18.1.stafford
TRANSCRIPT
Reconceiving the Warburg Library as a Working Museum of theMindBarbara Maria Stafford
Common Knowledge, Volume 18, Issue 1, Winter 2012, pp. 180-187 (Article)
Published by Duke University Press
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RECONCEIVING THE WARBURG LIBRARY AS A WORKING MUSEUM OF THE MIND
Barbara Maria Stafford
In a recent article published in Wired, Nicholas Carr argued that the Internet has made “skimming” our dominant habit of thought.1 That is, the Internet is simultaneously an interruption or distraction system as well as a connective net. The synthesizing World Wide Web paradoxically breaks focused attention through short reports, single findings, and brief encounters in the hot pursuit of the receding link. This brevity is itself a kind of marketing strategy — stripping away the supposedly extraneous parts of communication to arrive efficiently at their functional essence. In today’s consumption- wary economy, bites and bytes have become iconic. They shore up the popular rhetoric of sustainability — of achieving greater efficiency in using any resource, including information. By contrast, both reductivism and speed were alien to Aby Warburg, who believed no cultural object or symbol system could be understood without a careful study of its appearance and its context.2 The baroque and endlessly ramifying network
Common Knowledge 18:1
DOI 10.1215/0961754X-1456971
© 2012 by Duke University Press
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1. Nicholas Carr, “Chaos Theory,” Wired, June 18, 2010. 2. Hans Liebeschütz, “Aby Warburg (1866 – 1929) as Interpreter of Civilisation,” Leo Baeck Institute Yearbook 16.1 (1971): 225 – 36, at 234.
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81of natural and sociocultural interconnections is both too complex and lengthy
simply to outline.Warburg was prescient in advocating a new understanding, one that rep-
resents the rich, variegated, interdependent fabric of many levels and kinds of explanation that ultimately get integrated with one another into an effective interpretation. Akin to Sandra Mitchell, who in Unsimple Truths argues for a new epistemology (“integrative pluralism”) for biology and related “contingent” sci-ences, Warburg was interested in replacing standard cultural characterizations “with a more spacious and nuanced conceptual framework.”3 He thus linked sci-ence with pseudoscience, astronomy with astrology, art with pathos, anthropology with myth, medicine with physiognomics. His comparative or relational theory of cultural practices aimed to discover how the combined natural sciences, the social sciences, and the visual arts create rule- based representations for the multi-level, multicomponent, dynamic forms they study. His lifelong search for mytho- psychological evidence concerning the role played by memory in civilization acts as a useful foil to today’s global culture of instant messaging, online appropria-tion, and data manipulation. Had Warburg lived to witness the twenty- first cen-tury’s thinning of iconography, it is not unreasonable to suppose he would have countered by citing the oscillations and polarities associated with the electrical signals emitted by the nervous system. These rhythmic pulses present a biological countermodel to the fast techno- mashup or decontextualized pirating of rootless words, images, and ideas.4
The Warburg Institute Library is a renowned book repository, but its sin-gular holdings — both word and image — have other functions as well. Among the characteristics that make it so unusual is Aby Warburg’s spatialization of scholarship in unusual intersective objects. Warburg’s penchant for creating photographic and textual ars combinatoria interestingly resembles the earlier collecting habits of the founder of London’s Soane Museum. Currently under restoration, this institute for all things architectural is being refurbished and “improved” in an effort to “open” it up to new and broader publics. Erected in a series of campaigns between 1792 and 1824, the Soane Museum owes its pres-ent appearance to the successive demolishing and rebuilding of three adjacent townhouses located on the north side of Lincoln’s Inn Fields. Like the Warburg Institute, this Regency establishment possessed a novel, multipurpose, academy- like identity that allowed it, and continues to allow it, to function as much as a library as it does as a museum. Books, casts, models, paintings, watercolors, and drawings were evocatively set within intriguingly syncretic arrangements: a Basement Crypt, a convex- mirrored Domed Area, a Pompeian red Library Din-
3. Sandra D. Mitchell, Unsimple Truths: Science, Com-plexity, and Policy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 51.
4. See David Shields, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2010), 20 – 32.
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ing Room, and the Shakespeare and Tivoli Recesses, to name just a few themed rooms (Figures 1 – 5).
Aby Warburg, like Sir John Soane, was a polymath. The stretch of their minds was great, although the tangible effects of their multidisciplinary research ended up housed within small domestic interiors. In Warburg’s case, these effects included books, certainly, but also caricatures, playing cards, postage stamps, posters, prints, and photographs. Notwithstanding the difference in scale, Ingrid Rowland’s comment about the distinctive character of the Vatican Library also seems apt for these two intimate places of learning that manage to transcend their physical confines while, at the same time, requiring them: “It’s not just that they have these [precious] things. It [the Vatican Library] has this kind of space, this civilization.”5 It is, I would agree with Rowland, unfeasible to imagine ambitious collections of this type — formed by inspired collectors whose unique mentality is a central component of what makes them significant — in any space or context but their own.
I am inviting readers of Common Knowledge, then, to entertain an analogy. Imagine the Warburg Library in all its specialness and peculiarity as a variant of the house museum, one conceptually resembling another notable London insti-tution: that of John Soane. By nature, libraries and museums aspire to motion: they stimulate a rush of interest, prompt user participation, foster immersion
Figure 1. By courtesy of the
trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.
Photo credit: Derry Moore
5. Daniel Mendelsohn, “God’s Librarians: The Vatican Library Enters the Twenty- first Century,” New Yorker, January 3, 2011, 29.
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in an extraordinary environment, and encourage the categorization or order-ing of things.6 This analogy is not farfetched. To be sure, the Soane Museum possesses its own personal as well as esoteric period character — stocked as it is with architectural volumes recording changing eighteenth- century perspectives, archaeological ruins vital to the history of taste, and Grand Tour landscapes. But the Warburg Institute Library is equally personal, possessing its own hermetic period character, shaped by the quest to make manifest the genealogy of human thought. Soane desired that his home and collections be preserved for the larger benefit of “amateurs and students” in architecture, painting, and sculpture. War-burg used similar broad strokes when dedicating his Library to every aspect of classical learning and its later receptions. Like the Soane Museum, the Warburg Library makes provision for hands- on, open access to rare primary and secondary texts and assorted visual materials — and no doubt this is one compelling reason for arguing that its holdings should be maintained with their distinctive identity as an interrelated ensemble.7
6. For a fascinating discussion of spatial connections in a museum setting, see Zamani and John Peponis, “Co- Visibility and Pedagogy: Innovation and Challenge at the High Museum of Art,” Journal of Architecture 15.6 (2010): 858.
7. See, recently, Anna Somers Cocks, “The Warburg Insti-tute Is Fighting for Its Life,” Art Newspaper (July – August 2010; published online July 20, 2010); Martin Gayford,
“Warburg Institute, Saved from Nazis, Faces Bureaucratic Threat,” Bloomberg News, July 20, 2010, www.bloomberg .com/news/2010 – 07 – 20/warburg- institute- saved- from - nazis- battles- bureaucrats- martin- gayford.html. Also see Ingrid R. D. Rowland, “Move the Warburg to L.A.?” New York Review of Books, October 14, 2010: this letter was written in response to Anthony Grafton and Jeffrey Ham-burger, “Save the Warburg Library,” New York Review of Books, September 30, 2010.
Figure 2. By courtesy of the
trustees of Sir John Soane’s
Museum. Photo credit: Derry Moore
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But the Warburg Institute has already been assimilated into the Univer-sity of London’s School of Advanced Study, and so the holdings of the Warburg Library now face physical incorporation into the London Research Library Ser-vices. Given the growth of the Digital Humanities Project, the Kindle phenom-enon, and the rise of other interactive technologies, earlier statements made in this growing polemic to the effect that the Library “ought to be left as it is” thus remain unpersuasive.8 Indeed despite the economic downturn and university downsizing, there are budgetary as well as intellectual arguments to be made for conserving the collection intact. These, as I have been arguing, require a shift in perspective. It is not only university funding but also the Warburg Library’s aims and objectives that need refreshing.
Taking up the gauntlet, I propose, first, that a convincing case can be made for the Warburg Institute Library and its unique classificatory scheme (word, image, action, orientation) as a living and working example of an interconnective system housing other ordering systems side by side on its shelves. What intrigued Warburg was less this or that disciplinary fragment or piece of data and more
Figure 3. By courtesy of the trustees of Sir John Soane’s Museum.
Photo credit: Geremy Butler
8. Charles Hope, as cited in “Warburg Goes to War,” Art History Today, July 21, 2010, artintheblood.typepad.com/art_history_today/2010/07/warburg- goes- to- war.html.
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how they all intellectually hung together, their telling shapes and shifting parts. His fascination with Kulturwissenschaft, or the science of culture, stemmed from a deep desire to understand the biological and psychological preconditions of human creativity, including, especially, memory. (His motto, after all, was “Mne-mosyne.”) The task of historical retrieval was to gather those enduring remains persisting in the face of changing mentalities and to collect the primal types of cognitive order that have survived despite their gradual evolution. On that basis alone, the contemporary Warburg Institute should be known as the Hip-pocampal Institute! What is Warburg’s lifelong pursuit of the traces of classical antiquity and its transmissions — reflected in the intuitive connections sparked by the associative arrangement of the books and objects he collected — but an early neural- network model of the growth of connectivity? He wanted to understand how humankind learned to learn and continues to learn and remember. Recall too that the Archives of the Institute contain working papers of other great modern synthesizing systematizers of cultural symbols, methods, and concepts: among them, Ernst Gombrich, Fritz Saxl, Edgar Wind, and Frances A. Yates.
If we articulate a new rationale for the Library, one that involves redesign-ing it in concept, then I suggest that we begin in terms of the Warburg experience and show how irreplaceably important it is.9 That experience, as those who have
9. Julienne Hanson, Bill Hillier, and Hilaire Graham, “Ideas Are in Things,” Environment and Planning B: Plan-ning and Design 14.4 (1987): 363 – 85.
Figure 4. By courtesy of the
trustees of Sir John Soane’s
Museum. Photo credit: Derry Moore
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undergone it can attest, makes visible, as no other experience in the contempo-rary world does so well, a lengthy trajectory of systems of order and organization. If the volumes and their attendant images get dispersed, drowned, or otherwise absorbed — in the name of efficiency — these myriad shapes of order will be lost exactly at the moment when we most need their guidance, their models, their templates. It is the cognitive richness, those possible shapes of interactivity, those latent subshapes still lingering in the modern unconscious, that would be lost.
Efficiency, moreover, is not all it is cracked up to be. In 1865 the English-man William Stanley Jevons, in his book The Coal Question, showed that there was a general and hitherto unnoticed problem with efficiency gains. Paradoxi-cally, improved efficiency in the production of a resource lowers the relative cost of its use, thus increasing demand and counteracting whatever savings we would expect from increased efficiency. Take the case of American refrigeration, where, through efficiencies meant to conserve energy, costs got pushed down at every level of production, leading to the unintended effect that the number of houses air conditioned all summer long vastly increased.10 As a result, total energy con-sumption actually rose, rather than diminished, driving costs up again.
This “Jevons Effect” is central to current debates spanning everything from energy conservation to educational programs. Jevons importantly underscored the paradoxical inefficiency of supposed efficiencies — an unlooked- for effect amply documented not just in the present but in the history of past civilizations. Following Jevons’s lead, we may ask, in the name of efficiency and cost cutting, what would realistically happen if the Warburg’s books and photographs were dispersed throughout the London Research Library. Predictably, a diminished consumption of these decontextualized materials would result. Whatever tem-
10. See David Owen, “The Efficiency Dilemma,” New Yorker, December 20 and 27, 2010, 78 – 85.
Figure 5. By
courtesy of the
trustees of Sir
John Soane’s
Museum.
Photo credit:
Derry Moore
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87porary economic “improvement” would occur through consolidation would be
offset by decreased research efficiency. Ultimately, higher costs would inevitably return since unused materials are reckoned as more expensive to store and main-tain than materials that are frequently used. Further, when even a single volume gets called up (problematic in a distributed library system, geared to fewer books and more ebooks), the costs of locating and retrieving it would be greater.
In sum, what the Warburg Institute Library needs is not a reorganization but a cogent redescription. To that end, my proposal is, first, that the Library be represented to the university and the public as a kind of house museum, with all the intimate adjacencies expected of such institutions. The Soane Museum might well be used as a point of comparison in the London context, since both the Soane and the Warburg had founders who created distinctive syncretic systems. The intellectually demanding categorization of books and photographs at the Warburg Library obliges one to move among the shelves just as the visitor to the Soane Museum follows an intricate network of visual connections. The Warburg Library can be validly redescribed as a multistory gallery, fostering visual and mental cross views resembling the combinatorial prospects operating inside the Soane Museum. Second, it should be emphasized that the Warburg’s performa-tive system of shaping information complements and reinforces the content of the materials in its collection, for they are fundamentally about system building, the grouping and structuring of variable data, or what today we would call the science of informational complexity. Third, and finally, it is worth remembering, and on occasion mentioning with some emphasis, that the current pressures on the Warburg Library expose uniquely well the unexamined fallacies in our culture’s ubiquitous rhetoric of efficiency.