My spring break has officially began this week (one of the perks of being a teacher), and in celebration, I took my daughter to one of my favorite places in this city, the science museum and planetarium. Granted, this little building is a pretty sorry excuse for a science museum, most of it is horribly outdated (exhibits remain from when I was a child), but I didn’t think my three-year old daughter would mind.
This museum was very near my home when I was growing up, and it was my favorite weekend destination, which gratefully my grandparents were always more than happy take me. I would spend hours in the main gallery, getting my hands dirty with “science” with all their interactive exhibits, and then more hours in the planetarium, gazing up at the projected night sky, memorizing the locations of all the stars, planets, and constellations for the month. The best part of spending my days there was that I would always leave feeling as if I understood the world around me just that much better. I would walk into the parking lot looking at everything with a slightly more critical and keen eye, and that feeling would carry me well into the week. And when the sun went down, the curiosity that was piqued in the planetarium would be given free rein as I looked into the night sky and was awed by the sheer enormity of it all.
So with all of that in mind, I took my daughter to spend the day at the same museum, which, as I mentioned above, hasn’t changed much in the past thirty years. She loved it. She hopped and ran from exhibit to exhibit, trying her hand at all of the hands-on exhibits, asking for explanations, her eyes brightening with understanding every time she “got it.” She was mesmerized by fluid dynamics, spent exceptionally long periods of time staring at close up images of our planets, and even built her own Lego solar-powered car. Watching her eyes widen with excitement when we walked into the main gallery and she took it all in was wonderful in and of itself, but seeing her curiosity and awe take flight really made it all worth while. Not to mention that seeing and experience everything in that little museum again through her eyes rekindled my sense of child-like wonder.
As we were walking out, her new orange dinosaur in hand, she told me that she wanted to return every day. That night she asked to take out the telescope, and although it was cloudy, we did get a good look at the moon. As she looked through the telescope and I looked at her, I realized just how lucky I am to have a daughter who is so bright and so curious. It was a beautiful day and it made me think of what Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in his essay “On Life,”
Let us recollect our sensations as children. What a distinct and intense apprehension had we of the world and of ourselves!
Giovanni Paolo Pannini, Picture Galleries with Views of Ancient Rome, 1759
As the end of the year approaches, it seems as if everyone is compiling or discussing lists. This morning on my drive into work there must have been at least five different “end-of-year” lists referenced (and I live very close to my workplace), including “Top 100 Songs of 2011,” “NPR‘s Favorite 50 Albums of 2011,” and “Top 20 Books by Readers of 2011.” With this endless listing, it seems as if we attempt, looking back on the year, to make sense of it by creating these tidy catalogues. But that’s exactly the function of the list, to create order out of chaos; to organize, categorize, rank, and define. To reference a post from a couple of weeks ago, lists essentially act as a cultural Maxwell’s Demon.
But for Umberto Eco, lists do more than simply impose or express order, they function as creators of culture and windows into history. In late 2009, Eco curated an exhibition at the Louvre where his chosen subject was “The Vertigo of Lists.” Through this subject he intended to take us on a grand tour of art, literature, and music, all through the focus of lists. He was interviewed by Spiegel about this exhibit, and when asked why he chose the seemingly commonplace subject of lists for his work, he explained,
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.
He then continues to say,
The list doesn’t destroy culture; it creates it. Wherever you look in cultural history, you will find lists. In fact, there is a dizzying array: lists of saints, armies and medicinal plants, or of treasures and book titles. Think of the nature collections of the 16th century. My novels, by the way, are full of lists.
According to Jean-Marc Terrasse, auditorium manager of the Louvre,
his central thesis is that in Western culture a passion for accumulation is recurring: lists of saints, catalogues of plants, collections of art, all show how in the right hands there can be a ‘poetics of catalogues’.
Based on his work at the Louvre, Eco wrote a truly beautiful book titled The Vertigo of Lists (or The Infinity of Lists in the US). This book is a continuation of the work he had begun with his books History of Beauty and On Ugliness. It is replete with vivid images of the art he wants us to look at as exemplifying his argument, and selections of the literature he cites. In this book, as with his work with the Louvre, he takes one on a whirlwind tour of Western art, literature, and music, selecting pieces that not only reinforce the idea of enumeration, but that also give one the sense of voluptuousness, abundance, infinity, or “vertigo.”
He certainly succeeds at conveying this sense of the infinite through his meticulously chosen examples. In literature he begins with Homer’s Iliad, and continues with lists care of Vergil, Dante, Shakespeare, Proust, Calvino, Zola, Cervantes, Rimbaud, Neruda, etcetera (he even includes a selection from his book, TheName of the Rose, a book full of lists). In art, the list is also exhaustive, including the works of Pannini, Bosch, Dürer, Brueghel, Goya, Ernst, Warhol, among hundreds of others. This along with myriad reliquaries, scenes from Hollywood musicals, images of nerve cells, and photographs of collections. Merely listing what he includes seems to give one that sense of vertigo. In addition to all of this, he also cites music, my favorite mention of which is Ravel, of whose “Bolero” he writes that ”its obsessive rhythms suggests that it could continue infinitely.”
For Eco, in both the exhibit and the book, the list is a “cutout of infinity,” an intimation of what may lay beyond the frame of a painting, or behind the shop window. It is not only what is explicitly mentioned in the list that is significant, but also the ellipses and “etcetera” at the end of that list; the indication that there is more that cannot even be mentioned, the implication of the infinite.
We have a limit, a very discouraging, humiliating limit: death. That’s why we like all the things that we assume have no limits and, therefore, no end. It’s a way of escaping thoughts about death. We like lists because we don’t want to die.
Although I never had an opportunity to view the exhibition at the Louvre, I did recently read the book (I purchased a copy for my grandmother for Christmas, and bought one for myself, too). I’m sure on some level I had always thought about the significance of list and listing, on personal, cultural, and aesthetic levels. That being said, I’d never quite thought it all the way through in the way that Eco proposed. The list, not as the obvious expression of the finite, but as the intimation of the infinite and the ineffable.
And if you haven’t heard (or are haven’t listened in a while) to Ravel’s “Bolero,” here it is…
I’ll end this post with the words that Eco used to end his introduction to his book …
In conclusion, the search for lists was a most exciting experience not so much for what we managed to include in this volume as for all the things that had to be left out. What I mean to say, in other words, is that this book cannot but end with an etcetera.
If the misery of our poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin.
This line from Charles Darwin’s famous work, Voyage of the Beagle, is both epigraph and theme of Stephen Jay Gould’s The Mismeasure of Man, which is, in short, is a well-argued and well-written refutation of scientific racism and biological determinism.
I first read the book when it was published around fifteen years ago, but my interest in it was recently rekindled when I read about a museum exhibit that recently opened in Paris at the musée du quai Branly. This exhibit titled “Human Zoos: The invention of the savage,”
… unveils the history of women, men and children brought from Africa, Asia, Oceania and America to be exhibited in the Western world in circus numbers, theatre or cabaret performances, fairs, zoos, parades, reconstructed villages or international and colonial fairs. The practice started in the 16th Century royal courts and continued to increase until the mid-20th Century in Europe, America and Japan.
…Through 600 items and the screening of many film archives, the exhibition shows how this type of performance, when used as propaganda and entertainment, has fashioned the Western perspective and deeply influenced a certain perception of the Other for nearly five centuries.
In chapter four of Mismeasure of Man, Gould writes about how the introduction of evolutionary theory in the nineteenth century transformed the way Europeans looked at issues pertaining to race. Although racism was not new, the scientific justification for it was, if not entirely new, at least given greater weight. For example, Ernst Haeckel*, through his recapitulation theory (“ontology recapitulates phylogeny”) maintained that an individual, through its own growth, passed through a series of stages that each represented adult ancestral forms in the order in which we passed through them, in other words, that “an individual, in short, climbs its own family tree.” Haeckel’s theory would provide the backbone of many scientific theories of racism, allowing “scientists” and thinkers such as Vogt, Cope, and, of course, Herbert Spencer, creator of “Social Darwinism,” to provide quantitative and scientific substantiation for their various racial classification and ranking systems. Spencer summarized recapitulation in 1895:
The intellectual traits of the uncivilized . . . are traits recurring in the children of the civilized.
That other, non-European races were “just like children” was no longer simply a bigoted adage, it now represented a scientific belief that “inferior people” were literally not as evolved as superior (white, European) groups. It provided a seemingly scientific justification for that ever-present Victorian paternalism that was epitomized in Rudyard Kipling’s poetic apology of white, European supremacy, “White Man’s Burden.”
Take up the White Man’s Burden
send forth the best ye breed
go, Bind your sons to exile
to serve the captive’s need:
To wait, in heavy harness,
On fluttered folk and wild-
Your new-caught sullen peoples,
Half devil and half child.
Exposition Universelle of 1889 in Paris
Victorian “scientific” ideas of race provided a firm ground from which to justify colonial expansion and European imperialism. These ideas also provided a rationalization for what would emerge next, ethnological expositions, or human zoos. Although the practice of placing humans on display was as old as our contact with other cultures, the nineteenth century practically institutionalized the it through these expositions, which became increasingly popular in Europe and North America during this time. From London, to Paris, to Chicago, non-white people were being displayed and exploited for the entertainment and “edification” of those in attendance.
A French print entitled "La Belle Hottentot," depicting Saartjie Baartman. The European observers remarks include "Oh! God Damn what roast beef!" and "Ah! how comical is nature."
Individuals such as Saartjie Baartman (the Hottentot Venus), whose body was exhibited and studied throughout Europe during her life, and dismembered and still displayed after death, is perhaps one of the most recognizable examples of this practice, as is perhaps Ota Benga, the pygmy that was kept on display at New York’s Bronx Zoo, and whose short life ended in suicide. Of personal interest (and subject of an upcomming post) is “Little Egypt,” who was featured in 1893 at the Egyptian Theater in the World’s Columbian Exposition Midway in Chicago. At the time she was objectified and was the source of lewd curiosity, but she was also the one responsible for introducing what would eventually be recognized as Belly Dance to the West.
For Europeans and North Americans, their experiences with this kind of objectification and exhibition of human beings, paired with the pseudo-scientific theories of race that gained much popularity during the nineteenth century shaped their perceptions of both themselves and whatever was conceived as “the other.” Although this aspect of our collective history is, and should be, a source of shame, it should not be forgotten, as we have not rid ourselves of the cultural “baggage” that we acquired during that time. While the current exhibition at the quai Branly museum has had its share of controversy, it does serve as an important reminder of where many of our destructive ideas pertaining to race have come from. As echoed in the line by Darwin that I started this post with, our institutions have shaped our ideas of “otherness,” and have directly led to our current bigoted and prejudiced views. Our sin is, in this regard, very great.
