What is this relationship between Humans and Objects?
Is it as if Humans watched calmly a fact of nature that develops independently from their will? Would they be a passive human being before an active nature?
In the first place, I would like to clarify that I use the verb ‘admire’ with all the intrinsic strength of its [etymological] origin (ad-mirare) and the connotations attributed to it by Paulo Freire.
If a Human, a conscious subject, ADMIRES an Object, testimony of the Reality in which the human also participates, it means that:
1st Humans are no longer passive beings, but they are in the process of endless search, hope and discovery. Humans have the desire, the expectations and the attitude of one that discovers or reveals something: someone in the process of discovery.
1. Handwritten text from a notebook belonging to Waldisa Rússio, probably destined to be included in the third MuWoP (Museological Working Papers) number, an ICOFOM publication that was never released. Waldisa’s paper would have taken the same title than the handwritten text. Presumably 1983.
2. Text published in MuWoP (Museological Working Papers), N.2, p. 58-59 (original version in French and English), 1981. Released by ICOFOM (noted in the manuscript).
2nd The ad-mired and contemplated object is not only something to be looked at, observed or perceived, but something to ad-mire, that is, something that is assimilated in a process which admits different forms and levels. This means that the object, participating in the REAL or NATURAL world, will be assimilated, introjected, ‘apprehended’ by mankind, by the subject that knows. According to the form and intensity of the introjection, we will have a path from the natural world to the cultural world under the form of:
In a second moment of the perceived, apprehended image, the Human being moves on to conceptualisation. And we are, consequently, in the field of the strictly cultural fact, but far away from the mere introjection.1
How is this relation of close knowledge developed in the stage-museum?
The object even has its full communicating potential dormant. And the human being—capable of knowing, willing to know, with an attitude towards knowledge—
is also there.2
The stage-museum, therefore, has just a catalysing role, putting two elements participating in the real natural world in contact: the human being and the object.
As the human being AD-MIRES, they ‘apprehend’ the object, not just its dimen-sions, form, colour and density, but also its function, usefulness and beauty. As it is ‘introjected’, ‘internalised’, the object acts first as stimulus and feeling, and right away there is the perception, the image. This is the first step towards the cultural world.
But perception has already ploughed paths into the human being’s brain, it already nurtures their memory repertoire. Perception allows humans to recognise other similar objects, compare them, differentiate them, group them together or not3, and judge them. And it also allows humans to elaborate concepts. And this is a second immersion, a deepening4 into the cultural universe.
At this stage, objective information, transformed into memory, already allows human beings to act: [with] an action in agreement or a transforming action.
1. Author’s note: Apollonian, Dyonisian.
2. Author’s note: Umberto Eco.
3. Transcriber’s note: Paragraph written in the margin of the notebook sheet - referring to this part.
4. Idem.
Productive human beings recognise themselves as creators or virtual creators.
It could be said that this project is the same as when human beings face a na-tural or real fact.
And it is true.
Nevertheless, on the museum stage, the object and the human being are also natural and real; but the object and the human being are not there occasionally, in a fortuitous, accidental or random way.
The object was taken there precisely because its documentality, its informative power and its communicating potential. And the human being is there because they want to decipher the object’s ‘enigma’, because they want to ‘read’ the object, because they want to discover, as something that reveals a reality or a part of a reality to them.
It is this relationship, this fact, what makes it the object of study of Museology.
It is obvious that this process of discovery has several aspects to be considered:
The human being, a conceivable being, self-existing here and now, an unfinished project and, nonetheless, endowed with memory (including genetic memory), sensitivity, imagination, intelligence and will. This human being has an infor-mation network and a level of cultural development that condition, yet do not determine, their interpretation and understanding of the object.
The object itself, a form, a content, a sign—sometimes significant and meaning at the same time—which is an issuer filled with virtual and potential qualities.
(And the museological object is, itself, an essential contradiction: it is, at the same time, both the symbolised thing and the symbol. (We have learned that it is a characteristic of the symbol to be different from that that it symbolizes, however, the museological object is by itself, in its entity, the thing. The mu-seological object is the symbol1 of all the things that are identical or similar to it and it can also be the symbol of something completely different).
It is the museum stage the one that brings these two tractions of reality together:
the cognoscente—the human being—and the cognitional—the object. The mu-seum stage, in its catalyser role, becomes a ‘condition’ of the fact.
And side note:
I believe it is important to remember that in eco-museums (perhaps the most advanced form of contemporary Museology), the museum fact obtains its richest outlines—with the exception of the location—in its ‘aerials’ and in the preserved sites where life is still being processed, because the object in use still fulfils its purpose. But as the museum fact is perceived, as it becomes more and more
1. Author’s note: “Look for a better term to replace “symbol” in the second quotation”
‘museumisable’ due to its testimonial nature, its documentality and its com-municative power, it enters the world of signs and symbols without losing its original intention.
The museological object of Eco-museums hence is the outmost contradiction in terms of being both symbol and symbolised and, at the same time, the ultimate synthesis of these two aspects.