The birth of the museum part III-7

主旨：過去只注意到博物館中可見的文物，但作者主張經由博物館展示的過程，可以讓看不見的東西被看見，其中最重要的就是展示方法與時間的關係。

論點：這些敘述方法中最重要的元素是時間，博物館作為一種敘述機器，由於受到演化論思想的影響而鑲嵌於進步意識型態中，作者認為應該將此種進步意識型態視為一種展示的脈絡，且此種展示的概念是身體和心態(結構)的雙重性概念。最後，作者從理論上思考看待文化的兩種觀點。

摘要

Between the two cases, then, the process remains the same; it is only the relation to time that is altered. Yet, from the point of view of the various historical sciences in which, over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, this method (Zadig’s method ) was applied, the relation to time was crucial.(P177)
Rudwick’s concern here is with the formation of the modern disciplines of prehistory, perhaps the most crucial of which was palaeontology(古生物學) in view of its role in connecting geology and natural history and so mediating those narratives concerned with the history of the earth and those telling of the history of life on earth. In describing Zadig’s method, Huxley proposes a neologism- ‘would that there were such a word as “backteller !”’- as the best way of describing the procedures of ‘the retrospective prophet’ who ‘affirms that so many hours or years ago, such and such things were to be seen’(Huxley 1882:133) The narrative machinery of detective fiction may be constantly backward-glancing as it infers causes from their effects and makes visible the crime and its perpetrator from the traces he or she has left behind, but it constrantly moves the reader forward.(P178)The museum was another ‘backteller’, a narrative machinery, with similar properties. Of course, it was not alone in doing so, but it was in the museum and its sibling, the exhibition, that these new pasts were made visible in the form of reconstructions based on their artefactual or osteological remains. (P179)
But what are we to make of this? The answer easiest to hand suggests that, as the influence of evolutionary thought increased, museums came increasingly to embody or instantiate ideologies of progress . A better way of looking museum as providing a context for a performance that was simultaneously bodily and mental ( and in ways which question the terms of such a duality) inasmuch as the evolutionary narratives it instantiated were realized spatially in the form of routes that the visitor was expected-and often obliged-to complete.

對於文化有兩種理論觀點。其一，文化的運作是否是一個應用於各種不同的場域中也不會改變的影響力量，透過心態(再現)結構的運作影響思想和行為形式。另一個觀點是，文化應被視為一種技術的組合(assemblage of technologies)，此種技術能形塑思想和行為，而行為會依循機制(mechanisms)中的機器特質(apparatus-like qualities)。這兩個假設的區別在於，若文化做為一種所有思想和經驗不變的基礎，那個體是一個主體(subject)，否則個體是作為一個型塑人的技術人造物(artefact)。(P179)

問題：
什麼是Zadig的方法? The making of retrospective predictions、backteller(P178)、
Huxley的論點是什麼?無論是懷舊預言或有前景的，都是以時間為順序。
Cuvier的新方法是什麼?not look at, but look into(P185)

Organized Walking as evolutionary practice

主旨：由博物館展示序列再現出的時間關係，是各種博物館之間共同的隱藏含意，而Bennett的論點在於，博物館的設計上，無論是物品的展示形式或參觀者經驗到的動線設計，都是以演化論的觀點來設計的。

論證：首先，博物館的展示序列影響了參觀者的觀看心態，不同博物館型態都顯示出演化論觀點，例如自然史博物館、人類學博物館、美術館，而且還影響參觀者的心態，使他們不只是對物本身好奇，還產生想知道接下來發生什麼的好奇心。(P181)此外，此種演化觀點還應用在博物館建築設計而影響參觀者的身體實踐。博物館建築一開始並非為了特殊目的而建造，直到18世紀末才被視為特殊的文化體制，特殊建築設計影響參觀動線，其中隱含著演化論觀點的特殊敘述方式，筆者以Parr的研究、Henry Pitt Rivers以人類學圓形建築(rotunda)為人類學展示的演化安排(evolutionary arrangement)和Patrick Geddes設計Dunfermline的都市空間。(P181-183)。然而，也有對比於演化論式安排的例子，第一個是Musee Carnavalet，採斷裂描述的特殊安排是為了符合教學目的 ，第二個是Lee Rust Brown討論巴黎Jardin des plantes 的例子，此種博物館展示的目的是為了揭露政府的階級統治系統，(P184)如同Cuvier’s galleries，是要讓參觀者看到事物內部的秩序，花園也是同樣的道理，這些對動線的安排同時形塑了參觀者的心態和身體，達到”think through the steps”的效果。(P185)然而，這種展示環境並無不可逆連續性的設計，因此無法達到告知參觀者演化觀點的目的，所以十九世紀就將這種世俗時間(temporalization)轉變成空間設計，萬國博覽會就是一個例子。(P186)博物館作為一個”backteller”具有將許多物品聚集並重新組織的能力，因此，博物館參觀是以演化論觀點規劃過的走路形式來運作和被參觀者經驗。


摘要
Viewed as a ‘backteller’, I have argued, the museum bestows a socially coded visibility on the various pasts it organizes. The relations between the times represented by these sequences , that is to say, were ones of mutual implication.
The narratives of natural history connect with those of human history in view of the fact that ‘ Museums of Natural History and Anthropology meet on common ground in Man. This is not simply a matter of representation. To the contray, for the visitor, reaching the point at which the museum’s narrative culminates is a matter of doing as much as of seeing.The narrative machinery of the museum’s ‘backtelling’ took the form of an itinerary whose completion was experienced as a task requiring urgency and expedition.

(接下來談18世紀晚期後博物館建築的特殊目的)
Just as their collections were frequently assembled from earlier ones, so many of the buildings in which the new public museums were housed were not built specifically for that purpose. Where museums were custom built, however, the commitment to provide the visitor with a linear route within which an evolutionary itinerary might be accomplished was a strong one.

A couple of contrasts will help make the point I’m after here. The first is offered by the way in which the present arrangement of the Musee Carnavalet in Paris organizes the visitor’s route in the form of a ruptured narrative which contrasts tellingly with the smooth and contiuous evolution narratives that Pitt Rivers juded to be essential to the museum’s pedagogic mission. My second example is derived from Lee Rust Brown’s discussion of the ways in which, in the 1830s, the layout of the Jardin des Plantes in Paris provided a pedestrian complement to, and realization of , the system of classification governing the arrangement of exhibits in the Museum d’histoire naturelle. This was especially true of the gallery of comparative anatomy which, under Cuvier’s direction, had, since its opning in 1806, exploded nature so as to reveal the inner principles of its organization. Strolling through the walkways and passing from one flower-bed to the next, the visitor could both move and read from ‘family to family, order to order, class to class’ in a form of exercising that was, constitutively, both mental and physical.(P185)However, it was an environment, which, while not lacking a temporal dimension, did not organize time in the form of irreversible succession. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, by contrast, the visitor’s pathway through most museums came to be governed by the irreversible succession of evolutionary series.

The museum, as ‘backteller’, was characterized by its capacity to bring together, within the same space, a number of different times and to arrange them in the form of a path whose direction might be traversed in the course of an afternoon. The museum visit thus functioned and was experienced as a form of organized walking through evolutionary time.