Moments,Monuments and Explication: The Standing of the Millennium Dome

The construction of the Millennium Dome near the origin of Greenwich, at a cost of something in the order of one billion pounds to the British taxpayer, 1 see, for example, Nick Mathiason 'Downturn hits Dome sale,' The Observer , Sunday October 21, 2001. provides an excellent, if somewhat expensive, opportunity to reconsider the interrelations of time and space. For the Dome seeks to monumentalise and celebrate a moment of time as it simultaneously takes the form of a material structure that will persist. 2 Although the extent of this persistence has been a constant matter for considerable debate. This trade between moment and monument is replayed between the Dome as a startling visual immediacy, a whole to be apprehended in wonder, and the serialisation in progressive fashion of its staged contents. But it also represents an opportunity to see in the Dome a reflection of the society in which we live, and the possibilities it delivers. And we contend that the monumentalisation of the Dome may be read as an evisceration of the power of the moment, of the capacity of the human subject to engage in 'authentic unconditional ethical' ( i ek;, 2001, p. 151) action. In Britain, at least, much of the millennial moment was mediated through the Domic narrative. Nowhere else, after all, 'has anything like it'. An organising symbol for both malcontents and modernizers, reactions to the product were certainly diverse. But the majority of these reactions to the contents of the monument, and indeed the monument itself, represent a retreat from and obfuscation of our own complicity in the monumentalisation of our current society, of our refusal to treat the institution of society as an active product of our own imaginary making (Castoriadis, 1997). In their and our lack of reflection on, and problematisation of, the moment in time that is being monumentalised, we and they re-institute a denial of the possibility of 'real' time and thus of 'real' action and change. Through consideration of the work of Castoriadis (1997) and i ek (2001) we attempt to take back the millennial moment from the conservatism of the monument. Through a collage of media commentary on the Dome and constructivist and poststructualist commentary on our social condition, we attempt to show how a particular reading of the Dome as reflection of the impoverishment of our contemporary, progressivist modernity can open up an opportunity to engage in a project that wills a different society.