# "In the Planetarium: The Modern Museum on the Anthropocenic Stage"

Vincent Normand

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Vincent Normand. "In the Planetarium: The Modern Museum on the Anthropocenic Stage". Art in the Anthropocene: Encounters Among Aesthetics, Politics, Environments and Epistemologies, Open Humanities Press, 2015, 9781785420177. hal-04856787

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In the Planetarium:
The Modern Museum on the
Anthropocenic Stage

Vincent Normand

Importing the concept of the Anthropocene into art theory and aesthetics implies negotiating with a simple yet acute contradiction. The Anthropocene indifferently encircles both human affairs and the materiality of the planet, thus constituting a tool of “figuration” which makes visible inherited epistemological separations by radically destabilizing them. At the same time, the Anthropocene is a universalizing and unifying machine ceaselessly invoking the largest possible frames, in which art’s manifold horizon of representations can easily fade into the background.

This contradiction echoes another one, relative to the historical constitution of the space of art as an allegedly autonomous sphere of experience, whose negativity and transgressive ethos were founded on the economy of the limit which defined the symbolic and epistemic frameworks of modernity, while also producing a field of reflexivity that allowed it to stand at a critical distance from them. Moreover, if most of the modernist and postmodernist discussions of the situation of art in the twentieth century have focused on this question of autonomy (either as an event to be brought forward, purified and achieved, or as a condition to be critically de-constructed), surprisingly, the material and concrete history of the gradual entry of art into a regime of exceptionality and extra-territoriality (its epistemological and symbolical “insularization” throughout modernity) remains to be written.

The claim of this essay is that such a history can be initiated through a modeling of the ontological template against which modernity established its scientific, political, and aesthetic project. In the cosmography drawn up by this ontological template, the modern institution of art played a paradoxical role—one that the concept of Anthropocene helps to both circumscribe and make legible. By addressing the series of continuities transversing Earth systems and humans’ activity of “world-making,” the Anthropocene opens a space of ontological and epistemic insecurity that demands a history of the limits and borders that, throughout modernity, have shaped, organized, and secured the geometry of the “compearance”¹ between the subject and the world, where the space of art has been a fundamental constituent. “Back to Earth,” or so goes the Anthropocenic narrative: nothing seems more pressing than to invent new ways of thinking what Donna Haraway calls “naturecultures,” and to understand them historically. This materialist imperative for art history thus requires a double move: an archaeology of the grand narratives in which a series of “great divides” historically emerged (between nature and culture, reason and unreason, subjects and objects, etc.) in order to find a vantage point
from which to address their structures; and a practice of art's inscription in these
structural divides in order to situate its role in their conceptualization and possible
transformation.

The genre of exhibition occupies a central place in this history. The exhibition has been shaped throughout modernity by both the scientific positivity of the museological institution and by the negativity of modernist aesthetic experience. As such, the exhibition can be mobilized as a genre hinging together several modern ontological designations. If the task is to model the role of the space of art in the historical constitution of the modern ontological template, then one of the great implicit yet integrated structures for art throughout modernity must be turned into the object of study. This object is the modern museum, whose exhibition model has become an in-built backdrop for our relation to art, whose symbolic and epistemic workings lie at the nexus of many modern imperatives, and whose role on the "Anthropocenic stage" needs to be ungrounded.

The Naturalist Rift and the Space of Reason

The first consequence of the concept of the Anthropocene is the transfer, at a geo-
logic level, of the qualification of nature as an anthropogenic entity, thus triggering
a significant shift in its modern ontological status. If nature was previously con-
ceived as the mere background to human experience, on the Anthropocenic stage
nature only ever partially enters the sphere of human constructions. As such, the
Anthropocene disorganizes what one might call, borrowing anthropologist Philippe
Descola's system of four ontologies,² the "naturalist rift," or the dichotomy between
nature and culture that characterizes Western modernity's cosmography—the cleft
crossing through the modern world on the sides of which subjects and objects have
been historically distributed. This naturalist dualism found its modern form via
the ontological tipping point of the seventeenth-century mechanist revolution in
science, which gradually configured the *épistémè* as the background against which
the rationalization of the domain of the subject and that of the object unfolded.
Hence, the Anthropocene, from the objective position of geology, unsettles the
very geometry of the limits that defined modernity as a project of Reason, in which
the epistemic identification of objective truths and the ontological delineation of
subjectivity historically took place.

It has often been noted that Paul Crutzen, the Dutch chemist who coined the term Anthropocene, also proposed to link its origin to the invention, in 1784, of the steam engine—that instrument with which humans began to powerfully dig into the earth in search of underground suns and ancestral forests, seeking to transform their energy via calorific machines. An archetype of the paradigmatic shift in the relation between humans and their environment triggered by the industrial revolution and the emergence of capitalism, its apparition must be put in parallel with a contemporary mental reorientation, epitomized by the “Copernican revolution” proposed
by Immanuel Kant in 1787. This revolution—articulated by a radical separation between the figure of Man and the background provided by a unified concept of Nature—enacted the absolute discontinuity between the “historical subject” and the objective world. It emancipated the subject from the ancient hierarchical “closed world” to organize her entry into a democratic “boundless universe,” giving to the figure of Man its ontological state of exception and its role of “globe-constructor” or world-maker. As such, this Copernican reorientation of the subject outlines the central aspirations of the modern Western project of Reason: the symmetrization of “subject” and “world,” orientating thought towards the dismantling, stratum by stratum, of the world of appearances; the systematic transformation of implicit background conditions in explicit themes of reflection; the extraction of the modern subject from Nature; and the attribution of transcendence to subjectivity via the rationalization of its space of projection—the autonomous theatre of thought, or the space of Reason.

The Anthropocene makes explicit the systemic and material continuity between human gestures and the milieux in which they operate. In other words, it reveals, in its co-extensivity with modernity, that the age of extraction of *anthropos* from Nature has been, simultaneously, the age of constitution of *anthropos* as a geo-logical stratum. In this respect, the Anthropocene makes the modern gesture of separation between Nature and the historical subject a process inseparable from the erosion of the ground on which it was enacted. It figures the movement where-by the historical becoming of Man encounters against that which it was positing its movement, revealing the human figure and the backdrop of Nature in their mutual ontological instability. By revealing the unstable relation between the “background” and “figure,” the Anthropocene introduces a new precariousness in the ontological template that bolstered the constitution of the modern space of Reason.

By making explicit that the social construction of reality has been enacted through the ecological destruction of the planet, the Anthropocenic stage organizes a collision of humans with the Earth. As such, the Anthropocene introduces a strange chronotope to scientific discourse, by collapsing the distinction between “deep” cosmological time and “shallow” anthropological time: as Deleuze and Guattari foresaw,³ once the window that separated us from the unlimited Nature “outside” is broken, geology becomes a moral science (and vice versa). In many respects, by registering that modern instruments of knowledge and the appropriation of Nature have not merely contributed to an analytic image of it, but also helped produce it synthetically, the Anthropocene ratifies to some extent the symmetrical anthropology initiated by Bruno Latour in the 1990s. Latour affirms that the Moderns “see double.” In what he sets out as the “Constitution of the Moderns,”⁴ there exists a fundamental dissociation in the world rendered by modern knowledge, a gradual divorce between the *theory* the Moderns produced of themselves (a master narrative of *purification*, of the isolation of objective meanings in Nature, of a radical discontinuity between Nature and Culture, and between subjects and objects) and what the Moderns did in *practice* (a story of *hybridization*, of ceaseless associations
between Nature and technique, of incessant combinations between objective reality and subjectivity in the construction of “networks” and “quasi-objects”). By working to understand Natural laws, the Moderns can be said to have engineered Nature. This dissociation characterizes what could be defined as the “schizophrenia” of the Moderns: by negating the official existence of hybrids, they repressed—and ultimately stirred up—their proliferation in the technologically mediated “mess” of networks. The Anthropocene makes explicit this “binocular” rendition of the world that defines modern epistemology. By simultaneously revealing the theoretical discontinuities that constitute modern knowledge and the networks of material continuities that underlie its activity, the Anthropocene figures the twofold economy and chiastic nature of modernity’s ontological template.

Although the Latourian model allows one to locate “houses” of purification in the Modern Constitution (in which scientific and political divisions are theoretically performed, and subjects and objects purified), as well as the consequent identification of cases of “hybridity” that the Moderns did not allow to be represented as “real” in their Constitution (the insane, the primitive, cases of technological “mediality” between subjects and objects), the space it assigns to the institution of art (and its site of exhibition, the museum) is defined only as a site for the deposit of the “remains” of modern great divides (values to be respected, traditions, feelings, madness, etc.). As such, the institution of art is not liable to the dynamics of division drawn by the polarities of purification and hybridization, thereby ostracizing the space of art (in its institutional-museological contours or in its aesthetic definition) to the side of the imaginary or mere “fiction.” In this regard, Latour’s model remains to be completed with a materialist approach to art history, such as that advanced by Jonathan Crary.⁵ For Crary, the process of modernization produced an unprecedented mass of knowledge that simultaneously created hybrids, mixtures, and associations between vision and technology (under the form of new disciplinary technologies of capture and control of the attention of the human subject), the conditions of possibility for a purification of the aesthetic field, and the constitution of a new “frontier” around the visual arts (via a true emancipation of vision within Modernist art theory and experimentation). Following Crary, any consistent account of modern culture must confront the ways Modernism, far from being a mere reaction, redemption, or transcendence of the process of scientific purification and economic rationalization, is inseparable from its operations.

The space of art must therefore be defined as an immanent entity in the anthropological matrix of modernity, inseparable from its dynamic lines of transfer between subjects and objects, and purification and hybridization. In such a materialist articulation, it becomes possible to argue that the space of art—and especially the space of its exhibition—historically provided the great divides crossing the ontological template of the Moderns with a specific scenography, and to inscribe this space—both in its institutional outline and in its aesthetic definition—as an additional “house” in the Latourian model.
Clinic: Anatomy of the Border

If Walter Benjamin, in *The Arcades Project*, did not see any difference 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, epistemo-logical, and anthropological determinations shared by many modern technologies of the gaze and cultural practices that, together, define modernity as a reformation of vision. Indeed, the modern museum can be said to have provided the Kantian “Copernican revolution” of the subject with an instrumental framework.

The modern museum's birth can be traced to the Reign of Terror in Paris in 1793, with the parallel opening of the Muséum central des arts de la République in the Louvre and the Muséum nationale d'histoire naturelle in the Jardin des Plantes. As curator Anselm Franke has suggested, the museum is defined by the "dialectical reversal" it imprints on the "life" of objects.⁶ Working as a global isolator, it de-animates previously animated entities by uprooting them from their "milieu," and re-animates "dead" objects by over-determining their signification and projecting them in a restricted field of attention. As such, the museum performs a withdrawal that regulates and purifies the relation of the Cartesian subject with the contents of a world consequently defined as the outside. Its interior can indeed be considered as the interface between the two domains Descartes set apart, *res cogitans* and *res extensa*, the observer and the world. The museum is the site where an ordered projection of the world, of "extended substance," is made available for inspection by the mind. But the crucial aspect of the museum (as well as of other modern machines of exhibition such as the zoological garden) is its relation to the surrounding undifferentiated environment: it objectifies specimens in the world, intensifying their visibility without sacrificing their vitality. The process of objectification radically differentiates the museum from the cosmological model of the humanist cabinets of curiosities. It is a tool of epistemological conviction that "occults" the world of the object by making its original milieu absent, while inscribing the object in the "denaturalized" space of the institution and its logico-spatial order. As such, objectification can be modeled as a *denaturalizing cut* that endows the exhibited object with what Latour calls a "graph," a mode of inscription mobilizing meanings and referents that make the object "speak." The modern museum can thus be defined as an apparatus laying out a "silent" space criss-crossed by denaturalizing cuts, the space of an exchange put to death, de-animated, and instantly reanimated in a set of new continuities by way of synthetic mediations (elements modulating the phenomenological experience of objects: scenography, display cabinets, zenithal or focused lighting, para-texts, etc.).

In this respect, the modern museum incorporates an operation and a state of isolation that define the activity of the laboratories of scientific modernity: vivisection and quarantine.⁷ As a space dedicated to the production of limits, the modern museum opens a space of visibility analogous to the one Michel Foucault, in his history of madness and the archeology of medical perception,⁸ identified in the
<figure><img src="image_2.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 01 *Interior view of the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History showing displays of prehistoric skeletons, photograph, 1920. Los Angeles, California Historical Society Collection.*</figcaption></figure>
clinic. Foucault elevated the clinical gesture to the rank of anthropological truth by demonstrating that the “anatomico-clinical” method of auscultation of symptoms on bodies came to constitute the implicit lattice of the modern experience of knowledge at large. The key to understanding the space of visibility opened by the clinic is the twofold and paradoxical economy of the limit by which it becomes a space of production, multiplication, and projection of dynamic boundaries. As Foucault suggests, the inscription of a limit between reason and non-reason in social space consists in a gesture of caesura that lets tumble, on both sides of its sharp-cutting edge, entities suddenly made mute and deaf to each other (the sane and the insane), thus requiring the synthetic mediation of an institution of scientific veridiction to make them speak again: the clinic. In an ever-deepening instrumental continuity, the institution administers the border by which it has produced itself. The epistemic model of the clinical gesture is thus essentially double in nature: the separation is eclipsed by the positivity of the institution the moment it imprints itself in social space.

The clinic can be enlarged as the model of modern knowledge in that it mirrors the dialectical articulation of the visible and the utterable by which modern science has purified the category of the object. The process of “border production” of objectivizing procedures—the “outlining” and “slicing” of things into epistemic categories that constitute the modern cosmography of taxonomies and atlases—and the articulation of these borders in the language of scientific positivity can be said to consist primarily in clinical gestures. As Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison have argued, the modern notion of objectivity, differentiated from other epistemic ideals in the making of scientific images such as “truth-to-nature” or “trained judgment,” cannot be separated from the objectivizing gaze.⁹ Objectivity can then be considered a tool of veridiction that not only bolsters the process of objectivization of things in Nature, but culminates in a regime of visibility where the very act of seeing finds its vanishing point in the subjectivity of the observer. Objectivity also defines the “triangle of truth” assembled by the clinical gestures of scientific modernity: it projects limits and borders that *denaturalize* objects in the world and also cross through the interior of the subject and modern scientific culture. The “sleight of hand” of modern knowledge can thus be identified in the specific way rationalist boundaries and objective limits constantly *naturalize* themselves, by multiplying at all scales of knowledge, universalizing their language, and hence appearing as facts obscuring their existence as mere instruments of epistemic appraisal: the logic of the limit enacts the *denaturalization* of the objects it examines while *naturalizing* the borders it imprints between them onto a new ontological ground.

In the denaturalized space of the museum, the vanishing point of this naturalization is the spectator. The scenography of a gallery space such as a museum of natural history transports the logic of the clinic to the scale of Nature. By imprinting denaturalizing cuts around its objects while naturalizing these cuts with synthetic mediations, the dialectical reversal triggered by the process of objectification in the museum is configured by the twofold economy of clinical gestures: if the experience
of the modern museum is virtually an experience of the limit, then the actuality of
its operations lies in the “graft” of this limit to the eye of the observer. The modern
museum simultaneously institutes and bridges the rift that structures modern
cosmography: it is the institution that is allowed, in the purification complex of
the Latourian Modern Constitution, to represent hybrids (mixtures of nature and
technique); it is the site where the modern limit between persons and things is
rehearsed in the form of a chain of mediality between spectator and artifact. Hence,
the mode of existence of an objectified specimen in a museum leads its observer to
*literally* “see double” by constantly facing the unlimited recurrence of the limit, in
a fundamentally schizophrenic fashion. In this configuration, the mode of encoun-
ter assembled by the museum between the object and the subject consists in the
negotiation with an ever-deepening chasm, an inscrutable breach on either side
of which, in a ceaseless retreat, subjects and objects are constantly re-distributed.

This chasm, equally and symmetrically inscribed in the objective world and the
subjectivity of the spectator, allows for the inscription of the museum in the heart
of the modern diagram of power and knowledge, and at the core of its ontological
template. By providing the modern line of transfer between subjects and objects
with a specific scenography, as well as with an epistemic and phenomenological
pivot, the modern museum yields and authorizes modes of mediality between
entities that the Modern Constitution works at purifying. It is the very rule of the
twofold economy of the limit of which it is the product: deepening objective limits
in the world means, in mirror, delineating a subject, intensifying the continuity of
modes of subjectivation with operations of objectification, amplifying the associa-
tion of the human sensorium with technology. It can thus be said of the exhibition
model built by the modern museum that it lies at the nexus of two rationalist
imperatives: the call for things to comply with the human cognitive apparatus,
and the demand for human cognition to comply with technology. Simultaneously
purifying the space of compearance between subjects and objects and populating
it with a technological field of relations, the museum is inscribed in the line of
transfer between the polarities of the Latourian Modern Constitution, purification
and hybridization on the one hand, Nature and Culture on the other. As such, it
is one of the key sites where a modern politics of vision is constituted: there, a
technology of alignment of subjectivity with operations of objectification assem-
bles new procedures of individuation.

Salon: Topology of the Limit

The nine *Salons* Denis Diderot wrote between 1759 and 1781 are commonly
referred to both as the origin of art criticism and as a document registering the
institutionalization of exhibitions that heralded the public art museum. In his well-
known essay "Absorption and Theatricality: Painting and the Beholder," Michael
Fried identified Diderot's *Salons* as the place of birth for a new attention paid to
the pictorial arts, and of the "invention" of modern painting as such, recognizing
in Diderot's critic of theatricality his own Modernist thesis: whenever a theatrical
self-consciousness arises in the viewer, the technical features and symbolic frames of the representation are made visible, revealing the "hybridity" of the perceptual experience and threatening its autonomy, thus calling for a "purification" of the medium in order to safeguard the absorption of the viewer's attention in the aesthet-ic field. In the model we propose here, theatricality can be understood in a radically different way, that is, as the very *medium* of "aesthetic consciousness" and of the narrative of autonomy of art, the vehicle of its entry into a regime of exceptionality and negativity, whereby the structures from which it has been historically isolated by modernist theory (the systemic conditions of modernity and its economy of the limit) are put to a test, woven further, and turned into a sovereign experience. As art historian Juliane Rebentisch suggests in her study of the debates on theatrical-ity that surrounded the appearance of minimalism,¹⁰ the implicit critique of the autonomy of art that Michael Fried identified in what he coined as "literal art" is a tendency toward boundary-crossing that should be redefined as an intensification (rather than a transgression) of the modernist effects of "theatricalization," which provided aesthetic subjectivity with its sovereignty and autonomy. In this model, Diderot's *Salons* appear as a fascinating expression of the modern politics of vision, allowing for the definition of the aesthetic experience provided by the art museum as an intrinsic entity of the ontological template of modernity.

Theatre is for Diderot the one object where aesthetic and ethical aspects intersect. In a vertiginous exegesis titled *L'oeil révolté* ("*The revolted eye*"),¹¹ the literary his-torian Stéphane Lojkine argues that Diderot's *Salons* consist of a discursive and visual apparatus that mirrors the exhibition and defines them as the site where the philosopher elaborated a modern "politics of sight." According to Lojkine the *Salons* circumscribe a space where a new attention is paid to the geometry of the relation between the figures displayed in the pictorial space and the viewer anchored in the exhibition space. Diderot settles this relation in terms of a scenic apparatus: an abstract topology modeled after the theatre. As Lojkine demonstrates, a virtual wall appears to separate beholder and image, just as the invisible "fourth wall" implicitly separates the public from the stage in a theatre. In his successive *Salons*, Diderot imagines a viewer seeing paintings as if gazing through a semi-transparent partition wall—a suppressed and repressed separation—as the virtuality of an optic interdiction. His descriptions materialize this interdiction: for Diderot, the screen of representation is explicitly referred to as a theatre stage, into which the spectators' gaze virtually irrupts, and where the represented figures, much like actors in a theatre, are blind to the viewer's presence. The artworks celebrated by Diderot are precisely those whose composition pertains to the theatrical model without exposing it as a reflexive space. By negating the gaze of the beholder, the canvas elides the mechanics of desire it triggers in the viewer. In Diderot's *Salons*, the fourth wall of representation works as a one-way mirror behind which the figure is studied, unwittingly, by a spectator who is both investigator and witness.

This new geometry of attention allows Lojkine to describe the aesthetic relation between viewer and painting in the *Salons* as a space of "scopic crystallization,"
<figure><img src="image_3.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 02 Pietro Antonio Martini, *Exposition au Salon de 1787*, etching, 1787. Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France.</figcaption></figure>

a “vague” dynamic space connecting the eye of the viewer with the figures. In a marine painting by Claude Joseph Vernet, Diderot describes the “spectacle of waters” as a space within which the eye plays an “optic fort-da”¹²: here, a navigation occurs between the restricted scenic space of representation and that of the public, in an indefinite set of reflections where sight crystallizes. This “fort-da” of scopic crystallization carries the crucial feature of the new aesthetic relation that emerges between the subjectivity of the viewer and the object of the representation, or the figure. This feature is what Lojkine calls the “revolt” of the eye. The fourth wall constitutes the aesthetic relation as an intermittent separation that the mind posits and revokes, establishes in order to revolt against it. The scenic apparatus carries the foundation of a revolt against itself because one cannot see the figures without transgressing the invisible frontiers that enclose their space of visibility.

Diderot’s revolt of the eye models the chain of mediality that the art museum, from its earliest exhibitions, started to assemble: the circuit of the aesthetic relation is, for the eye, an experience of the crossing of a geometric limit, reaching out beyond the perceptual experience itself, in an effect of “theatricalization” that Rebentisch defines as “the specific aesthetic destabilization of the subject’s hermeneutic access to the aesthetic object.”¹³ In this articulation between the geometry of the figures and what can be seen by the viewer, another modern “triangulation” appears, not that of the clinic, but that of theatricality, based on a limit that is accomplished when exceeded in a scopic fort-da. The real revolt here is not only that of the eye,
but that of the image, which is ceaselessly revolving, carrying the spectator outside the margins of social space and perceptual experience and then circling around to fold her gaze back to its parterre. In Diderot's *Salons*, aesthetic experience can be understood as a space characterized by a manifest solidarity between the eruption of art's objective limits and the vector of subjectivity exceeding them.

In his homage to Georges Bataille titled "A Preface to Transgression" (from 1963, the same year as *Birth of the Clinic*), Foucault defined with great precision the way modern thought bound together limit and excess. According to Foucault, modernity does not restore the subject to a fully circumscribed and positive world, but to a world ceaselessly unfolded and "unknotted" in the experience of the limit, a world done and undone in the excess that transgresses it:

> Transgression is an action which involves the limit, that narrow zone of a line where it displays the flash of its passage, but perhaps also its entire trajectory, even its origin; it is likely that transgression has its entire space in the line it crosses. The play of limits and transgression seems to be regulated by a simple obstinacy: transgression incessantly crosses and re-crosses a line which closes up behind it in a wave of extremely short duration, and thus it is made to return once more right to the horizon of the un-crossable. [...] The limit opens violently onto the limitless, finds itself suddenly carried away by the content it had rejected and fulfilled by this alien plenitude which invades it to the core of its being.¹⁴

Transgression gives density to the limit it crosses. The experience of crossing the limit is one of a sudden reimport in the “infra-thin” space of transgression of that which the limit kept apart. In Diderot’s theatrical model, the aesthetic experience assembled by the museum is precisely where this relation to the limit is interiorized and transformed into a sovereign experience. In this model of the modern economy of the limit, the negativity of aesthetic experience can be understood as a site where the interiority of the subject is virtually oriented outside its bounds in a “vectorial” experience that crosses the rational apparatus of the museum, producing openings outside the positive world of the Moderns, while constantly weaving its space of projection further. As such, the negativity attached to the space of art in the modern cosmography is precisely that which encodes it within the modern limit regime.

Aesthetics did not pierce openings outside the ontological designations of modernity, but has always been an immanent entity of their constitution. As such, it demands to be inscribed at the core of the anthropological matrix of the Moderns. The experience of the limit which characterizes the aesthetic experience framed by the art museum brings about both a geometric purification and rationalization of the modern politics of vision (its rigorous projection in a “theatre of sight”), and an ever-complexifying hybridization of perceptual experience (by way of a scopic crystallization that is nothing more than a case of mediality where a technologically mediated image absorbs the viewer’s attention). Here again, the museum, both as a
<figure><img src="image_4.png" /><figcaption>Fig. 03 *Model of the Inscription of the Space of Art in the "Modern Constitution,"* after Bruno Latour, *We Have Never Been Modern*, translated by Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 11.</figcaption></figure>

machine of purification and as a site of hybridization of experience, is determined
by the twofold economy of the modern limit regime. The aesthetic experience
inaugurated by the art museum thus appears as a crucial node in the ontological
template of modernity given by the Latourian Modern Constitution. As a sphere
of figuration where hybrids enter the space of purification and where subjects
and objects mobilize each other, the space of art—by way of its implicit economy
of transgression, its negativity—can be modeled as a nodal point organizing the
recurrent and systemic reversal of modern dichotomies. All at once, by connecting
subjects and objects, and through the pathway of purification and hybridization,
the space of art articulates the lines of transfer that cleave the modern world.

The Genre of Exhibition: A Stereoscopic Facies¹⁵

The space of art lies at the hinge of the modern ontological designations that bol-
stered the extraction of *anthropos* from the background of Nature. The space of art,
both in its institutional contours (the modern museum) and in the negativity of
aesthetic experience, historically provided modern ontological boundaries with a
specific scenography, in which they turned into the medium of an independent, ex-
tra-territorial, and sovereign experience, endowing modernism with its transgres-
sive ethos. As such, the space of art is fully embedded in the epistemic structures
and dynamics of what has come to be known as the Anthropocene: it is a site of
invention of intensive tipping points in the lines of transfer that weave the modern
space of Reason.
In this model, it is possible to perceive that the extra-territorial character of the space of art historically appeared within the framework of the modern activity of discovery, acquisition, division, and symmetrization of conceptual realms. Its inscription as an intrinsic entity of an anthropological model of modern great divides allows one to read the modernist (read: Greenbergian and Friedian) stance as a constricted, almost trivial effort to purify the very vehicle of hybridity, and postmodernist and deconstructivist perspectives as mournful attempts at hybridizing a reified and caricatured purification model. This inscription also allows one to refute the dead ends inherent to these stances, and to read art in its dynamic and continuous tension with a considerably enlarged epistemological and political horizon, in which images, figures, and formal expressions can be considered in light of their historical continuity and complex articulation with the normative and systemic conditions of modernity. Localizing the space of art at the centre of the Modern Constitution allows us to perceive it as a space where, throughout modernity, the schizophrenic ontological template of modernity has been turned into a "stereoscopic" outlook on its infrastructure, where everything the Moderns repressed as mere fiction and which in return haunted the ontological foundations of their Constitution (cases of mediality between persons and things, entanglements between matter and signs), came back and irrupted in their Republic.

The qualification of the space of art as the site of a stereoscopy projected back onto the schizophrenic ontological template of modernity shows that initiating a materialist history of art—one that confronts the state of ontological insecurity introduced by the concept of Anthropocene—demands that we take the modern economy of the limit at face value. It requires simultaneously an archaeology of historically, epistemologically, and technologically integrated structures of production of representations, and the inscription of artistic gestures within the grand narratives these structures configured. And this work requires a model, not in a normative sense, but as an instrument of description belonging to the logic of discovery, allowing us to see at a glance, or at least alternatively, the realms that the illustrious "seeing double" of the Moderns historically separated, and that the Anthropocene aligns, in order to gain conceptual traction on them. It requires an "optic" making palpable, intelligible, and appropriable the ontological ruptures and epistemological discontinuities that we have inherited from modernity, in order to organize new continuities between their systemic conditions and their singular expressions, between "backgrounds" and "figures."

Jonathan Crary, undoubtedly inspired by the optical apparatuses punctuating Walter Benjamin's *Berlin Childhood around 1900* and *One-Way Street*, made the stereoscope both the trigger and the technical expression of the reformation that vision underwent in the middle of the nineteenth century.¹⁶ The stereoscope, which installed the viewer in front a mirror directing her eyes toward two different images, cleaved sight in two, and signalled the eradication of the subjective "point of view" that had historically configured the relation of the observer to the object of her vision. With the stereoscope, the relation of observer to image is not a relation
to an object extrinsically quantified relative to its position in space, but to two dissimilar images whose position simulates the intrinsic anatomical structure of the observer's body. Accompanying the technological reconfiguration of vision that constitutes the prehistory of cinema, the stereoscope suggests a technique of beholding that makes literal and explicit the alignment of subjectivity with the modern process of rationalization, by inscribing its splintering logic directly into the viewer's perception.

It is not as a disciplinary device, but as a machine explicating the systemic conditions of representation and as a structure mediating the subject with these conditions, that the optical model of the stereoscope embodies the twofold gesture of a materialist art history engaged with both background conditions and singular figures. A stereoscopic view of art in the space of Reason would mean bringing the modern "seeing double" to a space where the domains it historically separated are not aligned or reconciled, but where is invented between them non-normative mediations, or stereoscopic fusions. This stereoscopy would consist of coming, quite literally, face to face with the modern ontological designations and their conventional dichotomies, being installed on the ridge of their logic of partition, in the nexus of the dialectical constitution of the worldviews they assemble, in order to unground background structures of figuration, and to reinscribe figures (expressions, images, formal articulations, artworks, etc.) in narrative frameworks from which, on account of these structures, they have been historically isolated and insulated.

Considering the position of the space of art within the broader geography of modern ontological divides, the genre of exhibition seems uniquely suited to engage with such a stereoscopy. It is first through the scenography provided by the modern museum that the space of art posited itself at the hinge of the ontological designations of modernity. From the scenography of natural history museums to that of the first Salons, the genre of exhibition has been shaped throughout modernity by both the clinical positivity of the scientific fact that scripts the museological apparatus (and the truth effect it produces) and by the negativity of modernism's transgressive ethos (and its theatre of boundary-crossings). In other words, the implicit scripts and codes of the genre of exhibition are to be found in the historical articulation of "Clinic" and "Salon," of the science of showing and the knowledge of seeing. The exhibition can thus be seen to consist of a genre and an optical tool entirely situated in the space of mediation between the entities the ongoing process of modernization decodes, dismantles, and sets apart. As such, the genre of exhibition can be conceived of as a space where subjects and objects can be projected in a dialogic situation, in which they can engage in a process of reciprocal (stereoscopic) figuration that can itself be explored as dynamic and historically contingent: a space where ontological certainties are disembowelled by contingency.
"World" and "Earth" are the terms the Anthropocene subjects to a stereoscopic fusion: they are terms that, when conflated entirely, lead either to neo-primitivism or to radical eliminativism, and hence require an optical apparatus or an epistemological scaffolding allowing one to perceive and conceptualize them at once without mistaking one for the other. A materialist art history or curatorial practice being true to the requirements of this stereoscopic fusion would thus not consist in pulling down the separations built by modernity's purification models (including the borders that delimited art's regime of exceptionality), but to develop a "boundary practice" embracing and making explicit the dynamic aspect of the limits they projected, by making visible both the emancipatory power of autonomization and sovereignty of the activity of production of figures, and their debt toward the systemic conditions that form their background. Thinking art in the universalizing frameworks of the Anthropocene without sacrificing its political horizon could thus mean refusing to bridge, undo, or blur the divides from which the space of art emerged, and model vehicles for seeing from both of the sides of the limit they inscribe in us.
Notes

1 The term is borrowed from Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-Christophe Bailly, who use the French *comparution*, which refers to the act of appearing in court after been summoned. The Scottish common-law term "compearance" appears to be the best translation. Jean-Luc Nancy and Jean-Christophe Bailly, *La comparution (politique à venir)* (Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1991).

2 Philippe Descola distinguishes between four ontologies characterizing different types of societies: animism (where non-human entities can be the terms of a relation), totemism (where differences within the non-human realm are signs of human variety), analogism (where differences between human and non-human interiorities are systematically translated as differences between human and non-human physicalities), and naturalism (western modernity's ontology, the only one to posit a limit between the self and others, introducing the idea of Nature that implicitly underlies a worldview based on the dichotomy between Nature and Culture). Philippe Descola, *Beyond Nature and Culture*, trans. Janet Lloyd (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2013).

3 See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, "10,000 B.C.: The Geology of Morals (Who Does the Earth Think It Is?)," chapter three of *A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia*, Vol. 2, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 39–74.

4 Bruno Latour, *We Have Never Been Modern*, trans. Catherine Porter (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1993).

5 Jonathan Crary, *Suspensions of Perceptions: Attention, Spectacle and Modern Culture* (Cambridge, MA.: MIT Press, 2001).

6 Anselm Franke, "Much Trouble in the Transportation of Souls, or: The Sudden Disorganization of Boundaries," in *Animism*, ed. Anselm Franke (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2010), 11.

7 See Shiv Visvanathan, "From the Annals of the Laboratory State," *Alternatives* 12 (1987): 37–59.

8 Michel Foucault, *Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason*, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Random House, 1965 [1961]), and *The Birth of the Clinic: An Archaeology of Medical Perception*, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Routledge, 1991 [1963]).

9 Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison, *Objectivity* (New York: Zone Books, 2007).

10 Juliane Rebentisch, *The Aesthetics of Installation Art*, trans. Daniel Dendrickson and Gerrit Jackson (Berlin: Sternberg Press, 2012).

11 Stéphane Lojkine, *L'Œil révolté: les Salons de Diderot* (Paris: Actes Sud, Editions Jacqueline Chambon, 2007).

12 In Denis Diderot, *Salon de 1767, 1767*. Although Vernet's marine remains unidentified, it is described extensively in the segment of the Salon titled "La Promenade Vernet."

13 Rebentisch, *The Aesthetics of Installation Art*, 36.

14 First published as "Hommage à Georges Bataille," *Critique* 195–196 (1963): 751–770.

15 In medicine, "facies" designates the appearance or facial expression of an individual that is typical of a particular disease or condition; in geology, the character of a rock expressed by its formation, composition, and fossil content; and in ecology, the characteristic set of dominant species in a habitat.

16 Jonathan Crary, *Techniques of the Observer* (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992).