9
The determinations of the double topology yield a world in which narrative determinations are subordinate to mathematico-technological determinations. This does not mean that poetic determinations no longer play any role whatsoever. They enjoy their own kind of presence and continue to be cultivated. Yet the preservation of the presence of poetic determinations is oriented by the presence of mathematico-technological determinations.
This forking relationship between the MTT and the PT, which results in two forms of presence, produces the museum. The museum serves the recollection of narrative determinations. These include both general narratives, such as the myths and religions preserved in museums of ancient and Christian art, and the biographical and intimate narratives presented in museums of nineteenth- and twentieth-century art. There are of course also other kinds of museums, including those devoted to other (ethnological) narratives, or to the effects of past mathematico-technological processes of determination.
The museum of the double topology emerges through the intertwining of the PT and the MTT at a number of levels. The painting of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Baroque era presents a Christian topology that incorporates regional elements, as in the Venetian school. Real-life cities play a part in shaping the Christian topology, just as this topology serves to jointly determine the nature of these cities up to the present day. The forking presences of the MTT and the PT are further complicated when the museum comes to outgrow its institutional TCM-function. The TCM museum emerges from itself and begins to constitute the world.
The technological presentation of the poetic topography allows it to become legible as a bygone presence within a transit-topography of seemingly authentic places. In this process, these places themselves become museum-like. The self-narrating city becomes a museum.1 The MTT organizes the museum-like determinations of the PT. This is the origin of universal tourism.
When the MTT begins to present the narrative determinations of the PT in a universal mode, the inversion of the PT and the MTT is complete. At this point, even apparently regional spaces are subjected to a touristic universalization. They mutate into narrative simulations of the universal transit space. The universal subject goes camping in a bygone presence as in a museum of the museum – as a con-sequent integral of the TCM universal.
The tourist is then only a universal caricature because she constitutes one of the essential modes of the universal subject. The universal subject is a tourist and cannot but be. The presences entwined within the universal topography ultimately crystallize into this figure of the tourist. It is an intrinsic element of the presence that is wholly absorbed by technology.capital.medium. The presence of the tourist is therefore the presence of the museum, the conservation of our narrative past.
In this presence, time is twisted into a single anachronism. The MTT hollows out the narrative topographies until they become mere dummy models, coloured flags in a global positioning system. Tourists flow smoothly from one empty monument to another, leaving no trace. Since the universal subject is also an intimate subject who wishes to cling to narratives, her life as a whole becomes touristic and anachronistic. The museum and the museum-like thus prove to be necessary TCM integrals. For the TCM universal is the absolute GPS.
The fact that it is still possible to distinguish cities from one another at all in the universal topography is due exclusively to the double topology. What is common to all cities, what makes them part of the universal transit space, is the con-sequence of the TCM universal, the MTT. What differentiates them is the narrativity of the PT, as reconstructed by technology.capital.medium. Were a universal war to destroy every city without remainder, there would henceforth only be one TCM city. There would no longer be any criterion capable of distinguishing places from one another.
For the TCM universal, this would be a bitter loss, since it maintains its museum-like reserves in order to provide the productive universal subject with recreational spaces within the universal topography. The Mediterranean, for example – once the ‘cradle of culture’ – is now a single, universal, touristic estate, a single museum. It is only there to satisfy the needs of tourists. And tourism too is a form of production.
The art world too is unable to transcend its status as a narrative topography organized by the MTT. It has a museum-like character from the outset. Its products elicit a touristic interest, even when they generate significant capital movements. They resemble ornaments commissioned by the TCM universal to embellish its universal topography.
Note
1 This does not apply to those cities that emerged after the inversion of the PT and the MTT. These cities, ‘built overnight’ in the era of industrialization, can at best only tell a story of present or bygone prosperity. Yet since prosperity usually vanishes with the changing of the economic tides, such cities are often left to fall into decay.