Disaggregating the collection

In his 1958 series of essays Brave New World Revisited, Aldous Huxley described a primary and fundamental urge of the human mind to ‘bring harmony out of dissonance and unity out of multiplicity’. He called this intellectual instinct the ‘Will to Order’ (1994: 30). Looking through history we can identify countless examples, in different times and different places, of individuals and communities using visual and physical technologies in order to fi nd or fi x order on their world, seeking the harmony and unity to which Huxley referred. To look, for instance, at the Sephirot of Jewish mysticism is to see at fi rst a complex schema of ten circles interconnected by thirty-two lines. However, it is also to witness one faith community capturing and presenting the all-encompassing elements of its physical and metaphysical life, and the secret paths within them that lead to wisdom. This is an instantiation, in one sense, of ‘systematic’ thought (Manguel 1996: 8). Likewise, to look at a twelfth-century kinship table is to see one historically and geographically localised community attempting to determine possible consanguinity between marriage suitors by means of a horizontally and vertically tabulated schema. Here again, an individual’s sense of identity (in this case defi ned in terms of blood-line and genealogy) is given order through a standardised and visual system (Duby 1988: 118-19). Equally, the ‘reading wheel’, as conceived by Agostino Ramelli (1987) in the late sixteenth century, was essentially a desk attached to a rotating series of hinged shelves each carrying a different book. In a practical sense it represented an ingenious solution to the proliferation of reading and ownership of books that followed the invention of the moveable typeface and printing press at the end of the fi fteenth century. And yet, it is also a system, a technology, for containing and ordering the expansion in the printed word that took place at that time; it was an active desktop, an information management system. Similarly, to look at the intricacies of one of Robert Fludd’s seventeenth-century concentric ring images is to glimpse a historical moment where intelligent society thought it could diagram all that was to be known in art and nature, in heaven and earth. However, what we also see is a portable mnemonic – a memory

system, reducing all experience and knowledge to an ordered, condensed and memorable form (Belsey and Belsey 1990). In these examples (and others like them) sometimes the order is imposed, sometimes it is discovered. Sometimes it is used to remember, sometimes to control. Sometimes it is linear, circular or tabular; sometimes it is three-dimensional, sometimes physical, and sometimes mental. But in every case we see a culture attempting to make sense of its material surroundings, its knowledge and its experience, by containing them within a closed, ordered and logical system.