. One would have expected that Bataille – the theorist of the heterogeneous – would see in the museum something more than a large mirror in which the visitor sees reflected a flattering image of himself1. It is obvious that the museum visitor also encounters himself in the museum, that is, an image of human subjectivity. But who says that selfencounter should restrict itself to the form of self-awareness and self-appropriation?
The function of the heterogeneous category in Bataille’s thought is to give a name to that which cannot be appropriated, that which Sloterdijk defines as inassimilable”2.
The museum is inevitably confronted with the inassimilable. It is a machine to
overcome this confrontation. Something that clouds the mirror and distorts its image
is inassimilable or heterogeneous. The museum remains as much an archive, a depot, a collection, a representation area, a place of viewing and contemplation, as it is already a laboratory, a workshop, a generator, an engine room, an experiment. It cannot be denied that in the museum the familiar combines with the unfamiliar, collection with dispersal, the homogeneous with the heterogeneous, ideality with reality. Undoubtedly, the museum is the site of an irreducible conflict. A place of seemingly incessant turbulence. As long as the museum machine continues to have “chaos within itself” (Nietzsche), it will be the restless space of a subjectivity bound to that turbulence. Being open to chaos does not mean assimilating it. Chaos by definition is something that obstructs assimilation. Nevertheless, as this dynamic form that is the museum attempts to represent chaos more precisely, it is opened up to chaotic shapelessness. Representing chaos more precisely is the fundamental work carried out by the museum machine. Representing chaos more precisely means giving space to the inassimilable, staging human subjectivity’s primordial openness to the space where the subject closes.
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