Visitor Viewing Siamang Exhibit, Hall of Primates (1965) by Alex J. Rota, American Museum of Natural History Library. This picture represents a scene of modern quarantine, museological objectivation and ontological engineering. In the following rather sketchy and schematic notes, I try to follow the intertwined threads of two questions that haunt this image. First, how does the medium of the exhibition mediate between the naked eye of the spectator and the glass eye of the animal? And what does this technological mediation suggest about the very genre of exhibition, including the experience afforded by the exhibition of art? 109 NOTES ON THE EXHIBITION AS ONTOSCOPY BY VINCENT NORMAND 1. In this image, the animal is mobilized as a figure inscribing a limit in the space of natural history; it is installed in the modern cosmography of taxonomy. Put to death, it has been uprooted, “de-animated” and denaturalized. But it is also stufed, inscribed in the logico-spatial order of the museological device, and therefore has been “reanimated,” naturalized. A dialectical reversal is imprinted on the life of the animal: the museological device has objectified and de-animated the animal by isolating it from its milieu, yet also re-animated it by projecting it simultaneously in verisimilitude (taxidermy), in a continuous semiotic order (taxonomy), and in a restricted field of attention (scenography). The crucial aspect of the museum, as with other exhibition formats such as the zoological garden, is its relation to the undiferentiated surrounding environment. It objectifies specimens in the world, intensifying the visibility of the former without sacrificing the vitality of the latter. It is a tool of epistemological conviction that makes the original milieu of the object absent, while inscribing it in the denaturalized space of the institution. 2. If Walter Benjamin did not see any diference between the optical experience of a museum, a botanical garden, and a casino, it is because the identity of the modern museum is inscribed in a series of technological, epistemological and anthropological scripts shared by many modern technologies of the gaze and cultural practices that, 110 taken together, define modernity as a reformation of vision. Here, the vitrine enclosing the animal is an optical technology that formalizes the ontological matrix against which the museum has historically unfolded. The glass screen separating man from animal is a materialization of what we could call, borrowing from French anthropologist Philippe Descola’s system of four ontologies, the “naturalist rift”: the dichotomy between nature and culture that characterizes the cosmography of Western modernity, the ontological fissure that has historically crossed through the modern world, distributing subjects and objects on either side. The anthropological machine at work in modern naturalism has carved a radical separation between the figure of man and the backdrop provided by a unified concept of nature, emancipating the subject from the ancient hierarchical closed world and organizing his entry into a democratic boundless universe, giving man the role of world-maker. In this naturalist “Copernican” reorientation of the subject, we can recuperate the central aspirations of the project of reason in Western modernity: the symmetrization of “subject” and “world”; the decoding and dismantlement, stratum by stratum, of the world of appearances; the systematic transformation of implicit background conditions into explicit themes of relection; the extraction of the modern subject from nature; the attribution of a transcendent aspect to subjectivity via the rationalization of its space of projection. In this image, the museological display of natural history provides the modern naturalist rift with an instrumental framework: the implicit script coding the vitrine implies that it contains all of nature and nothing human. 3. This picture represents the scenography of a modern ontological frontier. It depicts the purification and coding of chains of mediation between subject-spectator and object-animal. The making of the object (animal) is, symmetrically, the making of the subject (spectator). Describing the operation of the museum in technological terms allows one to understand that the museum’s function is not primarily ontological (relating to what things are) but epistemic (relating to how we come to know these things, which is to say, relating to the spatialization of an order of knowledge rooted primarily in technological and socio-political spaces), and that its role is to allow for the naturalization of the denaturalizing procedures that constitute modern epistemology. That is, the translation of epistemic structures onto ontological grounds. By aligning taxonomy, taxidermy and scenography (or, graphs, illusion and theatre) the vitrine becomes the technology whereby scientific denaturalizing procedures (i.e. operations of objectivation and epistemological conviction) are universalized, made transparent, replicated and repeated at all scales of knowledge, and presented as facts rather than mere instruments of epistemic appraisal. PI E R R E’S 4. Between the mess of negotiations and partisan projects that animate epistemic constructions and the transparency and purity that characterize ontological foundations, knowledge at the museum is subject to powerful genealogical eclipsing. This is probably why romantic minds still like to think of museums as ghost boxes. This process of naturalization exists entirely in the mediation between subject and object, and the viewer is its vanishing point: the stage of the universalization of epistemic boundaries into ontological frontiers is the spectator’s eye, his sensorium, and ultimately his cognitive scafolding. This is probably why, throughout scientific modernity, the translation of denaturalizing frameworks from the status of epistemic to ontological (which, consequently, bears upon the formation of ontological designations) has been the object of much anxiety about embodied cognition or the naturalization of the “soul,” symptoms that emerged alongside the engineering of the modern psyche. The extent to which natural and material processes can be denaturalized is a question that, symmetrically, demands to know the extent to which the interiority of the subject can be naturalized. The genealogy of this anxiety can be traced back to the very beginnings of materialism, to a conversation held in 1769 between d’Alembert and Diderot, wherein the philosophers put their encyclopaedic program to a test by wondering how the materialist philosopher should classify a stone: should it be infused with the qualities of life and thus considered part of a greater sensitive being, or should it be thought of as a pure quantity, thus potentially negating the possibility of regarding the human as a sensitive and qualitative being? 5. The medium of exhibition as mobilized by the museological apparatus is entirely shaped by these dialectics of objectivation and subject-formation, and by the anxieties relative to the ontological discontinuities that these dialectics produce. Because of its function in the naturalization of epistemology into ontology, the exhibition is a privileged site for understanding the ramifications in subjectivity of the making of modern ontological frontiers. This is where the operation of the exhibition, and therefore the very genre of exhibition must be excavated: in the crafting of scientific facts through the naturalization of epistemic boundaries into ontological frontiers. 6. In this picture, the mediation between subject and object is clearly scripted by the positivity of the scientific fact. How can we conceive of the art exhibition in light of the exhibition’s role in crafting modern ontological designations? If, in an exhibition scripted by scientific facts, the matter at hand is the symmetry between subject and object, one could say that in an exhibition scripted by the negativity of the space of art, the principal issue is the introduction of asymmetry. In its most canonical form, the negativity of art (its symbolic insular position throughout modernity, its state of exception in the modern archipelago of disciplines) has been defined as being in excess of the descriptive, or positive, capacities of reason, language and science. It is also on the basis of this conception of negativity that the critique-project of postmodernity in the arts unfolded; that is, as a transgression of the modernist circle drawn around the autonomy of art. But, contrary to this art-historical conception, if we turn to a theory of aesthetic experience that is attentive to the economy of the limits that animate the ontological matrix of modernity, it becomes possible to part with the canonical understanding of the autonomy of art as a space of exceptionality. In its most simple and schematic form, such a theory of aesthetic experience could start by noting that, from Minimalism and Judd’s concept of “specific objects” onwards, the work of art has been articulated as a site of oscillation between being regarded as a literal thing (materially and geometrically delimited), and as a sign (an index of a meaning and ultimately of a generic concept of art). This oscillation, by denying the work both generic signification and literal meaning, obstructs its complete assimilation, destabilizing in turn the subject’s hermeneutic access to the object. The consequence of this destabilization is the introduction of asymmetry into the field of mediation between subject and object, enabling the subject to maintain an experimental relationship with the object. Consequently, if there is autonomy at all, it is that of the aesthetic experience, which is not something that can be had by the subject, but is entirely situated in the space of mediation between subject and object, and therefore irreducible to one or the other. 7. Aesthetic asymmetry is the critical leverage that the art exhibition has over ontological designations: by destabilizing the chain of mediations between subject and object, it makes visible and sensible what is usually transparent in the crafting of positive facts. This destabilization does not signify the introduction of “indetermination” or “aesthetic chaos” in the otherwise normative space of ontology; rather, it’s the process by which chaos and norm, anarchy and rule are no longer dialectically opposed, but projected into a synthetic dialogue. Aesthetic asymmetry can only make space for the negative by acknowledging that it is implicitly scripted by the ontological symmetry it inherits from the museological device. Ultimately, by revealing the physically, socially, politically, and historically contingent aspects of the forms of subjectivity and objectivity that it puts into play, aesthetic asymmetry reverses the “symmetrical” process of naturalization at work in the museological device, and makes ontological designations (first and foremost “subjects” and “objects”) into a matter of epistemic construction. It projects the purity of the former into the “mess” of the later. Therefore, if one understands autonomy not as a characteristic of art but of aesthetic experience, and if one describes postmodernism in the arts as not a transgression of modernist autonomy but as the universalization WI NTE R of its regime, then one can start developing an understanding of autonomy counter to the historical meaning that the standard-bearers of the “long” twentieth century have charged it with: not merely as an alternative realm in excess of the descriptive capacities of reason, language and science, but as the redirection of those capacities toward emancipatory ends. 8. Throughout modernity, the genre of exhibition has been shaped by both the scientific positivity of the museological institution (its logico-spatial order), and by the negativity of aesthetic experience. It has been coded by the positivity of the scientific fact that scripts the museological apparatus (and the symmetrical “truth efects” it produces), and by the autonomy found in aesthetic asymmetry. As such, the exhibition can be mobilized as a genre sitting at the crux of several modern ontological designations, ideally suited to engage their bifurcated histories. It is a space where ontological designations such as “subject” and “object” can be projected into a dialogic situation, engaged in a process of reciprocal (i.e. stereoscopic) figuration that can be explored as dynamic and historically contingent; a space where ontological certainties can be recuperated, projected into experimental asymmetric situations, and disembowelled by contingency. As such, the genre of exhibition can be described as an optical device that explores implicit continuities in the depth of explicit ontological discontinuities. That is, as ontoscopy. 111