Museumification exterminates what direct worms and decay could not
Evidence
Thus it would have been enough to exhume Ramses to ensure his extermination by museumification. Because mummies don’t rot from worms: they die from being transplanted from a slow order of the symbolic, master over putrefaction and death, to an order of history, science, and museums, our order, which no longer masters anything, which only knows how to condemn what preceded it to decay and death and subsequently to try to revive it with science. — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 41
Categorization
- DEEPTHINKING: Core Baudrillard move: the modern order kills the symbolic by preserving it within visibility, science, and history — preservation as extermination.
- XREF: connects to: Administered culture degrades while unadministered culture cannot survive — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry: Selected Essays…, 153; Cultures resist extermination; destruction aimed at them can harden them — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed: Religion and…, 393; Preservation requires removing something from its immediate existence — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity,…, 1059 (+2 more)
Broader Connections
- Administered culture degrades while unadministered culture cannot survive
#complicates(0.80) — Theodor W. Adorno, The Culture Industry, 153 - Preservation requires removing something from its immediate existence
#expands(0.78) — Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 1059 - Preserving an ethnographic object requires isolating it from all contact
#expands(0.75) — Jean Baudrillard, Simulacra and Simulation, 26 - Cultures resist extermination; destruction aimed at them can harden them
#contradicts(0.72) — Michael A. Sells, The Bridge Betrayed, 393