MUSEUMS IN LATE DEMOCRACIES, DIPESH CHAKRABARTY
MUSEUMS IN LATE DEMOCRACIES
by Dipesh Chakrabarty
“Before I get on to the matter of museums and their evolving relationship to democracies — my real subject in this short and sketchy essay — let me begin by explaining briefly what I see as the two models of democracy that coexist and sometimes clash in contemporary democratic polities. In the interest of brevity and exposition, I will keep my models separate and simple. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideas of democracy assumed a pedagogical understanding of politics. One was never born political even if it were thought that every human being had the capacity or the potential to take part in political life. But the condition of being human was not equated to the condition of being political. It was assumed that becoming a citizen, possessing and exercising rights, called for appropriate forms of education. Societies were understood to have both high and low forms of culture. Education provided the capacity for discernment — access to high culture — that the citizen needed. This could be self-education. It could be education through the right kind of experience. More commonly, however, it was thought that it fell to the educational institutions of modern societies to provide citizenly competence. Universities, museums, libraries, exhibitions and other comparable bodies assumed this task. A crucial aspect of this education was the capacity for abstract conceptualisation and reasoning. The book became the key object embodying this assumption. The importance given to the written language as the medium of instruction signified the high place accorded in this mode of thought to the trained, human capacity for abstraction. Abstract reasoning made it possible for the citizen to conceptualise such imaginary \entities as ‘class’, ‘public’, or ‘national’ interest and adjudicate between competing claims. Rationality was not merely a procedural aspect of disputations in life; it was itself thought to be an instrument of unity in public discussions. Rationality could help us appreciate our interests and arrange them mentally in the right order of priority. The public sphere was not only imagined as potentially united and unifiable; such unity was itself a value. For Marxists, ‘class’ could be the rational key explaining and promoting a unity between diverse underprivileged groups. For nationalists, something like ‘national interest’ could be a factor that overrode all divisions born of sectional interests. For liberals, rationality could lead to appreciation of that which was in the interest of all. Expanding the area of agreement through education and rational argumentation was seen as way of strengthening the fabric of national life.
This pedagogical understanding of citizenship is not history. It is not something we have left behind. Many of our institutional and personal actions are based on this understanding. Yet twentieth-century practices of mass-democracy — both in the West and in countries such as India — are also predicated on a very different understanding of the political. Following Homi Bhabha’s usage of the terms ‘pedagogic’ and ‘performative,’ we may call the second model of democratic politics a ‘performative’ one. The political, in this model, is not fundamentally a matter of pedagogy. The citizen is not someone who comes or is produced at the end of an educational process in which the school, the university, the library, and the museum intervene. In this conception that has increasingly dominated debates in and about public life in democracies since the 1960s, to be human is to be already political.”