Page 148 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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about objects, yet is actually as concerned with organizing the present and with
social relationships.
The museum, modern archiving systems, and the inventory all attempt to
organize space as well as time. Their development was due to imperialism,
exploration and trade which entailed collating and organizing information
relating to geographically distant places. By the 1920s a whole host of new
museum and archive projects were developing which were concerned with giv-
ing the new mass audience a sense of the world in which they lived. If the
Victorian museum was concerned with the production of citizens who identi-
fied with the nation-state, these projects are concerned with the production of
new forms of world citizenship. Architecture theorist Anthony Vidler has
described how, from the turn of the twentieth century, the role of the museum
began to be redefined. Attempts to turn the museum into ‘an instrument of
instruction’ used every technical aid available to teach a mass audience ‘about
its own place in the world, its geographical, social, technological and cultural
potentialities’ (Vidler 2001: 163–4).
One such project was Otto Neurath’s Museum of Society and Economy in
Vienna (discussed in Chapter 3), another the Palais Mondial (World Palace),
founded by his friend and collaborator Paul Otlet in 1919. Otlet was a lawyer
and bibliographer. He had founded various international organizations and
been involved in the peace movement. He also created the Universal Decimal
Classification system, a revision of the Dewey Classification System, which is
still in use today. The World Palace was situated in the Palais du Cinquantenaire
in Brussels. Here Otlet housed the massive filing card system he had been
developing since the 1890s, as well as displaying items such as model aero-
planes, scientific tools and instruments, projectors, optical devices, navigational
devices, and printing equipment, many of which were remnants of the Brussels
World’s Fair of 1910 (Vossoughian 2003: 84).
The artefacts in the museum were associated with transport and communica-
tion technologies. The index card was also a technology, enabling data to be
stored in standardized form and systematically retrieved. This filing system was
developed in the mid-nineteenth century, designed to allow accumulated
knowledge to be organized and put to use. This has been written about as
an issue of policing, because police record systems were a central technology
in the development of new forms of (disciplinary) social regulation in the
nineteenth century. In accounts influenced by Michel Foucault’s work on the
joining of knowledge and power, the paradigmatic archive is the police archive
(Tagg 1988; Sekula 1993). Perhaps it is not incidental that Otlet’s background
was in law. However, we can trace another history for the index card, which
does not dissociate it from government altogether, but is more suggestive
regarding the relationship between museum and database. One account sug-