Page 56 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

40 || MUSEUMS, MEDIA AND CULTURAL THEORY

depicted himself as an iconoclastic collective, declaring, ‘But we want no
part of it, the past, we the young and strong Futurists!’ New culture is to be
made from ‘violent spasms of action and creation’, its sources are modern
technology, its icons are racing cars.
Many of these themes – the anti-historicism, the cult of youth, the
emphasis on action, and national identity – can be found in the writing of
Friedrich Nietzsche who was an important influence on Marinetti. In his
second ‘Untimely Meditation’, published in 1873 and titled ‘On the Advan-
tages and Disadvantages of History for Life’, Nietzsche did not repudiate
history and the past altogether but attacked the ‘excess’ of history with which
he felt his own country, Germany, was burdened. He outlined different kinds
of relationships with the past and with history, different ways in which history
can ‘serve life’. The history that Nietzsche categorically opposed was history
as knowledge for its own sake, history as a science. Though he made little
reference to museums, it was there that the encyclopaedic historical orientation
of his era found public expression. In the discipline of history and in the
sciences, the past is not understood as one’s own roots (‘antiquarian history’) or
as an inspirational model (‘monumental history’) but appears as an infinite
overaccumulation of information:
Now the demands of life alone no longer reign and exercise constraint on
knowledge of the past; now all the frontiers have been torn down and all
that has ever been rushes upon mankind. All perspectives have been shuf-
fled back to the beginning of all becoming, back to infinity. Such an
immense spectacle as the science of universal becoming, history, now dis-
plays as has never before been seen by any generation; though it displays
it, to be sure, with the perilous daring of its motto: fiat veritas, pereat vita
[let truth prevail though life perish].
(Nietzsche 1997: 77)

The nineteenth-century discovery that the age of the earth was far greater
than had been previously assumed had an immense impact both on the discip-
line of history and on the ‘historical sciences’ (including natural history, geo-
logy, archaeology) (Bennett 2002: 32). Nietzsche argued that nineteenth-century
‘man’ becomes burdened with historical knowledge entirely divorced from
experience, and these ‘indigestible stones of knowledge’ are – like the artworks
in Marinetti’s cemeteries of art – at best strangers, and at worst, constantly
fighting one another. Conflicting and irreconcilable pieces of knowledge –
knowledge that does not add up and cannot be put to use in the business of
living and transforming one’s world – is internalized but not fully understood.
Nietzsche connected too much history with a lack of vitality, with degeneracy
and sickness. Yet whereas Marinetti opposes the sickly and the ‘moribund’ to