Prospects for a common world : museums, climate change, cosmopolitics

Writing in anticipation of the 2009 United Nations Climate Change Conference in Copenhagen and in the wake of the 2007 publication of the proceedings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, Botany curator, Richard Hebda, contended: This report is nothing short of a wake-up call that humanity's course is unsustainable and has depleted not only the resources we use, but also impacted the very processes that sustain us and all other life on earth. Humanity is at a crossroad and museums have a vital role in helping people make informed decisions about which turn to take (2007, 329). In many ways Hebda's proposition is as compelling as COP15's "road map" to a low emissions future proved to be disappointing. Nevertheless as persuasive as it is I think it is a proposition that demands pause for thought. This has less to do with the claim that museums ought to take up the challenge of climate change" without doubt this is vitally important and indeed in the interval since the publication of Hebda's article, many museological institutions have risen to the occasion. Rather, it has more to do with the ways in which museums might come to do so. Central here, I contend, is the understanding of the nature of the relationship between the institution of the museum and the shared world that its pedagogy would seek to negotiate in the daunting task of making "informed decision" about our impact on the "processes that sustain us and all other life on earth" (Hebda 2007, 329). In the relation between museums and the prospects of a shared world that is my concern here. The contention of this chapter is that these relations are regularly asserted through cosmopolitan appeals which are premised on the assumption that a cosmos, a world, a universe pre-exists its articulations; and that it is the task of reason and of science, through the medium of a museum pedagogies, to adjust the citizen-subject to this already present condition. I argue that this is a flawed position because it assumes what, in fact, is required to be built: a world in common.