Museification

Paragraph 753 of the Phenomenology begins by scoring the soon-to-become familiar critique of museification: the museum artwork exists as a beautiful but petrified object emptied of the spirit of its age.

What type of politics of memory is being rejected by questioning the global language of memorialistic museification? Undoubtedly, at the heart of resistance to museification lies a resistance to opening up the past of the CDCs, which takes us back to the peculiar living museum I analyzed earlier in the chapter on La fuga.

Such questioning of the politics and poetics of the museum forces us to think about the current “museification” of the world and the “cultural modes of regulating affective and ethical dispositions” as well as the positions, frames, or apparatus that make them possible. As the film illustrates, ethnological frames impact how we apprehend worked objects from Africa, as well as how we regard African lives, human beings, and beings in general. It is precisely these acts of “museification” and framing in general and ethnological framing of genres of Man in particular that this chapter is concerned with.