Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)
TANULMÁNYOK - MacLeod, Roy: Modern Times and the Sciene Museum: Museum Knowledge and its Management
tury, came also a secularisation of the framework of knowledge, with its own hierarchies, toying with the premise that classical culture required formal education - allegorical "sensibility" in the Augustan sense - but that natural knowledge required only a willingness to observe and learn. Oppositions came to be represented architecturally - Art and Science divided by Exhibition Road in Victorian London, by an intervening park in Habsburg Vienna, by parallels along the Mall in post-bellum Washington, and by Metro distances between arrondissements in Paris of the Third Republic. By the 1880s, museums were already a common feature of European and American national and municipal life. As such, they performed public acts just as zoos and botanic gardens did for living things - in transforming objects into ideological symbols, whether speaking to the wisdom of God in the Creation, or to the claims of patriotism and national greatness. The skeletal dinosaurs, the whales dominating the vestibule of every metropolitan natural history museum, were tokens of the power of the possessor, as were the giraffes and gorillas, the power of the civilising mission of the metropole to reduce and contain unruly, colonial nature. While in the natural history sciences came the principle of progress through evolution, in the mechanical museum, with its triumphal march of machines and its celebration of patents and inventions, came the signifiers of moral superiority, of the objectivity of science over the subjectivity of art. Once articulated, the authority of science became canonical, and the museum became its cathedral precincts, its messages resonating the principles of natural law and public order, underlying supposed unities between rulers and peoples, managers and men - if not between men and women. The science museum became a moral imperative. By the 1890s, in Europe and the United States, the "new museums movement" touched both mechanical and natural history museums, in encouraging a managerial distinction between teaching and research and - insofar as the public held the pursestrings - a commitment to both. But for the next hundred years, both in teaching and research, the science museums of the world developed their own discourse, stressing the customary attributes of objects, as viewed by Western culture - attributes of individuality, provenance, analysis, comparison, and the significance of locality. 13 Only with the the mid-20th century, were the experimental sciences to move away from the museum, as eventually did the natural history sciences, leaving them as places less for the interrogation of nature, than for the inventory, storage and description of natural objects and instruments. With this inventory, came taxonomies and the fashions of comparative structures, more importantly, came the justification of science, as an activity performed in
