ABSTRACT
Onlookers, like Latour’s psychologist, might well have believed that the intellectual world had been consumed in a pandemic of politicised subjectivity which saw former authorities rise up, zombie-like, with the single aim of destroying their structured and empirical existence. They might also have imagined – had not museums already slipped into the intellectual backwater, residues of a modernity now surpassed in the relentless pursuit of progress – that these institutions, the icons of Enlightenment thinking, would be the first port of call for the angry mob. A few, it is true, charged around the galleries, smashing cases with barbed words, in old neglected galleries which still promoted a nineteenth-century racism or modern ones which discussed the atom bomb, slavery or living ‘Others’ without recognising a new need for inclusive engagement. But others, on opening the doors to the museum, were amazed to find, in the smell of wood polish, among the serried rows of fossils, in the photograph that sat beside the weaving frame and in the lever waggling interactive placed beneath the ceiling-hung aeroplanes, a treasure house of a rather different kind. Not one of a million ordered facts or of a chaos of curiosities, but rather the very essence of everything that was ‘modern’ in buildings that also spoke of modernity’s antiquity. Many of those who made this discovery were not strangers to the museum at all: they had lived their lives there as professionals or as museum studies academics, but suddenly they found a veil had been lifted and the museum had changed.
