The Persian Version
Introducing the Persian translation of "Museum, Inc."
Here it is. The Introduction I wrote for the Persian Version of Museum, Inc. Barring a midnight knock from the Ministry of Culture and Capitalist Coercion. Taylor & Francis doesn’t make house calls.
How do you say “wack” in Persian? Five years or close I got an email from Mehdi Moshfegh in Tehran. Mehdi wanted me to know he was going to be publishing Museum, Inc. in Persian and there was nothing I could do about it since there are no mutual copyright agreements between Iran and the US. However, should I wish to write an introduction, Mehdi would be happy to include it. I told Mehdi I didn’t mind, provided we worked together to ensure an accurate translation. Fortunately my publisher, the late, wack, Marshall Sahlins, didn’t mind either. Marshall, I miss you.
Mehdi and I spent weeks and months going over the jokes and the puns and obscure references. Then the book had to be submitted to the Ministry of Culture and Islamic Guidance, the Taylor & Francis of Tehran. The Ministry didn’t ask for changes, nor was the manuscript submitted for peer review (so far as I know), but they did hold onto it forever. Persian version needs some urgin’.
So. Here it is. The Introduction I wrote for the Persian Version of Museum, Inc. You can add it to the original American version, which is now available for free download from Internet Archive:
Museum, Inc. The Author’s Cut.
Barring a midnight knock from the Ministry of Culture and Capitalist Coercion. Taylor & Francis doesn’t make house calls.
INTRODUCTION
In Jorge Semprun’s fictionalized account of the Czech show trials of 1952 the defendants were carefully groomed to present a public performance of guilt before their judges. To make sure the right message got through, the proceedings were broadcast live over the radio, and on tape delay in case anything should go wrong in these supposedly spontaneous confessions. The Secret Police were listening in, but they were unable to see what happened in the courtroom. Then, in the midst of his defense, one of the accused dropped his pants, and a roar of laughter rang through the courtroom. The Police, unable to parse the meaning of the laughter, allowed it to be broadcast. Semprun suggests this was the only way the defendants were able to communicate to the public the farcical nature of their trial.
This is the strategy I used in writing Museum, Inc.. Dropping my pants (in a purely metaphoric sense, of course) was the only, best way to ensure my book was understood and to ensure it was misunderstood by the people among whom I had every interest in sowing confusion. When my book was first published, I had a complimentary copy sent to one of the stodgiest, most reactionary cultural magazines in the United States. I am pleased to say that they took the bait, after which I was only too happy to hit back with a long-premeditated response. It was like reeling in a big fish and whacking it senseless against the deck.
For this I am grateful to the master pants-dropper of them all, the Russian literary critic Mikhail Bakhtin, who in the nineteen-thirties provided the dropping of pants with its theoretical basis. It was Bakhtin who coined the term Heteroglossia, meaning “Mixing of Tongues.” Heteroglossia is the deliberate confusion of voices: the noble with the vulgar, the officious with the casual, the foreign with the familiar — in other terms, the language of New York City, that vast mix of immigrant cultures and practices, of working-class resistance and quick-wittedness and adaptation. It’s a mix with a subversive intent, a mixture of Jewish, African American, Latino, and other voices, the insistence of the cog in the wheel of capital that refuses to be a cog in any wheel at all. It’s rooted in the African American practice of “getting over:” managing to present oneself as White, a performance whose triumph comes when the pants are dropped and the game the player has played so well is shown to be a farce. I had first interviewed at the Guggenheim for a position as Assistant Curator. I was turned down for lack of loyalty to the Roz Krauss Gang. Then I interviewed for the lowly position of Gallery Lecturer. After being hired, I called up an old friend who had recently been fired from the same job. “Watch out,” he said. “That place is going to break your heart — No,” I said,” I’m going to break theirs.” In a country where success is measured exclusively in terms of tangible rewards, the best form of subversion is to beat the Master at his own game, and then upend the game-board. Don’t cry for me, Guggenheim. I kept my promise.
Of course, New York City is not unique for its variety of superimposed cultures. The same could be said of any number of global mega-cities like São Paulo or Tokyo or Tehran. What’s unique about New York, especially in the field of Culture, is the stratification of cultural privilege. American official culture requires that the actual producers of Art or Music, whatever their national origin or class or gender, be fully expropriated, and that is the purpose of the majority of our museums and concert halls and the real meaning of my counter-expropriation. The dynamics of the production of Art and Music in New York City are comparable to those of movie-making in Los Angeles: in either case the financial viability of any one production must be calculated in advance according to the rational projections of capital investment. These rational projections are then made tangible by means of “production values,” the public demonstration of the expense associated with the latest technology and most expensive technicians. Production values then reach the public in the form of aesthetic judgements, to the point where production values are the single shared value among producers, critics, the general public and those who finance the whole process. Museum exhibitions are values made visible, and those values are the value of the capital invested. Back in 2005 when I wrote my book, I underestimated an important aspect of the dynamics of culture under capitalism: the increasing concentration of capital in a few hands, leading to a closed system of self-dealing and mutual reinforcement in politics, in finances and, of course in cultural production — see under Krauss, Roz, etc.. In the global culture all cultures are made available for consumption. Only the exploiter — the one who controls capital — has the means to exploit them.
This is why it was so important for me to address the exploitation in the language of the exploited — important, and a challenge. My book has previously appeared in English, in French and in Italian, and the subtle nuances of pants-dropping, which were a challenge even among cultures as close as those of America and Europe, have been a greater challenge yet for myself and for my Iranian translator, Mehdi Moshfegh. Of course, the High Culture references are the easiest to identify; the gutter references are a lot trickier. The dropping of pants is a highly skilled endeavor, and not recommended for the faint at heart. Mehdi and I have spent months combing over every type of subtle reference in my book. If the full meaning remains unclear to the reader, let the fault be mine.
Mehdi assures me that museums in Iran are not so different from those in New York or Paris or Rome, and I have no reason to disbelieve him. All the same, I have good reason to suspect there will be different ways of reacting to the system of museums in Iran. Because of the uneven development of capitalism from one part of the globe to another we are all simultaneously confronted with the same historical processes, but we do not all witness the same stage of their development or collapse. The local reaction of artists and art critics and cultural workers and what the Germans call Kopfarbeiter, “workers with their heads,” will be specific to the level of development of the Global Museum in their own nation or locality at that particular moment in time. Friends, I can’t tell you what to do next; but unless you recognize the common enemy as I’ve described him, you have no use for my book. As Charles Baudelaire, the greatest art critic in the European Tradition, said over a hundred fifty years ago:
Si tu n’as fait ta rhétorique Chez Satan, le rusé doyen, Jette ! Tu n’y comprendrais rien, Ou tu me croirais hystérique.
Go ahead. Throw away my book. Or leave it on a park bench. Someone is sure to find it.
Vienna, February 29, 2020.
WOID XXIV-14
August 24, 2024