9 - Museology

Summary

Major founded a discipline for arranging collections, "the Taxis of Chambers." Taxis was a military term for the strategic mobile arrangements of troops and supplies. Major understood all forms of order, from nature to society, as a form of taxis. In order to advance knowledge of these other forms of order, collections needed to be remade into dynamic repositories that both supplied materials for investigating taxis and themselves could be rearrangeable as knowledge of other orders shifted. To effect this redesign, Major surveyed practices of collecting around the world in a vernacular serial. He built a broad tent for museology while integrating knowledge from a public in ways that often undermined the authority of their views. Curators ought to be experimental philosophers, he maintained. He chided those who did not appreciate order, rather than monetary value, as the most precious part of a collection. He designed shelving, signage, and cataloging to make the museum into a tool of knowledge change. Through experimentation in the collection and discussions in the conference hall, he sought to transform the collection from a site that stupefied to one that awakened awareness.