Reading these selections back to back was interesting in that they offer two different aspects of organization, both a practical need for it, as illustrated by the Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonders excerpt, and the self-conscious repurposing of it, (organization as a confidence game?) as discussed in excerpt from Rick Poyner's Appropriation piece. It seems like the first challenge of the semester will be for us all to wrap our minds around the possibilities of creating our own unique systems of classification and organization—to grasp the concept of evolving metrics and proofs to categorize something in a new and different way. It’s a little boggling, but exciting, too.
The “Cabinet of Wonders” excerpt was thought provoking in its own right, and I wanted to mention a few things that came to mind:
1. Is innocent wonder really such a bad thing? So what if people used to collect random oddities without much regard for their place in the grand scheme of things. The confines of kingdom, phylum, class, and order are just an illustration of humankind’s need to make the infinite possibilities and variations of our world small and digestible.
2. The description of the works of the anatomist Frederik Ruysch, who positioned human skeletons into bizarre tableaux, reminded me quite vividly of Gunther von Hagens’ Body Worlds exhibit, which just closed at the Minnesota Science Museum, and which contained a legion of plasticized human corpses in many different positions, including riding horseback, skateboarding, and playing chess. Perhaps we haven’t come quite so far as we might think.
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