Classification and Human Language

Abstract

for animals are supposed, ideally at least, to motivate the framing of the zoo as a particular kind of space (though commercial interests have ways of subverting or by-passing such principles). The guide notes and explanations attempt to position the viewer as this concerned, responsible and democratic subject. It is reasonable to claim then that in diffusing particular kinds of knowledges and in forming subjects for such knowledges, collections operate mainly through the construction of a gaze, though the latter works effectively only in correlation with other apparatuses, for instance that of education, which prepares the subject for the practice of viewing and valuing collections in determinate ways, though clearly the subject positions or identities constituted by the gaze can be refused, provided mechanisms for such dissident disidentifications exist in the culture. As a category, then, the collection stands at the threshold of a number of domains: it is part of technologies of the social, participating in the formation of identities and of publics, yet at the same time it functions as the visible trace intimating the invisible and haphazard history of knowledge whilst remaining as testimony to yearnings and pleasures that weave biographies into the history of communities and their deeds. Collections are monuments and archives, the repository of a past and the legacy to be preserved. They inscribe the having been of a culture, preserving it for the present and the future, so that the knowledge and the memory that it inscribes can continue to be the object of a reflection on the way of life of the collectivity. Within the context of a global knowledge, such a reflection should trigger the work of memory aligned with working through in the psychoanalytic sense, that is, aligned with a critical hermeneutics.