Museums topologically, and thematically represents the dichotomy between
material and symbolical objects and records of cultural transmission: physical
entropy versus symbolical (ahistorical) invariance.
Museums, libraries and archives - all three memory agencies which act in the
Vatican context of Mengs' allegory - are agencies of cultural transmission across
time. The dramatic setting of Mengs' allegory is about conflicting tempor(e)alities
which are at work with cultural tradition: Chronos (physical, material entropy)
versus Clio (symbolic coding). In this allegory, storage and transfer media are not
just rhetorical metaphors for cultural tradition. In fact, technologies of tradition are
literally metaphorical (Röttgen, 1980, p. 121).
Mengs' Allegory of History features a genius who is transferring papyrus rolls to the
personification of history (Clio), in fact performing the archival act: which is the
rescuing of physically endangered records from the past by transcription into
symbolic historiography. The material record from the past (subject to entropy) is
thus translated into (negentropic) information. Such an act of transformation is
well known from the current massive digitisation of, f. e., early sound recordings in
the phonogram archives of Vienna and Berlin - a chrono-economical exchange
between the real and the symbolic, between aging and permanence.
Mengs' Allegory demonstrates the authority claim of the Roman church which is
based on long-time tradition (monumentum). The status of the museum objects
depicted on the painting is both material and semiophoric, depending on their
internal or external relation to the subject - the allegory of the Museum
Clementinum. Two regimes conflict here: registering and description, versus
historiographical narrative. On the borderline between history and archaeology, it is
not clear what Clio performs in the museum: does she write or register? Her
attention is diverted by double-faced Janus who points at the realm of the
aesthetic (represented by the Cleopatra/Ariadne in the museum), whereas in fact
what is brought to her is data. Instead of historiography, her book might be an
inventory.
The allegorical figure of Chronos embodies the physical reality of time which is
entropic decay. Asymmetrically, historiography is embodied by the female allegory of
Clio who records chronological events in the rather time-invariant symbols of
writing. But the chronological order (counting historical time) is a historicist
distortion of temporality itself: "Use of centuries - fingers and toes - distortion of
history", Harold A. Innis 1947/48 wrote in his Idea File.
Subject of the Stanza dei Papriri - both in its archaeological content and its painted
allegory - are the cultural technologies of transmission in time in their various
forms. When Mengs painted an ancient inscription in this scene, it had just been
interpreted as the donation mark of the family tomb of T. Claudius Primigenius
<comp. "Genius", der die Papyrusrollen herantragt, und der in der Philadelphia-
Version auf die Inschrift schaut!> who had been archivist of the imperial domains in
ancient Rome. Thus, the epigraph doubly offered itself (by its donator and by its
function) as a welcome supplement to the overall theme of the fresco: The archivist
as gatekeeper of historical memory here cares for his own remembrance. In a
wolfgang ernst technologies of tradition: between symbolic and material
(micro-)transmission
previous design for that fresco (preserved in the Philadelphia Museum of Fine Arts)
Mengs lets Saturn (Chronos) look directly at the inscription which in its materiality
reveals apparent traces of decay and age (Röttgen, 1980, fig 10).
Represented here is a literally archaeological moment, the excavation of an ancient
inscription - not simply as an allegory of vanity <comp. Winckelmann's critique of
baroque Ruinenmelancholie>, but as a symbol of rescuing the heritage of pagan
culture by means of the storage place museum.
There is another eighteenth century allegory of the mechanisms of transmission,
the frontispiece of Lafitau's publication Moeurs des sauvages Ameriquains (1724).
This image confronts archaeologically silent, but enduring material artefacts with
the discursive, but transient articulations of historiography. The viewer is
confronted with the encounter of writing and time in a collection space littered with
material traces coming from both Classical Antiquity and the New World:
"One holds the pen, the other the scythe, which approach each other without
ever touching, asymptotically. History deals with relics which can be seen, and seeks
to supply explanations; ancient things which have become mute through the
degradation owing to time may to some extent become clearer if we invoke customs
observed among contemporary savages. This operation needs a technique,
which is that of comparison and an author, an historian." (Lavers, 1985,
p. 330f)
Archaeology deals with gaps and therefore faces traumatic absences; historical
discourse is made to fill this up to generate some kind of symbolic order on the
material ruins of tradition.
Michel de Certeau enhanced his interpretation by drawing the configuration of
Chronos and Clio abstracted to a diagram where the supposed prologued lines of the
curved scythe and the linear pen become vectors. Directly deciphered in terms of
mathematics, the pen-line (as x-axis, the abscise) becomes the asymptote of the
scythe as hyperbole (on the y-axis). There is no point where the function touches or
traverses the x axis itself: no convergence between material ("historic") and
symbolic ("historiographical") phenomena of time.
In Lafitau's front cover illustration, the allegorical figure of Chronos is endowed
with a weapon (the scythe) indicating devastation with time - in fact "noise" which
happens in the temporal channel of transmission (to rephrase it in terms known
from transmission engineering); such material loss of information is compensated
by the female allegory of Clio "writing" history: copying of symbolic letters is an
almost lossless technology of tradition. A different loss though takes place at the
moment when real matter or energy is symbolically filtered, that is: compressed.
Tradition here means the separation of signal from noise by means of symbolic
transcription. When a message has been received which has somehow become
scrambled with another, unwanted message (usually called noise), the challenge lies
in "unscrambling these and restoring the original message with as little alteration as
possible, except perhaps for a lag in time" (Wiener, 1948/50, p. 205, italics W.E.) -
archives in liquid times
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