In his essay “On the Physical Geography of the Malay Archipelago,” Wallace describes the role of collecting, and the museum collection, with particularly noble aims:
An accurate knowledge of any group of birds or of insects, and of their geographical distribution, may assist us to map out the island and continents of a former epoch: the amount of difference that exists between the animals of adjacent districts being closely dependent uron preceding geological changes. By the collection of such minute facts alone we hope to fill a great gap
in the past history of the earth as revealed by geology, and obtain some indications of the existence of those ancient lands which now lie buried beneath the ocean. and have left us nothing but these living records of their former existence. It is for such inquiries the modern naturalist collects his materials: it is for this that he still wants to add to the apparently boundless treasures of our national museums, and will never rest satisfied as long as the native country, the geographical distribution, and the amount of variation of any living thing remains imperfectly known. He looks upon every species of animal and plant now living as the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth's history; and, as a few lost letters may make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of the numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation mentably entails will necessarily render obscure this invaluable record of the past. It is, therefore, an important object, which
governments and scientific institutions should immediately take steps to secure, that in all tropical countries colonized by Europeans the most perfect collections possible in every branch of natural history should be made and deposited in national museums, where they may be available for study and interpretation. 41
The study and interpretation of these vast tropical collections involved two related but distinct procedures: first, the scientific research of curators in the museum that advanced the biological knowledge of the natural world; and, second, the presentation of this research to a public audience, in the form of the museum displays that both justified collection process and advanced an appreciation of Nature and its driving process of invention, evolution. Between the front-of-house display and the back-of-house research collection, a circuit of affective valorization bound these two elements
of the museum together.
Yet, for all the pedagogical good intentions, we believe it is necessary to ask what the image of Nature on offer in the natural history museum obscures. How does a cultural program of human exceptionalism (anthropo-supremacy) become instantiated in museological scenography, narrative, and display? How do museums of natural history reinforce and reify biologically-informed ideas of human exceptionalism? What scenes, sleights, and normalizing gestures subtend this scientific-aesthetic agenda? As we approach such questions and attempt to engage them through our exhibition-making,
we have been informed by and repeatedly returned to a rather extraordinary passage in Sigmund Freud's lectures, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Specifically, we have reflected on Freud's contention that humanity has been subject to
three historic humiliations:
The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus [...]. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles, Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries.
His argument continues as he introduces the consequence of psychoanalysis:
Man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day
psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own mind. 42
While much more could certainly be said of the first and third humiliations, for our purpose here it is the Darwin-Wallace humiliation that beckons further attention. Indeed, the “humiliation” of evolution as it pertains to the origin story of the human species undermined any other claims to Man's God-given dominion over the natural world. It was simultaneously a profanation of the species and a demotion in rank, but the compensarory response has yet to be fully understood. Even after years of working in the collections in order to actively intervene in and augment the narratives
of these museums, it was only standing in the shared courtyard of Halle—between the natural history museum and the church—that we first understood the implication of this claim. If dominion over Nature could not be maintained through the theological register, wherein Man is given a divine right to Nature, it could still be won by other means, namely, the technological re-presentation of dead Nature as if it were alive and well-composed. Through his spectacular artifice, man could re-present Nature better than Nature could present itself, and thereby instaurate an institutionally-sanctioned psychosocial remedy—a form of collateral domination by way of technologies of necroaesthetic representation. For this reason, we might say that every image of Nature is an image of Man, just as every natural history museum is, upon closer inspection, a museum
of Man. If the natural history museum is a public institution whose remit is nominally the secular celebration of Man's place in the natural world, it is striking that perhaps nowhere is the humiliating origin of the species more repressed.
An accurate knowledge of any group of birds or of insects, and of their geographical distribution, may assist us to map out the island and continents of a former epoch: the amount of difference that exists between the animals of adjacent districts being closely dependent uron preceding geological changes. By the collection of such minute facts alone we hope to fill a great gap in the past history of the earth as revealed by geology, and obtain some indications of the existence of those ancient lands which now lie buried beneath the ocean. and have left us nothing but these living records of their former existence. It is for such inquiries the modern naturalist collects his materials: it is for this that he still wants to add to the apparently boundless treasures of our national museums, and will never rest satisfied as long as the native country, the geographical distribution, and the amount of variation of any living thing remains imperfectly known. He looks upon every species of animal and plant now living as the individual letters which go to make up one of the volumes of our earth's history; and, as a few lost letters may make a sentence unintelligible, so the extinction of the numerous forms of life which the progress of cultivation mentably entails will necessarily render obscure this invaluable record of the past. It is, therefore, an important object, which governments and scientific institutions should immediately take steps to secure, that in all tropical countries colonized by Europeans the most perfect collections possible in every branch of natural history should be made and deposited in national museums, where they may be available for study and
The study and interpretation of these vast tropical collections involved two related but distinct procedures: first, the scientific research of curators in the museum that advanced the biological knowledge of the natural world; and, second, the presentation of this research to a public audience, in the form of the museum displays that both justified collection process and advanced an appreciation of Nature and its driving process of invention, evolution. Between the front-of-house display and the back-of-house research collection, a circuit of affective valorization bound these two elements of the museum together.
Yet, for all the pedagogical good intentions, we believe it is necessary to ask what the image of Nature on offer in the natural history museum obscures. How does a cultural program of human exceptionalism (anthropo-supremacy) become instantiated in museological scenography, narrative, and display? How do museums of natural history reinforce and reify biologically-informed ideas of human exceptionalism? What scenes, sleights, and normalizing gestures subtend this scientific-aesthetic agenda? As we approach such questions and attempt to engage them through our exhibition-making, we have been informed by and repeatedly returned to a rather extraordinary passage in Sigmund Freud's lectures, A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis. Specifically, we have reflected on Freud's contention that humanity has been subject to three historic humiliations:
The first was when it realized that our earth was not the center of the universe, but only a tiny speck in a world-system of a magnitude hardly conceivable; this is associated in our minds with the name of Copernicus [...]. The second was when biological research robbed man of his peculiar privilege of having been specially created, and relegated him to a descent from the animal world, implying an ineradicable animal nature in him: this transvaluation has been accomplished in our own time upon the instigation of Charles, Darwin, Wallace, and their predecessors, and not without the most violent opposition from their contemporaries.
His argument continues as he introduces the consequence of psychoanalysis:
Man's craving for grandiosity is now suffering the third and most bitter blow from present-day psychological research which is endeavoring to prove to the ego of each one of us that he is not even master in his own house, but that he must remain content with the veriest scraps of information about what is going on unconsciously in his own
While much more could certainly be said of the first and third humiliations, for our purpose here it is the Darwin-Wallace humiliation that beckons further attention. Indeed, the “humiliation” of evolution as it pertains to the origin story of the human species undermined any other claims to Man's God-given dominion over the natural world. It was simultaneously a profanation of the species and a demotion in rank, but the compensarory response has yet to be fully understood. Even after years of working in the collections in order to actively intervene in and augment the narratives of these museums, it was only standing in the shared courtyard of Halle—between the natural history museum and the church—that we first understood the implication of this claim. If dominion over Nature could not be maintained through the theological register, wherein Man is given a divine right to Nature, it could still be won by other means, namely, the technological re-presentation of dead Nature as if it were alive and well-composed. Through his spectacular artifice, man could re-present Nature better than Nature could present itself, and thereby instaurate an institutionally-sanctioned psychosocial remedy—a form of collateral domination by way of technologies of necroaesthetic representation. For this reason, we might say that every image of Nature is an image of Man, just as every natural history museum is, upon closer inspection, a museum of Man. If the natural history museum is a public institution whose remit is nominally the secular celebration of Man's place in the natural world, it is striking that perhaps nowhere is the humiliating origin of the species more repressed.