museum fever

I cannot express my thoughts about museums without them sounding hollow and false. Like I'm trying to escape the miasma of reformism but it keeps creeping back in.

Museums need to stop doing lipservice and start doing actual things, I say, echoing a chorus that echoes me back.

Museums should take an interest in the lives of 'ordinary' people, but how quickly the trappings of normalcy have become fetishized and fashioned into instruments of nostalgia for a time that never was. It is nonetheless true that perhaps we once had different problems. Maybe the problem is that it's about the trappings. How can museums enable the lives of people rather than merely record them? Yet this call for investment in the living and participation, that too rings falsely back at me among participation, co-production ... it's all so un-real.

Maybe this is the museum's curse; everything tends toward rhetoric in the end. Even when you try to say that the museum is an institution, so of course it captures. That you think that maybe, being in the business of operating on knowledge, it is so trapped in its own intellectuality that it can never authentically exist within the world. That the idea of the museum is so bound up in its discourses, so hypermediated, so modern, so abstract, that talking about it will only ever lead you to one place. Even in making that point, you still end up there.

The words rattle in the empty bin. They sound like a million things that have all been said before by people who could hack it in academia better than I can. Maybe they're trapped by this thing too, unable to articulate a politics without it sounding stale and repetitive and broken. The museum is a dead place for dead ideas and dead ends. I have never encountered a discourse that so insidiously enforces itself before. Every attempt to break out just ends up back at the same damn place.

I feel like the only option is to try something else. Call it a library, a cultural centre, whatever. I feel like the fact that just changing the name of the thing seems to import such a change in its possibilities is a damning sign of just how sick and broken everything to do with museums is. Haven't I spent this whole time trying to be a materialist and railing against the tendency towards only changing the optics and linguistics in museums? Only to turn around and say 'let's not call it a museum'. Then again, if we don't have to call it a museum, maybe for once we can stop getting lost in the word-ideology soup and start learning together and making culture.

My thoughts and feelings long to be free. In my mind they are not quite words or shapes or sounds or emotions but some fluxing thing made up of all of them. It makes it almost impossible to nail down a good expression. I don't know how to give them form, I lack the artistry in any medium. There is so much I can understand and so little I can express. I wonder if it's because I lack ... something. Place, connection, grounding, belief. That feels perversely fetishistic, but maybe there really is no future for the former imperial core. If so, it's cruel that I still have to be a person with feelings and people I care about. Couldn't I just be a caricature instead? Much like one, I have nothing real to grasp on to. My beliefs and values are just flying untethered while I'm fucking falling.



i wrote this while i was working on my dissertation in 2023 and i felt like my mind was rocketing through inescapable spirals. while i enjoy academia, i can recommend going outside and doing some practical community organising instead. i have since discovered that i think modern identity politics might give museums a run for their money in being insidiously self-enforcing discourses