woocommerce-shipping-per-product domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131complianz-gdpr domain was triggered too early. This is usually an indicator for some code in the plugin or theme running too early. Translations should be loaded at the init action or later. Please see Debugging in WordPress for more information. (This message was added in version 6.7.0.) in /var/www/staging.esse.ca/htdocs/wp-includes/functions.php on line 6131Today, it is as if truth and authenticity were buried in the past or in some distant place; they are seldom thought of as part of the here and now. Real life and authentic values only seem accessible by means of our \u00adfascination with the past (a past that is more comprised of our own \u00adhistory and that of our ancestors than of the history of foreign \u00adcivilizations) and by means of exoticism (which relates to our archetypes of what constitutes a noble savage and not to the figure of the \u00adforeigner). For behind the experience of estrangement which most tourists seek lurks a stereotypical and exotic fantasy in which people hope to find authenticity in the words and gestures of the elders or the natives of a given land. The tourism industry, which is necessarily cultural, strives to ensure that native peoples conform to standard representations. The tourist gaze is well fed in clich\u00e9s and fantasies\u2014those regarding the life of our ancestors or a life close to nature\u2014and partakes in what I call the heritage syndrome, which is a syndrome that signals the \u00admuseification and aestheticization of the world in general and of our individual lifeworlds in particular. I contend that tourism represents a tendency in modern humans\u2014in homo touristicus<\/em>\u2014to become tourists in their own culture, visitors of their own memory, spectators of their own existence.<\/pre>\n\n\n\nThe first measures to preserve heritage were taken, by official decree and in great haste, under the French Revolution, with the aim to protect and preserve the monuments, treasures and collections that had belonged to the Ancien R\u00e9gime\u2019s nobility and clergy at a time when such objects were menaced by the iconoclastic zeal of those whom the Abb\u00e9 Gr\u00e9goire called Vandals (hence the concept of vandalism). Today, the act of \u00adpreserving heritage has become a categorical imperative that is a function of a duty to remember; it is, moreover, an administrative undertaking with considerable economic and political stakes whose meaning has changed radically. As a result, one sometimes entertains the troubling thought of whether we are still capable of imagining a future or living in the \u00adpresent without glancing into the rear-view mirror of history or recognizing \u00adourselves in the memory of museums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
It appears symptomatic to me that the catchword of our age of advanced modernity (which is sometimes justifiably termed \u00adpost-\u00admodern or also anti-modern) is the quest for authenticity. Adorno, among others, did not fail to condemn what he called the jargon of authenticity that \u00adcharacterizes a certain strain of existentialist thought\u2014and more \u00adparticularly the thought of Heidegger\u2014a jargon that intimates both a nostalgia for origins and the archaic, and draws on the myth of purity and incorruptibility whose consequences in the realm of politics is well known. This quest for authenticity seems to be the pendant to a state of \u00addisenchantment with respect to the modern world that was prophesized by Max Weber, the counterweight of what sociologists sometimes regard as a form of disorientation that is due to a breakdown of the norm or to a lack of stable references. In the face of such identity-related uncertainties, of such feelings of impotence with respect to developments in the world, of the apprehension felt in light of a future whose outcome is beyond control, the modern individual resorts to all kinds of knowledge and practices whose alleged function is to reassure one about one\u2019s own nature. Much like Gauguin who sought refuge in Tahiti, the leading questions here are \u201cWhere do we come from? What are we? Where are we going?\u201d Hence the trend of investigating and plunging into the nostalgic world of \u00adchildhood (which for some takes the form of a vacation on a beach or in the country, and for others a night out at the movies) or, better yet, of \u00adtravelling to the fantasmatic world of \u00adorigins. Herein lies the explanation for the unprecedented popularity of psychoanalysis with the middle-\u00adclasses throughout the industrialized world, for psychoanalysis (which is no longer the sole reserve of \u00adaristocrats seeking to guarantee the authenticity of their letters of patent) is a voyage of initiation to the sources of identity, to genealogy. Furthermore, this process is also related to the popularity of antique shops, to the sudden interest one takes in grandmother\u2019s recipes or in folklore, restoration, commemoration and museums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Today\u2019s museomania also partakes in this love for all that is old (and not for what is ancient), for it satisfies our desire for history, which is nothing less than an exoticism of history. The museum has \u00adundeniably contributed to the rise of such a \u201chistorical cult\u201d that converts living \u00adculture into heritage. Contrary to the Renaissance, in which the \u00addiscovery of \u00adantiquity was driven by a thirst for a knowledge liberated from the strictures of dogma, or even to the Encyclop\u00e9distes<\/em>, for whom the act of drawing up an inventory of the wealth and diversity of human practices was justified by the invention of progress, what drives our backward \u00adglance is no longer curiosity (it bears mentioning that the cabinet of \u00adcuriosities \u00adprefigured the modern museum) or even a sense of history (be it the \u00adofficial history that is told by means of the museum\u2019s ordering of the world), but rather the sheer nostalgia for the past. Nostalgia is what gives meaning to the inventory of heritage of which the \u201cmodern cult of \u00admonuments\u201d bears witness (to borrow the title of a famous essay by Viennese art \u00adhistorian Alois Riegl, whose research into historical memory echoes that of his fellow citizen Sigmund Freud). According to Riegl, there is a difference between memorials (monumentum<\/em>), which are \u00addeliberate creations whose basis in memory is part of the original intention, and \u00adhistorical monuments, that is, monuments that are endowed with a \u00adhistorical value and whose task is to bear witness to history. Put \u00adotherwise, the latter possess an \u201cage value\u201d that is both related to memory and to heritage, despite the fact that such monuments were not conceived as such. Moreover, Riegl explains the modern cult of monuments worn by the passage of time as arising from a \u201cvaguely aesthetic\u201d sentiment, from a melancholic \u00adrelation to the past. The development of cultural tourism\u2014at least since the eighteenth \u00adcentury\u2014undeniably feeds off such a sentimental source. For the time which lends a halo to works of art and thus makes them feel strangely intimate is not historical time (the time of civilizations that is studied by historians or anthropologists); rather, it is a time that subsists in museums, a time that does its magic by dislocating works from their history, while satisfying our \u201chistorical exoticism,\u201d to put it in the terms of Maurice Blanchot, who clearly disliked museums.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
In is in this light that one must understand the debate that \u00adopposes, on the one hand, those who commend the restoration of monuments and works of art spoiled by the passage of time in view of restoring them to their initial state and re-establishing the original effect such works \u00adprocured on the contemporary public, and, on the other hand, those who venerate the process whereby works of art, patina included, are \u00adennobled such that they echo the manner in which they are anchored in the \u00adcollective memory of successive generations. For instance, consider those statues, temples and churches that were originally painted. Or those busts sculpted out of chocolate by artist Dieter Roth, which are now being devoured by worms as the artist perhaps intended, but whose \u00adineluctable destruction is regarded as an unacceptable and invaluable loss by their owner and in light of future generations. What is at stake here is the \u00adephemeral nature of all works of art, which saves us from being crushed by the sheer number of masterpieces in existence. In the final analysis, what is vital\u2014and thus eternal\u2014is art itself, or rather the inalienable faculty of creating such masterpieces. But that is obviously not the point of view of collectors or museum curators.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Undoubtedly, the nineteenth century\u2019s great dream was to leave behind traces that would equal those from antiquity; hence the fashion for public monuments, triumphal arches, obelisks, funerary monuments, public buildings and, of course, museums, for a museum is as much a public monument as a public collection. The very glory of the Nation depended on such efforts, and public buildings were erected as much to embody such glory as to edify the people, who were called upon to \u00adpartake in the construction of a world that was on the road towards progress. The twentieth century was no less prolific in perpetuating this tradition of edifying and erecting monuments, but it was nonetheless haunted by the fear of being unable to remember. There is almost a kind of panic in this \u00adobsession to draw up inventories and to archive, which compels us compulsively to collect singular and collective histories, be they \u00adshared or personal. It is as if we were running the risk of irretrievably losing the very memory of the world and the possibility of writing its history. This obsession is all the more incomprehensible given the fact that our age is without contest the most abundant in documents, archives and first-hand accounts in the form of sound recordings or films. Of course, such an \u00adoverabundance of \u00addocuments perhaps saturates our quest for meaning, much like the constant flow of information tends to annul the actual content of the news. What remains meaningful when everything is meaningful? How can we continue to build cities if everything has to be preserved? How can we move forward if the present constantly eludes us and if the key to our existence seems to lie in the realm of heritage?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The heritage syndrome seems to hinge on the fact that we are \u00adhaunted by the fear of forgetting history, a history which we do not cease to recall, to commemorate and to celebrate. According to a Jewish \u00adproverb, one can only transmit two things to one\u2019s children: roots and wings. Perhaps the wings of modernity compel its children to seek out their roots. The quest for cultural identity, which is mediated by the quest for one\u2019s roots, is as much a type of personal therapy as it is a remedy against what \u00adsociologists call anomia in reference to Durkheim. To have elders recount the story of their lives, to find one\u2019s roots, to cultivate sites of memory, such are the diverse manners in which the late twentieth \u00adcentury\u2019s \u00adheritage tropism manifests itself, in the wake of the \u00adunpredictable mass success of various sorts of museums, such as ecomuseums, museums of Man and \u00adfuturoscopes. Yet although the museum claims to help us to \u00adbetter see and remember, does it not ultimately dispense us from \u00adlooking and making use of our memory as cultural tourists, as it reduces us to the function of merely recognizing the world as opposed to knowing it, of \u00adstoring images as opposed to actively engaging with reality? Is it not a museified world that is unknowingly put at the disposal of homo \u00adtouristicus<\/em>, in order to satisfy our thirst for all kinds of exoticism?<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Despite the fact that the present reveals itself and constructs itself without the past, we nonetheless find solace in the fable of \u00adheritage, that is, in a past to which we impute a truth value and which we strive to \u00adpreserve as if our ultimate illusions depended on it. We console \u00adourselves by consuming the world and its cultures in a touristic mode, collecting exotic clich\u00e9s or playing the role of natives or peasants during the short duration of our vacations; moreover, when we are back home we dress, decorate and eat according to our ideas of what is \u201cethnic\u201d or \u201cindigenous.\u201d Our contemporary sensibility, which is wholly aesthetic, is \u00adcharacterized by a nostalgia for an exotic or fantasmatic kind of history, which is the \u00adtemporal pendant to two contemporary trends, namely the need to resort to tourism as a means of estrangement and the obsession to locate \u00adidentity through genealogy. For tourists are more voyeurs than voyagers, even if they sometimes dream that they are adventurous. Such tourists aspire to recognize the \u201ctypical\u201d in clich\u00e9s, as they are driven by the \u00adpostcards and picture books of their childhood. Tourists seek the \u00adreproduction and repetition of a certain exotic emotion by means of their quest for a \u201cstaged authenticity.\u201d Such tourists, which we all embody, travel in order to recognize sites seen in magazines and catalogues, on television or at the movies, much in the same way as we go to museums to make sure that the originals actually resemble their reproductions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The departure from what is ordinary, common or banal does not, however, necessarily translate into an experience of the extraordinary, the picturesque or the exotic, despite the sales-pitch of tour-guide \u00adcompanies. In their efforts to keep us occupied, entertained and relieved of ourselves, the society of the spectacle and the tourism industry nearly obliterate the very possibility of being a fl\u00e2neur<\/em>, a dilettante or an amateur (the latter being another form of tourism to be rehabilitated), as well as our precious capacity to be bored. Ultimately, such are the principles of dreaming, \u00adimagining and creating.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Translated from the French by Eduardo Ralickas<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n