Museums and a common world: climate change, cosmopolitics, museum practice

Abstract

At stake in this paper is the nature of the relationship between the institution of the museum and the common world. It is contended that such relations are regularly asserted through cosmopolitan appeals, which are premised on the assumption that a cosmos, a world, a universal, pre-exists its articulation, and, that it is the task of reason and of science to adjust the citizen-subject to this already-present condition. This paper argues that this is a flawed position because it assumes, in fact, what is required to be built: a world in common. In defence of this proposition, two recent declarations of museum cosmopolitanism are explored: ICOM’s declaration on the ‘universal museum’, which focuses on the unity of the cultural heritage of humankind; and the Buffon Declaration, which concerns institutions of natural history and the imperilment of humanity’s biospheric inheritance. Subsequently, the paper turns to what might be called the empirics of the cosmopolitanism of the museum visitor. This examines the qualitative investigation of banal or everyday cosmopolitanism, which is largely ignored by such museum declarations. These different museological articulations of a common world are, in turn, reviewed through the juxtaposition of two sociologies: Ulrich Beck’s cosmopolitanism and Bruno Latour’s compositionism. It is in contrasting these various mobilizations of the cosmopolitan – the museological, the empirical and the sociological – that the paper advances its proposition: namely, that these cosmopolitan claims are based on the assumption that a common world exists prior to its assemblage as such.