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gests that the index card emerged in the redistribution of aristocratic and
monastic libraries after the French Revolution, when titles and details of books
were marked on the backs of playing cards (Tenner 2005). Whether or not this
marked a definitive moment of change in the management of collections and
inventory-keeping, it does suggest a relationship between the emergence of the
filing system, the democratization of treasure (see Chapter 1) and the new
mobility of objects in the age of museums and emergent capitalism. In libraries
and museums, a written ledger can do perfectly well as an inventory, but as
objects in the collection are moved or redistributed, each record needs to be
laboriously written out once more. The index card is a solution to a need for
standardized records, which could be rapidly retrieved, and to the ‘fundamental
problem of the archive, the problem of volume’ (Sekula 1993: 358). But it is also
a solution to the new mobility of objects and data.
If the index card is a means to manage a new situation in which data (and
objects) accumulate en masse and are exchangeable, it is perhaps not surprising
that index cards were first used by banks (from the 1850s) and libraries (after
the 1860s). Police identity cards came into use in Paris in 1883, pioneered by
Alphonse Bertillon (Sekula 1993: 357–62). These cards combined the technol-
ogy of the card filing system with the technologies of human measurement
(anthropometry) and photography. The photographer and photography theor-
ist Allan Sekula describes Bertillon’s system as ‘the first rigorous system of
archival cataloguing and retrieval of photographs’ (1993: 373). Sekula notes
that Bertillon’s system was part of a wider ‘grandiose clerical mentality’ associ-
ated with positivism, rationalization and Taylorism (1993: 374). He cites the
Institut International de Bibliographie, founded by Otlet, which recommended
that photographic prints be archived according to the Decimal Classification
System. Viewed through the police archive, Otlet’s bibliographic and museum
projects are exercises in bureaucracy and social control. However from another
angle Otlet’s own archiving efforts can be read as part of a utopian inter-
nationalism, in which the technology of the filing system was a means to
decentralize and democratize knowledge, allowing for broad public access and
for cross-referencing of information.
The filing system enabled systematic knowledge to be dissociated from
notions of typicality. Standard index cards could be used to inventory all sorts
of things. Using a classification system any item could be allocated a number
and recorded on an index card, and retrieved for inspection at will. For Otlet,
the index card filing system could be extended from a device for keeping a
record of world literature to a means of cataloguing the world itself. Museums
generally treat objects as representative of categories, often emphasizing typic-
ality over idiosyncrasy, turning the particular and the contingent into the
material for larger narratives and ideas (see Chapter 1). Otlet’s projects