Cable, Link Analyser, Synthesiser: Connecting the Cold War in the Museum

Nehring, Holger

Cable, Link Analyser, Synthesiser: Connecting the Cold War in the Museum

Resource type

Abstract

Creator (person)

Nehring, Holger

Abstract

In his book Grammophone, Film, Typewriter, the cultural theorist Friedrich Kittler linked the history of writing and imaging machines to the history of warfare. For him, the computer is fundamentally and essentially a machine that structures the production of knowledge in the Cold War. Kittler’s existentialist analysis, however, is based on the speculative and historically often problematic integration of disparate contexts into one master interpretation. The proposed chapter challenges this interpretation by engaging the question of how objects gain meaning in the context of a museum collection. It develops a collective biography of three objects in the collections of National Museums Scotland: the piece of the transatlantic underwater cable, a link analyser produced by Hewlett Packard, and the Parametric Artificial Talker (PAT). All three objects are about communications and connections. None of them is currently classified as a Cold War object – they relate either to the communications collection (PAT, cable), or the science and technology collection (link analyser). This collective biography will be used to interrogate how different technological objects generate different yet connected Cold War meanings: the cable highlights longer term continuities and global connections, the link analyser emphasises the context of communications, and the synthesiser evokes the connection between the civilian and military dimensions of the Cold War. Two of these objects – the cable and the synthesiser – come with Cold War stories attached to them. The link analyser, by contrast, is only one of many such objects in NMS’s store – it is in the museum never to be seen. The proposed chapter will show that these objects do not have essential or fundamental Cold War meanings in the way Kittler assumes. The proposed chapter will show how objects become Cold War objects through connections: the connections curators, museum visitors and academics establish and the stories they tell, and the connections the objects themselves evoke – connecting communications networks, connecting machines, and connecting different aspects of the Cold War to each other. Exploring these objects in the museum thus becomes an exercise in Cold War epistemology.