Hit and Run--Museums and Cultural Difference Author(s): Irit Rogoff Source: Art Journal, Vol. 61, No.

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Hit and Run--Museums and Cultural Difference

Interior view of the Berlin Jewish Museum designed by Daniel Libeskind. Courtesy of the Berlin Jewish Museum, Germany. Photo Bitter Bredt Photography.

I. The BerlinJewish Museum, designed by Daniel Libeskind,was originallyopened when empty, without any of its planned displays. Subsequently it was closed for installationand reopened in Autumn 200 I1 with galleries of objects on display.

The guide of the Englishlanguagetour at the BerlinJewishMuseumclearlyhad been askedto be particularly attentiveto the audience'sresponsesand subjectivities. Likea NorthernCalifornian of the Jungianilk, he would psychotherapist few look at us with concern and ask:"Andhow do you minutes, stop every great feel aboutthis?" His audiencewas a motley crew from abouta dozen countrieswith neither a sharedlanguagenor a set of sharedhistoricalreferences. Whatwe did have in common in the summerof 2000 was an immense anxietyabout the forththis buildcoming experienceof the tour.As a resultof variouspressreportages, ing had been circulatingin the media and popularimagination as a Disneyesquehorrorride, encompassingloss of orientation, Irit Rogoff destabilizedgravity, extremeshifts between claustrophobia, darkand light, and the specterof the much publicized Holocaust Tower. I had spent the morning at the museum'scuratorial office, calledin to discussa lectureseries on space,which the organizers in the educationdepartmentkeptcalling "yournew space work."My chronicallyunrulymind, which was furtheraffectedby the of the buildprescribeddisorientation ing, was suddenlyfull of visions of luscious lollipop space RogerVadim's of I extravaganza the i96os, Barbarella. wondered,would "myspacework" allow me to float aroundthe aweinspiringBerlinmuseum in a blond wig and leatherspacesuit a laJane Fondato the accompaniment of sweet, innocent sixtiespop music?The of the museumand the groundlessness of conjunctions gravityloss in outer spacecollapsedinto one another. from these fantasies Light-headed thathad been heightenedby the building'sabsenceof displayed objectswhich might have served to hold down and anchorthe space,I quicklydecided to join one of the tour haste I overlooked groups going throughthe building.'In my ethnographic the visitor'sbadge thathad been pinned on me when I enteredthe museum's offices, which identifiedthe beareras partof the building staff,and would provide perfectcamouflage. As the tour proceeded,a smalldissentingfactionamong the visitorsemerged.ThreeIsraeliswere clearlydisturbedand agitatedby the experience.Theyhad startedbehavingin a disruptivemanner,laughingand talking, while the knowledgeableone among them, probablyan architect,lectured the other two aboutarchitecture: who had influencedLibeskind in this wall, in thatdetail,where he had borrowedthe overallconcept from, etc.When we got to the void known as the HolocaustTowerthe dissentturnedhostile. "What," exclaimedthe knowledgeable visitor,"hadthis beautifulbuilding to do with the
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2. I have dealt with aspects of these arguments at greater length in the following essays: "Body Missing-Uncanny Histories and Cultural Hauntings"in KunstAls Beute, ed. SigridSchade, Vienna 2002; "MovingOn-Migration and the ... from Intertextualityof Trauma"in VeraFrenkel the Transit Bar, National Gallery of Canada, Ottawa and Power Plant,Toronto, 1994; and "The Aesthetics of Post History-A German eds. S. and Textuality, Perspective," in Vision Melvilleand B. Readings, (London: MacMillan, 1994).

Holocaust?" The tour guide panicked; this was not part of the anticipated scenario. Like a deer caught in headlights he held the Israelis' eyes throughout the rest of the tour, addressing them exclusively with ever more elaborate explanations. The three visitors kept muttering in Hebrew: "These Germans, torturing us with their guilt." At the end of the tour the threesome made a stand. "The museum" they said "was not an attempt to come to terms with Berlin's lost Jewish history or with its Jewish population, largely lost through murder or migration, not a coming to terms with the Holocaust; it was, in fact, an act of disavowal." The other visitors in the group were shocked, the guide pale. Any form of discussion seemed impossible in the face of such accusations and negations and I to reflect on my latest encounter with the ambivalences retreated to the U-bahn and disavowals that always seem to surface when museums engage with issues of cultural difference. Whether that engagement has to do with lost histories, destroyed heritages, the uneasy co-habitations of contemporary culture, the efforts to think through where anyone might belong beyond the legitimation of the state or of inherited rights-it is always an embattled terrain in which those who are being represented and those conceptualizing the representation seem to perform very different claims and vested interests. Here then is the crux of my question regarding museums' encounters with cultural difference. Moving beyond the supposition that absences need to be compensated for by the constitution of symbolic presences, and beyond the understanding that memory can directly or indirectly be recovered-we are left with the task of working and living with absence.2 Conventionally viewed, the culmination of violent historical acts and the aftermath of void demand to be marked and compensated for.While neither is a very active entity for the next steps of cultural production, they are the driving forces behind any critical inquiry-from the psychoanalytic to the deconstructive. A critical perception of the possibilities for museums to engage with cultural difference must therefore recognize the shift from the compensatory projects of atoning for absences and replacing voids, to a performative one in which loss is not only enacted, but is made manifest from within the culture that has remained a seemingly invulnerable dominant. To some extent I am arguing that museums' engagement with cultural difference cannot deal exclusively with that which has been lost, marginalized, or vilified. It must actually deal with the effects of those histories and dynamics on the cultures that perpetrated these elisions and remained seemingly inviolate in their wake. To put it more simply, I maintain that the encounter with cultural difference cannot be done by representing a loss or an absence, but needs to come about by the museum acknowledging and enacting a loss of some part of itself. By attempting to perform a lack the Berlin Jewish Museum has entered another structure, that of disavowal-partaking of the pleasure of the museum's unlimited accumulation, acknowledging the danger of attempting to compensate for an absence, and insisting on inhabiting both. The nineteenth-century project of collecting and archiving, the twentieth-century Modernist project of canon formation, and the turn-of-the-twenty-first century's insistence on staging memory, have in this instance given way to a performative mode. Plenitude, the museum's hallmark, has transformed into lack-a building, performing a museum, performing a plenitude, performing a lack. After the fall

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of the Berlin Wall, with great efforts at lessening the discrepancy between two very different German heritages regarding histories of both fascism and antiSemitism, the Berlin Jewish Museum building functions very differently. Its pleasure is that age-old moralizing panacea of "doing the right thing" and it does so at two levels simultaneously-with displayed objects documenting an absent history and a provocative architecture which insists on the void remaining just that. The danger of such incompatible dualities is that these forms of historical ownership split off the commemorated or the reinstated from the living and from ongoing histories on every street corner. By fencing in and compensating for a community of victims who have been made invisible, the museum also dismisses the continuation of those communities in hybridized modes all over the world. There are, of course, large populations of the homeless and unaccepted living a very short distance from the museum, wherever that museum might be situated. By insisting that the events commemorated are part of a historical past, the museum cuts itself off from contemporary parallels and limits the range of our understanding of just how complex and far reaching those continuities might be: whether guest workers, street peddlers, or refugees in every European city; or the New York psychoanalytic culture which became one of Central Europe's
greatest diasporas in the 193os and 1940s. Since the Berlin Jewish Museum takes

both courses simultaneously, it remains our task to reinscribe its performative disavowal as we now intersect its previously empty/currently full spaces. I have begun with this ethnography of my recent visit to the Berlin Jewish Museum and the dramas of difference which it staged because it allows me a slightly oblique entry point into the problematic of museums and cultural difference. The obliqueness, as it were, is a move away from the triple confrontation of displaced subjects, hegemonic histories, and institutions of display and representation. Those confrontations seem to do little more than assert that the museum is indeed the site of universal plenitude and that its role should be one of re-inscribing the excluded within its staging of more complete, inclusive, and just histories. But other dynamics are also available.At Goldsmiths College a few years ago we had a visit from Chris Dercon, the director of the Boijmans Van Beuningen Museum in Rotterdam. Knowing that we are particularly preoccupied with issues of cultural difference in relation to contemporary art and critical theory, he put forward a discussion of a problematic that he and his colleagues were currently preoccupied with-namely how to, in his words, "bring into the museum" the large Surinamese community living in Rotterdam, and how to make them feel that it is their cultural space as well. We were all quite surprised by the terms of the direction of this supposed cultural traffic.Why, asked our students, did the Rotterdam Museum think it needed to "bring in" these cultural presences and make itself more fully culturally representative, rather than go out and slightly unravel its own boundaries, its illusions of infinitely expandable plenitude. The question, posed in very good faith by the director of a major European museum-which has been scrupulous about staging exhibitions that are both inclusive and deconstructive of the European cultural heritage-affords us an opportunity, which museums rarely allow, to share dilemmas in revisiting urgent social issues from the perspectives of displayed culture. Nevertheless there is also the risk of collapsing into what my colleague

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Sarat calls "multi-cultural which we need to resistwith Maharaj managerialism," all our might.3 In relationto culturaldifferencewithin westernculturalinstitutions,we seem to havemade a smooth transitionfrom exclusionto inclusion,from xenoourselvesor our phobia to xenophiliain one fell swoop and without unravelling institutional in the The state was former characterized practices process. by the of exclusion all others as the raw materials of Western cultural complete except consciousness,as in the conceptof primitivism,the developmentof the science called"anthropology," of globmissionaryeducationor conversion,and markets al capitalbasedon the rawmaterials of eitherlocal or migrantlabor.Morecurin museumshas expresseditself in dozens of rently,the xenophiliaprevalent exhibitionswith the word other in their titles thataddressneitherthe sourcesof the initialexclusionnor their traumatic effectsbut attemptto redressthe balance of throughstrategies compensatory visibility. as revisionary, this infinitelyexpansive to its own self-perception Contrary institutions is actuallygrounded inclusiveness so practicedby manyexhibiting in an unrevisednotion of the museum'suntroubledabilitysimplyto add others without losing a bit of the self. It is basedon a romanticbelief thatwe can simof Modernismand its various ply insertother historiesinto the grandnarratives crisesand collapsesover the past thirtyyears,an assumptionthatignores the locatedcultures. Whatis especially conflictbetween hegemonic and marginally it this additive model is that leaves intact the about conceptof plenidisturbing Therefore it assumesa possibilityof tude at the heartof the museumproject. without remappingthe navigational changewithout loss, without alteration, incluprinciplesthatallow us to makejudgmentsaboutquality,appropriateness, sion, and revision. In tryingto locate other models of stagingthe actualworkingsof twentiethShort centurypoliticaland culturalencounters,I recentlysaw the exhibitionThe
in Africa 1945-1994, which began in Movements and Liberation Century: Independence

3. To give credit to the BoijmansVan Beuningen Museum, it has been responsible for some very reflexive exhibitions of late dealing precisely with issues of culturalunraveling,including most recently UnpackingEurope,exhibition and catalogue by Salah Hassan and IftikarDadi, 2001. 4. See the catalogue The ShortCentury: Movementsin Africa Independenceand Liberation 1945-1994, ed. Okuwi Enwezor (Munich: Prestel, 200 1) and Carol Becker, "A Conversation with Okwui Enwezor,"Art ournal,vol. 61, 2 (Summer 2002), 8-27.

Germany (Villa Stuck, Munich and Martin Gropius Bau, Berlin), continued to the Museum of Contemporary Art in Chicago, and was, at the time of this writing, at P.S.I in NewYork.4 The opening historical moment of the exhibition is mid-twentieth century with the independence movements and wars of national liberation that were taking place throughout the colonized continent of Africa. was very wide and included The informing notion of Africa in TheShort Century of Africa more considered North commonly part of the Middle East.This parts means that beyond a named place, a continent called Africa, we have a world of mutual histories and linked narratives-a sphere of global exchange and circulation that both challenges the hegemonic supremacy of the colonizer's culture and acknowledges the complex internal network of inter-African migrations, circulations, influences, and exchanges. In my reading of the exhibition, it operates through staging a series of losses to various fundamental assumptions that the West has about itself and through which it has traditionally constituted a place named Africa as its quintessential other. Thus, in the first instance, a fundamental Western assumption that has been lost here is one of the prevailing modes of European/African interlocution, namely the constitution of Africa in resistance to Western colonization. African scholars and Africanists from the West have produced a very large body of knowledge about the continent, its histories, and its

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Installation view of the Short Century exhibition at the P.S. I Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NewYork.

5. ChinuaAchebe, "Postscript:James Baldwin,"in Fictions: The Politicsof ImaginativeWriting, Critical ed. Philomena Mariani(Seattle: Bay Press, 199 1), 278-81.

cultures.Nevertheless, within much of culturalrepresentation, Africaremains viewed primarilyeither as a historicistresourceor as a zone in conflictwith the West,as well as one to which the Westcan point in termsof "widespread tragedy" utterlydivorcedfrom its own imbrications. Second,we encountera complex networkof mutuallyinformativeideological articulations and politicalstrugglesthatextends beyond the continent,with links to African AmericanandAfricanLatin Americanpoliticaland intellectual work. One exampleis Chinua Achebe'sremarkable tribute,"Postscript: James Baldwin."Here an Africanwriterbroughtup within the culturalprejudicesof Britishcolonialism,sets out to travelthe world under the aegis of the very internationalagenciesthathad inventedthe concept of developmentin which they locatedhim. He finallyencountersthe United Statesthroughhis pursuitof and meeting with JamesBaldwin,who himself was shortlyto flee for what he hoped would be the more welcoming host-cultureof Paris.Similarly, in The Short Century, complex networksof traveland exchange,mutualitiesenactedlargelythrough
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Installation view of the Short Century exhibition at the P.S. I Contemporary Art Center, Long Island City, NewYork.

6. J. M. Blaut, The Colonizer's Model of the and Eurocentric World-Geographical Diffusionism History(London/New York:Guilford Press, 1993), 28-29.

the back doors of culture, point to the fact that the West is part of a route and a process but hardly the only destination. The divisions of colonialism and more recently of the Cold War do not actually map out the globe as people in the West believe. Such belief structures had been made possible through traditional assumptions which, to quote J. M. Blaut's "Colonizer's Vision of the World," are grounded in "The unique historical advantage of the West-the West makes history, it advances, progresses, modernizes . . . the rest of the world keeps up or it stagnates."' Blaut argues that the entire geographic world system was constructed through a process of "Eurocentric Diffusionism" that created a flow of cultural processes over the world as a whole. This in turn was founded on the myth of "the autonomous rise of Europe" prior to 1492 that persisted up to the advent of colonialism and large-scale European/non-European interaction. In this dimension of TheShort Century's concept the loss enacted is of that old understanding of the production of collective identities in relation to space and place constituted through colonial empire, that is based on conquest, oppression, and hegemonic persuasion. Here it is replaced by a connective tissue of mutual influences in

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which models are borrowed, adapted, and changed from neo-Marxisms to cultural resistances to discourses on representation. Third, we begin to see how these struggles for liberation and independence pierced the fabric of European and American political culture and ruptured the twentieth century in the middle (thus the exhibition's title). Events taking place in Africa did not follow those taking place in the West but preceded them and made them possible. In fact, mid-century radicality, which came out of joint efforts at both liberation and social reform across Africa, actually paved the way for the explosion of anti-Vietnam War, student, and other social resistance movements which took place in the West almost a decade later.Thus, for example, after visiting this exhibition several times, I was astonished to note in revisiting accounts of the lives of radical European thinkers of the mid-century, how many of them single out the Algerian independence struggle to mark their own political awakening and radicalization. Here the loss enacted via the exhibition is akin to what an African friend once said had been his feeling throughout his student days in Paris: "The West is where the future happens first."This belief in the West's ownership of the very concept of innovative progress and radicality is one of western culture's most treasured conceits. Instead we can map a set of impetuses for extreme change that came from elsewhere. They spur the center into critically rethinking itself, not just out of guilt, or a sense of wanting to do justice to atone for the sins of an earlier unreflective past, but actually out of recognition that here was an opportunity for radical reevaluation. It is interesting to revisit the radical movements of the i96os and 197os and to see how their inscription into an autonomous and Eurocentric intellectual and political history has resulted in the shedding of their non-western catalysts and impetuses. With its metonymically displayed riches of art, film, documentary, and archival materials, the exhibition began to play with an idea that its curator, Okuwi Enwezor, has declared one of his guiding principles for the forthcoming Documenta xI as well, namely to question what happens to culture when you think it from the place of another archive. If the archive of western radicality might be located outside of itself, does this offer the opportunity to rethink the very concept of radicality and to cease perceiving of its location as an index of its significance? The spur against accumulation and expansion and toward a mode of radical questioning of the very concepts that constitute the subject at hand, had always been at the heart of any deconstructive impulse. As I tried to establish earlier, the recognition of an active category of culturally living with and living out loss, as opposed to compensating for it, is central to both psychoanalytic and deconstructive modes of thought. Their contribution towards an active rethinking of museum and exhibition display strategies might allow for the stagare actually insepaing of cultural encounters in which the West and all its others rably entwined and entangled in one another without the recourse of falling back into discrete histories. To some extent, postcolonial theory has been pointing to this debt and mutual imbrication for some time. If one thinks of the rise in recognition of the thought of Frantz Fanon7 over the past decade, one can trace a strand of alternative history in which a complex set of journeys between the Middle East and North Africa keeps weaving through France but never settling in it, always informing it and mobilizing against it at the same time. Fanon, then, is a field of entangled possibilities, informed by Europe and set up against

7. See FrantzFanon, Toward the AfricanRevolution: Political Essays, trans. H. Chevalier, New York: Grove Press, 1988). Also see the treatment of Fanon as a field of circulations in IsaacJulien'sfilm FrantzFanon-Black Skin,White Mask, 1996.

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its colonial and racist regimes, rejected by Europe and recognized by North African liberation activists, belatedly recognized by Europe in an attempt to anchor the work and thought to its own radical heritage of mid-century crises. In relegating Europe per se to a hinterland of African radicality, TheShort Century project rewrites the dynamic described above and allows for the enactment of a European loss through the recognition of the legitimacy of another entity and its claims to a competing heritage. Most recently I encountered the museological enactment of another form of loss, a conscious loss. In March 2002 I had the opportunity to visit the newly opened Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg in the company of a group of local artists and curators, largely made up of young black South African curators and museum workers who had taken up public positions in the period of so-called transformation. It was a sunny Sunday afternoon, and the museum, which I had expected to be very crowded, was quite empty. It is a very well thought out and executed concept and is probably one of the most harrowing museum experiences I have ever had. Although I thought I knew something about South African political history, I was not prepared for the brutal mindlessness of apartheid's institutionalized racism, with its intricate bureaucratic legal structures and its bewildering internal logics in which not a whiff of either sense or humanity seemed to exist. Nor was it easy to visit the museum with these particular colleagues who had been so marked by the horrific histories they and their families had lived through. If you like, the museum is a very accomplished representation of the horrors of racial warfare. It forces you to look it in the face and acknowledge it in all its dread. Perhaps one of its most horrific aspects is that it highlights the degree to which the history of black Africans in South Africa was a by-product of the struggle between the British and the Boers. The struggle and the damage that these two European powers inflicted on one another in Africa and, through their claims, on the continent determined the course of twentiethcentury politics in southern Africa. My colleagues looked at all of this gravely and I can only imagine the memories and traumas that the exhibits dredged up in them. However, the exhibits they gravitated to most eagerly were those in which various Afrikaans Nationalist politicians of previous generations articulated their most virulent theories about the racial inferiority of black Africans and the absolute impossibility of an equal co-existence between blacks and whites in South Africa.While life in South Africa has changed a great deal since the collapse of apartheid and the advent of majority rule under the African National Congress (ANC), it has remained very difficult. In many ways life is still extremely discriminatory, so that these exhibits are viewed through the ambivalence of a culture still in the throes of great trauma. It was hard for me to take on board the difference in our responses to these particular exhibits-my cringing, their glee. Perhaps in the sheer ludicrousness of these overblown political statements based in the primitive racial hatred of bigoted fundamentalists, statements made by politicians that history has now designated as irrelevant anachronisms, one could find a slight assurance that things had in fact changed-that a logic that was no logic had been exposed and had been turned in on itself. Throughout the narrative set up by the museum, it was the victory of the ANC over the powers of Afrikaans nationalism and apartheid that drove the later part of the story. But in

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an odd way the museum staged the loss of the governing logic that had kept everyone terrorized and downtrodden and whose consequences it was trying to document with a meticulous and taxonomic detail. Its workings were reminiscent of an Afrikaans stand-up comic who had been a very frequent and welcome visitor to London in the years of the struggle against apartheidinstead of writing material he would simply read from local South African newspapers. He would regale his disbelieving audiences with the surreal ludicrousness of fifteen "coloureds" who had applied to be classified as "whites" and seven "blacks" who had applied to be classified as "coloureds" and so on. In the process of this kind of exposure, outside of any complex legitimating order, it was, of course, the very instability of these categories of race on which the regime was impaling itself that became so glaringly obvious. My African colleagues, gathering with evident amusement around the video monitors on which these politicians were spouting yesterday's racial doctrines and the censures they had mobilized in their names were not simply pleased at their downfall but also at the evacuation of meaning which this form of open exposure affected. It was not the collapse of racism but the collapse and the acknowledged unraveling of the notion of the law itself that were being made manifest in these exhibits and in the responses of the local audience. It is "law" in Derrida's sense of that entire gamut of intertwined logic and power, discursively formed and disseminated through the juristic system, through grammar, through the establishment of such parameters as racial regulations which sustains division between those privileged with rights and those outside of them. The loss staged at the Apartheid Museum in Johannesburg is the loss of the law in its Derridean sense, and it is that loss rather than the change of specific laws regarding racial discrimination, to which my colleagues were responding with such festive humor. For myself, because I have long been preoccupied with conjunctions of geographical counter-cartographies and contemporary arts practices, this project of thinking about the possibilities of museums' potential encounters with cultural difference opened a great vista of alternative mappings. What if we took the privilege of mapping away from the nation-state where, entwined with epistemic structures, it had produced one of our most unshakable authorities, and handed it over to the resistance initiatives that the state terms "terror"?What if we attempted to decouple the exclusive relations between each so-called "terrorist" group and the immediate and specific state strictures it was struggling against, and instead traced its numerous links with other groups and their shared theoretical precepts and mutual engagements? What would we see if the Red Army Faction (RAF) and Brigate Rosse, the Palestinian Liberation Organization (PLO) and Irish Republican Army (IRA), the Basque Fatherland and Liberty Group (ETA), and extreme breakaway groups of Greenpeace ecowarriors were to be linked with slightly older histories of the Front de Lib6ration Nationale (FLP) in Algeria, Mau Mau rebellion in Kenya, Mouvement National Congolais, African National Congress (ANC) politics in South Africa, and Black Panthers in the United States, to mention only a very few of the struggles that emerged at mid-century? One of the most interesting points to emerge is a recognition that with hindsight, European radicalism has once again written itself as a form of

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diffusionism, its sources and impetuses exclusive unto itself. In the numerous books on the sixties, only conjunctions of very old and very European histories are acknowledged-state fascisms, proletarian struggles, engaged intellectuals, and mobilized rebellious students-as linking the numerous protest movements and radical resistance actions of the moment. Even the circulation of the Vietnam War-the site of horrific histories of atrocious colonialism from the Indochine of the French colonial empire to the divided nation of postwar superpower struggle between the U.S. and the U.S.S.R.-as a catalyst of much local western and nonwestern protest, has been divested of its colonial and race politics and become the floating signifier of unruly, rebellious, and antiauthoritarian youth. But even a very superficial historical investigation reveals that everything was linked through the popular imagination that encountered these links. Everyone with a television in 1977, viewers of what Jean Baudrillard was to call "our Theatre of Cruelty,"saw the German tourists cowering in the Lufthansa plane, jointly patrolled by German RAFactivists and Palestinian PLOguerrillas on the soil of Mogadishu, Somalia which is, of course, in Africa; or the Japanese members of radical armed resistance in support of Palestine gunning down Europebound travelers in Israel's Ben Gurion Airport. Everyone saw the traces of RAF actions against politicians and financiers in Germany and those of Brigate Rosse actions in Italy,but to speak of the connections between them is to recognize the duality of an unresolved fascist past in both countries. Everyone in 1979 was party to the veiled nuances and cultural shock of the purported suicides of the Baader-Meinhof collective at Stammheim Prison, but to question them would have meant to breach the carefully constructed boundary between the legal state and outlawed terror, viewed from within an exclusively European model. The problem was that not many people at that moment had the tools and reading strategies to link manifestations taking place in Western Europe, the Middle East,Africa, and Japan and locate them within a mutually imbricated politics that extended beyond the hollow and melodramatic jargon of the revolutionary romance of the moment or the equally hollow authoritarian discourse of politicians who saw their societies as at the edge of an abyss. The actions and protagonists of terror have always been positioned by the state as marginal resistances to itself, as murderers and destroyers of the civil order that the state upholds through its institutions, laws, and constant and vigilant policing. But what if we, for a moment, tried to read them as a set of geographical ambivalences, as a set of Third Spaces, in which the nation-state is unframed, the histories of colonialism are allowed to break out of their imprisoning legacies of oppression, thought flows in numerous directions, and named spaces are occupied with numerous and contradictory subjectivities? Looking from the perspective of "another archive" that Enwezor has put into the discussion of exhibited culture, we can no longer indulge in the multiin while remaining cultural management of inclusiveness-letting all the others with an unchanging concept of ourselves. Museums' encounters with cultural difference are in a sense an opportunity to contract rather than to expand, to contract the staunch belief system that organizes, classifies, locates, and judges everything from the prevailing perspective of the West. At a conference in Sweden on museums and democracy for which I had initially tried to articulate these thoughts, some participants who worked in museums asked how this loss

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might be affected in their practice. Others said that the work of inclusion had not yet been achieved, especially not in cultures that had only recently begun to be generally aware of hybridity and cultural difference. Therefore it could not yet be surpassed. At the time I was at a loss for responses because after all this was a theoretical and conceptual inquiry that I had embarked upon-a theoretical inquiry that was in pursuit of change but had no recipe to bring it about, a cultural politics that recognized that the moment had come to also move on from the previously necessary project of inclusiveness, not because those politics had been successfully transformed but because cultural politics always have to exist and run on several parallel planes concurrently, simultaneously doing the current work and thinking the next step. Now having had the opportunity to inhabit some of these thoughts slightly longer and to view a range of displayed cultural politics, I am beginning to perceive of the staging of culture as performatively taking place instead of being represented as a partial step in this direction. It is without in the making. This in the context of cinema, End Giorgio Agamben's Means which Agamben claims, ... has its centre in the gesture and not in the image and thus it belongs essentially to the realm of ethics and politics and not simply to that of aesthetics . . . What characterises gesture is that in it nothing is being produced or acted, but rather something is being endured and supported. The gesture in other words, opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human. But in what way is an action endured and supported?... In what way does a simple act become an event?... In the distinction between production and action; if producing is a means in view of an end and praxis is an end without means, the gesture then breaks with the false alternative between ends and means that paralyses morality and presents instead means that, as such, evade the orbit of mediality without becoming, for this reason, ends.8 In an illuminating burst of insight Agamben articulates for us the mistaken conception at the heart of art masquerading as politics through an assumption of political subject matter and or an investment with clear navigational principles between right and wrong and how to achieve these: Nothing is more misleading for an understanding of gesture, therefore, than representing, on the one hand, a sphere of means as addressing a goal (for example marching seen as a means of moving the body from point A to point B) and, on the other hand, a separate and superior sphere of gesture as a movement that has its end in itself (for example, dance seen as an aesthetic dimension) .... The gesture is the exhibition of a mediality: it is the process of making a means visible as such.9 The possibility of the museum's enactment of itself as the site of loss, rather than the representation of actual losses and elisions, is the process by which some theoretical thought regarding cultural difference might actually become an event, and as such mark the potential difference that this engagement might affect.
8. Giorgio Agamben, Means withoutEnd:Notes on Politics(Minneapolis:University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 55-58. 9. Ibid. Irit Rogoff holds a universitychair in art history and visual culture at Goldsmiths College, London University. She is the author of TerraInfirma-Geography's VisualCulture(Routledge, 2000) and is currently working on a study of participations in visual culture to be titled Looking Away.

73 art journal

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