Media Inventories of the Nineteenth Century: A Report from Two Workshops

Abstract

Media Inventories of the Nineteenth CenturyA Report from Two Workshops Sean Franzel, Ilinca Iurascu, and Petra McGillen The first self-proclaimed General Bibliography of Printed Inventories (Bibliographie générale des inventaires imprimés) (1892–1895), arduously compiled by Fernand de Mély and Edmund Bishop, starts with an immediate disclaimer: "If the fear of incompleteness had deterred its two authors, th[is] publication … would have never seen the light of day."1 "We have only included inventories properly speaking," the preface states, leaving aside "manuscript and library" catalogues, "mere lists of relics," and "testaments and literary descriptions," which "would have carried us too far." De Mély and Bishop's pointed reference to "proper" inventories (as distinct from other types of itemized written records) calls for further examination. While the volume does not offer any definitions for the terms it invokes, the commentary here can be considered against the background of nineteenth- century dictionary entries. In Larousse's Great Universal Dictionary, for example, the term "inventory" is primarily understood as a "catalogue, a record that inscribes and describes, article by article, all the objects, immovable and movable property, goods, titles, papers, belonging to a person, or found in a house or residence."2 But during the nineteenth century, a growing interest in inventories of artifacts associated with historical sites or collections (such as those announced in the Bibliographie générale) gives rise to the need for more diverse and, at the same time, more systematic approaches.3 In the process, categorical limits are continuously tested and reexamined. By their own admission, de Mély and Bishop are "compelled to admit some exceptions," challenging their own self-imposed criteria and thus returning to the impossible task of not going "too far." Inventories, as de Mély and Bishop's efforts suggest, promise an overview and a systematic organization of accumulations of discrete objects, yet are based in a sense of incompleteness visà-vis the excess of practices of storing, listing, ordering, and recording with which they are confronted. De Mély and Bishop's multivolume undertaking thus serves as an apt starting point for a discussion around the slippery margins of inventorying categories, their nineteenth-century histories, media practices, and techniques. What cultural premises mark the increased awareness of the importance of inventorying that gives rise to metaprojects such as the Bibliographie générale des inventaires imprimés? How do inventories work against and in dialogue with other media of storage and retrieval such [End Page 285] as catalogues, indexes, bibliographies, and archives? What new media configurations do techniques of inventorying enable and how, in turn, are such techniques shaped by the media channels and formats they employ? What is at stake in the critical effort of "taking stock"—whether as commercial, bureaucratic, literary, historiographical, or scientific undertakings—and what does this tell us specifically about the nineteenth century? These questions were at the forefront of two research workshops organized at Dartmouth College (March 2018) and the University of Missouri (February 2020) under the title "Media Inventories of the Nineteenth Century," with participation from scholars in German studies and related fields. One of our expressed goals has been to go beyond certain canonical accounts in German media studies that have tended to favor construing the beginning and end of the nineteenth century ("around 1800" or "around 1900") as foundational breaks or turning points. Instead, our working principle has been to explore multiple historical trajectories, to engage with local and temporal configurations of objects and actions, and to expand the range of critical interventions. As a cultural mode, model, and medium, inventorying is a felicitous category for thinking about nineteenth-century studies, not least because there is a marked interest in its (re)definition throughout the century. Furthermore, inventorying operates in conjunction (and tension) with related cultural techniques and media of collection, classification, preservation, and distribution (from lists to catalogues and beyond) that likewise invite modular approaches and new critical tactics. Focusing on the particular semantics and connotations of the inventory, it is worthwhile to consider briefly the conceptual history of the term in the German cultural context. The term inventory (inventarium) arises in the early modern...