ATDTDA (2): Merle's dream, 56ff #1

[Paul Nightingale]

Given that the novel began by juxtaposing macro- and micro-levels, it is
noteworthy that Merle's dream (57) operates in the same way. The "great
museum, a composite of all possible museums" is possibly the world in its
entirety, unknowable, in Latourian terms the 'global' become an unending
sequence of 'locals'.

For, what is a museum but a means to categorising, rationalising, imposing
order upon, the world? The Chicago Fair (eg, 22) has already shown us the
ideological function of such activity. Following Latour, incidentally, Tony
Bennett (in Pasts beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism, Routledge,
2004) describes "[t]he role of museums" as follows:

"The evolutionary principles of classification and exhibition developed in
the new museums of natural history, ethnology and geology which flourished
in the closing decades of the nineteenth century played a key role in making
these pasts visible and knowable. There were, however, two aspects to this
role. The first concerns the respects in which such museums functioned as
the 'laboratories' for these disciplines, providing the contexts in which
the new pasts they organised could become thinkable and perceptible as new
realities in the fields of thought and vision. The second concerns the part
played by the exhibition practices of those museums in translating these
pasts into a significant component of late-nineteenth century public
culture, enlisting them in service of new strategies of cultural governance.
In both regards, these museums served as the incubators for broader
developments affecting the very grammar of the artefactual field by
providing new rules for the classification and combination of objects. This
had repercussions throughout the museum sector, challenging the practices of
art museums as well as those of museums centred on classical archaeological
collections, for example." (2)

[...] 

"The role of museums, as the centres of calculation within which objects
from diverse locations were collected and arranged into these sequences, was
thus a constitutive one. It is not, that is to say, a matter of seeing
typological museum displays as simply a means of representing the new
orderings of time emerging from the historical sciences. Rather, playing a
role in relation to those sciences analogous to that played by the
laboratory in relation to the experimental sciences, the museum played a key
role in the operations through which the historical sciences measured and
partitioned time, and distributed human and non-human actors across it. Yet
the typological method was also central to the public pedagogy of the
evolutionary museum just as it was the lynchpin of the new system for
managing objects and the relations between them which made it possible for
earlier collections to be disassembled and reassembled in new
configurations." (64)