Linguaggi settoriali Inglese

Kevin Walsh

Modernity: definition

Jurgen Habermas has defined modernity as the epochal new beginning that marked the modern world’s break with the world of the Christian Middle Ages and antiquity that is repeated. The present perpetuates the break with the past in the form of a continual renewal. Modernity has its origins in the Renaissance and in the emergence of modern science, in the discovery of truths and facts for the possibility of objective truths. In this period emerged the meta-narratives discourses which implied a rigid objectivism; such meta-narratives discourses include Darwin’s theory of evolution and Marx’s analysis of capital. Modernism can be considered as a set of discourses concerned with the possibilities of representing reality and eternal truths.

The idea of progress

Enlightenment thinking: idea of progress with a faith in the ability of humankind to manipulate and exploit their environments for the benefit of society. Such society could escape from the elements of the past and could move to new horizons. A fundamental of Enlightenment thinking was a conception of a society which was advancing, a society that could overcome any of problems that it was either to confront. The belief in progress was in part based on Newtonian physics. There was a shift from the mythical/superstitious frameworks of the pre-enlightenment period to rationalized lifeworld of modernity, which was symbolized by the museum displays of the nineteenth century.

The idea of progress influenced many areas of thought, including the understanding of language. The progress of language seemed to have special significance. Pessimistic views of history began to disappear during the 1730s; in Britain the idea of progress in history was fundamental. During the eighteenth century the Christian vision of history developed, with an emphasis on the correlation of past events with scriptural predictions. In contemporary Christian thought the idea of progress was part of a wider optimism in the divine program for spiritual advancement.

The wider conceptions of history tended to articulate frameworks which were concerned to promote the idea of progress for example during the nineteenth century James Mill’s history of British India saw a societal development as moving through stages from primitiveness toward a high level of civilization. India was deemed to be near the lowest stage of development so the duty of European to colonize and educate those who were perceived as being less fortunate. The height of the popularity of the idea of progress was probably during the mid-Georgian period rather than the mid-Victorian period. The idea of progress is an ordering of the past which came about through a new conception of time and history.

Time in modernity

Time is a culturally constructed, although years and months are based on natural cyclic periods. The week is in fact a purely cultural unit of time, as are hours, minutes, and seconds. Despite this, humans often seem to consider time as a universal or absolute phenomenon. Time has its root in the enlightenment. This idea of time is linked with the idea of progress. It is the Judaeo-Christian concept of time which has had the greatest influence on the modern understanding of time. This concept was based on the linear concept of time, founded, in their case, on a teleological idea of history as the gradual revelation of God's purpose. Christians saw the crucifixion as a unique event and so it is crucial to explaining the western idea of linear and non-cyclical history.

Roman culture also emphasized an idea of linear history, attributing the success of the Roman empire not to one person in the present, but to many ancestors during Rome’s past. Newton’s concept of time is outlined in his Principia; Newton went on to develop a concern with chronology, which, during the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth centuries, was symptomatic of a wider concern with the authenticity of the Bible and its chronology. For much of the later medieval period, time was considered to be a destructive force. The image of time was as the destroyer equipped with hour-glass, scythe, or sickle. But during the renaissance an awareness of change through time developed.

1795: Condorcet’s sketch for a historical picture of the progress of the human mind was published. He expressed his belief in the inevitability of human progress and in the power of science and technology to transform man’s knowledge and control over himself and society. Then in 1896 the unidirectional nature of time was legitimated by discovery of radioactivity. Subsequently in 1902 the decay of radioactive elements was shown to be uniform and linear.

The idea of progress and history

Despite the fact that the Victorian age was a period dominated by industrial and scientific progress, it was also an age dominated by a fascination with the past; the past in fact was something which was present in the construction of the sense of place. This may be considered as a more organic form of history, one which recognizes the crucial contingency of past processes on present place. Places, natural and human-made features, acted as time marks, physical phenomena which exist in the present but possess a temporal depth which give them a special meaning.

A sense of place is considered here, as an attachment to one’s locality, an understanding or appreciation of the processes which have affected a place, both through time and space. The understanding of how other places and people have affected one’s place throughout history. The experience of industrialization and urbanization destroyed this organic past for some people. The Victorians’ fascination with the past was the product of an age obsessed with change. Also the idea that such a past was essentially a tale of progress towards the modern was rarely ever questioned by the majority of people.

The Victorians tended to believe that social development was a movement in a positive direction, a progression towards a constituted society. This idea of progress was reflected in the work of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations that articulates the belief that, despite the fact that people are selfish, their efforts for self-improvement would benefit society as a whole. The belief in the inevitability of progress works as the basis to Victorian evolutionism.

For Stephen Kern, thinking about the past centred on four major issues: the age of the earth, the impact of the past on the present, the value of that impact, and the most effective way to recapture a past that has been forgotten. The present was a result of the past. Leopold von Ranke. History of the Latin and Teutonic Nations was published in 1824. He presented the past as it really was. Moreover, during the Victorian period, the modern discipline of history expanded. Macaulay wrote multi-volumed histories of England.

Archaeology

Contemporary with the emergence of history as a discipline was the development of modern archaeology, which was different from antiquarianism in its emphasis on the use of artefacts in a consideration of human development. Christian Jurgensen Thomsen in 1816 was the first curator of the Danish National Museum in Copenhagen. He arranged the collections on the basis of three age system in a linear developmental scheme of technological change, moving from the use of stone artefacts, to bronze and ultimately to iron. The Danish National Museum was opened to the public in 1819. Thomsen made a concrete effort to educate peasants who visited the museum.

In Britain, there was Scottish antiquarian Daniel Wilson that used the three age system to organize the artefacts which belonged to the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland in Edinburgh. The acceptance of human antiquity was brought about as a result of the work of two geologists, William Pengelly and Hugh Falconer. Excavations at Brixham Cave near Torquay. The development of the museum has to be considered as part of the modern condition and the concomitant processes of modernization.

The first museums boom

The establishment of the British Museum was created by an act of parliament in 1753. The museum opened at Montagu House in Bloomsbury in 1759. During its formative years it was little more accessible than the Renaissance cabinets of curiosity, as entry was restricted to 60 visitors a day. However, this was increased to 120 by 1808 and daily opening was introduced in 1879. The first museums boom was during the second half of the 19th century. In 1860 there were about 90 museums; by the 1880s the number was closer to 180. Many of the museums that were built during the boom were built in the industrial cities of the north of England. The Education Act of 1870 was an important factor. In 1887 opened various museums in Bootle, Halifax, Sheffield; several of the larger ones were of the Greek temple type.

A critique to the modern museum

Weber argued that modernization could be considered as the rationalization of society; the capitalist project had, as its aim, rational economic action, and the state had as its goal, the rationalization of administration. Modern societies are considered as being subjected to forms of purposive-rationalization, where all action is directed towards some goal, usually economic, and the museums as a part of the structure of an emerging system of local government in Britain made a tacit contribution to this process in the field of administration through a rationalization of learning and leisure.

Every museum employed a similar didactic style, based on accepted rational forms of knowledge developed out of the Enlightenment. The museum display is a representation of past progress. They should be considered as part of the project necessary for the imposition of capitalist time – a precise time, a time that flowed in linear progression. There was a gradual imposition of a public universal time. It can be argued that time, as represented in museums displays, is a product of what is essentially a western conception that developed during the industrial revolution.

Most social analysts treat time and space as mere environments of action and accept the conception of time, as measurable clock time, characteristics of modern western culture. The argument is that museums, which have their roots in the late 18th and 19th centuries, not only reflected what was becoming the accepted conception of time, but were also reinforcing this conception. The majority of museums displays follow an accepted didactic, linear narrative that imposes a rigid framework, where time and space are sequestered by the curator.

The prehistoric displays are still essentially three-age oriented. One such display entitled "industrial progress" is a representation of the evolution of Bronze Age metalwork. Each artefact is named and positioned within the modern unifying framework, and each series of artefacts is divided into a phase. The emphasis is on the object for itself, artefact for artefact’s sake. In the museum, the viewer’s perception of the object is often constructed through her/his acceptance of the naming/identification of the object by an authority.

The homogeneous form of the museum display represents the past as a path of progress towards the modern, where our discovery and acquisition of past material culture legitimates the modern western position as the inheritor of civilization. The museum display not only reinforces the idea of progress, through its emphasis on technological advances, but also, through the emphasis on the auratic object. This is especially so in the national museums which have often access to the richest objects. Museum of London: one of the best museums in Britain. In fact, the story of London’s development is represented in the Museum of London’s displays. London was an industrial centre. It suffered from problems caused by the expanding urban mass.

So in the Museum of London, there is the display of the dark ages, that is shown in a darkened room. The dark ages are represented as a period of history which was an embarrassing hiccup on the road of progress, a road which the visitor knows will come out at the other end, as progress demands that there will always be a light at the end of the evolutionary tunnel. In a museum display, the object is without meaning. Its meaning is conferred by the writer that is the curator, the archaeologist, the historian, or the visitor who possesses the cultural competence to recognize the conferred meaning given by the expert.

Conclusion

The emergence of museums was a part of the experience of modernity. The museum can be considered as an ideological tool which reinforced the held conceptions of order, time, and progress or as tools of emancipation, representations of other places and other times.

Conserving a past

Conservation or preservationism has its roots in the 19th century but increased during the latter half of the 20th century. Preservationism starts in the middle ages. One of the earliest governmental bodies established in Europe was the Danish Royal Commission for Antiquities established in 1807. In the 1882 there was the Ancient Monuments Protection Act: if a monument was not protected then such a monument was clearly not of great importance. Some argued against the preservation of ancient British and Celtic remains as they were not deemed as worthy of preservation as those monuments which might be defined as English. In Scotland, monuments were to be administered by an inspector appointed by the government in London, and not by the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland.

Preservationism grew during the second half of the 19th century amongst the middle classes. Membership of the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, established in 1877, increased during this period. In the latter half of the 19th century produced a number of conservation groups. In the 1907 the trust was given the legal powers to protect sites and preserve them for the nation. Contemporary with the establishment of these conservation groups was the emergence of a number of photographic record societies. The National Photographic Record Association took photographs of scenes of interest and placed them in the British Museum. In France, an equivalent law to the Ancient Monuments Protection Act was passed in 1905.

Throughout the first half of the 20th century, the number of conservation societies gradually increased, in particular certain types of heritage like castles and the country house were considered to possess the qualities which could maintain and promote the historical identity of the nation. In Britain, the 1920s and the 1930s saw the establishment of the Ancient Monuments Society, the Council for the Care of Churches, the Council for the Protection of Rural England, the National Trust for Scotland and the Georgian Group. As well as the developing interest in preservationism, there was also an expansion of interest in the study of the past.

The growth of heritage conservation

During the post-war period, there has been a move away from traditional, class-based politics towards the establishment of sin