City as Museum, Museum as City

In drawing parallels between the organizational principles of city and museum I set out in two steps how cultural production might mediate everyday and special aspects of life. The first step outlines how the orders of city and museum can be considered narrative constructs. The second step sketches a few principles that contribute to a theory of passivity and distraction ¹ that helps to work the relation between everyday and special narratives of architectural- and museumlife, meaningfully yet without recourse to either ‘top-down’ or ‘bottom-up’ privilege. Such a theory sees radical potential in the passivity of everyday experience. I will set out how passivity is to be understood as an important aspect of action and, therefore, how the passive and active can be considered two aspects of the same process of how an audience/readership, fragmented or total, comes to terms with narrative. This enquiry moves beyond establishing narrative as an appropriate metaphor for considering the arrangements of city and museum, to speculate into the character of narratology appropriate to configuring the ‘sensible materiality’ ² of architecture and the museum as special yet, simultaneously, everyday contexts.