Page 90 - Museums, Media and Cultural Theory In Cultural and Media Studies

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Where media studies has chiefly focused on the use of media for circulation and
reproduction, and spatial transmission, Kittler regards the same media in terms
of their recording function. This is connected to Innis’ notion of temporal
transmission. Considered in these terms, all media are museum-like. Kittler
notes that all media extend the ‘realm of the dead’, for they make more of
the past present; he defines media not by their ephemerality, immediacy
and dematerializing effects, but their role in preservation and attempts at
immortality (1999: 13).
As we have already seen, the early twentieth-century avant-garde rejected the
museum’s preservation of the dead past in favour of new technologies associated
with speed and immediacy, and with a greater relevance to the present. Yet these
new technologies themselves would extend the ‘realm of the dead’ through
recording and archiving. Far from being a remnant from the past, Victorian
historicism and overaccumulation were characteristically modern. Dependent
on the new media technologies of the day, they were set to expand with the
expansion of the media, as more and more ephemeral and intangible aspects of
present reality could be technically reproduced and preserved. The history of
the modern museum coincides with the history of modern recording media.
The new media technologies of the late nineteenth century did not outmode the
museum, but developed the museum project, and their potential in this regard
was quickly seized upon by museums. While some popular museums closed their
doors when faced with the competition from cinema, others made very early
use of the various media for both display and archiving (Sandberg 2003: 35).
This argument holds not just for analogue media but also for digital media
and information technology in which concepts of memory, storage and archiv-
ing are fundamental. Many writers (including Kittler) trace the emergence of
new media and information technology to military developments. However,
there is another argument that databases and hypertext have precursors in the
classificatory and archiving systems developed in museums and libraries, par-
ticularly in the work of Otto Neurath and Paul Otlet, founders of museums in
Vienna and Brussels in the early twentieth century (see Chapter 5 and this
chapter, section 2). Some scholars have argued that the recent growth of the
media and of information technology, in the context of broader economic and
global changes, led to a massive expansion of forms of control (Deleuze, cited
in Crary 1999: 76). Yet these early figures were primarily concerned with finding
new ways in which accumulated knowledge could be disseminated in a new
mass society. The museum became mediatic in their hands. This does not sim-
ply mean that a lower priority was given to artefacts in the museum, but also
that the museums’ relation to its audience changed – both in the direction
of democratization and in the direction of increased control. This apparent
contradiction is an issue we will explore more fully throughout the chapter.