Technikatörténeti szemle 22. (1996)

TANULMÁNYOK - MacLeod, Roy: Modern Times and the Sciene Museum: Museum Knowledge and its Management

invites attention to the location and purpose behind its acquisition, registration, identification and presentation. Each, similarly, invites us to reflect on the meaning of the object, as interpreted at various points in its life, and by viewers using different interpretative lenses. Objects contain their own rhetoric. They are realist texts, which invite reading. Like other texts, they contain sequences and narrative structures. Exhibitions using texts inscribe certain myths - Robert Bud has nicely described that devoted to the chemical industry gallery and Alan Morton on the history of nuclear energy at the Science Museum. Superficially, myths may merely reflect the predilections of sponsors, but more deeply, they may reflect the received wisdom of scientific establishments, and the evaluative preferences of curators and designers. Roger Silverstone reflects on "Food for Thought" as not merely an exhibition on food processing, but as a statement of historical significance. 2. The museum exhibit becomes a moral object. The act of interpreting such objects always runs the risk of making events in nature appear hyperreal, as if they transcended time and context. But if all knowledge is provisional, so is our knowledge of the transcendent. The second law of thermodynamics has to be consistent with the underling symmetries of chaos theory. But few science museums manage to place such competing theories alongside one another in such a way as to invite us to understand, and accept, the deeper uncertainties they represent. It is difficult in science - although arguably, no more difficult than in art - to represent objects, theories, and their colocation as controversial, undergoing dynamic change, and open to negotiation. 3. Where, particularly in natural history museums, natural objects plants, animals, minerals - are so arranged by classification or function that they constitute a coherent representational universe, they require a special effort to localise their representational significance. Museums stress discontinuities, ambivalences, hybrids, that are the substance of human experience. For many, the representation of this proves difficult. Instead, the museum is under pressure to do the opposite - in a phrase, to provide an oasis of reassurance and clear understanding, in a world of uncertainty and violent change. In times of disorder, science museums are called upon, like medieval cathedrals, to be places for refuge. Of course, in few museums do we find inspirational readings from patent lists, and few offer prayers for national recovery. But many attempt to encourage the belief. The fear is not the end of the universe, but the possibility that there may be no certain knowledge, only bricolage, and engines and machines that manufacture goods and destroy the earth. The fear that truth may be more like bricolage, than unified theory, is intimidating. The fear of scientific prowess bringing an end to progress, is no less so.