ABSTRACT
In this chapter, we discuss how HS employees grapple with order and disorder in contexts of profusion, including designation of historic buildings and monuments, and management of collections of historic objects associated with them. We show that people negotiate disorder and profusion in specific, partial, situated ways using technologies of collecting, classifying, ordering and governing. In this way, they work towards a utopian ideal of an ordered and complete collection/archive, which is always deferred to the future. By focusing on the materialities and performativities involved in documentary practices, we reveal the effort involved in working towards stability and coherence; in controlling seemingly unruly things. In the process, objects, documents and associated infrastructures change and flow, even as people work towards fixity and atemporality. Fieldwork facilitates encounters with messy, fluid conservation objects, but it also allows these objects to be active agents in translating general principles into successful, locally specific action.
