ABSTRACT
The past (which others may call the museum, the archive, the library) recedes in an indefinite, perhaps infinite series of galleries. Archaeologists wander the winding and seemingly endless corridors, forever unlocking doors which appear new, armed with different analytical keys, picking over the skeletal remnants of past societies, scrutinizing shelves of death or gathering 'truths' from self-referencing site reports. The archaeologist is devoted to the embalmed relics deafeningly silent yet sacred in their meaninglessness, devoted to the preserved past. The past is a mystery and theories abound as to its meaning, its construction, its constructors. In their antiquarian amnesia and isolation (isolation in the midst of all the human debris), some frantically unlock door after door, compiling an infinite inventory of facts, self-evident truths. Others seek to map the labyrinthine floor plan, illuminating the corridors with the lengthening shadows of the present. But are there new doors? new facts? new truths? Is there a way through the maze of the past? Or has the archaeologist been condemned to eternal mythical repetition of the present, to forgetfulness? The solution is to demolish the museum, but destruktion, not zerstörung; the task is to dismantle the great metaphysical and rhetorical structure, the architecture of discourse erected in the name of a conserved past, not in order to smash and discard the contents, but in order to rescue them, reinscribe their meaning.
