Page 145 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

5 ARCHIVE

I dream of a new age of curiosity. We have the technical means for it; the
desire is there; the things to be known are infinite; the people who can
employ themselves at this task exist. Why do we suffer? From too little:
from channels that are too narrow, skimpy, quasi-monopolistic, insuffi-
cient. There is no point in adopting a protectionist attitude, to prevent
‘bad’ information from invading and suffocating the ‘good’. Rather, we
must multiply the paths and the possibility of comings and goings.
(Foucault 1988: 198–9)

Archives, indexes and copies

Museums are memory machines. That is, they are a technical means by which
societies remember, devices for organizing the past for the purposes of the
present. They are a product of societies which have an historical consciousness
and which treat material things as evidence or documents of past events. By
historical consciousness, I mean an understanding of time which is different
from the cyclical understanding of time associated with nature – the cycle of the
seasons, of birth and death, day and night, of regeneration and degeneration.
Historical consciousness is characteristic of societies that pass on the past to
the present through techniques such as oral storytelling, writing or pictures.
The French historian and publisher Pierre Nora asserts that modern memory
is ‘first of all archival. It relies entirely on the specificity of the trace, the materi-
ality of the vestige, the concreteness of the recording, the visibility of the
image’. The museum and the archive ratify a past through material substance,
and contain the ‘external props and tangible reminders’ of collective memory
(Nora 1996: 8).
This chapter considers how museums, archives, storage systems and collect-
ing practices put material things in the service of memory and history, and how
new exhibition practices bring museum and archive closer. The first section
considers museum and exhibition practices which might help us think about the