Page 152 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Nevertheless, technologies of data retrieval and now digital processing, make
it possible to replace historical narrative by cross-referencing and the mere
‘co-presence’ of objects (Ernst 2000a: 21, 29–30). A form of memory akin to
computer RAM (Random Access Memory) replaces historical narrative.
Otlet has been hailed as a ‘forefather of the internet’ for the advances he
made in data organization and retrieval. Yet this is a teleological claim. It is
perhaps more useful to see interest in Otlet as shaped by current preoccupa-
tions. The rediscovery of his work in the 1990s coincided with new understand-
ings of media and of museums in the light of developments in new media and
computing. We don’t need to see his work as a step in a linear progressive
development toward contemporary cultural forms in order to see its relevance
for the interpretation of these forms.
Ernst sees museums as becoming increasingly centred around information
processing. The post-1900 museum was premised on the separation of storage
and display, the museum disavowing the ‘nondiscursive’ and arbitrary character
of the storeroom through didactic displays. Only in this context could Warhol’s
Raid the Icebox operate critically, by exposing what ought to be concealed.
Now, Ernst argues, museums such as the Museo Gregoriano Profano in Rome
involve ‘a modular processing of past documents by means of a flexible, archive-
like presentation of artefacts that no longer separates storage techniques from
didactic display techniques’. By using the aesthetics of the storeroom in its
display, the Museo Gregoriano Profano ‘makes the museum memory transpar-
ent’ (Ernst 2000a: 26). Instead of storing objects for eternity, and organizing
them into narratives to produce historical consciousness and shape national
identities, the museum now operates as a holding container, or ‘flow-through
and transformer station’ (Ernst 2000a: 25). In Ernst’s view its prime function
is to ‘teach the user how to cope with information’ (Ernst 2000a: 18). The
arbitrary mass of the collection is now not managed through totalizing narra-
tive but technically, through the model of data-processing and retrieval. The
museum becomes increasingly like new digital media, whose fundamental form
is the database, and which reduce all kinds of sensory data to numerical code
(Manovich 2001:23).
The early index and record card systems had ambivalent potential. They
could be democratizing, distributing knowledge amongst the population, but
also centralizing, put to use in administering and regulating populations. In
their inexhaustible accumulation of the irreducibly particular, they could dis-
pense with the tyranny of the representative and the typical, but they also
appealed to a rationalistic, bureaucratic dream in which everything can be
assigned a number, reduced to data and filed. The merging of museum and
the logic of the information society is similarly ambivalent. In doing away with
the old split between front and back regions in favour of a new transparency,