as some nostalgic place of the old electronic or electromechanical television but we use it as a place to reflect on the new media, the new audiovisual media. And then suddenly there is the whole message – that the museum is not about cultural history but a dynamic place of reflection; it’s a completely different function from that of the museum – it becomes in itself a flexible institution. This is, of course, losing a bit of its strong read-only memory-oriented function, which it used to have for a long time. There are maybe other museums which are stronger when they are just proudly keeping the read-only memory because they have pieces of art or so which derive their authority and aura exactly from not being replaced by contemporary versions. So different museums should have different strategies – it depends on if it’s a museum of technology or a museum of art. I think even the museum itself should be differentiated and should develop different strategies for the different types of objects it has.
MH: I was very interested when I visited the Darwin Centre in the Natural History Museum in London because they had that. I went on a tour where you could see the research collection and the scientists at work. So it’s like a behind-the-scenes tour but it’s actually part of the design of it.
WE: Yes, the archaeological aesthetic has already been opening up the museums. It’s because they are used to gaining and organizing information themselves. You can now open the archive. For a long time we needed historians to work in the archive, but then to write it for us in the form of a big narrative that produces history. Now, more and more as a product of information, the user wants to use the archive material directly themselves. It doesn’t mean it’s not interesting to have a plausible interpretation offered by historians in a plausible museum exhibition which arranges objects in a way that is convincing, but at the same time there is a chance to rearrange it in accordance with different criteria. This aesthetic has opened the museum through access to the shelves or the tendency to replace the long-term exhibition with more temporary exhibitions. It’s more dynamic – like the tendency to have more short-term memories being a product of our media age, which means that the idea of the emphatic long-term memory is being replaced by the idea of short-term memories which are more functionally reusable by the present but which won’t last long. Once more, museum people have to decide to choose a precise counterstrategy, to say we are one of the only few places where there is a resistance to this acceleration of short-term memory.
MH: But, by doing that, they risk situating themselves as reactionary?
WE: In the Jean Baudrillard way: not reactionary, but rather retroactive. Exactly because museums are challenged by new media, they can develop counterstrategies. Let’s look at the opera house and other cultural institutions. The idea was that the gramophone would kill opera. No, it didn’t; that never happened – it just displaced that institution. These institutions did not win by trying to rival the new media. A theater can never be as good as a cinema when it comes to bringing together different places in one, or a montage, or jumping back and forth between times. Every film can do that which a theater cannot easily do. But the theater has the real presence, the authority of the real actor, and the accidents of the actor. Every performance is live, so if something goes wrong it actually goes wrong – it’s not recorded on tape. So there are virtues or qualities which are preserved in the opera house, in the theater, and I would say in the museum, like the material object as a counterstrategy. Not completely separate from the new media, always playing with the critical dialogue, playing with it dynamically, critically, or adopting a bit but still caring about the difference.
MH: But you mentioned earlier, I think, that visitors arrive with their senses adjusted to the different media with which they live. I was thinking of taking my daughter when she was very young to the theater for the first time. She shouted, cried, hid under the chairs, and then stood up on them and clapped, completely responding to what was happening and all the other children were sat there blank-faced as if it were a screen. She had never been to the theater or cinema and so I did wonder if she was out of sync with them in terms of how her mode of attention had been adjusted.
WE: Yes but that shows that the strength of the real theater would be to make us aware of the difference. There are qualities which cannot be covered by the cinema, although the cinema has opened marvelous new cultural options and, as a media theorist, I am fascinated by what media can do. But there are things which media cannot do and there are at least interesting differences in perception, in aesthetics, in information, so that’s why I come back to this counterstrategy again and again.
MH: But I suppose what I’m getting at is that, if you arrive at the museum with a cinema-adjusted brain, you’re going to look at the same displays very differently than if you had arrived before the age of cinema.
WE: Yes, and that’s why museum people cannot simply proudly ignore the new media. That’s not what counterstrategy is. Counterstrategy means paying attention to what is part of a discursive field, and this is a media-dominated cultural field. Now that’s why museum people have to know other ways of looking, of hearing, of moving, of interacting. Now people want to interact in museums naturally because of the use of the Internet, and so on. So all of this has to be known by the museum people, calculated by them, in order to then create their aesthetic strategies of the museum. But, then in the next step, not by trying to imitate and mimic this or say that we’ve fulfilled this expectation as well, but maybe by cleverly showing them the difference that is the unique strength of the museum. Just as you could show a unique strength of what the archive is as opposed to other memory agencies. This archive could well be separated and differentiated from the old world collective memory agencies by saying this is a completely different kind of authority which the archive has. It’s not just a memory. The archive has to do with the power of having access to things like that. The museum has material properties which are its unique feature. Lyotard made that the topic of his big exhibition Les immatériaux in Paris in 1985: to what degree does the material physical world count in our immaterial media culture? Those are the questions to which the museum can really respond – which is more difficult for libraries, which consist mainly of printed symbols in books that are still material.
MH: In Britain at the moment the government is trying to close libraries, and it seems there is a very strong countercampaign because libraries have become the place where people who don’t have much money have access to the new media as well. So they’re not just the preserve of the book. The destruction of the library is about the destruction of public space and a kind of attack on the public sphere.
WE: Whereas, for the library, the situation is really different. First of all, it’s symbolic. It’s based on symbols, the printed object. Although the material object is there, and a lot of conservative librarians will always trust the material object of the book, now e-books can imitate even the turning of the page and things like that. Since the central quality of the postmedieval book is the printed letter, which can be reproduced on a symbolic level, this can be adopted by new media to a high degree. But I will say it again: The structure of the archive cannot be adopted because it’s an authoritative space which is, first of all, not about memory. The museum, with its quality of being out of time for the moment, creating a space out of time, based on the metareality or the physicality of objects, is a quality that so far can in no way be replaced by any other reproduction media, not photography, nor television, nor film, nor the digital computer. And from that it can derive a lot of energy as a counterenergy, a reflective, dynamic counterenergy. Not a conservative counterenergy, but a dynamic counterenergy.
Acknowledgments
This interview was transcribed by Jen Rhodes. My thanks to her and to Wolfgang Ernst for all their help in the production of this chapter.
Notes
1 1 See also Ernst 1994; 2013b; Emerson 2013.
2 2 Negentropy is a scientific term meaning “negative entropy.” While,
